The Flute of Hlatar

As all know,the great sorcerer of Hlatar created the Zaben to be used as a costal invasion force totally invulnerble to fleets of any kind,on the royal orders of his master,the king of Ashtar. But fate can sometimes be cruel and will bring grand plans crashing down.

On a dark and wild night,a storm of terrifying fury and power, beset the desolate little island where Hlatar had decided to house his creations and whip them up into a proper army,keeping them in pens built along the rocky coast. During the great storm,the Zaben escaped and Hlatar perished as his dwellings were consumed by the ocean. All the great artifacts he had collected over his years of travel and the great discoveries he had made in the course of long years of research were lost,swallowed by the ocean. Wisdom that would have greaty benefitted the kingdom of Ashtar was now lost forever. Among the great treasures,both material and scholarly that were lost,was a simple wooden flute.

There were many who saw the storm as the wrath of the sea godess Zeboim,who horrified by the sorceror's twisting of her creations,the bull sharks,had destroyed him to serve as a warning to other arrogant mortals that might dare to follow in his footsteps. And there were even more who had said that this very venture had been a faliure from the start,sure that such ferocious beings could never have been trained into an army.

How were they to know that a wooden flute would have given the people of Ashtar complete control over the minds of the Zaben,making Ashtar mistress of all costal nations?

In his wisdom,Haltar knew that he would have to call on dark forces that even seasoned mages would be wary of, aware that it was the only way he could find the supernatural aid that would help him overcome the blood lust that made the Zaeban so difficult to mould into an army. To this end,he summoned the Trickster Naroll,from the relam of the jinn. Though knowing that the jinn's gift would inevitably be a double edged sword, he had little choice but to entrust the success of his experiment to the hands of the being he had summoned. He charged the Trickster with the task of crafting an instrument that would allow him to bend the predatory,ravenous will of the Zaben to do his bidding, sure that any dark twist wrought by the jinn would be easier to bear than the wrath of a dissapointed king. For the part of the jinn,bound as he was by the sorcerer's spell of summoning,he had to obey Hlatar.

And thus was the flute crafted. The wielder had only to blow on it to gather the Zaben around him and compel them to do his will. No matter how hard they tried to resist,they would find their minds flooded by the thoughts of the player of the flute and doing as these intrusive commands demanded. But the jinn had seen to it that the Zaben would also profit..

Magical Properties:

When a sharp,trilling note is blown on it,Zaben for miles around will stop anything they are doing and rush to respond to its call. It is something that draws them on,something stronger than the blood lust that normally drives them. Once they are before the player of the flute,he must blow another,shorter note that removes the weak barrier insulating the mind of the Zaben from his control. Otherwise,the Zaben will pounce on him and rip him apart limb from limb. But once he blows on the flute,they must do as he commands or suffer. Any attempt to ignore a thought of the player's ordering it to do something,will bring on a vicious, unendurable pain that would seem to split their very heads apart, so great is it.

But repeated use of this enchanted item results in something of an exchange of thoughts. Slowly,the Zaben will begin to find access to the knowledge of the vastly superior mind commanding theirs. Soon,they begin to become sentient, influenced by the thoughts and the thinking process of the hated master. Meanwhile,the player of the flute finds his brain slowly infiltrated by a strange alien hunger that screams in his mind for him to kill and devour anything that he crosses, lest it kill and devour him instead. It eats at him slowly,day after day,slowly seeping in,until he feels compelled to give in to the primal yet powerful will invading his mind.

Note:No physical changes happen. The flute player merely finds himself burderned with a shark's desparate hunger. For more info on the Zaben,check them out under the Animals Thread at the Idea Scroll forum.