"I honor that... let's go," Bid'Daum said softly, bidding Eragon to rise from his position and search for some live kin.

"Indeed, tonight was not meant to be a night of victory, but of triumph. So many were lost..."

"So that many more would not be. Grief should be saved for safety, not for a time such as this. Go, I suggest searching for the entrance with which you entered. The battle is over, there will be few here. If they are anywhere, they will be down below, in safety."

With a resigned sigh, Eragon followed Bid'Daum's logic and ran from the mess. He spent the next half hour searching for the entrance to the tunnel, hoping he could find it, hoping he had not rushed too quickly from the maw.

He found it.

And then he cautiously ran through it, deeply saddened by the few warriors whose bodies were rotting on the floor. When he reached the bottom he peeped out, looking for a telltale sign of smoke from anywhere.

"Good knight," a voice said quietly from the side, "it is good you have survived. Camp has been made three miles hence." A magician's staff pointed out towards the forest, and Eragon thanked the invisible hand holding the stick and ran in the given direction.

He ran slowly, as fast as his tired body would let him. Bid'Daum was silent, engulfed in Eragon's own exhaustion. Even so, Eragon made the three miles within twenty minutes, but what he found was not what his aching body wanted.

Two dragons, long as a tree was high and just as tall were doing battle with about twenty elves in a large clearing. Another dragon's body lay damming a creek, its blood polluting the water.

The remaining elves were in conditions worse than Eragon's, the Queen and Vladime giving orders in the heat of the battle as they tiredly dodged gushes of flame. From somewhere far-off a trumpet resounded, signalling help too far off to be of any immediate help.

"So here I go to die a hero," Eragon whispered to Bid'Daum. "Perhaps we will not be remembered. But at least we will not have died in vain," and with those thoughts he gathered what hidden strength he had in him and charged into the hopeless battle.

He ran in the creek, because it was the least strewn with bodies. As nimbly as a dead-tired elf could, he ran up the spine of the dragon and jumped for all he was worth towards a live dragon, mouth open in a soundless scream of exasperation, sword ready to stab through a spinal cord.

He missed.

He stabbed deep into a golden foreleg, cutting off a paw from the rest of the limb. A shriek of pain came from deep inside of the golden dragon, and the beast came bearing down on Eragon, flames gushing out in a fashion similar to the blood from his leg.

"Too bad it won't be remembered," Eragon/Bid'Daum thought hazily, barely having the strength to lift his light sword. "Because this might just be worth remembering."

The dragon missed just as badly as Eragon did.

Meaning it fell into the already dammed crick and snapped its jaw off with the force of its own attack.

Eragon shuddered for the writhing dragon, sight fading as he dropped his sword into mud. No one should have to die that way.

Blackness began to take over, and as Eragon fought for consciousness his last sight was that of a black-clad elf with unmarked armor leaping into the final fray, just as Vladime was being fried alive, the last sound he heard was that of a trumpet on his right, and his last thought was,

"No one should have to live through this."

And yet, somehow, he was one of the few that lived.

He was Eragon, or so the Queen had told her, and so she had recognized him from the travel. He had been a 'scavenger and tactician,' but now,

"He's not just a scout anymore. He's a hero—possibly more than that."

There had only been five that had survived that night, and her only regret was that she hadn't been there to save more. Eliana, for all of her talk of valour, had only one dragon kill under her belt, and that had been last night's.

She almost shuddered at the thought.

It hadn't been as easy as she had always dreamed—but she had done it, and that was the only thing that had mattered. She was a true warrior now, and the Queen had to admit it, despite all of their previous desputes.

But there was still that Eragon fellow.

When he woke up, unlike most patients he began asking questions about some fellow named 'Bid'Daum,' if he was okay and what had happened. Then he started asking about an elf with unmarked armor and then he had asked—

Basically he asked a lot of questions.

About the last night he remembered, about the last five minutes he did not experience, about people that had survived.

Eliana wasn't exactly thrilled about being the one to tell him, but duty forced her to slowly and sadly tell the truth.

And Eragon—the funny thing about him—he had taken it all silently, and then sighed and smiled with melancholy sadness. His jaw hadn't dropped, he hadn't fainted, he had just smiled.

She, for some reason that quite confused her, had been awarded with the title of Hero, highest rank. Eragon had been as well, though he was still out when he had received the title and was quite bewildered when he heard about it. His eyes—Eliana had to admit, she liked those tender honey-gray eyes—had lit up quizzically, as though expecting a "just kidding" a moment later, and it was almost hard for her to keep a serious face on.

He needed a hair-cut though. He was constantly tossing his bangs out of his eyes, which she liked to look at and—

Okay, okay. She liked him. Big deal. It wasn't a new concept, girls liking guys. She had noticed him before—and she had hoped, with a sort of desperation that he didn't remember their first encounter. That maybe, that little event could cease to exist in the memories of elves.

Knowing the psychology of the species though, that was highly unlikely, and there was such a slim chance of him forgetting the encounter that—

Maybe she needed to visit the psychologist.

Actually, what she needed to be was strong. Strong for the five severely wounded veterans. Strong for a certain dirty-blonde haired—

Geez! He wasn't more than a year older than her. He probably looked down on her. God—oh wait, she didn't believe in God... oh well—knew what he thought about her. He had been through one of the most bloody battles probably in the history of elves. And... well, there was a chance that she knew what he thought.

Quite honestly she was disillusioned and she knew it quite well. Which was why she was trying to be busy, or distracted by other things a lot more. Well, let's just say she was a confused teen trying to be more mature than she was, and that well, maybe, just maybe, she just happened to really like a certain hero of the highest rank.

Oh, what were those tiny molecules called? Hormones. She. Hated. Hormones.