This is all very excellent. I wanted to bring up a question if I may:
If Elvish ears are so sensitive, would they be able to also pick up the voices of the dead? I had a theory that came to mind for a relatively short amount of time. If an elf goes blind for instance and the other senses are enhanced to compensate for the loss, would the sensitivity of sound be amplified to the point where one could effectively hear the sounds of the dead?
It would be the ghosts that linger and the ambiance of the woods around them moaning for the long departed. But not just the dead. It would be memories embedded into the world around them. Scenes that have long since played out, but remain because the energy or emotion around them was so strong.
Would they be able to hear even that?
*cringes*
That isn’t something that we usually talk about… Most try to ignore it, but…
Well, when we sing to the trees, sometimes, they sing back.
Tevruden told me we need some feels and canon images; he won’t touch this one with a 10 foot pole, so here’s some Koltira holding his ears because of a bunch of undead spirits:
*Barkentin quickly runs off*
gOD ;A;
where does that image come from?
(Thank you, Barkentin, I was going to point that one out but I couldn’t find it anywhere and didn’t want to scan the book.
It’s from the Warcraft Death Knight manga.)
I assume it would for Death Knights since they’re already dead (sort of?) and communion with the departed would be rather easy.
But for the living, this would be even more torturous since they wouldn’t understand why this is happening, or why they would suddenly be able to see or hear them.
(That was an excellent chapter too.)
In the corresponding Dragonblight(?) quest, Arthas mentions that this is something that all death knights suffer from (and that Arthas kept them at bay.)
The panel before that one mentions that blood elves are especially attuned to it.