Ethera Grave

Book 3: The Graven

by Essa Hansen

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Genetic Engineering; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the final book of this genre-breaking, roller coaster of a space opera trilogy, bold new voice Essa Hansen will stretch the limits of your imagination in this far future adventure perfect for fans of The Expanse and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

Caiden has finally been reunited with his sister Leta after ten years on the run with his unique starship and managed to convince his longtime enemy—Threi—to join his side. But the multiverse isn’t safe yet. Threi’s sister Abriss is still the most powerful being in existence. And she still wants to collapse their beautiful, diverse, constellation of multiverses down to one, growing more powerful and more ruthless with each unique universe she destroys.
 
As Abriss’s strength grows, her sanity wanes under the burden of the universe’s whispers. And Caiden must weigh his final choice against a new risk: if he finally unlocks the ancient Graven abilities lying dormant in his genetics and saves the multiverse, he risks losing himself to the whispers just as Abriss has. For the last time, Caiden and his makeshift family must carry the fate of all the worlds in their hands.


The Graven Trilogy
Nophek Gloss
Azura Ghost
Ethera Grave

Release date: July 18, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 480

Sample

Nothing can save you from this,” Caiden signed to the gathered salthuin leaders. His hands quivered from pleading, his mind dried of words.

The Dynast Prime, Abriss Cetre, had collapsed this bubble universe into her own, like a membrane burst and new waters flooding through. Her central and immense spherical universe, Unity, was sweeping across this universe’s space and converting everything within—including this planet, Basren—to new physical laws. Anything that didn’t match Unity would be altered or destroyed when the rind flux passed through.

The Cartographers had confirmed that salthuin biology would not survive.

Graven Azura’s spiritual presence rippled the air around Caiden, warm as sunlit water. The safe, unique universe she could create wouldn’t be broad enough to protect one million salthuin from physics itself turning inside out.

The species’ main population had gathered aboveground to commune with the sky. Figures spilled off the starship dock like a field of flowers kilometers wide. So fragile: gownlike folds of gossamer tissue with spidery filament seams. Their ruffled bodies were almost lighter than air. The folds condensed to an opaque trunk wrapping a blue heart, topped with a clear, featureless head that contained an equally blue nebulous mass. Frondlike arms and billows swayed as the population synchronized in ritual motion. Individual patterning in pinks and oranges matched the deepening sunset behind them, which counted down the moments until Basren would be washed with change.

This sky wasn’t going to listen to their ritual. The first pulses of disruption had carried through, expanding space across the universe. Light broke its barriers of speed. Far-off but visible, Unity’s rind encroached as a wall of distorting spacetime, bending twilight’s stars into forbidding shapes.

Abriss had broken the rind’s stability at a single point. From there, the whole membrane was razing outward to subsume the volume of this universe and others. The collapsed universe that Basren rested in was large enough that it had taken some hours for the rind flux to reach this farthest side. Long enough for Cartographers to evacuate inhabited places like this. A rare chance to save something.

Not everyone listened.

Caiden tried again. “Please believe me. This isn’t the purification event from your lore.”

A crescent of salthuin leaders stood before him. “No,” one gestured with frilled fingers. “You will believe us. The land and its ocean blood will protect us.” Her motion indicated Basren’s sea as running through her as well. Glassy filaments down the back of her head and spine were crimped like stacked blooms that now flared in irritation. “We do not abandon the land; the land does not abandon us.”

Less than twenty arcminutes remained until their “land” was engulfed.

Adrenaline spiced Caiden’s throat and prickled his skin with sweat. Commanding worlds was Threi’s talent, not his, and this situation was undoing him: the huge parking deck reminded him of the Flat Docks of his homeworld. His heart took up an old rhythm from that day when his people had gathered like this, a mass of bodies, everyone believing they were awaiting salvation. The Casthen transports had stood ready to load them for slaughter.

Now he was the villain prepared to pile these salthuin into Cartographer and passager ships like livestock, and his panicked heart didn’t care that he meant to save them.

One salthuin signed grandly, “We will receive the fire-laden sky and carry it into the earth to our partners in the waters. We are connected, attuned.”

Caiden cut a frustrated motion. “This change will travel through every atom of the planet.”

The rest of the population in their underground city of rivers and lagoons would be destroyed by geology shifts and sea level changes. Caiden had started negotiations down there, indulging in their customs and bridging an understanding so they might accept the harder truths he had to share. It had only wasted time.

Overhead, the rind flux grew incandescent and blotted out the stars. Salthuin didn’t have a word for “physics.” They had belief, and their faith had an answer for every explanation he tried.

He signed more simply, “Spirit of all things will change shape everywhere.”

Erillin, the Cartographer Domineer aide that Threi had assigned to Caiden, stepped up to his elbow. “We are out of time, Ghost.”

Precisely to annoy Caiden, Threi had been encouraging the use of Caiden’s old monikers.

He glanced at the countdowns ringing Erillin’s wrist. In his peripheral vision, a handful of ships began atmospheric departure. Cartographer teams—susceptible to the conversion as well—had collected at-risk fauna and flora across the planet.

Erillin’s liquid eyes glittered as she hesitated. She was a falvees: her soft mouthless voice, resonating through the cartilage and tissues of her skull, came out all the more hollow and ominous when she said, “You can compel them.”

Threi would have. The Casthen Prime and darling of the Cartographers—he would have shouted Graven orders and made the salthuin load up in moments, saved against their will. He wouldn’t have cared about their connection to this planet or their beliefs or how leaving was a form of death to them. Salthuin were the only sporeweavers the Cartographers knew of. Threi would have saved them because they performed a function.

Caiden had been making Threi teach him how to manipulate his own genetically produced Graven influence, his “gravitas,” which attuned others to his will on both practical and fundamental levels of being that he disliked thinking about. Always a constant degree, it could not be turned on or off, but like a muscular force, he could flex or relax it. He hated that it was harder to dampen the effect than to focus and bludgeon with it, and even now he was rigid with the effort of restraining his gravitas, as if it were a beast he’d wrestled down. Since he could never completely rein it in, he knew the salthuin were serious about their devotion: it was steadfast despite the acquiescence his presence impressed.

Caiden replied, “I won’t force them…” Not to the same situation his population had been herded into, torn from everything that had informed their identity. He had survived, at fourteen years old, and it had been a death.

Azura responded to his rising heart rate. Her force slithered from under the skin of space and unfolded around him, wicking drops of sweat off his neck. The air plumped with bands of pressure that vibrated a feather-faint song, soothing his anxiety. The ends of his short hair and his long Cartographer coat lifted. Light bent around his edges as if he were armored in heat waves, and whispers of blue crossed his skin as Azura unbraided space with her motion.

Did it make him look as if he could be related to one of the salthuin’s celestial spirits? Would that sway them? He steadied his quivering hands and signed with all his heart, “You have a choice—please choose to live. You’re choosing for your future generations as well. We will take care of you and find you a home.”

Azura followed his fingers, carving shadows midair.

“Our life is the planet,” a salthuin replied, unfazed by the fearsome sight of Caiden.

Another added, “To leave is to cease to live. The ocean blood fills us, the waves pulse with ours.”

Caiden signed, “The Cartographers can simulate your waters.”

“It would not carry the energy of our earth.”

Caiden dropped his arms and drew a shaky breath. Azura’s force brushed sweetly across his cheek. She could generate a new universe with safe physical laws around Caiden and roughly a few surrounding meters, but the robustness of her universe’s border waned the farther it extended. The more salthuin Caiden tried to save, the less chance it would protect them.

The approaching rind hemmed the horizon like a wall of ragged flame. The salthuin continued their silent swaying—a million lives, none grasping that this wasn’t a time for celebration.

Caiden’s mind replayed the cheers of his people when the overseers had arrived. No one had told them they would die or had pleaded at them to live. He would have said yes.

And if someone had intervened that day and forced them away against their wishes… he would have been grateful.

Why couldn’t he do the same now?

“Ghost?” Erillin’s voice was tight with urgency. Her wristlet counted the time to atmospheric impact when the evacuation fleet would be out of time to escape.

Caiden kneaded his knuckles. The surefire way, hands-on action, rescuing species in the fray: that was familiar territory. But with these new massive stakes, Abriss collapsing worlds at an increasing rate, bigger actions were necessary.

He needed to stop her directly, but her gravitas was so powerful, she could halt any attack with a word. Caiden had the genetic potential to become more Graven to match her, if Feran’s teams could figure out how to make the process safe. Then it required his choice: embrace everything he hated about himself and perhaps destroy the core of him entirely… to stop Abriss Cetre. To end all this suffering.

“Get our contingent out of here,” he said to Erillin.

“Without the salthuin? They’re the only—”

“I’ve made the risk as clear as I can. We don’t have their consent. We can’t violate their choice.” Caiden’s body seized up, denying his words despite his conviction. The rind flux chewed the outer atmosphere. Gasps of aurorae flittered across the twilight while countdowns ticked around Erillin’s wrist. “I won’t compel them. Go.”

She nodded and whipped into action, calling for the nearest ships to relay the order.

Caiden looked over the salthuin leaders and the crowd beyond, searing the image atop rusty memories he would never be rid of. This was their informed choice. He would stay to witness what honoring their choice created.

“The land will protect us,” the leaders indicated together while hundreds of ships across the dock popped engines and warmed up, about to remove salvation forever.

Acrid pains twisted in Caiden’s middle. He turned his back on the scene so he could breathe.

His cloudcutter ship was parked nearby like a knife on its side or a void-black shard knapped off the world. Caiden whistled for his nophek companion, who surged out of the open hatch. C had hit an adolescent growth spurt, filling out a frame built for power: the monster’s shoulders were level with Caiden’s now, sloping down a muscular neck to a boxy head and down a ridged back to a long, finned tail.

Caiden planted his feet to catch C barreling into his arms. “All right, little boy. Stay close.”

C curled around his back, purring. Caiden lifted his arm so the nophek could shove his huge head under it—C’s babyhood habit that soothed them both.

Azura condensed to tease pressures across Caiden’s body and through his hair. She pressed spiral patterns in C’s fur.

Overhead, the Cartographer and passager fleet streaked the sky. On the opposite horizon, the encroaching rind flux hit the exosphere. Arcs of simmering luminosity coiled across the view. The salthuin entreated their heavens, billowing diaphanous bodies in synchrony, oceanic and serene.

A shudder tickled Caiden’s bones. More bad memories of other worlds like this, other devastation, other things too late to save. He squeezed his fist around C’s riding harness.

What is justice when choosing between many wrongs?

C pushed his muzzle against Caiden’s ribs and huffed. “We’re standing back,” Caiden whispered. And letting them make a bad decision.

He’d once imagined the Dynast Prime could be his model for how to use gravitas for good. Abriss had spent her whole life as the most powerful creature in the multiverse, compelling hearts around her even though she wished not to. Abriss had made an art of her care with her people, using gravitas to compel goodness. But she also collapsed universes without a thought beyond what it gained. She claimed that whatever things did not fit Unity’s physical alignment would be returned to the luminiferity, a primary dimension of boundless energy and information. As she’d said it once, Not lost but preserved and dismantled, to re-manifest in new ways.

It did not soothe Caiden to think of the salthuin dismantled.

Bands of darkness blasted across the view as the rind flux plowed through the outer atmosphere. Space peeled back to flickers of molten iridescence. Was that the luminiferity showing through? Like a wound into the very substrate of being. The sight blended terror and awe in Caiden. Sorrowfully, he’d grown used to this sight.

He stepped forward, still a hundred meters from the edge of the salthuin crowd. Azura stormed around him, resembling the rind flux but in miniature. When she had inhabited his original starship, her universe seemed technological, an energy field bubbling out in a perfect sphere. Now she was a loosed force of nature: slowed-down wind and transparent cloud and a gown of quantum alignments. Watery bands of motion and light curled off Caiden as Azura fluctuated physical parameters.

Caiden faced the salthuin crowd with a final offer. “We can save you.”

No response, no waver in the rhythm of the salthuin’s supplication.

The wall of chaotic space filled the sky like wildfire. A crackling howl split Caiden’s eardrums, and light cast over the salthuin masses. An old dread and a deepening sense of failure infested him with shivers. His eyes unfocused and turned the salthuin’s movements into a blur of color. C pressed against the hollow of Caiden’s back, stress growls rumbling up his spine.

Beyond the deck lay plains, bluffs, and ocean, all of which began to disappear in swallows of black void and golden aurora. The massive wall of rind flux plowed straight through the planet, guzzling atmosphere and earth. Shadow peeled off surfaces, then sizzled midair. Minerals bled from bedrock cracks. Waterfalls dried in wheezes of cloud.

Caiden raised his arms to either side, holding his invitation to the salthuin while his gravitas formed a grid of intent for Azura. She gathered, armoring him and C in a fresh universe from nothing: folds of writhing space inverted Caiden’s perception, turning light to shadow and back again, color finding never-seen in-between hues. A couple meters all around him became a pocket of safety.

