Written for Back to Middle Earth Month 2019. Prompt: Horror Crossover (H.P. Lovecraft) & Slavery

At the Mountain of Madness

“But of those unhappy ones who were ensnared by Melkor little is known of a certainty. For who of the living has descended into the pits of Utumno, or has explored the darkness of the counsels of Melkor?” ~ The Silmarillion

The Elf huddled against the cold floor of the cave. It was a huge, dark chamber made of black stone. It should have been impossible to see anything but there was a queer, flickering light coming from above. He looked up into the ceiling and saw—something. It was a terrible, indescribable thing. Huge and writhing, faintly self-luminous, shapeless congeries of flesh and iridescent black slime with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming. Terror pulsed through him. His mind struggled to understand what he was seeing, to make sense of its twisting shapes.

Something deep and visceral in his soul rebelled at the sight of the writhing, shifting horror above him. The thing reached out for him with tendrils of lightning and flesh. His skin burned and crawled under their touch. The tendrils lifted him up, surrounded him, pulling at his body, his flesh warping and shifting under their touch. He screamed in agony and horror. He felt his mind shifting too, twisting, the being’s power flooding it. He could not stop screaming, could not fight the horror of what was happening to him.

When his wits left him, leaving only madness, it was a mercy.

Note: some of the descriptions in this fic are taken from the novella At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft.