Heralds Of Valdemar / Tropes P to Z

The Heralds of Valdemar series provides examples of:

The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy has its own page.

• HeraldsOfValdemar.Tropes A To E
• HeraldsOfValdemar.Tropes F To O

Examples starting with P

• Parental Abandonment: Pops up from time to time, though less often than one might think. The most notable case is probably Darian of the Owl trilogy, for whom this is a major trauma.
• Parental Incest: Many characters have this as part of their backstory.
  • The rapist stepfather that Talia deals with at the end of Arrow's Flight functions as a trial of her newfound maturity with respect to her Gift.
  • Among the many crimes of Mornelithe Falconsbane is using his daughter as a sex slave — indeed, manipulating her via magic into being a sex slave.
• Parental Neglect: This occurs in Herald Jakyr's backstory. (His parents were part of the Valdemaran version of the Quiverfull movement, and had so many children that they often forget their kid's names and apparently didn't even notice when Jakyr got Chosen and left the family inn.)
  • Zig-zagged in general: the first trilogy claims that between duty and the Companion bond Heralds are unable to love anyone beyond brotherly affection unless it's a lifebond, and a man who had a wife and children before he was Chosen stopped loving them altogether. Later books don't stick to this, but it would seem that Heralds don't necessarily make attentive parents. All the successful Herald parents we see are permanently assigned to the capital (Selenay/Daren, Talia/Dirk, Nikolaus) or spend lots of time there (Pol). Natoli in the Mage Storms series is the daughter of a Herald, but isn't one herself; given the speech she gives to her fellow Artificers, it's fairly clear that the lack of parental participation in her upbringing left her utterly certain she didn't want to follow his career choice.
  • in the later stage of the short stories about Herald Wil and Bard Lyla, the conflict between being a single father and Herald causes major issues for him, and is the focus of more than one story. He has to get creative in order to resolve said conflict.
• Parrot Pet Position: Used by some but not all Tayledras bondbirds. The determining factor appears to be the size of the bird; Darkwind often carries Vree this way, but Starblade doesn't even try carrying the much larger Hyllar on his shoulder (he can barely carry Hyllar on his arm).
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • In Oathbound, Tarma and Kethry arrange the rape of a bandit infiltrator by sending him back to his companions, stripped naked and magically disguised as a woman.
  • Kethry's master sorcery in Oathbreakers involves harnessing the combined anger of all of the Sunhawks over their captain's brutal murder. It is used in a way that barely straddles the line between good and evil; it's even stated that Kethry's greatest challenge is not to let the sheer power of all that rage overwhelm her, lest she fall to The Dark Side.
  • Talia's literal Mind Rape of a (physical) rapist also qualifies; it was an act of calculated rage on her part, but she felt absolutely no remorse afterward, comparing it to shooting bandits and noting that if the man ever truly repents, he'll be freed.
  • When Vanyel stood against Lord Nedran of Hardorn and his demon-summoning wizard, who had been sacrificing his own people for power, he released the demons upon Nedran. "Now I shall give you, Nedran, all the power that you seek."
• Person of Mass Destruction: Most Adept-class mages are this, but some get special mention. Among those with Psychic Powers rather than magic, Firestarters are similarly capable.
  • Vanyel Ashkevron gives his life in a Heroic Sacrifice that obliterates a powerful mage and the entire army he was leading into Valdemar. Even prior to this, he is viewed with fear among his own people as he is said to be able to level the city of Haven should he ever so choose.
  • Lavan Firestorm, a Firestarter, reduces an entire army (and himself) to ash and sterilizes the pass they came through in his own Heroic Sacrifice.
  • The grand prize goes to Great Mages Urtho and Ma'ar of prehistory, who between their own vast powers and their Magitek WMDs managed to completely change the face of most of the continent in a magical Cataclysm so powerful that it echoed through time to recur thousands of years later.
• Phrase Catcher:
  • Vanyel at the beginning of Magic's Promise, when everyone he meets tells him that he looks like hell. Justified in that he does.
  • Elspeth in Winds Of Fury gets, "We thought you were dead!" After a while her traveling companions are calling it "the standard greeting."
  • Kerowyn in By The Sword cannot go out in public without people singing the song "Kerowyn's Ride" at her.
• Place of Power: Nodes, the intersection of Ley Lines and the most powerful sources of magic in the world. Only Adept-class mages can safely handle them. The Tayledras take it even further, having been taught by their Goddess to build Heartstones, which augment and focus the power of nodes to accomplish tasks no other mage can hope to duplicate, and particularly to maintain spells even after the mage's death. Focusing the power in this way also allows less powerful Master-class mages to access it. They teach Vanyel how to do it, which leads to him building a Heartstone beneath Haven. It maintains several of his masterworks for hundreds of years after his death.
• Planning with Props: In Winds of Fate. It backfires rather badly, thanks to the characters' failure to clean up their props before their plan goes into action - the bad guy comes to see them, looks down at the map and the props, and susses them out.
• Playful Pursuit: In The Black Gryphon, we learn that gryphons engage in "courtship chases" when Skandranon and Zhaneel resolve their UST with one.
• Playing with Fire: Firestarters, one of the rarer Psychic Powers, have pyrokinetic abilities.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Dirk, Kris, and Talia's Love Triangle would have been a lot easier to resolve if they had just talked to each other about it. Unfortunately, Talia gets thrown headfirst into Haven politics, Kris goes on a spree of debauchery, and Dirk falls victim to Drowning My Sorrows and refuses to listen when they try to talk. The whole thing doesn't sort itself out until after Kris dies and Talia nearly dies.
  • The beginning of Vanyel and Stefen's relationship got delayed in big part because Medren had failed to ever tell Vanyel that he and Stefen shared the same sexual orientation, while Stefen knew it. And if not him, plenty of other people, including Stefen himself, could have told Vanyel before Medren had to resort to get Withen (yes, Vanyel's homophobic father from the two previous books) to pull There Is Only One Bed on them during their stay at Forst Reach.
• Portal Cut:
  • Skandranon narrowly escapes this fate while retreating from Ma'ar's tower through a human-sized Gate. As it is, the narrow passage takes off a few feathers. He later barely escapes being trapped forever in the Nether Planes when the Gate he uses to escape Urtho's tower collapses.
  • When Wild Magic transports Darian's parents to the far north, his father's foot is left behind.
• Power at a Price: All supernormal abilities have a cost, or to be more specific, the energy they use must be sourced.
  • Psychic Powers use the person's own energy. (This includes the main Heraldic Gifts, the Healing Gift, and the Bardic Gift). It is possible to link up with multiple people to share the load, and Heralds can draw power from their Companions. These are weaker than true magic but are subtler: harder to block, and harder to detect.
  • [White] Magic uses the Background Magic Field of Life Energy, with innate Power Levels as described below. These are more powerful but also more obvious to enemies, plus Magic Is a Monster Magnet. Characters who have magic and psychic powers can use magical energy to boost their mental abilities, effectively having the best of both worlds.
  • Blood Magic uses Life Energy released (or forcibly taken) by pain and death. Except in cases of voluntary sacrifice, only evil mages will use this, because power taken in this way is roughly equivalent to cannibalism: an act that stains the soul.
  • Earth Magic uses the energy in the land itself. The ultimate form is Earth-binding, which puts one person in an empathic link with the country they govern, so that they prosper when their land prospers and suffer when it suffers.
  • Divine Magic calls directly on the power of a god or goddess and is only accessible to persons in good standing with that deity. The deity may also set certain conditions on the use of that power.
  • Magical artifacts appear seldom, but they usually have their power through spells or rituals invoked in their making, and/or they are capable of making demands on their bearer (e.g. Need).
• Power Levels: Mages are rated by their maximum capacity for handling magical energy, which is apparently genetic and (mostly) unalterable. Journeymen can only use power from within themselves and ambient power from their immediate environment, Masters can tap Ley Lines, and Adepts can tap nodes. While they are in training, mages may be identified by ranks below their maximum potential (example: a "Journeyman" with "Adept potential").
  
