There are some factions being underrepresented here so I wanted to present a case for one of them, Codex Alera. I'll start by copy/pasting their broad forces here and attempt to spell them out in more detail.
Codex Alera
Codex Alera at Alera Imperia - Led by Gaius Sextus, Tavi, and the defective Vord Queen
300k Alerans
200k Canim
100k Marat
500k Vord
Alerans
First, the Alerans and looking at some numbers to scale them from. After several major battles and many deaths, there are some 200,000 Alerans present at the muster for the last battles with the Lion's shard of their strength.
After all, even driven to her knees, Alera was still a force to be reckoned with. The greatest gathering of Legions in a thousand years had congregated on the open plain around the city of Riva—the vast majority of them made up of veterans from the continually warring cities of Antillus and Phrygia. Oh, true, some of the troops were militia—but the militia of the sister cities of the north were quite literally as formidable as any of the active Legions of the south, and smithies were turning out weapons and armor for the Legions more rapidly than at any time in Aleran history. In fact, if they could have produced even more equipment, the Realm had volunteers enough for a dozen more Legions to add to the thirty already encamped.
Ehren shook his head. Thirty Legions. Just over two hundred thousand steel-clad legionares, each one part of a Legion, a living, breathing engine of war. The lower ranks of the Citizenry had been distributed among the Legions, so many that every Legion there had a double-sized cohort of Knights ready to do battle. And, beyond that, a full bloody Legion Aeris, its ranks consisting solely of those with the skills of Knights Aeris, led by the upper ranks of the Citizenry, had been harassing the foe for months.
And standing by beyond even that force was the First Lord and the High Lords of the Realm, each a furycrafter of almost unbelievable power. There was strength enough in that camp to rip the earth to its very bones, to set the sky on fire, to draw down the hungry sea from the north, to raise the winds to a killing scythe that would destroy any caught before it, all protected by a seething sea of steel and discipline.
- First Lord's Fury
30 remaining Legions of 200,000 soldiers, with a dozen more able bodies needing equipment, equipment they can make enough of for 4 Legions in 3-4 weeks.
"How much time might this give us?"
"Assuming my calculations are correct and that the rate of progress is slowed to a comparable degree, four to five weeks."
"Giving us time enough to equip at least four more Legions, and a high probability of forcing the vord Queen to appear to lead the horde over the open ground." Aquitaine nodded, his expression pleased. "Excellent."
- First Lord's Fury
Legions are composed of 14-20 Cohorts generally (but usually called 6,000 men strong), a Cohort is made of four Centuries of 80 soldiers divided into 10 Spears. The Legionare is a soldier equipped like a fantasy Roman, they will have swords, shields, spears, the works, but unlike Romans they all one and all have magic abilities I'll touch on later. Regular Legionares might have only minor talents with magic, but very often the weapons, armor and equipment of the soldiers is "furycrafted" which is to say they are enhanced by magic in either their construction or actively enhanced with magic in the field, so that metals are more durable, their weapons can cut through things no real sword could, etc, so while they have literally Roman armor, it is going to have better than Roman performance. Each regular Legion also has 240 cavalry, so with 30 Legions that is 7,200 cavalry.
Where every Legionare has access to various magics and might only be minor talents, there are also a large number of Knights and Citizens turned Knights, people who are much more proficient with at least one type of furycrafting and can manifest a Fury. Furies are elemental creatures bonded and controlled by a person and might be anything from birds made of air to enormous bears made of granite, and are the source of the magic in the setting. As noted in the above quote, each Legion of this time has a double strength Cohort (640 people) worth of Knights attached to it. 30 Legions times 640 Knights is 19,200 Knights. There are six different types of Knight in Alera, so 3,200 of each. They are also backed up by a full Legion of Knight Aeris, so another 5-6,000 of them bringing the total to 24,200-25,200 Knights. In the first book a Legion of Knights Aeris is 5,000 strong, but this is not the same formation as shows up in the last book so it could be either.
This isn't truly the whole picture, as it is stated they are actually low on Knights Aeris, and that Earthcrafting (of which those skilled become Knights Terra) is by far the most common Furycrafting in Alera. And that once they gather the strength of the Citizens (which are all powerful Furycrafters akin to Knights in strength and everyone is mandated a tour in the Legions) the Knights are outnumbered by an order of magnitude.
Amara looked up and down the lines, counting heavy weaponry. She was shocked at how many Knights Terra she could see, waiting in supporting positions in the third or fourth rank of each Legion, ready to step forward and steady any weak points in the shield line. Standard tactical doctrine insisted that the power represented by Knights Terra should be concentrated in one place, hammered into a deadly spearpoint that could thrust through any foe.
Then she realized—in the current situation, standard tactical doctrine had been superseded by the desperation of the Realm's defenders. Standard doctrine was based upon the assumption that the furycrafting talent of a Knight would be in short supply, for the excellent reason that they nearly always were. But here, now, the Citizens standing to battle outnumbered the Legions' Knights by an order of magnitude. They could afford to place the normally rare assets into supporting positions in the line. There would be plenty of furypower left over.
- First Lord's Fury
Now, if we multiply the number of Knights by ten (not counting the Legion of Aeris) there would be some 192,000 Citizens, though not as well equipped as the Legions and many would be working in a support role alongside less capable Furycrafters to produce supplies, weapons, grow crops and heal the wounded. I actually think taking this literally is too high since supposedly all the Citizens in Alera would fit in a room that fits 200,000 people, but it can be considered a high-end estimate. Additionally, each Legion comes with 4,000-5,000 support personnel, the cooks, wives, the people who do the laundry, all of that but I'm not counting them towards the military number, but they would be part of the force if we are fleshing it out fully.
There are also at least several hundred, potentially several thousand (we see them in other locations and cities later) stone gargoyles of various sorts. Each is an animated stone beast described as being able to take out a century of the Legions. Here is hundreds of them in one secure location.
Every few paces were heavy statues of bleak stone on either side of the walkway. They were of odd, part-human creatures that the oldest writings had called a "sphinx," though nothing like it had ever been seen in Alera, and historians considered them an extinct species if not an outright hoax. But each statue posed a very real danger to enemies of the Realm, as a few of a legion of earth furies bound into stone statues all over the Citadel and under the direct command of the First Lord himself. A single gargoyle, it was said, could destroy a century of Aleran infantry before it was brought down—and the Citadel had hundreds of them.
- Academ's Fury
So let's just call it a thousand, equivalent to 80,000 Legionares (roughly). Lastly are the mules, literally Roman Onagers but with an absurd magical payload I'll touch on in a bit. There are at a minimum one hundred of them, which is what I will assume is present here. But they can manufacture more easily.
When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls.
- First Lord's Fury
200,000 Legionares, 7,200 Cavalry, 25,200 Knights (3,200 of each but 9,200 Knights Aeris) and because I only said 300,000 Alerans and not specifically Legionares to round it out is 67,600 Citizens (13,520 of each Furycrafting discpline as I am dividing them as everything but Knights Aeris because they have the Legion above Citizens joined and replenished), give and take for the number of Lords, Counts and High Lords and Ladies (there are something close to 20 High Lords and Ladies alive at this point). A thousand gargoyles and a hundred mules. Each Citizen and Knight has at least one Fury bound to them as well, whereas the nobility might have many. The First Lord can control many, many of them.
Canim
Next are the Canim. They are much simpler because their formations are not nearly as fleshed out. I am going to assume they have a broadly similar number of their equivalents to the Alerans here with some rounding and changes.
180,000 Warrior Caste Canim (also known as Canes, their smallest are 7 feet tall and their largest are 10 feet tall, they weigh several hundred pounds, can run as fast as or slightly slower than a horse and are many times stronger than a normal human). 5,000 Cavalry (they don't ride horses, they ride Taurg, giant bull-like creatures that outspeed horses, mass ¾ of a ton). While using Knight numbers would have them have a large number of Ritualists, it doesn't feel exactly right with how rare they seem to be, so I will just list them as being 10,000 strong. Lastly there are 5,000 Hunters, which are the stealthy Canes used for assassination.
Marat
The Marat are relatively easy because their numbers match what they are given in the final battles. 100,000 Marat (superhuman warriors that bond with creatures of a given world) show up with more than a thousand gargants in the first wave (absurdly strong giant badger related creatures) and many thousands of horses. I will say 2,000 gargants and 10,000 horses. Earlier in the series two other tribes, Herdbane and Wolf show up in very large numbers (many thousands easily visible in a battle where ~50,000 Marat of those tribes show up) and do show up at the end so I will assume 10,000 Wolves and 10,000 Herdbane (both of which they have armored for battle as of this late time in the series, Herdbane are 8 foot tall raptor-like birds that can tear a man to shreds).
Vord
Last are the Vord which are complicated because their force composition is generally changed for the specific battle in question. I'll just use a few numbers given for a few different armies for a best guess, but also hearing in mind they can't reproduce. The ground forces tend to outnumber the air forces so I will assume a starting point of 300,000 land-based Vord and 200,000 flyers.
There are a great deal of Vord forms, inspired by the Zerg as they are, and they are adapting to their enemies when they reproduce which is not an option here, so we will just use some of the standard forms we see of them across the series, from the standard Vord Warrior, to the Vord Mantis (adapted to take out shield walls) and their ilk, as well as their numerous flying forms usually called Vordknights in the fashion of Knights Aeris.
It almost looked human.
It had two arms, two legs, a head, with a face that was human in shape—but eerily featureless except for its segmented eyes. Dragonfly wings buzzed behind its shoulders, and its arms terminated not in hands, but in a single, gleaming, scythe-shaped talon a little less than two feet long—almost precisely the same length, Ehren realized, as a legionare's gladius. Its armor, too, resembled a legionare's lorica, though it melded seamlessly with its skin, all of it made from the same gleaming, dark chitin.
It looked, in fact, a great deal like a Knight Aeris.
- Princeps' Fury
And they are capable of operating with heinous damage (including losing a head for a time), are lighter and stronger than a man, and of course can fly. Here is one fighting highly skilled fighters with metalcrafting, it doesn't do very well but it is dangerous to them.
A vordknight landed on the deck not six feet from Marcus, and sent a lightning flash of terrified energy through his body.
The enemy was a few inches shorter than he, and roughly man-shaped. Its body was covered in chitinous armor, layered in bands that almost seemed to resemble a legionare's lorica. Its head was roughly the shape of a helmeted Aleran's though there was no opening where the mouth should have been—only smooth skin. Its eyes were multifaceted and greenly reflective, like a dragonfly's, an impression echoed by the four broad, translucent wings upon its back, now slowing from the blurring shape they had been in flight and folding in upon the vordknight's back.
Those alien eyes turned to Marcus, and the vord rushed him. Both of its arms ended in scything blades rather than hands, and its weapon-limbs were upraised and ready to strike.
