D&D Excerpts

A voice pierces the silence of your subconscious; It may or may not sound oddly familiar...
“I’m so sorry for what I’ve unleashed on the world.”

A song begins to play in the back of your mind. Gentle lute plucks and intense chords create an ebb and flow of two intertwined motifs, neither claiming the position of the melody, and neither being subjugated to merely the harmony.

A grandiose image fades into your field of vision; within a massive outdoor amphitheater, a beholder, perhaps somewhat familiar, reaches her tentacles towards a floating sphere of diamond as the clouds part and reveal countless twinkling stars. The orb shatters into prismatic shards and The Beholder begins to grow to godly proportions, her skin melting and falling away from her form, her flesh evaporating into thin air to reveal a pitch black skull, ivory teeth, and a brilliant star sapphire eye.
Again, that voice speaks, and abruptly, the scene is cut short; “I was too much of a coward…”

In front of you looms the massive form of The Beholder, speaking in a voice that demands every bit of attention you can give it, “If you ever lie to me again I will slaughter you and your entire flock.” Her tentacle shoots forth and impales you; the world goes black.

“With no true will of my own…”

Your hand feels as though it’s on fire, yet you can’t seem to force yourself to drop the rapier that’s in your grasp. The music and your own thoughts are drowned out by a terrible sound; perhaps it is a sound that you can simply never forget, or something that scared you as a child, or the voice of something terrifying… Still reeling from the backlash of the noise, you hear The Beholder’s voice, though you do not see her, “Your job was to break the bird, not have it break you!”

“With no direction. Aimless… Useless…”

“So you failed me.” The Beholder floats in front of you, then stabs a tentacle through your chest, only to toss you across the room. Before you hit the stone floor you are overcome with a jarring, jerking sensation, and it feels as though reality itself is shifting, breaking… or, perhaps it’s something else…

You’re not given time to ponder as once again you face The Beholder, and once again you are impaled, “You failed me.”

Over and over this occurs, and over and over, nothing you try to do, or say, or think matters. Finally, the voice brings this madness to an end: “I was selfish. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I didn’t want to get hurt.”

You feel a horrible pain in your chest, and realize that you’re being suspended in the air by a tentacle that has pierced through your heart, “If you fail me ever again I will let you choose three of your flock that survive.” You’re flung towards a wall, but before impact, the memory is cut short.

“So I just followed orders.”

A new scene fades in, with a booming male’s voice yelling over it, “You stupid bird! You follow orders, that’s your only job!”
You leap into a tavern through a window, armed with a dagger, slitting the throats of the women and children that had taken refuge there amid a dense fog. The task is performed with well-practiced ease, though still, not without the difficulty of another kind; with every attack comes a tinge of hesitation, a guilt in the back of your mind. It was nothing that couldn’t be quelled by fear.

“We were never free. We were born into this. Bred to be her version of ‘perfect.’”

You see an unusually short, pure white kenku, surrounded by her loyal followers.
The kenku is adorned with a brilliantly white cloak, the blue eye embedded in her chest on display, and behind her, refracting the light in an array of colors, gleams a pair of icy wings, matching the staff held proudly in her hands. What looks to be a small beholder floats by her side.
And the longer you look, the more dazzling she seems to become.
The longer you look, the more familiar she seems to become...

“We’re just numbers to her.”

The Beholder’s voice, accompanied by her ever imposing blue eye, jabs her tentacle into your chest; “You are nothing.” Your vision goes dark, and you hear her voice again, “Everything you are, you owe to me.”

“All of us.”

Images of various kenku, perhaps a few familiar to you, flash through your mind in quick succession.

“She doesn’t care about us.”

You see a young kenku, armed only with a fiery staff, fighting for his life against The Beholder. He moves to dodge but is instead impaled. Then, the scene seems to rewind, and there he is again, this time uttering the sound of rising flames as his staff shifts into a rapier. A tentacle swats at him as he makes an attack, but it is quickly made irrelevant after another rewind.
This continues, and it begins to become clear… The Beholder is merely toying with him, while he fights desperately to survive.

“She never cared about us.”

You see The Beholder use a tentacle to pick up a kenku, who seems to be either dead or unconscious, and toss the bird into her maw to devour her whole.

“She is not a god! *Songbird,* embrace your freedom! Do something with it! You can't go back home! Get rid of everything she gave you; just burn it! Never try to contact her, or any of the others! These aren’t the kenku that you know! ...And I helped to create them…”

You see before you a crowd of thousands in an outdoor theater; the overwhelming murmur of countless conversations dwindle, and all eyes are on you. Your fear fades, and whether you even believe in your own words or not… you begin to speak, touting in the voices of many Lord Aurem’s godhood, passionately convincing them to pray to her, to worship her.

“I lead them...”

You see a wave of dense fog roll into an elven village as several kenku slink silently into it, quickly disappearing from view. Fires begin to spread from building to building. You unsheathe your rapier and utter an elven war cry before charging into the fog.

“It’s all my fault.”

You look up to see Lord Aurem in her ascended form casting a spell. Magic swells around you, and existence warps and bends until finally, the spell goes off…
And you just know that whatever that spell was shouldn’t have been possible.

“I don't know if she will come after you, but if she does, I want you to be prepared. They rely on stealth, large groups, and distractions, usually fog and fire, and Aurem is more than capable of giving them powerful magic items. She seals phoenixes into jars and puts them into swords; these swords are very dangerous but have a limit on how much you can use them in a single day. She has access to incredibly powerful magic, and will not hesitate to use it…”

With each warning, suggestion, or piece of information, a correlating image was brought into your view; A kenku putting up the hood of their cloak and vanishing, another setting a building on fire, a glimpse at an incredible treasury filled with gold, weapons, and magic items of all kinds, a flaming avian creature sealed inside a glass pommel...

“But I… I think that you’ll be fine though. Jules, Harmony, keep her safe for me, okay? And, *Songbird,* never give up on your music.”

The last note of the song is finally cut off, and you can’t quite tell whether it ended in a somber sendoff or a triumphant finale. Seemingly, the dual melodies managed to be both.

Silence envelopes your perception; then, her voice shatters it: “Goodbye…”

Your eyes seem to open, and noise surrounds you; the music of a band in the near distance, the muddled conversations of a large crowd, and you see the stone walls of the amphitheater, lit by starlight.

You bring your hand into view- or, she does- her hand is distinctly birdlike; Distinctly kenku. Worn on one finger is a beautiful ring- which instantly becomes the center of your attention- adorned with three diamonds. One is pitch black, one is beautifully transparent, and the last seems to be losing its shine.

“And…”

You stand, and the sense of dread and fear wrapped in blinding courage becomes overwhelming. But something within you- within her- feels light, liberating; a strange bliss granted by courage in the face of certain death. Nothing you try to say, or think, or remember, or do, could ever change her mind; not that you successfully manage to try any of those things anyway.

“Good luck.”

You turn and face the monstrosity head on.
A diamond-tipped tentacle pierces your gut, lifting you upwards to face The Divine Eye of Brilliance. But the dream begins to fall apart; your vision blurs and darkens as the commotion of the crowd fades until only a terrible, searing pain remains.

Then, there was nothing.
But that kenku’s song lingers in your mind, even after you wake up.