Ophelia

Ophelia is fifty-four, one of the “astronomers without an observatory” of the Line. Her mother and grandmother kept the stones before her; she keeps the circle of menhirs of the Meridian Pillar from a round stone house on the ridge west of the Plain, with an old donkey called Compasso.

At the end of Book I she is on the Plain, watching the Pillar, which has flickered “a thread” since the Overload.