Azura Ghost Refresher
The Graven, Book 2 – Azura Ghost – SPOILER Plot Summary
This is a synopsis of the key events and elements in the second book of The Graven trilogy, Azura Ghost, for use as a memory refresher before starting the third and final book, Ethera Grave, and/or as a helpful guide for reviewers trying to recall specific elements from the book. (A glossary is also available here.)
Ten years after the events of Nophek Gloss, Caiden is thirty years old and has spent the past decade alone on the run to keep the Azura, his starship, out of enemy hands. He’s hunted by Casthen forces controlled by his nemesis, Threi Cetre, who took over the morally questionable Casthen organization that the two of them had temporarily teamed up to overthrow. Caiden stranded Threi in a small bubble universe that can only be accessed by using the Azura’s ability to generate a safe universe to bridge inside with. In order to keep Threi locked up in this way, Caiden has sacrificed a comfortable life of healing and family for a lonely fugitive existence. His only companion is C, the now juvenile nophek beast that he rescued from Casthen exploitation.
Unbeknownst to Caiden, his childhood friend, Leta, who he thought had been slaughtered with the rest of their home planet’s population, survived in the past thanks to Threi’s intervention. Threi passed child Leta to his sister, Abriss Cetre, to become part of a special experiment. The candidates underwent genetic conditioning and ethereal treatments to bring them physiologically closer to the what the revered Graven species were in ancient times, existing in deeper connection with the manifestation of reality. Abriss believes that Graven insight will unlock the last secrets of the multiverse and the nature of being, allowing her to finally completely unify, enlighten, and expand her universe, Unity, the central and primordial world in the multiverse.
When Threi learns that Leta is Caiden’s long lost friend, he plans to use her as bait, and makes a deal with Abriss. The Azura contains Graven technology, which Abriss desperately wants, and Threi is happy to hand it over after he uses it to unlock his prison. They’ll lure Caiden with the Azura into Unity where Abriss’s Graven powers of mind and heart control are insurmountable. Once Caiden is in her presence, he won’t be able to resist.
Now twenty years old, Leta is able to cast her consciousness from her real body to inhabit a nonphysical dimension of energy and information, called the luminiferity. Her consciousness can also inhabit an organic cyborg body, called a Proxy, built specifically to house her. She makes contact with Caiden remotely using this Proxy. Although her years of conditioning have erased her memories of him, she plays the part and convinces him that she’s alive and in need of rescue in Unity. Caiden senses a trap but can’t resist the bait. He reconnects with members of his old found family to help him and Leta infiltrate Abriss’s home and get her real body free.
While Leta works with Caiden to fake “rescue” herself, some memories return, and she grows conflicted about deceiving someone who clearly cares for her and spent years processing her supposed death. Though her heart wavers, she allows the trap to spring. Caiden is captured. Leta returns to Abriss’s coercion and to her siblings, six remaining “Graves” with whom she’s grown up and suffered the same treatments—they’re more of a family to her than Caiden after all.
Caiden has an audience with Abriss and attempts to convince her that Threi is lying to her: her brother has been obsessed with murdering her for decades, orchestrating the Casthen coup solely to gain power toward the ultimate end of ridding the multiverse of the threat of Abriss and her faction in Unity. Caiden is not convinced of Abriss’s malevolence—she seems devoted to harmony and to serving her people—but whether Abriss and Threi join forces or Threi kills her, both outcomes are bad. Abriss, however, believes that Threi is no threat due to her Graven power being stronger than his, able to bend his will if they were ever in the same space. She’s also eager to reunite with him and mend the family wounds that have kept them apart since they were young.
Caiden is imprisoned. The Azura is seized and—after Abriss makes her study of it—scheduled to be sent off to Threi to release him from the universe he’s trapped in. Caiden has lost everything by believing Leta and needing salvation so badly. Leta grapples with more emergent memories and her loyalty to Abriss and a growing feeling of wrongdoing. She knows Caiden did nothing to deserve this. Leta commits one more wrong to right this one: she invades a sibling’s Proxy in order to release Caiden. He reclaims the Azura and makes his getaway, only to be conflicted himself—Leta is alive, her heart has been coerced by Abriss, and she does need rescuing for real. Instead of jetting toward freedom and family, he heads back to the enemy stronghold to save her.
