The Nephilim

Lore & Background

In the deep history of the Throne of Glass world, the old gods did not merely create the land, the seas, and the first peoples—they mingled with them. The god-mortal hybrids are the fruits of that mingling: beings who carry a shard of divine essence within a mortal frame. They were not born in the way humans are born, nor were they conjured in the way the gods shaped the world. They came into being through the union of the two orders of existence, and in doing so, they became a third order entirely. Their power was staggering by any measure. Where a god could reshape continents, a hybrid could reshape a kingdom. Where a mortal mage might bend a single element, a hybrid could command the fundamental forces that undergirded reality. They were the gods' living legacy, the proof that divinity could be inherited, diluted, and passed down through blood. Yet they were not gods. They could die. They could grieve. They could be bound by the same mortal limitations that constrained the peoples they oversaw, and that duality made them both more dangerous and more tragic than their divine parents. By the time the events of the Throne of Glass series unfold, these hybrids are a memory, a name whispered in the oldest texts and the deepest magical traditions. The gods themselves are silent or absent, and the world has moved into an era where power is measured in magic, in politics, in the choices of individuals like Celaena Sardothien. The structure of magic in the present day is tied to Wyrdmarks, the Wyrdgate, and the gods' original creation—not to the passage of these hybrids. Still, their shadow lingers in the way certain bloodlines carry an inexplicable weight, in the way the oldest lands still hum with a resonance that no living being can fully explain.

In Their Own Story

The wind over the old coast did not blow so much as remember. It carried the salt of a sea that had not existed for ten thousand years, and beneath the salt, something older—a hum, low and vast, like a throat clearing after a long sleep. The Nephilim had walked this shore when the cliffs were young and the pines had not yet learned to bend. They had stood where the lighthouse now stood, and their footprints had not eroded. They never eroded. The stone remembered the weight of them the way a scar remembers the blade. A child from the village below climbed the cliff path, barefoot, chasing a crab. She did not know what she was walking through. She did not know that the sand beneath her toes was older than her language, older than her gods, older than the idea of gods. She kicked a pebble and it rolled into a crack in the rock, and the crack was shaped, impossibly, like a thumb. Like a finger. Like the hand of something that had once pressed this stone into being and then walked away and never come back. The child looked down. The crack looked back. Neither blinked.

Reader's Guide

The Age of the Gods. The old gods shaped the world in a time before recorded history, before the kingdoms, before the magic systems that mortals would later learn to harness. In that era, the boundary between divine and mortal was permeable. The gods walked among the first peoples, and from those unions the Nephilim came into being. They were not numerous, but each one carried enough divine force to reshape the landscape around them. They became the world's first true inheritors—neither creators nor subjects, but something in between that the gods themselves had not anticipated. The long-term consequence of the Nephilim's existence was the structuring of the world's magical and spiritual substrate. The way power flows, the way certain lands carry an inherent resonance, the way the oldest traditions speak of a time when the sky was closer and the earth answered to a touch—these are all echoes of the Nephilim's passage. They left the world changed in ways that no subsequent generation could fully reverse or replicate. In the present-day story, the Nephilim are absent but not forgotten. Their legacy is the foundation upon which everything else is built. The gods are silent, the divine is distant, and the world runs on the residual architecture the Nephilim left behind. When characters touch the deepest layers of magic, when the oldest lands react to a presence, when a bloodline carries a weight that defies explanation—they are standing in the footprints of beings who existed before the concept of history. The Nephilim are the reason the world has a shape, and their silence is the reason it is quiet.

Did You Know?

• These god-mortal hybrids are a distinct cosmological category in the Throne of Glass universe—neither gods nor mortals, but a third order of being.
• While the term 'Nephilim' is never explicitly used in the series, the concept of god-mortal hybrids exists within the established lore.
• No canonical source states that these hybrids ever surpassed the gods in power or capability.