Unchained-12 (Patreon)

The fire took him.

For an instant there was nothing but red — red light, red heat, the world shrunk to the inside of a forge with Eragon standing at its heart. The flames clawed at his wards and found them threadbare, the shields he'd kept deliberately thin for the larger fight peeling away like wax under a candle. Pain bloomed across his face, his forearms, the bare skin of his throat, and somewhere beneath the roar he heard his own mail begin to sing as the links glowed.

'Now, Shur'tugal.'

Jormun's voice did not ask. It simply opened, and behind it came the others — Obara, Istalri, Aeidail, all of them at once, a flood of borrowed strength pouring into him until his bones felt too small to hold it. Eragon seized the fire the way he had once seized a falling chandelier in Gil'ead, except this time there was no fumbling, no prayer. He set his will against Thorn's, and where the two magics met, his held.

The flames parted around him.

He did not put them out—Thorn was far too strong for that, the dragon's power saturating every ember—but he turned them, carved a hollow corridor through the inferno and stepped into it, and then he was running up that corridor toward the head that had made it. One second. He could spare one second before the borrowed strength guttered, and he spent it without hesitation.

The purple blade came up.

It passed through the last of the flames, through the shimmer of wards layered over the crimson scales, and Eragon felt them break against the Rider-steel like river-ice in spring — a dozen enchantments, gone, parting as though they had never been. Then the edge found scale, and scale gave, and Thorn's roar went off beside his skull loud enough to white out the world.

Eragon dropped.

He hit the cracked marble and rolled, his armor boiling against his skin, black-red blood raining across his shoulders where the wound had opened along the dragon's jaw. The sword was still in his hand, miraculously, though he had no time to be proud of it.

Thorn's foreleg swept across the hall and caught him full in the chest, and the world spun end over end as he was hurled back into a pillar. The impact drove the breath from him; only the mail kept his ribs from folding inward, and even so something deep in his side flared white. He came down in a heap among the dead Urgals, gasping, tasting copper and swimming in dead bodies and guts.

Above him, behind the curtain of smoke, Murtagh screamed, and Eragon's teeth shone bloody as he smiled.

It was not a sound of rage. It was the raw, involuntary noise of a man feeling his dragon's flesh part as if it were his own—and Eragon, even now, even with the betrayal still a fresh wound beneath his ribs, felt a vicious satisfaction at it. Good. Let him feel it. He hoped, distantly, that Arya had used the opening.

She had.

A flash of blue cut through the smoke overhead—his Saphira, dropping low, and on her back a slim figure with raven hair streaming behind her. Arya hauled herself flat against the saddle as the dragoness beat once, twice, and climbed, the two of them vanishing into the haze rising off Thorn's fires before the Red Rider could so much as turn his head. They were gone. Toward the dragonhold, toward the Eldunari, toward safety—exactly as he'd told them to go, and Eragon felt some relief at that.

'The Forsworn will heal himself and his dragon before he does anything else,' Obara said, the old dragon's voice cutting through the din with the weight of centuries. 'It is instinct, bone-deep. You have your interval, Shur'tugal. Use it. Kill the Shade now, while you still can.'

Eragon pushed himself upright on the splintered haft of someone's spear, and saw, how, across the ruined hall, where the wall had swallowed him, Durza was climbing back into the light.

The Shade was a ruin, and the spirit-bound-abomination did not seem to care.

One arm hung wrong at his side, the shoulder the purple blade had pierced now a mess of torn cloth and that strange dark blood that Shades bled. Urgal gore streaked his pale face. And still he was smiling—that same patient, knowing smile he'd worn in the cellars of Gil'ead with a whip in his hand and all the time in the world.

"There he is," Durza crooned, stepping over rubble with a lurching grace. "My almost-apprentice. Do you feel it yet, the interval? You think the boy will leave his dragon bleeding to come and save you. He won't. They never do." His crimson eyes flicked to the gash above Eragon's brow, to the blood sheeting down his arm. "You are tired, little Rider, and far from being my equal."

Eragon said nothing.

