On the Crossroads of Fate

[Disclaimer 2: This chapter features a creature called a "beholder" Beholders are ©Wizards of the Coast, and I do not claim ownership of such a creature. Thank you for reading and enjoy this installment of "On the Crossroads of Fate."]


Chapter 3:
A Sight to Behold!

Rin was excited.

She sat on the edge of the driver’s seat, watching the trees fade in and out of sight as the path through the woods wound around one bend after another. Although this was hardly any different from the trips between towns with her family’s caravan, Rin couldn’t help but feel that some new adventure must be waiting around every corner. Gantz hardly spoke as he urged the horses onward, directing them only occasionally when they’d start to veer too far to either side of the path.

Stretching her arms up over her head, Rin turned about and jumped down off of the driver’s seat and into the back of the wagon. She kneed her way, over the linens and horse blankets, toward Aden. The dark elf sat at the back of the wagon, pouring over some books from the sack he’d carried out of the farmhouse from where they had absconded with their wagon.

“So, what are we going to this town by the lake for anyway?” Rin asked Aden.

Slowly lifting his gaze from the book, Aden eyed Rin and blinked loftily, as if the answer should be obvious. When the girl hadn’t answered her own question, Aden gave an exaggerated sigh and tilted his head back against the side of the wagon. “Surface elves are widely known to have substantially voluminous accumulations of thaumaturgical artifice. Ergo! I acquiesce to my ambition to acquire these abundant artifice for my own agenda!”

Now it was Rin’s turn to blink at Aden. Twisting her face into a beleaguered scowl, she lowered her ears to the sides of her head. “You… Talk funny.”

Tossing his hands into the air, Aden barked out an annoyed growl. Just as he was about to start into another of his trademark rants, Rin piped up. “But you know, the Kiranoun elves here in the Undrigael Forest, they’re cities aren’t that old.” Rin lifted a hand up to cup her chin and canted her head aside, trying to remember the tales she’d heard around the caravans camp fires and song circles. “Yeah. They were driven out of their homes a long time ago, but a lot of their old stuff got all wrecked up by orcs. And the Kiranoun, as they are now, have almost nothing from the old times.”

“Wh-what?!” Aden snarled, tossing the book in his hand out the back of the wagon as casually as one might drop a discarded apple core. “Do not attempt to dissuade me with your distorted disinformation of my desired destination! I’ll hear no more of your mewling misrepresentation, you minute, mercurial, meddling malcontent!”

Rin gave a querulous “Hmph!” and rose to leave Aden’s side with a shrug. “Fine, then! whatever,” she mumbled, moving back up to climb into the driver’s seat beside Gantz. She turned and looked to the halfling, who was calmly guiding the horses up the rode and giving a soft clacking from his lips to urge them on in lue of snapping the reins.

Rin quirked an eyebrow as she looked to Gantz. Then she took a sidelong glance back at Aden and let her eyes slowly trail back again to Gantz. Trying to puzzle it out in her head had done no good, so Rin figured that the best way to answer the question that now nagged her was simply to ask. “Gantz,” she said, “You seem pretty laid back and easy going. How did someone like you end up traveling with someone so… Well… With Aden?”

Giving something between a chuckle a nervous sigh, Gantz turned his head to snerk at Rin for a moment. “Well, poppet, i’s actually kinda an intristin’ story. Ya see,” Gantz started to speak, but was very loudly interrupted by a thud as something collided with the side of the wagon at high speed, prompting a startled shout from Gantz before he looked back. “Wot the bloody ‘ell was tha’?!”

Pulling the reins back, Gantz eased the horses to a stop and moved to peer back to the side of the wagon. “Eh? Wot’s tha’ thing ova der?” he grumbled, starting to clamber down the side of the wagon grunting, as the driver’s seat was higher off the ground than the Aslowan’s full height.

Rin followed after him by way of moving through the wagon to grab up her sword. Crowing as she pulled it along, she hopped out the back of the wagon, giving a soft “Ack!” as the sword’s tip clanked against the ground. Heaving it up onto her shoulder, she moved around the wagon the opposite way from Gantz. Both of them paused as they saw what had struck the wagon, lying on the ground just a few feet from the road.

There was a large orb, roughly eight hands in diameter with a surface that looked like chewed and shredded tree bark in shades of dark brown and dingy red. On it was a long, narrow split along the “face” of it that was lined with needle-like teeth and several inches above that, there was the curving bulge of an eyelid, shut tightly as the object emitted low, gravelly groaning noises. The top of the ball was crowned with ten long, snaking tubes of flesh, each with a broad bulb on the top.

“Wot… The Hell is tha’ thing?” Gantz squawked in confused panic, having brought his pickaxe up off of his back. Holding it in both hands, he fingered the grip of it nervously and started forward a little.

Rin’s ears were perked up high, her curiosity getting the better of her. She walked a few steps closer and looked at the thing on the ground. “H-hello?”

