The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season

by

N. K. Jemisin

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Alabaster Character Analysis

Alabaster is an incredibly powerful, ten-ringed orogene who becomes Syenite’s mentor, reluctant lover, and friend—though the two constantly bicker and never directly admit their closeness to each other. Alabaster is described as tall and thin with extremely dark skin, and is in his 40s when he first meets Syenite. The Fulcrum instructs the two to conceive a child together as they travel to Allia to unblock its harbor. Alabaster is the highest-ranked living orogene at the time of the novel, and as he travels with Syenite, he performs feats that she never knew were possible, such as drawing power from obelisks, using her orogeny to aid his own, and manipulating the molecules within his own body. While she is awed by his power, Syenite is also constantly irritated by Alabaster and his unwillingness to maintain the polite facades of the Fulcrum. Instead, Alabaster is direct about the fact that orogenes are all essentially slaves, no matter how much autonomy and respect they are given. Alabaster also questions everything that Syenite has been taught, most dramatically by showing her what node maintainers really are—not orogenes condemned to a boring life, but his own incredibly powerful children who have been lobotomized to serve whoever is in power. He also reveals new details about stonelore and the story of Misalem and Shemshena. While he is gifted with incredible power, what Alabaster seems to want most is to live a normal life where he can be treated as a human being, fall in love, and have a family. He briefly finds this with Syenite and Innon in Meov, and has several relationships with men before this (other than the 10 Fulcrum-mandated relationships that he had with women in order to conceive children). But this is destroyed when the Guardians attack Meov, and Antimony, the stone eater who is especially fixated on Alabaster, drags him into the earth. Later, Alabaster is the one who breaks the Stillness in half, causing the current Fifth Season that will last for thousands of years. His motivations for this are left mysterious, but are at least partly born of the fact that his society’s treatment of orogenes is fundamentally evil and the Sanzed Empire deserves to be destroyed. At the novel’s end, Alabaster reunites with Essun in Castrima, and after his destruction of the continent his own body seems to be turning into stone, which Antimony is slowly eating.

Alabaster Quotes in The Fifth Season

The The Fifth Season quotes below are all either spoken by Alabaster or refer to Alabaster. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

And then he reaches forth with all the fine control that the world has brainwashed and backstabbed and brutalized out of him, and all the sensitivity that his masters have bred into him through generations of rape and coercion and highly unnatural selection. His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. […]

So he reaches deep and takes hold of the humming tapping bustling reverberating rippling vastness of the city, and the quieter bedrock beneath it, and the roiling churn of heat and pressure beneath that. Then he reaches wide, taking hold of the great sliding-puzzle piece of earthshell on which the continent sits.

Lastly, he reaches up. For power.

He takes all that, the strata and the magma and the people and the power, in his imaginary hands. Everything. He holds it. He is not alone. The earth is with him.

Then he breaks it.

Related Characters: Alabaster
Related Symbols: The Obelisks
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

If the problem is that ferals are not predictable…well, orogenes have to prove themselves reliable. The Fulcrum has a reputation to maintain; that’s part of this. So’s the training, and the uniform, and the endless rules they must follow, but the breeding is part of it too, or why is she here?

It's somewhat flattering to think that despite her feral status, they actually want something of her infused into their breeding lines. Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Alabaster
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:

But this is what it means to be civilized—doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all. […] With the experience and boost to her reputation, she’ll be that much closer to her fifth ring. That means her own apartment; no more roommates. Better missions, longer leave, more say in her own life. That’s worth it. Earthfire yes, it’s worth it.

She tells herself this all the way back to her room. Then she packs to leave, tidies up so she’ll come home to order and neatness, and takes a shower, methodically scrubbing every bit of flesh she can reach until her skin burns.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Alabaster
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“They kill us because they’ve got stonelore telling them at every turn that we’re born evil—some kind of agents of Father Earth, monsters that barely qualify as human.”

“Yes, but you can’t change stonelore.”

“Stonelore changes all the time, Syenite.” He doesn’t say her name often, either. It gets her attention. “Every civilization adds to it; parts that don’t matter to the people of the time are forgotten. There’s a reason Tablet Two is so damaged: someone, somewhere back in time, decided that it wasn’t important or was wrong, and didn’t bother to take care of it. Or maybe they even deliberately tried to obliterate it, which is why so many of the early copies are damaged in exactly the same way.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker)
Related Symbols: Stonelore
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:

“You think you matter?” All at once he smiles. It’s an ugly thing, cold as the vapor that curls off ice. “You think any of us matter beyond what we can do for them? Whether we obey or not.” He jerks his head toward the body of the abused, murdered child. “You think he mattered, after what they did to him? The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

She has never heard so much hate put into one word before.

Related Characters: Alabaster (speaker), Essun/Damaya/Syenite, The Node Maintainer
Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Alabaster smiles, though the muscles of his jaw flex repeatedly. “I would’ve thought you’d like being treated like a human being for a change.”

“I do. But what difference does it make? Even if you pull rank now, it won’t change how they feel about us—”

“No, it won’t. And I don’t care how they feel. They don’t have to rusting like us. What matters is what they do.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Asael Leadership Allia
Page Number: 159-160
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

There’re so many ways to die in this place. But they know about all of them—seriously—and as far as I can tell, they don’t care. At least they’ll die free, they say.”

“Free of what? Living?”

“Sanze.” Alabaster grins when Syen’s mouth falls open.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker)
Page Number: 294
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

And what do they even call this? It’s not a threesome, or a love triangle. It’s a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron. (And, well, maybe it’s love.) She should worry about another pregnancy, maybe from Alabaster again given how messy things get between the three of them, but she can’t bring herself to worry because it doesn’t matter. Someone will love her children no matter what. Just as she doesn’t think overmuch about what she does with her bed time or how this thing between them works; no one in Meov will care, no matter what. That’s another turn-on, probably: the utter lack of fear. Imagine that.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Alabaster, Innon Resistant Meov
Page Number: 372
Explanation and Analysis:

“Heh.” Innon sounds odd, and Syenite glances at him in surprise to see an almost regretful look on his face. “Sometimes, when I see what you and he can do, I wish I had gone to this Fulcrum of yours.”

“No, you don’t.” She doesn’t even want to think about what he would be like if he had grown up in captivity with the rest of them. Innon, but without his booming laugh or vivacious hedonism or cheerful confidence. Innon, with his graceful strong hands weaker and clumsier for having been broken. Not Innon.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Innon Resistant Meov (speaker), Alabaster
Page Number: 386
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“All the accounts differ on the details, but they agree on one thing: Misalem was the only survivor when his family was taken in a raid. Supposedly his children were slaughtered for Anafumeth’s own table, though I suspect that’s a bit of dramatic embellishment.” Alabaster sighs. “Regardless, they died, and it was Anafumeth’s fault, and he wanted Anafumeth dead for it. Like any man would.”

But a rogga is not any man. Roggas have no right to get angry, to want justice, to protect what they love. For his presumption, Shemshena had killed him—and became a hero for doing it.

Related Characters: Alabaster (speaker), Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Misalem, Shemshena, Emperor Anafumeth
Page Number: 418
Explanation and Analysis:

“Freedom means we get to control what we do now. No one else.”

“Yes. But now that I can think about what I want…” He shrugs as if nonchalant, but there’s an intensity in his gaze at he looks at Innon and Coru. “I’ve never wanted much from life. Just to be able to live it, really. I’m not like you, Syen. I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t want to change the world, or help people, or be anything great. I just want…this.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Innon Resistant Meov, Corundum
Page Number: 422
Explanation and Analysis:

Promise, Alabaster had said.

Do whatever you have to, Innon had tried to say.

And Syenite says: “No, you fucker.”

Coru is crying. She puts her hand over his mouth and nose, to silence him, to comfort him. She will keep him safe. She will not let them take him, enslave him, turn his body into a tool and his mind into a weapon and his life into a travesty of freedom.

[…]

Better that a child never have lived at all than live as a slave.

Better that he die.

Better that she die. Alabaster will hate her for this, for leaving him alone, but Alabaster is not here, and survival is not the same thing as living.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Innon Resistant Meov (speaker), Schaffa Guardian Warrant, Corundum
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

“After Meov. I was…” You’re not sure how to say it. There are griefs too deep to be borne, and yet you have borne them again and again. “I needed to be different.”

It makes no sense. Alabaster makes a soft affirmative sound, though, as if he understands. “You stayed free, at least.”

If hiding everything you are is free. “Yes.”

[…]

“I understand why you killed Corundum,” Alabaster says, very softly. And then, while you sway in your crouch, literally reeling from the blow of that sentence, he finishes you. “But I’ll never forgive you for doing it.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Corundum
Page Number: 446
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Fifth Season LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Fifth Season PDF

Alabaster Quotes in The Fifth Season

The The Fifth Season quotes below are all either spoken by Alabaster or refer to Alabaster. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

And then he reaches forth with all the fine control that the world has brainwashed and backstabbed and brutalized out of him, and all the sensitivity that his masters have bred into him through generations of rape and coercion and highly unnatural selection. His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. […]

So he reaches deep and takes hold of the humming tapping bustling reverberating rippling vastness of the city, and the quieter bedrock beneath it, and the roiling churn of heat and pressure beneath that. Then he reaches wide, taking hold of the great sliding-puzzle piece of earthshell on which the continent sits.

Lastly, he reaches up. For power.

He takes all that, the strata and the magma and the people and the power, in his imaginary hands. Everything. He holds it. He is not alone. The earth is with him.

Then he breaks it.

Related Characters: Alabaster
Related Symbols: The Obelisks
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

If the problem is that ferals are not predictable…well, orogenes have to prove themselves reliable. The Fulcrum has a reputation to maintain; that’s part of this. So’s the training, and the uniform, and the endless rules they must follow, but the breeding is part of it too, or why is she here?

It's somewhat flattering to think that despite her feral status, they actually want something of her infused into their breeding lines. Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Alabaster
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:

But this is what it means to be civilized—doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all. […] With the experience and boost to her reputation, she’ll be that much closer to her fifth ring. That means her own apartment; no more roommates. Better missions, longer leave, more say in her own life. That’s worth it. Earthfire yes, it’s worth it.

She tells herself this all the way back to her room. Then she packs to leave, tidies up so she’ll come home to order and neatness, and takes a shower, methodically scrubbing every bit of flesh she can reach until her skin burns.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Alabaster
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“They kill us because they’ve got stonelore telling them at every turn that we’re born evil—some kind of agents of Father Earth, monsters that barely qualify as human.”

“Yes, but you can’t change stonelore.”

“Stonelore changes all the time, Syenite.” He doesn’t say her name often, either. It gets her attention. “Every civilization adds to it; parts that don’t matter to the people of the time are forgotten. There’s a reason Tablet Two is so damaged: someone, somewhere back in time, decided that it wasn’t important or was wrong, and didn’t bother to take care of it. Or maybe they even deliberately tried to obliterate it, which is why so many of the early copies are damaged in exactly the same way.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker)
Related Symbols: Stonelore
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:

“You think you matter?” All at once he smiles. It’s an ugly thing, cold as the vapor that curls off ice. “You think any of us matter beyond what we can do for them? Whether we obey or not.” He jerks his head toward the body of the abused, murdered child. “You think he mattered, after what they did to him? The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

She has never heard so much hate put into one word before.

Related Characters: Alabaster (speaker), Essun/Damaya/Syenite, The Node Maintainer
Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Alabaster smiles, though the muscles of his jaw flex repeatedly. “I would’ve thought you’d like being treated like a human being for a change.”

