Moiraine's Warder and the uncrowned king of Malkier, a nation destroyed by the Blight before he was old enough to remember it. Lan is the archetypal fantasy warrior elevated well above the archetype - technically supreme, emotionally closed, and carrying a grief and sense of duty so deep they have become structural to his identity. He has been fighting the Shadow his entire life because there is nothing else for him to do, bound by his oath to Moiraine and by his own conviction that a Malkieri king's only remaining purpose is to die walking north into the Blight.

An Aes Sedai of the Blue Ajah who has spent twenty years searching for the Dragon Reborn, Moiraine is the catalyst who sets the entire story in motion by arriving in Emond's Field at the start of The Eye of the World. She is among the most capable and subtle political operators in the series - small, controlled, and apparently serene in a way that conceals both her considerable power and the personal cost of two decades of single-minded purpose. Her relationship with Rand is the series' central mentor dynamic, though it is never simple - she manipulates as much as she guides, and her view of the Dragon Reborn is shaped by two decades of treating the role as more important than the person.

A fisherman's daughter from Tear who rose to become Amyrlin Seat - the leader of all Aes Sedai. Siuan is extraordinarily strong in the Power and a formidable political operator. Her twenty-year friendship with Moiraine, forged when they were novices together, is one of the driving forces behind the search for the Dragon Reborn.