The Heralds of Valdemar series

A couple story ideas I had:

1. A pair of antagonists, one more antagonistic than the others. Two nobs, I'll call them Lord Brother and Lady Sister for lack of actual names. Lord Brother is a conspirator against the Heralds, and therefore the Crown, old hat that, though his beefs appears to be with the Heralds in general rather than just the Monarch. Not because of anything they did to him but because of something he seems to believe about him.

The idea I had is he's caught fairly early on, exposed and arrested, except he decides to go down swinging and does not survive his arrest. Authorities search his place and find his honest-to-god manifesto. Here, he describes the Companions as the inhuman masters of the Kingdom, the Heralds, including the Monarch, as their unwitting dupes. There's also proof that he's A) been spreading his manifesto about, there's boxes of copies printed out and finding the press is its own thing, and they don't know for sure who else has been absorbing this, and/or B) he's quoting someone in his manifesto, implying someone filled his head with all these ideas. Admittedly, some of this is a bit of a Black Box, I'm not fully certain on the details.

Now Lady Sister presents her own problem and implication. Namely, the implication that she's been fed some of the same beliefs but came to her own wildly different interpretations. When she finds out what her brother has been doing, she's honestly shocked and appalled. Why? Because she's worships Companions. She espouses the belief that they are perfect entities sent from the Heavens to rule them through their living avatars, the Heralds, and that the kingdom of Valdemar is all the better for having them as masters. She's been talking her maids and hanger-ons into this belief, spreading around Companion figurines that clearly double as idols and starting this Companion Cult.

So the conflict of the plot is dealing with both the "Companion Conspiracy", that is the followers Lord Brother swayed to the idea of it, and the question of what in the world to do with the Companion Cult formed by Lord Sister and how it interacts with Conspiracy.

~

2. Far future vision of Valdemar after guns and cars become more prominent. This is actually several ideas so:

a. Valdemar has become a Democratic Republic instead of a Monarchy. Some Noble plot to foment rebellion among the Commoners against the Monarch backfired as the movement transformed into general discontent against all the highborn. When a revolt ensued, the Monarch and the Heralds stepped in, on the side of the rebels, and a revolt transformed into a civil war, albeit a decidedly one-sided one.

Afterwards, the Monarch and the Heralds bore a great deal of popularity even with the Anti-Noble Rebels but the Rebel Leader wanted more representation for the common people and was also very popular. The Monarch agreed to step down and begin restructuring the government around a democratically elected Senate of representatives. The Senate would also be managed by a Chancellor, also elected by the people, but to qualify for that position would have to be a Herald. The Monarch was elected as the first Chancellor because of being so dang popular.

The Heralds continued doing their old jobs under this new system with some big changes and some things staying exactly the same. The job of Monarch's Own, still being connected to a Groveborn Companion, became the more generalized Councilor Of The Circle. The Councilor cannot be Chancellor.

b. Companions have also been through changes. People don't need magic horses when they have cars and motorbikes. Well, some of them do but not as many. Companions in the form of dogs appear out of the Grove and start a new line of magical friends, who similarly go out and Choose Heralds. There is an understanding the Heralds with canine Companions and equines ones are expected to do different jobs. As the world becomes more advanced, there may in fact be less and less need for the equine sort.

The great thing about the first plot idea is that both Lord Brother and Lady Sister are not entirely wrong - the companions do have a huge amount of influence - and also that the true nature of Companions (i.e. them being reincarnated former Heralds, iirc, except for the occasional one that’s an actual angelic being) is a huge secret. So have two people poking at it from different ends is the last thing either the Heralds or the Companions want.

(Sorry if I’m offbase, it’s been a long time since I read Valdemar books.)

No, you’re pretty spot-on. And the Companions do go in for a lot of reverence, and some aren’t above enough pride and vanity to encourage it a bit. What Valdemaran child doesn’t have a Companion doll and dream of the real thing? There’s a practical reason, too, encouraging trust in the Heraldic institution by leaning on the infallibility of Companion’s Choice—but that could so easily morph into a cult-like devotion. I’d read it.

As to the other idea, I’ve thought before about what Heralds and Companions might be like after they break out of Medieval Stasis, but haven’t gotten very far with it. I like the idea of dogs, and they could specialize further into different breeds. Greyhounds and German Shepherds and huskies. Equine Companions already do vary a bit—the couriers are even better at long-distance running than most, and Alberich’s Kantor is explicitly a warhorse. (The Firecats can stay exactly the same.)

I like the democratic Valdemar idea too, but how the Heralds would work within it could be tricky. They rely heavily on the Monarch’s central authority coordinating their actions. Would the Chancellor be able to act as decisively as an elected position?

