The Labyrinth of Eyes: “There’s no traps here, people”

---

The Labyrinth of Eyes

The company emerged from the portal into a dark corridor, illuminated by a strange silver-and-grey light. The moist stone walls, almost twenty feet high, were covered with dozens of staring eyes that twitch and blink, following every move.

Not surprisingly, everyone had the strange sensation they were being watched.

As the company oriented, the portal shrank down to a pinprick and vanished with a faint pop.

“That’s the same ‘pop’ that happens when I do this,” Sifer said as he jammed his dagger into the nearest eye. It withered and closed in an instant before blinking out of existence. “Magic?”

“Or freaky,” Uthar shrugged.

“It will take time, but are we going to puncture all these eyes?” Sifer said, daggering a few more for good measure.

“It’s the Lord’s work.”

Eli had not time for that. He walked ahead, following the north corridor.

“I notice we no longer check for traps?” Sifer said. Pop.

“There’s no traps here, people,” Eli called over his shoulder.

“Are we ready, mentally, for this?” Three said tiredly. “Walking down a corridor covered with eyes without Marko checking seems a bit lackadaisical.”

“It is.” Pop.

Eli found himself facing a very long corridor that led to darkness, with another corridor leading south at the midpoint. “This place is huge,” he called over his shoulder.

Uthar took the other passage, seeing Eli ahead once he rounded the corner. The company followed, Three examining the floor but seeing it was too damp for tracks. There were however spores floating in the humid air, so he covered his face as a precaution.

Sifer looked to Eli standing at the further junction. “If you go around that corner I’m just going to let you go,” he shrugged.

“Sifer you don’t let me do anything. I’m not answerable to you.” None the less he waited for Uthar and his aura. The eyes followed the company accusingly with every step.

The small corridor to the south was truncated at a large circular hole, eight-foot across, surrounded by a reddish-purple ring like an iris around a pupil. “Mister Marko do you want to stealth ahead to see what’s down there?”

Marko nodded and shifted down to the opening. A semi-circular, constructed groove lay in the floor and ceiling above. Both were covered in a vivid lime slime, as were the walls that line either side. “Dwarven work, perhaps,” he reported. he peered into the ‘eyehole’ and saw a circular tunnel continued ahead. He poked the rapier into the green goop, drawing a sample level with his eyeline. He smelled it carefully, studying it for poison. “Smells like a naturally occurring slime, not poison,” he called, “Come to me.”

The company gathered at the strange opening. Water had pooled in the floor tracks, like run off that might explain the goop. Marko flew inside, checking carefully. The rounded walls made it feel like the inside of a sewer or pipe. He landed on the floor and continued ahead, following the corridor around in a right angled bend. “Follow, it’s safe.”

“What are these corridors here for?” Eli asked as he climbed inside. “What was the point of the corridor we came from?”

Marko looked around the corner to see a large heap of broken glass that sparkled in a variety of colours. Another circular opening, with the same slime-covered grooves, lay before the piles of glass. He approached, finding the small room ahead was a dead end. “Decorative I think, not just smashed bottles,” he said picking up shards. On the walls he noticed small alcoves and some mounting points, perhaps for shelving now removed or destroyed. He tried to piece together a selection of same-coloured glass but quickly realised it was a fruitless task.

Three joined Marko, his steps crunching underfoot as he entered the room. He too looked closely at the glass, and his background made him sure of what he saw. “I think we’re walking through a museum, or gallery. This was a fine vase,” he said holding a semi-intact piece aloft.

Idris remained behind, trying to make sense of the slime in the groove. Whilst it was natural, it was different to the ooze covering the eye-laden walls. More like lubrication…

---

“Marko? These tracks look like a circular arc. I think this thing we’re in rotates?” Idris said.

“I do too. Look at the crack in the wall at each of the entrances around the tracks.”

“Then we need to take great care because if this piece turns and we don’t know how to unturn it then we’ll be trapped.”

“But why is it like this?” Three said, “Why the eyeballs?”

“No idea, you’re asking the wrong eyeball.”

“Should we look around the non-swivelling part of this maze before we attempt to swivel this part?” Eli suggested.

“That sounds wise,” Idris said.

“I agree,” Three said.

“Thank you for your support, master,” Eli smiled.

Idris nodded, despite Eli’s eyes being firmly trained on Three.

Pop. Pop. Sifer continued his eye destroying ways as the company retreated.

“You’re going to pay a price for that,” Three groaned.