“I do. But what difference does it make? Even if you pull rank now, it won’t change how they feel about us—”

“No, it won’t. And I don’t care how they feel. They don’t have to rusting like us. What matters is what they do.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Asael Leadership Allia
Page Number: 159-160
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

There’re so many ways to die in this place. But they know about all of them—seriously—and as far as I can tell, they don’t care. At least they’ll die free, they say.”

“Free of what? Living?”

“Sanze.” Alabaster grins when Syen’s mouth falls open.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker)
Page Number: 294
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

And what do they even call this? It’s not a threesome, or a love triangle. It’s a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron. (And, well, maybe it’s love.) She should worry about another pregnancy, maybe from Alabaster again given how messy things get between the three of them, but she can’t bring herself to worry because it doesn’t matter. Someone will love her children no matter what. Just as she doesn’t think overmuch about what she does with her bed time or how this thing between them works; no one in Meov will care, no matter what. That’s another turn-on, probably: the utter lack of fear. Imagine that.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Alabaster, Innon Resistant Meov
Page Number: 372
Explanation and Analysis:

“Heh.” Innon sounds odd, and Syenite glances at him in surprise to see an almost regretful look on his face. “Sometimes, when I see what you and he can do, I wish I had gone to this Fulcrum of yours.”

“No, you don’t.” She doesn’t even want to think about what he would be like if he had grown up in captivity with the rest of them. Innon, but without his booming laugh or vivacious hedonism or cheerful confidence. Innon, with his graceful strong hands weaker and clumsier for having been broken. Not Innon.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Innon Resistant Meov (speaker), Alabaster
Page Number: 386
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“All the accounts differ on the details, but they agree on one thing: Misalem was the only survivor when his family was taken in a raid. Supposedly his children were slaughtered for Anafumeth’s own table, though I suspect that’s a bit of dramatic embellishment.” Alabaster sighs. “Regardless, they died, and it was Anafumeth’s fault, and he wanted Anafumeth dead for it. Like any man would.”

But a rogga is not any man. Roggas have no right to get angry, to want justice, to protect what they love. For his presumption, Shemshena had killed him—and became a hero for doing it.

Related Characters: Alabaster (speaker), Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Misalem, Shemshena, Emperor Anafumeth
Page Number: 418
Explanation and Analysis:

“Freedom means we get to control what we do now. No one else.”

“Yes. But now that I can think about what I want…” He shrugs as if nonchalant, but there’s an intensity in his gaze at he looks at Innon and Coru. “I’ve never wanted much from life. Just to be able to live it, really. I’m not like you, Syen. I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t want to change the world, or help people, or be anything great. I just want…this.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Innon Resistant Meov, Corundum
Page Number: 422
Explanation and Analysis:

Promise, Alabaster had said.

Do whatever you have to, Innon had tried to say.

And Syenite says: “No, you fucker.”

Coru is crying. She puts her hand over his mouth and nose, to silence him, to comfort him. She will keep him safe. She will not let them take him, enslave him, turn his body into a tool and his mind into a weapon and his life into a travesty of freedom.

[…]

Better that a child never have lived at all than live as a slave.

Better that he die.

Better that she die. Alabaster will hate her for this, for leaving him alone, but Alabaster is not here, and survival is not the same thing as living.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Innon Resistant Meov (speaker), Schaffa Guardian Warrant, Corundum
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

“After Meov. I was…” You’re not sure how to say it. There are griefs too deep to be borne, and yet you have borne them again and again. “I needed to be different.”

It makes no sense. Alabaster makes a soft affirmative sound, though, as if he understands. “You stayed free, at least.”

If hiding everything you are is free. “Yes.”

[…]

“I understand why you killed Corundum,” Alabaster says, very softly. And then, while you sway in your crouch, literally reeling from the blow of that sentence, he finishes you. “But I’ll never forgive you for doing it.”

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite (speaker), Alabaster (speaker), Corundum
Page Number: 446
Explanation and Analysis: