Literature / The Stone Sky

The Stone Sky is a 2017 fantasy novel written by N. K. Jemisin. It is the third and final book of The Broken Earth Trilogy.

After defeating the invading army of Rennanis, Essun finds herself torn between helping the refugees of Castrima find a new home and completing her mission of using the Obelisk Gate to catch the Moon and end the Seasons forever.

Meanwhile, Essun's daughter Nassun has also discovered how to use the Obelisk Gate, but she has come to the conclusion that the only way to ensure that orogenes will never be oppressed again is to ensure the end of the world.

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This novel provides examples of:

• After the End: This book opens two years into the final Fifth Season. Two years without the sun has made the Stillness so cold that only the equatorial regions—those closest to the heat of the Rifting—are above freezing, and even then only just.
• Albinos Are Freaks: The tuners' being albino accentuates how different they look from the people of Syl Anagist, which makes them be considered subhuman. This is because they were deliberately engineered to be a racial caricature of Thniess people, who weren't albino but were associated with having relatively paler skin.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: Schaffa is aware he used to be a very different person and he was cruel to his charges unlike how he was with Nassun now, though he can't remember much of it at all.
• And I Must Scream: Implied that this is what happened to the Thniess and tuners in “the briar patch”, though it's left ambiguous how conscious they are (in any case, they at least aren't capable of feeling pain).
• Apocalyptic Log: Subverted. Many chapters begin with an excerpt from the logs of Yater Innovator Debars, detailing how a rogga has averted an apocalypse, usually at the cost of their own life.
• Artificial Humans: The original stone eaters are revealed to have been created by Syl Anagist to help create a new power source.
• Asshole Victim: In the confrontation between Essun and Nassun, Essun ends up sucking the life out of all the Guardians within Warrant for the power to contest Nassun's hold over the Obelisk Gate, and they die in agony. Considering everything the Guardians have done to Essun and to all the other orogenes since the Seasons began, both directly and indirectly, it's hard to feel sorry for them.
• The Atoner: Schaffa wants to make up for how he abused orogene children in the past by being unconditionally loyal to Nassun, even if it means helping her destroy the world.
• Bio Punk: The infrastructure and vehicles of Syl Anagist are designed by genetically engineering plants and occasionally animals; houses are made completely out of living material, for example. This is helped by them being able to use magic from living things as the source of their technology.
• Bittersweet Ending: Essun dies, but she lives on in the stone eater Hoa creates from her and continues to want to make the world better. The Seasons are stopped forever and the Fulcrum and Guardians are gone, but this Season still needs to be survived and there's no guarantee that the next empire or civilisation won't be built on yet more systemic oppression. Nassun lives, but she loses a hand and most of her orogeny, and with Schaffa and Essun's deaths she is left without any parents; it's uncertain what will happen to her, Essun's friends and Ykka's comm.
• Body Horror: Essun forgets what the Obelisk Gate has done to her orogeny and invokes it. This gives her the choice of which body part to turn to stone.
• Broken Ace: Essun, who is now a ten-ringer, but can’t use orogeny without turning to stone, and has endured many of the same hardships that broke Alabaster.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Kelenli and Gallat believed they were siblings until Kelenli was fifteen, and Gallat is incredibly protective and possessive of her, often acting more like a jilted boyfriend than a slighted sibling; it's possible that he's the father of her unborn child.
• Brought Down to Normal: Nassun, effectively, at the end of the book, since using orogeny again will turn her to stone.
• Catchphrase: "Hello, little enemy". The Earth towards anyone who becomes aware of its senscience, although it's not actually spoken with words, but a transalation of what they can sess of its intent.
• Cast from Hit Points: As with Alabaster in The Obelisk Gate, Essun's oregeny will now turn her partially to stone every time she uses it.
• Cast Full of Crazy: The world has been ending for over a year now. Who doesn’t show symptoms of PTSD?
• City Planet: Syl Anagist covered nearly all of the Stillness.
• Colony Drop: Nassun plans to end all the suffering in the world by, well, ending the world. However, she ultimately catches the moon, rather than smashing the planet with it, because she finally realized her mother loved her and chose to do what Essun would have wanted. This was also "burndown", the ultimate cause of the Shattering— some of the obelisks hit the planet, with the tuners barely managing to stop all of them from hitting it, which would have destroyed all life..
