The Final Empire characters

Also known as Valette Renoux

Appears from the start

A half-skaa street thief in Luthadel, capital of the Final Empire, small and underfed and about sixteen years old. She survives inside a criminal crew by making herself useful and invisible, and by trusting no one, a lesson her older brother beat into her before he disappeared. She believes she possesses a knack she calls Luck, a faint influence that makes people better disposed toward her and keeps her crewleader from discarding her. She has spent her life under falling ash, hiding from the obligators of the Steel Ministry and from the nobility who own the skaa, and she has no expectation that anything about the world can change.

Also known as The Survivor of Hathsin

First appears in chapter 2

A half-skaa crewleader, charming, theatrical, and famous in Luthadel's underworld. He was sent to the Pits of Hathsin, the Lord Ruler's prison mine, where the labor kills everyone sent there, and he came back alive, the only person ever to do so. He returns to the city changed: he is now a Mistborn, able to burn every Allomantic metal, and he wants far more than the wealthy scores that made his name. His wife Mare died in the Pits, and behind the grin he carries an unbending hatred of the nobility and of the empire that made them.

Also known as Dox

First appears in chapter 3

Kelsier's oldest partner and the crew's organizer. He handles money, supplies, forged papers, and the hundred practical arrangements that keep an operation running while Kelsier makes speeches. He is not an Allomancer and is quietly impatient with those who assume that makes him less useful. Steady and methodical, he is the crew member most likely to say plainly that a plan is madness, and then set about arranging it anyway.

Appears from the start

The brutal thieving crewleader Vin works under, a heavy, self-important man who beats those beneath him and is running an elaborate fraud on the Ministry's canal contracts. He keeps Vin close because her presence makes negotiations go his way, though he does not understand why, and he is quick to remind her that she survives only at his pleasure.

Appears from the start

Vin's older brother, who raised her after their mother was lost and who taught her to survive by expecting betrayal from everyone, including him. He hurt her deliberately so the lesson would hold, then vanished and left her with the crews. He is absent from her life when the book opens, but his voice still argues with her in her head whenever she is tempted to trust somebody.

First appears in chapter 6

The crew's Soother, an Allomancer who burns brass to dampen other people's emotions. Plump, impeccably dressed, and fond of a cane and a glass of wine, he treats manipulation as a craft and complains loudly about any work that requires him to walk. His arch, needling manner hides a genuinely formidable talent for steering a room.

Also known as Hammond

First appears in chapter 6

The crew's Thug, an Allomancer who burns pewter for strength and endurance, built like a soldier and cheerful about it. He enjoys picking at moral and logical puzzles and inflicting them on anyone who will argue back. He keeps his wife and children living away from him under a false name, because association with Kelsier's work would kill them.

Also known as Cladent

First appears in chapter 6

The crew's Smoker, an Allomancer who burns copper to hide other Allomancers from detection. He is old, sour, and lame in one leg from imperial military service, and he runs a woodworking shop whose apprentices and workrooms give the crew a legitimate front and a base in Luthadel. He greets almost everything with a scowl.

Also known as Lestibournes

First appears in chapter 6

Clubs's nephew and the crew's Tineye, an Allomancer who burns tin to sharpen his senses and is used mainly as a scout and lookout. He is a teenager, eager to be taken seriously, and speaks in a clipped eastern street cant that most of the crew cannot follow.

First appears in chapter 6

The leader of the skaa rebellion, a stubborn, unglamorous man who has spent years keeping an underground movement alive in the slums. He hires the crew despite despising thieves on principle, and never stops saying so. He believes in the rebellion as a cause rather than as an operation, and distrusts Kelsier's showmanship.

First appears in chapter 9

A Terrisman steward, tall, calm, and formally polite, assigned to teach Vin how to pass as a noblewoman. He is secretly a Keeper, a Feruchemist who stores knowledge in metalminds so that the histories, languages, and religions the Lord Ruler destroyed are not lost. He collects the beliefs of the dead peoples of the empire and offers them, gently and persistently, to anyone who might want one.

First appears in chapter 8

Kelsier's older brother, severe and disapproving, who ran the skaa rebellion before Yeden and blames Kelsier for the disaster that ended with Kelsier in the Pits. He is a Seeker, an Allomancer who burns bronze to sense others using Allomancy. Grim and self-contained, he agrees to take on the most dangerous role in the crew's plan: joining the Steel Ministry as a spy.

First appears in chapter 15

The heir of House Venture, one of the greatest noble houses of Luthadel. Young, untidy, and habitually late, he prefers to spend a ball hiding in an alcove with a book rather than dancing, which irritates his father and amuses almost nobody else. He reads banned political philosophy and has opinions about how the empire ought to be governed that he is careful to voice only among friends.

Appears from the start

The immortal emperor of the Final Empire, worshipped as God by his own priesthood and ruling from the palace of Kredik Shaw in Luthadel. He has held absolute power for a thousand years, having saved the world from a threat called the Deepness at the Well of Ascension, and he is remembered as having crushed every rebellion since. He is believed to be beyond killing, and the empire's whole order rests on that belief.

First appears in chapter 5

The elite enforcers of the Steel Ministry, inhuman figures with heavy spikes driven point-first through their eye sockets and out the back of the skull, who nonetheless see perfectly well. They hunt skaa who show Allomantic ability, and they are strong, fast, and by reputation impossible to kill. Their attention is the thing every member of the crew most wants to avoid.

First appears in chapter 26

A noblewoman of House Elariel, poised and sharply intelligent, whose family expects her to marry Elend Venture and bind the two houses together. She takes an immediate interest in the unknown young woman from the provinces who has been occupying Elend's attention, and her courtesy at court carries an edge.