A Sky Beyond the Storm characters

Also known as the Meherya

Appears from the start

The jinn who broke his people out of a thousand years of imprisonment and now leads them against the human kingdoms that put them there. His own kind call him the Meherya, the beloved. He is unhurried, articulate and without any interest in negotiation, and the grief underneath his campaign is older than every institution he is dismantling.

First appears in chapter 2

A Scholar leader in a world where the freed jinn are burning through kingdom after kingdom. She has no armlet, no reliable magic and no illusions left about what the Nightbringer is willing to do, and she is the person most determined to find the thing that will end him. Her brother, her mother and a network of Scholars in the free lands work with her, and the Martial civil war leaves her allies to choose from among people who have all been her enemies.

First appears in chapter 3

The keeper of the Waiting Place, who gave up his name and everything he felt in order to make its magic answer him. He ferries the dead onward and does not remember why he ever wanted anything else, except in flashes that the magic immediately smooths away. With the jinn free and a war beginning, the dead are arriving faster than one Soul Catcher can move them.

First appears in chapter 5

The force behind the Soul Catcher's work, ancient and mostly silent, which binds its servant to the Waiting Place and withdraws its power whenever he reaches for a living attachment. It is not explained to him, it does not argue, and it has held every Soul Catcher to the same bargain.

First appears in chapter 6

Blood Shrike of a broken Empire, holding the north for her infant nephew against an Empress who murdered most of her family. She commands the last legions willing to follow the old order, fights a civil war and a jinn invasion at once, and is running out of both soldiers and time. Her healing magic is the only reason many of her people are still alive.

Also known as the Commandant

First appears in chapter 6

Empress of the Martial Empire, having taken the throne over the corpse of her predecessor and the ruins of the capital. She rules by terror, prosecutes the extermination of the Scholars, and serves the Nightbringer's purposes while insisting to herself that the arrangement runs the other way. She is Elias's mother and has never once treated that as relevant.

First appears in chapter 6

The Mask who has served the Blood Shrike since she was first sent to hunt Elias, and whose loyalty she long ago stopped questioning. He is steady, unhurried, and the only person who tells her the truth without being asked, and he has stayed at her side through the loss of nearly everything she had.

First appears in chapter 6

Helene's sister, regent of the rump Empire in the north and mother of its infant emperor. She has become a genuinely capable ruler, which does not make her position any safer, and she and Helene do not always agree about what the crown can be spent on.

First appears in chapter 6

The infant Emperor of the Martial Empire, born during the fall of Antium, in whose name the Blood Shrike fights. He is a legitimacy claim before he is a child, and keeping him alive is the axis of every decision his family makes.

First appears in chapter 4

Laia's older brother, the only Scholar who knows how to make Martial steel and now the man arming a people who have been forbidden weapons for five hundred years. He has come a long way from the prisoner Laia carried out of Kauf and no longer accepts being kept out of the dangerous work.

First appears in chapter 4

The Scholar spymaster of Adisa, whose invisible wights carry information faster than any courier in the north. Flippant on the surface and relentless underneath, he supplies Laia with intelligence, money and a Scholar organisation capable of moving thousands of people out of the Empire's reach.

Also known as Cook, the Lioness

First appears in chapter 4

Laia's mother, once the leader of the Scholar resistance and long assumed dead, kept alive and destroyed by Keris Veturia at Blackcliff. Reunited with her surviving children, she is a ruined and formidable woman who understands the Empire's interrogators from the inside and has one unfinished piece of business with the Commandant.

First appears in chapter 9

Elias's grandfather, former head of Gens Veturia, an old general fighting on the Blood Shrike's side of the civil war against his own daughter. He is blunt about the odds and has no intention of surviving the Empire he served.

First appears in chapter 22

A presence of light that begins to speak to Laia, offering her the power to stand against jinn magic and asking her to trust it before it will explain itself. It knows a great deal about the Nightbringer and about the war that imprisoned his people, and it wants him destroyed. What it actually is becomes one of the book's late revelations.