#Heralds of Valdemar

[joysweeper]

A gorgeous commission I got from @spindlewit last year, showing Nyara with Need in the old tower, contemplating her options. I'm still so happy with this.

It's in the style of the art from the Mage Winds covers, though also Need is depicted there as the disturbing presence that Elspeth sees her as having. Nyara's sitting on one of Skif's tunics.

[iamnotshazam]

me, opening to the first page of Magic's Pawn: "oh boy, Talia's story was like a cup of hot chocolate with occasional bittersweet chunks, to make you appreciate the comforting sweetness of Valdemar and the Heralds all the more. I can't wait to see how this Vanyel kid fares."

200 pages later: "i want to get off mercedes lackey's wild ride"

[bookwyrm-art-stuff]

I know I'm looking for an INFINITESIMALLY small demographic here but did anyone else read The Last Herald Mage books (by Mercedes Lackey, you should totally read them if you haven't yet) and then later read specifically Owlsight by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon and get fucking FLASHBACKS to Vanyel's books? [spoilers for both books ahead] Like they say "Yeah Darian's really traumatized so his Mindspeech gift could totally go from normal to wide open super fast" and I'm sitting there as images of Vanyel's attempted suicides and Jaysen sitting at his bedside and Y'fandes curled around him protectively in a cave flash through my head. Like when I said that book gave me PTSD I was supposed to be JOKING. What the fuck. Anyway this happen to anybody else?

[chaoticgalaxygiver]

Last-Herald Mage Community

I just finished The Last-Herlad Mage trilogy and was wondering if there was a community on tumblr (or anywhere), especially for fanwriters.

Looking for anyone to just talk AU ideas with or just generally recover from the emotional damage of these books.

[artbyvampiraptor]

Companion

[mercy-misrule]

I've read like a third now of the second pern book.

Again, one of the things that absolutely sailed over my head as a kid is the abortion stances in the narrative.

Women are easily able to attain pain free, instant abortion via the dragon teleport, the mere act of going in between removes pregnancy.

And there's issues between the conservative Holders who don't believe in it, who are very anti sexual freedom in general, and the relaxed ideas of the dragon riders.

Also, women in the dragon weyr don't raise their own kids, they foster them out, and while people do form long term relationships, there isn't marriage.

These things are so obviously revolutionary in retrospect, they are such clear signs of the politics of the era.

And man, pern world building is just neat. Having it be backwards to fantasy is neat, it really is.

I read a really interesting fic that did some exploring of the darker implications of the dragon hierarchy, and the mating flights and stuff

And in it Jora lives, and I just felt really vindicated.

I hate the way the books talk about her, about fat bodies in general. I wish she could have been someone that Lessa could have interacted with, maybe with more sympathy, maybe with less power behind the men?

One of the weakest moments of description in the first book is Lessa looking at herself in the mirror after being clean for the first time in years and she's all 'im so skinny and pale, but still got those titties!'

God, it's such an exercise in conflicting values and concepts as a series, in authorial intent, in actual execution.

I think it's important to engage with its canon, rather than just handwave it away, and the fic I've been reading has done this, while exploring it, questioning it and evolving it. It's good stuff.

I was hoping there would be fic like that!

There's an astounding fic series, Friends Across Borders for Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series that has straight up supplanted a lot of the canon for me.

As I'm reading fantasy that I loved as a kid again, I hope I find more fic for those series that people write original scenarios and characters for while still embracing the canon with a critical eye.

[first-and-last-neocount]

I was talking to a friend about my DnD character, who is based on Vanyel, and it was pointed out that I have a type. I couldn’t rest until I had inflicted this on everyone else. 

(I’ve probably forgotten about others, these are just the ones that immediately sprang to mind, feel free to point out any obvious ones that I’ve forgotten XD)

[treeshrine]

me and all the other tumblrinas of valdemar reblogging each other's posts

[checkoutmybookshelf]

He's Just a Herald and He's On Fire!

