Mind flayer of Sınır Sapı

While Jonathan was questioning Captain Markus, a will spoke through the captain's red-eyed body. It said it had a hand in keeping Jonathan shut in the region and had plans of its own, and it refused to be called a servant of the drow. Jonathan gave it his own name. It said it had first tried to deal with the governor by offering something in return, and had driven Lady Teresa from her home because of the choices she made.³⁴⁵⁶

What it wanted was a single object buried in the earth, which Teresa knew of and which she linked with plenty, prosperity and the peace of the forest; obstacles it did not understand kept it from taking the object itself, and it asked that Jonathan find Teresa and bring it. It also claimed that inborn magical gifts appeared unusually often in the region. When the masked man called V arrived, it ordered him to wait outside, and he walked out as if no longer his own master. It said it kept the governor silent by threatening his family, and spoke of driving people mad in dreams and of steering the witch hunters with false signs of murder.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰

Jonathan bargained, asking that no one vanish, go mad or suffer meanwhile. The being agreed to wait about a week and then ask for his decision in a dream, and wished him to consult the governor. It wanted to take the object to its home and offered a further reward to whoever brought it; whether an exchange would be safe, and whether the folk of the surface would be left unharmed, stayed open.¹¹¹²¹³

It appeared at the upper entrance and was wounded by Jonathan's ball of fire. As it leapt from the stair, its fall slowed of itself, which a pair of enchanted cufflinks later found on it explained. It struck Jonathan's mind and wounded him, and tried to master Olaf but failed. It died in front of everyone from Jonathan's five bolts of force.^29303132

Its body and what Jonathan did not take were left to the witch hunters, and Jonathan and Olaf each kept a piece of tentacle as a keepsake of the battle. A captured drow said that his people served it as paid soldiers.³³³⁴³⁵

The two red, square cufflinks with yellowish edges came from its robe; Jonathan found that they work on their own when the wearer falls, slowing the fall before the ground, without the wearer choosing the moment. With a key from the dead creature he opened a chest of its notes: work on drawing on fey essence and the spirits of animals, dark rituals, strengthening bonds of the mind and breaking the forest's defences. Two rituals in it, one for sensing living things nearby and one for sharpening sight in darkness, even magical darkness, he later wrote into his own book. He kept the important notes and left the rest to the hunters.^36373839