Marcus sidestepped the first double blow of the deadly appendages, drawing his blade as he did. His first stroke clove into the chitin on the vord's shoulder, and was nearly trapped there as the vord's momentum carried him past. Marcus managed to jerk the weapon clear in time, leaving an ugly wound hacked into the vord's flesh. The weapon came away stained with green-brown blood.The vord spun to return to the attack—but there was a flash of steel and angry scarlet sparks, and the vordknight's head jumped up off its shoulders as if propelled by the blood that jetted up in a fountain behind it.
The headless vordknight turned in place as if the blow had done nothing to inconvenience it, blades slashing. Captain Demos, long blade in hand, was forced to leap back from the foe, though his sword spat angry scarlet sparks again as it met one of the enemy scythes, and cut it cleanly from the vord's body. Demos regained his balance, hacked the vord's other scythe away with casual efficiency, then stepped forward and drove his heel into the thrashing creature's belly. The kick sent it tumbling over the side of the ship.
...
He was heavier than the vord by a very great deal. It weighed no more than a large sack of meal, and as his armored body slammed the vordknight to the deck, it crunched audibly.
He heard Demos's light steps as the ship's captain went past him, and sparks flared several more times somewhere at the edge of his vision. Marcus concentrated on the vord beneath him—the creature was tremendously powerful, easily more than a match for his own physical strength, and Marcus could not enhance it with furycraft this far from the earth beneath the ship, even if it hadn't additionally been coated in six inches of ice.
- First Lord's Fury
The standard Vord Warrior is more than a match for a single Legionare, and often needs to be ganged up on to be taken out in an open fight.
Amara held up her hands to the level of her eyes, palms facing each other, and willed Cirrus into the air before her face, concentrating the winds to bend light and draw her vision to within several yards of the stone barn.
The legionare's sword slashed through a shining, black, hard-looking limb like nothing that Amara had ever seen, save perhaps the pinching claws of a lobster. The sword bit into the vord's claw—but just barely. The legionare struck again and again, and even then only managed to cripple the strength of the claw, rather than severing it completely.
The men dragged their wounded companion away from the barn, his boot flopping and twisting at a hideous angle.
The vord warrior followed them into the sunlight.
Amara stared down at the creature, her stomach suddenly cold. The vord warrior was the size of a pony, and had to have weighed four or five hundred pounds. It was covered in slick-looking, lacquer-gloss plates of some kind of dark hide. Four limbs thrust straight out to the sides from a humpbacked central body, rounded and hunched like the torso of a flea. Its head extended from that body on a short, segmented stalk of a neck. Twists and spines of chitin surrounded its head, and a pair of tiny eyes recessed within deep grooves glared out with scarlet malevolence. Massive, almost beetlelike mandibles extended from its chitinous face, and each mandible ended in the snapping claw that had crippled the legionare.
The vord rushed out of the doorway, hard on the heels of its prey, its gait alien, ungainly, and swift. Two of the legionares turned to face it, blades in hand, while the third dragged the wounded man away. The vord bounded forward in a sudden leap that brought it down on top of one of the legionares . The man dodged to one side, but not swiftly enough to prevent the vord from knocking him to the earth. It landed upon him and seized his waist between its mandibles. They ground down, and the man screamed in agony.
His partner charged the vord's back, screaming and hacking furiously with his short, vicious gladius. One of the blows landed upon a rounded protrusion upon the creature's back, and it sprayed forth some kind of greenly translucent, viscous liquid.
A string of clicking detonations emerged from the vord, and it released the first legionare to whirl on its new attacker and bounded into the air as before. The legionare darted to one side, and when the vord landed, he struck hard at its thick neck. The blow struck home, though the armored hide of the vord barely opened. But it had been enough to hurt it.
More liquid, nauseating greenish brown, spurted from the wound, and more explosive clicks crackled from the monster. It staggered to one side, unable to keep its balance despite its four legs. The legionare immediately seized his wounded companion, and began to drag the other man away from the wounded, unsteady vord. He moved as quickly as he could.
It wasn't enough.
Another half dozen of the creatures rushed out of the barn like angry hornets from a nest, and the buzzing click of the wounded vord became a terrifying, alien chorus. The vibrating roar increased, and the humped, round backs of the things abruptly parted into broad, blackened wings that let them leap into the air and come sailing at the fleeing legionares.
- Academ's Fury
We also know that for every dozen normal soldiers there might be a Behemoth. So with 300,000 Vord land-soldiers we can call it 25,000 Behemoths and I will just subtract that from the normal soldiers to keep things simple.
Most of the ground troops were the four-legged creatures that they had seen before, but for every dozen or so of them, there walked a single creature shaped something like an enormous ape. The behemoths had bandy legs and enormous apelike arms, and they rolled forward using their forelimbs as well as their feet for locomotion. They were huge, better than twelve feet tall, and covered in plates of Vord armor that looked inches thick.
- Princeps' Fury
There are also 6 Vordbulks, their largest seen assault creature.
They weren't huge on the same order as a gargant. They were huge on the same order as buildings. There were half a dozen of them, each the size of three or four of the largest merchant ships. They moved on four legs, each thicker than the trunk of any tree Amara had ever seen. Their vaguely triangular heads ended in a jagged, black chitin beak that rather reminded her of that of an octopus, except large enough to hold three or four hogshead barrels. The creatures had no eyes that she could see, and their beaks simply seemed to flow up into their skulls, and from there into enormous arching fans of the same material, spreading around the titans' heads like shields. Every stride carried them a good twenty feet, and though they looked ponderous, their pace was, like a gargant's, swifter than one would expect. Dozens of mantis warriors could run beneath them at a time, and though a mantis could run faster than some horses, they passed the enormous bulks of moving black chitin only slowly.
…
The mules loosed another volley, which landed all around the leading bulk, exploding into fiery destruction. The great beast did not react. It just kept coming on, as vast and unstoppable as a glacier. As the bulks passed through the fires, Amara saw vord behemoths and mantises crouched upon their glossy, armored backs, as tiny as parasite-birds on the backs of gargants.Amara could see the idea behind the creatures at once. They would roll forward and smash through the wall like so much rotten fencing. Anyone that attacked them would be forced to deal with the defenders riding upon them.
- First Lord's Fury
Takers are Vord infiltrators, they may hide inside animals from rats to crows to lions, and they go through people's mouths to latch onto their brain and take control of them, turning them into superhumans under the control of the Vord. How many Takers there are is unknown, but they are thrown around everywhere in the thousands or tens of thousands like candy and so I am just going to pull what I believe is a reasonable number of 300,000 since they cannot reproduce. This is what they look like and how they operate:
Took. What do you mean?"
"The vord," Doroga said. "They get inside you. Go in through the mouth, nose, ear. Burrow in. Then you die. But they have your body. Look like you. Can act like you."
Amara stared at Doroga, sickened. "What?"
"Don't know what they look like exactly," Doroga said. "The vord have many forms. Some like the Keepers of Silence. Like spiders. But they can be little. Mouthful." He shook his head. "The Takers are small, so they can get inside you."
"Like . . . some sort of worm? A parasite."
Doroga tilted his head, one pale war braid sliding over a massive shoulder. "Parasite. I do not know this word."
"It's a creature that attaches itself to another creature," Amara said. "Like a leech or a flea. They feed on a host creature to survive."
"Vord are not like this," Doroga said. "The host creature doesn't survive. Just look like they do."
"What do you mean?"
"Say a vord gets into my head. Doroga dies. The Doroga that is in here." He thumped his head with his thumb. "What Doroga feels. That is gone. But this Doroga"—he slapped his chest lightly with one hand—"this remains. You don't know any better, because you only know the true Doroga"—he touched his head—"through the Doroga you can see and talk to." He touched his chest.
Amara shivered. "Then what happened here?"
"What happened among my people," Doroga said. "Takers came. Took just a few. Looked around, maybe deciding who to take next. Then taking them. Until more were taken than were themselves. Took more than seven hundred Wolf Clan like that, one pack at a time."
…
And the shell is fast, strong. Feels no pain. Has no fear. Does not speak. Only the outside is the same."
…
"How is the taking accomplished?" Amara pressed. "Is it some kind of furycrafting?"
Doroga grunted and shook his head. "Not sure what it is," he said. "Some stories, the vord just look at you. Control you like some kind of stupid beast."
Walker made the ground shake with a basso rumble ending in a snort, and bumped Doroga with one thick-furred leg.
"Shut up, beast," Doroga said absently, recovering his balance and leaning against the gargant. "Other stories, they poison the water. Sometimes they send something to crawl inside you." He shrugged. "Haven't seen it happening. Just saw the results. Whole hunting tribes all gone together. Doubt they knew it was happening until it was over."
…
What do you mean, there aren't any rats?" she demanded, and she heard her voice shaking.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Just thinking out loud."
Terror made the fingers in her hand go numb, and the tin cup fell to the ground. The tactile memory of something small creeping over her feet as she woke flooded through her thoughts in bright scarlet realization and fear.
Sometimes they send something to crawl inside you.
"Oh no," Amara breathed, whirling toward the darkened great hall, where weary Knights, legionares, and holders lay wounded, resting, sleeping. "Oh no, no, no."
…
Great furies," Amara breathed. "I hope so. Because if the vord are taking people by sending things to crawl into them as they sleep, we have a problem. Most of the Knights were sleeping near me, on the cots where the lights were dimmest."
Bernard sucked in a sudden breath. "Crows and bloody carrion," he swore quietly. "You mean that you think that there were . . . things . . . crawling around in the hall?"
"I think that this is part of their first attack," Amara said. "It's just happening more quietly."
...
They look like this."
He jerked the cup up off the ground.
Amara stared at the taker. It was as long as her hand and very slender. Its flesh was a sickly, pale color, streaked with scarlet blood, and its body was covered in overlapping segments of translucent chitin. Dozens of legs protruded from either side of its body, and antennae fully as long as its body sprouted from either end of the creature. Its head was a barely discernible lump at one end of the body, and was armed with short, sharp-looking mandibles.
The taker flinched into a writhing ball when the light touched it, as if it could not stand its brightness. Its legs and chitinous plates scraped against the stones.
…
An odd and unpleasant burning sensation had begun to throb through Amara's finger scarce seconds after the taker had bitten down. Over the next several heartbeats, the burning numbness spread to her entire finger and hand, to the wrist. She tried to clench her fingers, and found them barely able to move. "Its bite," she said. "Some kind of poison."
Frederic nodded and held up his own weakly flapping hand. "Yes, ma'am. Bit me a few times when I caught it, but I don't feel sick or anything."
Amara nodded with a grimace. "It wouldn't make sense for a taker's venom to be lethal. We'll have to hope for the best. These things must have approached men who were sleeping. Crawled into their mouths." She started to feel queasy herself. "And then took control of them."
Giraldi frowned. "But you'd feel it crawling into your mouth. Those things are big enough to choke you."
"Not if it bit you," Amara responded. "Not if you'd gone numb, so you couldn't feel it on you. Especially if you were asleep to begin with."
"Great furies," Bernard breathed.
Amara continued to follow the line of logic. "They didn't pick random targets, either. Janus. Our Knights." She took a steadying breath. "And me."
- Academ's Fury
Some of the ways Takers are used and creatures they infect.
The beast was eight or nine feet long, its golden hide dappled with greenish stripes that would blend perfectly with the tall grasses of the Amaranth Vale. A powerful creature, far more heavily muscled than anything resembling a common house cat, the grass lion's upper fangs curved down like daggers from its upper jaws, thrusting past its lower lip, even when its mouth was closed.
Or, more accurately put, a living grass lion's fangs would do so. This grass lion no longer had a lower lip. It had been ripped or gnawed away. Flies buzzed around it. Patches of fur had fallen away to reveal swelling, rotted flesh beneath, pulsing with the movements of infestations of maggots or other insects. One of its eyes was filmy and white. The other was missing from its socket. Dark fluid had run from its nostrils and both its ears, staining the fine fur surrounding them.
And yet it moved.
"Taken," Amara breathed.
One of the more hideous tactics employed by the Vord was their ability to send small, scuttling creatures among their enemies. The takers would burrow into their targets, killing them and taking control of their corpses, directing them as a man might a puppet.
…
The grass lion stopped and stared at them for the space of a breath. Then two.
Then, moving with a speed that a living beast could not have bested, it turned and bounded into the trees.
"A scout!" Bernard hissed, kicking his horse into motion after it. "We have to stop it."
…
The taken grass lion was not running the way a true grass lion would. Such a beast, running through the trees and brush, would have been all but invisible, even to Amara, moving with lithe, silent grace through its natural habitat. Possessed by the Vord, though, the grass lion simply ran in a straight line. It smashed through thickets, heedless of brambles and thorns. It tore through brush, shouldered aside saplings, and altered course only to avoid the trees and boulders it could not plow aside or leap across.
For all that it lacked grace, it was fast, though. A true grass lion was not a cross-country runner, even if it could move very swiftly over short distances. Taken by the Vord, it ran at its best speed, tirelessly, and it was steadily leaving Bernard's horse behind.
…
Amara tried not to think of what would happen if a battering ram of four hundred pounds of rotting meat and hard bone slammed into her at the rate the beast was moving.
- Princeps' Fury
Uvarton had fallen after the Legions had taken barely a night's rest. The vordknights had caught up to them and begun dropping takers behind the town's walls. Ehren was still having nightmares about the fourteen-year-old girl, taken by the Vord, whom he'd seen rip the heavy wooden tongue from a wagon and beat half a dozen legionares to death with it before being cut down herself. That was only after she'd set half a dozen buildings on fire with a simple candle. Others had seen much worse, and the chaos wreaked by the takers had been severe enough to force the Legions to abandon the city before the Vord reached them.
- Princeps' Fury
And then the true death blow fell.
Crows by the tens of thousands suddenly plummeted into the capital's streets, buildings, and rooftops. Several of the creatures even fell to the stones of the balcony upon which Ehren stood. The crows, upon landing, fluttered in bizarre spasms, then went still.
Ehren and the others stared around the balcony and out at the city, perplexed.
"Great furies," Ehren breathed. "What was that about?"
Gaius's pensive frown suddenly froze in place. His eyes widened slightly, and he said, "No. Cursor, ware!"
The bodies of the crows erupted with Vord takers.
They weren't impressive things to look at. Each was about the size of a scorpion, and vaguely resembled one, except for dozens of flailing tendrils sprouting from all parts of its body. They were swift, though, as quick as startled mice, and half a dozen of the things scuttled toward those upon the balcony in a blur of green-black chitin.
Ehren spun and stomped a foot down upon one of the takers, and slapped a second from the back of his thigh. One of the couriers stomped at another one, missed, and lost his balance. Three takers swarmed up his body, and, as he cried out in surprise and revulsion, one of them plunged into his mouth.
The man screamed once, and then fell backward in convulsions, his eyes rolling back into his head. Another cry died as it was born—and then his eyes went flat, and swiveled toward the First Lord. He came to his feet and lurched at Gaius.
- Princeps' Fury
There are also some specialty creatures (at least 20 of them) acting as elite bodyguards of the Vord Queen known as blade-beasts, 400 pound giant spiders made of metal and with blades for arms, they can furycraft and fight master metalcrafter swordsmen.
She had not expected the four creatures that came dropping neatly out of the ceiling—what looked at first like... she wasn't sure what. Some kind of bizarre furylamp fixture, perhaps. They were spheres, essentially, with blades of gleaming steel standing out in ridges from the inner surface of each sphere, smoothly beautiful—until the bodies of the forms began to unfold with delicate grace into the long legs of creatures that resembled wax spiders—but which were ten times the size, and whose limbs were graced with blades of what was obviously furycrafted steel.
Vord. Made of steel. Isana felt fairly sure that didn't bode well for whatever Invidia had planned.
...
The three remaining blade-beasts rushed forward through the crowd of wax spiders at Antillus. He met them boldly—and within seconds found himself driven back. A dozen blades came darting in at him from every angle, and when his sword met one of the beast's limbs, there was an explosion of scarlet sparks against vord green.Furycraft. By the furies, Isana thought, these things could use furycraft.
- First Lord's Fury
And then of course there is the Vord Queen herself, more than the match of any single Furycrafter on the continent except perhaps Gaius Sextus, who is psychic and can read minds, commands the hivemind of the Vord, is inhumanely tough, fast, strong, and has full command of all Furycrafting abilities.
Final Numbers
Alerans
200,000 Legionares
7,200 Cavalry
25,200 Knights (3,200 of each but 9,200 Knights Aeris)
67,600 Citizens (13,520 of each Furycrafting discpline except Windcrafting)
A couple hundred lesser nobles
A couple dozen High Lords
First Lord Gaius Sextus and all the other named characters (this goes for all factions).
1,000 Gargoyles
100 Mules.
Each Citizen and Knight has at least one Fury bound to them as well they can manifest, whereas the nobility might have many. The First Lord can control many, many of them.
Canim
180,000 Warrior Caste Canim
5,000 Taurg Cavalry
10,000 Ritualists
5,000 Hunters
Marat
100,000 Marat (25,000 of each Clan)
2,000 Gargants
10,000 Horses
10,000 Wolves
10,000 Herdbane
Vord
275,000 Vord Warriors and Mantises
200,000 Vordknights
300,000 Takers
25,000 Behemoths
20 Blade-beasts
6 Vordbulks
1 Vord Queen
Capabilities
This post is getting rather large, so I won't break down literally everything, but I wanted to touch on some of the ranged weapons of the series and most importantly Furycrafting and some general ideas of what they can do. First, ranged weapons.
Your average Legionare is going to be effectively very mildly superhuman (if at all honestly) with equipment moderately better than the real-world Roman equivalent so I am not going to touch on them much here. But for the average Warrior Cane and the Merat, they are quite a bit more superhuman and their weapons, especially the balest, are insane.
Alerans
Furycrafting
Honestly there is an awful large number of things that can be done with Furycrafting, and you can read all about it when I post the huge document I have of everything I noted down rereading the series, but I wanted to focus on a couple offensive furycrafings gere, but do not that anything from flight (and supersonic flight at that at times), invisibility, healing and more can be done.
First, the most basic Knight Ignus offensive firecrafting and the more efficient version of it developed.
Even though she'd heard of the general theory behind the opening salvo of furycraft, Amara had never seen anything quite like it. She had witnessed the utter destruction of the city of Kalare by the wrath of the great fury Kalus, and it had been a horrible, hideous sight, vast beyond imagining, uncontrolled, horrible in its beauty—and completely impersonal. What happened to the leading wave of vord was every bit as terrible and even more frightening.
The lords of Alera spoke in a voice of fire.
The standard assault of a skilled firecrafter was the manifestation of a sudden and expanding sphere of white-hot fire. They were generally large enough to envelop a mounted rider. Anything caught inside them would be charred to ashes in an instant. Anything within five yards would generally be melted or set aflame—and anything living within another five yards of that would be scorched beyond the capacity of a human being to sustain hostilities. The fire came with an ear-piercing hiss and vanished with a hollow boom. It would leave secondary fires and smooth depressions of molten earth in its wake.
Manifesting such an attack was extremely draining upon the furycrafter involved. Even those with the talents of Lords and High Lords counted the number of spheres he could manifest without resting in the dozens, and not many of those. Given how many vord were on the field, even with the gathered might of all Alera's firecrafters, they could not inflict instant, significant losses upon the mass of the enemy body.
Gaius Attis had considered a way to improve on that.
Instead of the roar of full-blown fire-spheres, a flicker of tiny lights, like thousands of fireflies, sprang up ahead of the oncoming vord. A moment later, Amara began to hear a tide swell of tiny reports, pop pop pop, like the celebratory fireworks crafted by children at Midsummer. The sparkling lights thickened, redoubling, creating a low wall in front of the enemy, who charged ahead without slowing.
No single one of the little firecraftings was a deadly threat to a human being, much less to an armored warrior form of the vord—but there were hundreds of thousands of them, each one an almost-effortless crafting. As the little flowers of fire continued to blossom, the air around them began to shimmer, turning the sparkling line of lights into strip of hellishly molten air that almost seemed to glow with its own fire.
The leading elements of the vord plunged into the barrier and agonizing destruction. Their screams came up to Amara only distantly, and with a little help from Cirrus, she could see that the vord had not moved more than twenty feet across the killing oven Gaius Attis had prepared for them. The warriors staggered and collapsed, roasted alive, bits of flesh and armor cooking away and being flung up into the gale of rising hot air as ash. Tens of thousands of vord perished in the first sixty seconds.
But they kept coming.
Moving with frantic energy, the vord flung themselves in utter abandonment at the barrier, and thousands more died—but each vord that perished absorbed some of the furycrafted flame. Amara was reminded uncomfortably of a campfire in a thunderstorm. Certainly, no single drop of water could extinguish the flame. It would be boiled to steam as it tried—but sooner or later, the fire would go out.
The vord began to push through, bounding over the charred corpses of those who had come before, using as shields the bodies of their companions who were collapsing from the heat, each successive vord pushing a few feet farther than the one ahead of it.
Signals from the Crown Legion pulled the line of deadly heat back toward the Legion lines, forcing the enemy to pay the full price for those last yards of ground, but they could not bring the band of superheated air too close to the Aleran lines without exposing their own troops to the flame—which also blinded the Aleran battle commanders to the movements of the enemy. So, as the vord began to break through, another signal went up from the Crown Legion, and the massive firecrafting ceased. Seconds later, the vord joined battle with the Legions.
- First Lord's Fury
And the High Lord version of the same.
Then fire exploded directly upon her, the white-hot fury of a Knight Ignus's fire-sphere, intensified by an order of magnitude. The bloom of scalding heat washed back over Amara in a flood that flung her ragged-cut hair straight back from her head, and she threw herself to the ground to shield the unmoving Bernard's face from the scalding heat of that blast.
