I am Leito, and I hate life. I hate everything life involves, and I wish I would just die. Everything is just hateful now, and I find no joy in anything. I love and hate Melkor, and I want to like Iluvatar but I am simply unable to. My reasons are plain and simple: I am not allowed. I loathe myself, if I see my reflection, it ids of a mutilated, hideous, malevolent creature. I almost wish I would get killed in my attempts to murder today. I am ruthless, cruel, and cold-hearted, I no longer feel pity for any.

I wasn’t always a creature labeled "A mockery of the elves," but I was formerly an elf, before the darkest years of my life. I almost didn’t live to tell this tale, and I wish I hadn’t. I was a fool when I brooded about survival, I’d probably be happier if I’d literally been tortured to death.

Oh, I remember the capture as if it were yesterday, although it seems eons ago. The day had seemed merry, yet I was restless and at unease. All I wanted to do was explore the extremities of Ea. Giving in to what seemed to be my inner wishes, I said goodbye to my sister Kirya and my parents, telling them I’d return by nightfall. I was a mere elf-child of about fifteen, and I was as foolish as an adolescent lad can be. I wandered far from home, running, hopping, walking, skipping, and singing, right into a dark, foreboding place. My family lived in the vicinity of the area called Utumno. I was a curious teenager, wandering about the area, despite my instincts of peril going haywire, and then suddenly, darkness took me. When the physical agony ceased, after many long years, I was no longer Leito of the Elven-race, but of a new race, conceived by Melkor, called the Orcs; a vile race abhorred by all.

When I came around, I found myself in a dungeon within the deep confines of Ea, damp, yet overly dry; bitterly cold, yet swelteringly hot. I felt both extremes of many unpleasant sensations, yet there was one thing whose opposite did not surface: darkness. There was no light within this hellhole. As if being in a minute, cramped room with an unbearable climate and a lack of fresh air wasn’t foul enough, I was physically maltreated from the get-go. At first, it was merely meager rations of edible food and water, and minute slaps and punches, and then the "punishment" grew worse day by day. Melkor lied to me, saying that I had wronged Iluvatar with my previous merry-making lifestyle, paying no heed to the negative affairs of the world, he told me that Iluvatar had given the orders for me to be punished severely, by torture and not execution.

After the year, I was no longer given food fit for an elf to eat. Melkor’s reason was, "You are not a true elf; a true elf would not have committed the crimes you did to Iluvatar. He still hates you, and you haven’t even begun to pay for your sins." Instead, I was given raw flesh from snakes, or rats, or other animals, and sometimes fellow beings: man-flesh and elf-flesh. My "drink" was the foulest and murkiest of the water in all the land, more mud than anything else, infested by leeches, skater bugs, and other vermin of the lakes. Originally, I’d flat-out refused to eat any of the sludge, insisting I’d rather die, but when the hunger became unbearable, I made the resolution to live after all. Elves are supposed to be immortal, immune to sickness, yet I was physically ill from want of food and air, and the brutal torturing. I was determined not to let Melkor win this game, and I began eating the food given to me, knowing that although it was fetid, I needed to eat to survive another day.

The methods of torture were brutal. At first, I refused to confess to any crimes that Melkor accused me of having committed, ranging from not caring to theft to violation of others and murder. Outraged, Melkor accused of me as needing more severe chastisement due to my pride and overactive willpower. He was able to cause me agony merely by glaring at me, binding me with his spells and ill wishes, although he made use of also conventional methods of coercion: beatings, stretching, cutting, burnings, the whole nine yards. Once, bound my wrists and hung me from a hook in the rafter of a ceiling many feet above the ground for five after having strapped me to a rack, stretched me to the point where many of my ligaments and tendons had snapped, warmed a poisoned iron knife until it was red-hot, and then sliced open my limbs while I was still awake, saying I’d been injured by the rack more than he’d intended. Morgoth was laughing a cold, mirthless cackle the entire time he was cutting me open with the red-hot dagger. When he’d exposed the torn joints, he had cut them into thinner shreds before sewing them together with a fiery-hot needle and icy-cold, dirty thread. After reattaching my joints into a scrambled maze, Melkor sewed my gashes until they were his idea of shut: he deliberately kept each stitch so far apart that I was still bleeding profusely when he hung me from the rafter. Had I been the weight I was when I had first been captured, the wood would have broke, but as I’d lost almost half my body weight from malnutrition, I was light enough to easily be blown around by wind, and the wood was sturdy enough to support the entirety of my mass. I don’t know how much of my elven-blood I’d lost, but it was a miracle I’d survived that particular ordeal. I lost consciousness after the third day, as I learned later from Melkor taunting me as I lay weak in the corner of my dungeon cell. I had no concept of the passage time; as I couldn’t see the outside world, I ever knew if it was daylight or nighttime. Day and night alike were black where I was entombed.

After what seemed to be eons, Melkor stopped blaming me for my pain and commenced feigning sympathy, switching to a new method of corruption: placing the blames upon others, innocents, for my pain. He said I’d been brought up by kindred and comrades to be how I was, that I wasn’t born with my "endless detrimental traits." He said, lying through his teeth, that because my society had made me what I was, I was bearing the brunt of Iluvatar’s wrath. It was a falsehood that Iluvatar loathed me at all, but after I figured this out a long while after my imprisonment, I was already broken. For Melkor finally released me, after I was transformed from a member of the fairest Race of Ea to a specimen of a mutilated species. I callously killed almost any living thing that crossed my path, apathetic to their plight and pain. Melkor had released me under the instruction to wipe out all Elves and Men and others I could find, or once again bear the weight of Iluvatar’s fury. He said that both he and Iluvatar regretted the creation of men and elves; that I was fortunate, having been purified before it was too late. I was no longer tall and lean with unblemished skin, golden hair, and bright blue eyes. I was now diminished in stature and skeletally thin, scarred from years of affliction, red eyes, with stringy black hair, and fanged. I feasted on raw flesh of creatures from the lowliest slug to the flesh of Men and Elves, relishing every second. Food I’d once deemed delicacies were now regarded as products of evil, distasteful, disgusting.

I have had my few moments of sanity and the wits which I seem to have lost with my incarceration, but this sense of peace and knowledge is now fading, and I’m retreating back into hatred of all, including my master Morgoth. I am off to attempt to relieve of myself of this depression by doing what I do best: slaughtering innocents.

Epilogue: On the same day of the dark morning in which Leito had composed his brief memoirs, he met his death at last in an attempt to raid a village of the Numenoreans. He had been shot in the throat by a valiant, aristocratic youth who was ironically the same age as Leito was when he was first interned in a dungeon of Utumno: a mere fifteen years old. This lad was an ancestor of many generations of Elendil and Isildur, who would be vital to the tale of the Lord of the Rings.