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| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Jezal dan Luthar A vain, lazy, self-regarding nobleman whose talent with a sword is the only thing he has worked for, and even that mostly because it offers social advancement rather than out of any love for the craft. Jezal begins the trilogy as one of the least sympathetic protagonists in fantasy and ends it as something more complicated. His arc is the most conventionally structured of the three - the journey that should make him a better person - but Abercrombie's refusal to let the journey deliver its expected payoff is one of the trilogy's most pointed observations. What happens to Jezal is not what the story of Jezal suggests should happen to Jezal. | Member |
| Collem West A Union army officer of common birth who has risen through the ranks on merit, which the nobility around him find faintly embarrassing. West is competent, decent, and perpetually caught between the realities of military command and the political nonsense that surrounds it. He is Jezal's friend and effectively his keeper in the early books - the person who covers for him and quietly despairs of him. His own arc, largely set in the military campaigns of the second and third books, is quieter than the other POV characters but accumulates genuine weight. West is the closest thing the trilogy has to a straightforwardly good man, and Abercrombie treats that with appropriate caution. |
| Member |
| Bremer dan Gorst 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. | Member |