There had been a time, a few short months ago, when those words would have found purchase. When the rage they were built to summon would have flooded him—hot, blind, useless—and sent him charging onto that pale blade. Durza was good at this, this arrogant, patient talk that would send someone’s blood boiling. He had broken Eragon once with exactly this, needling and whispering until a frightened boy's own fury became a leash in a Shade's hand.

But Eragon had spent the months since learning what his anger was for.

He let it come, the anger, the hate, the wrath, all of it. He did not fight it—he let the wrath rise out of the place where Garrow's death lived, and Brom's, and the memory of Saphira muzzled at this thing's feet, and the sword in the back that Murtagh had become—and then he took it in both hands and pressed it flat and cold, until it stopped being a fire that ate him and became an edge, white hot yet searing cold as the ice in Beor’s peaks.

'We are with you,' Istalri whispered.

'All of us,' said Aeidail, who never spoke, and the energy came into him like a tide coming in, suffusing him once again…and out walked the Rider to meet the Shade.

Durza lunged, and Eragon let him.

The pale sword came for his throat, and he turned it—barely, the edge kissing his jaw—and answered, the single blade moving through Ingvar’s forms Jormun had drilled into him night after night while Murtagh slept. He had no second sword to bridge the gaps; Zar'roc was in his brother's hand now, and the absence of it was a wound all its own, the red blade Brom had given him gone to the one man he should never have trusted with anything. Eragon fought quick and with thought, but tt was not enough. It was never going to be enough.

But Eragon was not alone inside his own skull, and Durza was.

When the Shade struck at his mind—that silent viper's knife that had unmade him in the cellars—it met not a frightened boy but a wall of dragons. Obara and Jormun and Istalri threw themselves against the spirits writhing inside Durza, and the spirits screamed, twenty-one voices that were no longer twenty-one anything, and for the first time since Gil'ead, Eragon watched the Shade's smile slip.

The Elder Dragons shattered the already frayed consciousness in an instant, breaking into the Shade’s mind proper, and connected as he was with teh Eldurnarya, Eragon too felt his consciousness brush the Shade’s.

DESERT. THIRST. THE BOY WHO WAS CARSAIB.

The memories bled through again—someone else's childhood, someone else's master, the day the spirits had come for him—but this time Eragon did not drown in them. He let them wash past. He was Eragon, son of none, Rider of Saphira, and he had a debt to square.

Parrying the next frenzied strike, Eragon drove his shoulder into the Shade, wards long gone, and placed his heel behind his leg. Before Durza had even finished his fall, Eragon was moving, and he drove the purple blade through Durza's thigh and pinned him to the floor.

The Shade shrieked. The pale sword came round in a panic, and Eragon caught the blow and held it there, locked, their faces a hand's breadth apart, close enough that he could see the spirits moving behind those crimson eyes like maggots in a wound.

"You wanted to make me into this," Eragon said quietly. "A thing of yours. A weapon to be pointed."

Durza snarled and shoved against the blade, spittle flying from his lips, even as his mind and body both were pinned into place.

"Saphira burned them out of me, you know, the spirits you had summoned." Eragon felt the dragons gather behind his eyes, felt his own magic rise to join theirs until the air itself thrummed, until his vision went violet at the edges. "Let me show you how it felt."

"Brisingr."

The word left him, and the fire came—not the honest blue of Saphira's gift, but a deep and burning violet, the colour of his eyes, the colour of the thing Durza had tried to make of him. It poured down the blade and into the Shade's body, and Eragon did not aim it at flesh. Somehow, whether it was through his own experience with dragon magic, or the bloodlusted revenge of the Eldunari…Eragon guided the magic, and he aimed it at the spirits.

Durza's scream changed. It stopped being one voice and became a chorus, twenty-one throats tearing loose at once as the violet flame found the things tethered inside that dead body and burned them—the way light burns fog, the way Saphira's breath had burned them out of Eragon in the collapsing keep. The Shade's skin blistered and split. The crimson bled out of his eyes. For one instant something looked out through the ruin that was almost a boy, almost grateful—and then…Durza came apart. Not into the black mist that had fled Saphira's jaws once before, but into ash and falling cinders, the spirits scattered and unmade and gone into a dispersal of magic that shook the chamber, a visible pulse of magic travelling through the air.

