The Monstrefact: The Ettin Ceremorph

first of all, what an eton is named after? A giant from French traditions, The d and d Eton is a two headed giant whose main superpower is that two heads are better than one, at least when it comes to wisdom, perception checks, and related saving throws. Their exact origins were told in the fifth Monster Manual may involve cursed Orcs and a temple to the two headed demon lord Demogorgon, But who can say for sure that's the Eton?

But what is a seramorph eaten? To answer that question, we have to enter the world of the mind flares, more formally known as the Alithids. They're an alien species that once dominated the inner planes, depending on their own terrifying psylonic powers to enslave humanoid species and also utilizing their astral planes spanning not alloid vessels. Individual mind flares

resemble purple fleshed humanoids with heads like tentacled cephalopods. Despite their power, they are a civilization in decline, reduced to plotting and studying in their under dark colonies as well as other far flung locations in the multiverse. Christian and I devoted an entire stuff to Blow your Mind episode to these fantastic creatures back in I Believe twenty sixteen titled The Body Lithid Science of the mind Flares. So go back and find that if you want a more

in depth rundown. We can't possibly go into as much detail today. But the key thing to keep in mind about the mind flares is their method of reproduction, as detailed in Volo's Guide to Monsters and Lithids are hermaphroditic and lay eggs at key points in their life cycle before succumbing to old age or injury and being dissolved into the brine of the elder brain, which serves as a kind of librarian that rules over the tomes of

their collective memories. Parasitic larval tadpoles hatch from these eggs, and each vital specimen is then inserted into the brain of a comatose humanoid. There it feasts on the host's original brain tissue and eventually grows to become the host's new brain, attaching to the old brain stem, taking over altering the body in the process. This process is called seramorphosis. There are limits to what anlithid tadpole can do, We're told.

There's a reason adult mind flayers are generally medium sized humanoids. Seramorphosis simply doesn't work on larger bodies, and attempts to grow giant mind flayers via the introduction of a tadpole into the brain of various giant species have ended in failure. The exception, however, is the eaten seramorph the result of introducing not one, but two eilithid tadpoles into a single eaten one for each of the host organism's heads and

therefore brains. As Bigbe presents Glory of the Giants describes, each tadpole devours one of the eton's brains and grows to replace it, as you might expect, But then one of the two eaten heads begins to sink into the body, finally looking more like some sort of grotesque starfish attached to the giant's torso. Meanwhile, the other head, complete with idlithid tentacles, takes on a central position atop the shoulders. The sunken head controls the eaten seramorph's body, while the

other head handles cognition and psionic powers. While not psionically as powerful as a typical lithid, the eaten sera morph makes up for this with physical size and strength, often serving as a guardian of one form or another within a hidden a lithid colony. It's a wonderfully weird monster, and I love the illustration provided in Big Piece. The idea of a second brain that controls the body is an interesting concept, and one that I assume stems from

the real life nature of the octopus nervous system. To be clear, discussion of multiple brains within a single organism can get complicated, in part depending on what you define as a brain. The octopus, for example, only boasts a single central brain, but each arm has neural cells that seem to act as partially independent many brains to handle

the creature's complex limbs. As Nora Bradford explained in a twenty twenty three article for Scientific American, how octopus arms bypass the brain, It would all seem to enable a form of decentralized coordination. We can point to cases in insects and anaalids as well that raise similar questions regarding what is and what is in a brain. But with the Eden Sarah morph we might think of one brain becoming dominant and the other essentially becoming a mini brain

to handle the larger body. Now, this notion also raises the specter of an outdated hypothesis, that of the dinosaur

butt brain. Yes, the dinosaur butt brain. Riley Black points out in the twenty twelve Smithsonian Magazine posts the double dinosaur brain Myth that this was a nineteenth century hypothesis that argued that a canal in the vertebrae over the hips of the Stegosaurus was larger than the cavity for the dinosaur's brain, and therefore it might serve as a place for a secondary brain or a brain like neural mass to be located to coordinate the creature's hind, legs

and tail. After all, body is big and the tail is complex, so perhaps it just needed some extra neural power back there. Now, that cavity in question still remains something of a mystery, but palaeontologists are pretty sure it didn't house a second brain. Could an a lithoid put one in there, though, well, we'll have to think about that.

Of course. The idea of the pre seramorphosis eaten is in ways a fantasy extrapolation of real life cases of polycephaly or multiple heads on a single body, which does occur in the natural world. But division of control between individual brains in these cases seems to vary greatly depending on the exact case in question. And of course you don't have to go this far to think about two brains in a single body when you consider the two

hemispheres of our own brain. Things like dual brain theory and some fascinating studies concerning split brains in human beings. These are enough to make you wonder, well, maybe we are all eatens to a certain extent, but I digress. It all makes something like the eaten Sarah more, while a creature of pure fantasy, an interesting contemplation point, for considering purpose, identity, and plurality when it comes to brains. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The

Artifact or Anomalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.