Please join me. The view watered through Azura’s curtain and Caiden’s tears. A roar stuffed his skull as the world split apart, racing toward them.

The wall of Unity’s rind pressed through the back ranks of the salthuin. Sheer pink layers of body twisted into awful shapes. Rays of afterimage stamped the salthuin figures on Caiden’s mind against the memory of his people rushing into the light and to slaughter.

A wave of sudden recognition preceded the rind as some salthuin realized this was not purification. Too slow, they moved or closed tight, devotion abandoned. The flux chewed through half the population fast, threshing filaments and folds. Some salthuin broke away but tangled in the crowd. Many continued their supplication until the end.

Caiden gagged on a sob but kept his arms open, protection wreathing him in arcs of luminescence.

A handful of salthuin rushed from the edge of the crowd toward Caiden, limbs curling in frantic signs.

His heart leaped. They wished to be saved. “C!” he screamed, and grabbed the nophek’s harness, hauling himself astride. They galloped to close the distance as the salthuin darted for the safety of Azura’s blue sun-storm enveloping him.

These salthuin’s bodies shriveled with terror. They stumbled, stretching for the safety Caiden promised. His mind’s eye superimposed the sight of his own people careening across the desert for shelter that didn’t exist.

“Faster!” Adrenaline boiled through him, and he squinted against the brilliant rind wall obliterating thousands more salthuin. The flux nipped at the heels of the last runners. It gnawed one into wisps of cinder.

Ten meters. Caiden launched off C’s back, reaching. Azura expanded with him, flowing toward the five remaining salthuin like tongues of flame, but the rind wall devoured more. Crying out, Caiden swiped for the last two, his finger grazed—

The flux collided against the edge of Azura’s universe. Warring pressures exploded, storming up dark whorls that devoured the rind’s destructive light.

The final salthuin dissolved into shreds of matter. Flecks whisked through Caiden’s grasping hand as he fell to his knees.

C snuggled tight and whined as the rind flux passed safely over Azura’s bubble.

The storm hissed into quiet.

Caiden’s ears unstuffed, head ringing above the thunder of Azura’s universe dissolving around them. They needed it only for the crossover. Caiden and C could exist in the new universe—Unity—just fine.

The wall of rind continued pushing out to sea behind him, hurling screams of vapor alongside colossal waves. It would eventually pass out the planet’s far side, onward through space until it stopped where the border used to be. Mathematic changes continued to settle in its wake. The deep, primal judder of tectonic shifts were too subliminal for Caiden’s ears, but C whimpered and shoved a cold nose against his neck.

The vast parking deck had cracked open, gushing water from the flooding city below, and the tattered remains of one million salthuin were caught up like petals.

Caiden stared, eyes wet, as a blanket of water curled around his knees. Breaths sawed his throat and adrenaline twinkled away. A few Andalvian swears poured off his tongue.

Unity.

Within its boundaries, Caiden’s soreness dissolved, old bruises ebbed. His thoughts fell in harmony, and his irritability unwove like warm hands finding and unlacing all his knots. His spirit interconnected with a brilliant whole that promised everything he encountered would welcome him.

Nowhere else felt like Unity.

This was the enemy: his finely tuned cells, his worries soothed. Unity’s perfect physical nature unwound his anxiety, but he desperately wanted it back. Something deep in his being was begging him to stay here where he belonged. It would convince him that the salthuin had become part of their earth again, their spirits soaked back into the luminiferity, where they would find new forms, as if any of what had just happened was part of a natural order of things.

Caiden scraped at wet cheeks with the heel of his hand and peered over the new landscape.

Plants sprouted on nearby outcrops, so new and hungry he could hear the frizzle of their growth. Flying creatures tumbled from the sky. Fits of weather puffed by, clouds rooting in atmosphere, sheets of rain tossed on parched earth. The old universe was similar enough to Unity’s physics that most things remained unchanged. Caiden had seen better and worse cases, and conceived of it like a conversation between worlds: Unity and Basren coming at each other with needs and wants, figuring out a final compromise.

Springs burst and streams broke borders to spill across the land. Sprigs of strange fungus swirled from the ground. Birds, insects, and far-off megafauna filled the landscape with clicks and calls, feeling happier here, perhaps transformed for the better. Unity’s version of Basren was vibrant, but it was empty compared to the sight of one million salthuin dying for their planet.

