D&D Campaign Journal

Session 73: The Library of Eyes

Characters Present: Umal, Mario, Wendaline, Grimdur

Recap

Having solved the riddle door with colored eye-stones, the party stood at the threshold of Seltar’s domain. The Beholder’s voice had echoed from beyond: “Very amusing. Who enters my domain? The domain of Seltar.” Time continued to run out for Umal’s father, but they had agreed to the myconids’ bargain — kill the Beholder, gain information about the Creeping Death.

Narrative Summary

Into the Lair

The door opened into wrongness made manifest. A massive corridor stretched before them, its floor covered in a rotting red carpet that had warped into an amalgamation of fabric and decay. The stone walls writhed with unnatural curves, as if reality itself had been bent by an alien will. Massive iron chandeliers hung at odd angles, and stranger still — objects floated through the air. Books, pieces of armor, rubble, all drifting slowly through the space in defiance of gravity.

Mario sent Sal, his imp familiar, ahead to scout. The spirit creature flew through the partially-opened door and saw the corridor extend deep into the mountain, ending at another doorway far in the distance. The floating debris twisted and turned in mid-air like a slow-motion maelstrom of forgotten things.

Umal squeezed through the door first, casting Detect Magic. The entire space radiated conjuration — everything here was touched by the Beholder’s reality-warping presence. One by one, the party entered, weapons drawn, eyes scanning the darkness.

As they moved down the corridor, Mario’s pipe provided dim light that revealed something disturbing: veins of pulsing energy ran through the walls themselves, throbbing like blood vessels when exposed to illumination. The lair was alive in some terrible way.

When Umal cast Dancing Lights to better illuminate their path, the reaction was immediate. The veins pulsed brighter. The floating objects began to spin faster, forming into vortexes. And from those vortexes, two forms took shape: animated armor, cobbled together from mismatched pieces, held together by magical force and malevolent will.

The Animated Guardians

The constructs attacked without warning or mercy. Umal struck first with his Booming Blade, swords flashing in intricate patterns that sent the first construct reeling. Grimdur weathered brutal strikes, his dwarven constitution absorbing blows that would have felled a lesser warrior. Mario’s divine magic kept them alive, and Wendaline’s blades found gaps in the armor.

But the danger came not just from the constructs themselves. From the walls, eyes began to appear — actual eyeballs emerging from the stone, each firing a different magical ray. A green ray struck Wendaline with sickly poison. A white ray attempted to petrify Mario. A pale blue ray tried to slow Umal’s movements. The Beholder was testing them even before revealing himself.

The party destroyed the animated armor with focused efficiency, but they’d learned a harsh lesson: Seltar could see them, attack them, and manipulate his domain at will. They were fighting in his world, by his rules.

The Silent Witness

As the last construct fell, a figure emerged from the shadows — a Kenku dressed in dark purple and burgundy robes adorned with jingling bells. His face was stark white with black feathers, and he carried a sickle and dagger. Most strikingly, he made absolutely no sound. He moved his beak, gestured frantically, but produced no voice.

Through gestures, drawings, and eventually Umal’s Message spell (which allowed whispered telepathic replies), they learned his story: his name was Tear, he had been captured by the Beholder, and Seltar had stolen his voice and sealed it in a silver box. He’d been trapped in this corridor, unable to escape or speak, a prisoner in the dark.

The party was immediately suspicious. Mario’s attempts to help were met with panic. Every question revealed vaguer answers. But Tear seemed genuinely terrified of the Beholder, and when he gestured that his voice was in a book deeper within, they cautiously accepted his presence. Perhaps having another fighter would help against what lay ahead.

The Door of Knowledge

The corridor ended at another massive door, this one carved with text in Deep Speech. The inscription read:

“To enter, you must give what I crave, and truth you know, but none shall save. Speak it aloud, and I shall part, but choose with care, lest you lose your heart.”

Another riddle, but this one’s stakes were far more personal. The door demanded facts — truths spoken aloud. But speaking the wrong truth, or one that didn’t satisfy the Beholder’s hunger for knowledge, came with consequences.