I figure they'd be a bit like the Jedi order in the Star Wars films. Basically, an independent force that sometimes helps out the local government, when it fits their goals. Or, like some religious orders today.

Edited by FuzzyBoots on Jun 15th 2023 at 9:40:43 AM

Well, a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness in Arrows of the Queen is that the Heralds’ eventual goal is to expand beyond Valdemar and become a multinational organization. Severing their ties to the Valdemaran monarchy (by abolishing that monarchy) would be one way to get that process started.

They’d have to quit doing some of the things they’re best at, like overruling local judges and staffing Valdemar’s Supreme Court, and switch to an advisory/neutral arbiter role.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Jun 15th 2023 at 8:42:35 AM

Well, yes, that is the idea, that some people cotton on to the exact influence the Companions have but out of a combination of incomplete information, ignorance and biases of their own various hang-ups grossly exaggerate their position. Lord Brother sees something sinister while Lady Sister sees whatever it is she's seeing, and it probably makes the Companions uncomfortable.

Like, an idea I had is that the Heralds and the Palace bring in for questioning and she has to be kept away from the Field because she just freaks the Companion's out. Maybe a few of them bask under her devotion at first, but grew to find it just as unsettling as the rest.

Another idea is that Lady Sister has imperialist designs: Valdemar is blessed to have such fine equine angelic guidance, why not spread that to the rest of the world? Valdemar should totally start gearing up for world conquest. Of course, such ambitions are sullying to the purity of the Companions and their Chosen, it is up to their more earthly followers to pave the way for their stewardship over the world. Only problem with any amount of tension in such a plotline is that Heralds, Companions and the Crown are not only uncooperative but actively and quite advantageously obstructive to such line of thinking.

Yeah, I don't see it going anywhere, unless the Anti-Companion Conspiracy is able to fester and cells of it play some double blind bluffs or something.

Edited by God_of_Awesome on Jun 16th 2023 at 2:39:24 AM

Oh cool, someone split off The Founding of Valdemar as its own page! Oh darn, the desciption was just the Beyond dust-jacket blurb. I've rewritten it, but it's pretty minimal for now. If anyone wants to expand on it, feel free.

Oh, I just realized I read the first two Founding books and never actually commented on them here.

They were... fine, I guess? They both felt a little half-baked, but not to the point where they weren't enjoyable. The main problem with Beyond is that the Empire felt like a cartoon supervillain rather than a serious and horrifying threat. They also go to great pains to paint everyone at court as incredibly stupid and/or evil, presumably so that the audience won't feel bad when they're inevitably all left to burn, but then it also shows us that Valdemar refuses to be evil so he has to spend all his time carefully pretending to be stupid so that he won't be seen as a threat in court. Which raises the idea that Valdemar could possibly find allies (or at least innocents) among other courtiers doing the exact same thing. Hell, a minor character (one of the Emperor's people sent to spy on Valdemar's lands, IIRC) turns out to be literally exactly that! But this is never extended to the rest of the court in general, which feels weird.

Into the West felt more like a series of short stories than a novel with a single through-line. It was just a bunch of "this happened, and then this happened, and then that happened, and then another thing happened". Again, that's not bad, and most of the individual plots were entertaining enough, it just never quite managed to be more than the sum of its parts. The big boss battle at the end seemed to be an attempt to wrap things up and end the book on a satisfying note, but it just felt a little perfunctory. Also, the Hawkbrothers were there, having apparently changed not at all in the thousands of years between when these novels take place and when we see them in the main timeline. They were pretty boring, tbh. Felt more like a plot device than anything else. I was kind of looking forward to seeing Valdemar actually have to hack a city out of raw magic-tainted wilderness, so the fact that they just take it over from the Hawkbrothers is kind of a disappointment.

Edited by NativeJovian on Jul 28th 2023 at 5:36:27 AM

I've just finished Into the West; took me forever. I can't just read a book these days. I liked it, I didn't mind the Road Trip Plot since it was right in the title that that's what it would be. I also don't expect Hawkbrothers from any given century to be different from any other Hawkbrothers; we already saw that with Vanyel's interactions with them. They have a mission, their whole lifestyle revolves around it, and they know upfront it will take thousands of years, so they don't change. I do agree it's a bit disappointing that they just hand the kingdom over easy-peasy.

I thought we knew what Companions are, but the end seems to be foreshadowing that Rose and some of the other former Dolls might become them later. We know the vrondi stick around, since they power the Truth Spell, but talking to Mother, Kordas refers to Rose as "my companion" (small c), and she tells him they'll be together again.