“They changed their minds,” he whispered. Too late.

Bloody water buffeted his legs. Fragments of salthuin flesh pattered through his fingers, having converted to something inert, ossified. His focus unhooked again as numbness set in. There were going to be more of these choices ahead.

Azura pillowed around him, casting standing ripples on the water. A thick, slow wind pulled up his hair while smaller ribbons grazed questioningly across his forehead.

“No, I’m not all right.”

Abriss Cetre—immensely Graven and spiritually guided—was collapsing these universes at unpredictable locations. The Cartographers could never mobilize evacuations at speed, and Caiden was one hero, mostly human.

“A Graven being could stop Abriss.”

C whined and nuzzled the back of Caiden’s neck, where, on his crystalline upper vertebrae augmentation, was inscribed an upside-down tattoo of the brand he’d once worn there. A symbol of what he’d overcome.

“To void with me,” he whispered. “I can put an end to all this.”

Safe yet or not, he needed to go through with as much Graven enhancement as the team was ready for. The researchers were racing to figure out how to merge the Graven trinity into Caiden’s physiology. They had all three pieces but not the knowledge to puzzle it out. If they managed somehow, Caiden could become a Graven being like those that had existed before the universe was broken into a multiverse. Such an entity would surely understand everything, have even finer command of reality than Azura, and be superior to the Dynast Prime. With that power, he could stop her.

But the minimal Graven enhancement he’d already undergone had peeled layers of humanity away. The more he trained to control his gravitas, the more he felt something else overcoming him, fighting back. Caiden felt less himself and wondered if his consciousness was merely emergent from the genetic mosaicism designed to support this other Graven being, which was something decidedly not-him.

He feared becoming a worse threat than what he wished to stop. A monster of willpower warping space and time, commanding hearts and minds.

And if he died outright at the end… he would be leaving the multiverse to Threi Cetre. Caiden had seen all the worst of Threi and hadn’t yet gotten to know the man he’d become after ten years of isolation, whether his supposed goodness was a veneer or the real thing.

He needed their alliance but didn’t trust it yet.

Azura’s breeze kissed Caiden’s temples.

“The only Graven thing I trust is you.”

Sweat sheened across Threi’s bare chest, chilled by Vigil’s air. The sparring bored him now, the novelty of this scenario worn away. Shadowy projections of simulated mass attacked at dialed-up speed. He’d worked off some frustration.

Caiden failed. Hadn’t even returned yet.

The where and when of Abriss’s next shattering: unpredictable.

One final round of Graven enhancer tweaks to test. These had to work, because Feran didn’t have enough material to keep trying.

Threi landed an uppercut on a chketin-shaped sim-mass and ducked a blow from behind. None of his nice things—like the full-contact solo sparring unit—had been moved over from the Casthen Harvest to Vigil. Comforts weren’t a priority here.

The Graven planet-city—formerly RM28—had been named Vigil because its bizarre structure seemed designed around the Graven Dominant within it. Threi couldn’t spare teams to investigate this place’s secrets. The dreamy caverns, rivers, streets, hives: the colonized skull of a massive creature or a cosmic megastructure? His boredom-killing strolls were the most explored this place would get.

Threi whipped around an elbow strike and stepped in to throw his taller opponent: an unsatisfying buffet of pressure without real weight.

The program finished. Threi stood breathless, shards of worry in his mind. He raked messy black hair from his temples. It was just long enough that the curl got annoying. Grooming wasn’t a priority either.

Sweat itched under the too-tight bands of the Aurasever tech that encircled his torso and arms. The dark, translucent lattice followed meridian lines, punctuated with the bluish nodes of Azura’s old chrysalis matter. It ringed his fingers with the power to disrupt universe rinds. He’d ripped it off Abriss, before she’d made another. It didn’t fit him and he had no use for it, but it made him feel more like his sister’s equal. It was proof that he could steal from her, that she could bleed.

Vigil had no doors, so he didn’t see Feran stroll in, but buzzy servos protested in the old assistive frames that clasped Fer’s legs. Threi’s scientist swept toward him with a bouquet of pen syringes. More were clustered in the pockets of their thigh-length Cartographer coat.

Panting, Threi said, “Did you fin—”

Feran didn’t stop, just jammed one of the pens into his shoulder. Attack instinct detonated—he barely cinched it up in time to only bat Feran’s wrist away rather than punch them.