Mario tested first: “The king of the Dwendalian Empire is King Dwendal.” A rune appeared on the door. Progress, but painful — he took 18 psychic damage when a follow-up fact about the Revelry was rejected.

They realized the pattern: Seltar craved specific, interesting knowledge. General facts might work, but obscure, valuable information pleased him more. One by one, they offered truths from their adventures:

Umal offered the fact that “The king of the Dwendalian Empire is King Dwendal” — accepted without incident. But Mario’s fact about the Revelry was rejected, hitting him with 18 psychic damage. Facts that were too vague, already widely known, or insufficiently interesting were rejected with psychic backlash. But specific, unusual knowledge satisfied the door’s hunger. After seven successful facts, including the final revelation that they’d named their rescue ox Fatima, the door ground open.

Seltar’s true lair lay beyond.

The Library Impossible

They entered a nightmare of warped geometry and stolen knowledge. The chamber was a cylindrical tower that stretched impossibly upward, its walls lined with bookshelves that defied physics. Some shelves grew sideways from walls. Others hung upside-down from the distant ceiling. Floating platforms of stone drifted through the space, and books themselves flew like birds, fluttering through the air on pages that had become wings.

The floor was a mosaic of soft stone that seemed almost digestive. The ceiling swirled with a vortex of text and one massive, central eye. Pale blue fire orbs hung in the air, each imprisoning a screaming face. The entire space hummed with whispers, laughter, and the endless rustle of turning pages.

This was the Beholder’s collection — a library of hoarded knowledge, stolen memories, and forbidden secrets.

Mario, drawn by his curiosity for magical texts, climbed one of the impossible ladders and grabbed a book. But when he jumped down, gravity reasserted itself with prejudice, slamming him into the floor for his hubris. The book turned out to be a bestiary, detailing magical creatures and their weaknesses.

Wendaline spotted something important: high on a shelf, a large black tome with a cover bearing a skull wearing a blindfold. Something about it called to her, tugged at her mind.

And Umal saw it too — a silver box, sealed and floating among the debris.

The Battle Begins

That’s when they heard it: Seltar’s voice, echoing from everywhere and nowhere.

“Thieving.”

The word reverberated through the impossible space with disdain and dark amusement.

“Let us first observe how you handle these.”

More animated armor formed from the swirling debris. The walls spawned additional constructs. And then, descending slowly from the vortex above, reality warping around his presence — Seltar himself appeared.

He was massive. A gnarled, toothy maw dominated his spherical body, saliva dripping from the corners in grotesque excess. His central eye glowed with malevolent intelligence, while his eyestalks writhed around him like serpents, each tipped with a smaller eye. Frost and slime covered parts of his body, evidence of strange magical effects he’d absorbed over his long existence.

“Welcome to my domain,” he said, his voice dripping with cruel pleasure. “Please enjoy.”

The battle that followed was chaos.

Seltar’s eyestalks fired constantly — different rays with different effects. The Disintegration Ray nearly killed Wendaline, reducing her to single-digit hit points in one strike. The Paralyzing Ray turned Mario into a statue, forcing the party to protect him. The Sleep Ray knocked Tear unconscious. The Petrification Ray began slowly turning Mario to stone, requiring multiple Constitution saves to resist.

But worse than the rays was the Antimagic Cone. Seltar rotated his body, and from his central eye, a cone of absolute magical suppression swept the battlefield. When it passed over them, every spell effect vanished — protective wards, spiritual weapons, everything. They had to hide behind pillars of warped stone, timing their movements to avoid the cone while staying in range to attack.

The party fought with desperate coordination:

But Seltar was formidable. He used Legendary Resistances to shrug off devastating spells. He summoned a shield of four massive tomes that orbited him, blocking attacks. When Wendaline managed to destroy one of the books with a critical hit from her arrows, he simply summoned another.

Mario nearly died three times. Wendaline went unconscious and was poisoned by a ray that prevented healing, requiring Grimdur to use an antidote before magic could restore her. Tear was knocked out by a Sleep Ray. The battle became a war of attrition — could they burn through the Beholder’s defenses before his endless magical assault killed them all?

