The Hero of Ages characters

Appears from the start

Empress in name and the most dangerous Allomancer alive in practice, still uneasy with both facts. She travels with Elend's armies as they take city after city, hunting the Lord Ruler's hidden storage caverns, and she carries the knowledge that releasing the power at the Well of Ascension was her own mistake. She wears a single earring she has had since childhood and rarely thinks about it. Practical, direct, and increasingly certain that the war will end with her doing something no one else can, she spends much of the book trying to work out what her enemy actually wants.

Appears from the start

Emperor of the surviving remnant of the Final Empire and now a Mistborn himself, a year into learning powers most Allomancers grow up with. The scholar who once wrote constitutions has become a general who takes cities, and he is uncomfortably good at it. He is trying to feed a dying world, hold an empire together through ashfall and earthquake, and reconcile the philosopher he was with the man who now orders sieges.

First appears in chapter 3

The Terris Keeper, carrying the collected religions of a dead world and no longer believing in any of them. Tindwyl's death broke his faith, and he has set himself to reading through his catalogue of hundreds of beliefs one by one, writing a short dismissal of each and moving on. He continues to serve the empire out of habit and loyalty rather than conviction, and he alone is still working through the corrupted Terris records that describe the Hero of Ages.

Also known as Lestibournes

First appears in chapter 4

The crew's Tineye, now grown and sent north to the canal city of Urteau to watch a skaa government that has turned violent. Since his uncle's death he has burned tin constantly, never letting it go, until his senses are so raw that daylight blinds him and cloth hurts his skin. He keeps himself wrapped and hooded, works the city's underground alone, and is convinced that this time he will be the one who matters.

First appears in chapter 4

The crew's Soother, sent with Spook to Urteau to talk a hostile city into joining the empire. He is older, softer, and more tired than he admits, and his talent for steering a room has limits he is about to find.

Also known as Hammond

First appears in chapter 6

The crew's Thug, serving as one of Elend's commanders and one of the last people alive who knew Kelsier. He is still cheerful, still argumentative, and still the man everyone turns to when the line has to hold.

First appears in chapter 5

A kandra who broke his Contract and returned to the Homeland to be judged for it, imprisoned in the body of a dog by his own people. He is old by kandra reckoning, stubborn, and convinced that the danger he came home to warn about is real, while the Generations who rule his people prefer their thousand-year traditions and their refusal to interfere in the affairs of humans.

First appears in chapter 3

Kelsier's brother, a Steel Inquisitor whose spiked body is no longer entirely his own. Something speaks to him constantly and moves his hands when he resists, and the man he was survives only in narrow moments between one act and the next. What is left of him is the empire's most dangerous enemy.

First appears in chapter 5

The force released from the Well of Ascension: a god whose nature is decay, entropy, and the ending of things, freed after a thousand years of imprisonment. It cannot be seen or fought, it speaks to anyone whose body carries a metal spike, and it has spent centuries quietly altering every written record in the world so that history itself would deliver its escape. Its stated aim is not conquest but completion, and the ashfalls, quakes, and dying crops are its work.

First appears in chapter 8

Breeze's wife, formerly the flighty noblewoman of Luthadel, now travelling with him on the empire's business and considerably harder-edged than her manner suggests. She is Lord Cett's daughter and uses that leverage without embarrassment.

First appears in chapter 8

A general in Elend's army, risen from the skaa rebellion, and one of the most devout members of the Church of the Survivor. Steady, disciplined, and openly religious in a camp where faith is currency, he is trusted absolutely by soldiers who trust very little else.

First appears in chapter 10

The crippled warlord who once besieged Luthadel, now an unlikely member of Elend's court and Breeze's father-in-law. He is blunt, self-interested, and useful, and he says the things nobody else at the table will.

First appears in chapter 16

A koloss, one of the brutish war creatures Vin controls by Allomancy, distinguished from the rest by an unusual and unsettling degree of self-awareness. He speaks in short sentences, thinks about what he is, and has decided that he is the one who leads.

Also known as The Citizen

First appears in chapter 18

The ruler of Urteau, who overthrew its nobility in the name of the skaa and governs by public trial and public execution. He preaches equality, wears working clothes, forbids anything that looks like privilege, and burns those he judges to be of noble blood. He claims the Survivor's authority for all of it.

First appears in chapter 20

The obligator who rules Fadrex City, a Canton head of the old Steel Ministry who has kept his faith in the Lord Ruler through the empire's collapse. Precise, courteous, and genuinely devout, he refuses to acknowledge Elend as emperor and holds his city against the imperial army. He is also, impossibly, still able to burn atium, which no one else in the world can obtain.

First appears in chapter 28

The sister of Urteau's ruler, kept close to him and guarded constantly, watched by a city that treats her as its first lady. She has begun slipping out alone into the gardens, uneasy about what is being done in her brother's name and unable to say so to anyone who would listen.