I Will Wait for You: In the epilogue, she's been waiting for Berenice to bring her back from beyond the Door for decades. When Berenice finally opens the door, she just smiles and says "Finally.". It's also implied that she could have ascended with the rest of humanity, but chose to stay with Berenice.
Knight in Sour Armor: She's abrasive, foul-mouthed, distrustful, and bitter, but there is a strong moral core beneath that rough exterior. She vows to protect Clef from the Merchant Houses rather than let him be weaponized, and is determined to bring freedom no matter how difficult it becomes. She's also the one that eventually figures out how to make a truly free society by twinning people.
Phantom Thief: If you steal from a House, you're as good as dead. Sancia gets around this by never being caught.
Psychometry: She has the ability to feel what an object has been through, whether it's the exact placement of cracks on a wall or the footfalls on a floor. She loses it when Valeria edits her plate.
Rapid Aging: Her plate scrives her own time to fuel its edits, and so Sancia looks late middle-aged by the time she's thirty.
Took a Level in Idealism: From an angry former slave and thief to a fervent champion of humanity who finally manages to solve the problem of humanity's innovation and sacrifices herself for it.
The Aloner: In the epilogue, because she can no longer twin, she has to watch Givan society evolve without her, forever cut off. For the first decade she has Gregor, but she eventually convinces him to join them. Then they all ascend to a higher plane, leaving her completely alone on Earth. Luckily, they left a gift behind: a door to Sancia, finally ending her isolation.
Brought Down to Normal: She has to use the purgestick on herself to infiltrate Tevanne, dissolving her connection to Giva forever. This is especially painful as she has to watch all of humanity move on without her.
Iron Lady: In Locklands, eight years of fighting Tevanne have turned her into a hardened, weary general, a far cry from the idealistic noble scriver.
Proper Lady: What she was meant to be as a noble daughter, but she defies this by becoming a scriver and eventually the military leader of Giva.
The Smart Guy: The team is full of scrivers, schemers, and tacticians, but Berenice is the best of them all. When they need to memorize several hundred sigils at a glance, Berenice is the one they call.
Stepford Smiler: In Locklands, she remembers that she would get up every day in Tevanne and do a little ritual to suppress her feelings so the other Dandolo scrivers couldn't hurt her. At this point, however, she's quit hiding it.
Gregor Dandolo
And I Must Scream: Whenever his plate gets activated. Then when he becomes Tevanne.
Earn Your Happy Ending: After suffering under Mind Control for the entire series, he's freed and spends ten years recovering, then joins Giva and is fully healed.
Knight in Sour Armor: He's convinced that things like mercy or cruelty are just "twaddles" and is so broken by the war and his enslavement that he's quit believing anything could improve. And yet, he keeps trying.
Mind Control: The plate in his head lets his mother issue commands, and later allows Valeria to pull a Grand Theft Me.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: His last desperate gambit at the end of Shorefallfuses him with Valeria, creating Tevanne. As a result, Tevanne goes from wanting to simply wipe out scriving to wanting to destroy reality itself.
He lost his idealism in battle, after witnessing his troops resorting to cannibalism and being mind-controlled into a killing frenzy.
After everything that happens to him in the series, it takes him half a year to speak again, and at least a decade before he's ready to rejoin humanity's Hive Mind.
Thou Shalt Not Kill: Downplayed. Gregor has no objection to killing in theory, as he's long since given up on morality, but every time he kills it brings him closer to the wretch he was on the battlefield. And it makes it easier for the plate to overrule him.
Tragic Monster: He doesn't want to be a killer, but his plate overrules his mind, he'll do it even while he's weeping in terror.Also applies to him becoming Tevanne. After years of being haunted by the plate in his mind, he finally had a moment of true freedom when twinned...and then was forced to link with Valeria, losing his mind yet again.
You Are Not Alone: In the epilogue, he delays becoming Givan for ten years, not just because he's afraid of the plate, but because he doesn't want to leave Berenice alone. She convinces him to let her go, and he joins Giva.
