The Fifth Season: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Syenite wakes up to a cold wind, the taste of dirt in her mouth, and the feeling that her whole body is bruised. She opens her eyes and looks around, trying to figure out where she is—somewhere next to the ocean, and near to Allia but much colder and rockier. She tries to sess the tectonic plate beneath her but finds that she can hardly feel anything. Then she notices Alabaster curled up nearby, alive, and a white-robed woman standing beyond him, looking away.

Syenite speaks to the woman, who doesn’t turn to face her. The woman says that they are on an island a hundred miles off the eastern coast of the Stillness. Syen is terrified to hear this, as she has been taught that islands are deadly places, constantly in danger of tsunamis. She stumbles to her feet and walks closer to the woman to see that they are atop a cliff over the ocean, with no other land in sight. The woman says that she brought them here, and Syen turns to her angrily only to fall silent in shock. The person next to her is more like a block of stone carved to look like a woman, entirely pale with black and red hair and eyes—a stone eater.

Behind them, Alabaster groans, and Syenite asks the stone eater why she brought them to this island. She responds that she did it to keep Alabaster safe. Alabaster now slowly wakes up, cursing in another language, and when he sees the stone eater, he immediately seems to recognize her. He asks her what she’s done now, and she says that she saved his life. The stone eater then points westward, out to sea. There is nothing on the horizon but a single point of reddish glow and smoke. This is Allia, the woman says.

As Syenite and Alabaster recover their strength and examine the island further, they find that there is a village carved into the face of a cliff lining the island’s harbor. They discover a set of stone steps leading toward it and begin to walk in that direction. As they walk, Alabaster tells Syen that the stone eater doesn’t have a name, but he calls her Antimony, which she has agreed to answer to. She has now disappeared, but Alabaster says that he knows she is nearby. Syenite asks why she brought them here, and Alabaster admits that no one knows a stone eaters’ motives, though Antimony has been visiting him for the last five years. She tells him only that she is “here for him.”

Alabaster says that the stone eaters can move through rock as if it were air—Antimony is back in the earth right now—and that this is also how she must have brought him and Syenite to the island and away from Allia. Syenite doesn’t like thinking about this. She finds the existence of stone eaters unnerving, something that defies reason like orogeny or the obelisks. She then tells Alabaster about the stone eater in the obelisk and says that she saw it move and speak. Alabaster pauses, and then says that what Syenite did with the obelisk should have killed her, and it would have if the obelisk hadn’t itself been broken.

Still frustrated and confused about everything, Syenite asks Alabaster to explain what happened with the Guardian back at Allia. Alabaster admits that he doesn’t have all the answers, but he can tell her his best guesses. He thinks that a mysterious “someone”—likely a faction within the Guardians—knew about the obelisk in Allia’s harbor, and suspected that a ten-ringer like Alabaster would be able to find it. Syenite is surprised to hear that there might be divisions among the Guardians, but Alabaster reminds her that this is the case in any group. He continues, saying that this is probably why they tried to have Alabaster killed, and then tried to kill Syen when they learned that she was the one who moved the obelisk.

Thinking again about how Alabaster used the obelisk to remove the poison from his body at the inn, Syenite asks him if anyone knows what he’s really capable of. He says that even he doesn’t know, and that at some point, he had to move beyond the Fulcrum’s teachings and into uncharted waters. If anyone else knew what he could do, Alabaster says, the Guardians would have killed him long before. Syenite questions him further, and Alabaster admits that he even doesn’t know whom the Guardians answer to—some think it’s the Emperor, or the Yumenes Leadership families, or the Fulcrum.

Alabaster goes on, explaining that Guardians are all children of roggas but not roggas themselves, and there is an operation performed on them where something is implanted into their sessapinae. This gives them the ability to negate others’ orogeny, among other things. Hearing this, Syenite’s hand hurts in memory of an old injury. She asks about the knife that Edki used to stab Alabaster, and Alabaster says that it was another Guardian specialty, designed to negate an orogene’s power. He then assures Syen that both of their orogeny will come back in a few days.

Syenite asks why Alabaster warned her not to let the Guardian’s skin touch her, and he falls silent for a while. Finally, he goes on: at the Fulcrum, he was trained by another ten-ringer named Hessionite. He implies that they were in love and says that one day, they were looking for privacy when suddenly they were confronted by a shirtless Guardian. The Guardian grabbed Hessionite, grinned in delight, and then murdered him in a horrible way—somehow a Guardian’s skin turns an orogene’s power inward, Alabaster says, forcing all that incredible strength back on the orogene’s own body. His story trails off here, and Syenite doesn’t ask him to continue. 

After a moment, Alabaster suggests that they continue on to the village and Syenite reluctantly agrees, despite their currently negated orogeny. As they approach, Syenite thinks about how the village might survive tsunamis, and she notices several boats docked in the harbor below, though their design is entirely foreign to her. People are working on the docks, and others have already seen Alabaster and Syen—a large group has gathered to meet them at the first of the village’s cavern entrances.

Syenite greets the villagers, but none of them respond. Examining them, she thinks that they are “Eastcoasters,” tall and dark like Alabaster. A man who seems to be the leader approaches and speaks in an unfamiliar language—the same one that Syen has heard Alabaster use on occasion. Alabaster responds to the man, and everyone seems to laugh and relax. They continue to speak, with Syenite standing by in frustrated silence as Alabaster translates when he can. The comm is called Meov, he says, and the headman he’s talking to is named Harlas. They make their living by piracy.

Later the people of Meov have invited Alabaster and Syenite into their comm, and Alabaster continues to explain to Syen everything they’ve told him. Piracy is the only way they can survive, as nothing grows there. The entire village exists within the cliff, some of it carved by ancient and unknown methods. Alabaster and Syen have been put up in a “guesthouse” cavern, where Syen now watches Alabaster tend to his wounded shoulder and continue to talk. The Meovites have nothing to trade with the mainland, he says, so they attack vessels on trading routes or extort coastal comms for protection from pirate attacks, even though they are the pirates all along.

Syenite asks why anyone would live on an island, and how they’ll survive if there’s a Fifth Season. Alabaster says he doesn’t know, but the Meovites are aware of all the dangers and choose to stay here where they are free of Sanze. They claim that Meov and some other island comms have been around for thousands of years, since even before the Sanzed Empire began. Sanze doesn’t know or doesn’t care about their existence, and they were never annexed into its empire. Syenite can’t believe this, and she still thinks that anyone would be crazy to live here.

Alabaster says that part of how the Meovites have survived is because life in the ocean doesn’t die out during a Season the way that land or rivers does. But the main reason, he says with a grin, is that the Meovites don’t kill their roggas—instead, they make them their leaders. The chapter ends with a quotation from stonelore saying that “the stone eater is folly made flesh,” and to “learn the lesson of its creation.”