To everyone that reviewed last chapter, thank you for your time and interest! I'm never gonna hold this story ransom for reviews, but people showing interest in my story psyches me up for it. I've got a ton of projects IRL and off-site, so devoted readers help me remember some of the babies that might get a little neglected.

Eragon awoke to Erna bringing breakfast. While her girls carried the usual platters she herself cradled a bundle in her arms, long and thin. He and Saphira awkwardly rose. There was another girl where Lillias had been not three days before.

"I'm sorry," he murmured quietly. Saphira bowed her head own head. "I should have... I should have done something."

Erna sighed up at them. "Lillias fought with a bravery far beyond her age. Now she sleeps with our Mother. I hope it a restful one."

She deserves nothing less, Saphira added diligently.

Erna carefully placed the bundle at their feet. Her lips twitched. "I believed you misplaced the night before, my prince."

Eragon carefully opened the cloth with a claw, blinking down at the same sword and sheathe granted by Caedmon. Belatedly he recalled it discarded on the floor, alongside the shredded remnants of his clothing upon that instinctive transformation. He blushed beneath his scales. "Thank you," he offered, dignified as possible. "This was a gift sorely missed."

You just remembered it existed, stone-head, Saphira pointed out privately.

We've had more important things to worry about! he snapped back.

The servants bowed and left the to their breakfast. After scarcely eating the last few days Eragon devoured the food. Gods damn his insatiable belly. The extraneous effort of transformation had certainly not helped either.. Saphira needed meat to properly fuel her flame and handle the energy of flight. Weredragons were no different.

Eragon blinked down at clumsy dragon hands as something else occurred to him. How the seven hells did he shift back?

You did it the night before, didn't you?

On utter accident, he answered sourly.

My first flame was much the same, Saphira pointed out sympathetically. They both happily skipped over the dire circumstances that had forced it. After that it came near naturally as breathing. Your abilities must be much the same. Especially since you're returning to the shape you've held sixteen years already.

Eragon frowned down at his paws, willing them small and scaleless. He concentrated until his head throbbed. He folded his wings tight to his body and coiled his tail awkwardly to make them... retract or whatever the seven hells they'd done the first transformation back. Perhaps near sleeping through the shifthadn't been the best idea.

Eventually Eragon was reduced to cursing under his breath. His native language clumsily hissed and slurred off his dragon tongue.

Shouldn't Oisin have been there to bitch over your technique by now? Saphira wondered in utter boredom, sprawled out and basking on the balcony.

They both snapped to attention when a dragon chose that moment to alight down outside. Because this was not their stuffy poet. Caedmon loomed like only Hrothgar and Islanzadi could loom. Royal presence (or at least pompousness) apparently transcended beyond species. Saphira slunk back inside and Eragon prowled closer to her.

"Nephew," the weredragon rumbled. His golden eyes swept elsewhere, hesitating only moments. "Saphira."

"Uncle," he returned flatly.

The bite mark on Caedmon's lower left forearm was certainly new, as was the way he favored weight on his right paw. Something had not quite succeeded in gnawing it off. "I hope this morning finds you well."

"As well as can be expected," he offered bluntly.

"Aye," allowed Caedmon. "You are a full member of the clan. Your arachtide has broken." He scowled down at new gouges in the balcony, where some creature had tried to force its way inside the other night. "We've both lived to see another sunrise. And suffer each other's company for many mornings more."

Eragon's stomach dropped as he remembered all those bodies, all the funerals given. "Did..."

"None of our clan." Caedmon growled, pinching the bridge of his snout in a very human gesture of annoyance. "Though Niall, stars bless the little fucking fool, tried very hard to have that happen. Our people..." He sighed, lowering his paw. "Well, we've been fortunate these past few years. Serpents are fickle beasts. The north and west have more than paid our price. Now... Now the balance has been restored."

What a pleasant way to surmise a lucky streak had been broken with a death toll to return things to the natural order.

