A disgraced royal duelist reassigned to the humiliating role of royal observer at the battle in The Heroes, which means he watches the fighting rather than participating in it. Gorst is the finest swordsman in the Union - possibly in the world - and is entirely aware that his skills are wasted in his current role. His interior monologue, bitter and self-lacerating, is one of Abercrombie's funniest and most uncomfortable achievements: a man consumed by violent fantasies who applies to them the same sardonic intelligence he applies to everything else. In combat he becomes something else entirely.

The First of the Magi, one of the most powerful practitioners of the Art in the world, who arrives in Adua claiming to be the legendary founder of the Union and demanding access to the royal library. He is old, irritable, occasionally charming, and completely accustomed to getting what he wants. Everything about Bayaz is carefully constructed to suggest the benevolent wizard archetype, and Abercrombie spends three books systematically dismantling that suggestion. What Bayaz actually is, what he actually wants, and what he is willing to do to get it is the trilogy's central revelation, and it reframes everything that preceded it.

A celebrated war hero and the son of a powerful noble house, Leo is brave, charismatic, and not particularly thoughtful - exactly the kind of person that institutions and ambitious people find useful. His arc across the Age of Madness trilogy is about the distance between the hero he believes himself to be and the uses to which that belief gets put. He is not stupid, but he is surrounded by people who are better at thinking than he is and who know it, and his unwillingness to acknowledge this is what drives him toward the series' central catastrophe.

The daughter of Sand dan Glokta, now the most successful investor in the Union - a woman who has built a financial empire through intelligence, ruthlessness, and a clear understanding of how power actually works. Savine is her father's daughter in ways she both recognises and prefers not to examine. She enters the Age of Madness trilogy at the top of the social and financial hierarchy and spends three books watching that hierarchy collapse, discovering in the process what she is actually capable of. She is one of Abercrombie's most complex characters in the later work - someone whose competence is genuine and whose blind spots are equally genuine.

The son of Jezal dan Luthar, Crown Prince of the Union, and a man who has inherited his father's charm and none of his ambition - which in Orso's case means a cheerful, self-deprecating dissolution rather than Jezal's vain striving. Orso knows he is not cut out for what is being asked of him and is the only person in his vicinity honest about it. His arc across the Age of Madness trilogy involves the discovery that decency, in a world moving toward revolution, is not enough and may not be the point. He is one of Abercrombie's most sympathetic creations and one of his most brutally treated.