An Ogier from Stedding Shangtai, Loial is eight feet tall, gentle, bookish, and deeply reluctant to be involved in anything that might end up in a story - Ogier live for centuries and consider haste to be a sign of poor judgment. He joins the group as a guide through the Ways, the Ogier-built network of passage between stedding, and stays because he is curious and because the friends he makes matter to him more than his discomfort. Loial is a scholar writing a book about the Dragon Reborn, which he considers a considerable conflict of interest given that he is watching events unfold from the inside. He is one of the few characters who is both genuinely powerful (Ogier are enormously strong) and entirely peaceable by nature, which makes the moments when he fights all the more striking.