  Of course, pure power isn't the only indicator of success; skill also counts. It's noted in many stories that a clever Journeyman, by avoiding direct confrontation, could stymie even an Adept. Many of the powerful spells that Adepts can pull off would not be possible, or would have terrible environmental side effects, if the mages didn't have teams of Journeymen and apprentices working to maintain the magical balance.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Eastern Empire's hat explaining how Grand Duke Tremane could come from them. (also contrasting every other antagonist in the series). To list:
  • The Empire allows free practice of any religion so long as you don't try to prevent the free practice of any other religion. It also fosters and encourages multiculturalism and actively exposes its citizens to other peoples. This is due to the Empire being so large and non-homogenous, it would be impossible to maintain if the Empire wasn't tolerant or pluralistic. Furthermore, being accepting of other cultures makes it easier for a country to accept being conquered.
  • The Empire treats women better than most countries - there are laws protecting them from rape and they are allowed to own property and have careers if not encouraged to in practice. This allows for easier subjugation of enemies - it's harder to rebel if 50% of the population finds it's lives improved by the Empire.
  • The Empire encourages fair treatment of its soldiers, not viewing them as expendable and always making sure they're paid properly and on time.
  • Blood magic is highly frowned upon in the upper echelons of the Empire though not outright banned. The corrupting effects of blood magic often overrides a mage's good sense which in the Decadent Court could mean the difference between life and death.
  • In general, the Emperor comes across as controlling and pragmatic but not wantonly cruel and cultivates a Machiavellian mindset.
• Prequel in the Lost Age:
  • The Last Herald-Mage trilogy, set in Vanyel's time before magic vanished from Valdemar.
  • The Mage Wars trilogy, set during the last days of the Mage Wars and the resulting fallout.
• Private Military Contractors: Various mercenary companies, such as the Sunhawks (Vows and Honor) and the Skybolts (By the Sword). Some are bonded and affiliated with a trade union (the Mercenaries Guild) which keeps order.
• Promotion, Not Punishment: Kerowyn in By the Sword has a long-term variant. When faced with an incompetent mercenary Captain who is planning a suicidal charge she breaks with her Contract – effectively exiling herself from her Company – and flees before her Captain has a change to retaliate. She clears it with the Guild and is excused, but is then only able to get a job as a tavern bouncer. Several weeks later she is jailed for attacking a drunken city guard in self-defense, but people speak up in her defense and she is released, although with no hope of continuing her job. When she comes out, she is faced with the remains of the Company who have finally caught up with her... only to be told that her leaving had prompted them to vote out their Captain and they want her as their replacement.
• Psychic Block Defense: All Gifted individuals and magic users learn to put up shields to protect their minds from offensive powers, and those shields stay up unless consciously lowered. In the case of a truly strong Gift, the shields do the double duty of keeping that Gift 'inside' and preventing unintentional use of the power.
• Psychic Powers: Mind-Magic or Heraldic "Gifts", which range from the relatively benign, like FarSight or ForeSight, to the potentially devastating, like Firestarting. Gifts often vary in strength, and many Heralds have more than one. Inside Valdemar, practically anyone demonstrating these Gifts seems to end up Chosen; outside, Gifts pop up randomly from time to time, but less commonly, and only one other nation is mentioned making use of them on Valdemar's level.
• Puberty Superpower: Heralds usually gain their Companions and their Gifts in their teens.
• Punctuation Shaker: Glottal-stop apostrophes in the Kaled'a'in languages (Kaled'a'in, Shin'a'in, and Tayledras).
• Put on a Bus: Bear and Lena disappear between the end of Bastion and the beginning of Closer To Home, with only a page to explain where they went.
  • Nyara and Need, despite their prominence in the Mage Winds books, are noted to be in the same palace complex as most of the cast of Storm Rising but simply do not appear beyond a fleeting mention, and then in the second book they and Skif are noted to have gone off to be envoys to the Kaled'a'in. Need comes Back for the Finale.

