The story of the Spiralchain is a tale about a group of complex, ornery main characters that are surrounded on all sides by a frankly ridiculous number of supporting cast members. The cast got so big that popular demand forced a Cast of Characters list into the front of each book starting with Volume 4 (Fatewaker), and those lists have gotten bigger with each book. I’ll be honest–I don’t expect that trend to slow down in Book 7 either.

While a cast of such prodigious size can be intimidating to those thinking of jumping in to the series for the first time, you have to remember that it took us years to get to this point! Each of the 8 worlds of the Spiral has its own cast of crazy, interesting, troubling, and charming women and men, and it is only as we draw closer to the end that all of those casts start to interact and collide in fun ways.

The hardest part about maintaining the Cast of Characters lists at the front of each book is deciding how much information to give about characters who appear for the first time in that book. Back in Fatewaker, major characters had a brief descriptive blurb. That has gone by the wayside now in favor of more objective, factual information.

As a rule, the Cast listing will tell you if a character is a member of any special order or organization and it will tell you if they are notably related to anyone else in the cast. And, of course, it will tell you what world each character is from.*

For those wondering, the word used to describe a person from each of the eight worlds is…

• Nurian
• From Core (there is no fancy word for people from Core, though if forced to give one, it would be Coreborn)
• Depalese
• Onusborn
• Arctosian
• Murrodite
• Reik
• Pithysian

One of these days, the Cast of Characters lists for each book (maybe even ones for the first books that lack them) will be housed here on Spiralchain.net. Until then, you can browse the names, affiliations, relationships, and origins of our entire cast, one book at a time, at the front of Fatewaker, Shadowbender, or Boltsender. And, in less than a year, Bloodmender will join that list with the penultimate chapter of our eight book journey across parallel worlds and perilous prophecies.

* The reason that the Fatewaker Cast of Characters does not list the origin point of the characters is to preserve a critical revelation from that book. I agonized over what to do about that for WEEKS!