The Fifth Season

Damaya spends the first few days of the journey marveling at the comms and landscapes she and Schaffa pass. She’s also surprised to hear Schaffa moaning in his sleep their first night on the road; when she asks about the noise, he says he was snoring.

Late the next day, Damaya and Schaffa enter a “shatterland”—a place where seismic activity has broken up the earth. Instinctively, she begins to seek the energy of the fault line; Schaffa tells her to stop and distracts her with a story. In the days of Old Sanze, he says, an orogene named Misalem threatened to destroy Yumenes unless the Emperor met him face-to-face. The Emperor agreed, but (unbeknownst to Misalem) his bodyguard Shemshena evacuated the city, emptied it of its crops and livestock, and killed any living thing left behind. As a result, when Misalem tried to access the energy around him, there was almost nothing for him to draw on, and Shemshena was able to stab and kill him.

Schaffa tells Damaya that this is how the Guardians originated:

We learn how orogenic power works, and we find ways to use this knowledge against you. We watch for those among your kind who might become the next Misalems, and we eliminate them. The rest we take care of (93).

Realizing the story was a warning, Damaya grows troubled and tells Schaffa she wants to be able to control herself without oversight. Schaffa, however, argues that when threatened, her instinct will always be to use orogeny; he demonstrates his point by squeezing her hand until the bones break. When Damaya resists the impulse to try to attack him or quell the pain, he praises her. However, he then threatens to crush the bones of her hand so completely they can’t be reset. Damaya objects, which brings Schaffa to his second point: Orogenes cannot say no to their Guardians. He sets her hand and comforts her.

That evening, Schaffa asks Damaya whether she understands his actions, and she tells him she does: If she resists orders or poses a threat, Schaffa will punish her. Schaffa wakes her from nightmares later that night, and they pretend that her cries were snores.

Essun wakes up to the sight of Hoa playing. He still says almost nothing about where he came from or who he is, and he’s so dirty that Essun can’t make out much about his appearance beyond his unusually pale “icewhite” eyes. Both this and his demeanor strike Essun as odd: He acts older than his apparent age and is “inordinately cheerful” for “a child who’d obviously been through some disaster” (107).

Nevertheless, Essun doesn’t feel she can abandon a child, so the two set off. When she notices other travelers staring at Hoa, she takes him to a creek where he can clean himself. Once Hoa is free of dirt, Essun realizes just how strange looking he truly is: his skin and hair are pure white, and his build is short and stocky. This perplexes Essun, since every ethnic group she knows has some “Sanzed” characteristics.

Hoa continues to dodge Essun’s questions, but when the two continue walking, he reveals that he knows that Essun is searching for her daughter. Moreover, he can sense Nassun and several other orogenes a few days’ travel from their current location. Essun doesn’t understand how this is possible but allows him to take the lead on the off chance he can reunite her with her daughter.

Syenite and her mentor (Alabaster) set off for Allia. Syen soon notices that Alabaster is using his powers to quell microshakes. He tells her he’s helping node maintainers (orogenes stationed at hot spots to stabilize the surrounding area) and demands that she do the same. Meanwhile, the two dutifully have sex each day.

One morning, Alabaster asks Syen why she dislikes him, and suggests that what she’s truly angry about is the way society treats orogenes. They’re camped near the ruins of ancient civilizations, so Alabaster begins to wonder aloud whether any of these societies might have had a different system. Syen insists their own culture would never entrust orogenes with power, but Alabaster says that prejudice only exists because of stonelore, which can and does change.

The debate abruptly ends as an earthquake hits: Its epicenter is roughly two hundred miles away in a region supposedly protected by a node. Alabaster somehow harnesses Syen’s orogeny to bolster his own, quelling the shake and preventing a volcanic eruption. He tells Syen they need to visit the node, as he believes the orogene stationed there triggered the shake.

Two days later, they arrive at the node to find all the staff dead and the body of the maintainer—a young boy—strapped to a chair and hooked to various medical devices. Alabaster explains that orogenes dubbed unstable are lobotomized in such a way that they can still instinctively quell earthquakes: “Drug away the infections and so forth, keep him alive enough to function, and you’ve got the one thing even the Fulcrum can’t provide: a reliable, harmless, completely beneficial source of orogeny” (142). This orogene, he concludes, must have briefly awoken from his sedation and lashed out.

That night, Alabaster remarks that he thinks he has twelve children, and Syen realizes the node maintainer was his son. When Syen reassures him that their own child could be a “still,” Alabaster reveals that the Fulcrum uses any non-orogenic offspring of orogenes as Guardians. He tells her to forget everything she’s experienced that day, laughing at her outrage and setting off several microshakes. Syen accuses him of being crazy and asks where his Guardian is. Alabaster implies he did something to his Guardian, telling Syen, “I’ve been crazy for years. If you stay with me for long, you will be, too” (149).

The narrator tells the reader “[t]here are things you should be noticing, here. Things that are missing, and conspicuous by their absence” (150). He offers several examples of topics that seem to go unmentioned in the Stillness: islands (which exist but are largely uninhabited due to the risk of tsunamis), other continents (which may exist but remain unknown to Sanze, because seafaring is so dangerous), and celestial objects like stars and the sun (which exist but seem irrelevant given people’s preoccupation with the earth). He concludes that it isn’t human nature to notice absences, and that it’s therefore “fortunate […] that there are more people in this world than just humankind” (151).