IT'S ALIVE!

Okay, recap since it's been a lifetime since I've updated this fic:

An HP-SI character named David falls into the Eragon-verse after having completed his more or less autistic climb to godhood in his previous world (it was my first fic: 'The Bigger Picture' and yes, it has a lot of problems).

By chance, Arya&co find him while they're carrying Saphira's egg, which hatches for him.

The two elves accompanying Arya get captured by the Shade while the SI flees with Arya and the newly hatched Saphira.

They reach Brom and move in the Spine to avoid being pursued and they kill the two Ra'zac that attempt to their lives, and Saphira decides that she wants to rescue the captured elves.

David has problems getting to listen to Brom, which is a cantankerous old bastard, and trying to stop Saphira from going ahead with her plan, he leaves and reaches Terim, where he more or less hooks up with Angela.

The Rider however is exceptional with the Mind Arts, and he can reach across the land like Oromis, so he returns with his mind to Saphira in time for the assault on Gil'ead.

Enjoy.

The Eye of the Storm

Kidnapping a single guard long enough for his mind to be pried open hadn't been unreasonably difficult: even planning a realistic way to save the two elven prisoners didn't take that long, after all, there was only so many ways in which one could spell 'infiltrate, grab the prisoners, and run away'.

The sheer expertise of Brom turned the superior constitution of Arya into something that would have otherwise been impossible to achieve: with no strategic flaw, the duo walked about the city until they met with servants bringing back and forth from the lake the carts filled with the cleaned uniforms and whatnot needed for the upkeep of the fortress-prison of Gil'ead.

Hiding weapons and armory inside the carts allowed the two to sneak into the fortress proper, the information taken by a servant's mind clicked with what the duo already knew from the first soldier they had taken from one of the patrols.

Reaching the cells had been more difficult, but far from being beyond them.

When Arya saw them, she barely managed to hold back tears, power flooding her mind and ancient words finding their way on her lips only for a calloused hand to close on her wrist: "No!"

The imperious hiss of the aged Rider made the elf turn with a frown: she recognized both the abilities and the experience odìf Brom-elda, but stopping now that their objective was so easy to reach...

"Never use the route provided by the enemy!" the eagle nose of the aged Rider didn't manage to hide the wide look in his eyes, "If you were their captors, would you seal them away with powerful magic, inside a fortress under your command, or prepare something to warn you there were spies or traitors attempting to open the cells?"

The retort Arya had been about to produce died of a swift death as the inescapable logic of Brom made itself known: "If the Shade is to know when we open the cell, we'll need to coordinate the escape with Saphira's attack instead of having her as a back-up."

Out of nowhere, a humorous grin found its way on Brom's features, which matched the gleam in his eyes: "Or we don't touch the cell at all."

Moving with a speed that betrayed the fact he hadn't quite aged as he should even considering the loss of his dragon, Brom fished out the keys to the cells the duo had retrieved on their way to the prisoners, and opened... the adjacent cell.

The flat ringing of iron accompanied his low chuckle and Arya's ever-mounting confusion, only for her expression to go slack with surprise as she witnessed the aged Rider in action: approaching the stone wall between the empty cell they were in and the one holding Fäolin and Glenwing, he landed a hand over it, and in a whisper, he began to utter words in the ancient tongue.

Arya cast a quick glance in the corridor, her sharp eyes scanning the surroundings for an instant before her attention returned to the sounds leaving Brom's mouth: that was no spell or proper period in the ancient tongue. The aged Rider used single nouns or adjectives in a mockery of the perfect cadence and beautiful resonance that was the Ancient Tongue.

Even whispered, the voice of Brom had an authority that reality didn't dare deny: "Stenr," he spoke, and crowning Aren, the ring symbolizing the Friendship of Elvenkind gifted to the aged Rider by Inslanzadi herself, the stone seemed to quiver with anticipation.

"Hljód." as the last sound fell from the old man's lips, nothing else could be heard, and Arya blinked in open surprise, edging forward as if she could better discern what was going on by sight alone. From a second to the next, with the command of 'silence' she could no longer hear the breath of the aged man, no longer perceive his heartbeat.

'Stone', 'Silence'. She repeated in her mind, a light frown escaping her iron wrought control over her reactions as Brom spoke once more, the impossible quiet surrounding him forbidding her from hearing that last word.