She looked back a moment later, her eyes still dazzled from the intensity, and found that half of the building's rooftop, the part where Invidia had stood, was simply gone. There was no rubble, no fires, no dust—the building simply ceased to be in the area of a sphere the diameter of a couple of carriages. The places where the building had been devoured were cut as neatly as if with a knife, the very edge of the original material burned black and otherwise perfectly in shape. A terrible smell filled the air.
There was no sign of Invidia.
There was the sound of a very light impact on the rooftop nearby. Amara looked up to see another veiled, nearly invisible shape, standing ten feet away, facing the sterile destruction on the rooftop. "I do hope," Gaius Attis murmured, "that you were not burned. I tried to contain the spread of the heat."
- First Lord's Fury
Knights Aeris burning people to ash in great lightning blasts harnessed from a furystorm.
And then a storm of fire and deafening sound roared down from the low clouds and charred two dozen of the taken holders to ash and blackened bones.
Amara gasped, leaning weakly against Bernard.
"Close in!" Bernard bellowed. "Close in, stay together, stay low!" Amara was aware of the legionares, struggling to obey Bernard's orders, of Doroga urging Walker in one of the Marat tongues. But mostly she was conscious of another flicker of light in the clouds, an eight-pointed star formed of lightning that danced from point to point so swiftly to make it seem a wheel of sudden fire—a fire that coalesced, flashed down, and charred another, even broader swath of the taken to corpses.
She had to have been imagining it. From the furious sky appeared dozens of forms—Knights Aeris, both flying formation and serving as bearers for open aerial litters. Twice more, lightning tore from the heavens, rending the ranks of the taken, and then another eight Knights Aeris descended low enough to be seen, gathering a final burst of lightning into an eight-pointed star between them, and hurling it down at the taken.
- Academ's Fury
This is what a High Lord entering battle looks like.
Antillus Raucus, High Lord of Antillus, let the rage boil up inside him in a white-hot fire as he swept his sword from its sheath at his side. He opened his mouth in a wordless roar of pure wrath, bellowing to his furies, calling out to the land around him, to his land, which for a lifetime he had fought to defend, as had his father, and his father, and his father before him.
The Aleran High Lord screamed his outrage to the land and the sky.
And the land and the sky gave answer.
The clear twilight air boiled and blackened with storm clouds, and dark streamers of mist followed him in a spiral as he dived. Thunder magnified the High Lord's battle cry tens of thousands of times over. Raucus felt his rage flow into the sword in his hand, and the blade burst into scarlet flame, burning through the cold air in a sizzling hiss, lighting the sky around him as if the sun had suddenly risen back above the horizon.
Light fell onto the desperate legionares, and faces began to turn skyward. A sudden roar of hope and wild excitement rose from the Legion, and lines that had begun to buckle abruptly locked into place again, shields binding together, firming, holding.
It took a few seconds more before the first of the Icemen began to look up, and only then, as Raucus readied himself to enter the fray, did the High Lord unleash the furies of his skies against the foe.
Lightning came down from the sky in threads so tiny and numerous that more than anything, they resembled burning rain. Blue-white bolts raked the Icemen on the ground below the wall, killing and burning, sending Icemen into screaming confusion—and suddenly choking the pressure of their advance onto the wall.
Raucus flung his sword's point down as he closed on the exact center of the Icemen's position atop the wall, and called fire from the burning blade, sending out a white-hot column of flame that charred flesh to ash and blackened bone in a circle fifteen feet across. At the last second, he called upon his wind furies to slow him, landed hard upon the unyielding stone of the wall—now cleared of the treacherous ice.
Raucus called strength up from the earth, shattered two hurled clubs with sweeps of his burning blade, swept a wave of fire over a hundred of the foe between himself and the southern side of the wall, then began grimly hacking his way northward. The Icemen were no fools. They knew that even the mightiest furycrafter could be felled if enough spears and arrows and clubs were thrown at him—and Raucus knew it, too.
But before the shocked Icemen could coordinate their attacks, the High Lord of Antillus was among them with his deadly sword, giving them no chance to overwhelm his defenses with a storm of missiles—and no Iceman alive, no dozen of the savages, was the match for the skill of Antillus Raucus with steel in his hand.
The Icemen fought with savage ferocity, each of them possessed of far more strength than a man—but not more than an enraged High Lord, drawing power from the stones of the land itself. Twice, Icemen managed to seize Raucus with their huge, leathery hands. He broke their necks with the use of one hand and flung the corpses through several ranks of the enemy around him, knocking down dozens at a time.
- Princeps' Fury
Here is what thousands of Citizens unleashing furies looks like.
Thousands of Citizens stood among their ranks, called forth to fight for their land, to demonstrate the obligation that went with the privileges of their title. Among the Citizenry, earthcrafting was by far the most common talent, and now those Citizens unleashed their furies upon the Vord.
Just ahead of the Vord ranks, the ground erupted, swelling into hillocks and blisters of stone that burst to disgorge furies of the earth. Gargants, wolves, serpents, great dogs, and nameless things—both beautiful and hideous—came bounding and slithering and charging out of the very soil of the land, to fall upon the first wave of the alien horde.
The battle that ensued had a ghastly sort of beauty to it. The Aleran furies, like statuary come to frenzied life, slammed into the Vord. Furies of the earth, though not swift, were viciously strong and difficult to actually harm—and the Vord were packed in close to one another as they came for Alera Imperia. Ehren watched as a bear made of black-and-grey marble slammed its paws down with methodical precision, crushing a Vord at every blow. A gargant of flint and clay thundered into the Vord ranks without being noticeably slowed, leaving destruction in its wake. A great sandstone serpent wound swiftly around one Vord after another, crushing the howling creatures in its coils and slithering on. The earth furies broke Vord quadrupeds like toys, and shrugged off blow after blow in response.
The behemoths, though, proved tougher than the Vord-lizards. Ehren saw one of them accept a pair of hammerblows from the great bear without flinching, and in response it simply bent and heaved the fury's form up off the ground. The granite was riven and shattered, and a few seconds later, the "crack" of protesting stone reached the citadel. The behemoth smashed the bear-form down to the ground, where it crumbled into motionless rubble.
- Princeps' Fury
Whereas this is what a massed unleashing of Furycrafting from the First Lord, many High Lords and Lords.
The first Vord to climb began to crest the walls and mount the battlements.
From deeper and higher within the city, trumpets sounded, sudden and sharp and clear. Amara felt the instantaneous, massive stirring of windcrafting in the air, felt the hairs on her neck and at the base of her scalp begin to stir and rise of their own accord. The air itself seemed to dance and glitter with a hundred thousand flickering pinpoints of silver-white light, a host of miniature stars erupting into brilliant, brief life in the air and upon the trees across the whole of the Ceresian valley.
And then, with a roar that shook the city to the stones of its foundation, lightning leapt up from the city's walls to the Aleran skies, great, savage spears of scarlet and azure flame, twisting into the shapes of eagles leaping into flight, the colors and symbols of the House of Gaius. That sheet of thunder and power shattered the leading wave of Vord, tearing them from the walls by the hundreds, charring them to black powder in the air, and scattering them back over the stunned forms of their fellows following in their wake.
Once the echoes of that titanic stroke of thunder had rolled once over the land, they were followed by a chorus of smaller flashes that rained down from the skies above—by the hundreds. Strokes of lightning crashed down among the Vord, shattering and smashing dozens at a time. There, fiery gold hornet shapes of Rhodes fell to earth, and there, blazing green lightning shaped like the twin bulls of Placida sent Vord sailing fifty feet into the air. Crimson falcons of Aquitaine fell like fiery rain, each stroke tiny by comparison to the others, but striking with deadly precision and in terrible waves.
Amara stared in raw terror at the power being unleashed before her, and wished that she and her husband had found a rather safer distance from which to observe the battle. This was not the admittedly deadly power of a century of Knights attached to a Legion, or even that of multiple Legions' Knights working in concert—it was the concentrated furycraft of the lords of Alera, and it literally tore the earth asunder beneath the feet of the Vord as they advanced. The light was blinding, and she had to lift her hand to shield her eyes against it. Debris—and not all of it earth and stone, either—began to rain down all around them, cast out to the abandoned steadholt by the power of the furycraft unleashed upon the Vord. The sound was deafening, even where they crouched, and Amara desperately shifted some of Cirrus's effort into shielding their ears from the terrible din. Amara had never seen or imagined such sheer, awe-inspiring power unleashed—save once—and she suddenly wanted nothing in the world so much as to be in a very deep hole, hiding quietly until the entire business was concluded.
- Princeps' Fury
I want to specially mention Gaius Sextus as he is the strongest Furycrafter in the entire series, and does some really crazy things including detonating two volcanoes, snapping the necks of more than a thousand men at once by manipulating their metal collars, and generating such fear it kills thousands of veteran soldiers.
He can heal himself and others without water extremely rapidly.
Gaius shook his head briskly and strode toward Amara and Bernard. He put one hand on her shoulder, another on Bernard's. Bernard let out a hiss of discomfort—then there was a wrenching pop that dragged a muffled curse from his throat.
"There," Gaius murmured. "Try to move it."
Bernard did, rotating his wounded shoulder slowly. "Tender," he said after a moment. "But it will serve, sire."
Gaius nodded and squeezed Amara's shoulder gently. In that simple gesture, relief and energy seemed to flood into her, weariness washed away before it. She shuddered at the pleasant sensation left when her aches and fatigue vanished.
...
Fire engulfed the entire right side of her body. She felt herself contort strangely, saw the shape of her abdomen alter, watched as her arm straightened, unwinding as it went, almost like a twisted cord. The pain was indescribable, but there was a sensation of silvery ecstasy mixed with it that left her unable to move or cry out. She could only weep, and the stars blurred upon her tears, mixing with the lights of the city below.
- Captain's Fury
Using the collars on between 700 to more than a thousand Immortals to snap their necks at once.
They both looked away from the charging Immortals, at one another, and that was how Amara saw the First Lord, in the corner of her vision, raise a hand and murmur another bone-deep word that rose from the very mountain beneath them.
"No."
There was a sudden noise, lower than the cries of charging Immortals, more piercing than the tread of their boots. It was a rippling staccato of a sound, somewhat like a saw going through wood.
Amara turned to stare as every Immortal, every single Immortal on the mountainside suddenly convulsed. Their necks twisted sharply, and the snapping bones were the source of the strange sound.
And then they fell dead.
All of them.
One second, a force the size of two or three Legion cohorts was howling for their blood. The next, the Immortals lay on the ground, twitching and dying, the strange metal collars now bent and misshapen, all deformed so sharply and suddenly that they had broken the necks of the men wearing them.
- Captain's Fury
Killing thousands just with fear.
Gaius Sextus fell upon the forward ranks of the legionares coming toward them, and terror like none they had known crashed over them.