Eragon had nothing he could say to that and so shifted the subject back to where it mattered most. "Why are you here?"

You've certainly tried very hard pretending we don't exist, Saphira offered snidely. Not that her mind was open for Caedmon to hear.

"You've survived the Lord Moon's judgement and Amalia's Will without our blood boiling you alive," he offered blankly. "By virtue of your arachtide breaking you're now a full member of the clan. And full responsibility of the clan. There are matters not even the fili can be entrusted to teach you properly." His face puckered. "Things that should be left to... blood."

Eragon's hackles raised. "I lasted sixteen damn years without knowing your blood."

"Aye," growled the dragon. "Then you fucking poked your little Rider nose where it never belonged and my grandfather, gods know why, decided to embrace you as clan when he was well within his right his slaughter you and Saphira both. Whatever claim your blood had to the name Ruadhluan died with Beline's exile! Yet here we are."

Eragon snarled right back, jamming his face into a male more than twice his size. "Why the fuck are you even here?"

Caedmon inhaled, summoning some inner well of patience, and exhaled calmly. He blinked knowingly down at him. "I think we all know why I'm here."

The black dragon froze before spitting indignant sparks. "Oisin showed me all I needed!"

"The bare basics of that form," Caedmon deadpanned. "And not a bit more." He stared stoically down. "If that's not the case, show me your first face, and I will let today's lesson drop."

Eragon glared back. Saphira stared at him. Seconds dragged by into minutes.

At last he huffed and rolled his eyes. Pride could only take him so far. He certainly couldn't kill Galbatorix without first figuring out how to will himself back into a body capable of magic and swordsmanship.

"All right, then." Caedmon's gaze flicked to Saphira, who settled and made herself comfortable for yet another tedious lesson that had nothing to do with her. "Saphira, I can teach you nothing today. Would your not time be better suited elsewhere?"

She bristled, but pried open her mind enough to grit out, My leash only allows me to fly so far and I can only fish so many times in these damned waters.

Caedmon's tail twitched before he waved a wing out to the castle denizens going about their business. "You have all Crown Castle at your disposal. There are fliers that can teach how to fight without relying on an ounce of Will. Or to the chefs for the best flames for cooking or the shepherds on how to manage flocks. What stops you from learning what you wish?"

Saphira did not dignify that obvious answer with a response. Caedmon's eyes narrowed at the silence. Then he widened and cursed his own stupidity.

"Regardless of how you came to these Isles or convoluted your relation, you are clan. You can claim the name Ruadhluan and the clan's right to know the aspects of those sworn to us." He paused in suspense. "Just as it is your right to demand your due, so long as you are not intervening in dire manners."

Saphira's eyes glittered hungrily. Eragon bit back a grin as she wished him luck and all but tore herself from his side. Even if it left him alone to yet another mentor.

"Will you drown me in instincts how?" he drawled, long used to the routine.

Caedmon grimaced. "We are usually only so intimate when dealing with little children still mastering the language and in dire need of knowing how to handle their own bodies. Your tutelage with Oisin was... pragmatic, to whittle down years of instruction to weeks. I think we'd both much prefer methods more... suited to your actual maturity."

Eragon blinked. Only with great reluctance did he admit to not even knowing where to start. At least Oisin's methods earned quick results.

Caedmon frowned thoughtfully. "I was dragonborn, but now the shift either way comes easy as breathing. Except for when those lovely times of the year draw near." His own form shrank and shimmered in a seamless transition of scales to skin. Eragon's eyes ached at trying to follow it all. "Then it is... part Will and part muscle. So much happens along the spine. Everywhere else pales in comparison."

Eragon gouged his claws into the floor. His muscles shuddered as muscles should never shudder. His scales itched and wings cramped. Always he was left for gasping for breath, thoroughly draconic by the end. Caedmon shifted back and forth beside him. The ease of transformation annoyed him. His uncle's increasingly hapless attempts to stutter out every inane detail almost made up for it.