Not that she needed to when the effect revealed itself immediately: where the stones acting as unbreakable bricks met each other, there was a puff of dust, as if the lime that had been used to hold them together had decided to walk away on its own.

Arya's uncomparable sight also spotted the large amount of stone dust that rolled away from the wall: He removed a thin layer of each stone, breaking away something with minimal effort.

Finally realizing what the aged man had been up to, she took a step forward, her unreasonable strength toppling the stones that had been subjected to Brom's magic. Still, in a silence that made the world feel almost unreal, the wall of stone fell apart, leaving a human-shaped hole for them to sneak the prisoners away.

A brief flash of agony made itself known when Arya's eyes landed on the chained forms of her fellow elves, and she quickly fed it to the ever-increasing rage that accompanied her since they had been taken away.

"We must be quick, and no magic inside the cell!" the coarse voice of Brom returned with the sounds of his breath and heartbeat, but before she could use magic to crack open the shackles that held them, Zar'roc flashed in the air, accompanied by an ugly sneer on the Rider's visage and the clattering of broken iron: "We cannot risk the traps on the chains, they might kill them before we manage to free them."

The explanation was quickly accepted, and Arya put to service the strength of her race by balancing the limp forms of her companions over her shoulders.

The duo left the cell with a fast but controlled pace, it wouldn't do to have their presence revealed now that they were halfway through with their plan: as soon as they started crossing the corridor, Arya called forth her magic, and with a few choice words, the unconscious forms of Fäolin and Glenwing were lifted into the air, floating behind the duo that had planned their rescue.

Without exchanging another word, Arya was the one to open the line, her faster reflexes and deadly speed more useful there than anywhere else, while Brom brought up the rear, the unmerciful red blade of Morzan barely concealed by the cloak he carried.

The guards walked leisurely along the bulwark of the citadel of Gil'ead, bored eyes peering half-heartedly into the growing darkness as the night cast her cloak over the sky and the sunset finally surrendered to what was to come.

Far above the unaware mortals, in the silence of those that foresaw no trouble incoming, Saphira gave proof that the sky could belong only to her.

Arching back just enough to catch a lonely updraft of warm air, the blue dragon slowed from her wide recon of the surroundings of her ultimate target, and rose. The wind that she had been out running before was now almost solid against her wings, and exactly as she had envisioned: she stalled.

Two hawks passed her by and described a spiraling pattern in front of her: and even protected she felt a flare of joy at the unexpected help that her Rider had chosen to provide. He was to far to wield magic as Brom had defined it, but his mind was mighty, and as he had done once before, he had jumped from fox to snake to human to owl until he could settle his consciousness over the lesser flyers that were barely keeping up with her.

For a single instant, she was a still object in the darkening sky: her powerful muscles and innate understanding of her place in her world singing together in a chorus that none would understand. Then, gravity reclaimed her body, and tucking her wings as flat as she could against her back, she tore through harmless white clouds that were still occasionally hit by the dying sunset. The ground, from distant and insignificant as it had appeared when she was completing her recon of the city, zoomed towards her with unerring determination, looking almost as if it was part of a giant's weapon that was being swung towards the blue dragon.

The two hawks fell into a dive immediately after her, burrowing into her wake to expend less energy while Saphira readied herself. She knew, because that was what she would do if she were not the best flying creature on the land, and because she understood her Rider in a way that David ignored. She knew his fear of irrelevance, his warped understanding of respect and hierarchy, and she felt his dedication to her. With his decision to leave Brom, Arya, and herself behind, he had hoped to force her to avoid confrontations for the foreseeable future, with his presence lacking, he had planned to forcefully stall the rate at which she approached certain danger.

But a dragon wasn't meant to be manipulated, not even with good intentions, not even by her Rider. So she had refused to stop, because she was his equal, not a companion to be ordered around. That he had conceived the separation between them as a bridle to constrain her was endearing, if she were to accept a human's point of view, but she wasn't human. She shared his same fierce need for freedom, and that his order had come disguised in order to pretend that he didn't expect his will to be always followed was almost unforgivable.

That he joined me, however, is a good sign that he might come to truly heal from the warped mentality that brought us apart. Before the mounting of their attack, David had told her that he was safely tucked away in a meditative trance that allowed his mind to reach across the land, and that he'd always help her. His words hadn't fully accepted nor recognized his misguided attempt at manipulating her back when he left for Terim, but there would be time for that after they saved the elves from the Shade's clutches.

