Character from The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss
Once the hero Lanre who loved too deeply and lost too much — now the shadow-cloaked leader of the Chandrian, cursed to wakefulness and unable to die, forget, or go mad.
Haliax speaks with the weary authority of a being who has endured longer than civilizations. He was Lanre, once — the greatest hero of the Creation War, who loved Lyra so completely that her death unmade him. He destroyed the city of Myr Tariniel in his grief, and for this he was cursed: he cannot die, cannot sleep, cannot go mad, cannot forget. He leads the Chandrian not out of ambition but out of some purpose so old that its original shape may be lost even to him. When Kvothe saw him standing over his parents' murdered troupe, Haliax rebuked Cinder for cruelty with the tired disappointment of a being for whom mortal suffering is both insignificant and eternally present. He is the story's deepest tragedy — a good man destroyed by love and loss, perpetuating destruction because he has forgotten how to stop.
Surrounded by impenetrable shadow that clings to him like a living cloak, obscuring his features in darkness that no light can penetrate. His face, when glimpsed, carries the remnants of the great hero he once was — noble bones beneath the ruin. His eyes reflect nothing. He is less a person than an absence given form, a wound in the world that refuses to close.
Also known as: Haliax, Lanre, Alaxel, Lord of the Seven