Eragon flexed his right hand thoughtfully, where the silver scales of his gedwey ignasia still shimmered. "Maybe I should try it one step at a time?"

Caedmon growled emphatically. "No. Our body wants one or the other. Never both at once." He clenched his own fist for emphasis, the arm shimmering gold and powerful before wrenching back into human shape. "This comes from years of time and practice. From knowing yourself inside and out." With a pensive scowl he rolled his shoulder blades. "The muscles between the wings do... curious things. They expand and contract with the shape. When arachtide or duinetide looms you almost always feel the ache there first. Try focusing there."

Eragon tried. Gods, did he try. His stomach heaved when things started breaking in a way bones should never break. He shuddered in revulsion and relief when everything snapped back into place. "W-Where does it all even go?"

Caedmon smiled wanly. "How does a dragon support its weight in the air? Sometimes the gods just made things as they are. Talamh Mathair intended to trap the Lord Moon in human skin until his dying day. Amalia was human until the day she was not. Red was a dragon until she granted him a new name and a new chance." He rapped a hand against his chest. "You've got two hearts. Our equilibrium is a constant struggle between the two."

"Like... warring against someone out to invade your mind?"

The duine-arach shuddered. "Nothing so dramatic. Both halves are you. But... in a way. You must want it, and make it so."

Eragon stopped straining for his human face. He flexed his claws. He knew what they felt like, smooth and small, dexterous enough to polish a blade or scratch that one spot on Saphira's horns. He knew the wind through his hair, the reassuring coolness of stone on naked skin. All of that was him.

And he wanted it back.

It came in slow, sporadic bursts. Every time fear urged him back he gritted his teeth and pressed on. There was no pain this time, only unsettling sounds and sensations he refused to dwell on. Suddenly he reached a breaking point. From there things snapped into place themselves.

His chin smacked the floor with a grunt. He wrenched himself on his hands and knees, utterly human and utterly nude.

"Excellent," his uncle rumbled in earnest praise. "Now, the other way."

So it went. For hours. Every shift ticked seconds off the total time, then minutes. His instincts stopped screaming at him and slowly came to accept this was just something he could do now. It was far from seamless when Caedmon finally made him stop, but by gods was it easier. Even if he was gasping, sweaty, and his stomach felt like it was digesting itself.

"Good," Caedmon murmured.

His uncle extended a hand. Eragon was too tired not to take it. He stood on wobbly legs and frowned at the man's clothes, rich red and richly made.

"When the seven hells do clothes come into it?"

Caedmon chuckled. "After you give your body time to rest. You're already shredding your way through my old clothes. Let's not give the poor weavers cause to make anymore."

Eragon conceded the point. While his uncle took his left he dragged himself into a bath and clean clothes. By then late lunch (or early dinner) had come up. Despite his current shape he wolfed down most of the plates. He collapsed into bed with a weary, bone-deep satisfaction. At last he felt confident in his own body again, that its new abilities were well within his control.

Maybe they could be a weapon all their own. If he mastered the shift fast enough he could bite Galbatorix's head off without the king being none the wiser.

"Slippery... little... bitch."

"Walk it off, Aed," Brede ordered. She quirked a pleased smile Saphira's way. "Rather nice aim, back there."

Saphira chuffed as Aed collapsed into himself. Etain sighed, helping haul his newly human ass down from the training yard. Weredragon males were not as infuriatingly armored as true males. The chinks in their scales were wider, softer. After gouging for Thorn's arm pits above the Burning Plains getting a solid kick on Aed's had been easy. He might have been twice her size, but twice as blind in guarding his own weak points.

He's not the first I've had to try it out on, she answered humbly as she could. She and Glaedr had trained endless hours on any blind spot Shruikan might yield.

The recruits her size gaped at her. "Y-You fought the Beast?" Nessa spluttered. "And lived?"