I need to go look at the end of Beyond again and see if it says what happened to Star. Of the three main Dolls from that book, Rose attaches herself to Kordas and Ivy to Isla, but I don't remember if Star is doing anything in particular. She had been in charge, more or less.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Sep 27th 2023 at 12:24:34 PM

Well, future Companions are former Heralds, it did leave the question who/what the first Companions came from

Angelic spirits, I thought. Direct from the Star-Eyed and the other gods. But they could be vrondi and other Elementals too, I guess.

And, when the Star-Eyed puts in an appearance just before Mother shows up, powerful air elementals are in her retinue. So.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Sep 27th 2023 at 12:25:48 PM

Yeah, it was always the case that grove-born Companions (who just appear fully grown out of a grove in Companion's Field, thus the name) were non-human spirits sent by the gods to aid the Heralds of Valdemar. Those are still around even in "modern" Valdemar, though IIRC only the Monarch's Own is routinely a grove-born.

Also like half of the grove-born in the series are Rolan. I will honestly be astonished if it doesn't turn out that Rolan is the very first Companion.

Actually, the first three Companions (and their Heralds) were named back in Arrows of the Queen.

Restil and Beltran have already appeared in the Founding books alongside Kordas Valdemar. Restil is still a young boy, of course.

When I went looking for the quote, I was thinking that maybe only Ardatha was named, and Rolan could be Beltran’s Companion, since Beltran—whose office named the entire order—is clearly the first King’s Own. But no, they all have names. Ardatha is female, which at least doesn’t kill my theory.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Sep 28th 2023 at 10:25:35 AM

Ah, the curse of having nearly 40 years of continuity to deal with. Alas. Still, Rolan has to be the Companion we've seen incarnated the most, and given that he's a grove-born there's got to be more to it than just a Herald who really wants to stick around and help out. It's not really the sort of thing that needs an explanation, but I wonder about it anyway.

There’s only been one Monarch’s Own’s Companion not named Rolan, IIRC. His name is Taver in Exile’s Honor, and he is killed at the end to be replaced by—Rolan, who Chooses his Herald Talamir and keeps him alive long enough for Talia to be ready to take over.

My headcanon is that Rolan and Taver are the only two; whenever one is killed the other takes over for him. It is canon that they don’t age and only die by violence.

Note the Early-Installment Weirdness; we’ve never really seen a Companion who gets named by their Herald. And while it’s still mentioned as a possibility that an existing Herald could get re-Chosen as Monarch’s Own, we haven’t seen that either, and so never have reckoned with what actually happens to that Herald’s original Companion and their bond. (Although it went the other way in Closer to Home via Revival Loophole—Nikolas died, Rolan chose his daughter Amily, then Mags did CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable and Nikolas got a new Companion.)

Elspeth’s Gwena is the only other Grove-born we know of after the Founding, because of her Special Destiny as the first new Herald-Mage, and Rolan had to work hard to make that happen.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Sep 29th 2023 at 9:13:30 AM

And then Gwena nearly screws that up by being ridiculously unsubtle in how she is manipulating Elspeth towards her Grand Destiny.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2023 at 9:24:04 AM

Someone in the know—Vanyel’s spirit, I think—says that Gwena is “very young,” which doesn’t make much sense to the humans. But clearly she hasn’t reincarnated over the ages like Rolan or most of the “normal” Companions. She’s a fresh spirit on her first big divine mission.

If they just cycled between the two like that, you'd expect someone to notice and mention it at some point. But you'd also expect that just of the fact that a grove-born named Rolan keeps showing up as the Companion of the Monarch's Own. The Arrows trilogy in particular has some pretty funny Early-Installment Weirdness, though. Hard to imagine Rolan just shoving someone's existing Companion aside so he can go "okay you're King's Own now".

I still feel like that's more on Elspeth than anyone else. It's a bit Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like. I don't think it's unreasonable for Elspeth to insist on being included in the planning stages instead of just having the Companions benevolently manipulating everything on her behalf, but deliberately ruining the Companions' plan because it isn't her plan is childish at the best of times and frankly bewildering when she's on a big mission to save Valdemar rather than on a personal quest for her own reasons.

Eh, it's sort of a shared responsibility. The Companions are supposed to empathically bond with their Heralds and use appropriate levels of reinforcement/persuasion, not just carry them off on magical quests of destiny without any say in the matter. Gwena clearly does not understand her Herald if she thinks Elspeth is going to go along with something like that.

Elspeth, in turn, needs to rein in the stubbornness a little and become more selfless. Her revolt against Gwena is predictable, as I said, and it's the kind of problem you get when two young hotheads are along for a trip and have different ideas about the destination. Part of Elspeth's journey is to surrender control when appropriate, and she wouldn't have learned that on Gwena's original plan, or at least not in the same way.