“Interestingly some of the ones from the entrance have started to respawn,” Sifer said glancing back along the corridor where fresh eyes were emerging.

Marko led the way opposite, clearing the floors for traps. Eli followed close behind, impatient to get ahead. At the end of the corridor Marko stopped and held his hand up. “I hear…crying?” he whispered, confused.

“Is it Eli?” Three whispered back to a stifled laugh. Eli waved Three away and stepped around the corner into a large chamber divided by thin stone walls, with smashed tables and tools filling shallow alcoves. “Like the glass—smashed in anger not just looted,” Eli muttered to Uthar.

“I hear the sobs too,” Uthar said quietly as he stepped south. Eli nodded, taking the northern path to circle toward the sound. Uthar stepped ahead toward the sighs and tears and stumbled to a halt when he saw the source of all this misery.

---

A slimy conglomeration of tear-rimmed eyes in many sizes and shapes floated in the corridor ahead. As Uthar appeared all the eyes turned on him.

“Why do you disturb Goculus’s misery? Is it not enough that I am stripped of my reason to exist?” From the depths of melancholy the creature bellowed out a heaving sob, a wave of crushing despair that sent Three and Marko into a fit of sympathetic wallowing.

Eli, seeing Marko suddenly bawling, sprinted past but took the wrong turn. He skidded to a stop on seeing Three also collapsed to his knees, deep anguish etched upon his ruined face. Eli dropped too, wrapping his arms around a grateful Three. “Devourer! What has happened?”

Three looked up to meet Eli’s concerned gaze, then his eyes lowered to something over Eli’s shoulder. There were no tears, just gasps of barely contained despair. Eli turned his head and startled on seeing Goculus. He sprung to his feet and drew his sword, ready to defend his mentor.

Further back, Sifer shrugged the sadness away. He couldn’t see the threat, but he guessed: he reached into his pocket and jammed two globs of well-used wax into his ears, then ran down the corridor to join Eli. He grabbed the incapacitated Three and pulled him to safety.

Last to arrive on the scene was Idris, who was the only one to remain unshaken on seeing the monstrosity ahead. He was curious about what this creature could be, and why it was so disturbed. He probed what he hoped was the mind behind the eyes, detecting the thoughts that lay within. The surface level was obvious: Goculus was drowning in misery. It had been transformed from something far more powerful into this new form, a useless, worthless, nothing. A bundle of eyes stripped of all worth. Idris probed again, looking for what this thing was prior to this regretful transformation. He found a hidden path the led deeper, and followed it. Goculus was right: it was once a dreaded and dreadful beholder, with a towering ego and every trapping of power and success. This maze was its lair and it ruled supreme, before a troupe of uppity mind-flayers blasted the beholder’s sanity and transformed it into a miserable, obsessive shell of its former self. Only one thing remained of Goculus’s ego: an abiding and deep hatred of mind-flayers.

“Just like me,” Idris muttered to himself. He knew beholders were all total assholes, but Goculus was no longer that. He turned to Uthar. “This used to be a beholder before it was tortured by Ghaik,” he spat. He turned back to the creature. “Goculus, are the flayers still here?”

“They live! Theyyyy liivvee! They have tortured me, taken everything from me!!” Goculus cried with growing rage.

“Where?”

“Everywhere. They’re everywhere!!”

“It’s insane,” Idris said softly.

Uthar was shocked to here empathy in Idris’s tone. Just look at that thing. He wasn’t going to wait to find out if Idris was right. He jumped ahead and sliced his sword through the soft flesh of Goculus, who let out a writhing howl.

“You will pay the price that they did not!” Goculus cried with a sob. Every eye opened wide to release a withering glare, scarlet energy sweeping the room ahead. Eli was directly in the path, bombarded, whilst the rest of the company variously avoided most of the impact. Two pseudopods reached out from the blob of eyes and wrapped themselves around Uthar and Eli; Uthar fought it off, but Eli felt the dreadful contact and rocked back to the psychic flash, resisting the accompanying urge to flee but barely. “You feel my pain, you know my pain!” Goculus bellowed.

Sifer watched the eyes on the wall, wondering if they would respond to Goculus. But they were all focussed on the fight, nothing more sinister. A surveillance system, he thought. He stepped out and lined up Goculus; it was an easy target. He loaded up with all he had and unleashed three precise shots. POP POP. Rather more satisfying than the eyes on the walls. The third shot caused Uthar to duck his head as it shattered into the wall by his side.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Idris joined the fray. He had tried, but now it was time to finish this—his sorcerer’s burst sent Goculus further into insanity. “It’s a mercy killing,” he muttered. Uthar swung, but such was the flood of offal and eye viscera that he failed with both attempts.

