A society that enslaves a group with useful power first reclassifies them as a separate, non-human category, which converts exploitation and casual killing into something unremarkable rather than monstrous. The slur applied to them becomes load-bearing: once a person accepts the label for themselves, they police their own behavior to survive, completing the system from the inside.
The very trait that makes a group valuable (here, the ability to control seismic energy) is the reason they are enslaved rather than freed, because a capability too important to lose is managed through control rather than partnership. Fear of the power and dependence on it coexist, so the group is simultaneously indispensable and treated as disposable.
A woman returns home to find her toddler son beaten to death by her husband, who killed the boy on discovering he had inherited her hidden, feared power, then fled with their daughter. She sets out across a dying continent not primarily in grief but to recover the surviving child and confront what the father has made of her family.
Presenting what appears to be three separate women at different ages as, eventually, a single person across time reframes a life as discontinuous selves shaped by successive traumas rather than one continuous identity. Reading a biography this way surfaces how a person can be unrecognizable to their own earlier self and still be held accountable as continuous.