The novel's protagonist, Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are all the same woman: a “mongrel Midlatter” who is tall and “well-fleshed” in the Sanzed manner, but whose “hair hangs round her face in ropy fused locks,” and whose “skin is unpleasantly ocher-brown by some standards and unpleasantly olive-pale by others” (10). More importantly, she is an orogene. Her powers first manifest when she is “Damaya”—a girl of nine or 10 who nearly freezes a boy bullying her at school. 

Damaya is a shy and somewhat anxious child, and multiple external factors—her parents’ rejection of her, the alternately kind and abusive treatment she receives from her Guardian Schaffa, her outsider status at the Fulcrum—exacerbate these tendencies. Nevertheless, Damaya is talented, perceptive, and curious, progressing quickly in her classes and spending much of her free time exploring the complex. She passes her first ring test a year before her peers, taking the name “Syenite.”

Syenite’s storyline takes place several years later, when the character is in her mid-twenties. Now a four-ringer, Syenite is ambitious and frustrated with her relatively low rank at the Fulcrum, though (like most orogenes) she keeps a tight rein on her emotions in public. Her inner

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