Lucía is a wanderer whom the narrator finds in the woods and falls in love with. She immediately captivates the narrator with her “majestic” beauty and her self-assuredness. Unlike the other women, who live in the world of the Sacred Sisterhood, Lucía is the “maker” and “sole inhabitant” of her own “inner universe” (88). She is independent, a free-thinker who refuses to participate in the Sisterhood’s practices of cruelty. The narrator often describes her looking like a “white deer,” but her voice also holds “the yellow gaze of a wolf” (73); although she is compassionate, she is not naive. She has “experienced and accepted terror,” but remains “someone able to create beauty” (73). The other women in the Sisterhood are likewise frightened and enchanted by Lucía, especially as she seems to have special powers, such as the ability to walk on coals without being burned and command a swarm of wasps. Her admirers see these powers as “miracles,” while others see them as the work of dark witchcraft. Lucía is pure and beautiful, and the others see her as intense competition for the coveted positions of Chosen and Enlightened. Some of the unworthy, particularly Lourdes, begin to spread ugly rumors about Lucía, claiming she killed a Diaphanous Spirit using “dark, ancestral magic” (149). Lucía is “unperturbed” by these rumors, but the narrator doesn’t yet have Lucía’s “capacity for mercy” (151) and tries to take revenge on behalf of Lucía, feeding Lourdes the amanitas that lead the Superior Sister to beat and kill the other woman. When they sneak out to bury Lourdes, the narrator feels remorse, but Lucía never blames her for the other woman’s death.

Lucía helps the narrator to “feel things [she’s] forgotten, like mercy” (163). She opens her eyes to life outside of the Sacred Sisterhood and helps her to see the evil and brutality of their doctrine. When Lucía is chosen as Enlightened, the narrator knows she must rescue her. She enters the Refuge of the Enlightened to find “Him,” the supposed leader of the Sisterhood, raping the sequestered Enlightened, including Lucía. The narrator frees Lucía, although she suffers mortal injury herself, indicating that she has released the doctrine of self-preservation at all costs.

Lucía’s most striking trait is her moral clarity. She does not posture or perform righteousness; she simply refuses to participate in cruelty, even when it is rewarded. This quiet resistance makes her seem mystical to others, but her “miracles” are really extensions of her inner resolve. Lucía is brave, but not hardened; wise, but not cynical. Her strength lies in her ability to see suffering without absorbing its logic. In many ways, she serves as the narrator’s moral and emotional opposite, an embodiment of what it looks like to survive without losing the capacity for tenderness.

The Superior Sister is the antagonist and tyrannical mother superior of the Sacred Sisterhood. A “colossal” figure with a “magnificent and terrifying presence” (51), she is a symbol of how patriarchal systems of oppression pit women against one another. She wears “war boots” that remind the narrator of a soldier and often carries a whip that she uses “to educate [the unworthy] in the art of agony” (30). She is strong, capable of carrying other women easily, and “so resilient she could be immortal” (153). Rumors circulate about her life before the Sisterhood as the unworthy collectively “fear and admire her” (87). Some believe that she was a “climate migrant” and fought in the “water wars” as whole nations were swallowed up by the sea. Some whisper that He is her brother, and together they killed the monks who used to inhabit the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. The Superior Sister subjects the women to all manner of horrible punishments, from sexual abuse and beatings to burning and burying alive. No one, not even her “favorites,” like Lourdes, are safe from her sadistic rampages. Towards the end of the novel.

The Superior Sister is not just an enforcer of cruelty; she is a portrait of internalized patriarchy, having weaponized the pain she likely once endured as a woman. Her tyranny is calculated—she isolates women from each other, rewards betrayal, and ritualizes suffering to maintain control. Her persona is mythic, almost supernatural, but her power rests on fear and spectacle. Ultimately, she reveals how authoritarian systems use women as both victims and instruments of oppression, transforming them into enforcers of the very structures that dehumanize them.

Lourdes is one of the unworthy and a favorite to become Chosen or Enlightened. She is chosen for important honors and duties, such as dealing out “exemplary punishments” for the other unworthy and planning the Minor Saint’s funeral. This special treatment inspires jealousy in the other women, especially the narrator, who dreams of seeing Lourdes fail and even longs to kill her at times. She is “radiant and pristine,” beautiful, unblemished, and free of “signs of contamination” on the outside, but the narrator suspects she is “rotten on the inside” because she remains unworthy (35). When Lucía arrives, Lourdes sees the other woman as competition and tries to sabotage her, first by planting a wasp nest in her cell, then by spreading rumors that “Lucía is a witch who turns into a cockroach at night” (132). However, these tactics backfire when the narrator feeds Lourdes amanitas, causing her to dance naked in the garden and incur the Superior Sister’s wrath. The Superior Sister beats Lourdes in the forest; the narrator and Lucía try to save her, but the next morning, she is hanging dead from the tree. Even though she spent much of the time hating Lourdes, the narrator feels “pain coursing through [her] bones” (153) at the sight of the other woman’s body, indicating the maturation of her compassion and empathy.

Lourdes represents what happens when power is dangled as a reward for obedience in a corrupt system. She is desperate to ascend and clings to proximity to authority, even as it destroys her. On the surface, she is poised and devout, but underneath, she is brittle—driven by fear, competition, and the need to matter. She is not irredeemably cruel; her malice is a learned behavior, modeled by the Sisterhood. Lourdes’s downfall is tragic because it mirrors the narrator’s potential path, and her death becomes a pivotal moment of awakening for those left behind.

Circe is a cat that becomes the narrator’s cherished companion during the unspecified period of time before she arrives at the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. The narrator names her after the sorceress from Greek mythology who turns men into animals, a story by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar about a woman who feeds her boyfriend candies filled with cockroaches. She sees Circe not as a cat but as a companion, a little “sorceress” or “enchantress” whose purr is a “magical sound” that soothes the narrator. Circe is presented in such a way that it isn’t immediately clear what kind of creature she is, or even if she is an animal or a human. She and the narrator are both wary of one another, but they slowly begin to trust and rely on one another, becoming “a pack of two” (130). Their brief companionship comes to a tragic end when Circe is stabbed to death by a group of violent men. Her death devastates the narrator and remains one of her most significant traumas from her time outside the Sacred Sisterhood. Their relationship illustrates how love and companionship can transcend species.

Circe is the narrator’s last tether to innocence and affection before the Sisterhood. Her mysterious presence blurs the line between reality and symbol, functioning as a source of comfort, agency, and memory. Circe’s loyalty is silent but absolute, and her presence humanizes the narrator during her most desolate period. Her brutal death shatters the narrator’s sense of safety and catalyzes her descent into numbness. In the narrator’s inner cosmology, Circe remains a sacred figure and a memory of love uncorrupted by doctrine.