Durza was gone.

Truly gone.

The pale sword clattered to the marble.

Eragon stood over the place where the Shade had been, the blade smoking in his hand, and breathed in relief with the smell of the dead and fire and ash. After Gil'ead—after the whip and the oil and the months of dreaming about crimson eyes—it was done.

He did not get to feel it for long.

The hall shook, and Thorn rose into his terrible, crimson form once again.

The red dragon hauled himself upright in a spray of his own blood, his savaged jaw hanging and his ruined foreleg trembling beneath him—healed, not whole, the wounds Eragon had carved into him knit shut in ragged, hurried lines. Murtagh sat upon the crimson neck with Zar'roc bare and dripping in his fist. Eragon’s purple eyes crossed the older man’s, and he saw something gone dead behind the Crimson Rider’s maroon eyes. Durza was dead, and the break was over. 

Whatever brotherly fondness the Red Rider had claimed only minutes ago was gone now, burned away with Durza's ashes and the sight of his dragon's broken face.

"You shouldn't have done that, Eragon," Murtagh said, and there was no warmth left in it at all, as Zar’roc rose to point at him.

Thorn breathed in, and the fire kindled deep in his throat, a crimson glow crawling up his neck.

Eragon threw up everything he had left—a ward, a wall, the last dregs the Eldunari could spare him—and knew even as his hand came up that it would not be enough. It would never have been enough. He was spent, bleeding, one-bladed and alone, and the fire that was coming would leave nothing of him, not even ashes.

And then a roar he knew better than his own heartbeat split the chamber, and the world came apart in a rain of crimson radiance.

Saphira.

She had not gone. She had climbed for the dragonhold with Arya on her back, up and up through the heart of Tronjheim—and somewhere above the great chamber she had felt him through the bond, felt the fire, felt the certainty of his death—and she had turned. Against his order. Against all sense. There was no time to circle down to him, no time to find the long way, and so she took the only path that would put her between her Rider and the flame in the half-second that was left.

She dove straight down onto the Isidar Mithrim, and she did not slow.

Sixty feet of flawless star sapphire—the heart of Tronjheim, the pride of a nation, already singing and cracked from the pulse of Durza's unmaking—shattered beneath her like river-ice under a falling stone. And yet, even as he saw the crimson stones enter his vision, Eragon knew, that it was too late. He could already feel it, sense the magic inside Thorn, see the embers growing inside his bloody, mangled maw. His eyes began to close, and then he was sent crashing to the floor as a great blast of air threw him off…and Saphira arrived.

The Dragoness threw herself over her Rider, and mantled him—both wings flung wide to make a roof of her own body between the fallen boy and the Red dragon.

Thorn's fire took her full across the left wing.

Eragon felt it through the bond a half-instant before he heard her pained, defiant roar—felt the great membrane that had carried her over half a continent catch, and crisp, and burn, searing away to nothing in the space of a single breath, the flame chewing down the wing-arm until there was nothing left of that side of her but a blackened frame and smoke and the reek of it, that smelt of nothing but ruin and sadness. 

Saphira shrieked—a sound that went through the mountain and through Eragon and through every living thing in that hall—and she did not lift away. She did not move. She held the ruin of her wing over him and took the fire and held, even as Thorn's claws came down and raked her flank to the bone, even as the last of the Star Rose rained down around them both as if the sky itself was bleeding.

And Eragon, pinned beneath the wreck of the wing that had just given itself for his life, felt something in him go past rage and out the far side of it, as his mind snapped into wrath he had never felt before.

Something let go.

Not the cold, forged thing he had used to end Durza—that had been will, and craft, and patience. This was the other thing, the Shade that lived beneath his skin and had gutted a garrison in Gil'ead and laughed while it did it. It rose up through him like bile, like fire, like the very tide the Eldunari poured into his veins…and this time he did not press it flat.

This time he let it burn.

He did not remember crossing the hall. One moment he was on his knees in the gore and the falling sapphire, and the next the purple blade was carving up into the wound he'd already opened in Thorn's foreleg—splitting scale, parting sinew, grinding against the bone beneath—and the dragon reared back screaming loud enough to shake fresh dust from the broken roof, his flames cut off. Hot blood sluiced down over his arms, boiling where it touched, and Eragon did not care. He wanted more of it. He wanted the beast that had burned his Saphira opened from throat to tail, wanted it to hurt, wanted—

Zar'roc opened him along the ribs.

He felt it as heat first—a bright, clean line drawn down his side—and then as a deep and spreading wrong as the crimson blade bit through mail and flesh alike. Murtagh had come off the dragon's neck without him ever seeing it. And it was that blade—Morzan's blade, the red sword Brom had carried and gifted and died still keeping his secrets about—now in the hand of Morzan's eldest and buried to the width of a hand in the side of Morzan's youngest. The same steel that had once scored the scar down Murtagh's own spine, come round at last to answer itself in blood.

The purple blade slipped from Eragon's fingers, and he went down.

He hit the marble on his side, the world greying at its edges, and above him Thorn loomed with his jaws splitting wide and the fire climbing once more up that ravaged throat even as the dragon shook

—and then something came down upon the world that had nothing to do with fire.

Eragon felt it at the very edge of his own reeling mind: a pressure so vast, so cold, so utterly beyond him that for a moment he thought he had already died and this was only the weight of the void closing over his head. It was not aimed at him. It rolled past him the way a wave rolls past a stone, and struck the Red Rider and his dragon full-on.

Thorn's fire died in his throat.

The great crimson head snapped up, jaws still gaping, and a sound came out of the dragon that Eragon had not known a dragon could make—not a roar, not pain, but a raw and animal confusion, like the deer who often walked into the snares in the Spine. On his neck Murtagh went rigid, both hands flying to his temples, Zar'roc forgotten and swinging loose from his fist, his maroon eyes suddenly white-rimmed and blind.

Dimly, through his failing mind, Eragon was aware of how Eldunari went utterly still.

For a single heartbeat Eragon felt them recognise it—felt some vast and ancient memory stir behind their silence—Whatever it was, it had reached across an impossible distance to be here, and it bore down on the Red Rider and his dragon like the whole weight of a mountain settling onto two minds at once. It did not strike to kill, or to break. It just pressed—patient, enormous, pitiless—and it did not stop.

He saw it in Murtagh’s face, his gritted teeth and shivering hand.

They could not hold against all of it. Not body and mind at once. Not here, not tonight, not with Thorn already bleeding from a dozen wounds, and now something out of the dark grinding their thoughts to powder.

Thorn convulsed—a full-body lash of agony as the unseen thing raked through his ancient mind—and threw his great head back with a sound that made his lips spread in a satisfied smile.

"Another time." Murtagh's voice came ragged now, all its certainty gone out of it. He looked down at Eragon one last time—at the blood, at Saphira crumpled behind him with one wing burned down to a blackened ruin, at the brother he had come to collect and could not take. "Heal well, little brother. The King will want you whole when next we meet." he smiled sharply, though there was some tremble in his voice. For all of his power and magic, Murtagh had not escaped this night unscathed either.

Thorn gathered his broken limbs beneath him and hurled them both up and out through the gaping wound Saphira had torn in the roof of the chamber, into the dark above the mountain, and was gone.

And the vast cold pressure went with them—following them out, and up, and away into the night, until Eragon could feel it no longer.

He lay where he had fallen, and could not make his body do anything else.

His side was a sheet of fire, the blood coming slow and thick and endless. His face was crusted with three kinds of gore, little of it his own, and a few feet away the great mountain of blue that was the other half of his soul lay sprawled across the shattered marble and shattered sapphire both—one wing half-furled and whole, the other a charred and shrunken ruin that ended in nothing. He reached for her through the bond, and flinched from what he found there. 

Not the pain, though there was pain enough to drown a city. Shame. Vast, and black, and drowning. The shame of a dragon who had failed to keep her Rider whole—who had shattered the heart of a mountain and burned away her own wing to do even that much—and who, in some cold and certain corner of herself, already knew she might never leave the ground again.

‘Saphi-’

"Eragon!"