The syringe dissolved into his skin with pressure. The contents frizzled up his veins, needled his brain, spun around the shards of worry still there. Itchiness flamed every freckle in his flesh. Then a pitch dropped to his heart and made it flurry.

“Latest Graven enhancer formulas.” Feran prepped a second syringe. Gold spots bubbled on their neck. Threi’s special lenses showed the hidden ultraviolet patterns in their endaal skin’s chromatophores, strobing bright with excitement. “I used everything we have learned so far.”

Threi blinked hard. Age-accelerated knowledge avalanched from deep in his brain where it had been folded, offering him unnecessary medical facts and analyses of his internal state. “A little high on your new throne, Fer? Using the Casthen Prime as your test subject without so much as a hello.”

“Hush.”

Feran readied three pens in one fist. They took Threi’s jaw in their fingers to tilt him and stab at his neck. Just before, Threi leaned down and kissed them, soft enough to tease. Feran made a frustrated sound, but lingered… then pushed in for a heartbeat. Threi curled his arms around Feran’s shoulders.

“If you wish me to work faster or better, you must be tame.” Feran executed a precise escape and blocked him with a hand as he stepped forward. They raised the syringes to stab his jugular vein, but the height difference tipped Feran back and their prosthetics failed to assist balance. As they fell, Threi lunged into a kneeling position and caught their waist, laughing.

Feran glowered but their skin betrayed them with a glitter. “Do you feel powerful picking a fight with someone impaired?” Fer planted their forehead against his, pressure soft and electric. Breath against his lips. Threi’s brain blanked, and Feran seized the distraction. They torqued to take his leg out, landing him on his back. Feran sat astride him and pinned his arms above his head while brandishing the pens in their other hand.

Threi lay obediently and smiled up at Feran. Purple spots were raining down their temples, the sides of their neck, and over their shoulders, which their coat left bare. Their tied-up tail of hair filaments—rare for endaal—spilled forward and tickled Threi’s forehead. Little details only he knew about: the pruning blade scar on their right shoulder that time he’d made them laugh and they’d dropped it—he heard only the shriek after—and the knotty sap burn down their left knuckles, which he’d only heard described but now knew the taste of.

He’d imagined the novelty of Feran would have worn off after they were united in person and not just a communication line between prisoners. Feran had been the victim of his violent boredom, preoccupying all his moments. Perhaps the endaal’s heightened resistance to his gravitas was what still felt enticing.

“Ready?” Feran stabbed Threi’s neck with the syringe trio.

Pain sizzled over his skull and down to his guts. Then, in a flash, his gravitas over-empowered. Every rhythm of his being knitted into deeper dimensions, demanding the luminiferity to align to his will, affecting everything in proximity. This luscious feeling. Warm and expansive. Sparking synapses and towing heartbeats in sync.

Feran’s dilating pupils filled with reflected shine. They let go of his wrists and sat upright, straddling his middle. Patterns fluttered across their skin, the irritation in their face smoothed out to awe, and Threi despised it. This level of gravitas rendered Feran into something he didn’t desire.

But it had worked. This was as much gravitas as Abriss wielded, meaning he could confront her and not be controlled.

He wouldn’t need Caiden.

As fast as triumph surged up, the enhancement dissolved. His gravitas coherence faded back to its normal degree. Threi bit back a nasty curse before he could shout it.

“D-did it end,” Feran inquired, recovering, “just like that?”

“Please,” Threi teased. “I’ve never insulted you by being that fast.”

Feran’s skin prickled with a blush. Without extra gravitas compelling loving feelings, they returned to the complicated creature he enjoyed.

They brandished a scan glove to look over the injections’ results. Disappointment seeped across their skin as they stared and muttered about rates of dispersal and dissolution.

Hope evaporated in Threi, too, and a frigid emotion welled in the hollows. He gripped Feran’s knees, grounding himself with touch. Not enough to hurt. Years ago, he would have hurt or smashed something after a failure like this. Feran remained composed, trusting him to control himself.

Feran was the Casthen’s foremost cultivator and genetic metamorphicist, having spent a decade imprisoned with and studying one thing: the now-destroyed remnants of a completely Graven being. Every Graven enhancer Feran had developed with their expertise shortened in duration the higher the potency—and this new batch was no better—meaning Threi would never become more perfectly, permanently Graven.

But Caiden could. There was one batch of enhancers that were permanent on Caiden, amplifying his Graven traits