Tear Jerker / The Arts of Dark and Light

• Lithriel as a Stepford Snarker in her horrible situation. She used to be a flying elf with magic in a world full of wonder—but then she was enslaved and raped by humans, and her magic was destroyed. She's also too ashamed to go home to her own country (where she'll be treated as a cripple at best, anyway) even after she's freed, so she has to live as a defector of sorts in Savondir instead. And all this when she is still a teenager, as elves count time. She puts on a facade of blasé carelessness that most people seem to accept as genuine—but the perceptive Fjotra sees the real sadness in her eyes right away.
• Aulan watching the corpses, debris and freshly dug makeshift graves littering the highway on the way to Amorr, as the civil war strikes and masses of people are forced to flee their homes in the dead of winter. Especially the children. It's enough to make even him a little sad. To make it even worse, the descriptions appear to be inspired by real-life events.
• Consul Corvus' anguish over his own regime's brutal persecution of his political opponents, which have killed thousands of mostly innocent people in Amorr and driven tens of thousands from their homes. He regrets it to the depths of his heart, but still thinks it had to be done to keep the city safe from a potential fifth column when the civil war strikes. The scene is heartbreaking on multiple levels: most obviously because of how it conveys the horror of the situation (and Corvus' genuine torment), but more profoundly for how it shows the honorable general degenerating into a paranoid tyrant.
• In the prequel shorts, the final interactions between Witchking Ar Mauragh and his beloved companion as the elves are storming their shelter is quite tragic, even though they are high-ranking leaders in the most Obviously Evil faction in the setting. It helps that we never actually see them doing anything evil personally (and that the elves destroying the Witchking kingdoms are not very nice about it either), but the main thing is their sadness and stoic resignation.
  No grave, my love. No tomb. None shall disturb your ashes.
• What happened to Waleran and his monastery in "Opera Vita Aeterna" is just horrible, as well as Bessarias' reaction to it. If there is a God, he asks, why would He not protect His most kind, inoffensive and faithful servants from the machinations of His enemies? Through hundreds of years, this is his major crisis of faith.

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