Follow TV Tropes

Following

Characters / Heralds Of Valdemar Brightly Burning
aka: Brightly Burning

Go To

Main Character Index | Deities and General Character Tropes | Mage Wars Trilogy | Last Herald Mage Trilogy | Collegium Chronicles | Brightly Burning | Vows and Honor | Exile Duology | Arrows Trilogy and Related Books | Mage Winds and Mage Storms | Darian's Tale

This subsection of the Heralds of Valdemar Character Sheet covers the standalone book Brightly Burning.

Lavan Chitward (later Firestorm) and Companion Kalira

  • Achilles' Heel: Lavan's powers require his and Kalira's full attention and Lavan can rarely focus on anything else when using them. This leaves him frighteningly open and vulnerable.
  • Angst Nuke: Kalira being injured makes Lan's powers flare up dramatically. She helps him keep it together when she's just hit by an arrow in Haven's streets, but when she's killed on the battlefield, well...
  • Black Sheep: Lavan was this to start with, as the only one of his siblings to dislike the family trade. He finds himself increasingly distanced from his family over the course of the book, as both his Chosen status and his powers set him apart and cause them to fear him. It's not a total shunning though, when visiting for the holidays Lan is adored by the cousins his age and younger and quite enjoys this, and his sister Macy is still friendly, even if he cynically thinks she mostly just wants to be near his Companion.
  • Blessed with Suck: The Firestarting Gift as he has it is almost akin to having a Superpowered Evil Side that comes out when he's upset and wants to burn everything. When his powers first awaken he manages to exert just enough control over them that he doesn't kill all his bullies, and the power turns on him in anger and burns him too. After that awakening, the fire is ready to come back whenever he's upset, though Kalira's presence can subdue it.
    • Pol also considers Lan's lifebond with Kalira to be this, since Brightly Burning was written after Lackey became more critical of the concept. They're in each others' heads far more often than most Herald-Companion pairs, Lan will never be independent or be able to figure himself out, and when Kalira's hurt Lan can't think about anything else. While Heralds don't usually live long after their Companions are killed, Lan reacts very badly to Kalira's death and tries to light the world on fire - and only his own death contains the destruction.
  • Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Lan sure does brood. In most of their interactions Kalira's there either soothing him or cheerfully trying to break him out of his moods.
  • Clingy Jealous Girl: Kalira jokes about becoming jealous whenever Lan talks to "other women".
  • Cooldown Hug: Being horse-shaped Kalira can't physically do this but she's able to make do with her Psychic Powers, breaking his anger and keeping his Gift from raging out of control.
    Something enfolded him, wrapped and cradled him in an emotion he almost didn't recognize. And when he realized what it was he wept, and as he wept he returned it with all his heart and wrapped the giver in the gift. They trembled together there, in an embrace so close that there was no room for thought.
  • Cornered Rattlesnake: He, and the Sixth Formers at trade school, thought he was just some scrawny loser kid who kept having blinding headaches and not showing up in class, not someone with apocalyptic fire powers.
  • Defence Mechanism Superpower: Lan's Gift has two modes, "inactive" and "full blast". Strong negative emotions bring on the latter, even if he's not actually under threat at the time.
  • Dramatic Irony: Lan spends almost the whole book wrestling with guilt and wondering if he's a murderer for having burned a bully to death. The woman whose son he killed thinks he is (and that he escaped justice by being Chosen), but every Herald including the King thinks he isn't. Tuck eventually says that technically Lan committed involuntary manslaughter in self-defense, not murder. But several hundred years later in Take a Thief, Herald-Chronicler Myste calls Lan a Sympathetic Murderer - evidently, that's how he's regarded long after his demise.
  • Embarrassing Nickname: The bullies at trade school dubbed him "Scrub".
  • Evil Is Burning Hot: Lan's Firestarting Gift is personified to a degree that just doesn't happen elsewhere in the series. It's a bad personality that basically just wants to burn everyone that upsets him, and everything around them for good measure. When he's using it on enemies, Lan loses his usual scruples and finds himself consumed by hatred and sadism and feeling a 'hunger' that only increases with each victim, eventually going even beyond Kalira's ability to moderate. In the end he did not care who he killed, he only wanted to burn the world.
  • Extremely Short Timespan: By Talia's time it usually takes three to five years for a Heraldic Trainee to become a full Herald. Lan is Chosen late in the fall and is pressed into his Whites some time after midwinter that year, reminiscent of Vanyel's Herald aunt giving him Whites soon after he kills Krebain. In the epilogue, said to take place months after Lan's death, it's early spring.
