In Essun’s first main section, she comes home to find her young son, Uche, beaten to death by Essun’s husband, Jija, who is now gone along with their daughter, Nassun. The man uses his power to break the Stillness in two, beginning a new Fifth Season.

The man is an orogene, which means that he can draw energy from the earth and other living things and use it to manipulate seismic events-yet orogenes are also classified as non-human and are violently discriminated against. Eventually, these three characters are revealed to be the same person at different stages of her life, though the chapters rotate between the three and are all narrated in the present tense.Īn unnamed man and a mysterious being called a stone eater look out over Yumenes, the largest city on the Stillness. The other two are narrated in the third person and follow a young girl named Damaya and a woman in her early twenties named Syenite. One, narrated in the second person, follows a middle-aged woman named Essun from a small town called Tirimo. The Fifth Season is set on a supercontinent called the Stillness that is constantly rocked by seismic activity, some of it devastating to civilization and causing an extended winter referred to as a “Fifth Season.” The story is split into three separate narratives.

The Fifth Season tells us of the story of three Orogenes: Damaya, a young Orogene, who is taken to the Fulcrum to be trained as an Imperial Orogene Syenite, a four-ringer Imperial Orogene, who goes on a mission to help a coastal comm and at the same time procreate with the ten-ringer Alabaster and Essun, an Orogene who lives in disguise as a still. Humans fear the Orogenes, and given the chance, slaughter them. Living among humans are Orogenes, who can harness the power of the earth to wield magic. On a singular supercontinent called The Stillness, people live with the constant danger of quakes and, in the coastal comms, tsunamis.

The fifth season novel