• Crapsaccharine World: Syl Anagist is a marvel of Organic Technology where the entire city is alive, magic is a freely available utility, and life is "sacred" — and is populated by genocidal bigots who think nothing of draining the Life Energy of millions of eternally trapped, undying victims to prime the pump for a Magitek project.
• Crossing the Desert: The people of Castrima undertake a grueling desert journey to get to Rennanis, where they will be able to have the resources to survive, made even more deadly by the fact that it is during The End of the World as We Know It.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Hoa was an Artificial Human created to be a slave.
• Death by Depower: The Guardians are all made The Ageless by the implanted shard of the Evil Earth that grants them their Mage Killer powers, and age to death in months if it's removed. The Evil Earth itself does this to Schaffa, trying to force Nassun to abandon her plans in order to save him; its gambit fails and Schaffa spends a few weeks with Nassun before dying peacefully.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Danel agrees to join Castrima after her army is defeated and becomes friends with Essun, helped by how she wasn't very enthusiastic about being a general in Rennanis's army in the first place.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Lerna is killed off suddenly by Steel and his allies when Hoa brings Essun and her allies to Corepoint. Essun has a brief Heroic BSoD over how pointless and sudden his death was.
• Dug Too Deep: Digging into the core of the Earth to use it's magic as a power source for Syl Anagist turns out to be a bad idea when the Earth turns out to be sentient and he lashes out against them.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Nassun loses Schaffa, one hand, and her ability to perform orogeny. Essun dies. But there will be no more Seasons, and the stone eater that Hoa creates from the remains of Essun appears to have her memories and the desire to make the world better.
• Emergency Transformation: Invoked at the climax when the Earth pulls out Schaffa's corestone, kick-starting deadly Rapid Aging, to provoke Nassun to use the Obelisk Gate to transform him into a Stone Eater rather than destroy the planet. Trouble is, the Gate isn't at all precise, so she'd have to transform every human into a Stone Eater...
• The Ending Changes Everything: The final chapter reveals that the reason that the trilogy is written in the second person is because Hoa is narrating the events of the trilogy to the stone eater he made from Essun, in the hopes that it will help that stone eater to become Essun. Judging by her reaction once she wakes up, he appears to have succeeded.
• Fantastic Racism: In the stone eaters’ backstory, we get Sylanagists committing genocide against the Thniess for the simple reason that they couldn't understand their magic and the Thniess wouldn't subscribe to the idea of magic as a commodity, which was fundamental Sylanagistine society. Even Gallat is looked down upon, because his ice-white eyes make it pretty obvious that there's at least some Thniess in his recent ancestry. It's also mentioned that the Thniess aren't the only group of people that Syl Anagist exploited and exterminated, they're just the latest.
• Freudian Excuse: The people of Syl Anagist planned to enslave the Earth by draining all his magic for power, and ultimately stole his only child. Hence the Seasons; the Earth didn't start the war, but it's doing its best to end it.
• From Cataclysm to Myth: The Shattering is only vaguely described in myths as the worst season and to have originated from the Earth's anger at orogenes for the loss of his only child. The Obelisk Gate clarifies that this really happened and the "child" was the moon, and this book gives the whole story, showing that some details were forgotten like the Shattering actually being delayed for a hundred years after the loss of the moon and destruction of Syl Anagist.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Sanzed mythology teaches that the Evil Earth utterly despises humans. Turns out that the Earth itself is a Genius Loci who was tapped for its magic by the people of Syl Anagist and lashed out to prevent itself from being forcibly reforged into a Magitek engine, but doesn't understand the difference between its original enemies and later factions of humanity.
• Gambit Pileup: The first run of the Plutonic Engine: it was designed by Syl Anagist to bring forth Geoarcanity, a perpetual draining device from the Earth's magic, using Artificial Humans known as tuners to access the obelisks. The tuners, treated as lesser beings for their whole lives, have had enough and plan to use the Engine to shutdown their entire magic system and collapse the Sylanagistine civilization. But then the Earth becomes aware of the humanity's attempts to steal its power and takes over the Engine, planning to cause a cataclysm bad enough to end all life on the planet. The tuners, led by Hoa, manage to take back control of most obelisks, redirect their power to the moon, which is thrown off-orbit, and the Earth only manages to inflict a still devastating, but survivable cataclysm, which would be known as The Shattering.