  • Fiery Redhead: His hair is described as red-chestnut.
  • Fire Means Chaos: Lan's Gift is associated with fear and rage and wants nothing but to consume and spread.
  • Foil: Lavan is an interesting contrast with Herald-Mage Vanyel. Each was a Person of Mass Destruction who fought against Karse, became Famed In-Story, had unusual love lives, and were Doomed by Canon. Vanyel had a well-intentioned but silly mother and an abusive father who both came around and became more supportive of a son who wasn't what they'd been expecting; Lavan's parents didn't know quite what to do with him and tried to do their best for him, but their relationship became strained and worse over time. Van at sixteen had a cruel streak while at the same age Lan was far more gentle and softhearted, but while while Lan soon started Slowly Slipping Into Evil, Van was largely heroic (although he briefly lapsed). Vanyel lived until he was nearly forty and made decisions about his own life the entire time, though his Chronic Hero Syndrome certainly weighted some choices over others. Lan died only a few months after being Chosen and was basically railroaded to his destiny. On the other hand Lan spent less of his life unhappy and exhausted, didn't endure a long period of grief, and was praised by soldiers and Heralds alike, while Van was shunned and feared.
  • Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Lan's family regards him as a lazy slacker initially. By the time the book starts, all his siblings have found places in the family business that they enjoy and have been apprenticed to work on their skills for years, but Lan has reached the age of sixteen with zero job skills by slipping out of the house first thing in the morning to spend all day every day with his friends. His parents send him to trade school, much to his dismay, in the hopes that he'll learn something more to his liking. When he's bullied terribly and tries to tell them about it, they think he's just exaggerating and trying to get out of having to work.
  • Hope Sprouts Eternal: Some of the other books claim that the mountain pass where Lan made his last, catastrophic stand have been barren ever since, for hundreds of years given when those are set. Brightly Burning itself ends with the surviving cast finding the tiny seedlings of pines that need fire to propagate growing in the ash. They consider taking one found at the place where Lan died back with them, to leave at his grave, but are informed that this species needs harsher conditions than Haven to thrive, and make it into an impromptu memorial instead.
  • If We Get Through This…: While studying at the merchant school, and then later at the Collegium, Lan realizes there's a life he could lead that he would enjoy and that would fully engage him; traveling with merchant caravans in the first case, doing a kind of border patrol and always going where he was needed in the second one. Both realizations make him happy but, of course, it's not to be.
  • Interspecies Romance: Lan and Kalira have a Lifebond as well as the usual Companion bond, making neither of them interested in anyone but one another. This is necessary in order to anchor his sanity in the face of his deeply alarming Gift. The usual affectionate Herald and Companion banter is a lot more charged with these two. They flirt often and Lan is touched and gratified to hear that Kalira has no interest in Companion stallions but would be interested in him.
  • It Gets Easier: Lan is plagued by nightmares and guilt over killing his bullies, and hates the idea of killing anyone else. After he's slow to act when Pol is attacked, resulting in Pol being blinded and almost dying, he decides he'll never hesitate again and starts igniting enemies and burning down forts. For a time he still tends to feel guilty and uncertain about it but soon he starts to embrace the joy he feels in burning people to death, even gleefully hunting them.
  • It's All About Me: At the start of the book, Lan's family has just moved from the countryside to Haven and he's no longer able to avoid them, so his parents are actually able to try to address his future. With his complete lack of interest in textiles and his near inability to even be polite about it, he has no job skills at sixteen. Knowing he'd hate to be given to the temple, they enroll him in trade school where he can hopefully find something more to his liking. Lan hates this idea and sees them as not caring about what he wants, as all he wants is to go back to the countryside and presumably live on a stipend. It's very teenager of him. Being Chosen changes his outlook.
    • Kalira's death changes it back and marks another way he's a Foil for Vanyel - when Van suffered great loss, he only wanted to kill himself. Lan wants to take the world with him.
  • Living Emotional Crutch: Kalira, after Lan's powers awaken. Before she appears and Chooses him his powers are completely out of his control and he almost either kills or gets killed by Herald Pol and several of the Guard when they ask what happened at his school. Her cheer, concern, and psychic Cooldown Hugs get him out of his dark moods and keep his powers controlled - when she's hurt he can barely function, and when she dies he completely loses it.