So, if there is one consistent theme with protagonists in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar universe, it's that there is a STARTLING number of them who are misfits in their families, misunderstood, and a little anxious and melancholic about the whole thing. You'd think that this would get boring fast, but Lackey manages to mix up the details enough that they don't meld together in my head, and in point of fact, I have actual favorites. One of whom we are talking about today. That's what this post is for. Lan Chitward is one of my favorite herald protagonists. Let's talk Brightly Burning.

Hi, hello, welcome. If this is your first time on my blog, please be warned that this is A SPOILERIFIC ZONE. I will SPOIL THE CRAP OUT OF THIS BOOK. Consider yourself warned.

Y'all, I am a Shakespeare scholar, so if I ever post anything along the lines of "Tragedies suck and I hate them," please send help, I've been kidnapped. Your girl LOVES a good tragedy, and that's really what this book is: An Amazing Tragedy. But that's just the end for Herald Lavan Firestorm and his Companion Kalira.

At the beginning of this book, we meet Lavan "Lan" Chitward, ugly duckling son of a pair of extremely prosperous merchants who feels ignored, misunderstood, and transplanted from the place that made him happiest. Kiddo has zero desire to follow either of his parents into their trades, so when they hit their wits' ends, said parents send Lan to a merchant-run school so Lan can find himself a direction in life that he feels will suit him.

Lan's parents might not be able to empathize or communicate with their son, but they did try to set him up for success. They tried. They get a couple of points for that. Not a lot. But a couple.

Unfortunately for Lan, he gets to discover the downsides of private school firsthand when he is relentlessly and cruelly bullied by older students. Lan's anxiety and very real, rational fear of bodily and social harm get so bad that to save his life, his Firestarting Gift explodes out of his control. By the time the smoke clears, four boys are dead and Lan is being carted up to the palace to explain to Herald Pol what on earth had been happening in his school and how the fire started. Stress from being questioned makes Lan lose control again, but before he can start a second killer fire, Kalira chooses Lan. Handily, Kalira is the daughter of Pol's companion, Satiran, so Pol is aware from the jump that Lan is more than just Kalira's Choice: The two are lifebonded.

Go nuts, Ao3.

However, this is about when the members of the heraldic circle start looking at each other sideways and going, "oh no. Firestarting Gifts usually only pop up when we're going to need them..." So while Lan is getting tutored by Pol, Kalira, his new best friend Tuck, and Pol's daughter Eleanor, Karse is causing trouble at the border--like preparing to invade and burn all the heralds to death trouble. Karse is not your friend, and their sun priests tend to target heralds and healers, and the only thing worse than being killed by Karsite troops is being taken alive to be burned at the stake or--for healers--be forced to use your gift until you burn out and die. So: Bad Situation.

Ultimately, the command decision is made to send Lan to the front. Lan at this point is an emotionally unstable, half-trained at best trainee herald. The poor kid is getting yeeted into a situation he is absolutely unprepared to handle. Before he and Pol even MAKE it to the front, they're attacked by a scout group and Pol is blinded--put a pin in that, we're going to come back to it. So Lan gets to the front already traumatized and somewhat sans his trusted mentor. It's not good.

Ultimately, the title of this book comes back to haunt Lan and Kalira: they burn, too brightly. Kalira takes an arrow in battle to save Lan, and in his grief and rage, Lan unleashes his final strike, taking out the Karsite army, an entire pine forest, and even some of his own soldiers--firestorms are hard to aim. Lan is posthumously raised to full Herald rank, and losing their entire army puts Karse on the shelf. It's the very definition of a pyrrhic victory, however. Lan burned himself out at age sixteen. He was a half-trained child doing his level best, and he was put in a situation that he was objectively unready for. It's heartbreaking, it's tragic...it's WONDERFULLY done.