Anyway, if Elspeth hadn't rebelled, the Hawkbrothers probably would have been defeated by Mornelithe Falconsbane, and that could have spelled doom for Valdemar, never mind the world when the Mage Storms returned. Call it serendipity if you will, but it's all but blatantly obvious that the Starry-Eyed had some hand in things. Gwena was never really "in charge" to begin with, and thinking she was was probably part of the plan.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2023 at 10:13:33 AM

Yeah, I don't think that Elspeth was in the wrong for being unhappy with the Companions' behavior, only in the way she responded to it. But on the whole I'm more sympathetic to the Companions, because they do ultimately mean well, and Elspeth is the one who digs her heels in and refuses to compromise. The initial problem was a lack of communication resulting in differing expectations, which is on the Companions for just doing stuff without running it past Elspeth first even though she's deeply involved in their plans. But instead of making sure that communication takes place so that Elspeth is included in the Companions' planning both now and in the future, Elspeth just starts doing the same thing (making decisions entirely on her own without consulting the other people involved) but with an extra layer of spite where she refuses to go along with the Companions' plan just because it's their plan, even though she would have been perfectly satisfied doing it that way if it was her own idea.

As far as Elspeth's stubbornness being the first domino in the line that leads to saving the world from the Cataclysm, I'm not so sure. There was a team of Shin'a'in ninjas Swordsworn on the case during the Mornelithe situation, so it's not like that would have gone unnoticed if Elspeth hadn't stumbled into it. It certainly would have turned out differently, and it's an open question whether the Vale that Mornelithe was targeting would have survived, but the Star-Eyed is perfectly willing to just show up in person and tell the Hawkbrothers and/or the Shin'a'in to march their asses to Haven and offer their assistance if that's what it takes to get the ball rolling.

I agree that both parties are at fault: Gwena for lack of communication and Elspeth for unreasonable stubbornness. That's how stories work: you establish character flaws and then show them overcoming those flaws.

As for whether Kal'enel would have found another way to prevent the Cataclysm, possibly, but everything we've seen from her indicates that she prefers to act with subtlety. It's hard to say if Elspeth's rebellion is part of her plan from the beginning or if she simply adapts to it, but either way she seems to operate on the principle that humans need to believe that they're acting out of free will.

Edit: In the case of the Shin'a'in, the Swordsworn are explicitly souls in her direct command, so it's perfectly reasonable for her to send them on a mission to stop Falconsbane. That wouldn't violate any of the rules she's set out for herself. Still, she seems to think it's valuable to have the Valdemar-Tayledras-Shin'a'in alliance form naturally as a result of the actions of individuals, not because of a divine mandate.

Also, Elspeth and Darkwind are an adorable couple.

Edit 2: Remember, they need Ma'ar's knowledge to stop the Cataclysm, since he's the only "living" being who was around for the first one. Everything that happens is part of that careful plan to keep his soul around until it can be defeated in precisely the right way to "kill" him but not lose what he knows. If a single thing had gone differently, it might have been lost.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2023 at 11:30:47 AM

The gods in Valdemar seem to operate on a principle of minimum interference, but I don't think they'd just let the Cataclysm kill everyone For Want Of A Nail because Elspeth didn't show up and do just the right thing to preserve Ma'ar's knowledge in a usable way. It would just raise the threshold of "minimum" in minimum interference. The Star-Eyed was already pretty directly involved, what with the Swordsworn acting against Ma'ar from the outside and sending her avatars to help An'desha fight from within Ma'ar's mind.

We can have it either way, but not both. The gods relied on that precise sequence of events to avert the second Cataclysm, or they adapted their plan to events as they occurred.

In neither case are Elspeth or Gwena directly accountable for anything other than their own behavior, since they could not possibly have known (nor should they have known, to preserve the "free will" thing) the consequences.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2023 at 12:24:19 PM

I went to look up Winds of Fury to confirm that it’s Vanyel talking about Gwena, and for what it’s worth, he seems to indicate the latter.

Yes, according to Vanyel, both Gwena and Rolan were in on Elspeth's "Glorious Destiny", and it was something they cooked up between themselves, not a direct instruction from the Star-Eyed.

What's more interesting about that conversation is the obvious implication that Vanyel has some direct knowledge of these matters, implying that he's got connections as well. After all, it's not like he would have had the opportunity to personally meet Gwena until this point in order to interrogate her.

Kal'enel works in mysterious ways, but one of those ways is apparently some high-level transparency for her chosen spirits. Either that or Vanyel is just that awesome that he can divine the information from so far away.

(I wouldn't put it past Her to feel a bit sorry for everything she put Vanyel through and cut him some slack because of it; indeed it's implied in Mage Storms that this is the case.)

Edit 2: We also learn during Mage Winds that the mage Vanyel fought and defeated (at the cost of his life) during his time was another reincarnation of Ma'ar.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2023 at 3:32:42 PM