Tropes starting with R

• Racial Remnant: The Tedrel Mercenaries are the survivors of a lost nation. They became mercenaries and tried to get enough money to create a new homeland.
• Rage Against the Author: A non-canonical short story, "After Midnight", published in the DAW 30th Anniversary anthology, has a number of Mercedes Lackey's lead characters confront her. A few are from her other works but most are Valdemarans, out not for blood but to vent their frustration with their creator, and to snipe at each other. Vanyel complains about being trapped haunting a forest and suffering forest ills for centuries and also doesn't appreciate being written as whiny. Lavan complains about dying young and a virgin, and about Lackey bragging about getting readers to like a character before dropping a mountain on them. Talia's more temperate but wants it registered that crushing her feet was uncalled for. Kerowyn wants it known that getting torn away from her hard-earned mercenary captain position to become a Herald at her age is absurd. Finally Myste defends the author and gets the others to leave and says it's a good thing none of them realize she's an Author Avatar, then negotiates a favorable role and romance with Alberich in the then-upcoming Exile duology.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Elspeth is really not happy at being yanked around by the gods and flatly rejects their Omniscient Morality License. It takes until the Mage Storms trilogy for the gods' avatars to finally level with everyone, because otherwise Elspeth is likely to slip her leash again and put the whole plan in jeopardy.
• Rage Against the Mentor: Ancar, to Hulda, once it becomes apparent that she will not teach him any magic beyond Master level. Mornelithe Falconsbane capitalizes on this to foster rebellion in the young King. Of course, what she doesn't tell him (and Falconsbane has no intention of revealing, for the same reason of stringing him along) is that his Gift just isn't strong enough to go beyond Master.
• Rage Breaking Point: In a form of Teach Him Anger, Karal has to bring An’desha past this point to prove to him that he can release his emotions without losing control of his powers.
• Rape as Backstory: Pretty often. See particularly Tarma, Kethry, and Nyara.
• Rape as Drama: Talia, Vanyel.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Someone who rapes others is shorthand for 'irredeemably evil bastard' in this 'verse. Over time, the series introduces dark mages who not only force sex on others but make it part of magical rituals that brainwash the victim or draw magical power from their suffering.
• Rare Money: In Oathbreakers, the Hawkspiece is a coin worth little, and rarely seen out of the town of Hawksnest. Handy when you need an identification token hundreds of miles away.
• Really Gets Around: Some Heralds and even Heraldic trainees. (It's explicit that they're not expected to be chaste while off-duty.) Bard Stefen (before meeting Vanyel). And of course the Tayledras, whose Shin'a'in cousins describe them as having the randy habits of kestrels - Elspeth, quite used to what Heralds get up to, is shocked by their lack of inhibition.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Bazie's gang of thieves don't see sewing and laundry as women's work. Since a large part of their business involves stealing textiles, mending and cleaning them allows them to get higher prices and disguise hot goods.
• Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Some books unfortunately tend towards this, with feminine women who don't have some masculine interests and skills dismissed as stupid and shallow by male characters and Action Girls. Maybe the lowest example is in the Tarma and Kethry story "A Tale of Heroes", in which the pair take pity on a servant girl raped by a "hero" and then ostracized for not pleasing him. They take Fallan with them as they leave town only to have her inexperience with rough living Played for Laughs; she is only good at cooking and cleaning, so they take her to a man who Kethry rejected as a suitor because he wanted to rule her and not be a friend and partner. They tell him she's a "pet" to take in, not very bright but a hard worker, and leave satisfied; she seems happy, but they never asked her what she wants.
  • Additionally the "hero" was in for the Standard Hero Reward, about to marry a woman who Tarma and Kethry see in passing, elaborately garbed, looking petulant and enjoying attention. Tarma says she doesn't know if she should feel sorrier for her or the "hero" and Kethry says they deserve each other. As if vanity and being a rapist are equivalent.
• Rearing Horse: With wings! The official crest of Valdemar.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: In Silver Gryphon, after the crash, Tad and Silverblade are forced to put their survival training to use, supplementing the field rations of dried meat and hard biscuits with things like rodents, snakes, and insects.
  • During one of the Tarma and Kethry stories the pair and their wolflike kyree companion Warrl traipse across peaceful agricultural territory. So peaceful, these mercenaries have no chance of making money to buy food. Warrl happily takes advantage of the bounty of mice and rats and advises his companions do the same. Tarma is so hungry and repulsed that she becomes willing to enter the Pelagirs to look for food there instead.
• Refuge in Audacity: Invoked by Falconsbane in Winds of Fury when he says he took down Valdemar's anti-magic field for Ancar, noting that one of his early teachers had taught him that if you tell a big enough lie everyone will believe it simply becaue it's too audacious not to be the truth.
• 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. Stefen aside, reincarnated characters virtually always have very similar names to those of their past incarnations.
• Reincarnated as a Non-Humanoid: Companions are reincarnated former Heralds, in particular Kerowyn's Companion Sayvil appears to be the reincarnation of Vanyel's aunt Savil Ashkevron. (Word of God confirms this.) The Firecats of Karse are reincarnated ancient Sons of the Suns.
• Renowned Selective Mentor: Darian certainly has this reaction when he finds out Firesong k'Treva has moved to k'Valdemar Vale specifically to train him.
• Retcon:
  • A minor one; the magic system utilized by Kethry in Vows and Honor undergoes a major and mostly unremarked upon revision in later works. A somewhat bare justification given in-story is that some mage schools apparently don't know about Ley Lines and therefore don't teach their students about them. Another justification is that Kethry was dumbing down her explanation for her audience, as she didn't have time to hold an entire Magical Theory 101 session.
  • Another minor one is concerning the death of Selenay's first husband and father-in-law. The first time (by order of publication) it's mentioned, it's implied that they happened at about the same time. In By The Sword, it's stated that learning about Thanel's treachery and death caused his father to die of shock. In Exile's Valor, the death of Thanel's father takes place nearly a year before Thanel's death.
  • Yet another minor one, this one regarding Talamir's Companion. The Arrows Trilogy has an off-hand remark from the third-person omniscient narrative about Rolan being able to offer considerable expertise to Talia due to having been linked to Talamir since he was a student at the Collegium, but in Exile's Honor, Talamir had a different Companion, Taver, until the Tedrel Wars, well after he completed his schooling at the Collegium.
  • In By the Sword, Kerowyn says that the Mercenaries' Guild has placed several representatives in Iftel over the years, but none stuck because there was no call for their services and they found living there too boring. In the Mage Storms trilogy, Iftel is revealed to be populated by Kaled'a'in and a good many nonhumans such as gryphons and who play frequent and bloody war games, something that one would think at least one of those Guild reps might have found interesting enough to give them a reason to stick around. A justification for this one might be inferred from the fact that Iftel was not merely unsociable, but an outright Hidden Elf Village on a national scale. The really hardcore deity-level magic preserving it that way quite possibly gave them Fake Memories to discourage them and others from investigating why they'd been physically kept out.
    • In Magic's Promise, Vanyel mentions that Queen Elspeth the Peacemaker strategically married a noble from Iftel to buy peace with that country. But when Kerowyn tries to discuss Iftel with the Valdemarans she finds that they can barely think about the country or say its name; something, presumably its god, turns their minds from it. Talia can only say that they've never had trouble with it in all their history. Maybe things were different seven hundred years ago, and that same magic keeps them from recalling the kind of difficulty that led to the Queen of Valdemar herself having to take an Iftel noble as a husband to keep the peace.
  • In the Mage Winds trilogy, Skif tells another character that his mother had taught him how to pick pockets until she got killed by a rival thief. In Take a Thief, which centers on him, we find out that his mother had died of illness and he was left to the care of her brother, who used Skif as unpaid labor in his inn. He runs away and joins a group of boys learning the 'trade' of theft from a nice guy named Bazie, who lost his legs in the Tedrel Wars.
  • Dirk's Age. Elsewhere on this page, he's stated to be in his mid-thirties when Talia's late teens/very early twenties. However: in Arrows of the Queen, Talia has just turned thirteen, and Kris is stated to have 'just earned his Whites' (usually five years after being Chosen) when Talia hears the chicken story when she's shown around the Collegium just after she arrives. Kris mentions to Talia in Arrow's Flight that he and Dirk went on internship together with the same mentor - Dirk is also younger than Kris, as he was Chosen at twelve, 'probably because he was a lot more mature at twelve than I was at thirteen'. During Talia's first year at the Collegium, the mess with Dirk and Lady Naril occurs; Jadus explains to Talia that Dirk is a young Herald, just off internship (usually eighteen months), serving his first circuit assigned to the Court, implying that he himself is nineteen or twenty at the same time Talia is thirteen.
  • In general Mercedes Lackey is just very prone to making Series Continuity Errors which are larger the longer it's been since something was revisited but will even show up between one book in a trilogy and the next. For example, in the first Mage Winds book, Need speculates about why she was 'asleep' for so long to Elspeth. In the second book, Elspeth complains that Need refused to tell her what put her to sleep.
    • Speaking of Need, in the years between the Mage Storms books, ending in 1996, and her reappearance in a short story in 2019, Lackey apparently forgot her personality and powerset. Need in Woman's Need Calls Me is happy to let her long term bearer depend on her to scout and keep watch in non-extreme circumstances, doesn't Heal said bearer, is compelled even when awake to rescue women instead of it being a choice, instead of protecting fighters from magic works magic at their command, can't work magic at all when carried by a mage, and doesn't even flash her inscription when a bearer draws her for the first time. There's also the fact that in the Storms books Need says she survived the Cataclysm in a shielded vault in a shielded temple and even then emerged drained to the dregs, but in this short story has weathered it in the hands of a minor mage with no apparent difficulties.
• Retired Badass: Tarma in By the Sword (not that the plot lets her be idle).
• The Rich Have White Stuff: This is one of the many reasons the Heralds' Highly Conspicuous Uniforms are pure white. Besides matching their Companions and standing out in a crowd, the uniforms are hard to counterfeit, because only the Crown can afford to keep that many white outfits laundered and in good repair.
• Riddle for the Ages: At the end of Arrow's Fall, Talia presents Dirk with a harp that is the twin to her own My Lady — same creator, same wood, same age. How or where she got it, she won't say.
• Rightful King Returns: The final section of Oathbreakers involves working to put prince-in-exile Stefansen on the throne of Rethwellan.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • Tarma goes on one of these when bandits slaughter her Clan.
  • Tylendel does it after his twin brother is assassinated, leading to his repudiation, and Vanyel has a brief but thorough one in Magic's Price.
  • Lavan Firestorm performs an almost-literal version against a Karsite invasion in Brightly Burning — sadly, it is because his Companion had died and he is Taking You with Me.
• Royal Brat: Selenay and Karethanelan's daughter Princess Elspeth has a rocky childhood for a while, since her resemblance to her late, treasonous father caused Selenay to mostly leave her upbringing in the hands of Hulda, who deliberately isolated and groomed her to be a royal terror. Her actual nickname is "the Brat" until Talia manages to counsel and civilize her, and her poor reputation continues to hang over her into adulthood.
• Royally Screwed Up: Almost completely averted in Valdemar thanks to the requirement that the Monarch must be a Herald. In full force, however, in Hardorn, and occasionally in Rethwellan.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: The Monarch must be a Herald. Heralds are all Special-Forces-qualified. However, the Heir is noted as the only Herald under orders to stay away from any danger they can reasonably avoid; when faced with a conflict between this injunction and her duty as a Herald-Mage to take the lead against the forces of evil, Elspeth is only able to resolve the conflict by abdicating her spot in the royal line of succession. (She is only able to do this because there are other heirs available)
• Ruling Couple: Selenay and Daren of Valdemar. In fact, any Valdemaran royal spouse will become a co-consort provided that they are also chosen as a Herald. There are several examples of this in the back story. Daren, however, takes the title of Prince-Consort rather than King, which as a Herald he would be entitled to. One of the short stories justifies this as his not wanting the job, and also wanting to set himself apart from Selenay's regicidally ambitious previous husband (aka Daren's un-lamented late elder brother).
• Runaway Fiancé: Talia, initially.