The entire time you're reading this book and falling in love with Lan and Kalira, you're thinking "they'll be alright, won't they? They have to be alright." But you have enough other beloved characters that you get to know well enough that you also get to mourn with them once Lan and Kalira are gone. You get pulled into this story and you just want to hug Lan and stick him somewhere safe. This is one of my favorite Valdemar books, no question.

This is where I want to just briefly come back to Herald Pol and the attack that costs him his sight. I have no objection about the context in which this occurs. Shit happens in war. It's tragic, it's traumatic, it COMPLETELY SUCKS, but there aren't any red flags in terms of how Pol is disabled. There is also a fairly realistic period in which Pol is trying to adjust to not having sight. He also can see through Satiran's eyes for short periods of time because magic, but since this comes with a cost in energy and magic and doesn't inherently negate the disability, we're still fine. It's an emergency stopgap measure, not a functional cure. So far, so fine.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of things I don't love about how Pol's blinding is handled. The first thing is a bit "your mileage may vary" rather than a genuinely harmful negative representation, but it threw up a faint red flag when I was reading, so I'm talking about it. Traumatic injuries are so described for a reason; people have very very valid feelings and reactions to being suddenly and violently disabled, and part of adjusting is having the time and space to work through those feelings. Now. Pol and Lan are literally in a war zone, they are indispensably important figures, so they can't just be sent home. There also kind of isn't time and space to deal with the emotions in a war zone. All of that is fair enough. It would suck to have to just swallow the feels and keep functioning, and that could even lead to some good narrative tension.

That's not what happens though.

I'll just give you the text from the book for this bit:

Some time during the ride to headquarters, Pol had made up his mind on several points; it had given him relief from the pain to work things logically through in that way. Losing his eyesight was not going to be a tragedy, and if Ilea could not Heal him, then he would simply accept that. The events of the evening only confirmed that belief. He worked through everything as logically as he could during the ride, and during that night and the day and night that followed, in his dreams he was able to employ a technique called directed dreaming to work through things emotionally. It wasn't easy; he exhausted himself all over again, weeping for what he had lost and raging against everyone involved, including himself. But it had to be done, and quickly, and dreams were the best and least harmful place to do so.

I'm not going to say that his experience as a Herald and soldier don't give this some credibility, and I'm not going to say that narrative compression isn't a thing that writers can and do use to get characters from emotional point a to point b, but this stretched my credibility just a skooch and made me go, "They're going to keep him blind, right?"

Reader, they healed him at the end of the book. Can we PLEASE let him live a full herald life while blind??? He was no less effective without his sight than with it, and A LITTLE PHYSICAL DISABILITY REP AMONG THE ACTIVE-DUTY HERALDS WOULD BE LOVELY. Plenty of them live with anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, or other mental health challenges, but heaven forbid a herald have a physical disability.

This is a pattern I'm noticing more and more in books. Soldiers and soldier-adjacent characters can experience mental illness and disability, but not physical. It's that really annoying mind-body split looming large, and I don't have a good solution for this other than letting active duty characters also have physical disabilities, rather than having them be cured, retired, or in roles that never require them to be in the field. And I do get that like...if you are physically disabled, your best bet is not to be in a fight, but that's not how LIFE works. Sometimes the fight comes to you, or your expertise is needed in the field. It happens. LET IT.

Other than my growing frustration with disability rep in military, military-adjacent, and martial-esque organizations in fiction, I love this book to little tiny pieces. It's a beautifully executed tragedy without being self-indulgent or unnecessarily maudlin.

[pherryt]

The Scouts Path

Fandom: Valdemar Ship: Skif/Wintermoon (With background Elspeth/Darkwind, mentioned past one sided Skif/Elspeth, mentioned past Skif/Nyara) Rating: M Wordcount: Chapter 1 - 1857 - Cymry POV Chapter 2 - 2655 - Skif POV Chapter 3 - 1483 - Wintermoon POV Chapter 4 - 3343 - Skif POV Chapter 5 - 1408 - Wintermoon POV Chapter 6 - 1049 - Skif POV Chapter 7 - 1962 - Wintermoon POV Chapter 8 - 1335 - Skif POV Chapter 9 - 1405 - Wintermoon POV Chapter 10 - 1220 - Skif POV Chapter 11 - 1606 - Wintermoon POV Chapter 12 (Final) - 1112 - Skif POV Total Wordcount Posted: 20,435 Summary: What if Skif fell for the Hawkbrother Scout helping him find Nyara? What if Wintermoon found himself falling for an Outlander, despite all his reasons not to? And what if Nyara was just fine with all of that?

