Curiously enough, Cradle canon has the exact opposite fight go down: one Monarch fighting with one sage to try to fight the authority and three Heralds to fight the Monarch physically.
From what we see, the Sage is on the defensive the whole time and the three Heralds together don't do so well. Being a Herald and a Sage seems to make the Herald body better and the Sage workings have more authority. The one Sage is more experienced at being a Sage than the Monarch is, but still on the defensive, and the Heralds aren't strong enough to fight the Monarch evenly. All casualties in this fight are on the non-Monarch side.
It's pretty likely to me that "four and four" is more the usual even fight, which is supported by some events in the last book and also that the Eight Man Empire is what it is. Some evidence exists that the numbers can go up or down a bit based on the match-ups of the Sages/Heralds/Monarchs in question.
Going Herald vs Sage is a bit like choosing power vs finesse/enlightenment. Heralds have a
tremendous amount of raw power, and since they're spirits-given-form that power is at once spiritual and physical and anything in between as they choose. This fic uses a line which echoes one in canon, that trying to interfere with a Sage's working without authority of your own is like trying to close a door by blowing on it... and in this metaphor, a Herald has so much raw power that
they can actually blow the door closed.
Sages, meanwhile, have a deep connection to one or more Icons that grant them conceptual powers, powers that tend pretty far towards the abstract and absolute and allow them to punch way, way above their nominal weight class and outright rewrite the laws of reality in their vicinity if they can justify it to their Icon. In some ways, their signature 'level one' skill of speaking reality into another form is also their
capstone, the fact that reality considers them
allowed to tell it what to do, overriding whatever structure might already exist. It doesn't even a hard resource cost (unlike madra, say, which is fundamentally something you expend in measurable, conserved quantities), and if you
do spend resources then Sage authority is a tremendous force multiplier even when doing things that
aren't just plain impossible without it.
And then you hit Monarch, and suddenly you're using 'enough power to blow the house down' (the house is reality)
with the 'proper authorization' so that reality is actively cooperating with you, you're using your abstract high-efficiency conceptual power to
multiply an absolutely absurd amount of raw power.
It's no wonder that Cradle bulges at the seams just to contain them.
And that the Abidan will do a lot to preserver their Cradle.