Sifer hauled Three to his feet, bolstering him with an encouraging slap across the shoulders. Three took a breath and walked forward toward the chaotic scene, praying. He opened his eyes, made direct contact, and held his hands aloft: “Go to sleep!” A burst of radiance shone forth and sent Goculus to the death it so deeply deserved.

---

“Master, can a thing like that even find heaven?” Eli said, toeing the mass of flesh and mucus.

“I think Goculus was already in hell,” Three said before Idris could answer.

“Then you have done great work.”

“We all have. It was living in a misery.”

“So should we kill hobos then?”

“Think on it, Eli,” Three frowned.

“And master, I don’t like to put myself ahead of others, but I am losing a fair amount of blood?”

Three nodded and fixed that situation, rather weakly (had Goculus’s sorrow impacted his healing magic?). He sighed and started rifling through the detritus in the room. There was very little of worth, but a few items stood out: a set of jeweller’s tools, three rubies carved to look like eyeballs. Marko uncovered a statue that he showed triumphantly—a statuette of a beholder with emeralds at the ends of the eyestalks and a huge diamond for a central eye.

“He did have a big ego,” Idris smirked on seeing the self-portrait. “There is no more path,” he added having followed the various turns in Goculus’s lair.

“So we all need to gather on the rotating circle,” Eli said. “How did that floating ball of eyes use it?”

“The same way I do,” Idris said. “With their minds.”

“So you know these guys?”

“I know of them, but I’ve never seen one—thankfully. I hear they’re not pleasant.”

“I don’t know that anyone has seen whatever that was,” Three said.

“Three, that was a beholder. It was changed by mind flayers.”

“I hope it’s not mind flayers, plural. Because I know from my reading, and you know from reality, they are—”

“We’ve killed two!” Idris protested.

“Yes but not ones ready to go to war. You know that.”

“I’m familiar,” Idris deadpanned.

“The eyeballs have all regenerated,” Sifer noted as the company returned to the middle of the maze. “They’re not to do with the assailant, they’re to do with the jailer. The mind flayers.”

Eli stood before the circular central chamber. “Can I make a suggestion? Surely, if that room were to rotate, the controls would be within it. So that someone who stepped inside could rotate it themselves?”

This made good sense given there had been no sign of an external control. But despite a thorough search, no mechanism could be found. “We could shut down all their eyes?” Sifer said hopefully, to shakes of ‘no’. Idris tried speaking in Deep Speech inside the centre, trying variations on ‘turn’, ‘rotate’, and the like, with no luck. Telepathy was no better.

“What about if it just needs a push?” Uthar said to the stumped company. “Maybe we just need to physically rotate it?”

“But there’s no leverage point?” Sifer sighed.

“If you stand and push against the outside wall?” Eli said, “One of us in one entrance, one in the other?” He and Idris positioned themselves before both had the same thought: once the walls move will there be no further purchase? If not the company would be trapped inside.

Sifer had a sudden flash. “You know what we need? An immovable bar. You put it in position and haul away! And as luck would have it I believe Acererak left us one,” he grinned.

“Of course! You’re a genius!” Idris cried as Marko pulled the said object out of his sack.

It was a very strange thing. The holder could position the rod in empty space and it would lock into place with no support. One of the simplest but most powerful demonstrations of magic, often used to entertain children and vaudeville shows. But Marko, on finding it, had known just how useful it was.

Uthar, strongest of the company, set the rod in place in the midpoint of the internal corridor. He gripped it and hauled with all his strength.

The entire centre of the maze started to shift anticlockwise, making the corridor beyond slowly disappear as it turned. “It moves far more easily that I would expect,” Uthar said happily. He released the rod and repositioned it, repeating the trick. Idris ran his hand along the revealed inner wall, finding it heavily greased, near impossible to grip or get a hand hold. “And this is why we had to be careful,” he said.

---

After several moves, a new corridor leading west was revealed. Uthar grinned, wiping the sweat from his brow.

Marko stepped out, finding the same dank atmosphere and eternally watching eyes. He led the company ahead, turning south until a smallish chamber was revealed to the east. “Get up there Uthar before Marko walks in there on his own,” Sifer urged.

“Would you mind, Mister Marko, if we put a—long, not short—but a longish leash you on?” Eli asked innocently.