Caiden must first enhance his own Graven rank to have a fighting chance against Abriss and be able to resist her swaying his will. He consumes a vial of Graven “enhancer” that he’d once stolen from Threi. He has no idea what it’s made of but it temporarily amplifies the Graven part of him that he still loathes. His origin is a mystery, and this enhancement feels like something foreign growing to outsize him, with its own memories bubbling up…including vague memories of Azura from some other time. Caiden endures in order to confront Abriss.
Abriss has foreseen Caiden’s return. As he tries to talk Leta into going with him, he realizes that Abriss is using her as bait once again, this time to have a bubble universe—the Azura’s universe—on which to test a device she reverse-engineered from the Azura’s own energies. This wearable tech, called “Aurasever,” allows Abriss to pop a universe entirely, merging that universe’s interior space into the surrounding universe and converting its laws to match. Abriss pops the Azura’s universe successfully, but the universe sundering also unexpectedly tears the ship apart and shatters the Graven chrysalis inside it. Caiden plummets with the wreckage of the Azura. He survives, but losing his precious ship feels worse than death. Leta is spirited away with Abriss and the other Graves in their Proxies on a ship headed toward Threi out in the multiverse. The Aurasever could easily pop the universe prison that Threi is inside. Once released, he’ll kill Abriss and take over the most powerful factions in the worlds.
Family comes to retrieve Caiden, and as they escape the planet together, something strange overcomes the ship, infiltrating its construction and altering it, enlivening it. This is Azura: she wasn’t a starship that was a destroyed, but a swarm of fragmented spirits of some kind, a Graven will, released when the chrysalis within the ship ruptured. She is a nonphysical entity able to possess any vehicle or digital system, and still responds to Caiden’s presence and thoughts. Caiden is relieved at this victory, but dismayed to find that the Graven enhancer he consumed was not temporary, but is permanent on him due to some mystery of his genetics. He hates that it distances him from his humanity, but can’t fault its usefulness because it means he’s as Graven as Threi, now, and cannot be coerced by the man. He’s empowered to stop Threi from being released.
Caiden arrives at the Casthen headquarters far out in the multiverse and infiltrates in with Azura’s help taking over facility security—but he’s too late. Abriss has already reached the universe keeping her brother contained. She pops it to release Threi, then their tender and tense reunion proves how much more powerful her Graven will is than his. He is easily controlled, but Abriss wishes to rekindle a better relationship beyond their fraught history, so she gives him leeway to speak his own thoughts and she tells her Proxy guards to stand down. Her and Threi’s shared memories have barbs and their opposing ideologies poison every conversation as they try to work out their mutual goals.
Caiden changes plans: he heads toward Leta’s real body in Abriss’s docked ship. Rather than rescue her this time, he intends to wake her consciousness in this body and pull it from her other Proxy body at the meeting. He can convince her that Abriss is in danger and Threi needs to be stopped, and she can return to her Proxy to relay the threat. While Caiden races to this new objective, Threi drops all pretense of playing nice and makes his move. As his and Abriss’s debate veers away from friendly, Threi convinces half of Abriss’s Proxy guards to turn to his side. He consumes a Graven enhancer—like Caiden had—to temporarily boost his Gravenness and make him equal to his sister and able to resist her control. Abriss, Leta, and the remaining loyal Proxies fight back.
Caiden reaches Leta’s real body elsewhere in the facility, but he wakes her with horrific timing, pulling her consciousness away from her Proxy just as she’s about to deal Threi a killing blow. The Proxy goes inert and she wakes in Caiden’s arms, so panicked and confused she can’t absorb his words. She frantically reconnects with her Proxy back at the battle in time to save Abriss’s life and flee Threi’s onslaught. Threi is too injured to follow but he managed to steal Abriss’s Aurasever device, the power to destroy universe borders. Caiden scoops up Leta’s unconscious real body and rendezvous with Abriss’s group, forging a tentative alliance so they can all get to safety.
Caiden’s family and Abriss with her Proxies are going to leave the Casthen planet while Threi struggles to regroup. Caiden decides to stay in order to investigate the enigma of his Graven origin housed deep in this Casthen facility. He’s here anyway—and Azura is in a form that cannot be stolen from him anymore—so he might as well unravel this final knot. Leta insists on joining him: his Graven origin might be the answer she and the other Graves have needed all along, the missing link that Abriss has been seeking in order to finish their incomplete existences. Azura is drawn to it and guides their way across the Casthen megastructure.
