History HeraldsOfValdemar / TropesPToZ

** In ''Owlknight'', Darian goes looking for his parents, who vanished ten years before, using two applications of sympathetic magic. He tracks down their campsite by using his own blood connection to them, and finds that WildMagic transported them away. Left behind was his father's foot, sheared off by a PortalCut, and he uses the bones to determine that his father is alive and get a general direction to start looking in.

* SecretCompartment: ** At one point in ''Literature/TheFoundingOfValdemar'', Kordas thinks back to the summer he spent designing and making concealed compartments in just about everything he could find at the manor to impress his grandfather (who had already started work on the family "escape-the-Empire" plan).
** ''Exile's Valor'' -- the table in Alberich's quarters has a secret compartment in one leg, positioned so that he can place items in it without a hypothetical person peeking in the window noticing anything.
** ''Storm Rising'' -- General Tremaine's travel desk contains a concealed drawer designed for storing blackmail materials. Unlocking it requires a complex series of actions in a carefully timed sequence. Get the sequence wrong, and something Very Bad will happen.
* ''Literature/InDeath'': In ''Glory in Death'', the second book in the series, Officer Peabody finds the killer's stash of trophies taken from his victims in a secret compartment in his sofa. She explains that when she was a child her father liked to build things with hidden compartments for his children to find, so she was able to easily recognize one.

** Need, again, in the Oath books. She gives Kethry the mage fighting prowess, which is useful at close quarters, but she makes Tarma the fighter completely immune to nonconsensual magic to a degree that's frankly broken, letting her just wade in and cut the enemy down while they stare in shock at their powers becoming useless. The two women never seem to recall that this is the case or hand Need to Tarma ''before'' facing a mage, the handover only ever happening at a dramatic moment of near defeat.

* {{Reincarnation}}: Stefen in ''Magic's Price'' is more or less confirmed to be the reincarnation of Tylendel, and later books confirm that many Companions are reincarnated Heralds; in particular, [[spoiler:Kerowyn's Companion Sayvil]] appears to be the reincarnation of [[spoiler:Vanyel's aunt Savil Ashkevron]]. (WordOfGod confirms this.) The Firecats of Karse are reincarnated ancient Sons of the Suns. Stefen aside, reincarnated characters virtually always have very similar names to those of their past incarnations.

* WizardingSchool: There are several schools of magic, with White Winds being the most mentioned one, that has several branches since all graduating mages that reach Master or Adept level are supposed to found schools of their own. Tarma and Kethry end up starting a combination fighting/mage school towards the end of ''Oathbreakers''. In the ''Owls'' trilogy, it's mentioned that a Mage Collegium was set up so that non-Herald Mages can get training and learn to use their magic ethically.

* WorldSundering: The Cataclysm

** There's also the part where Tylendel, Mags, and Lavan came along a very long time before Talia (in approximate order roughly six hundred, four or five hundred and at least two hundred years); and Talia's meltdown was partly her wrongfully trained Empathy, and partly a widespread whispering campaign targeted against her by the series first BigBad [[spoiler: Lord Orthallen]] who had been [[MagnificentBastard manipulating the Heraldic circle and Royal family]] for generations, and been so good at it that it took some unprecedented MomentOfAwesome actions [[spoiler: Dirk and Elspeth with three Companions - two Grove-born - Fetching Talia out of Ancar's dungeons]] to get a live witness able to not only discover actionable information but testify against him.

* ShootTheShaggyDog: ''The Talisman'', a Tarma and Kethry story reprinted in ''Oathblood'', details the two being called by Need to a small town, where they find one of Kethry's mage-school yearmates, Mara, who has been [[VoluntaryShapeshifting magically turning herself into a bear]]. Transformation is dangerous in Velgarth because [[TheMindIsAPlaythingOfTheBody an animal brain just can't support a human mind]]; even brief forays into animal shape cause mental damage that can ''probably'' be reversed by spending a lot longer in human form, and Mara has been spending days at a time as a bear. Kethry believes that Need could fix that kind of damage, but by the time she sees Mara, Mara is suffering from serious delusions and is too paranoid to accept help, instead transforming to try to kill Kethry. Tarma kills Mara instead, and knowing that the town was aware of Mara's proclivities and won't like that she's dead, she and Kethry move on.

* ShootTheShaggyDog: ''The Talisman'', a Tarma and Kethry story reprinted in ''Oathblood'', details the two being called by Need to a small town, where they find one of Kethry's mage-school yearmates, Mara, who has been [[VoluntaryShapeshifting magically turning herself into a bear]]. Transformation is dangerous in Velgarth because [[TheMindIsAPlaythingOfTheBody an animal brain just can't support a human mind]]; even brief forays into animal shape cause mental damage that can ''probably'' be reversed by spending a lot longer in human form, and Mara has been spending days at a time as a bear. Kethry believes that Need could fix that kind of damage, but by the time she sees Mara, Mara is suffering from serious delusions and is too paranoid to accept help, instead transforming to try to kill Kethry. Tarma kills Mara instead, and she and Kethry move on.

** Vanyel is adamant in ''Magic's Promise'' that Companions don't Choose murderers. One of his friends had been a thief before she was Chosen, though. While meeting a freshly-Chosen Skif, Chronicler Myste says that she's just searched the archives and found record of several murderers (though granted, they were all in self-defense), one of them Lavan Firestorm, and a conwoman, but no thieves! It may be that Companions after Vanyel's time were more open to [[RecruitingTheCriminal recruiting sympathetic murderers]]. As for the records, Myste ''is'' an AuthorAvatar, so perhaps she misses things too.