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Tuesday, October 27

Eo Character Guide

Finish Red Rising and choose it above to read this guide. Later-book sections remain hidden until you select those books.

Eo pixel art

Character guide · first on-page appearance: Red Rising

Who is Eo?

Eo is Darrow’s wife in Lykos. They are both sixteen when Red Rising begins and married the previous year, following the customs of their mining community. Darrow imagines a better life through success at work; Eo questions why the people doing that work must accept the limits imposed on them.

The Sons of Ares turn the recording of her execution into a rallying cry. For Darrow, she remains the wife he grew up with and lost, even as strangers come to know her as a martyr.

Current status

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Appearance and personality

Eo belongs to the same dusty underground world as Darrow. She tends his burned hands with dust still in her hair, arranges a surprise and uses dancing to draw him out of anger. The headband she makes from her own hair becomes one of the personal keepsakes he finds after her death.

Eo is affectionate with Darrow and impatient with his faith in the mine’s rules. She sees that the Laurel keeps the clans competing against each other. In the garden, she imagines their children being free and asks Darrow to fight for that future. She wants him to live for it, rather than die as another martyr.[1]

Attributes and abilities

Eo has no military training or position of authority. She understands how the mine keeps people obedient and challenges Darrow to question what he has been taught. Her forbidden song gives the other Reds words for anger they have been told to suppress.

Eo knows their lives amount to slavery, but she does not know that Mars’s surface is already inhabited. Darrow learns that after her death.[2]

History

Book 1

Red Rising

Eo and Darrow grow up together in Lykos. As a child she places a haemanthus in his father’s workboot, connecting her to the family’s grief before their marriage. When Darrow’s work fails to win the Laurel, she challenges his confidence that labor and merit will be rewarded fairly.

She takes him into a hidden garden and argues that their life is slavery, rather than an honorable sacrifice for future settlers. Their discovery leads to punishment. During the whipping, Eo sings a forbidden song despite knowing its penalty. She is sentenced to hang, whispers a private message to Dio and asks Darrow to live.

Mars’s low gravity makes the hanging slow. Darrow pulls Eo’s feet to end her suffering, then takes her body down and buries her beneath the garden tree. He keeps her wedding ring and finds the headband she made for him. The Sons circulate the recording of her execution to show other people what the Society does to Reds.[3]

Book 2

Golden Son

Harmony shows Darrow a recording that reveals Eo was pregnant and knew it before her execution. She withheld that knowledge from him to spare him further pain. The revelation intensifies his grief and makes a destructive revenge plan more tempting.

Back in Lykos, Darrow begins remembering Eo’s faults as well as her courage. He cannot know what she would say about every choice he has made. Deanna has her own, more critical view of Eo and the pain her death left behind.[4]

Book 3

Morning Star

During his recovery, Darrow tells Sevro that Eo could be angry and selfish as well as brave. He grieves the ordinary life they never got to share. On Phobos, the Rising broadcasts her execution again to inspire rebellion.

Sevro invokes Eo and Fitchner when he argues against revenge killings. Darrow later plans to tell Pax about her and help build the future she wanted.[5]

Book 6

Light Bringer

The Forbidden Song is engraved on Pyrphoros, the weapon made for Darrow. Before Athena, he argues that Eo’s dream of freedom must include people on worlds she never knew existed. He also has to answer for abandoning the Sons in the Rim.[6]

Relationships

Darrow

Darrow and Eo tease, comfort and frustrate each other. He wants to make their life in Lykos safer; she wants him to imagine a life beyond it. After her execution, he grieves their marriage while the Sons ask him to help lead a rebellion in her name.[7]

Darrow struggles with loving Mustang while still loving Eo. He eventually accepts that he can carry Eo’s memory without giving up a future with someone else.[8]

Dio

Eo whispers something to Dio before she is hanged. Darrow cannot hear it, and the first book leaves the message unexplained.[9]

In Golden Son, the recording reveals that Eo was pregnant and asked Dio not to tell Darrow. He learns this long after the execution.[10]

References

  1. Red Rising, chapters 1–6. ↩
  2. Red Rising, chapters 3–6, 9. ↩
  3. Red Rising, chapters 1–9. ↩
  4. Golden Son, chapters 9–10, 47–50. ↩
  5. Morning Star, chapters 22–23, 35, 50, 54. ↩
  6. Light Bringer, chapters 59–60. ↩
  7. Red Rising, chapters 1–12. ↩
  8. Golden Son, chapters 33, 42–43, 47. ↩
  9. Red Rising, chapters 6. ↩
  10. Golden Son, chapters 9. ↩