Harrowing Vision

Any harrow elves entering a particular tower in Goth Gulgamel receive this vision.

A flash of images fill your mind, a jumble of the tortures inflicted in this room. It quickly overwhelms you and you fall unconscious. Then the images get more personal and vivid, as if these tortures were happening to you, like reliving memories that belong to other people. You feel, see, hear, smell them, one after another in rapid succession. The agony is unbearable, but after a while, you become a bit numb to the sensations and start to notice some other things. Through the pain, you learn the following:

• The result of these atrocities was the creation of the harrow elves.
• When it was fully operational, Goth Gulgamel held hundreds of chambers like this one.
• This particular chamber was special, in that it was used by Ghul personally. You see his face in many visions and, though he does take some pleasure in the proceedings, it is clear that is is after more than just sadism. These are experiments, with some purpose.
• Other than Ghul, almost none of the other torturers are human. Many are Zaug (a type of obese, maggot-eaten demon). Some are even fouler creatures you do not recognise.
• It takes a while to notice, but eventually you realise that the elves being tortured in these memories are not like the elves you know. These must have been elder elves, now extinct, and it seems to you that both shoal and harrow elves are somehow lesser copies of this race, lacking something present in all those being tortured.
• On a few occasions, you experience the exact moment when the victim "breaks". They totally give up and something is taken from them, and the torturers are clearly satisfied. You expect death to follow but it doesn't. Instead, the victim, now twisted and mauled into a harrow elf, is taken to the platform outside the tower. As they are hurled off the platform, a spell (clearly feather fall) is cast on them and they float safely to the bottom of the Spire.
• You catch a few glimpses of something that turns out to be crucial: unlike you, these elves could sleep.
• As the visions progress, instances of elves "breaking" become more and more frequent, and you realise what is being taken from them: their ability to dream or, more accurately, a type of connection to the dreamtime that these elves all shared.
• Towards the end, you get a flash of the sheer numbers elder elves subjected to this process, tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, over nearly a hundred years.
• Ghuls plan becomes clear: on a massive scale, he and his minions systematically severed a special connection to the dreaming of countless numbers of elder elves. The idea was if you sever enough of them, the whole race's connection to the dreaming collapses. And this plan worked, with devastating results on the elder elves. Among other things, they lost the ability to breed. And, though it took another century, lack of access to the dreamtime weakened the defenses of the elder elves, allowing Ghul to invade, raise their homeland and exterminate them.

This revelation snaps you out of your enchantment. You wake, with a spinning head.