The Fifth Season characters

Appears from the start

A woman in her forties living quietly in the small southern comm of Tirimo, where she teaches at the creche. She is an orogene: she can sense and shape the movement of the earth, a power the Stillness fears and usually answers with a lynching, so she has hidden it for years from her neighbors and from her husband. She taught both her children in secret, and harshly, to hide what they inherited from her. The book opens on the day she comes home to find her three-year-old son beaten to death and her husband and daughter gone, and on the day a rift opens across the width of the continent and begins a Season that may not end in her lifetime.

Appears from the start

Essun's three-year-old son, a talkative and unusually quick child who had already begun to show orogeny at home. His father kills him before the book opens, and Essun sits with his body for two days before she can make herself move.

Appears from the start

Essun's husband, a stone-knapper in Tirimo who works flint and glass and is well liked in the comm. Until the day the book opens he was an affectionate father. On discovering that his younger child was an orogene, he beat the boy to death and left the comm with their daughter.

Appears from the start

Essun's daughter, a watchful, self-possessed girl who inherited her mother's orogeny and was drilled in secret to keep it hidden and controlled. She is not in Tirimo when the book opens: her father has taken her south. Finding her alive is the reason Essun leaves home at all.

First appears in chapter 2

A girl from a small northern village who is locked in her family's barn after her orogeny surfaces in front of the other children at school. Her parents have sent for someone to take her away. Proud, stubborn, and quick to reason her way through a bad situation, she understands that her family has given her up and is trying to work out what she is worth to anyone now. She is bright, she does not cry where people can see her, and she wants very badly to be kept.

First appears in chapter 2

A Guardian, one of the order that finds orogene children and delivers them to the Fulcrum or kills them where they stand. He arrives to collect Damaya: an enormous man with long black hair, pale eyes, and an easy affectionate manner that never quite matches what he does. He is genuinely warm toward the frightened child in his care and also, calmly, brutal with her, and explains both as necessary. Guardians can shut off an orogene's power with a touch, which is why the Fulcrum's orogenes obey.

First appears in chapter 3

Tirimo's doctor, a serious young man who grew up in the comm, trained elsewhere, and came back to it. He is one of the few people who treats Essun as a person rather than a rumor once the town turns suspicious, and he makes it clear that what she is does not surprise him.

First appears in chapter 4

A four-ring orogene of the Fulcrum, the imperial institution in the capital that trains, houses and rents out the orogenes it can catch. She is competent, sharp-tongued, and impatient for the rings that would bring her better work and more freedom. The assignment she is given instead is a humiliation: clear a silted harbor in a provincial coastal city, in the company of the Fulcrum's most senior orogene, and conceive a child by him on the way, because the Fulcrum breeds its orogenes as deliberately as it trains them.

First appears in chapter 4

The Fulcrum's only ten-ring orogene, far more powerful than anyone Syenite has met and used by the institution as both a tool and a stud. He is theatrical, sardonic, and openly contemptuous of the rules and deference that structure Syenite's whole life, which makes him exhausting to travel with. He appears unstable and half broken, and he is nevertheless right about a great many things she was never allowed to learn.

First appears in chapter 5

A small boy Essun finds on the road south: naked, filthy, entirely unafraid, with white hair, white skin and eyes like clear ice. He gives his name as Hoa, will not say where he came from, and attaches himself to her journey on the claim that he can help her find her daughter. He does not eat ordinary food, is stronger and stranger than a child should be, and knows things about the roads, and about Essun, that he has no way of knowing.

First appears in chapter 13

A filthy, foul-tempered commless traveler who takes up with Essun and Hoa on the road south and will not be shaken off. She is educated far past anything a road scavenger should be, obsessively interested in obelisks and in ancient ruins, evasive about where her learning came from, and unnervingly curious about Essun in particular.

First appears in chapter 15

A stone eater: one of the rare statue-like beings who move through solid rock as easily as a person walks through air, hold impossible stillness between one moment and the next, and take an interest in orogenes for reasons they decline to explain. She gives her name as Antimony, fixes her attention on Alabaster, and does not leave.

First appears in chapter 15

A girl of a wealthy Leadership family in the capital who bribes and lies her way onto the Fulcrum's grounds while Damaya is training there. She is not an orogene. She is looking for something the city's oldest records say lies beneath the compound and that no one in authority will admit exists.

First appears in chapter 19

The leader of Meov, an island comm whose people live by raiding the ships that pass their stretch of coast. He is huge, loud and generous, and he is an orogene who was never taken by a Guardian and never trained by the Fulcrum, self-taught in ways the Fulcrum insists are impossible and unashamed of any of it.

Also known as Coru

First appears in chapter 21

The son born to Syenite and Alabaster on Meov: a calm, strong child raised beyond the Fulcrum's reach, and powerful from the moment he can reach for anything at all.

First appears in chapter 21

The headwoman of Castrima, a comm built underground inside a geode. She is openly an orogene, recruits others instead of hiding them, and holds together a settlement in which orogenes and ordinary people share the same space, which nowhere else on the continent manages. Self-taught, dry, and relentlessly practical about what the arrangement costs.