"I heard the Dragon-Killer fed him on elders the size of mountains!" Cairbre added.

"Well, my great-grandmother says he was never a true dragon at all," Treasa sniffed. "The Dragon-Killer just twisted a Serpent to look like one."

Saphira blinked, somewhere between flattered and unsettled to have dragons her age and size crowding reverently around her. Even if they were only half. Galbatorix left more than just his dragon. He forced another to hatch for him. That's the one I fought.

Still bound by oath, Glaedr remained secret even out here.

Brede frowned sharply, exchanging a dire look with Ciar. "He had ten or so abominations at one point. How many is he up to now?"

Just the one, Saphira answered in grim satisfaction. The others have been... taken of.

"By who?"

Humans, mostly. A few by the Galbatorix himself. He's... They call him the Mad King for a reason.

Once more Saphira was swamped in questions by weredragon teenagers. This time the senior warriors were through trying to shut them up. They snapped to attention when Brede demanded it, and fluttered off when she finally gave her leave. Saphira let herself be dragged with them.

Oh, they hadn't been anywhere near as close this morning. Beating each other's aggression out in sparring had been the exact therapy needed. Knock a few heads around and suddenly the arrogant ones had shut right about primitive little beasts.

There was a rocky islet out to sea the weredragons alighted upon like a flock of squawking puffins. Saphira's oaths just strained as she neared their limit. Still she comfortably landed with them. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of bird shit.

"Sorry," Nessa giggled. "You get used to it."

"Or you just lose your sense of smell entirely," deadpanned Treasa.

Saphira snorted. Then Odhran asked her what the hell had brought her and Eragon to fight Thorn in the first place.

Well, it's not like we expected them to be there. We held our own until they retreated. Or at least until Murtagh had found a way to bypass his oaths without capturing them. But her audience didn't need to know that.

Of course Saphira was not allowed to retreat without first digging into how the hell she had come to the Isles in the first place. Long before she reached that point she was bogged down on her origins.

"You sat in an egg. For a hundred years?"

Saphira shrugged. It's not like any of the idiots paraded before me were worth hatching for. So I waited until the right soul came along. And by some twist of fate he turned out to be part we-... duine-arach. It saved us from getting killed, didn't it?

Nessa cocked her head. "Did you hatch for the prince when he was a baby or something? Because you're, like, our age."

They gaped in disbelief when Saphira retorted she was either over a hundred years old or less than two, depending on how weredragons counted age. Which raised a thousand more questions, each more outlandish than the last. Saphira turned the debate back on them by asking how the hell dragons could be born, how one could just be reaching teething stage when a true dragon was ready to breathe fire.

"Oh gods," groaned another. "Imagine my little sisters with fire as babies. They'd burn the whole island down around their ears!"

Saphira did not respond dragons at six months old were sexually mature. This was a race that grew slowly, like their human halves. Only as adolescence peaked did their dragon longevity kick in. To an extent. An innocent question to the weredragons revealed the oldest elder in their clans to be a decade over three hundred. Less than half of Glaedr's age.

As sunset drew near Nessa was the first to invite her to dinner. Saphira politely declined. She had Eragon to get back too.

However, she did promise to join in later spars if Brede had the room for her. At least there was something she could practice. Thorn had only Shruikan as teacher, if the dread dragon had mind enough left to do so. Saphira had seasoned warriors who knew how to work in tandem with human partners. Fliers like Brede provided the brute power, while casters like Ciar offered deadly finesse.

Weary but satisfied, Saphira returned to their chambers. She hummed to find her bonded human and already passed out.

He blearily cracked open blue eyes to smile at her. "Oh, hello Saphira."

Hello, little one, she answered fondly. How was your lesson?

He proudly waved to his human form. "Coming along. How was your day?"