Tropes starting with S

• Sacred Flames: A sacred fire is lit on the altars of Vkandis (supposedly by the god himself, but corrupt priests use a fire-starting spell instead) as part of the winter solstice ceremony.
• Safety in Indifference: At the start of Magic's Pawn Vanyel finally decides to cut himself off from all emotion as a way of dealing with his emotionally abusive father exiling him to a strange city. This is reflected by his ice dream, and eventually leads to him opening up to Tylendel.
• Samaritan Syndrome: This is part of the Heralds' job description, but none feel it more keenly than Vanyel, who can't ignore even non-Valdemarans in peril. Need tries to pull her bearers into this when she's asleep, calling them to the sides of any women in danger, but is more choosy about it when awake.
• Sapient Steed: The Companions and some of the intelligent ridable creatures like dyheli.
• Screw Destiny:
  • Elspeth, to the point where she gets Very Annoyed when people start mentioning Destinies. Need, naturally, approves—while Gwena finds it irritating to the extreme. But then, Gwena was the one trying to shanghai her into a Glorious Destiny, wherein Elspeth would be the first of the Herald-Mages to return to Valdemar after the last one died, several centuries ago. Interestingly, she does return to Valdemar as a Herald-Mage, albeit by a completely different path then the Companions had intended.
  • The trope is subverted in a number of ways: strong-willed characters like Elspeth, Vanyel, and Kerowyn swear up and down that they are going to fight the winds of fate, but they all end up more or less where they're supposed to be anyway.
• Secret Compartment:
  • At one point in The Founding of Valdemar, 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.
• Secret Legacy: The ruling line of Valdemar is directly descended from Vanyel, the last Herald-Mage, by way of the King's mistress at the time. This was done very intentionally and then covered up just as deliberately, as: (a) the King had a disease preventing him from siring children, (b) Vanyel was widely known to be gay, and (c) Valdemar was in significant political turmoil and needed to maintain the continuity of the Royal bloodline — and keep an alliance-marriage a viable option. This turns out to be an in-story Chekhov's Gun as, six hundred years later, Princess Elspeth inherits Vanyel's mage gifts and becomes the first new Herald-Mage since his death. Herald Kris was a descendant of the same line.
  • This comes to the fore in Spy, Spy Again; by the end of the book, Prince Kyril cannot ever return to Valdemar, because his Adept-Class Mage Gift has woken. The legacy continues to be a secret because he has fallen in Love at First Sight with Sleepgiver Princess Siratai. As Kree's the third son and fourth child - and not Chosen - he probably would have become an ambassador to another country anyway. His never returning to Valdemar is justified by an alliance marriage to a country very far away; only the Royal Family and the family of Monarch's Own Amily/Heraldic Spymaster Mags knows it's because of the Mage Gift as well. In point of fact, not even they know where the mage gift is handed down from, since Herald-Mages were in the Royal family before Leareth's war of attrition.
• Secret Relationship: Vanyel and Tylendel in Magic's Pawn, due to the fact that Vanyel's father finding out about them would be bad news for them. They go up to pretending to hate each other in public, which causes a lot of grief during and after the events that lead to Tylendel's death.
• Self-Insert: In story, no less; the first time we meet Talia, she's daydreaming about having been a Herald accompanying Vanyel at his last stand. On a meta-level, Herald-Chronicler Myste is the author's avatar.
• Series Continuity Error: See "Retcon". The longer it's been since Mercedes Lackey visited a character or topic the less she remembers about them, but there are often discrepancies from one book in a trilogy to the next, or from one short story in an anthology to the next. Lampshaded as early as the Tarma and Kethry short stories, where she attributes a difference in her Filk Song about one of the pair's adventures and the story she wrote about it later to an in-universe musician who keeps getting things wrong.
  • In Winds of Fate, Need explains to Elspeth that she doesn't know why she was "asleep" for so long but speculates about it to her. The next book, Winds of Change, has Elspeth complaining that Need "refused" to tell her why she'd been asleep for so long.
  • Out of the Deep is set hundreds of years before the reign of Queen Selenay. A King with a non-Chosen consort not named Selenay rules, and the story stars a Herald with a female Companion, though he's separated from her by the action pretty early on. By the end of the story he's thinking about "Queen Selenay's Guard" and his Companion is being referred to as his "brother" and spoken of with masculine pronouns.
  • Several of the novels have a timeline at the beginning, that states Valdemar was founded 1000 years after the Mage Wars, making the era that Arrows and so on are set in take place two thousand years after the Cataclysm. Into The West makes a big deal out of Kordas and his people arriving at the site of the future capital of Valdemar 500 years after the Mage Wars. (Specifically, 500 years after the Tayledras take their oath to cleanse the land, but since that took place shortly after the Cataclysm it's basically the same.)
  • Vanyel is adamant in Magic's Promise that Companions don't Choose murderers. One of his friends was an apprentice-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 recruiting sympathetic murderers. As for the records, Myste is an Author Avatar, so perhaps she misses things too.
  • Herald-Mage Savil's Companion, Kellan, is a mare in the Last Herald-Mage books but a stallion in "The Sword of Ice."
• Servant Race: Hertasi were uplifted from clever, solitary animals by a mage who instilled in them a sense of gratitude to their creator. Urtho worked on this project after the initial mage's death, not bothering to change that gratitude. In The Black Gryphon hertasi servants are already present at all levels of his army camp. Hertasi feel a strong urge to be useful and most live with or near Kaled'a'in or Tayledras, doing their gruntwork. Most are either shy or Servile Snarkers. Some hertasi communities are relatively independent, but they're drawn to powerful white-haired mages - perhaps reminded on a racial level of Urtho - and Darkwind, watching them flock to Firesong, muses that even the independent ones would drop everything to see to him. Firesong drops a single cryptic hint that their drive to serve is the expression of some past species-wide trauma but he doesn't elaborate on this.
• Sex by Proxy: Blessed with Suck, Talia experiences this with Companion Rolan and nearby Herald-Trainees. She chooses a tower room as her Heraldic residence to ensure her own privacy.
• Sex Magic: Falconsbane uses a mix of sex magic, nonconsensual BDSM, and Mind Rape to brainwash Starblade. Undoing the damage requires a female Healer with Intimate Healing. Darkwind also muses about teaching Elspeth consensual sex magic, but what this entails goes unsaid.
• Sexual Karma: Lackey's writing features a lot of rapist villains, incestous villains, and villains who like both, and this is in full display in Velgarth from Thalhkarsh to Falconsbane. Conversely her heroes almost always have very good sex and if one partner is more experienced they are very attentive. A standout is Darkwind and Elspeth in Winds of Change, where Darkwind shelves his own desires to consider her inexperience and uncertainty of what he wanted from her and proceeds so gently, careful to avoid any unfamiliar 'techniques', that her fear evaporates and she's eager to learn.
• Shaped Like Itself: Early in The Black Gryphon, the narration describes the way Amberdrake feels after healing Skandranon: "In short, as if he had served his full roster of clients, then Healed a gravely injured gryphon."
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: The god Vkandis decides to show his displeasure with his priesthood by (among other things) incinerating the high priest with a Bolt of Divine Retribution; a witness says that nothing was left but the man's smoking vestments and boots.
• She Is the King:
  • Solaris is High Priest, not Priestess, of Karse. Her title is "Son of the Sun." In Exile's Honor, set a generation earlier, the little boy (Vkandis in disguise) mentions to Herald Alberich his daughter who will be his Son.
  • In the second part of By the Sword, some ten-plus years prior to Solaris, Kerowyn notes that the High Priest leading Karse in its war against Rethwellan is purportedly a woman pretending to be a man, complete with faux mustache, styling herself "the true-born Son of the Sun."
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: 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 magically turning herself into a bear. Transformation is dangerous in Velgarth because 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.
• Shout-Out:
  • Bard Aiken is this to Clay Aiken.
  • In Mage Storms, there's one line where an unnamed character uses a Catchphrase from Ninja High School: "The world can be saved by steam!"
  • One country, never visited, but shown on the maps and mentioned now and again, is named Seejay (alternately spelled Ceejay). Also, there's the Terilee river, named for one of the administrators at Firebird Arts & Music, which carries a lot of stuff related to Valdemar.
  • The name "Orser", used twice (for a human non-Herald and a Companion) in the Last Herald-Mage trilogy, may be a reference to the great Canadian figure skater Brian Orser. (Figure skating...figures in a couple of scenes in other novels.)
  • At one point Karal inverts a classic line from Blake's 7:
  I am expendable. I am stupid. Here I go.
  • In the Collegium Chronicles, the Weaponmaster is a man named Marion.
  • The short story Moving Targets is pretty much a Fusion Fic with Scooby-Doo, complete with the sentence "I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you meddling Heralds!"
• Shown Their Work: Mercedes Lackey is an expert equestrian and falconer. Anything she writes about these subjects is as accurate as it gets, minus the magical trappings. Companions are people and bondbirds are large, social, and intelligent, but some of the care needed for the real animals creeps in, and she generally puts a disclaimer at the end about how horses are incredibly expensive and birds of prey will at best tolerate their handlers.
• Shrinking Violet: Talia at first, due to crippling shyness and fear of men in particular. As she becomes a full Herald, she grows out of it.
• Shrouded in Myth: Vanyel, to later generations of Valdemarans. Of course, he was indeed every bit as powerful a mage as the legends tell, if not more.
  • Several of the songs associated with the Herald-Mage trilogy are about adventures of Vanyel's that are unmentioned or only briefly alluded to in the books; the degree of bardic exaggeration involved is left to the reader to decide.
• Signature Instrument: The primary comfort of disabled Herald Jadus is his harp, which he calls "My Lady". Talia first meets Jadus because she hears the music coming from his room, and the harp lessons he gives her teach her as much about his personality as the instrument. After Jadus dies, he wills "My Lady" to Talia, who eventually overcomes her grief enough that she can use it again. Her wedding gift to Dirk is a harp almost completely identical to "My Lady", which symbolizes that he's her perfect soulmate. Since so many characters in Arrows play harps, it could be considered the Signature Instrument of the trilogy itself.
• Significant Name Overlap: Two characters in different historical periods with similar names often indicates that they are the same person reincarnated, e.g. Herald-Mage Savil and Companion Sayvil.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Talia. The queen's Herald/personal advisor, she is patient, kind, and can fight with both a knife and a bow. Her style of close-range fighting is inspired by Skif's life on the street, and is implied to be entirely sneaky and dirty.
• Simple, yet Opulent: If a heroic character has money, they generally display it like this. Special note goes to Solaris, who has plain furnishings made with exotic wood and fabric.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Characters who are Lifebonded lose all interest in anyone else. Normally this is not a problem, but it comes up particularly with King Randale (who may have to take a wife who isn't his Lifebonded due to Altar Diplomacy) and Herald Lavan, whose need for stability is so great he becomes Lifebonded to his own Companion.