When they reach the site of Caiden’s progenitor, it’s not what he expected. Not a database of code, not some vials of genetic material, not a person. It’s an aquatic garden of life support that sustains chunks of bioluminescent organic matter. These are the remnants of a Graven being that had been discovered on this planet, and its material is a key element in the production of Threi’s temporary enhancer medicines. The enhancer Caiden consumed was permanent because they were amplifying an already innate part of himself rather than providing a missing part. Before Caiden can decide what to do with this information, Threi intrudes, having hastened here to get more enhancers made before he can pursue Abriss for another murder attempt.
Threi and Caiden have a long overdue duel, and are now Graven equals due to Caiden’s previous enhancement. Gone is the power imbalance of their association ten years ago. But Threi has more experience and Caiden cannot get the upper hand, even with Azura’s help. Facing defeat, he sees an opportunity to make his imminent death have more impact by destroying the material of his Graven progenitor along with him. Threi is now robbed of power, faced with a political mess, and still needs a backup plan for enhancers. He leaves Caiden’s dead body in the garden pool.
Caiden’s spirit, however, was caught by Azura before it dissolved into the luminiferous plenum. Leta joins him and her mourning is brief because she can see he’s still present. The organic life support garden revives Caiden’s body while Leta has the skills necessary to merge his spirit and body back together and resurrect him.
Now they must stop both Threi and Abriss, who are headed in opposite directions. Luckily Leta has two bodies. She connects to her Proxy, which is with Abriss universes away, only to realize that Threi’s betrayal has broken Abriss’s kind heart for good. She’s just as powerful and dangerous as Threi had warned, now with her ambitions turned in a violent direction. Leta knows she has to stop Abriss, but years of love and loyalty can’t be overturned in an instant, and Leta still wants to believe the best of Abriss, so she fails to murder her once and for all. Abriss disables Leta’s Proxy, and all Leta can do is watch as Abriss dons a backup Aurasever device and uses it to pop a massive universe bordering Unity, which takes over the space and translates everything within to Unity’s physics. Destruction on unfathomable scale. Two of Caiden’s family members are almost killed in the conversion of physical laws.
Abriss now intends to create unity the direct way: by popping universes bordering hers in order to expand it until the multiverse ceases to exist and everything is one massive world with perfect science and accord. Caiden and Leta are too far away to do anything more to stop Abriss, but they can still stop Threi.
Threi has lost the Graven remains that generated his enhancers, his only means of being Gravenly equal to Abriss. Now he seeks out the only other source of the same material out in the multiverse, buried somewhere deep inside the impenetrable crust of the same planet where Caiden and Leta’s home population was once slaughtered. That planet is a secret he hasn’t been able to crack before, but now he can with the Aurasever tech he stole from his sister.
Caiden and Leta intercept and battle Threi and his armada, but don’t have the firepower to kill him. The pair is grounded on the planet while Threi pops the universe that this planet is in. Space contracts. A physical translation sweeps toward them. Azura bubbles Caiden and Leta in enough of her own universe to protect them from the conversion as change erupts through the planet…revealing it to be an immense Graven structure on the inside, containing the Graven matter or entity that Threi was targeting. He heads inside to seek it out, and so does Caiden and Leta, guided by Azura.
The Graven energy well in the center of this ethereal structure is nothing like the physical Graven remains that had been kept in the Casthen Harvest. Still, it represents one part of a Graven trinity which both Abriss and Threi have been aiming for, and it means either Threi or Caiden could potentially become Abriss’s equal and able to go up against her.
Threi meets Caiden here, and before the two can duel once again, Leta intervenes. Having seen what Abriss is becoming, and what it will take to stop Abriss now that her heart is broken and her mind is cracked open to Graven whispers from the past, Leta tries to convince these two men that destroying each other because of an old rivalry is not the answer. The only way to move forward toward preserving the multiverse—their shared goal—is to join forces. Threi was right that Abriss is the multiverse’s biggest threat. She wants Unity to pave over everything, and nothing can shake her resolve now. The multiverse needs a union of their own to stop her. If this new Graven energy well, plus Azura, plus Threi or Caiden is the trinity key to becoming as powerful as Abriss and stopping her and her armies…then the solution is not Threi or Caiden. It’s Threi and Caiden.
The three cement a tentative alliance in order to take on this bigger—perhaps insurmountable—foe.