Harry Turtledove's the Darkness series is written in the third-person omniscient format from a large number of viewpoint characters. The first book, Into the Darkness, lists 17 viewpoint characters from 10 nations. Several of these viewpoint characters are killed off as the series progresses and new ones appear to take their place. The viewpoint characters rarely meet, so while the viewpoint may jump several times among a like number of characters in a chapter there is generally a substantial amount of writing done between jumps.
Bembo Bembo is an Algarvian constable from the town of Tricarico in eastern Algarve. He is chubby, lazy, and prone to taking bribes. When Algarve occupies Forthweg, he is sent to serve as a constable in the occupation force - and to take part in rounding up Kaunians and sending them to their deaths. Precisely due to his venality, he is not the worst - being on occasion willing to save some people's lives in return for monetary or sexual favors. Turtledove sets him off in contrast to his partner Oraste, a dour and brutal man who enjoys breaking heads. In the end, Bembo returns to Tricarico and continues working as a constable under Kuusaaman occupation, while Oraste ends up a slave-labourer in the Unkerlanter mines - and there becomes a gang leader among the rough prisoners.
Cornelu Cornelu is a Sibian Leviathan rider - riding on a huge cetacean which can eat a human in two bites but which can become very attached to its rider (and vice versa) and doing the equivalent of a submarine's job - from sinking enemy ships to ferrying spies and saboteurs into enemy territory and taking out VIP refugees such as the exile King of Forthweg. While he is on a mission, the Algarvians invade and conquer his homeland. Bitter but undaunted, he sets his Leviathan to swim to Lagoas and offers his services to their navy. He risks his life again and again and survives. Even when his beloved Leviathan Eforiel is killed by an Algarvian dragon, he swims to the Sibian shore, hides out in a logging camp and eventually manages to steal an Algarvian leviathan and return to the war. Yet upon his triumphant return to liberated Sibiu, he is poisoned by his wife, whom he found pregnant by an Algarvian officer. His wife is beheaded for the murder, and the fate of her unborn bastard and her and Cornelu's daughter is unknown.
Ealstan Ealstan is a young Forthwegian, who appears in the very first and the very last episode of the series. In the beginning, he is a schoolboy, with no greater concerns than boredom at school and an idle curiosity about girls. The series takes him through a growing-up process greatly accelerated through war and occupation. A boys' rivalry with his cousin Sidroc turns literally into a matter of life and death when Sidroc becomes a collaborator with the Algarvian occupiers. Similarly, his meeting Vanai and their falling in love with each other, which in other circumstances might have been no more than an innocent teen love affair, becomes a highly sensitive and dangerous issue since she is one of the persecuted Kaunians, liable to be murdered out of hand for no more reason than having eyes and hair of a certain colour. They become totally committed to each other and get married, despite the laws prohibiting it. Much of Ealstan's story, particularly in the later books, revolves around his involvement in the Forthwegian resistance. He works as a bookkeeper, first for a half-Kaunian musician named Ethelhelm, then after having a falling out with him, he worked for Pybba, who ran the largest pottery business in Eoforwic. Pybba is quite secretive, and after Ealstan showed too much curiosity on where unaccounted-for funds went, he sacked him, but rehired him after hearing about what happened to Leofsig, as Pybba had been funding subversive activities against the Algarvians and now felt he could trust Ealstan. After the uprising at Eoforwic (Warsaw) is crushed by Algarve he evades capture, only to be impressed into the conquering Unkerlanter army. There, he is wounded fighting to take his home town, Gromheort - which turns out to be good fortune as it enables him to reunite with his family. In between all his dangerous adventures, Ealstan develops a skill as an accountant, a trade he learns from his father Hestan, together with also imbibing his father's deeply tolerant, humanitarian and broad-minded world-view.
Fernao Fernao is a Lagoan mage of the first rank, one of the best mages in the kingdom. Starting out as a ship's mage, Fernao is later hired by a mysterious man whose identity is never fully revealed to travel to Yanina and rescue the fugitive King Penda of Forthweg, who fled after the fall of his own kingdom to Algarvian and Unkerlanter forces. Algarve and Unkerlant both demand that Penda be yielded to them, but Fernao, despite the untimely demise of his employer, is able to use his magic to get Penda to the land of the Ice People, and from there eventually makes his way to a Lagoan-held town from which the Sibian leviathan rider Cornelu is able to retrieve them just as Yaninan forces take the town. This experience leads to Fernao being assigned to the Lagoan expedition to take the austral continent from the Yaninans, who are supplying cinnabar (equivalent to oil) to their Algarvian allies from the mines there. Since Algarve has very little cinnabar in her own territory, the eventual Lagoan victory is a crippling blow to the Algarvian war effort. Before this occurs, however, Fernao is seriously injured by a bursting egg. Slowed down by magic, he is flown by dragon via several ships back to Setubal where he slowly starts to recover. He is then assigned to be the Lagoan representative on the Kuusaaman project to unify the laws of similarity and contagion, which ultimately leads to the development of spells equivalent to nuclear weapons. While working on the project, he falls in love with Pekka, a Kuusaaman theoretical sorcerer who developed the basis for their work, and they are married after Pekka's husband is killed during the liberation of Jelgava.
