Sauron unleashed!  I love the bit about Sauron transforming into a "wolf the size of a hill."  And the artwork is richly done.  

Beautiful, beautiful work, Wesley!  There's a palpable magnificence in Sauron's tale with your striking use of description and your ability to take the reader into this remarkable being's POV.  Very, very well done there, that ability to combine the epic and the otherworldly with a strong inner narrative is not easy to achieve and you do it so well!

There are so many passages that ring my chimes in this story that it's challenging to select favorites, so here are a couple:

The hunter and the forgemaster collided in a fury. The hills rattled and fires burst forth, silver arrows flew like shooting stars into the endless night.

Now that's some epic stuff!  I love this paragraph...

Mairon could not bring himself to look upon the orcs. Nor could he easily tend the seedling eggs that would become dragons, or the scaled and bony terrors that his Master had twisted into being without feeling a quiver of horror. These creatures that Melkor had birthed himself seemed unimaginably grotesque to his eyes, still hampered by the quaint veil of Ainur aesthetics. This squeamishness shamed him, but he trusted Melkor. He admired that his creations were strong instead of beautiful; His master valued adaptivity and resilience over symmetry, and his children came in great variety.  Some were clever, with the same malefic genius as their progenitor. Others moved like cogs in a machine with their own efficient elegance. Some, like the goblins, were so variable that they could hardly be classified.

In one fell swoop, you provide an excellent characterization of Mairon (and foreshadow his transition to claiming his name The Abhorred) and also give us insight into Melkor's methodologies, and highlight that adaptivity and resilience have a beauty of their own.

That the artwork is fabulous goes without saying, but I will say it:  FABULOUS!

The Cruel is being marked as one of my favorites.