>>Kind of like how with Meraud giving him strength, Vorclaf was able to stand up to Lyras and The Hunger.
>>For a few minutes.

This stuff was touched on in-game and in the IC write ups, but to speak of it a bit more plainly...

The Hunger and Meraud are both extraplanar creatures that are so "large" that they cannot encompass their full being into something as quaint as three-dimensional space. While there might be radical differences in power and composition out there in the greater universe, when it comes to a divine slugging match on the surface of planet Elanthia, the individual power of the god or demon doesn't really matter so much. Instead, we're talking bandwidth: how big of a conduit does the creature have to manifest itself?

Devotion, the Cleric's connectivity to the gods, is a relatively mild version of this concept -- using faith and ritual cleanliness to connect to the Immortals and draw down a bit of them into day to day reality. More powerful avatars and manifestations can exist too, though the more an extraplanar creature -- even one as "nice" as a god -- gets in, the weirder and more reality breaking it gets.

Vorclaf and Lyras's fight, more than anything else, was a contest between which mortal vessel could bring down as much of the divine/demonic as possible and create a localized superiority, presumably enough to obliterate the other person. Vorclaf was a very impressive sight, but Lyras cheated: due to her undead state, she was able to do a blood ritual that would literally kill anyone who tried it. Using the symbolism and power of her own heart's blood, she was able to win the fight.

And then she crawled away for a few years to sleep it off.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas