Beholder the Man

he’s not portugal and he’s not yet an aberation

2025-10-03

Hubris, paranoia, and genius always served Beauregard Freeholder well. He was obsessive, secretive, and severely talented.

He pursued magic with a singular, determined focus. For him it was a zero sum game: the more others had, the less he had. And the more he had, the less anyone else could challenge him. He surreptitiously stalked other wizards. He thieved wands, tomes, scrolls, and spells.

Of particular help in this endeavor was the amulet he wore around his chest. A medallion in shape of small bullseye lantern that, when activated, nullified the magic of anything it cast its gaze upon. With its help, he was able to easily bypass magical wards and traps, and also overcome wizards and mages who had become too comfortable and overreliant on their own spells.

As his collection and his knowledge grew, he soon established himself as one of the most sought-after, if eccentric and difficult wizards in Banwel.

The first time Morgan met him, Freeholder had just moved into the newly erected tower just inside the city wall by Broad Gate. His accomplishments and undeniable skill had earned him a position with the city of Blue Harbor.

Every city of a certain size — once large enough to require certain unsavory but necessary deeds — finds itself in want of an official Unethical Wizard on the payroll to perform enchantments, transmutations, and necromancy that no other respectable wizard would agree to. And Blue Harbor is no exception.

For a small salary, plus a stipend for books and research, and access to a tower, the city gains the benefits of all the unscrupulous and questionable magicks that the wizard is capable of offering. And the other city wizards get to sleep soundly at night maintaining their sterling, impeccable reputations.

Freeholder is physically striking. Very tall and very round, with long dark hair and a long dark mustache that he waxes and curls at the ends. He lost his right eye in a lab accident and wears a studded eyepatch. He is in the habit of wearing a bandoleer of magic wands so he has a veritable arsenal of spells at his disposal wherever he goes.

One of his earliest successes for the city was a bit of transmutation, necromancy, and domination that created the “corn beasts”, mostly mindless golems that lurk in the fields outside the city walls ignoring most everything except the dire crows that had previously regularly decimated the crops.

When the Mollusk Wars broke out between Blue Harbor and the Gilded Gastropod, Freeholder should have been more than capable of at least partially alleviating the siege of the city. In theory it should be trivial to reprogram the corn beasts to recognize the giant slugs as pests. But as it was, due to lack of beak and feather, the beasts stood idly by as the slugs invaded and quickly destroyed the year’s crops.

Freeholder more or less disappeared during the siege and his duties to the city remained unfulfilled, and the giant slugs laid waste to the food supplies outside the city, poisoning the earth in their wake.

He wasn’t really missing of course. At least, he knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. Freeholder was feeding an obsession. A breach had surfaced out in the bay, opening a rare direct passage to the underworld below and its fell magicks. A voice called to him from beneath, drowning out everything else and overwhelming him. It called, in his sleep and in his dreams, and he answered.

It fell onto the shoulders Morgan and her pals to deal with both the giant poisonous slugs in the fields, and also the giant clams filling the harbor and piercing the hulls of merchant ships as they tried to enter or leave the port.

Eventually a truce was brokered with the cephalopods (what passes for lawyers among the mollusks) and an uneasy peace returned to Blue Harbor.

In the aftermath, they eventually did find Freeholder. Gaunt, sallow, and missing an arm. Paranoid as he was, he had not yet succumbed so completely to his own madness that he would go so far as to dispatch his hirelings and minions. So rumors began to circulate that Freeholder returned from the breach with a relic. A large orb covered with glyphs and runes.

Freeholder secluded himself in his tower until he finally deciphered and correctly read the sigils on the stone. The carvings glowed and pulsed briefly before a seam appeared on its surface and split open revealing a red, glaring eye.

As he physically weakened, Freeholder created artificial limbs and appendages to assist him in his lab. Various magical lenses he could peer through to better perceive the Dreamstone’s arcane properties. Extra hands for holding magical wands and trinkets for more steady precision casting His own hands began to weaken and tremble as the stone slowly leeched his strength.

The Dreamstone’s wakefulness could not be compelled, nor predicted. The baleful eye would snap open sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes not for weeks. It would remain open for minutes or hours. All according to its own schedule and based on no pattern that Freeholder could discern.

Freeholder handled and studied the relic. And the stone fixed him with its unblinking eye, bathed him in the dark light of the void out of which it peered, and slowly worked its foul magicks on him. His hair fell out. Then his teeth. When he became so swollen and bloated he could not lift his own body, he delighted in levitating his bulk around his lair. His remaining limbs withered and wasted away. No matter, he further modified his artificial limbs and grafted them directly onto his body. Each one, specialized and topped with its own magic lens, resembled a wavering eye-stalk and lended him an arachnid sort of appearance.

His elastic face drifted across his body until his one remaining eye and his gaping mouth came to dominate his whole self. A tentacled levitating orb of greed and power.

The creature (he had at some point stopped thinking of himself as the man Beauregard Freeholder) destroyed all his servants in a fit of paranoia, fled his tower with the stone, and established a new lair in the tunnels beneath the city where he could plot and plan and scheme and research in peace and solitude.

The Dreamstone now slept. This creature, once a man, may not be capable of waking its slumbering master, that eldest thing which sleeps and dreams beyond space and time, beyond our powers of perception. But it could at least let its master’s maddening dreams wash over it and warp it, reshaping and reforming it in a manner the master would find pleasing. And in doing so, let a little bit of otherworldly madness loose in the world.

And thus did Beau’holder the Tyrant take up residency beneath Blue Harbor.