Marko turned back. “Yes I would mind. Would you mind if you got stabbed in the eye accidentally?”

“Well to be fair, Marko,” Idris said, “In the Tomb you did that to yourself!”

“Stabbed himself in the eye?” Uthar asked, wracking his memory.

“No—he roped himself onto a leash!”

“That was a Tomb. Of horrors,” Marko frowned and stepped into the room. On the far end of the room, ten stone rods protruded from the wall. One ended at a cup the size of an eyeball, while the others all had jagged ends. The stone floor beneath the rods was stained a sickly pink colour. Marko flew to the intact rod and hovered before it. It was obvious that the cup was designed for resting an eye against to look inside the rod. “The pink stain on the floor—blood I guess—is old. Dried and cracked,” he reported.

Sifer walked up behind Marko and rested a hand on his shoulder. He motioned to the eye-cup. “Look inside,” he suggested.

Marko wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. He did a careful check but could find no trap or obvious danger. “Maybe step away, just in case?”

“I was going to protect you if something happened, but ok.”

Marko leaned into the cup. It sealed over his eye with a soft slurp. He saw a hideous pool of grotesque brine, miles-deep and swirling slowly with murky dim green light that welled up from the depths. The sight filled Marko with an existential dread like a psychic sliver inserted into his mind. At the pool’s bottom he saw a tiny, dark hole and somehow knew it to be a powerful gate to a place deep in the Far Realm.

As the knowledge flooded Marko’s conscious mind, his unconscious mind started to collapse. So wrong was what he was seeing that it could no longer function, and the horror quickly overwhelmed his every sense. His mind blanked and his every motivation disappeared. The last thing he saw before insanity took him was a dark shadow flittering through the murky depths.

Marko’s head dropped, breaking the seal, as he stood swaying softly. “Marko?” Sifer called. Marko turned, blank faced, though there was a hint of recognition.

“It’s just like what happened to Eli in the Tomb,” Three groaned, “I can restore him.” He prayed for Kelemvor to return Marko’s intelligence, and moments later Marko’s glance sharpened as he looked around. “I saw something I wish I hadn’t seen it I…I…it was a pool it was green there was something in it and it was deep and it was long and—”

Marko’s usual florid and rapid speech was a dull, monotonous monologue. “I’ll have to do more,” Three said, and added a second more powerful prayer into the mix.

“—There was no end to it. Until there was! At the very foot of the pool: a gateway, a tiny hole. And that hole led somewhere that I instinctively knew, without knowing why,” Marko said dramatically, his vim fully returned. “The Far Realm…”

“Oh he’s actually saying something,” Sifer laughed. “I thought he was just dribbling.”

“I wasn’t listening, I couldn’t stand it,” Eli nodded.

Marko turned to Three. “Thank you!”

“Did you say you saw the Far Realm?” Idris said cautiously.

“Yes—what is it?”

Idris looked around the company. “It’s a place that exists outside our reality, where eldritch gods of insane and unknown provenance dwell.”

“What??” Marko gasped.

“And it’s the place from which spawn many things that would be categorised as aberrant and unnatural. Like beholders…and mind flayers. I know of warlocks that have treated with these powers to get their abilities.”

Marko’s thoughts drifted to Donald, his old companion and trusted accountant of Stormwatch. Surely not? “Why would you?”

“They offer a great ability to influence others,” Idris said simply. “Every warlock makes their own bargain.”

Phew. Not Donald, Marko nodded to himself, relieved.

“That was a terrible thing for you to go through, Marko, it’s not meant to be seen.”

“It was horrific,” Marko confirmed.

“Does it bring us any insights?” Sifer asked.

“And what is the purpose of this room?” Eli added.

“Communication with the Far Realm perhaps?”

“Why are nine of the ten rods broken?”

“Because it’s obviously a bit hard to communicate with them,” Sifer snorted, glancing at Marko.

“So should we smash this last one?”

“No because we don’t know if one of us is going to have to do something with it later,” Idris said.

Three held a mirror to the eye-cup, hoping to see something of what Marko did. But all he could see was an echo, a sworl of sickly green and nothing more.

---

Marko led on. Idris, watching Sifer’s continued eye-popping, nicked one off the wall intact. The second it detached it too blinked out of existence. He studied the connectors to see if they may form one networked presence, but they all seemed individual, a theory supported by their respawn. “Things like this are on brand for the Far Realm,” he muttered to Sifer. “As is something like Goculus.”