The Killing Blow

The turning point came when multiple factors aligned. Grimdur’s Mass Cure Wounds brought everyone back from the brink. A Disintegration Ray forced Seltar to burn one of his last Legendary Resistances. And Wendaline, positioned with a clear shot, fired her longbow twice in rapid succession.

The first arrow flew true — 28 to hit. It struck one of the protective tomes, and Tear’s counterspell prevented Seltar from using Shield to deflect it. The book shattered.

Seltar tried to flee, flying upward 90 feet into the tower’s heights with Umal still clinging to his back. But he was too wounded. Wendaline’s second arrow (using Bardic Inspiration from Tear) found its mark, driving deep into one of his eye stalks.

The great Beholder shrieked — a sound of rage, disbelief, and, at the very end, something almost like relief — and fell.

All 90 feet.

Umal, who had been riding on the Beholder, began falling as well. Mario — bloodied, exhausted, and barely conscious — used his Aura of the Guardian. He took all the falling damage himself to save Umal, dropping unconscious in a crater of golden holy light even as the Beholder’s corpse crashed beside him.

Seltar the Unfathomed was dead.

The Aftermath

As books rained down (causing minor injuries to everyone), the party caught their breath and began searching the impossible library. They found:

Umal flew up and retrieved the tome. Its cover bore a skull with a blindfold — the same symbol they’d seen somewhere before. Wendaline recognized it immediately: abyssal script along the binding read “The Book of Silent Screams.”

It matched the other book they’d found — the Book of Whispered Words. This was volume two of some horrific set.

The silver box proved stranger still. When Umal examined it, he found it had no keyhole, no lid, no apparent way to open it. But his Arcana check revealed unsettling truths: the box was hungry. It wanted magical energy. When he tried casting Dancing Lights near it, the box opened like a mouth full of teeth, devoured the spell, and spat it back out as force damage.

The box required a third-level spell or higher to satisfy it, consuming the magic as payment to open.

The Deception Revealed

As they recovered and discussed the box’s puzzle, Tear approached with renewed interest. He insisted the Book of Silent Screams belonged to him — that the Beholder had stolen it years ago. The party was skeptical. The story didn’t add up. Why would a Kenku singer possess a book that steals voices? Where was this “Darkwood Forest” he claimed to be from?

Mario tried to tackle Tear to prevent him from leaving. But…

A green shimmer.

Tear cast Mislead — creating an illusory double while becoming invisible.

Where the illusion stood, they saw a familiar green glyph forming on the ground — the same one they’d seen before in their adventures. The invisible figure, holding the Book of Silent Screams, escaped as green flame engulfed the teleportation circle.

“Creeping death, eh? Myconids, eh? You guys have been up to quite something,” the voice called out.

“My book!” the figure declared triumphantly as the spell completed.

Someone in the party exclaimed “Ticondrius!” — recognizing the voice and tactics from previous encounters.

But had it truly been Ticondrius all along? Or was this someone else entirely, collecting the dark tomes for their own purposes? The master of deception had left them with no proof, only suspicions and a name shouted in surprise.

All that remained was the silver box, lying on the floor where Tear had dropped it.

Key Discoveries & Decisions

Seltar’s Lair:

The Battle:

Treasure & Items:

The Mysterious Escape:

New Questions:

Open Threads

Immediate:

The Book of Silent Screams:

The Mysterious Figure:

Still Unresolved:

Notable Quotes

“To enter, you must give what I crave, and truth you know, but none shall save.” — Inscription on the second door

“Thieving. Let us first observe how you handle these.” — Seltar, upon seeing them take books from his library

“Welcome to my domain. Please enjoy.” — Seltar, descending from the vortex

“You will never get me.” — Umal to Seltar, moments before Seltar flew upward and escaped (briefly)

“We have a rescue ox named Fatima.” — Grimdur, stating the final fact that opened the door

“The box is hungry.” — Umal, after examining the silver container

“Creeping death, eh? Myconids, eh? You guys have been up to quite something. My book!” — The mysterious figure, escaping with the Book of Silent Screams

“Ticondrius!” — A party member, recognizing the voice and tactics

“This little bitch!” — Multiple party members, realizing they’d been deceived

“Should have killed the stranger while we had the chance.” — The general consensus after the escape

← Session 72: The Temple of Whispers