The Duty of a Rider

Of reason above meaningless violence, of personal freedom gained through an understanding of both the world and themselves, of the responsibility intrinsic in having a power that promised to stretch across years uncountable, as Riders could only become more powerful and hopefully wise with age.

With the years of memories Eragon and Saphira left her, Taylor had known the True Names of many people and dragons. Each unique, and yet all carrying an ineffable quality: the will to act.

Not only to act, because using power with no purpose is simple abuse, regardless of the results, but to be aware of the consequences, of being ready to embrace the unintended results. To be committed to striving to learn from errors and to be better.

In the week she spent in the hospital after the locker, Taylor had sought an answer to the same question she had asked Eragon in the not-dream that had gifted her with the strange powers that made of her a very powerful, very dangerous, and very confused teenager.

So, with the experience of an Eragon who had lived for more than a millennium, she had found her True Name.

And Taylor, still bound to her bed because of the wounds she had been inflicted, had cried.

The memory of the Locker was almost a distant thing, buried as it was under endless years of Eragon's memories. Memories that were available to her without drowning her much younger conscience, likely because of something the old Rider purposefully did.

Taylor didn't like her own Name, which was a rather straightforward way of confirming that she didn't like herself. But where before that revelation she had simply disliked her life, from the school, to the absentee father, all the way to her own more mundane insecurities, she now had a clear view of what she was.

And since she remembered several of the Names Eragon had grown into along with Saphira through their long life, Taylor also knew what she aspired to be.

Even as she cried for her own failures, bared as they were in her True Name, Taylor had also laughed wetly, for not everything in her was to be thrown away. She quickly found the Edoc'sil that had caught Eragon's attention, and she had held herself to the dimply shining parts of herself as she realized how much she had to change before she could call herself a hero.

To change her Name, and her life, now that she clearly saw how much one was the other, she needed to act. Partially, with her own determination to change, very much like Murtagh had done, her Name had marginally become different.

Her life before was about enduring and then ignoring the dark chapter that was Winslow in its entirety.

Taylor now simply refused to suffer meaninglessly anymore. She was entitled to her rage, to her pain, she was allowed to never forgive, and never forget.

But, from the height of Eragon's perspective, she was strong enough to survive without her hate, and not because of it.

Taylor needed time, she realized that much when she still was in the hospital, time to heal not only her body, but also her mind. When you have a broken foot, you don't walk on it, but you allow yourself rest for healing, before walking once more: when it came to her life in Winslow, it was very much the same.

She would one day walk again, but not in Winslow, and not until she was healed.

While still in the hospital, revelations and understandings had followed one another like links of a chain.

Taylor also knew that she was very much not a parahuman, and that things like the Manton Limit were jokes to the very nature of her power.

It had been almost three months since her unusual Trigger, and during those months, she spent each minute of free time she had growing, as she had been shown to do in the bottomless well of memories that were so readily available in her mind.

So she ate a lot, she performed the Rimgar, she repeated unfamiliar words in a tongue so ancient and powerful that it dwarfed her despite Eragon's memories, she meditated, she learned how to write glyphs, and she slept.

Danny Hebert had been contrary to letting her home to do nothing, and she hadn't needed the insight in his mind to understand his reasons, mundane as they were.

She showed him the diary and the e-mails that proved the torture she underwent in Winslow, talked him out of rampaging against the crooked institution, and he allowed her to study from home, with the promise that the next year she would enroll in another school with placement tests.

Taylor lied and promised Danny Hebert that she would once again go to school.

In other words, she smiled to reassure him and let him believe that she would be a normal girl. Studying graduating, going to college, and conducting a perfectly normal life.

In her heart, Taylor knew that none of that would ever come to pass. With what she knew, she would never need mundane work. With what she would one day be able to do, she would never be able to not act for what was right.

And she would not be able to do that only as a Literature Grad.

Even if without a dragon bonded to her, with no companion capable of constantly steering her mind, Taylor held tightly to her almost forgotten dreams of being a hero, and she remained Edoc'sil.

