Essun
The middle-aged orogene at the heart of the present-day thread, narrated in an intimate second person. When her husband kills their small son and vanishes with their daughter, she walks out of Tirimo into the worst Season in recorded history to find the girl; the novel reveals that she, Syenite, and Damaya are one woman at different points in her life.
Syenite
An ambitious four-ring Fulcrum orogene, the middle stage of the protagonist's life across the book's three threads. Paired with Alabaster on the Allia assignment, she raises a dead obelisk from the seabed, finds freedom and family on Meov, and smothers her own baby rather than let the Guardians take him, afterward burying her past and becoming Essun.
Damaya
A girl from the comm of Palela whose orogeny surfaces at school, the earliest stage of the protagonist's life. Locked in a barn by her frightened parents and collected by the Guardian Schaffa, she endures the Fulcrum's brutal discipline and chooses Syenite as the name she will take when she earns her first ring.
Alabaster
The sole ten-ring orogene still alive and the strongest in the world, bitter and brilliant, who dismantles everything the Fulcrum taught Syenite and fathers her son. He proves to be the unnamed man of the prologue who ripped the continent open to start the Season, and he ends the book dying in Castrima, asking Essun to help him make things worse and whether she has heard of a moon.
Hoa
A strange boy with chalk-white skin who joins Essun on the road and can sense her daughter's trail. He is in truth a stone eater, and the narrator who has been telling Essun her own life back to her throughout the novel.
Schaffa
The Guardian who takes Damaya from her family's barn, courteous, paternal, and terrifying at once; he breaks the bones of her hand to teach her that a Guardian's authority is absolute, insisting he does it out of love. Years later he leads the assault on Meov and reaches for Syenite's baby, forcing the book's most devastating choice.
Jija
Essun's husband, who beats their three-year-old son to death on discovering the boy is an orogene and flees with their daughter. His act opens the novel and sets Essun's entire journey in motion.
Nassun
Essun and Jija's orogene daughter, carried off by her father after her brother's death. Finding her is the purpose that keeps Essun alive and moving across the dying continent.
Tonkee
An unwashed, brilliant geomest without a comm who latches onto Essun's party during the journey. In Castrima, Essun recognizes her as Binof, the Leadership-caste girl who once snuck into the Fulcrum and whom Damaya helped reach the hidden chamber where the obelisks were made.
Innon
A huge, warm feral orogene, raised free and untrained, who leads the island comm of Meov, where orogenes are honored instead of hunted. He becomes the lover of both Syenite and Alabaster, and a Guardian murders him by turning his own orogeny inward.
Ykka
An unbound orogene with the uncanny ability to draw others of her kind toward her. She leads Castrima, a comm built inside a vast crystal geode running on ancient orogene-powered technology, and takes Essun's party in.
Antimony
The stone eater who has silently watched over Alabaster for years. She pulls him down into the earth to save him during the raid on Meov, and at the end she is slowly consuming his body as it turns to stone.
Corundum
Syenite and Alabaster's infant son, born free on Meov. When the Guardians storm the island, Syenite presses her hand over his mouth and nose, choosing his death over a life of enslavement in a node station.
Uche
Essun's three-year-old son, killed by his father Jija for being an orogene. His body on the floor of her home is where the novel begins, and his death propels everything that follows.