Light Bringer characters

Also known as The Reaper

Appears from the start

The Reaper, believed dead by most of the worlds after the annihilation of his legions on Mercury. He begins the book a castaway: no army, no fleet, no way home, and no certainty that his wife, his son or his friends are still alive. Stripped of everything that made him the Republic's sword, he has to work out what he is without it, and whether the man the propaganda made of him is worth being.

First appears in chapter 3

The last son of House Bellona, once Darrow's friend at the Institute and then the enemy who hunted him for years. Long exile and captivity have left him without a cause or a home, and circumstance has thrown him back together with the man who destroyed his family. Courteous, exhausted, and still the finest swordsman most people will ever see, he is trying to be something better than what the Society made of him.

Also known as The Storm Knight

First appears in chapter 3

An Olympic Knight of the Rim and son of the late Romulus au Raa, bound by an honor code he applies to himself far more strictly than to anyone else. Far from Io and among people his family calls enemies, he holds to his obligations anyway, and his rigid decency becomes the fixed point the rest of his company navigates by.

First appears in chapter 5

Heir of the Lune line and, since the fall of Mercury, the most celebrated figure in the Gold cause. Young, disciplined and persuasive, he has the prestige of a victory and the credibility of having earned it, and he is spending both to gather the Society's fractured survivors behind his idea of order. He still believes he is the reasonable one.

First appears in chapter 10

Daughter of the Ash Lord, the commander who took Mercury, and now the ranking power of the Gold cause with the largest fleet in the solar system under her. Indulgent, theatrical and entirely ruthless, she intends to finish the Republic, and she regards her brilliant young Lune protege as an asset she owns.

Also known as The Minotaur

First appears in chapter 21

A Gold warlord of enormous appetite and equally enormous skill, famous for his vanity, his cruelty and his taste for speeches. Once among the Society's most feared commanders, he is at large again and thrown in with company that would have been unthinkable to him, an ally nobody wants and nobody can spare.

Also known as Lyria of Lagalos

First appears in chapter 12

The Red woman from the Martian camps who was blamed for the abduction of the Sovereign's son and who survived the collapse of Luna. Hardened by everything the past year did to her and out of patience with people who use her, she is looking for the Obsidian woman who disappeared on the night the children were freed.

Also known as Mustang

First appears in chapter 14

Sovereign of what is left of the Solar Republic, governing a state that has lost its expeditionary army, the working parts of its capital, and its most famous soldier inside a single year. Pragmatic, tired and formidably clear-eyed, she is trying to keep a republic alive while the people around her argue for a strongman, and she has to fight a war she cannot win by force alone.

First appears in chapter 18

The young son of Darrow and Virginia, returned to his mother after his abduction and the violence that followed it. He has his father's stubbornness and his mother's mind, and he has learned far too early what his family's name costs the people who carry it.

First appears in chapter 21

Sevro's wife, heir to the Julii fortune, and one of the Republic's fiercest Gold partisans. Blunt, fearless and lethal in a fight, she has lost more to this war than almost anyone and answers grief with action.

First appears in chapter 40

The Obsidian woman who vanished on the night the abducted children were freed, wanted by the Republic for a crime she did not choose. Immensely strong and unusually gentle, raised inside the Republic rather than among her own people, she is a long way from anyone who knows her and a long way from anywhere that would take her in.

Also known as Goblin

First appears in chapter 77

Darrow's oldest friend, founder of the Howlers, and the one person who has never once had to be persuaded to follow him. Whatever the war has done to him since Mercury, his loyalty is unchanged.