The Eye of the Bedlam Bride characters

Appears from the start

Arriving on the eighth floor, a haunted replay of pre-collapse Earth, Carl must fight through a card-game floor built from human memories, including, eventually, his own: the system reconstructs his estranged father's death to see what it does to him. Between card battles he runs assassinations, god-bargains, and Faction Wars politics.

Also known as Donut

Appears from the start

Carl's talking Persian cat and party leader, opening the floor as a Master Telephone Psychic. On a floor built around collectible-card summons she becomes the party's deckmaster, commanding a growing roster of captured monsters and people, and is forced into real command decisions when the fights are too big for her to hide behind Carl.

First appears in chapter 2

Donut's bound manager, a hulking cyclops on this floor. A prologue set decades earlier shows the wound he has carried since his own crawl: a choice engineered by others at the end of his tenth floor that saved his team, ended his brother Uzzi, and left him bound in indenture, the debt at the root of his hatred for certain old acquaintances.

Also known as Psamathe

First appears in chapter 2

The doll-headed goddess-fragment, still hunting for a body and still incapable of subtlety. Her talents for being swallowed by things and for augmenting spells beyond their design both shape the floor's biggest battles, and her newest captor introduces the party to the entity called the Bedlam Bride.

Also known as Katia Grim

Appears from the start

The doppelganger crawler, leading her own squad in Iceland and carrying the Crown of the Sepsis Whore, Eva's dying curse, which means only one of her and Donut can pass the ninth floor. Her hunt for a way out, and the price the floor extracts from her on the way, runs underneath the whole book.

Also known as Ines Quiteria

First appears in chapter 5

A nun of the Cat Girl race traveling with the crawlers Paz and Anton, met in the ruins of remembered Havana. Serene, kind, and inseparable from her companions, she is more complicated than she appears, and the floor's structure eventually sets her squad and Carl's on a collision course.

First appears in chapter 5

A Cuban crawler whose Santero class ties him to the floor's gods and spirits. Devout and good-humored, he pays the price of standing between his friends and an offended god, and his last act is to trust Sister Ines with what he knows.

First appears in chapter 5

Paz's friend and fellow crawler, met in remembered Havana. Loyal and unlucky, he is caught in the middle when the floor's competing deities begin auctioning their favor to the crawlers.

Also known as the Bedlam Bride

First appears in chapter 26

A demigod with the body of a vast spider and a bride's affect, holding court in remembered Cuba with Samantha in her belly. She plays at gentleness, and Carl sees through the performance quickly, but her power is real, her card is priceless, and her interest in Carl outlasts every bargain struck with her.

Appears from the start

The ancient host of the galaxy's most-watched interview program and, since the early floors, Carl and Donut's most powerful and most ambiguous benefactor. Her interest in the pair has always run deeper than ratings, and she shares an old, unexplained history with Mordecai.

First appears in chapter 58

A demon prince of Sheol, pulled onto the floor when mass death triggers a demonic eviction and stuffed into the body of a giant snake. Neither ally nor simple enemy, he wants only to take his evicted kin home, and the crawlers must decide what a bound demon prince is to them.