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.