• Generation Xerox: Essun realizes that due to a combination of how she raised her daughter, and all that's happened during the Season, Nassun basically is her now. But stronger and better, to the point that she can hack the Obelisk Gate.
• Genius Loci: Finally confirmed. Father Earth is alive. And he’s pissed.
• Genocide Backfire: Syl Anagist actually did manage to get rid of all of the Thniess/Niess. However, they then tried to genetically engineer racial caricatures of the Thniess to use their powers for energy generation, to show the world how thoroughly they had dominated them, and those people violently turned against them.
• Gone Horribly Right: Hoa sought to destroy Syl Anagist to end the oppression of his people and the Niess. Unfortunately, Father Earth had the same idea and hijacked Hoa's plan, bringing about the fall of all human civilization and the beginning of the Seasons.
• Good All Along: Hoa/Houwha acts sinister at many points in the trilogy, but he ultimately turns out to be working to ensure the survival of humanity.
• Handicapped Badass: As with Alabaster before her, Essun is a ten-ringer whose orogeny will turn her partially to stone when used. She finds herself in more than one situation where she knows what to do, but is unwilling to pay the cost of doing it.
• Hand on Womb: When Houwha is spying on Kelenli and Gallat arguing, Kelenli protectively covering her stomach when Gallat grabs her is what clues Houwha in that she's pregnant.
• Happiness in Slavery: Originally, the tuners believed they were the pinnacles of science and should be proud of their position, even if sometimes some of them were sent to the briar patch. Until Kelenli, a fellow Artificial Human, helped them realize they were slaves.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Yaetr's notes at the end of chapters at one point tell a story of a group of imperial orogenes who were too weak to stop a volcano eruption, but they didn't have time to get reinforcements so they sacrificed their lives to stop it.
  • Essun knows that she will turn to stone if she tries to activate the Obelisk Gate again, but is willing to do so to fix the world.
• History Repeats: Hoa, having realized that the empire of Syl Anagist needs the systemic oppression of his people to survive, brings about the end of human civilization. 40,000 years later, Alabaster, having realized that Sanze Empire requires the systemic oppression of his people to survive, brings about the end of human civilization. And, as Nassun and Hoa discuss in the ending, it's entirely possible that this cycle will repeat itself anew, now that the Fulcrum has been utterly destroyed and there's nothing to stop orogenes from taking over.
• Human Resources: Syl Anagist turns out to be fueled by the Thniess, an oppressed people that Syl Anagist turned into a power source and kept barely alive in the 'Briar Patch'.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Stone Eaters, which is why Steel wants the whole world destroyed.
• I'm a Humanitarian: At one point while crossing a wasteland, Ykka's group runs low on supplies. “You don’t think about the meat.”
• I'm Not a Hero, I'm...: Danel refers to Essun as like a hero of lore, to which she thinks this trope in response, seeing all of the people she's killed and failing her daughter as clearly showing she's no hero.
• Info Dump: The Syl Anagist chapters go into great detail on how the Stone Eaters were created and the mechanics of how they operate.
• Ironic Echo: "Life is sacred in Syl Anagist." Even when death would be preferable...
• Just Before the End: Hoa's flashbacks show Sylanagist just prior to, and arguably during, the fall of their situation and the start of the Fifth Seasons.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: It’s the end of the world and Essun is both forty-four and near starving. She still gets pregnant.
  • Potentially a Justified Trope in-universe: the Seasons have implicitly selected for people who can have children even under conditions of extreme stress, and the Sanze Empire made such selection explicit policy (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by forcing specific people to have children). Out-of-universe, Jemisin has stated she had Essun learn she is pregnant immediately before she dies because "Pregnancy doesn't always come at a good time. People can't always rearrange their lives to make it work." .
• Magitek: The Obelisk Gate was originally advanced technology designed to harvest magic from the earth and supply all of Syl Anagist.
