Again and again, it charged at Eragon, and every time he jumped out of the way. At last the snalglí grew tired of the game. It withdrew a half-dozen yards and sat staring at him with its fist-sized eyeballs.
“How do you ever catch anything when you’re so slow?” Eragon asked in a mocking tone, and he stuck his tongue out at the snail.
The snalglí hissed once more, and then it turned around and slid off into the darkness.
Eragon waited several minutes to be sure it was gone before he returned to clearing the rubble. “Maybe I should just call myself Snail Vanquisher,” he muttered as he rolled a section of a pillar across the courtyard. “Eragon Shadeslayer, Vanquisher of Snails.… I would strike fear into the hearts of men wherever I went.”
It was the deepest part of the night when he finally dropped the last piece of stone onto the border of grass that edged the courtyard. There he stood, panting. He was cold and hungry and tired, and the scrapes on his hands and wrists smarted.
He had ended by the northeastern corner of the courtyard. To the north was an immense hall that had been mostly destroyed during the battle; all that remained standing was a portion of the back walls and a single, ivy-covered pillar where the entryway had been.
He stared at the pillar for the longest time. Above it, a cluster of stars—red, blue, and white—shone through an opening in the clouds, gleaming like cut diamonds. He felt a strange attraction to them, as if their appearance signified something that he ought to be aware of.
Without bothering to consider his action, he walked to the base of the pillar—scrambling over piles of rubble—then reached as high as he could and grasped the thickest part of the ivy: a stem as big around as his forearm and covered with thousands of tiny hairs.
He tugged on the vine. It held, so he jumped off the ground and began to climb. Hand over hand, he scaled the pillar, which must have been three hundred feet tall, but which felt taller the farther he got from the ground.
He knew he was being reckless, but then, he felt reckless.
Halfway up, the smaller tendrils of vine began to peel off the stone when he put his full weight on them. After that, he was careful to only grab hold of the main stem and some of the thicker side branches.
His grip had almost given out by the time he arrived at the top. The crown of the pillar was still intact; it formed a square, flat surface large enough to sit on, with over a foot to spare on each side.
Feeling somewhat shaky from the exertion, Eragon crossed his legs and rested his hands palm upward on his knees, allowing the air to soothe his torn skin.
Below him lay the ruined city: a maze of shattered husks that often echoed with strange, forlorn cries. In a few places where there were ponds, he could see the faint, glowing lights of the bullfrogs’ lures, like lanterns viewed from a great distance.
Angler frogs, he thought suddenly in the ancient language. That’s what their name is: angler frogs. And he knew he was right, for the words seemed to fit like a key in a lock.
Then he shifted his gaze to the cluster of stars that had inspired his climb. He slowed his breathing and concentrated on maintaining a steady, never-ending flow of air in and out of his lungs. The cold, his hunger, and his trembling exhaustion gave him a peculiar sense of clarity; he seemed to float apart from his body, as if the bond between his consciousness and his flesh had grown attenuated, and there came upon him a heightened awareness of the city and the island around him. He was acutely sensitive to every motion of the wind and to every sound and smell that wafted past the top of the pillar.
As he sat there, he thought of more names, and though none fully described him, his failures did not upset him, for the clarity he felt was too deep-seated for any setback to perturb his equanimity.
How can I include everything I am in just a few words? he wondered, and he continued to ponder the question as the stars turned.
Three warped shadows flew across the city—like small, moving rifts in reality—and landed upon the roof of the building to his left. Then the dark, owl-shaped silhouettes spread their barbed plumes and stared at him with luminous, evil-looking eyes. The shadows chattered softly to one another, and two of them scratched their empty wings with claws that had no depth. The third held the remains of a bullfrog between its ebony talons.
He watched the menacing birds for several minutes, and they watched him in return, and then they took flight and ghosted away to the west, making no more noise than a falling feather.
Near dawn, when Eragon could see the morning star between two peaks to the east, he asked himself, “What do I want?”
Until then, he had not bothered to consider the question. He wanted to overthrow Galbatorix: that, of course. But should they succeed, what, then? Ever since he had left Palancar Valley, he had thought that he and Saphira would one day return, to live near the mountains he so loved. However, as he pondered the prospect, he slowly realized that it no longer appealed to him.
He had grown up in Palancar Valley, and he would always consider it home. But what was left there for him or Saphira? Carvahall was destroyed, and even if the villagers rebuilt it someday, the town would never be the same. Besides, most of the friends he and Saphira had made lived elsewhere, and the two of them had obligations to the various races of Alagaësia—obligations that they could not ignore. And after all the things they had done and seen, he could not imagine that either of them would be content to live in such an ordinary, isolated place.
For the sky is hollow and the world is round.…
Even if they did return, what would they do? Raise cows and farm wheat? He had no desire to eke out a living from the land as his family had during his childhood. He and Saphira were a Rider and dragon; their doom and their destiny was to fly at the forefront of history, not to sit before a fire and grow fat and lazy.
And then there was Arya. If he and Saphira lived in Palancar Valley, he would see her rarely, if at all.
“No,” said Eragon, and the word was like a hammerblow in the silence. “I don’t want to go back.”
A cold tingle crawled down his spine. He had known he had changed since he, Brom, and Saphira had set out to track down the Ra’zac, but he had clung to the belief that, at his core, he was still the same person. Now he understood that this was no longer true. The boy he had been when he first set foot outside of Palancar Valley had ceased to exist; Eragon did not look like him, he did not act like him, and he no longer wanted the same things from life.
He took a deep breath and then released it in a long, shuddering sigh as the truth sank into him.
“I am not who I was.” Saying it aloud seemed to give the thought weight.