The Obelisk Gate characters

Appears from the start

The woman who was Damaya and then Syenite, now living in the underground comm of Castrima under the name Essun. She has survived the Rift, the murder of her younger child and the loss of her daughter, and she is the strongest living orogene apart from the man she has just found dying. Two things pull against each other in her: she wants Nassun back, and she has been handed a task by Alabaster that she does not know how to refuse. She is middle-aged, out of patience, and unwilling to belong to another community that will turn on her.

Appears from the start

Once the Fulcrum's ten-ring senior, and the man who deliberately tore the continent open at Yumenes. He is in Castrima now and dying by inches: his body turns to stone from the extremities inward, and the stone eater Antimony consumes what he sheds. He has strength enough left to teach, to be difficult, and to insist, and very little time in which to hand over what he knows.

Appears from the start

The stone eater who traveled with Essun in the shape of a strange white-eyed boy and has since stopped pretending. He is smaller and less imposing than others of his kind, protective of Essun in a way stone eaters are not usually, and unwilling to explain most of what he is or wants. Others of his kind take an interest in her too, and not on the same terms.

Appears from the start

The headwoman of Castrima: an orogene who neither hides what she is nor apologizes for it, and who has built a comm where orogenes and ordinary people share the same space, which nowhere else on the continent manages. She holds it together by force of personality and by refusing to pretend the arrangement is comfortable. She and Essun recognize each other's strength immediately and do not much like each other.

Appears from the start

Born Binof Leadership Yumenes, now a geomest who walked away from her family and her name to study obelisks and the ruins of the civilization that made them. She has followed Essun to Castrima and settled in, and she is at least as interested in the machinery of the geode the comm lives inside as in any of the people in it.

Appears from the start

The doctor who came from Tirimo, now Castrima's only real physician and a member of its governing council. He is younger than Essun, unsentimental about her, and one of the very few people who will tell her plainly when he thinks she is wrong.

Appears from the start

The stone eater who carried Alabaster out of the sea years ago and has kept him alive long past the point where he should have died. She waits beside him in Castrima, consuming the parts of him that have turned to stone, and answers questions only when it suits her.

First appears in chapter 2

Essun's daughter, taken south by her father after he killed her brother. She is capable, watchful, and old beyond her years about adults: she spent her childhood being trained in secret by a mother who was frightened for her and frightening to her, and she travels now with the man who murdered her brother for being what she also is. She is looking, in her own way, for somewhere she is wanted as she is.

First appears in chapter 2

Nassun's father, a stone-knapper from Tirimo, traveling south with his daughter after beating his son to death. He genuinely loves Nassun, and he is looking for a place he has heard of where orogenes can be cured. He has not let himself decide what he will do if no such place exists.

First appears in chapter 4

The Guardian who once took Damaya to the Fulcrum, and who by any reasonable account should not have survived Meov. He surfaces far to the south with most of his memory gone and in constant pain from the thing lodged in his head, running a school for orogene children in the comm of Jekity. What is left of him is still capable of great gentleness, and is still not safe.

First appears in chapter 5

A member of Castrima's council, from an old Leadership family, with filed teeth and no appetite for the work of governing. She is blunt about what the comm can and cannot afford, and she takes up with Tonkee.

First appears in chapter 6

One of two Guardians stationed alongside Schaffa at Found Moon, sharing the work of collecting and training the orogene children brought to Jekity. He is watchful, correct, and increasingly interested in how far Schaffa has drifted from what a Guardian is supposed to be.

First appears in chapter 6

The second Guardian at Found Moon, brightly cheerful in the way Guardians often are and not remotely reassuring for it. She keeps a close eye on the children's progress, and a closer one on Schaffa's.

First appears in chapter 8

A stone eater the color of gray rock, who appears to people without being invited, answers questions with questions, and clearly wants something from the orogenes he attends. He is not visibly on anyone's side, and he is patient in a way that suggests he has been waiting a very long time.