Rhythm of War characters

Appears from the start

The sworn Windrunner and founder of Bridge Four, now a battle-worn commander of flying knights. Years of war and loss have taken a heavy toll on him, and though his power to protect is unmatched, he is exhausted and haunted, unable so far to speak the next oath his order demands of him. He remains bonded to the honorspren Syl.

Appears from the start

The Lightweaver knight, now married to Adolin Kholin, who works covert and dangerous missions and moves among several carefully maintained personas. Skilled at illusion and disguise, she is entangled with a ruthless secret society and still guards painful truths about her own past behind her masks.

Appears from the start

The Bondsmith who leads the coalition against the enemy, bonded to the spirit of the storm and able to wield rare, unifying power. Having claimed the whole of his violent past, he is now a disciplined statesman and general, searching the storm-visions and history for a way to win a war against a god.

Appears from the start

The scholar-queen of Alethkar and Dalinar's wife, who leads the coalition's scientists in the study of the ancient devices that power their world. Brilliant, methodical, and driven, she pushes the boundaries of the era's mechanical magic in search of weapons and defenses against an enemy out of legend.

Appears from the start

Dalinar's elder son, a superb duelist and now Shallan's husband, who remains conspicuously without a Radiant's power in a family and army increasingly full of knights. Loyal and unusually principled, he carries a lifeless Shardblade he treats with strange, stubborn tenderness.

Appears from the start

The scholar-princess who now sits as Queen of Alethkar, an Elsecaller among the Radiants. Coldly rational and formidably learned, she weighs the hardest choices of the war with a philosopher's detachment, willing to consider options others cannot bear to name.

Appears from the start

Dalinar's quiet younger son, a Radiant whose gift lets him glimpse possible futures, a power unsettling even to his allies. Gentle and perceptive, often more comfortable with numbers and patterns than with people, he has found a measure of belonging he never expected among the reborn knights.

Also known as Szeth-son-son-Vallano

Appears from the start

The Shin former assassin, now sworn to Dalinar as a Skybreaker seeking lawful justice rather than blind obedience, and bearer of a strange, hungry living sword. Quiet and self-condemning, he longs to answer for his past and to one day return to the homeland that cast him out.

Appears from the start

The aged king of Kharbranth, secretly bound to the enemy god yet still treated as an ally by the coalition. His mind swings between dullness and terrible brilliance from day to day, and he pursues a cold, sweeping plan he believes is the only way to save any fragment of humanity, whatever the moral cost.

Appears from the start

A listener scholar who once helped bring her people into the enemy's service and now moves among the ranks of the reborn immortals, privately doubting the cause she advanced. She carries hidden guilt over her role in her people's fate and secret hopes for a different future for them.

Also known as Vyre

Appears from the start

Kaladin's former friend from Bridge Four, now a willing servant of the enemy and the murderer of a king. Numbed to his own guilt and drawn to a philosophy that promises freedom from pain, he has become a cold and dangerous instrument of the immortals, at ease with killing.

Also known as Lady of Wishes

First appears in chapter 30

An ancient and cultured Fused, one of the enemy's reborn immortal warriors, renowned among her kind as both a commander and a scholar. Coolly courteous and endlessly patient, she takes a scientist's interest in the nature of power itself and is willing to pursue radical means to bring the eternal war to an end.