The Company
Spoiler-light: everything here is what you know by the campaign's opening marches. Where the story goes afterward, it goes without warning.
You, the Tactician
At 27, you inherit Lanternhold's Tactician chair after your predecessor — and professor, and mentor — disappears without explanation. You were his chosen student at the hold's private academy: noticed not for polish but for structural instinct and tenacity, trained deliberately as a successor, and handed the office a decade early, already in crisis.
You do not swing a sword. You write the doctrine that swings it — and the people below are the ones who carry your writing past the treeline.
Rowan Vale — the predecessor
Ten years ago, at 22, Rowan held Lanternhold's approaches against a Sarn invasion for days with the last organized companies, answering every adaptation with new formations and writs. Sarn withdrew; the victory made him a legend — and cost him every soldier dear to him, lost in the defense. He taught at the academy afterward, took the Tactician's chair back up when the well crisis worsened — and at 32 he murdered a man in front of the oldest institution in the Reach, refused to say why, and crossed the border by week's end.
Now Sarn wins battles carried by doctrine your scribes recognize as his, and he is being paid for it, extravagantly, in a currency nobody quite understands. The Rector asks that he be brought back alive. Fighting Rowan feels like fighting an older version of your own reasoning — he taught you the foundations, and he always expected the student to become capable of defeating the teacher.
Rector Lucan Orre
Head of the Tactician Academy: the man who seats you in Rowan's chair and becomes your principal institutional ally. Lucan opens sealed archives, confronts the council, protects the investigation, and asks for the truth before judgment. Fine inscription scars from a career of deep Chronicle work cross his brow and writing hand; a pot of his mother's Banana Bread tea goes cold beside him during late readings, and Captain Rook replaces it without comment.
Captain Sable Rook
Lucan's longtime companion, field aide, and a former expedition commander. Sable handles danger, deception, and the human consequences that elegant reasoning misses. She alone calls the Rector Lucan, may interrupt his Chronicle readings, and quietly supplies words when his memory fails. Her past holds a famous, terrible expedition she does not discuss; a worn bronze oath-token sits at her throat. She wants justice for the soldiers Rowan's engagements have killed — soldiers she trained.
The first company
The four who carry your first writs beyond the treeline.
Corren Ash — the Field Captain. A Knight, a widowed father, and the first company's shield and human interpreter. You author the writs; Corren challenges them before sealing, interprets their intent when circumstances change, and refuses to call authentic opposing soldiers "poachers" merely because Lanternhold's order says so. His warmth is practiced care: terrible dad jokes, generous praise, and a booming laugh that makes hard work feel survivable. His politics are local — he knows who goes hungry when a noble says "necessary contraction." Build your early tactics around his Cover; the company already has.
Halden Reeve — the Vanguard. A branded man serving out a blood-debt at the front rank, blunt and more observant than his one-line orders imply. He prefers instructions that leave no room for interpretation, because interpretation has historically been a privilege used against him. He defends the institution that branded him because he has seen what exists outside it.
Sister Ottiline — the Mender. Cloister-trained, genuinely gentle, and not remotely naive: she understands that medicine is rationing performed one body at a time, and keeps a private record of everyone the reliquary lacked the Glim to treat. She takes up a blade with real reluctance. Old friends with Corren — old enough that the company has opinions about it.
Perrin Quill — the Marksman. The youngest, clever and eager, kept breathing by her orders: loose at their back line first. She joined half expecting that correct orders could make war clean. Her humor protects her from examining the person at the far end of her bow — for now.
Also on the roster
Ysra Fen — Hedgeblade. From an unseated settlement diminished by a crown's extraction; Lanternhold is the only place that would employ her without first licensing her craft or her existence. She knows the wild is no refuge — failed ground and poisoned water kill her people too — and she opposes the Reachline because "managed retreat" means seated crowns survive while people like hers become refugees. Lanternhold is both the machine she distrusts and the only home that has given her comrades, food, and a future.
The rival Tacticians, the contract engineers, and the people in the Reachline's path are in Faces of the Reach.