• May–December Romance: Essun and Lerna. She's fifteen years older than he is.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: A variant - Essun gives up the fight with Nassun in order to save her and dies, giving Nassun the power to do whatever she wants with the Obelisk Gate, but instead of using it to destroy the world or turn everyone into stone eaters she decides to follow through with Essun's plan anyway.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Essun after she finds out that Nassun has killed Jija and she realizes how much she's failed as a mother, not being there for her and letting her daughter turn into something just like herself.
• The Night That Never Ends: The story opens on the road from the ruins of Tirimo, two years into the Season. Everything is gray from being coated with ash, and the only reason the temperature is above freezing is because the characters are so close to the Rifting.
• No Immortal Inertia: Guardians are immortal with their corestones, not so much without them. Schaffa dies scant weeks after his corestone is removed.
• N-Word Privileges: Explicitly discussed. Both Essun and Ykka refer to themselves as roggas, but Essun eventually tells off Danel, a prisoner who later becomes a member of Castrima, for using the term, saying she doesn't have the right. The fact Danel doesn't argue is one of the signs she's no longer an enemy.
• Oh, My Gods!: In addition to people in the Stillness swearing by “Evil Earth”, we get Sylanagists swearing by “Evil Death”.
• Older Than They Look: In The Obelisk Gate, we found out that the Guardians are hundreds of years old, but in this book, we find out that Schaffa is several thousands of years old, and is quite likely among the first Guardians ever created.
• Parental Substitute: Schaffa for Nassun, even more explicitly than in the previous book. Unlike with her mother, he's actually good at it this time.
• Planetary Core Manipulation: Advanced Ancient Humans built the Obelisk Gate system to control and tap the planet's core for unlimited magical power, unaware that the core is a Genius Loci who objected with apocalyptic force.
• Polyamory: Ykka and her rotating pool of lovers.
• Post-Historical Trauma: Alabaster was badly shaken by discovering the history of Syl Anagist, and how it shows that history has always been full of people like him being oppressed and there is no escape.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Sylanagist powered their greatest creation via enslaving an ethnic minority and using them as a power source.
• The Power of Love: Steel says the reason Schaffa is so old but still sane is that he truly loved all his charges, even though he's treated all but one very badly. Also counts as Love Redeems, as for Nassun he finally becomes a good parental figure, if not a good person in general.
• The Promised Land: The people of Castrima desperately want to get to Rennanis because it is a big city with more than enough resources for them and they will likely starve if they stay where they are, though they have to take a long and dangerous journey to get there.
• The Punishment: The original stone eaters were made immortal and given the strange powers stone eaters have as a punishment for taking magic from the earth to fuel the Plutonic Engine, though unlike most examples of this trope not all of them are villainous.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Some of the stone eaters like Steel want to crash the moon into the earth because that would be the only way to kill themselves, though other stone eaters like Hoa are happy to be alive and would rather fix the world. Steel convinces Nassun to help him in this endeavor, which she agrees to because she has her own grievances with the world and equally wants things to be at peace by ending it all.
• Raised in a Lab: The Tuners are Artificial Human Child Mages trained from birth to operate the Obelisk Gate Amplifier Artifact. On their one trip outside the lab, they realize that they're kept sequestered because the Sylanagistine people loathe them and that they'll be destroyed for Human Resources as soon as they've served their purpose.
• Really 700 Years Old: The Guardians and the stone eaters. The average Guardian can last for three to four thousand years before the fragment of Evil Earth wears them down and corrupts them, and Schaffa is much older than that. The original stone eaters such as Hoa/Houwha, Antimony/Gaewha and Steel/Raewha are forty thousand years old.
• Released to Elsewhere: The tuners who are sent to the briar patch, who turn out to be sent to be kept barely alive and used as a power source for Syl Anagist.
• The Reveal: The stone eaters’ backstory. They were tuners, artificially created from the Thniess, a persecuted people, in order to tap into the wellspring of the Earth's magical power and harness it for the use of Syl Anagist. Once they learned the truth about themselves they attempted to sabotage the project, but the Earth usurped it, setting the stage for the Seasons and transforming the tuners into their present forms as punishment.
