The Lost Metal characters

Also known as Wax, Lord Waxillium Ladrian

Appears from the start

Six years on, Waxillium Ladrian is a senator in Elendel, a husband and a father, and no longer the man who chased criminals across rooftops. He is still Twinborn, a Coinshot who Pushes on metal and a Skimmer who can change his own weight, and he still has the Bands of Mourning, but he has put the lawman's life down deliberately and is trying to believe he can leave it there. His relationship with Harmony is functional rather than warm: he wears the earring, he answers when the god speaks, and he has not forgiven him for anything.

Appears from the start

Still a Twinborn Slider and Bloodmaker, still refusing to carry a gun, still collecting hats and identities. He works cases with Marasi now rather than with Wax, and he is a better investigator than his performance suggests, because the performance is most of how he investigates. He has spent his adult life quietly paying a debt for something he did as a boy, and he has never told most of the people around him about it.

Appears from the start

A senior constable with a reputation and a caseload, working the Set's remaining activity in the Basin. She is a Pulser, able to slow time inside a bubble, and she has grown into someone who assumes command rather than waiting to be handed it. She is also the person in this story most willing to follow a question past the point where the answer stops being comfortable.

Appears from the start

Wax's wife, and by some distance the most competent administrator in the family. Her habit of planning in exhaustive detail for improbable disasters has become a civic asset rather than a social embarrassment, and she runs the political side of Wax's life with the same thoroughness she applies to everything else.

Also known as Max

Appears from the start

Wax and Steris's young son, who has inherited abilities of his own and rather more of his father's instincts than his mother would prefer. He is a child throughout this book, kept well away from the work, and the reason Wax gives for having stopped doing it.

Also known as Sazed

First appears in chapter 2

The god of this world, once the Terris scholar Sazed. He speaks to Wax through an earring, tells him less than he knows, and is markedly more constrained than he was when this era began: another power has terms with him, and he cannot simply act on his own world whenever he chooses.

First appears in chapter 3

A kandra, one of Harmony's Faceless Immortals, long attached to Wax's circle and to Wayne in particular. Her work for the god increasingly takes her away from the Basin and from him.

First appears in chapter 6

A gunsmith and an old friend from the Roughs, still building weapons for people she considers worth the trouble, and still entirely uninterested in Wayne. She has a life of her own that he has spent years declining to notice.

First appears in chapter 8

The Malwish sky-sailor from the southern continent who became the Basin's first contact with his people, now settled in the north and acting as a link between two nations that are still deciding what they are to each other.

First appears in chapter 12

An agent of the Ghostbloods, the secretive organization that turns up wherever the Set's business is, who becomes Marasi's partner and guide. She is competent, deflective, and knows a great deal more about what is actually happening than she is willing to say, including things about the world that nobody in the Basin has been told.

First appears in chapter 20

A Set officer running the organization's interests in Bilming, wealthy, theatrical and pleased with himself. He treats the catastrophe his employers are preparing as a commercial opportunity, and he is the point at which the conspiracy becomes a person Wayne can get close to.

Also known as Autonomy

First appears in chapter 40

The god the Set serves, a power from beyond this world that has been reaching toward it for centuries and that holds Harmony to terms limiting what he may do here. It works through worshippers, proxies and a metal of its own, and its interest in this planet is not diplomatic.

First appears in chapter 45

Wax's older sister, who left with their uncle rather than being rescued from him. She is not a follower in the Set and never was, and what she has been building in Bilming is her own project as much as her patron's.

Also known as Kelsier, the Survivor

First appears in chapter 62

The head of the Ghostbloods, known to his own people by a name rather than a face. He is Kelsier, the man who began the rebellion that ended the Final Empire three centuries ago and was killed doing it, and who is worshipped across the Basin as the Survivor. He did not stay dead, he has been working on this world and beyond it ever since, and his goals overlap with Wax's only partially.