I do like stumbling on new facts years after I first experienced something
I’m currently re-reading the Codex Alera -- a fantasy series by Jim Butcher -- and as I near the end again I got to thinking about the Vord, the world-threatening antagonists of the last two books. There are a few hints as to their origin throughout the series, but we never do get anything concrete and what we do learn is vague and distorted as legends passed down for millennia. We-the-audience are left in the same position as the characters themselves, scrambling to make sense of an unknown enemy with very little information to work with and no confirmation that our guesses are anywhere close to accurate.
From their apparent knowledge that there are other planets, and a reference to living between stars, we can glean that they are somehow a space-traveling race, but that’s really it. And even that’s vague and could indicate something else (For example, those comments might just mean that they are aware of the process which transported them and the other races to Carna even if they don’t have any control over it). Their origin and ultimate intentions are completely untouched.
So I went browsing on-line to see if maybe there had been any behind-the-scenes information revealed while the series was being published. That’s when I found Jim Butcher’s comment on the valley where the Vord were first discovered, and the strange maybe-metallic-sort-of-like-a-tree-but-not-really-column in its center:
No one in Alera has the phrase "impact crater" in his vocabulary, but if they did...
And that one sentence changes the entire game. The Vord are extra-terrestrial aliens, who apparently have spacetravel. They crashed in Alera many years ago, with one Queen surviving in the spaceship and incubating/hibernating/maturing until it was ready to emerge. It also lends credence to the “They are a terraforming process” theory that’s been bandied about for years.
All from just that one sentence.
