Failing Sight
This is a place where the foulest of dreams take root in the husk of what was once a beholder so massive, its remains formed the backbone of an actual city, a monument to madness and decay. It sits on the precarious edge of the Great Mother’s territory, a place where danger lurks in every nook and cranny, and where the ever-present threat of annihilation hangs heavy in the air.
Now, the burg itself is divided into three main parts, each more dreadful than the last. The Bowels, that be the lower region, houses human petitioners and cultists living in squalid conditions that’d make a Gehennan slum look like paradise. The streets be 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 disease runs rampant, where life hangs by the slenderest of threads, and where the promise of being devoured by the Great Mother keeps every soul in constant terror. The very architecture here be grotesque, a gnarled labyrinth of flesh and bone, twisted towers hanging by rusted chains like perverse decorations from the gaping maw of the dead tyrant. It ain’t no place for the faint of heart, let me tell you, berk.
Then we have the Eye, the unholy heart of the burg. In the socket where the beholder’s monstrous eye once resided, now stands a glassed-in cathedral, a temple of depravity where worship of the most twisted kind takes place. Rituals of such viciousness and perversion that it would shake even the most stalwart of cutters to their core. It’s a boil on the Abyss where evil festers and grows with each sickening rite conducted in the name of the beholder gods.
Above the Eye, you find the Mind, the stronghold of the abominable rulers of this wretched place, the tiefling triplets Xxajuz, Zxjuax, and Azujxz. In the twisted caverns that once housed the great beholder’s brain, they forge plans most wicked, sacrificing and toiling for their beholder masters. They are a trifecta of evil, a living testament to the cruelty and madness that festers in the heart of Failing Sight.
Now, patrolling the skies about Failing Sight are the Blind Watchers, seven towers forged from the remaining eyes of the dead tyrant. Connected to the main city with chains of bone harvested from defeated baatezu, these towers hold a grim purpose. Inside each lies a chamber housing weapons of terrifying power, forged from the very organs that gave the beholder its deadly arsenal. These weapons, capable of replicating the devastating effects of the gargantuan beholder corpses’s eye rays, ensure that Failing Sight remains a place of dread, a place where even the bravest souls fear to tread.
So if you’re thinking about visiting Failing Sight, take this advice to heart, berk: keep yer wits about ya. It’s a place of darkness and despair, a city forged from the very essence of cruelty and madness. It ain’t for the faint of heart, and it certainly ain’t for the likes of naïve primes who wander in without knowin’ the dark of it.
Source: Chris Nichols and Jon Winter-Holt