• Skeleton Government: In Closer to Home, the King and the Prince have to spend a lot of time and effort personally babysitting a couple of very minor noble houses involved in gang brawls. [{Justified}} in that the heads of both houses are so stubborn and arrogant about the damn feud, the King and the Prince are the only ones with the authourity to quash them - Lord Raeylen and Chendlar would simply ignore everyone else.
• Sketchy Successor:
  • Averted in Valdemar, where one must be Chosen as a Herald, with all the Incorruptible Pure Pureness that implies, in order to be eligible for the throne. It is in fact key to the origin of the Heraldic Circle: King Valdemar, concerned that one of his descendents would eventually fall into this trope, prayed to every God he could think of for a way to ensure that his successors would always be worthy people, and was answered by the appearance of three Companions who promptly Chose him, his son, and his herald.
  • Rethwellen had the Sword That Sings, a magical blade that glowed and sang in the presence of the best monarch, Said monarch was then bound to the land. The sword went missing for several decades - one of the short stories has it magically compelling a minor noble to steal it and take it into the mountains - and was found by Tarma and Kethry. In the meantime, at least one middling bad ruler took the throne and was succeeded by a much worse one before Tarma and Kethry got his sword-approved brother to replace him.
  • Played straight, meanwhile, with the King of Hardorn, who was a pretty good king and ally of Valdemar until his son Ancar killed him and took over, enslaving his people and starting wars with Valdemar and Karse.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: While investigating multiple cases of people, including children, being abducted off the streets of Haven and sold, Alberich gravely tells Skif that this is worse than being murdered, and Skif wholeheartedly agrees.
• Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter: Inverted. The priests of Karse spent several centuries drifting away from the true tenets of their god Vkandis, falling further and further into vile corruption and demon-summoning, while still invoking Vkandis' name to cement their theocratic rule. One fine midwinter's day, during the annual high holy ceremonies of their religion, Vkandis chose to actually answer an invocation.
• Snake Talk: Most of the Gryphons. But not in any evil or sinister sense; it's due to their vocal anatomy.
• Sorceror King:
  • The backstory of the books, explored in the Mage Wars trilogy, features the conflict between reluctant leader Urtho, the Mage of Silence, and would-be world conqueror Ma'ar—along with its world-shattering aftermath.
  • King Valdemar himself was also a mage, and the prayer to all the gods that led to the creation of the Heralds was in part a very powerful spell.
• Spare to the Throne: The implications of noble families having lots of extra sons with nothing to do are explored in Closer to Home. Male spares are given far more leeway in that matters of drinking, carousing, and whoring than firstborn sons, since the best they can typically hope for is to marry into a family with only daughters and become heir of someone else's estate, and there aren't many noble families without male heirs of their own. They also have to compete with older nobles looking for young wives to produce their own heirs, and wealthy merchants looking to marry up, so many young spares don't put much effort into the game.
• Spirit Advisor:
  • The Shin'a'in "Swordsworn"—including Tarma—become these after death, and help to train and advise living Swordsworn. The ghosts of Vanyel, Stefen, and Yfandes also act as Spirit Advisors briefly in The Mage Winds and The Mage Storms before finally moving on to "Bermuda".
  • Technically, the Companions themselves count, although they are embodied rather than incorporeal. So do the Firecats. And Need when she's awake.
• Squishy Wizard: Most mages, including Kethry except that Need makes up the difference in her case. It's mentioned that the reason for the squishiness of wizards is the time investment needed: "Fighter, mage, social life: pick two". Herald-Mages attain Magic Knight status instead by sacrificing the third one, and by getting the best and fastest possible training in both disciplines.
• Stock Medieval Meal:
  • Tarma and Kethry eat a lot of roast rabbit, "stew", and bread and cheese with wine.
  • Higher-class inns have more variety, but the "menu" at poorer inns/taverns like the Hollybush from Take A Thief is stew made from better inns' scraps, coarse bread, and stale beer.
  • The Collegium Chronicles novels have a lot of "traveler's pies", at one inn visited in Bastion different versions of these pies are the only things on the menu.
• Story-Breaker Power: Foresight is this (as telling the future would reduce a lot of tension) which is why it's the only one that's consistently nerfed. Most Foreseers have weak powers that only see ahead a few minutes, show multiple possibilities or give brief flashes. The ones that do have more powerful gifts tend to be unable to control them (like Alberich). Furthermore, it's implied that mages could block the Sight.
  • Humans who can read minds adhere to Mind over Manners and try not to listen in at all. Companions listen freely but rarely put their hooves in and try to set misunderstandings and general error right without being asked. Need also listens to thoughts, but has much less compunction about ironing things out when they get in the way - her interference would have simplified much of the Storms trilogy, which is probably why she only appears at the very end.
  • 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 only thing that helps to preserve narrative tension is that Need is specifically bonded to Kethry and it's usually more useful for Kethry to have access to Need's fighting prowess and handle countering hostile magic than it would be to give Tarma the benefit of magical immunity at the cost of leaving Kethry a Squishy Wizard with no close combat ability.
• Starcrossed Lovers: Sunsinger and Shadowdancer, in the backstory.
• Stay in the Kitchen: The followers and Priests of Sethor have this mindset, believing that women should only exist for sex, keeping house, and child-rearing. They highly disapprove of any woman working outside the home, especially in jobs they as more suitable for males, unless it's for the benefit of their men and with their permission. Their attempts to impose their views on others through violence gets the order outlawed in Valdemar. The Holderkin also have a similar mindset, but unlike the Sethorites, keep their views to themselves, and do not use their religion to justify violating civil law. Even there, Selenay does have to send teachers to ensure that girls who are willing to be cast out of their families know their legal rights.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: Herald Alberich speaks Valdemaran with Karsite word order. He was born and raised in Karse and only ended up in Valdemar after being kidnapped/rescued by a Companion, who eventually psychically fed Valdemaran vocabulary into his head... and only vocabulary.
• Strangled by the Red String: Justified and used In-Universe with lifebonds. People most certainly do fall in love Because Destiny Says So, either because one or both individuals involved need someone to cling to to keep from going insane (the most common motivation) or because it's necessary to the gods' plans that the individuals involved marry. The Arrows trilogy claims lifebonds are the only way that a Herald can fall in love and they won't marry without one. Other books often ignore this.
• Straw Misogynist: The entire priesthood of Sethor could qualify as this.
• Street Urchin: Skif, Stefen, and a number of other characters.
• Strong Family Resemblance: The Ashkevron family.
• Sudden Principled Stand: Kerowyn has one in the second act of By the Sword, after she realizes not only just how far the Skybolts have fallen but that their employers are planning on getting them massacred rather than have to pay them. Standing up in front of the entire company, she bluntly calls their employers out for their plans and their Captain out for her terrible leadership, rips off her Skybolt badge, and quits the company with the declaration that she doesn't see anyone present she'd be willing to call a Skybolt.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Valdemaran mages and mind-mages tend to this, especially when a bunch of artificers get into the act in Mage Storms.
  • The mages of the Eastern Empire are also noted to take a scientific, logical approach to their magic.
  • The worldbuilding supplementals written by Larry Dixon trend this way. In one he states that the Tayledras, with their focus on magic-as-a-byproduct-of-life, are aware of what bacteria are.
• Suit Up of Destiny: Graduation from a Herald-Trainee to a full Herald is marked by a simple wardrobe change from the grey Trainee uniform to Heraldic Whites.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Both mage powers and mind magic are inherited and inheritable, generally, although they can also hang around latent or spontaneously arise.
• Superpower Lottery: An incident involving the creation of a Gate left Vanyel Ashkevron with not only Adept-level mage ability but just about all Psychic Powers the Heralds knew of to one degree or another. Of course the same incident led directly to his lover's suicide so...
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Jisette Jelnack's fate in Brightly Burning after trying to have Lan assassinated to avenge her son. On top of trying to murder a Heraldic Trainee (and his Companion), she violated the terms of the judicial order Pol issued earlier in the novel (as a Senior Herald and with the King's authority and blessing) to drop the matter. It's thus no surprise that King Theran throws the book at her during her trial and sentencing.
  • Her husband's fate too. While he's not formally charged alongside her (though Pol doesn't believe for an instant he didn't know about the plot), his reputation is irreparably tainted by her actions and his utter failure to enforce that judicial order. It's also strongly implied the Silver Guild will be forcing to step down as Master Silversmith immediately).
• Suspicious Spending: In one of the short stories, Tarma figures out who The Mole is by realizing that one of the guards is wearing jewelry and riding a horse that he shouldn't be able to afford (though this is only considered to be grounds for suspicion, not proof in and of itself).
• Swap Teleportation: The massive waves of magical force that make up the Mage Storms have two centers, so the waves interact as they move. At certain times and places (there's a pattern but it's never made entirely clear) these intersecting waves of force swap spherical areas - a sphere at one intersection for a sphere at another. It appears that the stronger the waves are, the larger the swapped spheres are, and the farther they travel. In at least one case, the swapped spheres were eight or ten feet across and traveled at least a thousand miles.
• Sword and Sorcerer: Tarma and Kethry are this precisely, although it's played with a bit in that Need, their geased sword, makes Kethry a master fighter and Tarma immune to magic, depending on who's holding it at the time.
• Symbol Motif Clothing: The Tayledras will often have a motif repeated in their clothing, usually something to do with birds or feathers. Given their relationship with birds of prey, this is entirely fitting.
• Sympathetic Magic:
  • 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 Wild Magic transported them away in a Swap Teleportation. Left behind was his father's foot, sheared off by a Portal Cut, and he uses the bones to determine that his father is alive and get a general direction to start looking in.
  • Used for a bit of spycraft in Beyond. Duke Kordas Valdemar knows one of his lords is spying on him for the Emperor, and has tricked the lord into purchasing a fine desk which is bespelled to copy anything written on it into a drawer in Kordas's own desk, letting Kordas monitor the spy's dispatches. Kordas notes that carving his drawer and the spy's desk out of the same tree made the spellwork much easier.

