A Reaper at the Gates characters

Appears from the start

An ancient jinn, the only one of his kind left free, who spent a thousand years in human shapes gathering the scattered fragments of the Star in order to break his people out of the prison the Scholars built for them. He has the last piece now. Patient beyond human measure and entirely without pity for the descendants of the people who wronged him, he moves through the Empire's politics as an ally of convenience to whoever serves his purpose.

First appears in chapter 2

A Scholar woman who has learned what the man she trusted actually was and what her mother's armlet was worth to him. She travels with her brother Darin and a small company, hunting for anything that can stop the Nightbringer before he frees the jinn, and trying to warn a Scholar population the Empire is preparing to exterminate. Her ability to pass unseen comes and goes without warning, and she has begun to suspect why.

First appears in chapter 3

Once a Mask and an Aspirant for the throne, now bound to the Waiting Place as apprentice to its Soul Catcher. His work is to move the ghosts of the dead onward before their grief turns them dangerous, and the forest also holds the imprisoned jinn. The magic that should make the work possible will not answer him properly, because it requires a detachment from the living that he has not managed and does not want.

First appears in chapter 3

The immortal jinn who has kept the Waiting Place for centuries as penance for betraying her own kind to the Scholars, and who bound Elias to the forest to save his life. She is training him quickly because she believes her time is short and because the jinn behind their prison walls have begun to press outward. She will not tell him everything she knows about how the imprisonment was done.

First appears in chapter 4

Blood Shrike of the Martial Empire, second to an Emperor she despises and the only reason his throne is still standing. Her surviving family are hostages in all but name, and the Empire is coming apart at the edges under Karkaun raids and Keris Veturia's ambition. She has a healing magic she can barely control and cannot afford anyone to learn about.

First appears in chapter 4

The Mask assigned to the Blood Shrike's service, still watching her, still saying little. Helene has spent a year assuming he informs on her to the Commandant and has never caught him doing it. He is competent, unbothered by her hostility, and steadily present at every moment when she has no one else.

First appears in chapter 2

Laia's older brother, recovering from Kauf but permanently marked by it. He is the only Scholar alive who knows how to make Martial steel, which makes him the most valuable person in the Empire to several parties at once, and he is determined to be more than a secret somebody is guarding.

First appears in chapter 5

The scarred old Scholar woman who ran the Commandant's kitchen at Blackcliff and now travels with Laia. She is brutal in her assessments, contemptuous of hope, and better informed about the Empire's inner workings than a household slave has any business being. She refuses to explain where the knowledge or the scars came from.

First appears in chapter 7

The Emperor of the Martial Empire, holding power through fear and the Blood Shrike's competence. He is coming apart: sleepless, tormented by the brother he killed to take the throne, and increasingly unable to tell what is in front of him from what is not. His court is full of people waiting for him to fall.

Also known as the Commandant

First appears in chapter 7

Elias's mother, commandant of Blackcliff and mistress of the Empire's wealthiest city, patiently assembling everything she needs to take the throne. She has a plan for the Scholar population that amounts to their extermination, and an ally older and stranger than anyone in the Empire suspects. Every order the Blood Shrike is given seems to have been arranged so that carrying it out will destroy her.

First appears in chapter 7

Helene's younger sister, married to the Emperor and carrying his child, which makes her both the most protected and the most endangered person in the capital. She has proved tougher than her family expected and has begun to understand the court as a system she can work inside rather than merely survive.

First appears in chapter 20

A Scholar of Adisa in the free kingdom of Marinn, wealthy, talkative and apparently frivolous, who commands the wights: small invisible creatures that carry messages and gossip across the whole city for him. He knows everything happening in Adisa and can be persuaded to share almost none of it. He becomes Laia's route into the northern Scholar community.

First appears in chapter 20

The heir to the throne of Marinn, the free kingdom north of the Empire, governing in place of her ageing father King Irmand. Marinn has sheltered Scholar refugees for generations, and whether it will risk a war with the Martials on their behalf is her decision to make.

First appears in chapter 31

Elias's grandfather and the former head of Gens Veturia, a retired general with no illusions about his daughter Keris and no affection left for her. Blunt, old and still dangerous, he is one of the few Martials with the standing to oppose the Commandant openly and the inclination to help the Blood Shrike do it.

First appears in chapter 30

The warlord leading the Karkaun tribes against the Empire from the north, a butcher who fights alongside warlocks and whose armies have grown far better supplied and far better informed than they have any right to be. He wants the Martial heartland, and he is prepared to spend as many of his own people as it takes.