Inside her room, Taylor Hebert twisted her body, slowly stretching each muscle as he performed a sequence of movements of a complexity that was constantly growing. Even as slowly as she was moving, her body was drenched in sweat, and her breath was heavy but controlled, even if only just.

Living beings are intrinsically tied to their physical presence. One of the not-hers memories had instructed the young Parahuman, Keeping your body in its peak condition is important, as it balances the weight of the decisions your mind will have to make.

The Rimgar, also known as the Dance of the Sanke and the Crane, was somewhat like Yoga. In the same way that a mountain was somewhat like an anthill.

Taylor's routine, if any would have bothered observing her, would have been impossible for a human: simply because the calories she burned through were more than those she ingested by eating.

Taylor slowly lowered herself to the floor, balancing her weight on her palms as her arms burned uncomfortably: "Never seen a crane do this shit." she complained to herself.

But even if her words were scathing, there was a determined grin on her features, something that twisted the too-wide mouth of the teenager into something that her past-self wouldn't have appreciated.

Good. Taylor embraced the distance that she was slowly putting between her and what she had been, and she pushed off her arms, her left foot slowly becoming her main support while she rose her right as far as it would go.

With months to herself and wisdom slowly trickling into her decisions and opinions, she had immediately pushed herself to work. Her clever mind had freely roamed the memories of Eragon, finding the best tricks she could pull to quickly ready herself for the career as a hero she had once dreamed of. There was a plan in place to make her able to fight any opponent that this world could throw at her.

What hope do I have if Eragon refused to fight this Enemy? Taylor asked herself as a thick drop of sweat rolled down her nose.

Bound by the trust Eragon had put in her, Taylor didn't start eating the life-force of the living beings around her, remembering the words that Oromis had once told to the Shadeslayer: "If I made your body as capable as the fittest of the elves, and used my own knowledge of magic to make you the mightiest mage of this forest, you wouldn't understand how you gained those powers, nor you'd still be a Rider."

There are no shortcuts for the Rider's path. The thought had kept Taylor from singing in the Ancient Tongue, leeching power from the world around her in order to turn herself into something more.

"Even if Eragon actually got himself a magical body by mistake in that bloody forest." she grunted to herself as her remaining foot joined the other on the floor, and she finally allowed herself to rise to an upright position, her back stretching almost painfully as she brought her hands far above her head.

From the height of the perspective granted by the many centuries of Eragon and Saphira memories, on one hand, Taylor knew that there were few elements in the world truly capable of posing an actual threat to her existence, at least once she was done with her preparations. On the other hand, now she could destroy those that had hurt her with a single word, and a heated thought.

It partly scared her, how clearly she could recognize her own emotions. But then again, Eragon had felt much in his long life, and seen many people feel and suffer much more as Head of the Riders. How many students of his had struggled through their own feelings and half-formed thoughts? Almost all of them, and it was because of that struggle that those had been able to shape themselves as people whose personal responsibility was geared towards the protection and diffusion of civility.

Taylor was aware of the risks of becoming the bully instead of the bullied. It was one of the reasons why she refused to step back into Winslow.

She was the one in control of her own choices, and with the power at her fingertips, something that promised only to grow as she went on with her plan, Taylor had to be careful, because while changing one's very self was a challenge, she couldn't risk becoming the very evil she wished to fight against.

"The path of the warrior is the path of knowledge." she quoted to herself, finally completing the apparently endless sequence of movements that were slowly but surely forging her body in something adequate for war.

Seated over the towel damp with sweat that she had placed over the floor, Taylor grabbed a pen and stared at it intently.

Knowing what to look for, she searched her own mind, finally finding the wall-not-wall that separated her from her power, and pushed.

Hammering with the whole strength of her unconquerable will inside her own mind, she fiercely grinned when her being was flooded with light.

Focusing as she had trained herself to do, she watched the pen in her own hand: "Reisa."

With a shiver of compliance, Taylor's mental focus strained as reality bent to her will, and the pen in her hand was lifted into the air.

AN

A bit of a training chapter here, I couldn't simply have Taylor jump off to do whatever. I wanted to place a bit of distance between her and her canon-self before we got started with the escalation.