Tropes starting with T

• Tagalong Chronicler: Tarma and Kethry have a bard called Leslac following them around, who keeps, ahem, "embellishing" the details of their adventures, much to their irritation.
• Take Me Instead: Standard Heraldic MO. Any Herald would die for the Monarch, for another Herald, or for Duty.
• Taking You with Me: The purpose of a mage's Final Strike. Used on a massive scale at the end of the Mage Wars, when Urtho unleashed the Cataclysm to prevent Ma'ar's imminent victory.
• Talking Animal: The lizard Gervaise from "Lizard Dreams," a talking lizard from the Pelagirs who wants to be a wizard.
• Talking in Your Dreams: Kero and Eldan in By The Sword. For ten years. It's not clear whether Eldan is doing it intentionally or if it's the result of their unconscious minds reaching out to one another telepathically while they're asleep, but by the time they meet again in person he's at least figured out what's going on. Kero, on the other hand, assumes they're just dreams, and she's rather annoyed when she finds out otherwise.
  • In Spy, spy again, Kree and Siratai do this for some time before they meet and fall in Love at First Sight (it's foreshadowed as a lifebond, but turns out not to be), although neither can remember the details of their conversations. It helps that they're both mages, and that Kree is using his mage gift to boost his Heterosexual Life-Partner's FarSight to search for her, while they're on an active mission to find and free Siratai from the Karsites.
• Talking Weapon: Need, after she regains full awareness in Winds of Fate.
• Teleportation: "Gates", spells that allow people to travel long distance instantly, are the primary form. The "Fetching" mind-magic gift is a much shorter-ranged and smaller-payload version.
• Teleportation Sickness: Heralds, Companions, and others with a strong 'Fetching' gift can move living things and even themselves. It apparently feels jolting, like a sudden strong leap, and is somewhat unpleasant for the target.
• Teleporter's Visualization Clause: This is one of the rules of the Gates, magical portals wizards can use to teleport vast distances. The wizard casting the spell must be intimately familiar with the destination he's going to. This fact is what helped Urtho's forces disrupt Maar's supply lines as they retreated during the Mage Wars, and in fact is a distinct advantage to any defending or retreating army.
  • During the Arrows books it's established that strong Fetching-Gifted Heralds like Dirk can only teleport distant objects if either they've seen and can clearly visualize the place and location of the item, have a clairvoyant Gift, or if they're partnering with someone who does and feeds them information.
• That Man Is Dead: Tayledras use-names reflect the owner. They're given childhood names that they usually shed in adolesence or by young adulthood for new ones that reflect their personality or achievements somehow. When something significant enough happens to a Tayledras they may change their use-name, indicating that they see themselves as a new/different person. This is how Songwind became Darkwind. Adept Moonwing also became Silence - also becoming a hermit and communicating only telepathically - after surviving the same traumatic incident, and after healing on a long offscreen journey she became Snowfire.
  • Another significant example is the story about Tallo. After accidentally killing his lover, Tallo is rescued by Savil and taken to a Tayledras clan. To assuage his guilt, Tallo 'dies' and is adopted by the Tayledras as Moondance.
• The Talk: In Bastion, Herald Jakyr asks Mags about his relationship with Amily, intending to give him some form of The Talk. When Mags explains that he knows the basics, but has no idea about how to make it pleasurable for Amily, Jakyr instead proceeds to tell him how to do exactly that.
• The Women Are Safe with Us: The Eastern Empire has very strict laws about rape that gets imposed whenever they conquer a new land. Basically, any woman that gets raped is granted the status of a divorced spouse, which means that half the perpetrator's possessions and wages go to victim, five years if there is no child and sixteen if there is one. If the child is a daughter, the guy has to provide a dowry, and if it's a son, he has to pay for the outfitting when the son is conscripted into the military. If the perpetrator doesn't have means to pay, then he gets sent to a government labor camp with his wages paying for it. If a guy is stupid enough to rape again, then he undergoes physical and magical punishment that leave him outwardly intact but unable to repeat the act.
• There Are No Therapists: Should be averted by the MindHealers, who are portrayed as the competent type of The Shrink with psychic powers backing them up. In practice, the Collegium rather consistently fails to provide adequate therapy for young Heralds. Many new-Chosen are teenagers with Dark And Troubled Pasts, complete with lingering mental trauma, who are now expected to deal with an accelerated educational curriculum and their emergent Psychic Powers as well as the usual turmoil of adolescence; while MindHealers are notably rare, there doesn't seem to be any other policies in place at the Collegium or within the Heraldic Circle to make sure that trainees receive counseling to help them through such a volatile stage of their lives. This has led to several spectacular meltdowns on the part of Heralds, most notably Tylendel, Lavan Firestorm, Talia, and Mags^note at least one Amazon review of Intrigues puts a trigger warning on the book. Lifebonds sort out most of the really bad cases, but when they fail (or aren't suited for the problem at hand), the results can lead to tragedy - also, obviously, it's much harder on someone to expect them to be a stable point for someone all their life than to be a therapist.
  • Averted by the the Monarch's Own Herald, who is a state mandated aversion to this, as a personal confidant/therapist/trusted advisor to the Monarch. It is stated in the Arrow's trilogy that powerful Monarch's Own Heralds end up ministering to the entire Circle as well as the Monarch. Queen's Own Talia is seen doing this several times in the Arrows and later trilogies.
  • This might, in fact, be a literal version of the trope. It's stated that MindHealers, as opposed to just Healers are very, very, rare. In the early part of Arrows Fall Talia is helping a fellow Herald with the trauma of her intern dying (the same incident that's triggering Dirk's Drowning My Sorrows) and she's talking to Healer Rene, who's also a MindHealer. They're explicitly stated to be the only two currently active. Apparently, the field of psychiatry hasn't been invented yet.
  • 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 Big Bad Lord Orthallen who had been manipulating the Heraldic circle and Royal family for generations, and been so good at it that it took some unprecedented Moment of Awesome actions 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.
  • Averted elsewhere in the setting. The Kaled'a'in and several other Mage Wars-era cultures had the profession of the kestra'chern, who have many and varied methods to help clients feel happier and more at ease, from massage therapy to beauty treatments to talk therapy to sex. Their descendants the Tayledras and the Shin'a'in have some grasp of those same concepts without it being as formalized. k'Sheyna Vale really could have used some therapists after the incident with the Heartstone, but as Starblade under Falconsbane's control drove away everyone who wanted to help, they limped on poorly without them.
• Thinking Up Portals: Gate magic. How well it is understood varies between groups of mages. Most believe that they have to be created within some kind of frame (like a doorway) and can only be powered by the creator's own personal energies. But the Eastern Empire mages have much more advanced knowledge and create freestanding Gates, as well as draw upon the power of groups of mages to power them. In ancient time permanent Gates existed.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Karal is a 'Channel' — a type of mage who can safely transmit huge amounts of magical energy. His talent is absolutely critical at the climax of each book in the Mage Storms trilogy but otherwise he's the equivalent of a non-mage who can maybe light a candle.
• Together in Death: Vanyel and Stefen/Tylendel.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Tarma and Kethry. Subverted a bit, because tomboy Tarma is the one who most adores babies and children.
• Top Wife: Among the Holderkin, men take several wives, but the first one rules over the other wives. Talia, the protagonist of the first trilogy, is a Holderkin girl whose mother is dead. Right before she get Chosen, her father's other wives are shown telling her she'll need to get married soon and to choose if she'd rather be a first wife or a secondary wife, listing the pros and cons of each option.
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: In The White Gryphon.
• Tragedy: Brightly Burning is the tale of Lavan Firestorm's destruction by his uncontrolled anger and madness.
• Training the Gift of Magic: This is how special abilities work in this world, barring creatures who are inherently magical — in order to be truly effective with magic or psychic powers, you have to be born with the potential to use them and you must be trained in how to control them. Blood Magic can circumvent some of the restrictions, which makes it attrative to villains, and they usually don't mind taking it directly from the unwilling.
• Transplanted Character Fic: One of the miniseries in the anthologies is about several young Heralds going on their internship together, riding in a brightly-painted wagon and accompanied by a kyree who has learned to speak out laboriously out loud. They're all expies for Scooby-Doo characters, and they do get referenced in the main series.
• Trauma Conga Line: The price Vanyel apparently pays for his earthshattering powers is to be hated by his family, targeted by every enemy of Valdemar, and lose nearly everyone he cares about. Subtly justified with the revelation in Magic's Price that there really is someone who has it in for him and has been deliberately trying to destroy him.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Zigzagged. Gifts in this setting typically manifest at puberty, which is treated as the 'natural' course of events. But Gifts awakened earlier or later than that (usually through a traumatic event) cause all sorts of problems.
  • Talia in Arrows of the Queen develops a minor degree of her Empathy normally but it's not fully awakened until she's dropped into a freezing river in an assassination attempt and has to call Rolan for help. Later in the novel, the death of a Herald's lifebonded partner unlocks her other partner's latent Mindspeech.
  • Vanyel in The Last Herald-Mage has his gifts triggered when his lover/soulmate commits suicide and he takes the full backlash from the closing of the Gate that his latent power helped open. Tylendel, said soulmate, had his Gifts come on too early and lived in misery for years until his Companion finally arrived.
  • In Brightly Burning, Lavan's Firestarting Gift was starting to come through as a normal Puberty Superpower, but being tortured by the older students snapped it on full-power.
• Trilogy Creep: The Collegium Chronicles trilogy was expanded to four books... and then five. And now there's a sequel series with the same characters, making Mags the headliner of more books than anyone else in the series.
• Troubled Toybreaker: In Arrows of the Queen, six-year-old Princess Elspeth is prone to wrecking her nursery during her periodic temper tantrums. At first it looks like there's no deep reason for it - she's just a spoiled brat who gets away with it because her mother the Queen is too busy (and young and inexperienced as a mother) to take care of her properly, and no one else dares to discipline the Queen's daughter. Well, no one dares until Talia, the new Queen's Own Herald, gets involved. It isn't until later that Talia (and the reader) discovers that Elspeth was being carefully manipulated into becoming a brat by her nursemaid, a woman in the pay of a traitorous noble who wanted to make sure Elspeth could never inherit the throne.
• Trrrilling Rrrs: Gryphons tend to speak this way, although some, like Skandranon, can manage perfect diction. They also have a touch of Snake Talk.
• True Love Is a Kink: Heralds in the Arrows books are said to be unable to fall or be in love with anyone unless they have a lifebond; if they don't experience Love at First Sight with someone they won't love them at all only experience Friends with Benefits. Lifebonded lovers are basically Insatiable Newlyweds whenever they're not too tired or otherwise busy. Later books generally disregard the limitation and allow non-lifebonded love, but this trope remains. Kero and Eldan are an example, with Kero having to hide her Mind gifts until meeting him and finding that he brings his gift to the table.
• Tsundere: Elspeth.
• Tyke Bomb: Ancar of Hardorn is one of the single most successful examples (at least until Rage Against the Mentor started kicking in after several years on the throne). The irony is that he was Hulda's second choice — Elspeth would have become this had Talia not interfered, and a much more powerful one to boot due to being a potential Adept.