As Rin neared it, the thing suddenly opened up the large, central eye above its craggy gob. The colossal yellow eye, with its vertical, cat-like iris stared at Rin for a long moment before the whole of the creature flew up into the air a few feet, hovering. Its mouth dropped open as it rotated in place and looked back and forth between Rin and Gantz, its eye focusing on their weapons briefly. All of the bulbs on the ends of the stalks on top of it shuddered lightly as individual eyes opened on all of them and the creature broke into a loud scream, its eye stalks flailing about and looking in every direction.

With the abrupt screech spewing from it, both disoriented onlookers stumbled back, wailing in panic as well. The creature flew one way and then another, attempting to escape, though in which way, it seemed too panicked to decide.

With all of the yelling going on, Aden was soon out and stomping around the corner of the wagon. “Gantz! What’s holding us up? I want to- YE PHRAKTOS!! What in Wevren-yah’s name is THAT horrid thing?!” he cried, pulling his hands up quickly to start into the gestures of a spell.

Upon seeing Aden appear, the creature stopped its panicked flight and fixed its central eye directly on the drow, closing its mouth up tight with a sharp snap. When Aden completed the words and motions of his spell, he pointed both hands toward the eye-beast, subsequently looking completely bewildered as nothing filled the air between them but the parched dust of the trail. With the yelling ceased, Rin stopped and looked over to Aden. She was now flat against the wagon, eyes wide as she looked at the creature, then back over to the flabbergasted dark elf.

“Wh-th- …HOW?!” Aden snapped. his eyes were wide as he stared down at his hands and started into the gestures for another spell.

The creature’s eyes stalks still flailed about, looking for an escape route while two of them still focused on Rin and Gantz. By now, Gantz had moved around to where he thought was behind the monster. His pick was still held firmly in hand when he noticed that one of the eye stalks was yet following him.

“Wait!” Rin said, dropping her sword to the ground and heading for the back of the wagon. She returned a moment after the exasperated drow failed to befall another spell. With a book in one hand and a shiny, red apple in the other, she slowly approached the creature. “Everyone shut up!” Rin said, casting a black look toward Aden and then to the bout-ready halfling.

Aden started to object, but Gantz shook his head insistently as he pointed up to the eye stalks, one of which was now locked on the bellicose sorcerer. As Rin approached, the creature floated upward a bit, attempting to attain the higher sphere. Its main eye glanced to her tentatively before snapping back up to Aden.

“Ah… Here?” Rin offered, lifting the apple up toward the creature’s snaggletoothed aperture.

The globular aberration squinted its enormous eye curiously and looked back down to her for a moment before it let its mouth gape a bit. Thin strands of mucous laden drool dripped down from the cavernous orifice as a long, thickly muscled tongue extended downward. The tip of it wrapped about the apple, pulling it from Rin’s hand and snapping up into its mouth. Rin convulsed when the thing bit down into the apple with a snapping crunch, juices and spittle spraying out from between its teeth to strike the young girl across the face and neck.

“Rin! Wot th’ ‘ell ya think ya doin’?” Gantz shouted, taking a step forward, but promptly retreated again when another pair of the creature’s eye stalks turned toward him. “Gah! Th-tha’ monster may jus’ decide to eatcha up! Git away from it!”

Aden was cursing and stamping his feet against the ground as Rin looked up at the creature and she shook her head slowly. “Don’t listen to them,” she said to the creature, “If you really wanted to hurt us, you probably could have by now anyway.” With a placating smile, she picked up the book she held and started to flip through its pages until she found a sketch of a creature similar to the beast bobbing in the air before her.

“What in the blazing depths of the lowest hells are you doing now?” Aden complained, starting to stomp across the ground over toward her.

Rin cleared her throat and lifted the book up so Aden could see it when he moved to peer over her shoulder. “Beholder; Also known as the Eye Tyrant, these violent and wicked creatures are identified by their large, central eye and a crown of ten eye stalks on top of their spherical body. A danger to even the most skilled adventurers, they are known to cast a magic negating field from their main eye and are able to cast a variety of deadly spells from their eye stalks.”

“Tura loi,” Gantz said, his face going pale as he looked at the creature. “We, ah… Why we still standin’ around den?”

Aden quirked his thin, white eye brow with a grumble. “So that’s what was in that book you were reading on the road earlier,” he mumbled under his breath.

Rin seemed about to reply when the creature let out a grumbling noise, prompting Gantz to stumble back, expecting the worst. After a moment, a hoarse noise rose past its lips. In a gruff, sonorous voice that sounded like rocks tumbling in a narrow chute, it spoke. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you might try to eat me.”

“Eww!” Rin twisted her face into an expression of disgust, sticking her tongue out and shaking her head. “Why would we want to eat you? That’s… That’s just weird.”

“Well, that’s what my mother was trying to do when I flew up out of a hole back there,” he grumbled out quietly, turning his whole body to look back through the tree line. “But, I think it gave up. Couldn’t fit through the little hole I went through and it was a long way to the surface.”

