The last of the gunslingers and the sole surviving member of a knightly order sworn to protect the Beams that hold the multiverse together. Roland has pursued the Man in Black across a dying world for years, driven by a singular obsession with the Dark Tower - the nexus of all realities. Trained from boyhood in Gilead, he is one of the finest warriors alive, possessed of an almost supernatural speed and accuracy with his revolvers. He is also ruthless, willing to put the quest above all else - a quality that defines him across eight books.

The primary antagonist of the early Dark Tower books and one of Stephen King's most recurring villains across his wider fiction. A sorcerer of vast age and power, Walter has manipulated events across countless worlds and centuries. He is the Man in Black whom Roland has been pursuing since the first line of the series. Devious and theatrical, he is a figure of genuine menace.

The weapons master of Gilead who trained Roland and his generation of gunslingers. Brutal, demanding, and deeply traditional, Cort tested each apprentice with a formal combat trial that would either earn them their guns or exile them. Roland defeated him at an unusually young age - the youngest ever to do so - using a trained hawk named David. Cort appears primarily in the Wizard and Glass flashbacks and in Roland's memories throughout the series.

Roland's closest childhood friend and fellow apprentice gunslinger in Gilead. Cuthbert is the quick-witted, talkative one of the trio - sharper-spoken than Roland and quicker to a joke, with a ready grin he can produce even in situations no one else in the room can find anything funny about. He trains alongside Roland under Cort, present for the small everyday cruelties of their apprenticeship and the larger crises that shape them: the master hawkman David's training, the cook Hax's treason, and the unprecedented early test Roland is driven to demand for his coming of age. Loyal, sharp, and unsentimental about the kind of company gunslingers tend to keep, Cuthbert is the friend Roland trusts soonest and longest.

A boy from New York who finds himself drawn into Mid-World, where he becomes a companion to Roland and his ka-tet. Perceptive and brave beyond his years, Jake possesses a low-level psychic ability and bonds deeply with the billy-bumbler Oy.