  • The Magnificent: He becomes informally known as "Lavan Firestarter" while at the Collegium, dubbed so by the King himself. During the war, he became "Lavan Firestorm", which is how he's remembered by future generations.
  • Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Kalira's motivation is mainly to help Lan in as many ways as she can. She can't introduce much whimsy, as a duty-bound Companion, but she's got a deep reservoir of cheer, constantly tries to get him to see the bright side, and tries to coach him through awkward social situations and into embracing time with his friends and fun pastimes when they're available, and is always happy to take him on a gallop.
  • Mindlink Mates: Companions often talk in their Heralds' heads, reading their minds. Persons with a lifebond have a strong emotional connection that often has them sharing feelings. Put these together and there's a connection that Pol sees as unhealthy but not something that can be changed.
  • Morality Chain: Once his Gift is fully awakened, Kalira is the only thing keeping him this side of morality (and sanity) when he uses it. When she dies, Lan lets all his power and ethics go, happy to burn the world to cinders as long as he goes with it.
  • Mundane Utility: The Karsite war occurs in the winter, and Lan can make any wood burn, so several times he's the one asked to make the camp fires.
  • Murder by Cremation: The way he kills most people, naturally.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Vanyel before him was such a formidable figure during an initial war between Karse and Valdemar that Karse became increasingly rigid and hostile to Valdemar and to citizens with Gifts, its leadership whipping up the population with existential fear of the demonic Heralds and their strange powers. Vanyel was "just" a very powerful Magic Knight who could make the demons the Karsites summoned Eat the Summoner; he could replace five other Herald-Mages, but his abilities weren't too different from them. Lavan's Gift is more limited in applications but also much more apocalyptically dramatic and terrifying, and he doesn't have Vanyel's restraint. Well before he's sent to the front lines, Pol reflects ruefully that Lan will reinforce the Karsite terror of Gifts and of Valdemar and keep that enmity going, but doesn't see another choice.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Rarely called anything but Lan.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: Much as he'd rather not be, for quite some time.
  • Playing with Fire: Has the Firestarting Gift, obviously. While he doesn't have a normal hot temper, he perceives his Gift as almost an Enemy Within that reacts to any upset by becoming toweringly angry, at which point fires start appearing and growing.
  • Power Incontinence: Without Kalira's help his Gift is either inactive or at full blast and the best he can do to keep it contained is to try not to think about it.
  • The Power of Hate: Lan's powers being fueled by strong negative emotions eventually evolve into this. It's not a good thing.
  • Pyromaniac: Lan conceptualizes his Gift as being like a serpent or dragon curled up inside him, waking with his fear or anger and then taking great, intoxicating joy in destruction and especially death, which he feels himself consumed by. Kalira's able to suppress that aspect of him, so most of the time Lan is sickened by the memory of those thoughts, but even before she's killed he's getting to a point where he and the dragon are one and the same. On the sliding scale Lan feels "the dragon" is full XXX but after it's awakened he considers himself about a 1, a number which grows and grows.
  • Rage Against the Author: In the non-canon story After Midnight Lan, along with a number of Mercedes Lackey's other protagonists, gets to rail against the author for making him suffer.
    “And then you brag about it! ‘The Lackey-patented formula for success - make your audience identify with and care deeply for a character and then drop a mountain on him!’”
  • Required Secondary Powers: Situationally fireproof. When his Gift came upon him, he was untouched while standing in a burning building until a cornered survivor begged for mercy and Lan tried to let him escape - the fire didn't like that and turned on him, leaving him with some burns. Later, in situations where Lan uses his powers on a large scale to kill enemies, small flames travel through his and Kalira's hair and over their bodies without causing harm. After Kalira is killed and Lan flies into an Unstoppable Rage he thinks he'll join her as soon as he takes Revenge, and is consumed himself.
    • It only comes up in passing but Lan's control of fire means he can also instantly extinguish it, letting him put out a campfire so completely that someone can put their hand down among the ashes and feel only faint warmth remaining.
  • Self-Immolation: After Kalira dies, Lan burns the land and everyone on it in great swathes and allows his fire to take him too.
  • Single-Target Sexuality: Before meeting his Companion Lan was interested in girls and sometimes fantasized about impressing them. Kalira seemed to have some interest in Companion stallions but thought that pregnancy, which is much harder for Companions than for horses, wasn't worth it. Once they meet and are Lifebonded they're interested only in each other. If they have a physical relationship it's never explored in the text beyond flirting (Kalira says the risk of pregnancy and pregnancy itself would be Worth It if Lan was the stallion, which he's very happy to hear), so for anyone else they're both effectively asexual, as Herald Pol has to explain to Elenor.
  • Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Using his power on people is just not good for Lan. Pol starts to notice towards the end and wonders if it's an encroaching madness, but after Lan's death Pol, like future Valdemarans, focuses instead on how the boy's meltdown ended the war in a day and saved a lot of Valdemarans who would have fought if it continued, and interprets it as something more like a deliberate Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Steven Ulysses Perhero: Lavan has appallingly strong fire powers.
  • Super-Power Meltdown: Lan's power is tied to negative emotions. Kalira acts as a limiter for him, modulating him and drawing him back from the brink, though by the end of the book he's gone beyond listening to her. When she's sniped, the brakes come off and only the sense of sudden dread Pol and other future-attuned Heralds have, which leads them to frantically calling a retreat, keeps the whole Valdemaran army from being incinerated with the Karsite one.
    The fire had a voice - it howled like millions of damned souls. It had a mind, and the mind was mad. From the ground to the mountaintop, there was nothing but flame. Fire churned and roiled, fire roared and shrieked, fire filled the sky. Vortices of flames twisted, hellish dancers with the grace of a streamer in the wind and the appetite of a demon. Those nearest the flames were suddenly sucked up by a wind or the firestorm itself inhaling, pulled off their feet, into the air, and then, screaming, into the maelstrom. It pulsed once, like a spasming heart, and enlarged again.
  • Think Happy Thoughts: Being on the border and calling on his Superpowered Evil Side in the war against Karse is not good for Lan's state of mind. Kalira's love for him manages to hold back the despair as she gives him a vision of the two of them at peace in the afterlife.
  • This Is Your Brain on Evil: The first time he really uses his power it feels amazing in the moment, but a cornered bully pleading for his life sickens Lan and gets him to try to stop. For the rest of the book, right up until Pol is attacked, Lan really doesn't want to use his power to kill again and Kalira is able to help, but that desire lurks inside him and he is, after all, forced to use it for Valdemar.
  • Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Lan's power was completely dormant until he started attending trade school. Faced with incessant bullying he started having intense headaches and odd fevers, which abated as he found ways to avoid the Sixth Formers and started to make friends with other loser kids who followed suit... meaning when he was found he was made into an example, not just beaten up but "sentenced" to eighty lashes. That's bad enough but Lan found his power awakening to be, itself, terrifying and deeply upsetting, especially since he had almost no control over it. Pol speculates that it could otherwise have surfaced more gently over several months and then been easier to manage.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Probably the biggest case of this in the series. In that short window between his Firestarting awakening and meeting his Companion, Lan is unable to regulate himself emotionally and painfully aware that something horrible is just on the verge of happening. Kalira after she Chooses him clamps down on it and allows him to think and act normally enough and even to use his power deliberately in an only slightly alarming way - he draws on fear and hatred every time, even while lighting hay bales - but once he's hurriedly shoved into Whites and sent to the front and has to start killing people, her control stops being enough.
    • Notably, Herald Griffon in Talia's day, another Firestarter with a considerably more modest degree of this power (he can choose one enemy at a time to burn at a range) is completely rational and stable on the battlefield in Arrow's Fall.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Kalira's death completes Lan's slippage. He'd been playing with the Karsite forces before, delighting in their terror and pain, but without her to love him and hold him back, he stops distinguishing friend from foe and just wants to burn the world and die in the process. Fortunately Pol and any other Heralds able to get hints from the future managed to call a retreat in time, or he would have annihilated the armies of both countries.

