The Bridgeburners are a veteran Malazan military company with a reputation that has outlasted the campaigns that built it. Founded during the Emperor's conquests and forged across decades of the empire's most difficult engagements, they are among the most capable soldiers in the Malazan military - and among the most politically inconvenient. Their loyalty is to each other and to commanders they have chosen to trust, rather than to institutions or empresses, a quality that has made them useful and simultaneously made them a problem. By the time of Gardens of the Moon the Bridgeburners have been systematically reduced through assignment to impossible situations, their numbers a fraction of what they once were. They persist through competence, mutual obligation, and a stubborn refusal to accept the obvious conclusion.

The Realm of Shadow - also known as Meanas - is one of the magical warrens, a dimension of power claimed as a domain by Shadowthrone and Cotillion. It is a place of ambiguity and misdirection, its nature reflecting the qualities of its rulers - nothing in Shadow is entirely what it appears to be. The two gods who rule it came to their positions through means the sequence discloses gradually, and their management of the realm reflects both their individual temperaments and their partnership. Shadow's agents in the mortal world operate with a freedom and unpredictability that distinguishes them from the servants of more conventionally organised divine powers.