Failing Sight

Failing Sight

Location: Abyss / Eyenabella

Failing Sight is a monument to madness, where the foulest of dreams take shape. It’s been constructed in the husk-like corpse of a massive beholder so massive, its remains now forming the districts of the city. Failing Sight sits deep inside the Great Mother’s territory, where the ever-present threat of annihilation hangs heavy in the air. It seems likely that the behemoth beholder was a former rival, lover, or relative of the Great Mother—and potentially all three—but the identity of the beast is not remembered.

Now, the burg itself is divided into three main parts, each more dreadful than the last. The Bowels, that would be the lower region, houses human petitioners and cultists living in squalid conditions that make a Gehennan slum look like paradise. Yes, berk—there really are humans who worship the Queen of Eye Tyrants. Although they aren’t numerous, the low life expectancy of beholder cultists keeps the flow of souls nice and regular. The vile streets here are awash in the viscera and remnants of the great beast’s internals, a foul syrup of body fluids and rotting flesh. It’s a place where Abyssal diseases run rampant, where life hangs by the slenderest of threads, and where the promise of being devoured by the minions of the Mother keeps every sod in constant terror. The architecture here is grotesque, a gnarly labyrinth of flesh and bone, twisted towers hanging by rusted chains like perverse decorations. It ain’t no place for the squeamish, let me tell you, berk.

Then we have the Eye, the unholy centre of the burg. In the socket where the beholder’s monstrous eye once resided, now stands a glass cathedral—a temple of depravity where worship of the most twisted kind takes place. Rituals of such viciousness and perversion are enacted here that I dare not repeat, even in impolite company. It’s a boil on the Abyss where evil festers and grows with each sickening rite conducted in the name of the beholder Mother.

Above the Eye, you find the Mind, the stronghold of the abominable rulers of this wretched place, the tiefling cultist triplets Xxajuz, Zxjuax, and Azujxz. In the twisted caverns that once housed the great beholder’s brain, these bloods forge plans most wicked, always needing to come up with evermore creative ways to sacrifice petitioners for their beholder Overlords. Together, they are a trifecta of evil, summing up the cruelty and madness that festers at the heart of Failing Sight. 

Hanging in the the air about Failing Sight are the Blind Watchers, seven ‘towers’ forged from the remaining eyes of the dead tyrant. Connected to the main city with chained-together eyestalk bones these each towers contain a chamber housing weapons of terrifying power, forged from the very organs that gave the beholder its deadly arsenal. These weapons, which each replicate one effect of the gargantuan beholder corpse’s eye rays, serve to protect the burg from invasion by tanar’ri—although it’s a rare tanar’ri who would dare set foot in the layer—and more commonly attacks from beholders hailing from Eye for an Eye, another beholder settlement in Eyenabella, vicious rival of Failing Sight.

Source: Chris Nichols and Jon Winter-Holt. This location is homebrewed.