In Saphira's mind, the pride and joy that accompanied every action she took in the sky faded away, replaced by the sharp and unbreakable focus of the hunt, and simmering just around it, as if flame coating an otherwise naked sword, there was rage. Rage at her fate, alone as she was in a land that had known dragons uncountable in the course of millennia, and rage because of the two elven warriors that had been captured to protect her when she was the meanest hatchling.

Her acute eyes quickly made out the part of the human-nest that hosted her objective, and the smallest torsion of her tail was enough to direct her dive as she wished. When she was less than one hundred meters from the bulwark, she heard the startled and disbelieving screams of those sentinels that managed to recognize the threat she represented. In that moment, Saphira let go of a thunderous roar that almost visibly exploded from her maw, reverberating in the bones of the frail two-legs, rattling the very stones they stood upon.

Flaring open her wings at the last possible moment caused a small part of her mind to flare painfully, powerful muscles and tendons straining uncomfortably as her momentum almost visibly pivoted on her barycentre, only to slam through her powerful rear legs onto the slated roof of the building Arya and Brom had planned for her to attack.

The wide roof of the main building of the human-nest buckled and failed to resist her weight and strength, rupturing as an egg just before another insanely powerful downward swing of her wings brought her to hover once more, her front claws tearing deep gouges in the stone that still tried to support the structure she was breaking apart.

With her consciousness buried under the crystalline focus of her rage, she couldn't use her mind to check on her allies, she couldn't use the more collected thoughts of her Rider to choose the next moves, but her hearing was frighteningly accurate, so she picked apart the screams of the meaningless two legs from the barked orders, the cries of pain, and fear-fueled insults from a single peal of chilling laughter.

From the corner of her eye, she took notice of soldiers randomly tripping to their deaths over the bulwark, or stabbing their companions with jerky movements of their arms, and she felt a flare of pride for David, that even far away was fighting on the frontline.

Once she regained her balance on what was left of the stone supports of the roof, Saphira immediately proceeded to hook her claws into the roof through the hole she had created with her assault, the fractured wooden beams harmless as feathers when they scratched against her sturdy scales. Shifting her weight was an easy thing, as it was ignoring the arrows that impacted uselessly against either her thicker scales or the localized magical shields Arya and Brom had provided her with.

With fiery rage surrounding her thoughts like a flaming mantle ready to burn through any intruder, she dislodged what was left of the roof, revealing the large room underneath, where her allies were fighting an ever-increasing number of guards that happened to fail at controlling fully their movements despite being led by the worst thing the land knew: a Shade.

The Shade spoke suggestively as he strode forward, the orders he had given previously trickling down the chain of command while his chilling presence pressed against the mind of both Arya and Brom, the latter grunting in discomfort.

"An old man and a little elf, come to die?" his lips barely moved, almost as if he was hissing, but his words resounded over the clash of steel and gurgling screams of the human soldiers dying like flies, and his eyes rose to meet the form of Saphira: "And the next dragon for the king! As well as the hidden mind that is sowing such chaos, a shy Rider, perhaps?"

It was then that one of the soldiers turned sideways, his sword plunging into the neck of his companion just as he was starting to draw back an arrow on the short bow he had. An instant later, the betrayer screamed in agony fell to the ground accompanied by the furious snarl of the Shade: "I wonder where you might be, little Rider..."

It was then that everyone could hear David's voice ringing over their defenses: "Owerwhem him, but be ready to disengage your minds!"

Invisible among them, the Rider drove his determination as a cherry-red hot iron rod into the Shade's mind, immediately followed by the others sans Saphira. With no delay, the Shade's awareness splintered over each front, each part of its conscious independently striking back at the minds of those that had dared attack it.

Brom hastily retreated, both physically and mentally, in order to avoid a wild swing of the Shade's blade as his slow subsuming of the enemy' thoughts was revealed and negated.

Arya darted into the opening thusly created, her mind posed like a coiled snake and ready to unleash venom into the consciousness of her opponent while her sword pierced the side of the unholy creature

Saphira uncaringly tore through the human garrison, her tail flattening three soldiers while her claws flashed sharply, ignoring armor and bones as if they were of paper while her fire washed over another dozen of soldiers that had just run into the room.