It was Arya. Her hands were at his face, cold and certain, her raven hair falling around him like a curtain against the guttering firelight, her emerald eyes far too bright. Her fingers found the wound down his ribs and pressed, and he heard her breath catch at the depth of it—but whatever she saw there, she did not let it into her voice.

"Stay still, Shur'tugal. Stay with me. Angela and Orik are seeing to Saphira—you have only to stay awake a moment longer."

He wanted to tell her. 

About the brother. 

About the boy who had looked out through the Shade's dying face. 

About the thing that had reached out of the dark and broken a Forsworn's dragon without ever showing itself. 

But most of all, he wanted to tell her about the wing—gods, her wing—and the spells she would need to heal her, and how he was fine and Saphira was the one she sho-"Slytha," Arya whispered, her palm coming to rest against his brow, her voice following him gently down into the dark. "Sundavr-vergandí. Slytha."

And despite his protests…Eragon went under, the last thing he felt the wounded warmth of Saphira's mind, refusing even now to let him go.

Arya sat back on her heels with the Rider asleep and bleeding in her lap, and turned at last to the dragon.

The sight of her stopped Arya's breath. She had carried this magnificent being. For twenty years and more she had borne the sapphire egg between the Varden and Ellesméra, had felt it warm against her side on a hundred cold roads, had come in the end to think of the life inside it as something almost her own—and now that life lay broken across the wreck of the Star Rose, one wing burned down to a smoking frame, her flank laid open to the bone, her great sides heaving.

Arya reached for her, gently, her mind extended in open comfort, ‘I am here, Bjartskular, let me help you, let me carry a little of it’—and she brushed the very edge of the dragon's consciousness.

And Saphira threw her out.

It was not a rebuff. It was a wall, slammed down whole and absolute, a door of iron closing in Arya's face with force enough to leave her blinking and reeling on the shattered floor. There was no thought in it. No word of rejection even. Only refusal.

And yet, in that infinitesimally small moment where she had been able to touch Saphira’s mind, she had felt it. Shame and anger and sadness so great, that she had nearly drowned under it. Saphira had shut the whole world out—Arya, the Eldunari, all of it.

Arya pressed a hand to her own temple and made herself breathe. She is not dying, she told herself, though her heart was hammering against her ribs. A dying dragon has not the strength to shut a door like that.

And yet, a traitorous part of her mind whispered, ‘What did she know of dying dragons?’

Across the wreckage, Saphira moved. She dragged herself, twitching, the ruined half of her useless and trailing through the crimson dust, the whole vast weight of her hauled forward by will alone—and she brought her great blue head down and pressed her snout against the sleeping Rider's chest, over the heart that still beat beneath the blood.

A shudder went through her, nose to tail. A long breath left her, warm over Eragon's still face, and then her eyes rolled closed, and she was gone—sliding down into a dark deeper than the sleep Arya had given her Rider, the great head coming to rest against him, a dead weight of grief and burned flesh, curled even in oblivion toward the one thing in all the world she would not shut out.

Arya knelt between them and, for a moment, did not know what to do with the ache in her chest, as tears came to her eyes, despite the control she had over herself. But then, the weight of her station returned, and she narrowed her gaze, bringing the remains of her magic to bear.

She would not let either of them die, even if she would need to expend her own lif-

"Move, girl, and let me work," the Wise One said, flat and unhurried as someone who has stitched far worse, and Angela dropped ot the ground besides her, herbs and salves and potions already floating out of her satchel onto the floor.

Orik came out of the smoke like a boulder given legs and purpose. His axe was still in his fist, and the tears were going down his face, but there was iron beneath the grief, and he was barking Dwarvish before he reached them, hard and fast. Within moments a ring of his kin was closing around the fallen Rider and his dragon, around Arya and Angela both: broad warriors with their shields grounded and their backs turned inward, a wall of iron and beard and clan-mail sealing the wreckage off from the churning hall beyond.

"Nobody comes through," Orik growled, as much to himself as to them. He looked once at Saphira—at the smoking ruin of the wing, at the head bowed over the boy—and something crossed his blunt face that was grief and awe and a terrible sorrow all at once, before he set his jaw and turned outward with the rest.

