Zac stood, sword in hand, in the midst of the void closing in around him. The destruction of the prison was no longer a distant threat, it was a metaphysical cancer eating away at reality, an ocean of nothingness rising to drown everything. No path remained visible. No exit, there had never been an easy one.
But he was no longer the man searching for roads. He was now the one who understood the nature of the walls.
His epiphany, born from solitude and suffering, had taught him a fundamental truth: this prison was not a place. It was a parasite. A layer of false reality, an illusion woven over the fabric of the true world. And if that illusion faded, then what lay beneath, the raw, ancient, imperfect rock of the mountain, must still exist. He did not need to create a path. He needed to reveal it.
He raised his blade, not as a warrior's weapon, but as a surgeon's scalpel of reality. He did not sing. He struck.
He hammered at the void before him. The impact produced no sound, but a violence of concept beyond anything imaginable. The nothingness did not tear like a curtain, it shattered like glass. The illusion flaked and cracked, and for a fraction of a second revealed the dark, solid wall of a lava tunnel: the real tunnel, the path he'd once traveled as prey.
The void tried to reform, but Zac struck again, with methodical precision. Each balanced blow did not cut, it "erased." He was an inverted scribe, wiping the parchment of illusion to reveal the original text beneath.
A desperate race against erasure began. He advanced through a tunnel that was born and died around him, its walls a shifting mosaic of solid rock and hungry void. The ground beneath his feet shimmered, threatening to disappear at any moment. He no longer trusted his eyes, which could only see chaos, but relied on a new sense, a perception of "solidity" he could feel through the soles of his feet and the tip of his sword. He sensed the difference between the prison's falsehood and the mountain's truth.
He did not run blindly, but followed the memory of his own path, retracing it with every strike, forcing reality to remember him. The higher he climbed, the more the real world seemed to struggle to reclaim its place. He felt the heat of the volcano's heart, not a threat now, but an anchor. He smelled the sulfur, a familiar and nearly comforting stench. He heard the deep rumbling of the living mountain, a sound that covered the sterile silence of the void.
He reached the last wall of flickering nothingness, the very surface of the prison. He knew the sky lay just beyond. Gathering his strength, he did not strike but plunged his sword into the illusion to the hilt and tore it wide with a single, powerful motion, like a painter ripping a failed canvas from the easel.
He stumbled forward, not into light, but onto hard, grainy, cold rock. He felt the shock in his knees, a real and welcome pain. A sharp wind, stinging his face, swept away the last scent of dust and death. He opened his eyes.
He was standing at the rim of Mount Doom. Behind him, the rift, the gaping wound he had opened in the fabric of his prison, did not close like a scar. It simply dissolved. The hungry void did not recede; it ceased ever to have been. The prison, with its horrors, cruel logic, and millennia of suffering, did not implode. It was erased from reality, demoted to a forgotten nightmare, a dissonance that had finally found silence.
Before him, the world. The real world. The vast sky of Arda stretched above, an infinite dome of blue and gray so broad and deep that his mind, accustomed to stone ceilings, could scarcely comprehend the scale. The first stars of twilight began to pierce the veil of day, cold diamonds scattered on dark velvet. This was no illusion. It was not a vision. It was truth, in all its indifferent beauty.
A glacial wind scoured the summit, a pure, memoryless wind. Zac breathed deeply. The air was sharp, so cold it burned his throat and lungs, an exquisite, violent pain. This was the burn of life, a welcome assault after an eternity spent breathing the dust of the dead and the sterile breath of the void. Every breath was an affirmation. Every exhale, a release. He felt the ground beneath his feet, the hard, gritty, real rock, an anchor in an ocean of dizzying freedom.
He was free.
The word echoed in the silence of his mind, not with explosive joy, but with immense tranquility. He was a castaway who, after swimming across an ocean, finally set foot on silent, solid ground.
He turned one last time to where the prison had been. There was nothing. No scar. No echo. Only the ordinary, menacing slope of the mountain.
He let the hell become just a memory, a terrible memory, an indelible part of him, but a memory nonetheless. The book was closed. A new page, white and terrifying, opened before him.
Zac slipped beneath his shroud. The instrument of his torment became the cradle of his rest, and its silence, the sweetest lullaby.