Character from The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
Herald of the Bondsmiths. Once the wisest of the Heralds, now utterly mad. Claims to be God. Conducts horrific experiments pulling spren into the Physical Realm. Dangerous beyond measure.
Ishar — Ishi'Elin, the Herald of Luck, patron of the Bondsmiths — was once considered the wisest of the ten Heralds, the architect of the Oathpact itself and the one who established the original Knights Radiant orders. He understood the fundamental mechanics of Surgebinding and the nahel bond better than perhaps any being other than Honor himself. But four and a half millennia of guilt and madness have transformed the wisest Herald into the most dangerous. Ishar now claims to be God — the Almighty reborn — and has established himself as a god-king in Tukar, ruling through religious authority. His experiments are the stuff of nightmares: he has found ways to pull spren bodily from the Cognitive Realm into the Physical Realm, where they manifest as twisted, dying things stretched between worlds. He seeks to understand and control the fundamental bonds of Roshar, and his Bondsmith abilities — the most powerful of all Surgebinding — make him nearly unstoppable. Dalinar's attempts to reach him as a fellow Bondsmith have met with violent resistance. Ishar represents the terrifying possibility of vast knowledge wielded without sanity.
An older man with a long white beard and the bearing of absolute authority — a god-king in his own fractured mind. His robes are fine but stained, and his eyes burn with the terrifying certainty of divine madness. He carries his Honorblade with casual ease and moves with the power of a Herald despite his apparent age. There is nothing frail about him — he radiates menace wrapped in the trappings of holiness.
Also known as: Ishi, Ishi'Elin, Tashi, God-King of Tukar