• Sadistic Choice: Essun draws on her orogeny without thinking about it, forgetting what the Obelisk Gate has done to her. She realizes it's going to turn part of her to stone, but is quick enough that she gets to decide exactly which piece of her body she'll permanently lose use of. She chooses a breast as the least useful remaining piece of her anatomy, picking the left to balance the missing weight of her right arm.
• Science Fantasy: There's orogeny and magic! Using both together is called "tuning". Nassun can do it.
• Servant Race: The tuners were genetically engineered to be the ideal workers on the Plutonic Engine.
• Shout-Out: An incredibly dark one. The place where the tuners that made waves and the Thniess are used as living batteries is called "the briar patch".
• Single Tear: When Essun dies, it's with a single tear, now turned to diamond, glistening on her stone cheek.
• Smile of Approval: When The Archmage Essun and her estranged daughter Nassun fight over control of an apocalyptic Amplifier Artifact, Essun realizes she's outmatched, and when Phlebotinum Overload petrifies her, she dies smiling with pride at how amazing her daughter has become — the first time in their lives that she'd smiled at her. It convinces Nassun to use the artifact to save the world.
• Soiled City on a Hill: Syl Anagist turns out to be built on the oppression of people like the Thniess who are used as Human Resources. The tuners decide to destroy it, and the Earth does the rest.
• Super Prototype: Kelenli, the prototype for the tuners, is more skilled than the rest of them. She says this is due to the others not having enough experience in the outside world rather than her being innately more powerful, though she has her own reasons for wanting the tuners to see what's outside.
• Title Drop: Averted for the first time in the series.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Part of Kelenli's backstory. She was raised alongside Gallat as his sister and treated as human until the age of fifteen, at which pointed she discovered she was the product of genetic engineering (or biomagestry).
• Transhuman Treachery: The Artificial Humans forced to work as tuners for Syl Anagist, thanks to Kelenli, become aware of their own exploitation and the truth about the world they live in, the genocidal designs of their masters, and that they would inevitably be forced to work in the briar patch forever. So they plan to use the Plutonic Engine to shatter the civilization that uses them - but the Earth has other, even more catastrophic plans, and hijacks their rebellious attempt.
• Trauma Conga Line: Standard for this trilogy, especially for Essun and Nassun.
• Undying Loyalty: Schaffa is willing to help Nassun destroy the world if it would make her happy, in part as a strange way to atone for how he was to orogens children in the past.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Yaetr's notes show that there are many cases of orogens saving people from horrible catastrophes only for those people to kill them for being orogenes.
• Unreliable Narrator: Lampshaded by Hoa when he is giving the stone eaters' backstory, saying that his memory works a lot like a human’s, meaning that it is imperfect. For example, he describes Kelenli and Gallat with terms that correspond to Essun and Schaffa, respectively — but he quickly clarifies that this resemblance is just artistic licence; it's hard for him to remember what Kelenli and Gallat actually looked like, and what he can recall is influenced by the fact that he likes Kelenli/Essun and doesn't like Gallat/Schaffa.
• The Unreveal: What happened to Maxixe’s legs and face.
• Was Once a Man: Some of the stone eaters (including Alabaster and Essun), although the original sixteen were essentially created in a lab.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Steel, to a degree. He does want to end the suffering of both the stone eaters and the orogenes.
  • All of the stone eaters in their backstory. They wanted to destroy the civilization that was enslaving them and oppressing the Thniess.

• What Happened to the Mouse?: Tonkee’s hormone replacement therapy. Mentioned in The Fifth Season and ignored in both The Obelisk Gate and this book. Presumably she couldn’t get any more due to the whole apocalypse thing, but unlike in The Fifth Season, there’s no mention of Tonkee’s facial hair growing back.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Steel wants to destroy the world because he is tired of life after living 40,000 years. He also invokes this when telling Nassun she should let a comatose Schaffa die.
• Will They or Won't They?: Essun and Lerna, lampshaded by Ykka (and, in the previous book, Alabaster). They do.
• You Are Not Alone: The cynical Essun gradually begins to see that people in Castrima genuinely care about her and aren't going to turn into a bigoted hate mob. In the end many of them agree to come with her on her final quest.