The Black Prism characters

Also known as Kip Delauria

Appears from the start

A fifteen-year-old boy from Rekton, a small town in the ruined satrapy of Tyrea. Heavy, sharp-tongued and used to being the butt of the town's jokes, he lives close to destitution because his mother spends what little they have on the drug haze. He has never been told who his father is. He scavenges the old battlefield at nearby Sundered Rock, where the civil war of sixteen years ago ended, and he reacts to light in ways he does not yet have a name for.

First appears in chapter 2

The Prism: the one living person who can split light into every colour, and by doing so hold the world's magic in balance. He is the spiritual head of the Seven Satrapies and the most powerful drafter alive, sixteen years after winning the False Prism's War against his younger brother Dazen. Charming, restless and privately afraid, he has set himself five great purposes and keeps a careful count of the years he believes he has left.

First appears in chapter 2

Gavin's younger brother, dead sixteen years. When the Chromeria named Gavin the next Prism, Dazen refused to accept it, declared himself Prism instead, and split the Seven Satrapies in a civil war remembered as the False Prism's War. It ended at Sundered Rock in Tyrea, and the histories say Gavin killed him there. Tyrea has been treated as a defeated province ever since.

First appears in chapter 3

A red and green bichrome drafter and a member of the Blackguard, the elite corps sworn to protect the Prism and the White. Before the war she was betrothed to Gavin Guile. A fire at her family's estate killed several of her brothers and was blamed on his brother Dazen, and the war that followed finished the ruin of her house. She is small, fast, quick to anger, and has never entirely put down her grievance against Gavin.

First appears in chapter 3

A man held in a seamless cell of blue luxin somewhere beneath the world, fed through a slot and visited by exactly one person. He insists on his own name, keeps count of the years, and works patiently at the only project left to him: getting out.

Also known as Lina

Appears from the start

Kip's mother, worn down by years of the drug haze and by whatever she has been running from. She is cruel to her son as often as she is affectionate, and she has kept hidden both the name of his father and an object she has never explained.

Appears from the start

Rekton's dyer, a quiet widower whose daughter is away studying at the Chromeria. The town respects him for reasons it cannot quite articulate, and he is plainly more than a provincial craftsman who happened to settle in a backwater.

Also known as Liv

First appears in chapter 9

Aliviana Danavis, the dyer's daughter, now a yellow drafter in her final years at the Chromeria. Clever and proud, she is held on a short leash by the debts her schooling has run up and by the fact that she is Tyrean, which in the Seven Satrapies is a thing to apologise for. She knew Kip when they were children in Rekton.

First appears in chapter 6

The self-declared king of Tyrea and son of the satrap the Chromeria deposed at the end of the war. He is assembling an army of soldiers and unlicensed drafters and intends to take back the satrapy his family lost, starting with the towns that submitted.

Also known as Orea Pullawr

First appears in chapter 20

The White: the administrative head of the Chromeria and the deliberate counterweight to the Prism. Elderly and confined to a wheeled chair, she runs the institution's politics, its money and its informants with great patience, and is entirely immune to charm.

First appears in chapter 20

Commander of the Blackguard, a very large Parian officer with a shaved head and an unshakeable calm. He answers to the White and the Prism both, trains his people hard, and is one of the few men Gavin Guile treats as an equal.

First appears in chapter 26

Gavin's father, head of House Guile and the satrapy of Ruthgar's representative on the Spectrum, the council of Colors that governs the Chromeria alongside the White. A lifetime of drafting red has left his eyes unable to bear light, so he conducts all his business from a sealed, unlit room. He is the most dangerous political operator in the Seven Satrapies, plays the card game Nine Kings for stakes that are never really about cards, and treats his family as instruments.

First appears in chapter 27

Gavin's mother and the manager of House Guile's public face and much of its private business. She is warmer to Kip than her husband is and considerably shrewder than she allows herself to appear.

First appears in chapter 88

A man burned almost past recognition, his skin cracked through with seams of every colour of luxin. He takes command of the rebellion's drafters and offers them something the Chromeria never has: a future in which drafters are not put to death when their power runs out, and in which the Chromeria's authority is broken altogether.