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Mara Thorne's Journal Entry: Dawn, The Scavenger
He does not sleep. He only rests—a deep, immobile stillness that is more unnerving than a scream. We spend the darkness scavenging. He calls it 'resource acquisition.' He made me strip the armour from the dead, even the dead children, whispering that the metal was necessary for the living. We found a few pieces of a language he calls the 'Dwarven Tongue'—small, engraved plaques. He stared at them for an hour, his eyes like polished obsidian, and then dismissed them as 'crude, predictable art.' He is hungry for information, not comfort. He has seen a dozen horrors, but his only response is a question: 'How can this be utilized?'
— Mara Thorne, Scribe, Reluctant Accomplice
The ruined village, soaked in the blood of the innocent and radiating the lingering malice of the warband, became Kael Ironhand's first classroom. Sauron, locked within the feverish shell, spent the hours before dawn absorbing the silent, damning testimony of the massacre.
He had learned of the Chaos Gods—Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle, and Slaanesh—by observing their consequences. He understood them not as deities, but as immense, self-perpetuating thought-forms drawn from the collective psychic consciousness of the mortal races. They were the ultimate corruption of the spirit of Arda, where the natural emotions of mortals—rage, hope, despair, and pleasure—were magnified and weaponized.
This understanding led to a singular, chilling conclusion: This world has no Valar, no divine protection.
The Horror of Unchecked Entropy
In his home world, the Valar, however distant, still acted as a metaphysical check, a foundational layer of Order that contained the worst excesses of Melkor. Here, there was only the fragile, failing resistance of mortal men. The concept was profoundly unsettling to Sauron, whose existence was founded on the fundamental principle that higher powers dictated and shaped creation.
This universe, he realized, was unguarded.
He began to analyze the few scattered records Mara had salvaged—broken scrolls, fragments of Imperial proclamations, and the tattered pages of a soldier's diary. He cross-referenced this with the residual, crude memories of the mercenary, Kael.
The Empire: A loose, decentralized collection of rival provinces, constantly plagued by internal feuds, driven by inefficient bureaucracy, and held together by the thin thread of the Sigmarite faith. Their system was fundamentally inefficient.
Nagash: He spent the longest time analyzing the faint, disturbing rumors of the Great Necromancer. Nagash was an ordering force, a rival whose ultimate goal—absolute dominion over the living and the dead to create an empire of eternal stagnation—was terrifyingly similar to Sauron's own concept of perfect order, yet twisted by a different, less ambitious malice. Nagash sought an end to the world through permanent death; Sauron sought an elevation of the world through permanent control. Nagash, he decided, was a philosophical and practical foil, a mirror to his own ultimate goal.
The Dwarfs and Elves: Fading remnants of once-great races, now obsessed with history, grudge, and insular survival. They were not global players; they were historical footnotes, slowly being consumed by their own rigidity.
The world was an endless, churning maelstrom of entropy, violence, and decay. The key, Sauron recognized, was not to join the storm, but to become the calm at its center. He must offer the one thing these desperate people lacked: survival.
The Anatomy of Control
His possession of Kael's body remained tenuous. The mercenary's fever was spiking again, forcing Sauron to dedicate nearly all of his remaining spiritual energy to keeping the body alive. He needed immediate, external energy to stabilize his anchor, and he knew precisely where to find it.
He directed the remnants of the refugee group to a small, hidden cult site Kael's memory had flagged—a crude, stone-ringed clearing deep in the woods, used by a petty, disorganized group of Tzeentchian zealots. They were low-grade cultists, weak in power, but rich in the single commodity Sauron required: arcane energy.
"We need power," Sauron rasped to Mara, leaning heavily on the farmer Thomas, his voice a dry, metallic whisper that sliced through the twilight. "They have placed their offerings here. They will be saturated with the Aether. We will take them."
Mara looked horrified. "But Captain, that is Chaos magic! It will corrupt us."
Sauron turned his head slowly, his eyes burning with unnatural clarity from the fevered face of the warlord.
"Corruption," he whispered, the word cold and final. "Is weakness. This world is corrupted to its core. The question is not if you touch it, but how you master it. They are foolish. They let the current pull them. We will take the current and make it a weapon."
It was his first articulation of the core principle of his new strategy: Total Utilization. He would not fear the enemy's power; he would strip it down, master its form, and use it against its own masters.
The First Artifact
The cult site was deserted. The Tzeentchian followers had fled south with the larger warband, leaving behind their offerings in their hasty retreat.
The focus of the site was a rough-hewn stone altar, upon which lay a crudely carved Tzeentchian Icon—a small wooden bird with too many eyes—and a handful of shimmering, strangely polished stones. These stones, which seemed to throb with a faint, low-grade psychic hum, were what Sauron sought. They were shards of crystallized Warp energy, used by the cultists to focus their pitiful rituals.
As Mara and Thomas stood trembling, Sauron forced Kael's ravaged body to the altar. The moment his calloused hand touched the first stone, the pain was immediate and excruciating.
The Chaos energy, wild and corrosive, attempted to bind itself to his spirit, a parasitic invasion aimed at drawing the powerful Maiar essence into the service of the Change God. But Sauron was not a naive mortal. He was the great Architect of Form.
He did not absorb the energy; he re-ordered it.
He used his residual, innate power—the power of shaping the very fabric of existence, a pale echo of the strength he once wielded—to crush the psychic signature of Tzeentch within the stone. He did not destroy the energy, but violently re-patterned its flow, turning the chaotic essence into a pure, clean battery of arcane power.
The process was agonizing. Sweat poured from Kael's skin, not from heat, but from the impossible pressure of wrestling an eternal, divine consciousness.
When he was done, the Warp stone no longer hummed with Tzeentchian intent. It was dead, cold to the touch, yet radiating a powerful, controlled heat—a miniature, perfectly contained power source.
Sauron forced Kael's fingers to crush the stone into powder. He spread the fine, dark dust across the gaping, festering wound in Kael's side.
The effect was instantaneous and shocking.
The Healing and the Oath
The pure, concentrated energy, stripped of its chaotic taint, did not magically heal the wound, but it flooded Kael's exhausted cells with sufficient energy to kickstart the body's own healing process. The fever broke violently. Kael's body shuddered, seizing briefly as the powerful influx of energy momentarily overwhelmed the nervous system.
Then, stillness.
Sauron opened Kael's eyes. The pain was still present, but the desperation was gone. His anchor was stabilized. He was still weak, still a Shattered Lord, but he was no longer dying.
He looked at Mara Thorne, who was staring at him with a mixture of terror and awe—a perfect, potent cocktail of fear and worship.
"The process is complete," Sauron rasped, the tone of Kael's voice now stronger, deeper, stripped of its previous desperation. "The weapon of the enemy has been turned upon itself. I am stabilized."
He slowly stood up, fully upright, no longer needing Thomas's support. He stood amidst the dark ruins of the cult site, his figure outlined by the last rays of the dying sun.
"Mara Thorne," he commanded, his voice now a steady, metallic murmur that seemed to fill the clearing. "You have seen the truth of this world. You have seen that their gods offer only ruin. You have seen that their systems offer only chaos. And you have seen that I offer the only method of survival."
He gestured to the surrounding woods, thick with shadows and the promise of endless enemies.
"I need a scribe. Someone to manage logistics, to observe, to document—to establish the first layer of Order in this void. You will keep records. You will document every resource, every foe, every necessary cruelty. You will document the truth of what I am, and what I must become."
Mara stood utterly still, her thin shoulders slumped, but her gaze locked on his.
"I will do it, Captain," she whispered, her fear giving way to a desperate, pragmatic resolution. "But what are you truly building? What is the final form of this… Order?"
Sauron stared at her—the Maiar mind evaluating its first true subordinate. He did not lie. He told her a strategic truth.
"I am building a wall," he whispered, the sound a promise and a threat. "A wall between humanity and the endless war that consumes this world. And walls require absolute strength, absolute vigilance, and absolute cost. This is the only path to survival, Mara. There is no other god here. Only survival."
The words were an oath, a demand, and the perfect foundation for his dominion. The first witness was bound not by enchantment, but by necessity. The shattered lord had found his first follower, and the meticulous process of forging his Iron Empire had officially begun.