Garivald Garivald, an Unkerlanter peasant, is perhaps analogous to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, though only in having literary talents and falling foul of the Soviet/Unkerlanter authorities, rather than in any specific biographical details. Garivald is an extremely capable and talented man, of which he himself is not fully aware, and would have gotten much further had he not been born an illiterate peasant under an oppressive regime which often rewards loyal service with severe punishment (especially when said service involved too much of an independent initiative). Specifically, he is from Unkerlant's Duchy of Grelz (analogue of the Ukraine), an area with some smouldering separatist tendencies, which makes the central government all the more suspicious of him. Shortly before the arrival of the invading Algarvian army, Garivald discovered that he has a talent for song and poetry, and once under occupation he applied this talent to composing patriotic songs, rousing the people to struggle, which soon became widely popular throughout the Algarvian-occupied part of Unkerlant. The Algarvians captured him, but on the way to execution he was liberated by a band of irregulars, soon became a renowned fighter as well as poet, and became the leader of the band when the previous leader was killed. Supported and complemented by the central government's emissaries as long as he was under occupation, once his band's area of operations was liberated he fell under suspicion - King Swemmel's "inspectors" (secret police) reasoning that a man who wrote subversive songs and headed insurgent guerrillas under one regime might continue to do so under another regime as well. Garivald slipped away in the night and returned to his original village - only to find it completely destroyed in the war, with his wife and children probably dead. Together with his lover Obilot, a former fellow-irregular who had also lost her entire family, he tried to hide out, the two of them cultivating a small forest clearing. Desperately needing to find the seed hidden by peasants in a ruined village, Garivald designs a magic spell which does the trick - but failed to draw from this any conclusion about his own innate power and ability. (Non-mages can perform some simple magic, but usually they use spells designed by professionals.) The couple's hide-out was discovered by the King's men - who didn't realize that "Fariulf", (as he now called himself) is the fugitive poet Garivald, but they did impress him into the army, then going into the offensive against the Algarvians and needing manpower to compensate for its enormous losses. Though a latecomer to the regular army, his evident ability soon earned him the rank of sergeant (had the war lasted a bit longer, he would have probably become an officer). He carefully refrained from composing any more songs, but the officer who taught him his letters soon noticed that his reports had a literary quality to them. Garivald took part in invading Algarve and cutting it in half, and was present when the Unkerlanters effected juncture with the Lagoan/Kuusaaman (Anglo-American) forces. Subsequently, the senior Kussaaman mage Ilmarinen, at the time a colonel, briefly met Garivald/Fariulf and detected in him "a blazing power, not magical though akin to magic power" whose like even Ilmarinen - one of the greatest mages of his generation - never encountered before. However, the Unkerlanters discovered Ilmarien's identity and, (correctly) suspecting him of espionage, barred him from their territory, so that he (and the reader, and for that matter Garivald himself) tantalisingly never found out more about the nature of Garivald's power. Meanwhile, after discharge from the army Garivald/Fariulf once again fell foul of the "inspectors" - for no more reason than that he had been in Algarve (Germany) long enough to notice how much richer and more highly developed than his own country it was - which could (and in fact, did) lead him to subversive thoughts. He was sent to twenty-five years in the cinnabar mines of the Mamming Hills, which amounted to a slow sentence of death. There he came in contact with Algarvian and Algarvian-allied captives, all feeling that on whatever side they had fought they had lost the war. He and Ceorl, who once fought each other, escaped together - Ceorl being killed by pursuing guards but Garivald managing to escape, helped on the way by sympathetic peasants, and rejoin Obilot - where the book finally leaves him. In the course of his escape, one further hint is given of Garivald's power: with a river too wide to swim in front of him and pursuit close behind, Garivald goes to sleep with the "irrational" belief that things will be okay in the morning - and wakes up to find the river full of logs which can be jumped across. It seems that Garivald is somehow able to manipulate events and even out a bit the enormous odds against him. That is all the reader can know, short of Turtledove writing a sequel.
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