“Y-your mom was trying to eat you?!” Rin exclaimed, looking fully mortified.

By now, Aden had snatched the book from Rin and was thumbing through the pages of it. “Ah, yes,” he said, skimming some lines of text, “Apparently most beholders are so xenophobic that if their own offspring don’t very closely resemble them, they devour them. Of course, if the survivors don’t leave in due course themselves, they too will be devoured.”

“Oh, wow, that’s just,” Rin started to speak, but found her words failing and just trailed off into silence.

“I, uh,” the creature started to speak again, “I don’t want to hurt you though. I just don’t want anything to eat me either.”

Thumbing over the pages of the book a bit, Aden grumbled a bit and shook his head. “If you really wanted to stop us from hurting you, you could have… ah, you could have,” he paused again and looked over the book. “Aha! You could put us into a comatose slumber! Or freeze our bodies in place to hold us immobile! Or simply incinerate us to ash and cinder!”

The folds of the creature’s enormous eye lid furrowed together in a look of brief contemplation. “No. I can’t,” it said simply, “I’m too new for any of that. We have to absorb magic to fuel that and the little bit of casting you tried earlier just isn’t enough to start it.”

Aden’s eyes went wide, a brief smile forming on his lips. “S-so that’s it? Haha! Brilliant! So, it isn’t simply that your eye cancels out the channeling of arcane energy, but it also serves as a form of sustenance for your own supernatural aptitudes. Fascinating!”

Rin and the creature both stared on at Aden as he started into casting another spell only to have it fizzle out in the form of tiny purple-black flecks of energy sputtering from his finger tips. Rin glanced back up to the creature and shrugged. “You can ignore him if you want.”

“Duly noted,” the creature mumbled back to her.

Clearing her throat, Rin stood up straight and looked right up to the creature. “Oh, yeah! We haven’t been introduced yet!” Thinking a moment that she ought to lift her hand for a handshake, Rin reconsidered the thought, noting the beholder’s distinct lack of hands. “My name’s Rin. What’s yours?”

The sound that came from the creature’s mouth in response was an unpronounceable accumulation of hacking, hissing noises that Rin could scarcely even begin to interpret into human speech. Lifting a hand to rub the back of her head for a moment, she thought to herself. “Ah… That’s kinda hard to say, is it okay if I just call you… Bob?”

“Bob?” the beholder asked, the sides of its mouth turning down into a sort of frown in his confusion.

“Bob?” Gantz reiterated as he walked up toward Rin, now a little more confident that the beholder wasn’t about to turn him into lunch.

“Yeah! Because that’s what he does,” Rin elated at her own self-proclaimed cleverness and pointed up to the floating creature, moving her finger up and down to follow the slight up and down motion of his floating.

The beholder looked down toward the ground, noticing Rin was right. Giving a few up and down levitations on purpose, it chuckled lightly and moved to focus most of its eyes on Rin. “Bob, huh? I like it,” he said, mouth turning up into a bit of a grin.

Gantz lifted a hand up to rub the back of his neck, grimacing slightly. “Aha, well, uh… Nice to meet ya, Bob,” he said, a bit of a smile sneaking on to his face. “Name’s Gantz an’ ah’m the strongest ‘alfling in all’a Aslow.”

Recomposing himself, Aden stood up straight, trying to take on a demeanor of poise. “I am Aden of house Torrahel in the grand drow city of Harouzad.”

“Yay! We made a new friend!” Rin laughed, moving a hand up as she stepped around behind Bob and started pushing his floating self toward the wagon. “C’mon! C’mon! Let’s go!”

“W-wot?” Gantz shouted incredulously. “R-Rin ya caun’t jus’…” he started, but quickly gave up, shaking his head. “Gasha fon tura, tha’ lass gon’ be the death of us, aoi swea’.”

Aden made no arguments himself, simply stroking his chin with one hand as he started back into the wagon. Rin was quick to push Bob up into the covered cart, easily moving his almost buoyant form, since he wasn’t putting up a fight. She laughed as she told Bob about all the adventures they were going to go on. and secretly showed off the collection of gems she’d found as Gantz climbed back up into the driver’s seat and got the horses moving again.

Tilting his head back as the trees started to pass again, Gantz glanced back at Rin, who was clearly having fun as she fed Bob more apples and some other food she’d found in the bag Aden had loaded into the cart earlier that morning. Smiling to himself, he shook his head and snapped the horses’ reins.

“No regrets, Pa,” the halfling said to himself, turning his eyes back to the road.


[Exciting! A beholder, eh? What a cute name, don't you think? Bob seemed to like it, anyhow. I wonder what strange creature or aberration Rin will befriend in the next chapter of "On the Crossroads of Fate": "What's this thingy do?"

Thanks again for reading, and I hope I didn't disappoint.]

~Pink