THE EYE TYRANTS
CHAPTER 3
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through the creature’s body by the pulsations of the lung. Once the nutrients and oxygen provided by the fluid are completely consumed, the waste liquid drains back into the beholder’s cavernous maw. It is then expelled or, more often, it dribbles out in a constant stream of foul-smelling drool. A beholder that goes without food grows more lethargic as its body begins to dry out. Anything a beholder finds indigestible is either vomited back up and spat out or slowly absorbed into the lining of its stomach and eventually embedded in the inside surface of its “skeleton.”
Reproductive System Beholders are gender neutral, and they become fertile only once in their lives. During this period (which happens within the first forty years of a beholder’s life), the creature grows increasingly more erratic and paranoid in behavior. A strange ovoid organ (6) below the back of the creature’s tongue grows large and swollen; this is the creature’s womb. A typical beholder gestates up to twelve young in its womb over a period of nearly six months, during which time it grows more and more active and cantankerous. A pregnant beholder eats nearly four times its normal amount of food for the first four months of its term, storing up food reserves in its stomach, intestines, and even its lung. During the final two months, the creature’s womb has swollen so large that its mouth becomes incapable of swallowing more food, and its tongue protrudes grossly from its maw. A beholder is at its most paranoid during this time and remains hidden in its lair until it gives birth. The birthing of new beholders is a sight that few have witnessed, and by all accounts, it’s something that even fewer would want to witness. When a brood comes to term, a beholder’s jaw unhinges, and it regurgitates its womb out through the mouth. The creature bites the womb off, and it floats gently in the air. The young beholders are forced to chew their way out of the gory mass to freedom; they are capable of flight immediately, but their eye powers develop later in life. Although a beholder gives birth to up to a dozen young at once, only a handful survive. The parent observes its young and decides which look most like itself. The others are eaten by the ravenous parent, along with the discarded womb, and the surviving young are forced from the parent’s lair within the hour to fend for themselves. Central Nervous System A beholder’s intense magical power and energy are gathered and directed in the internal organs that comprise its nervous system and brain (7). Some theorize that beholders gather magical energy from the bodies of spellcasting creatures they’ve eaten, while others believe that they simply absorb ambient magic from the environment. In fact, a beholder’s vast store of magical power is directly connected to its eyes. Just as the creature’s braided optic nerves transmit light to the brain to allow sight, so do the eyes transmit magic to the brain for storage and augmentation. A beholder can absorb magical energy by looking at spell effects in action,
by observing magic creatures like constructs or spellcasters, by gazing upon ancient relics and minor magic baubles, and by simply reading or studying spellbooks. It can even absorb magic from watching its own eye rays, recycling the power back into its brain as it uses them. The amount of magical energy the eyes absorb is miniscule; a beholder could study the same magic missile scroll nonstop for months before the study would render the scroll useless. The more powerful and permanent the magic is, the longer it takes to absorb. Further, beholders build up tolerances to magic of the same variety. A beholder would gain much less magical energy from studying a single pair of winged boots over the course of a week than it would from studying an entire library full of arcane tomes. A beholder that goes without a steady supply of new magic to study grows cantankerous and paranoid. More than any sense of greed, this forces the creature to hoard magic items as treasure or to seek out ruins, dungeons, and other repositories of powerful magic. A beholder’s brain is quite large. Much of it consists of two lobes that descend down to the left and right like horns. These are known as dweomerlobes, and it is here that magical energy is stored and amplified.
THE BEHOLDER’S MIND A beholder’s mind, like its body, is alien to the natural world and actually consists of two separate, independent minds. These minds can be categorized as the rational mind and the intuitive mind. Having two minds does not give a beholder any sort of tactical or magical advantage; if anything, it is perhaps the monster’s greatest disadvantage. The rational mind is a coldly logical machine that classifies information into forms and shapes that a beholder can assimilate. It stores plans, magical knowledge, personal rationalizations, memories, and goals. The intuitive mind consists of what a beholder sees. It sorts what it observes to determine what can and cannot be passed on to the rational mind. Here, a beholder keeps suppressed memories and suppressed knowledge, details of past failures, and theories that would shatter its rational mind. In the gulf that exists between a beholder’s two minds lurk its paranoia and xenophobia. Beholders are considered to be insane, but not all beholders suffer from the side effects of having two minds. In some, their rational and intuitive minds work together to assimilate thoughts and plans without hiding truth and knowledge. These beholders are considered sane, and they can interact with other creatures in a nondestructive manner, although they remain just as capable of cruelty and sadism as the more common variety. (See Beholder Society, below, for more details.)
BEHOLDER LIFE Theoretically, a beholder can live for more than a hundred years. In practice, though, only a few survive their first decade, since beholders spend their early years exploring and seeking a proper lair.
