Strengths and Weaknesses
The Cauldron-Born's greatest advantage is that they are not alive, and thus cannot be killed. They feel no pain or fear or mercy, do not need water or food or sleep, and they never question orders because they possess no soul or memory of who they were in life. Simply put, they are puppets of Arawn who will obey his every command. However, the Cauldron-Born are not omnipotent. Their power diminishes the further they get from Annuvin and the Black Cauldron. In fact it is possible for them to stray far enough that they return to a normal corpse. However, it seems they have an innate knowledge of exactly how far they can go before this happens. This limit aside they only have one true weakness, the black sword Dyrnwyn. In The High King Taran strikes a Cauldron warrior with the sword, which in turn kills all of them.
Because of their great strengths the Cauldron-Born make formidable warriors. In The High King they slew the high-king Math and in The High King, during the battle of Caer Dathyl, they caused the attacking army to draw back into formation, parting like a gate as the Cauldron-Born marched towards the castle. Since the Cauldron-Born never speak, it would seem that they cannot engage in coordinated tactics or strategic movement during a battle, at least not without some person present to relay information. They do, however, understand speech in some fashion: in The Book of Three Achren gives them orders in an unknown language.
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