The flaming brand in his fist cast out a blinding radiance, and Amara could feel the very edges of the fearcrafting that imbued it. Once before she had borne a flame containing a fury of terror, and she had barely remained conscious during the act. Count Gram's fearcrafting had been formidable, routing thousands of barbarian Marat and their war beasts alike, sending them screaming from the walls of Garrison during Second Calderon.
Beside the horror Alera's First Lord now sent against the Kalaran legionares, Gram's fearcrafting had been a momentary flutter of insecurity.
The men nearest Gaius, those file leaders of whatever luckless century had the fortune to make up the column's center, never got to scream. Their eyes rolled back in their heads, and as a single man, they convulsed and fell to the stony ground.
Then the screams began.
Hundreds of throats opened in terrorized howls, a sudden and deafening cacophony. Ranks and files melted like butter on a hot skillet, and Legion discipline vanished like dew beneath a desert sunrise. Some men fell, clutching at their shoulders and chests, bleeding from the eyes, or frothing at the lips. Some sobbed and staggered to their knees, weapons tumbling from fear-numbed fingers. Some turned their weapons upon those near them, panicked beyond reason or ability to recognize their sword-brethren. Most simply fled, casting aside their swords and shields.
Among those hundreds of afflicted souls, one man alone stood his ground. Though his face was ashen, somehow this man withstood that horrible fear, bracing his shield and raising his sword in wavering defiance.
The First Lord's blade of fire swept down, and no shield or sword in all of Alera could have withstood that molten furnace of a blow. In a flash of light, the legionare's shield shattered into cleaved halves and droplets of molten metal, parted every bit as easily as his armor and the flesh beneath. He fell in a horrible cloud of hissing gasses and the stench of scorched flesh, and Amara could not help but feel pity that the poor man had been so rewarded for his courage, greater than any of the Legion about him.
- Captain's Fury
His second most impressive feat is detonating a volcano.
The First Lord let out a sudden sigh, closing his eyes. "Crows take you, Brencis. At least your son had wisdom enough to know when he was beaten. Crows take you and rip out your eyes for forcing me to this."
And then Gaius Sextus suddenly closed his reaching hand into a fist and jerked it back, as if snapping a particularly tough cord.
The night went red.
Blinding light flared from the distant mountain.
It took Amara several dull, thudding seconds to realize what she was seeing.
Fire erupted from the mountain, white-hot, lifting in a great geyser that rose miles into the air. That first rush of blinding liquid flame spattered out for what had to be miles and miles in every direction around the mountain and only then did the earth suddenly move, the mountain jumping as if it had been an old wagon hitting a pothole in a bad road. Rocks fell. Somewhere nearby, a cliff-side collapsed in a deafening roar.
Amara couldn't take her eyes from what was happening below. The mountain itself began to spew out a great cloud of what looked like grey powder, illuminated from within by scarlet light. The cloud billowed out in slow, graceful beauty—or so it looked from the distance. She watched as it rolled down over the valley of Kalare. It washed over the pinpoint lights of the little steadholts. It devoured the larger clusters of lights marking the little towns and villages around the valley.
And, within moments, it washed over the city of Kalare itself.
Amara could not help herself. She lifted her hands, tiredly willing Cirrus into a sight-crafting. The grey cloud was not simply ash, as she had at first thought. It was… as if fire had been made into one vast thunderhead. Whatever was caught in the path of that scarlet-limned grey flood was instantly incinerated by its touch. She saw, just barely, small moving shadows flying before the oncoming inferno, but if the cloud moved with lazy grace, those tiny figures—those Alerans, she realized—moved at a snail's pace. She herself, one of the fastest fliers in Alera, could not have outpaced that incendiary nebula. Those holders had no chance. None at all.
She stared at the valley below them in numb shock, as more jolts and tremors rattled the mountain beneath her. How many thousands—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people had just died? How many families, sleeping in their beds, had just been reduced to ashes? How many children had just been burned alive? How many homes, how many stories, how many beloved faces and names had just been incinerated like so much useless garbage?
Amara knelt there beside her husband and witnessed the death of Kalare— of its city, its people, its lands, and its lord.
A vast cloud of steam rose as the watery valley surrendered to the embrace of the fire-mountain, and their view of that steam vanished as dust from the rockslides and tremors rose up around them, creating a thick shroud that blotted away the stars.
There was still light, though. Light from the blazing mountain and from the burning corpse of the city of Kalare painted everything in a surreal, scarlet twilight.
- Captain's Fury
Although arguably breaking the backs of hurricanes might be on par.
There," Gaius said. "The eighth hurricane this spring."
After a hushed moment, Miles said, "It's huge."
"Yes. And this isn't the worst of them. They keep making them bigger."
Miles looked up at the First Lord sharply. "Someone is crafting these storms?"
Gaius nodded. "The Canim ritualists, I believe. They've never exerted this much power across the seas before. Ambassador Varg denies it, of course."
...
Why don't you ask the High Lords on the coast for assistance? With enough windcrafters, they should be able to blunt the storms."
"They already are helping," Gaius said quietly. "Though they don't know it. I've been breaking the storm's back and letting the High Lords protect their own territory once it was manageable."
- Furies of Calderon
The last thing Gaius does in the series is also the best feat of Furycrafting, where he unleashes a volcano and massive furycraftings to destroy the entire city of Alera Imperia and the ground for miles around it.
The capital was burning.
Vord swarmed all over it, like some kind of gleaming mold. Aquitaine's Legions had apparently made good their escape—though he had only three of them remaining, not the five he'd begun the operation with. They had managed to cross the Gaul, then bring it back into its normal course, and were withdrawing to the north.
White and violet fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen suddenly flashed from the top of the First Lord's tower. Vordknights swarmed through the air toward it. Knights Aeris, presumably the enemy's, rushed toward it upon gales that sounded hollow in the distance. A star of scarlet-and-azure light suddenly blazed upon the tower top—the First Lord's sword, kindled to life.
Ehren held up his hands and brought the air between them into focus. His gifts at windcrafting were, at best, modest. He would not be able to see nearly so well through his visioncrafting as he had through Gaius's. But it would have to do.
He couldn't see much more than a gleam of silver and the blazing sword upon the top of the Citadel, but he knew that it had to be Gaius. Vordknights buzzed around the tower like moths around a lantern, so thickly that they sometimes obscured the light almost completely.
Lightning crackled down from the sky to strike the tower, but immediately flashed back upward again, bouncing off like light against a mirror. Vord began to scale the tower, hundreds of them, clawing their way directly up its sides.
Then the figure atop the tower raised both arms above his head, and the earth itself bucked and shook like a stallion at the bite of a horsefly. Ehren was thrown from his feet to the ground, and he lost his visioncrafting—but he could not look away.
The ground rippled like the surface of the sea, shattering buildings like so many toothpicks. The earth split open, great, yawning cracks spreading out for a mile in every direction from the citadel—and then those cracks began to glow with inner, scarlet light. The tremors stopped, and for an instant everything was perfectly silent, motionless.
And then fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen, rock so hot that it had begun to flow like liquid, erupted upward from the ground in a column that was literally miles across. The magma clawed for the sky like a fountain in a city square, and hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of winged forms erupted from the fiery spray, eagles which spread their great wings and streaked through the air, leaving blazing columns of fire in their wakes. The wind rose violently, the superheated air reacting to the eruption, and the fire-eagles swept and spun in great circles, crying out in shrieks made tiny by distance.
Fire filled the skies over Alera Imperia. Cyclones of flame spun away from the city, deadly funnels that seemed to lift everything they touched from the ground, only to incinerate them to ashes.
The ground beneath the city and for miles around began to buckle. Falling walls and buildings added their own gravelly screams to the night's cacophony. The Vord died by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, devoured by insatiable flame and ravenous earth.
With a final scream, Alera Imperia collapsed into the earth, lowered like a corpse into its grave and consumed by the fires that raged there.
So died Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, his pyre lighting the Realm for fifty miles in every direction.
- Princeps' Fury
There are also a number of weapons furycrafted for less skilled people to use and wreak great havoc, like javelins, bows and mules.
Fire Javelins:
Somewhere nearby, a centurion bellowed something that went completely unheard in all the noise. Fortunately, the legionares knew their work well enough without any such command. As the enemy closed, an Aleran-borne shadow passed over the ground before the wall, and more spears than a body could count in a week flew out to come sailing down into the front ranks of the vord. The spears weren't particularly deadly, in and of themselves. They might have scored one kill in fifty, by Ehren's estimation, one kill in thirty, tops—but every vord struck by one of the heavy weapons staggered in pain. Even if the wound was not fatal, the vord's pace faltered, and it was swiftly trampled by the warriors rushing along behind.
The volley was devastating to enemy cohesion, and an old standard Legion tactic.
But, this being a battle plan Tavi had a hand in, it didn't stop there.
The artisans of the Calderon Valley hadn't been able to provide every single legionare on the wall with one of the modified javelins—only the most skilled man of each spear of eight had been given the new designs. More often than not, the spears that had killed a vord outright had been thrown by those men—and every single one of the new spears contained a small sphere of glass, nestled into the cup of the javelin's iron head, where the wooden shaft joined it. Whether the javelins missed and struck the earth or hit home, thousands of tiny glass spheres shattered, unleashing the furies that had been bound within.
Ehren himself had field-tested the firestones, furycrafted devices developed from the coldstones used to keep food chilled in restaurants and wealthy households around the Realm—another innovation sprung from the tricky, twisty labyrinth Octavian had for a brain. The glass spheres could contain even more heat for their size than the first generation of stones could, and they were far easier to make.
Destruction was almost always easier to manage than something useful, Ehren reflected.
The fire-javelins exploded together in a roar, each bursting into a sudden sphere of flame the size of a supply wagon. It wasn't the white-hot fire of a Knight Ignus's attack, but it didn't have to be. The fire engulfed the front two ranks of the enemy and sucked so much air in to feed its short-lived flame that Ehren's cloak was drawn up against his back and legs, snapping as if he stood with his back to a strong wind. Greasy black smoke billowed out, the smell indescribably foul, and for a few instants, the vord line was thrown into complete disarray.
- First Lord's Fury
Or the deadly mules using their firecrafted munitions.
The mules went to work.
Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike frame. Wooden support struts rose above it, to support a long wooden arm with a shallow bowl at its end. Amara wasn't familiar with the details of the devices, but each arm was drawn back by a crew of two men, who used raw strength and very minor woodcrafting to pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position. A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back—and when it was removed, the arm snapped forward with startlingly energetic violence. When it did, it carried so much power with it that the entire framework jumped up off the ground at one end, like a cantankerous mule kicking out with its hind legs.
When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls. They leapt up into the air and spread out into a glittering cloud that caught the light of the lowering sun, throwing back sparkles of scarlet, orange, and gold.
Then the fire-spheres struck the earth and burst into globes of hungry fire, hundreds of them all at once, spread out over a wide swath of land.
