Soon she encounters a strange child who introduces himself as Hoa and who starts traveling with her. Then she sets out to find Jija and Nassun, hoping that her daughter is still alive and planning on killing her husband.

Letting her rage and grief consume her, Essun uses her orogeny to kill everyone around her and destroy part of the town. She resolves to leave Tirimo before the townspeople kill her as well, but as she heads through the gate, one of the guards fires a crossbow at her. Essun knows that Jija probably killed Uche when he discovered that the boy was an orogene. Essun shuts down in her grief and sits with Uche’s body for two days, in the meantime sensing the massive earthquake from Yumenes passing by and diverting it away from her town using her orogeny. 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 by N.K. Jemisin