Quentin Coldwater

Quentin Makepeace Coldwater is the protagonist of the trilogy. At the start, he is 17, obsessed with a series of children's books called "Fillory and Further", and depressed. After a successful interview, he moves to Brakebills to study magic. After his graduation from Brakebills, Penny brings him evidence of travel between worlds and he travels to Fillory. Following a confrontation with the Beast in which he is seriously injured, he spends 6 months unconscious being healed by centaurs. He returns to Earth, taking a non-magical job before Eliot, Janet, and Julia arrive and he goes with them to rule Fillory. As a King of Fillory, he travels to the outer islands to collect unpaid taxes and is accidentally returned to Earth. After returning to Fillory and helping Eliot finish a quest to return magic to Fillory, he is again ejected from Fillory. Back on Earth, he returns to Brakebills, is assigned the Discipline of Minor Mendings, and becomes a professor until, after a prank by Plum, a Brakebills student, goes wrong, he is fired. He accepts a job attempting to steal a suitcase from a pair of magicians, and begins working with Plum. In the aftermath of the heist, he moves to New York with Plum, and they try to use the contents of the briefcase to create a magical land. Missing a key ingredient, they fail. Following Eliot to Fillory, which is now almost dead, he sacrifices Ember and Umber, gains their power, and repairs the land. He returns to New York, and is then successful in creating a magical land, which he begins to explore. In an interview, Grossman describes Quentin at the start of the trilogy as being a lot like he was as a teenager and "at the very end of the books gets to somewhere around where I'm trying to be". Quentin is at least somewhat bisexual, as though he prefers women, he was open to sleeping with Eliot.