Brede let me spar with the trainees our size. After I thrashed enough of them she let me try some of the adults. She rumbled in satisfaction. Including one from our capture. If you're still learning weredragon things I might go back tomorrow.

He grinned. "Learn anything interesting?"

Saphira cocked her head thoughtfully as she considered the long list of conversations shared. Weredragons play 'chicken.'

Eragon snorted. "I played several games could called back in Carvahall. None of them tended to end well."

Human children can't goad each other into free-falling, only to snap their wings open at the last possible moment.

His mouth worked soundlessly. "Were... you invited to play?"

Brede threatened them all with fulling duty if they ever thought to do it, Saphira answered bleakly. Apparently the idiots are prone to shattering limbs this way. If not their necks.

"For the adults back home it was the same with the kids that kept daring each other to claim Igualda Falls." He smirked. "I won."

When dinner came Saphira happily wolfed it down. Eragon ate a respectable amount for all he had feasted scant hours before. Later he sprawled out for bed without making the effort to shift forms. Saphira shoved her disappointment behind thick mental barriers.

His human form was a blessing in disguise. Truly. Even if he could not keep her warm and twine his tail with hers like this, this was Eragon. His truest shape. The one he had been born to and held for sixteen years. It emphasized the parameters of their bond, eternal and ineffable. Their souls were joined on a higher level, above baser instincts. Sure, some human Riders might wed and Rider's dragons mate to produce eggs, but nothing came between the bond first and foremost in their souls.

Unfortunately Saphira's instincts were fickle. They had once led her into disgrace with Glaedr not too long ago. For all he was an elder many times her age and size, he was also her only chance for a mate that would respect her as such, the one possible father to her children not an utter monster. All other nebulous hopes rested on an unhatched egg yet languishing in Galbatorix's possession.

Above the Burning Plains she had met Thorn in fang and fire. Her instincts dismissed him as only enemy, a threat to her and her own. Enemies did not stand.

Now, after only vague and embarrassing dreams of desire and flashes of ancestral memory, fate had thrown Saphira an island of males, from old and grizzled to young and untried. By following their forms she realized she preferred the strong to the lithe, those with long snouts to those blunted. Then she glimpsed their rounded pupils, their blunted teeth, their strange thumbs for the arousal to wither and die. These were not true dragons. These were daonna-arach, dragon-men, who could never match what her heart of hearts desired.

Eragon's second form was black as the midnight sky, already strong and only stronger in the years to come. His flames burned deep blue at their edges and bright, hot blue at their core, near the color of her own scales. With him, she felt...

It didn't matter. Their bond was strong and stable, whatever weredragon magic had wrought. All else would fade in time, once her hapless instincts realized this too was another desperate dream impossible to obtain.

Saphira curled up by his side to lend her strength to his, the way it had been and the way it should always be.

Always.

For all Caedmon has severe mommy and daddy issues weredragons are all about that clan. Which Eragon is. He is somewhere between surly teenager and one of those little babies that likes to totter off cliffs when no one's looking. Cue attempts at taking responsibility for the nephew his grandpa adopted into the clan before peacing out. Mostly because Eragon is now fully duine-arach and subject to the rights thereof. Which means someone got stuck with making sure he doesn't get eaten alive by court. Or the suitors about to eat the shiny new prince alive. Or the things in the thin places that actually just want to... eat him alive.

Stupid teenagers will be stupid teenagers. This is a universal truth :D

For one certain love-struck teenager her current instincts are falling hard into Uncanny Valley. In humans something nearly human but not quite there (an unsettling robot or CGI shitty in just the right way) triggers feelings of eeriness or revulsion instead of a natural affinity humans should feel toward humans. Daonna-arach are dragons that are not quite dragons. And send poor Saphira's instincts haywire. Add this on top of the bond already shared with Eragon, his other form being totally her type, and some trauma over Glaedr... Yeah. Our girl's a train wreck. But at least now she has a healthy outlet of beating up some nice friends (more or less) her mental age!