“I don’t want to have to go there,” Eli said, overhearing.

“The more we move down this corridor the closer we get to it,” Sifer shrugged. “We’ve got a job to do—let’s keep moving, people.”

The winding passages led to a long, wider chamber. One the southern wall a green-and-silver rift roiled and throbbed on the wall, and fleshy tendrils reached out toward others on the opposite side that surrounded several much larger wall eyes. As Marko drew close he found he could see through the rift: beyond it lay a greyish-pink tunnel that resembles the folds of a titanic brain.

“That should be our last resort,” Idris pointed to the rift.

“It looks like a one-way trip,” Sifer agreed. “Let’s continue ahead.”

Eli led the way now, convinced there were no traps to worry about. Marko kept checking, but Eli wasn’t stopping. He was proven right, eventually finding himself at another of the rotation points. It was blocked, as the central chamber was locked to the opposite passage.

Uthar went to work to rotate until an access point was revealed. Everyone stepped inside, and again Uthar shifted the chamber. A new exit was revealed, to the south this time. A short corridor led south before twisting back north. At the end of the dead end a withered corpse dressed in leather armour lay slumped into a corner.

Uthar approached carefully. The leather armour was so dried out that it was cracked and peeling in strips. “It’s a—”

“Gith,” Idris finished. He crouched down before the corpse. Blackened marks covered the chest, as if the victim had been struck by a beam of energy. A cracked leather belt held four small, crystal daggers, obviously ornamental—perhaps kill trophies. Three arrived by Idris’s side to examine the remains.

“There’s something different about the limbs,” Idris pointed. “The torso and head are withered away, but the legs and arms are almost still intact, even fat?”

Before Three could speak Idris reached forward and, very gently, lifted the dead gith’s head.

WHOMP!

The corpse exploded. Idris and Three were thrown back, the rest of the company more sheltered but still covered in the remains. “Kelemvor,” Three said, near reflexively, quickly healing everyone.

“Apologies,” Idris said to Three, wiping the goop away. “That was very unexpected.”

“Apologies for what?”

“I should have been more careful with the corpse.”

“Do the corpses of your dead normally do that?” Eli asked.

“No. I’m wondering if this was residual or if the body was trapped.”

“The limbs were swollen,” Three said, wiping his face with the filthy corpse cloth he carried for just such a purpose. “I would guess a necrotic build up that was triggered with the slightest touch—not a trap, just unlucky. Those black marks on the chest looked like burns, or energy.”

“It was chased into a corner and zapped by a beam,” Sifer explained. “Probably Goculus before he was neutered.”

Idris reached down and retrieved the daggers, the belt disintegrating in his hands. He said something softly in gith, a blessing of farewell.

---

The company returned to the glowing portal. Eli stood before it thoughtfully. “I have two questions. First; do we think this gate through to wherever-the-hell, and I’m not being figurative, is Goculus’s front door back to wherever-the-hell? And second question: how the hell did the beholder rotate the centre of this maze?”

“It didn’t,” Idris said flatly.

“It was like a prisoner,” Three said wrongly.

“This was his lair! And then he became a prisoner,” Eli corrected.

“Oh, you’re right. Well then it would have used telekinesis,” Idris explained. “It would have moved the stone with its mind.”

“Seemed slightly unnecessary.”

“They don’t have hands, Eli.”

“No I mean it seems unnecessary to have this structure within its home.”

“It’s like you trying to explain why an ant builds its colony in the way it does,” Idris said in all earnestness. “The intelligence of things like beholders is as different to you and me as how you and a worm think.”

“Got it,” Eli nodded, despite the mixed metaphor.

“It’s lucky we’re so similar to the gith that we can communicate,” Sifer added.

Three raised an eyebrow. “From the river to the sea, Sifer, we’re all people.”

“You’re lucky that I’m a gith that wants to communicate with you, Sifer,” Idris growled. “Most of them don’t.”

“Well. There’s only one way left for us to go,” Three said, pointing to the rift dubiously.

“You have to remember, people,” Sifer said, “Everything always gets worse. That’s where we’re going: always a descent.”

“Is that true, master?” Eli asked. Idris turned, before realising it was Three Eli was addressing.

“I believe so,” Three nodded.

“There is a possibility that this is not going to be good,” Sifer repeated. “Let’s give it a moment’s thought before we all dive in.”

After two seconds of thoughtful silence, Idris nodded to Uthar and stepped through.

---

Session played February 9, 23 2025

---