Tropes starting with U

• Uncoffee: Chava, or sometimes bitteralm, appears to be this verse's coffee equivalent (though most people just stick to strong tea, and in some books chava more resembles hot chocolate).
• The Un-Favourite:
  • Queen Selenay's relationship with her eldest daughter was complicated well into the latter's adulthood by the former's fear that she subconsciously regarded her as this. The fact that Elspeth looked a fair bit like her father did not help.
  • Vanyel Ashkevron's early life is a perfect example. His father instructs his armsmaster to beat Vanyel so badly that he breaks his arm, rather than accept that his son is not going to live up to his standards of "manliness".
  • Talia was The Unfavorite of her father and his several wives, to point that she gets disowned after running away and is Chosen to be a Herald.
• Un-person: A dire sentence passed by the Eastern Empire onto individuals who have really angered the Emperor. This removes all references to the person from official records, and in the Empire is tantamount to eliminating his or her afterlife.
  • The Holders and the northern Karsites have a "Shunning" which is more of the I Have No Son! variety.
• Unproblematic Prostitution: In Closer to Home, the brothel that Mags directs his friends to is a clear example of this, where young men pay classy women for fine wine, intelligent conversation and sexual skill, with the full approval of their fathers (as Mags says, "a man likes to know his son's a man"). In fact, going to Flora's is part of what establishes Brand's reputation as a gentleman, as he pays well and doesn't cause trouble.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Inverted. With a few exceptions, every time characters make or consider a plan that the viewers are privy to, it goes off totally smoothly with only the slightest hitches, though sometimes things change and make their plans go even more smoothly. Quite often a character will think something along the lines of, "If someone suspects me, I'll just say X and appear innocent and they'll let me go" only for exactly that to happen within a page. Tragedy can still strike if there isn't a whole plan, though.
• Unreliable Narrator: In the song The Leslac Version, a minstrel trying to sing one of Leslac's hagiographic songs about Tarma and Kethry keeps getting interrupted by Tarma herself, who insists on explaining how it really happened. Her version is a lot less heroic and a lot more amusing. In fact, Word of God is that Leslac's entire reason for existing is to be an unreliable narrator - she wrote some of the Tarma and Kethry songs before she wrote the stories behind them, so she created Leslac to justify any inaccuracies: Either he failed to do the research when composing the song or he deliberately rewrote the tale to be more dramatic (Which is what happened in The Leslac Version, which he personally witnessed).
• Unsuspectingly Soused: Elspeth, Firesong, and their team try to invoke this trope during Winds of Fury, when they discover a town their carnival is visiting has a full garrison of Ancar's elite guards. They encourage the guards to drink as much of Firesong's "Magic Cure-All" (brandy with some herbs added) as possible, in the hopes that none of them are used to anything with that high an alcohol content. It works ... unfortunately, the guards turn out to be mean drunks.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Shaych", short for "shay'a'chern", a Tayledras word meaning "homosexual", which has become a loanword in Valdemaran from the time of Vanyel (introduced by Vanyel, in reference to himself, in fact). In the area of Rethwellan and the other kingdoms to the south of Valdemar, the Shin'a'in word "she'chorne" is used. "Fey" is also used pretty generally, presumably because of its rhyming similarity to "gay" and implication of otherness.
• Unwanted Assistance: Tarma's attitude toward the bard who follows her around. Not that he does much assisting, anyway.
• Uplifted Animal: There was a trend thousands of years ago for powerful mages working in teams to modify animals, some of which survive as sentient peoples in the "modern day". Kyree, ratha, and dyheli are not physically very different from their cheetah-wolf, big cat, and antelope forebears but are intelligent and communicate with Telepathy. Hertasi are more extensively modifed, ending up as bipedal lizardfolk with clever hands. Tervardi apparently started out as large songbirds and were made far more humanoid, though not as human physiologically as they appeared. While all of the above are commonly attributed to Urtho, between Mage Wars books and Word of God it's evident that he only helped complete the hertasi uplift started by another mage and was part of the tervardi project, as well as creating the gryphons out of whole cloth.
  • The Shin'a'in battlesteeds and the Tayledras bondbirds are partially uplifted. Battlesteeds have very different behavior compared to normal horses and even compared to the Shin'a'in's other mounts, thinking and acting more like very intelligent and trainable dogs. The intelligence of bondbirds varies depending on the breed but some speak in full sentences and are capable of understanding fairly complicated subjects.

Tropes starting with V-Y

• Vengeance Feels Empty: At the end of Take A Thief, the person responsible for Bazie's (Skif's thief-mentor) death is killed by Skif. When Alberich asks, Skif says he's not happy, because "there weren't no justice" — the man got a quick death, and can't be hauled into court to answer for everything else he was behind.
• The 'Verse: The name of the planet on which the series takes place is Velgarth, but this is never mentioned other than in the introduction of the first trilogy written. Even the largest maps don't even show the entire continent.
• Villain Decay: Justified and actually invoked in-universe in the form of Ma'ar, as his method for cheating death down the centuries gradually damages his psyche more and more, until the heroes are finally able to bring him down in Winds of Fury. Mind you, even in his emotionally-crippled, erratic, semi-functional latest incarnation, he's still terrifyingly competent and thorough, and it's revealed later that the gods have been very carefully planning this—allowing him to reincarnate time and time again—until he can be killed in just such a way as to preserve the knowledge he carried over from the Mage Wars.
• Vomiting Cop: Chapter 9 of Changes turns into an episode of CSI: Haven when four enemy spies are found dead. Two summertime days of decomposition make several hardened Guardsmen "violently ill," but the Special Squad of CSIs are unfazed.
• Weapon Wields You: Need's ability to turn a physically unskilled bearer into a master swordfighter is mostly a case of Instant Expert. In the hands of someone untrained in either magic or combat, however, the sword can and will hijack its bearer's body completely, as Kerowyn discovers in the early chapters of By the Sword. In later books, when Need is "awake," she can still do this, though she usually either asks permission first or stops when her bearer resists.
• We Can Rule Together: A truly astonishing number of villains try this ploy on Vanyel. It never works, but it doesn't stop them from trying. To be fair, he'd be a great guy to have on your side rather than fighting you.
• We Have Reserves: Accurately sums up the attitude of both Ancar and Falconsbane towards military tactics (Though Falconsbane is willing to acknowledge that when you don't have reserves, you need to take care of the troops available to you). Also nearly wipes out the Skybolts.
  • Deconstructed with Hardorn—it's suggested that, if Ancar hadn't been killed when he was, he'd have wiped out his own people.
• Weird Weather: The Mage Storm Trilogy documents the after effects of the Cataclysm. The most noticeable one is two magical storms wreaking havoc on the country side. Where they interact people spot circles of destruction, magical corruption that warps and changes people and animals, and other strange magical phenomena.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Vanyel is troubled by this for a significant portion of his life... not so much to get his father to approve of his accomplishments as to approve of him.
  • Subverted in Winds of Fate with Darkwind and his father. In his youth, Darkwind was close to his parents. But when the Heartstone was sabotaged, and Darkwind's mother died, his father turned against him. It turns out that Darkwind's father is Mind Controlled by the Big Bad and is deliberately trying to drive his son away to protect him, in the only way he can. When the spell is broken, Darkwind is amazed at the change in his personality and wonders how he could have failed to notice.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The second book in the Last Herald Mage trilogy features a Tayledras Heartstone in (what was then) a small nation on Valdemar's frontier, which is holding together a fault line. Fast forward several centuries to the Mage Storms trilogy, and all the mages are scrambling to make sure nothing goes wrong with the Heartstone in Haven due to the storms, but the other one is never addressed; it could conceivably have mended the fault line and gone inactive by then, but it's never mentioned one way or the other.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Played every which way but straight. Most characters with minimal or very specialized talents soon find ways to demonstrate that Heart Is an Awesome Power. In Out of the Deep Alain has a two-page turnaround where he bemoans the uselessness of Animal Mindspeech only for his Companion to tell him he's being ridiculous and he loves being able to understand animals, and he admits she's right.
• What's Up, King Dude?: Valdemar's monarchs tend toward an open door policy. The Palace grounds are open to the public, and Mags (at that point, just a regular Herald) is allowed to barge into the middle of an emergency royal council and bluntly tell the King to settle down.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Firesong gets lambasted in the Mage Storms trilogy for his fits of jealous rage over An'desha's friendship with Karal. It turns out he was being driven crazy by the storms themselves, so all ends up forgiven.
• When She Smiles: Talia is often regarded this way, since she's serious so much of the time. During her wedding preparations, Jeri laments, "Two hours I spend on her, and in the blink of an eye he makes everything I've done look insignificant!"
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Vanyel gets a lot of this from his family.
• Wife Husbandry: Reversed; Hulda raised Ancar to be a tyrant king, and being his lover was merely a part of that. Also subverted in that Hulda regards him as merely a tool and is more than willing to cast him aside once he outlives his usefulness.
• Wise Beyond Their Years:
  • Talia is precocious enough as a thirteen year old girl to have an insightful conversation with Queen Selenay before even knowing who she is. This as much as her empathy makes her ideally suited to be the Queen's Own.
  • In Exile's Valor, Alberich speculates that the Herald's training is a rushed maturation process. By the time most Heralds are graduated at 18 years, they are as mature as people in their 30s.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
  • The traumatic awakening of Lavan Firestorm's powers leaves him mentally fragile and only his bond with his Companion keeps him sane and his power in check. When she dies, all bets are off.
  • This almost certainly would have happened to Vanyel, were it not for his mentor's relationship with the Tayledras.
  • Talia has an early bout with this, due to her abilities as The Empath and the fact that the Collegium critically failed when training her, leaving her completely unable to control her gift. Kris, under circumstances that amount to direct divine intervention, manages to get her Gift trained before she loses it completely, but nearly gets killed while doing so.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: One of the driving tenets behind nearly every Herald's character. Herald-Mage Vanyel and Queen's Own Herald Talia have this to a particularly high degree.
• Wizarding School: 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.
• Wizards Live Longer: And don't age as quickly either, though heavy magic use bleaches hair white.
• Wizards' War: The Mage Wars ended with the Great Mages Urtho and Ma'ar causing the Cataclysm, an event that shook the world so hard that it left two giant craters in the landscape over a hundred miles wide, and strange magic mutations even farther out. It was so great in fact that, three thousand years later, the event rebounds like a rubber band, causing the whole mess to happen again in reverse.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In-Universe. Vanyel discovers to his dismay, near the beginning of Magic's Promise, that people fear the possible consequences that may result from the combination of his extraordinary degree of power and the equally extraordinary amount of stress he is almost perpetually under. A Herald himself goes to serve Vanyel rather than sending a page and risking a Freak Out that blows up the Palace (or even the entire city of Haven).

• World-Wrecking Wave: The Cataclysm, which takes the form of waves of magical energy emanating from the twin foci of Ma'ar and Urtho's citadels. Where the interaction of the waves produces a "crest", massive destruction is wrought even by comparison with the original purely physical blast. In Mage Storms, the Valdemaran artificers plan much of the Allies' defense against the storms on the basis of a geometric analysis of the wave patterns.
• Wretched Hive: The seedier areas of even Haven, the capital of Valdemar itself, can get like this. Alberich notes that if noble-minded Selenay knew what happened in the slums of her own capital every day she would send her Guards and Heralds to scour them and execute scores of people - which would make her hated by her own citizens, and this would just displace most of the scum. It's not as bad as some examples, though; as Take A Thief outlines, even in the slums bucket brigades form to fight fires; the free breakfasts provided with the mandatory lessons in reading, writing, and math give even Street Urchins a meal a day; and while adults can proposition even rather young children in taverns and feel safe in doing so, most people quite dislike when those adults insist or when brothels publically offer children. The most hardened, seediest Heralds also roam the slums at times disguised as everyday folk, trying to investigate and stop the worst of offences.
• You Didn't Ask: Elspeth is infuriated when she finds out that her Companion, Gwena, never bothered to tell her that Gwena is also a mage. Or Grove-born. This despite the fact that she did ask if Gwena was a mage and was told no.
• "You!" Exclamation: Mags receives one from the mad foreign assassin at the end of Foundation. His search to discover why the unknown assassin recognises him links in to discovering the identity of his parents, with both questions at least partially answered in the fourth book and completely resolved in the fifth.
• You Shall Not Pass!:
  • Vanyel pulls a great big one at the end of Magic's Price.
    • He pulls a smaller one at Stony Tor in the song Demonsbane.
  • Darian's master pulls one at the start of OwlFlight, leaving Darian with massive unresolved guilt over his dislike and contempt for the old man who died a hero.
  • Lavan tried one at the end of Brightly Burning, but it ended up as a Taking You with Me instead.

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