"Bloody crows!" screamed a nearby legionare.
The fire seemed to ripple out in a long ribbon as each group of mules unleashed its projectiles. Each mule's deadly payload devoured scores and scores of the enemy in clouds of sullen flame, spread out over an area fifty yards across. Indeed, if anything, the mules had been spaced too near one another—there were ample areas of overlap, where the spheres from multiple mules detonated in the same area. Thousands of vord died in the flames, and thousands more were scorched and disabled, wailing and running in circles, mad with pain, lashing out at anything that moved.
Amara stared in purest shock as she realized that she had just watched the world change, radically and forever.
That overwhelming hammerblow upon the vord had not been delivered by an exalted High Lord. No group of Citizens or Knights Aeris had unleashed their wrath upon the vord. Crows, it wasn't even the result of standard Legion battlecrafting. The engines had been shaped here, in the workshops of the holders of the Calderon Valley. Most of the people on their crews were simple holders—nearly half of them were children, young men too young to have served their term in the Legions. The spheres, intended only for a single use, rather than the long-term function of the food-cooling coldstones, had been manufactured in the Valley as well, each of them representing perhaps an hour's effort by someone gifted with a modest affinity for firecrafting—and much more quickly by someone with a more substantial gift.
Whatever happened, if Alera survived its latest foe, it could not return to what it had been before. Not when the holders had wielded the power of Citizens. Alera's laws protected freemen to some degree, but they were clearly made to protect the interests of Citizens first and foremost. More than once, Aleran Counts and Lords and even High Lords had faced rebellions from angry freemen—rebellions that were inevitably put down by the superior furycraft of the Citizenry. That was a constant, an immutable fact of Aleran history. The Citizenry ruled precisely because they had access to greater power than any freeman, or any group of freemen.
But that all changed the instant the holders of the Calderon Valley dealt the enemy a blow worthy of the assembled High Lords themselves.
And, less than a minute later, they did it again.
…
The hollow booms of firecraftings continued to rumble irregularly through the night, accompanied by the scattered popping sounds of the occasional launch of fire-spheres from a mule, but even those were infrequent. Ehren asked Count Calderon about it.
"The firecrafters are resting in rotation," he said quietly. "They're exhausted. There are just a few of them on duty to prevent any breaches of the wall. And we're running low on ammunition for the mules. Right now, there are workshops being established in the refugee camp east of the city to manufacture more fire-spheres, but it isn't coming along as fast as we'd like."
"How fast would we like it?" Ehren asked dubiously. A stray sphere from the last mule launch had come down inside the ramparts, and a supply wagon was burning enthusiastically.
"Twelve million of them an hour would be ideal," Calderon replied.
Ehren choked. "Twelve mil—An hour?"
"That would be enough for one hundred mules to loose two-hundred-shot loads at their maximum rate of fire, nonstop," Bernard said. He squinted out at the battle. "With that, I could kill every vord in this swarm without losing a man. We're going to have to figure out a way to manufacture these things more quickly."
Ehren shook his head. "Seems so unbelievable. When Tavi showed me the sketches for this idea, I thought he'd gone insane."
- First Lord's Fury
And how easy the munitions are to make such that hundreds of Citizens are making potentially millions of the fire spheres.
Hundreds of Citizens brought up the flickering curtain of fist-sized fire-spheres that had first been used at Riva. It proved just as deadly to the foe here as it had at the great city. Vord surged into the burned zone before the wall and were slain in blasts of fire and superheated air, a million deadly fireflies barring their way. The horde died by the hundreds, then the thousands, but as they had at Riva, the weight of numbers began to let the vord grind their way forward, scrambling over the corpses of their fallen comrades, laying a road of death and twitching limbs for those coming behind them.
Within moments, the vord had paid the necessary toll, and the Aleran firecrafters who lined the walls began to crumple down, exhausted.
And a small thing, but because of furycrafting increasing the effectiveness of archers, anyone at or near a Knight Flora's skill can shoot arrows at 600 yards, and they are absurdly precise.
All along the wall, the archers began shooting. Each man loosed an arrow every five or six breaths, or even faster. Amara stood beside Giraldi in the one crenellation not occupied by a shieldman and watched the arrows slither through the air and into the oncoming Marat ranks. The deadly aim of the Aleran holders dropped Marat and beast alike with equal ferocity, littering the ground with fresh corpses, making the eager crows swoop and dive in a swarm over the charging horde.
But still the horde came on.
The archers had begun shooting at close to six hundred yards—an incredible distance, Amara knew. They had to have been woodcrafters of nearly a Knight's skill to manage such a feat. For perhaps a minute, there was no sound but the grunt of archers drawing bows, legionares kneeling and standing again, the droning blare of Marat horns, and the rumbling of thousands of feet.
- Furies of Calderon
Two men in the first squad were killed when the first taken holders with hammers attacked, and after that Bernard began allowing his archers to expend arrows on the taken armed with heavy weaponry. Only a hit in the eyes or mouth would put one of them down reliably, but Bernard himself was an archer of nearly unbelievable skill, and he demanded that the woodcrafters in his command keep pace. When one of Bernard's archers shot, their arrows struck home and one of the taken went down.
…
"Loose at will!" Bernard called, and suddenly the air of the cave hummed with the passing of the woodcrafters' deadly shafts. The half dozen taken who had broken through fell in their tracks. Then the woodcrafters started threading shots through the battle lines, passing in the space under a legionare 's arm when he lifted his sword to strike, sailing over one's head when he ducked a swing from a clumsy club, flitting between another's shield and his ear when he lunged forward, changing his center of balance.
- Academ's Fury
Canim
Warriors
The biggest specimens of the Canim are -unarmored- ten feet tall and the mass of three big men. Here is Varg, their leader.
The Cane stood at its full height, and the ten-foot ceiling barely allowed it. Covered with fur the color of the darkest depths of night, the creature stood upon two legs, with the mass of two or three big legionares. Its shoulders looked too narrow for its height, and its arms were longer than human proportions. Its long, blunt fingers were tipped with dark claws. The Cane had a head that reminded Tavi unpleasantly of the direwolves that had accompanied the Wolf Clan of the Marat, though broader, its muzzle shorter. Massive muscles framed the Cane's jawline, and Tavi knew that its sharp, gleaming white-yellow teeth could snap through a man's arm or leg without particular effort. The Cane's eyes were amber yellow set against dark scarlet, and it gave the creature the look of something that saw everything through a veil of blood.
- Academ's Fury
The smallest adults are over seven feet tall, hunched.
Each Cane was far larger than a human being, the smallest of them standing well over seven feet tall—though the way their lean bodies hunched at the shoulders would have meant they would have been another foot taller, standing straight.
- Academ's Fury
The average Cane stood between seven and eight feet tall, and that was in their standard, half-crouched posture. Standing erect, they would have been a foot taller than that, and the sheer speed and power held within those lean frames was terrifying.
- Captain's Fury
And the Warriors are universally larger than them.
You know the difference between their raiders and their regulars, I take it?"
The First Spear grunted. "Raiders are bad enough. I never faced their regulars, but I know men who have. They're worse. Bigger, stronger, better fighters. You don't take them down without Knights and casualties."
"The raiders are their conscripts. They're not even their active military. The regulars you've heard about are their soldiery. Specifically, they come from an entire social class of hereditary soldiering bloodlines. Their warrior caste."
- Academ's Fury
They can also see in the dark.
"No time," Tavi said. "They can see in the dark. We can't.
- Academ's Fury
Their equipment includes heavy javelins, shields, spears, axes, falx, swords and balests. Here is the javelin and Canim fully armored running not quite as fast as a horse.
The Canim covered the distance to the walls with unnerving speed—not so swiftly as horsem*n, perhaps, but far more quickly than a man could run. Once they were within perhaps sixty or seventy yards, the oncoming Canim hurled a shower of javelins thicker and heavier than an Aleran battle spear.
The weapons hit hard. Beside Tavi, there was a heavy, crunching sound and a grunt of surprise as one of the javelins smashed into a veteran's shield. The Canim weapon shattered, but threw the legionare to the ground and left an enormous dent in the shield's surface.
...
"Engage!" Tavi cried, and legionares snapped into two-man teams, shield-man and archer. Arrows darted down into the heavily armored Canim warriors, but this time, many of the warriors carried heavy shields of scarlet steel, and arrows struck with small effect. The deadly, heavy javelins came next, striking legionares standing between the merlons. One archer took an instant too long to aim, and a spear struck him, its tip exploding from his back, while the force of the impact threw him from the battlements entirely to land on the stones of the courtyard. Another legionare had not properly secured his shield to his arm, and when a spear struck it, the top edge of the shield spun back, striking him in the face and wrenching his arm from its socket in a burst of crackling pops.
- Academ's Fury
Whereas a Canim spear is even deadlier, as are them throwing rocks or using slings to throw rocks half the height of a man (which, assuming they are spherical and a yard wide, they weigh ~1040kg assuming they are made of granite. 880kg assuming sandstone). I will also note that Earthcrafters are the physical match or close to it of Canim.
The captain watched as the Canim defenders fell back to the city wall under the cover of a veritable thunderstorm of missiles. The Canim favored spears sized to fit them, and the crow-eaten things were thick and long enough to spit a cow upon. Driven by the unbelievable strength of the wolf-warriors they could pierce a legionare, body, armor, and all, and still retain enough power to wound the man behind him.
Worse than the spears, though, was the sudden thunderstorm of hurled stones. A Canim warrior could hurl a stone the size of a man's head without any particular effort, and they lobbed them in high arcs, so that they plummeted almost straight down upon the hapless Guard below. Armor and helmets of Aleran steel were of limited use against the impact of stones so large and heavy. Even when laboring Tribunes began bellowing the orders for their cohorts to shift to a tortoise formation, the rain of stones disrupted the tight ranks necessary for it, leaving men exposed and breaking upraised arms, even through the shields they wielded.
The primitive missiles were less deadly, in a relative sense, than well-aimed arrow fire, but they possessed a far greater capacity to inflict crippling injuries, and the ranks of the Guard nearest the town walls were badly mauled before they were ordered back to the earthworks and out of rock range.
...
Marcus looked up to see dark shapes rising from concealment atop the bluff, and they were soon mirrored by more movement on the eastern side. Marcus could see forms atop both bluffs moving strangely, but it took him a moment to realize what they were doing.
They were spinning in place.
The stones that began to fall upon the conveniently massed ranks of the Guard made the hand-tossed projectiles of moments before seem like pebbles by comparison. Stones half the height of a man came crashing down, lethal to anyone beneath them, crippling to anyone close enough to be struck as the stone rebounded from the earth and tumbled wildly.
Marcus stared in mute surprise. It would take an earthcrafter of considerable talent to throw stones that size, and the Canim had no earthcrafters. Not only that, but even if they had been strong enough to throw the boulders, they could not possibly have been thrown at such speed to such distance—and yet they were doing it.