Good timing too, because the hall had seen what Arya had seen, and not all of it grieved. They came in a knot—four of them, shouldering up against the shield-ring with their faces black and their eyes wild, and at their head a broad grey-beard with a warhammer and a voice like splitting stone.

"Out of the way, Ingeitum!" he roared at Orik. "That beast has shattered Isidar Mithrim—the work of Dûrok himself, the heart of Tronjheim, gone to gravel! Blood answers for the Star. The Rider and the dragon both will answer to the clans—stand aside and let us take them!"

"You will take nothing," Orik said, and did not move, his axe, still dripping blood raised in open invitation.

"They cannot even stand! Now is the—"

"They are under my guard," Orik said, "and you will go back to your hall and thank your gods that I am a patient dwarf tonight."

The grey-beard's hammer came up. Two of his fellows pressed forward. For half a heartbeat the shield-ring bowed—

—and Arya rose.

She did not shout. She did not reach for the bow at her back, nor the sword at her hip. She simply stood up out of the blood and the shattered sapphire and let them see her—the ambassador of Queen Islanzadí, drenched to the elbows in blood, her eyes gone flat and green and terrible—and she let the magic come up beneath her skin until the air around her hummed and the torchlight leaned toward her, and every hair in the hall stood on end.

"You will not touch them."

Her voice was very quiet, and the Ancient Language did its work, for alarm and confusion both showed on their faces, her voice carrying to the back of the hall.

"That dragon burned her own wing from her body to shield her Rider from the fire. She broke your Star because it was the only thing between her and his death. She might be asleep, but I, Arya, Ambassador of Islanzadi, stand before them and you." She took a single step, and the grey-bearded dwarf gave a single step back before he knew that he had. "You want blood for a stone? I am standing in a hall full of your dead, over the boy who killed the Shade that was going to deliver every last one of you to Galbatorix in chains, who stalemated the dragon and Rider that would have laid waste to your kingdom—and you would spend what is left of this night threatening him where he lies. Try—Please. Give me the excuse."

Silence. 

"Islanzadí will hear of this," the grey-beard managed—but the fight had gone out of it, and every dwarf in earshot knew it.

"She will," Arya agreed softly. "She will hear that the dwarves of Farthen Dûr wept over a jewel while the last free dragon lay burning on their floor. Go and decide which half of that tale you would rather have told across the Beors."

They went. Not all at once, and not gracefully—muttering, black-faced, promising the ear of their king—but they went, and the shield-ring closed again behind them, and"That," Orik let a long breath out through his nose as they went away, promising the ear of their King, "was not wise of you. And I thank you for it."

Arya said nothing. She lowered herself back down between the sleeping Rider and the unconscious dragon, in the drift of shattered sapphire that had been the pride of a nation not an hour past, and the blood and bodies that decorated the floor around her…and set one hand on Eragon's brow and let the other rest, lightly, against the cool unburned blue of Saphira's jaw—the only means she had left to comfort the great dragoness.

There would be a reckoning for the Star. She had not lied to the grey-beard: her queen would hear, and Hrothgar would too. But the dwarves also neither forgave easily nor soon, and she knew, that it would come knocking for the Shur’tugal and Dragoness far too soon.

But that was tomorrow's trouble.

Tonight there was only her charges, and their wellbeing.

And as Angela worked on Eragon and slowly the crowd around them grew, Arya thought about the other thing—the vast, cold pressure that had come out of the north, out of the direction of Du Weldenvarden, out of the direction of home, and driven a Forsworn's dragon screaming from the mountain, and then simply withdrawn. A power hidden in the heart of her own people's forest that even she—ambassador, and daughter of the queen—had never once been permitted to know.

Too much, for one night. Far too much.

So Arya bowed her head over the two of them and kept her watch, and did not move again until the dawn came slowly down through the broken roof of the world and lit the sapphire dust, and the ruin of the wing, and the sleeping face of the boy who had killed a Shade.

Far to the east, riding a wounded dragon over a sleeping continent, a son of Morzan was already shaping the words he would carry to his King—and there was not one among them the King would be glad to hear.