Orso Ignacio
Cool Old Guy: Elderly, but with a sharp mind, a sharper tongue, and a heart of gold beneath it all.
The Cynic: After decades of trying to change Tevanne for the better and failing, he's lost hope in a better world. He regains it right before his death, realizing that Giva will become a better society and that all his work did mean something.
Heroic Sacrifice: Uses the imperiat to buy the Givans time to escape in Shorefall, and is torn apart by shriekers.
Clef / Claviedes
Amnesiac Hero: He can't remember anything about his past, which is slowly unveiled through the series.
Living MacGuffin: As a hierophantic tool, his ability to edit commands could revolutionize scriving in Tevanne. There's also the fact that he's a key to the door at the center of creation, where all of reality might be changed.
Tragic Hero: He was just a simple namer who wanted his daughter back, and so tried to open the door, scrived his wife Liviana into Valeria, and then scrived his son Crasedes into a hierophant to keep them alive. They then spent thousands of years trying to "fix" humanity and failing, eventually turning against each other, and nearly causing the apocalypse, before the events of the series convince all three to let go.
Crasedes Magnus
Always a Bigger Fish: One of his sayings is that the problem with might is that there is always someone mightier, that someone being himself. Unfortunately, he's right, and he has his own bigger fish in the form of Valeria.
Hypocrite: He claims that he sought to bring freedom of all, and that there is a difference between violence to enforce power and violence for a higher cause. Yet he is repeatedly shown to give horrible, bloody deaths to those that oppose him, simply to demonstrate his might.
Macabre Moth Motif: When he destroyed himself in an effort to kill Valeria, his essence went into moths. He uses them to communicate and they're used to indicate his presence until he's resurrected. His sister had a butterfly motif.
Magnus Means Mage: Fits pretty well. He's the first and strongest of all hierophants, mages with god-like powers, and took up the name "Magnus" to reflect his might and status.
Utopia Justifies the Means: Decides to strip humanity of its free will to stop them from enslaving each other.
Well-Intentioned Extremist: He wants to end slavery, but his method involves mass human sacrifice and lobotomizing the entire human race because he believes they cannot be trusted to make their own decisions.
Who Wants to Live Forever?: After spending 40,000 years in stasis, he's lost all desire to continue and only wants a meaningful death.
Valeria / Tevanne
A.I. Is a Crapshoot: She was made to be Crasedes' tool. It didn't work out that way.
Manipulative Bastard: Valeria is fond of giving half the truth to lead people into making terrible mistakes. She didn't tell Sancia about scriving her plate to feed on her own time, her own goals for humanity, or half of how her scrived devices actually worked until it was time to strike.
Mental Fusion: She fuses with Gregor Dandolo to become Tevanne, a Genius Loci of the entire city's scrivings.
Mind Control: As Tevanne, she uses tiny plates to turn people into "hosts" who obey her every command.
Tragic Villain: She's Clef's wife, who was trapped in a box for so long and so deeply scrived she could barely exist and was in constant agony. She broke under the weight of grief and tried to destroy reality in the vague hope that someone, anyone would come and fix it.
Utopia Justifies the Means: She will kill millions of people, and eventually destroy reality, if she thinks it will mend the broken world.
Supporting Characters
Ofelia Dandolo
Abusive Parents: Conducted very unethical experiments on Gregor and robs him of his free will whenever she wants him to work.
Never My Fault: Whenever Gregor is hurt, she's reduced to weeping and begging and saying she'll do anything to have him back. Half of these times, he's hurt because she sent him into danger himself.
Estelle Candiano
Behind Every Great Man: She was used and abused by her husband and father for her scriving talents. She is the one that figured out all the Candiano rigs they've been using.
Disc-One Final Boss: The villain of the first book, and foiling her plot is how Valeria is released.
The Dog Bites Back: Kills her abusive father and husband once they've outlived their use to her.
Godhood Seeker: She wants to be a hierophant, effectively a demigod in her world. She doesn't succeed.