The captain narrowed his eyes, staring at the bluffs, and let out a sudden snarl. "Slingers," he said. "Bloody crows, they're slingers."
Marcus shot a glance at the captain and peered more closely. The young officer was right, by the great furies. The Canim atop the bluffs were whirling the enormous stones at the end of long, heavy chains. Each slinger would rush forward, get the stone moving, then begin to spin, whirling the boulders in great circles, gathering speed, until they released them to sail out and down onto the Guard below.
- Captain's Fury
Elite Canes might do things like throw armored men 20 feet through the air with a quick jerk, or smash people to death through steel armor with a sword.
Then a horrible bellowing roar, and Nasaug burst through the tiny opening with terrifying ease and agility, curved war sword in his hand. The Cane Battlemaster killed three legionares before any of them had time to react, the massive sword shattering bone even through steel armor, and slicing through exposed flesh with terrible efficiency. He parried another legionares thrusting sword, seized the rim of the man's shield with one paw, and with a simple, clean motion threw the man twenty feet through the air, over the side of the bridge, to fall screaming to the river below.
- Academ's Fury
Arguably their deadliest weapon is the balest, a sort of super-crossbow that fires bolts at slightly below the speed of sound, can do things like penetrate a shield and then the man behind it, penetrate a horse and still kill a man in armor behind it, and have a range of 2/3 of a mile.
Even as legionares moved to battle positions, there was a humming sound and then a series of miniature thunderclaps. A spray of blood erupted from a veteran three feet from Tavi, and the man dropped without a sound. Down the wall, the same happened to others. Something slammed through a shield and killed the veteran behind it. One of the archers jerked, then collapsed. Another's head snapped back so sharply that Tavi clearly heard his neck break. The corpse fell near him, head lolling to one side, eyes open and unblinking. A vaned metal shaft as thick as the circle of Tavi's thumb and forefinger protruded from the helmet. As Tavi stared, a thin trickle of blood slithered down over one of the legionares sightless eyes, and was almost instantly thinned and washed away by the rain.
…
A buzzing thrum sounded, and another steel bolt ripped through the legionare's lower back, straight through his armor, until an inch of the bolt's tip showed through the veteran's breastplate.
- Academ's Fury
"This," Tavi said, "is a Canim weapon. It's an innovation on a standard bow, and we call it a balest. It's capable of throwing a solid steel projectile nearly two-thirds of a mile, if the wind is favorable, and it hits with enough force to punch cleanly through a breastplate, the man beneath, and out the other side."
...
The flat, metallic twang of the odd bows was not loud, but they were near enough now to hear it. Each twang was followed almost instantly by the heavy sound of impact—a thud accompanied by the shriek of torn steel.
- Captain's Fury
A bolt hurled by one of the deadly weapons could slam through his armor's backplates, his body, and his breastplate in an instant, and still carry enough momentum to kill a second armored man on the other side of him.
- Princeps' Fury
A balest bolt could pass through a horse and fatally wound an armored legionare on the other side.
- First Lord's Fury
Ritualists
Ritualists of the Canim use blood magic to perform all their sorcery, be it from blood donated by people or taken from sacrifices, willing or not. At this time they are unlikely to use sacrifices and will be using donations and non-lethal amounts due to their morality in later books. They use a variety of weapons and attacks, like horrible poison gas:
And those ritualists came up a while ago, started throwing these smoking censers at our people. The smoke was poison. Killed a lot of men. Not quick."
- Academ's Fury
Or they might make someone throw up their organs.
"Go back into the tent, Nhar," Marok said gently.
Nhar snarled and plunged one hand into the blood pouch.
Marok moved even more quickly. One of the knives sprang off his belt into his hand and whipped across his own left forearm.
Nhar screamed something, and a cloud of blue-grey mist formed in front of him, coalescing into some kind of solid shape in response. But before it could fully form, Marok flicked several drops of his own blood onto the other Cane. Then the old master closed his eyes and made a calm, beckoning gesture.
Nhar convulsed. At first Tavi thought that the Cane was vomiting, but as more and more substance poured out of Nhar's mouth, it only took a few seconds for Tavi to realize what was really happening.
Nhar's belly and guts had just been ejected from his body, as if an unseen hand had reached down his throat and pulled them out.
Nhar made a number of hideous sounds, but within seconds he was silent and still.
- First Lord's Fury
They may summon lightning.
And then the night was torn with blinding white light and a wall of thunder that smashed against Tavi in a sonic tsunami, staggering him, almost robbing him of his balance. He managed to steady Crassus when the young man began to fall. It lasted for a bare heartbeat, then the thunderous sound vanished into a high-pitched ringing tone in his ears, while the flashing streak of light remained burned into his blinded eyes, shifting colors slowly against the blackness.
It took several moments for his eyes to readjust to the night, and even longer for his ears to stop ringing. His instincts screaming, he hurried forward as fast as he could, to return to the town and the legion's fortification there. Sir Crassus, his expression somewhat dazed, followed along.
Fires burned in the fortifications. Tavi could hear the screams of wounded men and terrified horses. There were shouts and cries all around them, and confusion ran rampant.
Tavi reached the captain's command tent and stopped in his tracks, stunned.
Where Cyril's command had been, there was now a great, gaping hole torn in the blackened earth. Fires burned in patches all around it. Bodies—and pieces of bodies—lay scattered in the ruins.
Overhead, the thunder from the unnatural storm rumbled in what sounded to Tavi like hungry anticipation.
"Scipio!" shouted a frantic voice, and Tavi turned to find Max running forward through the chaos.
"What happened?" Tavi asked, his voice shocked.
"Lightning." Max panted. He had lost half of one eyebrow, singed away by the head, and there were blisters on the skin of his forehead and along one cheekbone. "A crowbegotten wall of lightning. Came down like a hammer, not twenty feet away." Max stared at the ruins. "Right on top of the captain's meeting."
…
We've got two more survivors so far."
"Who?" Tavi asked.
"That's the thing," Foss said. "I can't tell."
Tavi winced.
"They'll have to tell us if they wake up. Burns are too bad. Look like they got skinned. Some of it was so hot, pieces of their armor melted." Foss let out a shaking breath. "I've seen bad. But never bad like that."
- Academ's Fury
Sari's hand flashed to his satchel and flicked it open, and Tavi suddenly realized that the pale leather case, like the ritualist's mantles, was made of human skin. Sari withdrew his hand, flinging it straight up over his head. His hand was covered in fresh, scarlet blood, and the droplets flew into the air, scattering, vanishing. He howled something in Canish, and the acolytes behind him joined in.
Tavi turned his horse, desperate to flee, but everything moved with nightmarish deliberation. Before he could give the beast its head, the clouds above them lit up with an inferno of scarlet lightning. Tavi looked up in time to see an enormous wheel of streaming lightning suddenly condense into a single, white-hot point overhead.
Tavi tried to kick the horse into a run, but he was moving too slowly, and he could not tear his eyes from the gathering stroke of power—the same power that had massacred the First Aleran's officers, none of whom were as helpless as Tavi.
The point of fire suddenly expanded into a blinding white light and an avalanche of furious noise, and Tavi opened his mouth and screamed in terror and disbelief. He never heard it.
- Academ's Fury
Or call down skyfire.
That was when the Canim unleashed their sorcery once again.
Marcus had little time to gawk, but he did catch a patch of unusual motion at one of the fallen palisades. A number of Canim figures in mantles of pale, pale leather appeared, filing steadily forward, swinging lit braziers in rhythm in front of them. They fell into a line, facing the hill, and then as one reached their clawed hands into gaping pouches slung across their bodies. They withdrew their hands as one single motion, sending out splattering arcs of scarlet liquid, and as one body the ritualists threw their heads back and howled.
Lines of violet flame sleeted suddenly from the skies. They struck the hillside near the distinctively deadly forms of the battling Knights and erupted into spheres of hellish fire and light. Men screamed and died, and if the skyfire wasn't the enormous destructive force that had struck the First Aleran at the Elinarch two years before, the more precise, smaller eruptions of fire certainly struck with telling effect.
The Aleran lines collapsed. Marcus screamed orders, dragged at wounded men, and had no idea how he managed to avoid all the Canim weapons that came screaming at him. He remembered felling one Cane that had leapt upon a badly burned Knight he recognized as Maximus, and then his weapon was struck from his hand. He fell on Antillar's wounded form, covering them both with his shield, and then there was a flash of steel, and Crassus was at his side, long blade in his right hand, and the curved, heavy blade of a Cane dagger in his left.
Crassus dealt two death strokes in as many seconds, driving the Canim back. "Inside!" he screamed, and rushed forward.
It was not a second too soon. Another delicate-looking line of violet skyfire descended upon him and exploded into a blinding sphere of heat and light. A second later it was gone, leaving a circle of blackened earth behind it—and Crassus with it, untouched by the fire, the bloodred gems in the hilt of the Canim dagger glittering in the lowering light.
…
Streamers of violet fire fell upon the hilltop in what was almost a regular cadence, slamming onto the walls and blasting great gouges from the stones, or from the earth when they struck the ground—and presumably from any Aleran unfortunate enough to be beneath one.
- Captain's Fury
They can summon a horrible dissolving gas.
As he watched, one of the ritualists thrust a clawed paw-hand into a leather basket-pouch at his side, and withdrew it soaked in dark crimson blood. He flung the blood out over the edge of the battlements he defended just as a number of Vord scaled the top simultaneously, threatening to create a breach in the defenses. Tavi couldn't hear the Cane from his position, but he saw the ritualist lift his muzzle to the night sky, jaws parted in a primal howl.
There was a flicker in the air as the droplets of blood flew, green-gold sparkles, and suddenly a cloud of sickly green gas billowed forth from the empty air. The gas rolled out in an instant, engulfing the threatening Vord—who simply dissolved, convulsing in agony, their bodies liquefying with terrifying abruptness as the green cloud touched them. The ritualist lifted the bloodstained paw-hand and slammed it down, as if smashing a book down upon an insect, and the green cloud descended over the edge of the battlements just as abruptly.
Tavi had seen some of his own men slain by an identical ritual-working during his two-year battle with the Narashans. He had no qualms with watching the Vord be slain, but he was just as glad that he did not see the carnage that the ritualist had just visited upon whatever creatures were unfortunate enough to be below that section of the wall.
- Princeps' Fury
And in combination with Knights they summon thunderclouds and bind them to Knights to allow them to more easily call down lightning strikes and conceal locations.
As the Legions and their Canim allies swept down from the hills above Riva, the low-hanging clouds and curtains of rain seemed to cling to the banners of Aleran troops and Canim warriors alike, bound by a myriad of misty, intangible scarlet threads that stretched out into the air all around. The leashed clouds engulfed the entire force, concealing their numbers and identity from outside observation—courtesy of the Canim ritualists, led by their new commander, Master Marok.
Within the cloud, Crassus and the fliers of the Knights Pisces hovered over the heads of the marching forces. The Knights Aeris had gathered up the swirling energy of a dozen thunderbolts from a storm that had come through before first light. The strokes of lightning rumbled and crackled back and forth between the Knights, blue-white beasts caged in a circle of windcrafting. Their growling thunder rolled out ahead of the advancing host, concealing the sound of marching troops and cavalry alike.
- First Lord's Fury
They frequently throw hurricanes at Alera at great cost.
There," Gaius said. "The eighth hurricane this spring."
After a hushed moment, Miles said, "It's huge."
"Yes. And this isn't the worst of them. They keep making them bigger."
Miles looked up at the First Lord sharply. "Someone is crafting these storms?"
Gaius nodded. "The Canim ritualists, I believe. They've never exerted this much power across the seas before. Ambassador Varg denies it, of course."
- Furies of Calderon
Canim Ritualists, in their greatest ritual known as the Night of Red Stars cover an entire continent in eldritch horror clouds that descend from ~4,000 feet to just above treetops.
I believe," Gaius said, "that it is some working of the Canim. The change came from the west and spread over toward the east. I suspect that it is some kind of very high, very fine cloud, that colors the light of the stars as they shine down."
"A cloud?" Amara murmured. "Can you not simply examine it?"
Gaius frowned faintly. "In fact, no. I've sent dozens of furies up to investigate. They did not return."
Amara blinked. "Something . . . damaged them?"
"So it would seem," Gaius said.
"But . . . I did not think the Canim could do such an enormous thing. I know their rituals give them some kind of rude parallel to Aleran furycraft, but I never thought that they could manage something on this scale."
"They never have," Gaius replied. "But the remarkable thing about this working of theirs is that it has had some far-reaching effects I have never encountered before. I have been unable to observe activities and events passing in the Realm beyond perhaps a hundred miles of Alera Imperia. I suspect that the other High Lords have been similarly blinded."
Amara frowned. "How could the Canim have done such a thing?"
Gaius shook his head. "I've no way of knowing. But whatever they have done, the upper air groans with it. Travel has become quite dangerous in only a few hours. I suspect that it will only become worse as time passes. Which is why I must take my leave at once. I have a great many things to do, and if air travel becomes as difficult as I suspect it might, then I must set out at once—and so must you."
...
Crassus licked his lips, eyes focused into the distance. "I was point man on the air patrol, sir. Bardis and Adrian, there, were my flankers. I wanted to take advantage of the cover, hide us in the edges where we could still watch the ground ahead. I led them up there."He shuddered and closed his eyes.
"Go on," Cyril said, his voice quiet and unyielding.
Crassus blinked his eyes several times. "Something came out of the cloud. Scarlet things. Shapes."
"Windmanes?"
"No, sir. Definitely not. They were solid, but . . . amorphous, I think, is the word. They didn't have a fixed profile. And they had all these legs. Or maybe tentacles. They came out of nowhere and grabbed us with them."
Cyril frowned. "What happened?"
"They started choking us. Pulling at us. More of them kept coming." Crassus took a deep breath. "I burned off the one that had me, and tried to help them. I cut at them, and it seemed to hurt them—but it didn't slow them down. So I started chopping at those leg things until Bardis was free. I think Adrian had an arm free and struck, too. But neither of them could keep themselves up, so I had to catch them before they fell. Sir Fantus helped, or I would have lost one of them."
Cyril pursed his lips, brows furrowed in consternation. "Lady Antillus? How fare the men?"
The High Lady glanced up from her work. "They've been burned. Some sort of acid, I believe. It is potent—it is still dissolving flesh."
"Will they live?"
"Too soon to tell," she said, and turned back to the tubs.
Cyril grunted, rubbed at his jaw, and asked Fantus, "Did you get a feel for the crafting behind this overcast?"
"No," Fantus said. "It isn't furycrafted."
More thunder rumbled. Scarlet lightning danced behind veils of clouds. "It's natural?"
Fantus stared up. "Obviously not. But it isn't furycraft."
"What else could it be?" Cyril murmured. He glanced at the wounded Knights. "Acid burns. Never heard of a fury that could do that."
…
Tavi glanced back at the tubs and nearly threw up.
One of the men was dead, horribly dead, his body shrunken and wrinkled like a rotten grape, gaping holes burned into the body. The other Knight was breathing in frenzied gasps, his eyes wide and bulging, while the healers worked frantically to save him.
…
The scarlet haze condensed into dozens of smaller, opaque, scarlet clouds. Ruddy vinelike appendages emerged from the undersides of each smaller cloud, and writhed and whipped through the air with terrifying and purposeful motion.
An eerie shriek like nothing Amara had ever heard assaulted her ears.
A dozen bloody vines shot toward her pursuer.
The enemy Knight loosed his shot. The impact of the bizarre tendrils sent the shaft wide.
The Knight screamed, one long, continuous sound of agony and terror, a young man's voice that cracked in the middle.
Dark crimson cloudbeasts surrounded him, vines ripping, tearing.
His screams stopped.
…
She was in time to be sprinkled with the blood of the Knight taken by the cloudbeasts. Amara had beat it to the ground.
…
Lady Aquitaine lifted her eyes to the red skies above.
Droplets of blood still fell, tiny beads of red that had once been a human being.
...
They had gained nearly four thousand feet of altitude before the sun rose, reducing the landscape beneath to a broad diorama, every feature on it seemingly rendered in miniature.
...
The sky became covered with a low, growling overcast, perpetually rumbling with thunder and flickering with lightning, though no rain ever fell. The deadly scarlet haze now reached down to some point within the overcast. One afternoon, in an attempt to rise higher in the hopes of it making their travel quicker, Amara realized that they had accidentally ascended into the red haze, and she saw those deadly creatures begin to condense from the fine mist. Amara had led the coach in an emergency dive back out of the clouds, and no one was harmed, but they scarcely dared fly too much higher than the treetops lest the creatures renew the attack.
…
"No," Giraldi said. "There's something about this storm that keeps Knights Aeris from flying more than a few yards off the ground.
- Academ's Fury
Some of the general abilities of their blood magic, though the many hurricanes they threw at Alera and the Night of Red Stars costed millions of Canim to do it.
"Take no particular offense, Aleran," Varg rumbled. "They are not choosy about which blood they take, so long as it is from a reasoning being. The ritualists have killed more of my people than the whole of your race. The sorceries they used to assault your shores, block your skies, redden your stars would have required millions upon millions of lives."
"And you allow them to exist?" Tavi spat.
"They serve a purpose," Varg replied. "They have the power to bless bloodlines. Increase fertility in our females. Increase the bounty of crops, and to lessen the ravages of storms, droughts, plagues."
"And you are willing to sacrifice your peoples lives for them to do it?"
"My people are willing to make a gift of their blood upon death," Varg growled. "Though there are times when a particularly powerful ritualist forgets that his power should be used to serve his people. Not the other way around."
- Captain's Fury
The more talented Ritualists can call the horrible red tentacle clouds to ground level as precision attacks.
Marok stepped forward with four other Canim wearing vord-chitin mantles rather than those made of human leather. He snarled something in a language Fidelias did not understand, and the five ritualists drew their daggers in a single, simultaneous motion. A similar movement laid open a long cut upon each of their forearms, bloodying the bright steel of the daggers. They all threw their arms up, scattering droplets of blood to the sky, where they flickered and vanished—until with a single unified howl they lowered their arms—and the misty sky suddenly boiled with dark clouds and fell in time with the ritualists' arms.
Something like a thundercloud fell over the beleaguered Free Aleran cohort, a mass of dark grey. Fidelias thought he could see things writhing within it, sinuous shapes and flickering tentacles.
The vord within the cloud began to shriek and wail in distress.
Marok watched the cloud intently for a moment, then threw his bleeding arm out again, scattering droplets of blood into the darkness of the cloud, crying, "It is enough! The demons are not for you!" in Canish.
The cloud went still. The brisk spring wind soon began dispersing it, and when it had all washed away a moment later, the Free Aleran legionares stood entirely alone, with confused, stunned looks on their faces, their chests heaving for breath.
There was no sign whatsoever of the vord who had been attacking them.
Marok turned to face Fidelias and took on the posture of a Cane waiting for the answer to a question.
"Impressive," Fidelias said.
"Clouds of acid are for amateurs," Marok replied. He glanced over his shoulder at most of the other ritualists, who continued their steady chant and occasional self-bloodletting. None of them looked at him. Marok growled in unmistakable satisfaction.
- First Lord's Fury
Marat
Marat gain various powers and abilities depending on the animals they are bonded with. Marat bonded to Gargants might gain extreme strength, while those with horses gain extreme dexterity and speed, etc. Here is Doroga, one of if not the strongest Marat, throwing a coffin-sized boulder (assuming granite and that it literally has the dimensions of a coffin it would have a volume of .886 cubic meters and would weigh ~2300kg).
From above came a slow and tortured scream, bellowing in Doroga's basso, filled with anger and defiance Tavi would never have believed that a man could lift a boulder that large. But Doroga appeared at the top of the cliff again, bearing a stone the size of a coffin over his head, arms and shoulders and thighs bulging with effort. He flexed the whole of his body, a ponderous motion, and the huge stone hurtled down toward the creature.
- Furies of Calderon
Marat of the Herbane clan can jump 15 to 20 feet vertically.
There were no scaling poles this time, no ram to assault the gates. Instead, the first rank of the Marat, howling their defiance, simply hurled itself at the walls and, running at a furious pace, leapt up to the top.
- Furies of Calderon
The Gargants, specifically this massive specimen of one, are extremely strong and often used as siege beasts. Here one tears down walls 30 feet tall and similarly thick.
The walls of Garrison stood, thirty feet high and grim, and bristled with razor-edged daggers of the same black stone, Amara could now see, that the Marat used for their own weapons.
...
Sudden thunder shook the air in a roar that made what came before sound like nothing more than the rumbling of an empty belly. Screams, frantic, howling cries, rose in a symphony. The walls themselves shook, just beside the gates. They shook again, beneath a thunderous impact, and a web of cracks spread out through them. Again, the thunder rammed against the outer walls, and with a roar an entire section gave in. Alerans on the battlements had to scramble to either side, stone tumbling down in huge and uneven sections, dust flooding out, light from the newly risen sun pouring through the dust in a sudden flood of terrible golden splendor.
Through the sudden gap in the walls came a thunderous bellow, and the vast shape of a black-coated gargant, a gargant bigger than any such beast Amara had ever seen. Bloodied, painted in wild and garish colors, the beast seemed something out of a madman's nightmare. It lifted its head and let out another bellowing roar and tore down another ten feet of wall with its vast digging claws. The gargant bellowed again and shouldered its way through the wall and into the courtyard itself.
- Furies of Calderon
The Vord I did a decent amount of spelling out in their number section so will leave that for now. Anyways there is obviously a lot more that could be spelled out but I think this can give a good example of the things people will be dealing with against Codex Alera.
