Ocular adept

Ocular adepts were humanoids who had given themselves in service to beholders, gaining special abilities that went with their worship of the beholder goddess, the Great Mother.

Description
An ocular adept was a divine caster of the Great Mother. What differed an ocular adept from other members of the deity's clergy was that they were humanoids and not beholders.

Becoming
A humanoid needed to swear to cut all present and future ties with other deities but Great Mother and ask for inclusion into a beholder community as a first step to become an ocular adept. As a second step, the individual needed to willingly undergo a surgery by a beholder to become an ocular adept. The surgery consisted of getting a hole drilled through the forehead by the surgeon through its disintegrate eye ray as the first step. The second step was to get an eye from an eyeball implanted in the new hole, the death throes of the eye connected it with the new host. The surgery concluded with a chant that turned the eye functional and gave the "patient" new abilities. A sturdy and enduring body as well as some capability at maintaining a mental focus was needed to survive the process.

Abilities
An ocular adept had access to spells like other clerics, unlike other clerics though an ocular adept didn't have access to strong spells but only to, comparatively, weak spells, albeit, especially those who were clerics to begin with, in a large number. An ocular adept's most distinguishing feature was its third eye, the connection to its brain it gave the host the ability to understand the beholder language and a mind set alien from human point of view. The third eye was able to see, an ocular adept had better sight than normal people. With growing strength, the eye in the forehead also gained a number of abilities, namely the ability to shoot eye rays with the effects of charm person, sleep, inflict moderate wounds, slow, fear, charm monster, telekinesis, flesh to stone, disintegrate and finger of death.

Role
Ocular adepts often fulfilled the role of cult leaders serving a beholder. They were recruited from the most devout individuals inside a given cult and were often under the employ of a so called sane beholder, a beholder who had both of its mind under a functional working relationship. Their comparatively huge repertoire of weak spells combined with their eye rays from the third eye allowed them to keep their cultists in line. While their third eye was off-putting for non-beholders, they were the closest thing a beholder individual or community had to a presentable envoy with some importance and fulfilled negotiation jobs for their masters with humanoids.

Truth
A beholder's view on the ocular adepts ran the entire gamut from pawn to cattle, the deity Great Mother wasn't an exception. What an ocular adept mistook for --impossible to understand-- divine messages, were in fact the remains of the eyeball's psyche. The reason, why an ocular adept didn't have access to the strong spells was simply that the Great Mother didn't want to give the strong ones to a non-beholder, in fact the Great Mother could kill an ocular adept at any time by disintegration channeled through the third eye.