Basically a What If based on a reread of the books for the first time in years, seeing it in a new light and thinking there was more chemistry and interaction between Skif and Wintermoon than there ever was of Skif and Nyara.

[bloodysart]

You know this somehow isn't the most bizarre au/fusion thing I've made but it's close.

For context I made my friend @theomaru read the Heralds of Valdemar books and he was like 'I think my Guild Wars 2 OC would be a Companion. but a fucked up one' and I was like 'awesome can my Guild Wars 2 OC be her Herald?' and now we're in too deep and I think I've finally got the whole fake anime screenshot deal figured out tee hee.

(Yes I know the companions are all blue-eyed in the books I explain why I changed that under the cut and give context as to what the hell is going on)

Okay so for those of you who don't know:

Heralds of Valdemar is a fantasy novel series that got started in the late 80s and is still having new installments published. It's about Valdemar, a fantasy country whose forces and government include Heralds. Heralds are people who are Chosen by Companions (magical horse-like beings) and Heralds, once Chosen, are proven to be fundamentally decent and uncorruptable people and also get psychic powers. As a result, the ruler of Valdemar always has to be a Herald to prevent a shitty ruler from taking over. The books run all over the place in the timeline, from the founding of the country to hundreds of years later. One of the main themes of the series is the power of good over evil and what exactly those mean, and how exactly you can use your magical horse-angel-friend and your psychic powers to become a fully realized person and save the people you love.

Guild Wars 2 is a fantasy video game about a fantasy world under threat of Elder Dragons who are primordial forces of nature that corrupt and blight the world and eat magic. In the game, you as the player character end up becoming second-in-command of an organization dedicated to killing the Elder Dragons to save the world as we know it. One of the five playable races are the charr, giant militaristic cat people with horns. One of the main themes of the game is unity, and how all the disperate peoples and races of Tyria need to unite to fight against a threat to all of them.

So Theo and I ended up making an AU wherein Valdemar is an originally human kingdom, but over time different groups of the different races were integrated into the country as a whole, more or less. Valdemar has no magic, except for the Gifts (psychic powers), and most within Valdemar believe that magic isn't real anymore. The themes of the AU are finding the fundamental goodness in yourself, accepting yourself for who you are and finding the people who love you, and finding unity with different people in the face of the end of the world.

Starriean Greybone has recently been made into a gladium, put at the lowest rung of charr society, and is targeted by a group of bullies who plan to frame her for desertion and possibly beat her to death. She's saved what she thought was a feral horse, who reveals herself to be a Companion after making short work of the bullies and Chooses Starriean, which I depicted here.

Kilven (the Companion) has pink eyes because the actual design for the OC does, and meta-textually in the anime the animators gave her pink eyes to make her stand out more as a protagonist because goodness knows covers and adaptations love to fib about what the characters of the book look like.

[joysweeper]

@oroborian drew my beloved Sister Lashan / Need for me last year and it's very special. I got it printed and framed it but I'm constantly waffling about where to put it!

they also drew Nyara getting to learn about Fashion. I think she likes it.

[iamnotshazam]

Talia and Dirk, pining alone: woe is me! I have a soulmate that doesn't want me. And my horse best friend that I have a empathic/telepathic link with keeps shtupping their horse best friend that they have a link with, and I haven't told anyone about my feelings so the horses don't know what it's doing to me, and I guess I just have to suffer in silence

Rolan and Ahrodie, after their fifth round of the sex that week that is supposed to be helping Talia and Dirk grow closer: Wow, didn't think our humans could get any dumber, but these two found a way

[artbyhazeltwilight]

I did an LPS custom (my first one)! It is based on this guy :

He is a firecat from the valdemar universe by mercedes lackey!

