The Stone Sky characters

Appears from the start

The woman who was Damaya, then Syenite, and is now Essun. She wakes in Castrima weeks after opening the Obelisk Gate: her right arm is stone, Alabaster is dead, and the comm she saved cannot stay where it is. She is the only person alive who knows what Alabaster wanted done and roughly how to do it, and she is losing more of her body to every use of the obelisks. She also wants her daughter back, and is no longer certain those two goals point the same way.

Appears from the start

The stone eater who first came to Essun as a white-eyed boy on the road, and who has been telling her story throughout. In this book he tells his own as well: where stone eaters come from, what he was before he was stone, and why he attached himself to this particular orogene. He is not neutral, he is not safe, and he is the closest thing to a friend Essun has.

Appears from the start

The headwoman of Castrima, holding together a comm of orogenes and ordinary people who have just survived a siege and must now abandon the only shelter that made them viable. She is pragmatic, exhausted and stubborn, and she is one of the few people who argues with Essun as an equal rather than a supplicant.

Appears from the start

Castrima's doctor, Essun's lover, and the person who keeps telling her the truth about her own body when she would rather not hear it. He came out of Tirimo with nothing and has made himself indispensable; he is clear-eyed about what Essun is doing to herself and unable to stop her.

Appears from the start

The geomest born Binof Leadership Yumenes, who has spent her life chasing the machinery of the civilization that made the obelisks. She leaves the geode with Castrima and keeps studying, which on a march through an ash winter is a liability and occasionally the reason anyone survives.

First appears in chapter 2

Essun's daughter, who has killed her father, watched the school that took her in destroyed, and set out with the only adult who ever wanted her exactly as she is. She is one of the two people alive who can open the Obelisk Gate, and she has decided what she will do with it: end a world that grinds up children like her, cleanly and for good. She is not raging about it. She has simply thought it through and found no argument against it.

First appears in chapter 2

The Guardian who once collected orogene children for the Fulcrum and now travels south with Nassun, remembering almost nothing of who he was. The corestone lodged in his head keeps him alive and keeps him in constant, worsening pain, and pushes him toward harming the child he loves. He is failing, and both of them know it.

First appears in chapter 2

The gray stone eater who has attached himself to Nassun. He answers questions with questions, offers directions rather than help, and wants the Obelisk Gate opened for reasons of his own. He is very old and very patient, and nothing he says is offered without a purpose behind it.

First appears in chapter 3

A general of Rennanis, captured when its army was destroyed and taken in by Castrima on sufferance. She is a competent soldier with nothing left to command, and she attaches herself to the comm's record-keeping, deciding that what has happened here should be remembered accurately by somebody.

First appears in chapter 3

A woman brought to the tuners of Syl Anagist as an instructor: like them and not like them, able to speak aloud and to move through the city as a person rather than a component. She is meant to teach them the last thing they need in order to make the great engine work, and she teaches them a good deal more than that.

First appears in chapter 3

One of the six tuners of Syl Anagist, built alongside Hoa to run the machinery that will tap the planet's core. She is cautious where he is curious, and she has spent her whole existence, like him, in a facility where they are inventory rather than people.

First appears in chapter 5

An orogene who trained at the Fulcrum in the same years Damaya did, and who is a very long way from the boy she knew: he has lost his legs, most of his teeth, and any illusions about what the world does with people like him. He is with Castrima now, and he is still, by a considerable margin, one of its strongest.

First appears in chapter 5

The conductor in charge of the tuners' facility in Syl Anagist: the man who oversees their training, their testing and their maintenance. He is not cruel by the standards of his society, which is the point. He treats the tuners with a proprietary, occasionally affectionate concern, and never as anything other than equipment.