iczar wrote:Ok a couple of questions. Satansfist, is the Illearth Stone is it embedded in his head? The Cavewights and Ur-viles. What do you think they look like?
The Cavewights are described as having large hands. You get an idea that they are humanoid and ugly, but strong as hell.
The Ur-Viles interested me much more. They are described as having no eyes, dark skin, large wet nostrils, and sharp teeth. In my mind, I see them as having long, thin slit-like nostrils that begin high on their faces in the center and extend toward the edges of their large mouthed-lips, but not quite in either width or touching their lips. The slits would be flaring out in the lower middle. I suppose that upsidedown female genitalia would go a long way to expressing the shape. At any rate, the places inside the nostrils that are visible, especially at the flared out areas would appear to be wet or have a sheen that implied wetness.
The teeth of the Ur-Viles wouldn't appear broken or jagged, but rather they would be curved and sharp and well cared for. The cavewights might have bad teeth, but the Ur-Viles are more intelligent and probably very organized and methodical in everything they do. I would suspect bony white long curved fangs lining their gums from side to side. This isn't because it is well-suited for tearing muscle or for any real reason at all, but just because they are monsters and a good monster should have teeth like that.
Their skin is dark, like the skin of the blackest black man you've ever seen. But even then, it has a grayer hue, as if the creature lacks any color whatsoever. As if everything about the creature is colorless, joyless, empty of the goodness of the land, and all that remains is the cunning intelligence it has within a mind that has no morals and no ethics at all. It isn't evil in the way that we would think of evil. It does not betray. It does not lie. It knows its place in the scheme of things, accepts it, and uses its resources to obey the will of Lord Foul. It requires no reward. It doesn't care about punishment. It is single-minded in its cold, empty, emotionless life.
When they combine into triangles, I imagine that they place their hands on the shoulders of the Ur-Vile in front of it, so that 4 Ur-Viles place their hands on 3 Ur-Viles before them, and those 3 the 2 before them, and those 2 the one before them. I imagine seeing a dark-light emanating from their hands, like a cold power. Each rank causing the cold power to be stronger, with smoke-like tendrils drifting away from those close to the front.
I think that when a person reads a particularly good book like the Covenant series, that they should read the action parts once through, then read them bit by bit, putting the book aside & thinking about how it might have looked, and finally to read it in their mind like a movie; only now you have a very richly detailed movie. At any rate, I believe that some people just have vague impressions of what things or people look like & that's just ashame. It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong in your imagination as long as your imagination is very specific so that you get more out of it than the casual reader.