Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Red-born, Gold-carved war hero of the Rising; ArchImperator weary of a war he cannot set down.
Once a Red Helldiver of Lykos carved into a Gold by the Sons of Ares after his wife Eo was hanged, Darrow has spent a decade as the sword of the Solar Republic he helped build. Now thirty-three and in the tenth year of war, he returns to Luna a conquering hero after defying the Senate to launch a costly Iron Rain on Mercury—a victory that cost a million of his own men and pushed the Ash Lord back to his last bastion, Venus. He walks the Via Triumphia to jeers as well as cheers, the Vox Populi painting him a would-be tyrant, and kneels at last before his wife Mustang, the Sovereign.
At the family retreat of Silene, he reunites with his son Pax, now grown cold and distant in his father's long absences, and with his mother Deanna, who tends a garden in penance for surviving. His oldest friend and rival in the Senate, Dancer, warns him plainly: a hero who breaks the law he built salts the ground for tyrants. Darrow comes home wanting only to end the war on Venus and rest, but he carries a secret—unnamed 'emissaries'—that he cannot even share with Dancer, and he feels the raw-hearted boy he once was dying inside the warlord he has become.
A tall, broad man of thirty-three, thicker and more brutal in build than in his youth; the golden eyes and gold hair Mickey the Carver gave him now feel more his own than the Red boy he was, though the miner still lives beneath.
POV protagonist; ArchImperator and supreme warlord of the Solar Republic, torn between ending the war and the family and peace he longs for.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: