Exa is one of the two Handmaidens of the Herd of God, the living vessel of Madness and the "mad poet" of the pair. Darker and dreamier than her sister Electra, she longs to live in "an enchanted reality made of beautiful, sparkling, Nabokovian language." A lifelong insomniac who "never sleeps," she requires a constant supply of interesting events to outrun her own unraveling, and begins The Rite of Ascent depressed and "bereft of language, like a bee parched for honey." She is said to be in touch with all her past lives and to move through them freely. With Electra she serves as one of the Herd's flirty fishers and assists Magnetic Rose at Astral Spaceways Incorporated.