The Burning God characters

Also known as Fang Runin

Appears from the start

One-handed, permanently anchored to Kitay, and back in the province she was born in, Rin intends to raise Nikan's poorest people into an army and take the country from both the Empire and the Dragon Republic that discarded her. Her fire is under control for the first time in her life; very little else about her is. The southerners who follow her treat her less as a general than as a figure out of their own religion, and she does not discourage it.

Appears from the start

Rin's anchor and chief strategist, bound to her permanently: he feels what she feels, steadies her mind when the Phoenix has hold of it, and will die if she does. He runs the army's supply and planning and is the only person willing to argue with her about what she does with it.

Appears from the start

A Sinegard classmate and survivor of Golyn Niis, now one of Rin's officers and her best marksman. Blunt, impatient and without illusions about anyone she serves with.

Appears from the start

A Cike veteran who fights with a nine-pointed rake and channels a boar god, and one of the last of the unit still standing.

Appears from the start

An enormous Cike soldier who channels a monkey god, still fighting to keep it from taking him over for good.

Appears from the start

The Cike's explosives-maker, the youngest of them, who has kept the unit supplied with fire powder through two wars.

Also known as The Vipress

Appears from the start

The deposed empress of Nikan, travelling with Rin as something between prisoner, advisor and hostage. She is a shaman whose god works on perception, she is a great deal older than she appears, and she is the only living person who can explain how the Nikara Empire was actually made and by whom.

First appears in chapter 3

One of the warlords directing the Southern Coalition, the alliance of southern militias that has been fighting the stranded Mugenese occupation without help from the Empire or the Republic. He is willing to use Rin's reputation and unwilling to hand her his army.

First appears in chapter 3

A southern militia commander who has fought the Mugenese occupation with ambushes and local knowledge, and who speaks for the peasant recruits who make up most of the Coalition's strength. Charismatic, plain-spoken and enormously popular with the rank and file, he becomes Rin's closest ally among the southern leadership.

First appears in chapter 5

Rin's younger foster brother from Tikany, a small child when she left for Sinegard and nearly grown by the time she comes back to a town the war has emptied.

First appears in chapter 10

Rin's rival since Sinegard, now the Dragon Republic's commander in the field and the Hesperians' working partner in Nikan. He is a shaman himself, bound since childhood to a river dragon, and the only person in the country able to meet Rin's fire with anything comparable.

First appears in chapter 10

Warlord of the Dragon Province, Nezha's father and head of the Dragon Republic, governing the greater part of Nikan in partnership with the Hesperians who recognised his state and armed it.

First appears in chapter 12

The Hesperian missionary and natural scientist who studied Rin at Arlong and regards shamans as diseased rather than divine. Her order's assessment of Nikan determines how much of the country the Hesperians intend to govern themselves.

Also known as Master Jiang, The Gatekeeper

First appears in chapter 26

Rin's vanished master from Sinegard, found sealed inside the stone of the Chuluu Korikh: far older than any ordinary man, badly damaged, and lucid only in stretches. The gardener who taught her meditation and refused to fight in her war was one of the three shamans who founded the Nikara Empire.

Also known as The Dragon Emperor

First appears in chapter 28

The Dragon Emperor: the third of the shamans who drove the Federation out two generations ago and built the Nikara Empire, sealed inside the Chuluu Korikh for decades. Commanding, magnetic and entirely without restraint, he intends to have his country back on his own terms.