Herald Pol and Companion Satiran

  • A Day in the Limelight: Satiran gets no POV writing, but he might be the Companion whose inner life is the most explored. As Pol is older and they've been together for a long time, their relationship is more equal than most Herald-Companion pairs and Satiran's own hopes and fears are suggested more often than usual.
  • All for Nothing: Their and the army's long and grueling march to the pass Lan guards and their subsequent fight with the Karsites, the former of which left everyone like "walking corpses". Kalira dying leads to Lan forgetting all control of his power and burning the mountain and the entire pass - if they hadn't come in time to see that, they wouldn't have even taken casualties.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: Pol is said to be lazy, or rather, that he'd like to be lazy. In his middle age especially he's just not physically energetic and prefers to stay in and around Haven, training students and getting to be there for his daughter, and not riding circuit. He's also aware that if he has to fight he's not going to be great at it. Getting blinded, he and his wife reflect bitterly, does rather limit the danger he'll be subject to.
  • Deuteragonist: The parts of the book that are not from Lan's pov are from Pol's. At fifty, Pol has a more complete view of the situation and some different fears, and some authority over the teens in the cast.
  • Dream Weaver: Pol is able to speed through his understandable upset over being slashed across the eyes by inducing an off-page Vision Quest in which he rages and weeps and grapples with his feelings, overnight becoming calmer and better able to deal with the ongoing situation.
  • Feeling Their Age: Pol's just not as physically capable as he used to be and that is just one more thing to stress about as war with Karse looms.
  • Good Parents: Pol is Elenor's father, and Satiran is Kalira's. They worry about their children and both try to be supportive without being controlling. As a Herald, and as someone whose wife is a traveling Healer, Pol worries that their youngest daughter Elenor hasn't had enough personal attention from her parents.
  • Happily Married: To a Healer, Ilea, who's apart at the border for most of the book.
  • Jack of All Trades: Pol is notable for having a small measure of every known Gift, including the Mage-Gift. Because he's had no mage teacher, that last manifests for him as nothing more than an ability to perceive the energy put off by living things. His Gifts besides strong Mindspeech are too small to be useful very often, unlike Vanyel's winning the Superpower Lottery, but he's got enough to at least get started on teaching even the most unusual talents that show up in the Collegium. And doubtless being able to light kindling without flint and steel, and to communicate with animals he's touching and etc, can have their uses.
  • Mentor Occupational Hazard: There's a lot of hinting at his possible death through the book, from a child with prophetic powers seeing a vision of Pol in an apocalyptic firestorm to his own complaints of being too old to fight effectively, to having the standard Heraldic disregard for his own safety in the face of danger. Ultimately though he survives being knifed across the eyes, and being blinded means not being put in very dangerous positions afterwards.
  • Mundane Utility: A blinded Pol is still very useful to the war effort, as his and Satiran's Mind gifts allow him to contact other Heralds in the field and relay observations and orders instantaneously over a great distance, which is an invaluable service for the non-Chosen military officials.
  • No Sympathy: He's a father himself, but due to this being a setting that tends to hold that evil people don't have loved ones and are not loved themselves he has only contempt for the parents of a bully Lan killed during his Traumatic Superpower Awakening. He thinks it's in poor taste for the family to mourn a bad child.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted, and it might not even be a case of Reincarnation this time - there was a Mage Wars-era mercenary named 'Pol' who shows up in one of the anthologies.
  • Outliving One's Offspring: Satiran had an older child who died on the Karsite border before the start of the book. Kalira considers him overly protective of her as a result, but just like Pol he tries not to meddle too much. Satiran takes it very hard when Kalira dies and is just barely hauled away from the spreading fires by a heroic squire.
  • Parental Substitute: Pol acts as a surrogate father to some younger Heraldic Trainees, including a Waif Prophet who predicts Lavan's contribution to the war.
  • Seeing Through Another's Eyes: After he's injured Pol spends the last part of the story with his eyes bandaged. When another Herald connects to him they can lend him their eyes, as can Satiran. The Companion's eyesight is at least as sharp as a human's but with a wider field of view.
  • Temporary Blindness: Ilea in despair fears it will be permanent and can't repair the damage by herself. He gets by with the above trope and uses his Psychic Powers to help coordinate from the sidelines. The timeskip epilogue reveals that thanks to the end of the war freeing up battlefield Healers, Ilea was able to get several together. With their collected knowledge, experience, and power she was able to imperfectly restore Pol, even if his sight isn't as good as before he was attacked.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: Pol and Satiran poke at each other a lot. When a falling tree lands on Pol, Satiran loses a lot of weight from stress and then starts taunting him as soon as he's solidly on the path to recovery. As Herald and Companion though they do clearly care deeply about each other and get on well.

Tuck Chester and Companion Dacerie

  • Cannot Tell a Lie: To the point that it's described as "it was as if a permanent Truth Spell was working on him".
  • Extremely Short Timespan: He'd been a Herald-Trainee for longer than Lan's couple months but as the war ramps up Tuck studies furiously wanting to make Herald and go with him, and he does become a Herald rather faster than is usual in Talia's day.
  • Hidden Depths: While he's mostly quite prosaic, he loves history and on very little prompting can start talking about what it means to discard the past while reinventing yourself.
  • Massive Numbered Siblings: Has five sisters and four brothers
  • Real Men Wear Pink: He was taught how to sew by his grandmother, and as a consequence, one of his chore assignments in the Collegium is in the sewing and mending room. He greatly enjoys "being the only rooster in the henhouse".

Elenor

  • Hopeless Suitor: Carries a torch for Lan, but because he is Lifebonded to his Companion, nothing comes of it. Elenor has a hard time accepting that he won't ever return her feelings.
  • Loving a Shadow: Her parents know that what she, at fourteen, has for Lan is just teen infatuation, but a first love still feels real, and so is her heartbreak at being Just Friends. She's deep in mourning for about a month after he dies, and then finds herself feeling better.
  • Romantic Runner-Up: She would have been a good prospect if not for that lifebond - before being Chosen Lan was definitely into pretty girls, as the daughter to Lan's mentor Pol they're often in the same place, and Healer-Herald pairings can work well. But, she just doesn't have a chance.
  • There Are No Therapists: As a Mindhealer Elenor doesn't have any ability to heal external sickness or injury but is able to address mental hurts. She's able to help a Waif Prophet who has a terrible vision of things to come, but not Lan. Her parents speculate that she could potentially put a little healthy space between Lan and Kalira, but knows it would be a bad idea to tell Elenor as that would give her false hope.

Macy Chitward

  • Textile Work Is Feminine: Unlike Lan, and like their other siblings, Macy is perfectly happy in the family trade, which is textiles. She enjoys embroidery, knows how to spin, weave, and sew, and can do fancy braiding. She makes a bracelet for Lan out of Kalira's hair, and upon seeing it, other Trainees commission her to make bracelets for them out of their own Companions' hair.

Alternative Title(s): Brightly Burning

Top