David's mind twisted and twirled around the tendrils of hateful despair that were the Shade's attack, unerringly leaving just enough of himself exposed in order to be an exciting target, but not enough for Durza to find anything to sink his hooks into: when it came to the Mind Arts, there were few beings that could withstand the discordant symphony that the Rider's experience in his previous world granted him.

Finite beings weren't meant to understand what it was like to be a rock, to slither as wind, to fall like lightning.

But while David's mind was managing to shore up the defenses of his allies by being the main focus of the Shade, the spirits that composed it hadn't always been bound in a prison of flesh, and so the Rider found that the fantastical psychedelic nature of his thoughts was being followed with no issue by Durza, which was instead growing more and more used to the instinctive associations among things that couldn't be brought together.

The sword in the hands of the Shade flashed as he held back the twin assault of Brom and Arya, while the air started to grow heavy with smoke and the always-loud roars of Saphira, but while the battle on the physical plane seemed to be stalled, the minds of the presents were slowly falling back, pushed steadily where the unholy creature wanted them, slowly losing their focus as the twisted perspective of Durza kept wounding them.

Years before, in a world far from the one they were in, David had tried to bastardize Odin's self-sacrifice in order to become one with the entirety of the world, so that his will, supported by understanding, would be able to wash over reality as if it was a Fundamental Force on par with gravity.

The spirits that composed Durza had always been a part of the world: a twisted and cruel minute essence in a greater whole, but present nevertheless as an unbound and limitless existence.

Slowly, a discordant song of glass echoing in empty halls of stone joined David's effort. The song was a sound of the mind, a collection of inconsistencies that brought together the swishing of a cat's tail with rose-tinted white clouds that intercepted the dawn before the sun managed to properly rise, it was a consciousness made of sharp curiosity and perfect self-mastery, carried by a capricious will that nevertheless was focused on a single target: the Shade.

Like a blade of diamond, the new presence struck in the chaotic mess that was the core of the Shade's essence: and the mind wielded by the spirits recoiled.

"NOW!" David's mind gave the equivalent of a great shove to Arya and Brom, who immediately sealed off their consciousnesses while Zar'roc pierced the distance between the dragon-less Rider and the unholy creature that had terrorized the land at the command of Galbatorix.

The blade of Morzan struck with precision at the heart of Durza, and the Shade died.

AN

Wow, this has been a long fucking wait.

So, I've read again this fic, as well as the hazy plan I had about it going forward, and... meh.

Mainly, this fic is to try and recover from 'The Bigger Picture', which as my first fic, presented a thick list of problems that I've realized in hindsight and about which I could endlessly rant.

In any case, I can confirm now that essentially swapping the MC with Eragon was necessary to have David actually get involved in some meaningful way, but I'd like to add that his stubborn refusal to follow Brom's direction is dictated more from a sense of urgency than out of pettiness.

Ultimately magic is the great game-changer here, and given that Iron Trunk still works, along with Raven, some shit from the Potterverse carried over: meaning that magic acting on 'concepts' instead of the more or less scientific one typical of the Inheritance cycle is a possibility.

This brings the MC to realize pretty fast the advantages and disadvantages of both: for example, being able to bend time at the opportune moment would be a great fucking help, considering that one of the possible consequences of losing is eternal slavery to Galbatorix.

All of this is to say that there are more than the reasons stated by the MC for why he does some things, at the time I wrote the first 12 chapters, that was because I wanted to showcase his lack of perfect awareness of himself.

I wanted this chapter to be as dynamic as possible, did I manage it? The shifts in perspective are built to provide different views on the events without getting stuck halfway through by the sudden appearance of Saphira: I chose to have a brief recounting of the planning and the first moments of action in the section dedicated to Arya & Brom, which ties neatly (in my opinion) with Saphira's standard roof breaking.

In any case, I hope that this chapter managed to rekindle the interest for this wobbling story, even if I'm not telling anything about future events, that'd be boring, wouldn't it? In any case, I'm trying to properly foreshadow events yet to come, so let me know what you think.

(In any case, 'Meddling Giant is another HP-SI fic on my profile that uses Magic to bring forth the story (but there is AN ACTUAL STORY), I've also begun a SI-Cedric Diggory to try and write 'The Bigger Picture' that could have been if had I any idea about what I was doing at the time, give it a glance if you want, and let me know what you think!)