Awakening... The Luriel Cycle

When I originally wrote AWAKENING, it was a different time in the real world, before the 2016 U.S. elections. Already, there were divisions in our culture. I initially knew that I wanted to write a story about good versus evil and a bad boy who would be changed. Originally, the series was to be called the Shadow Realm Saga.

Around the time that I published the book (the first time), I had my health fall apart. I didn't know if I could finish the series I had in mind. At that time, I had planned four books. Apparently, that was not meant to be. It wasn't out long before I pulled the book off publication and put it aside. I didn't want to have a book available that was promising more but which I couldn't follow through.

A couple years later, as I started recovering my health, I re-imagined the series into a trilogy and renamed it The Luriel Cycle. I had a clearer idea of what needed to happen in the series, which wasn't as big as I originally expected, but it still surprised me. I knew I only had enough ideas for two more books, and ENLIGHTENMENT and ETERNAL fit. The series was to be about a healing. I knew that the daemons and luriel originally were single beings but that something split them into their dark and light sides, not just visually but in personalities.

I knew that I couldn't write the Luriel Cycle as described in the books to become the book titles -- Awakening, Enlightenment, Ascension, (and Eternal as a fourth book originally) -- but had to skip Ascension. The series was about breaking that cycle. There was no Ascension, because it had to be stopped there. That realization became a sort of revelation event and jumped to Eternal, which was not a stage in the described Luriel Cycle in the series but was the end, representative of breaking the cycle.

So, I started digging deeper into the root of the series. I also had to make it work in the way I wanted, so I made some tweaks to AWAKENING, small adjustments to fit with the new vision of the series, and re-released it. It didn't take much and anyone who read both version probably missed those details because they were so small; but I had to make the series make sense for what I knew was to come.

In writing ENLIGHTENMENT, I realized that the real purpose of the series was to use Lilly and Darrac to reunite those who had been split. At the time, our culture was being split along ideological lines and that worked its way into the series. The characters became a tool for healing the Eternals who had been victims of their own hubris. They had been split into the evil and good sides, represented by the cliche light and dark. Lilly's world was still whole, gray (the combination of light and dark), hence the reason that the daemons and luriel referred to it as the Gray Realm. Through the second book, I explored the idea of the cause of the split.

Lilly also had to grow. She is reluctant to accept the truth in the first book and is a bit selfish in her own little world, but she begins to accept her fate as she learns the truth throughout ENLIGHTENMENT about Darrac and his connection to the source of the cataclysm. She learns about her power to heal the people from the Shadow Realm. She goes through the Luriel Cycle enlightenment but she also enlightens Mychel to the truth about the daemons. It doesn't make them any less evil, but it does reveal to him that they are as much victims as the luriel. Through one which he comes to care about, he accepts the responsibility that leads to his healing in ETERNAL.

In the final book, all the pieces come together, literally. It doesn't come easy. The healing isn't only applied to the daemons and luriel but also to the characters who had to face their own prejudices and reconcile with the new reality.

Our world is split in such a way, each side thinking the other is oppressive, but both have been wronged and are mistaken; like the struggle between the luriel and daemons in this series, neither is completely right. There is true evil, but it exists primarily at the individual level. Also, when one side of an ideal is destroyed, it destroys the other. There must be balance, a moderation. Both must perish for one to survive.