I’m not familiar LPS but I saw a youtube video of someone making customs and I wanted to try. It was a lot of fun. :)

[softlysilverfountainsfall]

There is almost no way that anyone with an ounce of monarchical political knowledge would believe that Jisa and Treven's marriage came about the way it actually did. The theories must range wildly:

Jisa's mother Shavri used her position, both as King's Own and King Randale's lover, to ensure that her daughter would become Queen Consort if not Queen Regnant. (Very, very possible given the influence of both those positions and even likely, except for the fact that it couldn't be more wrong, Shavri was doing her best to keep Jisa off the throne)

1a. Debate ranges over how much Randale was involved, whether as a co-conspirator to being completely manipulated or too sick to do anything.

2. Randale used his position as King to make Treven marry his daughter so that Jisa would quasi-inherit even if she wasn't Chosen.

3. That one historian who is incredibly right about Vanyel being Jisa's biological father (probably not recorded in the Chronicles) and incredibly wrong about all the conclusions drawn from that. (No, Vanyel, arguably the most powerful person in the kingdom, did nothing to make Jisa queen.)

4. Treven had to marry Jisa to satisfy some court faction that supported her/bloodline traditionalists willing to overlook the out-of-wedlock part if it meant keeping Randale's direct bloodline (joke's on them).

5. Jisa seduced Treven to keep a position in the royal family.

6. What actually happened (which is probably in the Chronicles): two teens in love eloped with complete disregard for politics, they just happened to be the King's daughter and his distant Chosen heir.

[tafkarfanfic]

Reading my way through the Mercedes Lackey Valdemar books. There are some things that feel very ‘80s/90s fantasy, including:

Gang rape is character development for heroes and heroines

Speaking of which: “hey, we’re going to cast a spell that leads to the bad guy getting gang raped; won’t that be a riot?” is a thing that actually happens

What I’m saying is: whoa, there is a lot of rape in here

Massive age gap relationships (like, 17 year old woman/50 year old man — although there are m/m age gap relationships too) are super common

The description of Dirk is so similar to the description of Brianne of Tarth in ASOIAF that it makes me wonder if both characters were based on a real human in fandom:

His nose was much too long for his face; his ears looked as if they’d just been stuck on by guess and then left there. His jaw was square and didn't match his rather high cheekbones; his teeth looked like they'd be more at home in his Companion's mouth than in his. His forehead didn't match any of the rest of his face; it was much too broad, and his overly generous mouth was lopsided. His straw-colored hair looked more like the thatched roof of a cottage... The only thing that redeemed him from being repulsive was the good-natured smile that always hovered around the corners of his mouth ...

That, and his eyes—he had the most beautiful eyes Talia had ever seen; brimming with kindness and compassion... they were the same living sapphire blue as a Companion's

At some point Lackey stopped giving people last names and it just…feels kinda weird. Why is Vanyel’s family the only one with a last name?

The books jump around in the history of the world. What is notable is the books that were written earlier (such as The Last Herald-Mage books) have lots of work in the Guard and in positions of power; the more recently the books were written the more gendered occupations become. This has the weird effect of having a several hundred years time jump and suddenly everyone is way more sexist and most of the women seem to care about fashion more than doing things.

And also…gay people suddenly vanish after being a presence in the stories for many volumes. Then poof! They’re back!

There is also a lot to like.

Ace representation (Tarma) WAAAAAY before being ace was commonly talked about! And other ace representation too!

Lots of people doing their best and trying to make the world a better place.

Beings that are actually incorruptible.

Humans that do heroic things but are also flawed…but NOT in a grimdark way!

I still think it is worth reading. But the problematic parts stand out a LOT more to me now.