Life is learning

Murtagh finished laying the foundations to the wall in his cave just as he heard Thorn land outside, carrying two large stone blocks in his claws. After a few seconds, Thorn wound his head round to see what Murtagh was doing and snorted. Amused and interested, he enquired to Thorn if there was something wrong and in return he nearly kicked himself. "Murtagh, I was thinking, you know how we are going to build this castle, how exactly do they keep castles stuck together, is there some kind of sticky substance to make sure the walls do not fall over?" "I have no idea" responded Murtagh, "we might have to come up with something or go back to Alagaesia to get ideas, although I am sure Galbatorix taught us something about how castles were built." Thorn stayed still for a second as he thought over the matter, "I am sure we can come up with something, we would make a terrible dragon-rider pairing if we were stumped by how to hold a castle together." Not so sure about the fact that they would be able to build castles without something together, but sensing that there would be a way out of this, without causing anymore strife he simply said "Hmnn" and let Thorn be.

Grabbing the chisel and the hammer which he had fashioned out of stone, albeit with the help of magic, he walked outside, the freezing maw, which looked like it was going to start snowing again, and started chiselling away at the two stone blocks Thorn had brought. Roughly oval in shape, they were about the size of him, and would be able to provide numerous stones for the wall. Once he had chiselled away all the blocks he had not the slightest indication of what to do with the fragments. Gradually as he mulled over the problem, he thought he could get Thorn to meld them together with his fire, but that would be too impractical. Instead he thought, they would form the perfect filling for the walls, mixed in with dirt and protected with magic, they could provide insulation and safety, some two things Murtagh kept dearly to his heart. He was quickly interrupted from going down lines of thought that would not be helpful, by almost smashing his finger with the hammer. To his disappointment, when he had closely examined the stone block, he had hardly made any progress. He was now under the realisation that the spells Galbatorix had cast on his body to make him stronger were gradually wearing off, although he sorely missed them, one reason being the fact that it made every single elf, and a few dwarfs, stronger than him, he had come to the conclusion that he would be better served by acquiring a riders full strength naturally.

Suspecting that in the future it would be very handy to access a formidable source of energy, he had decided that after he had done chiselling he would store some energy in the pommel of Zar'roc. Speaking of which, he had no idea where the sword was, "Silly Murtagh" voiced Thorn in his head "It's at your hip, your so used to wearing it you forget when you are wearing it." And truth be told, when he looked down, there it was, hanging in its sheath from his brown leather belt. Embarrassed by his shortcoming, he shut Thorn out of his mind, but he could still hear the amusement coming from Thorn, in the form of deep grating sound echoing throughout the valley. Coming to the conclusion that it would be more than likely he would forget about storing energy in the ruby, he did it then and there, just to make sure. "You can never be too careful" he thought wryly, especially considering the premonition he had seen prior some time ago. It would take a great fool to be naïve about the abominations that walked the land. One only had to look as far as his journey from being a respected swordsman in the Varden, to the Empire's most deadly and ferocious warrior, all in the course of a few months. This he thought was the prime example of how fast events in this world could go at. But out here, in the wilderness, with Thorn and a few hardy animals, life proceeded slowly and with little significance.

He grinned at the amount of the stone blocks he chiselled, not even the imminent storm clouds could darken his mood. He picked two of the blocks up and carried them over to the cave wall, where he laid them down inside. In total, there were 10 medium sized blocks which he had successfully managed to carve out of the stone ovals, which meant he had had to make another 4 trips back and forth. Littered around the flat space where he had carved the blocks, where numerous fragments which he gathered up in a pile, and transported onto to the floor of the cave. He called out to Thorn with his mind, and soon enough he could hear the approaching noise of steadily beating wings. While he waited Thorn sent him a mental image of him flying with another set of stones, and then, as Thorn came into view of their little tucked away cove of isolation, he sent a query about all the stones which had yet to be carved up, lying in a pile just a few metres from the foundations of the castle. Cursing himself for not noticing them, he issued a mental version of a shrug and responded by saying "I have not had enough time to embark on cutting all those up, but I thank you dearly for delivering those. I know you would not care where we lived, but I feel this project will prove my worth and make our time spent in exile interesting." To which Thorn responded with "You need not prove your worth to anyone but yourself and me, you have already proved your worth when I chose to hatch for you and surely you have proven you to yourself a hundred times over. Only look as far as allowing Eragon a chance to kill Galbatorix even though it might have meant severe pain on your behalf. On the subject of interesting events, would you not say we have had our full of them for several centuries. Now, what is it that you would have me do?"

Tapping into magic through the ancient language, he created a light and then using it as a source of illumination, for the dim light that penetrated through the ever-present clouds was gradually disappearing, manipulated the two stone blocks so that they were up against an un-used cave wall. Stepping back, he watched as Thorn released from his mouth a torrent of red flames aimed at the stone blocks, and thus kept it aimed there for a few minutes, until the stones were literally melting and gradually intertwining together. At his command, Thorn relinquished the stream of flames, and slowly the surrounding air cooled down, even as the blocks were still hot. Casting a ward to protect him from the molten stone, he grabbed the hammer lying on a rock near him, and started banging the stone together to hold the blocks together. Gradually, as the block cooled down and formed in place, he could see that they were linked to form a single block. Pleased with his and Thorns work for the day, he wrapped himself in some furs which they had gotten from an animal they had skinned and walked outside. He then proceeded to mount Thorn and then after half a minute of slowly adjusting and strapping himself into his harness, they took off, leaving their icy retreat behind.

After a few hours of flying around, and by which it was almost the time for the sun to set, they had finally caught a few deer and one obviously lost feral goat. He had slung the goat in front of him on Thorns back, Thorn had taken to noisily crunching one of the deer, and the other two were being clutched in each of Thorn's front claws. Once they had landed, and extracted the slightly squashed remains of two poor deer from Thorn's claws, which were now set aside for Thorn only, he had started a fire, which he was now tending as he roasted a bit of the goat on the spit. Behind him, further back in the cave Thorn was licking the bloody mess of his claws clean. Thorn curled up, reminded him of a cat, licking his scales as a cat licks its furs only made the likeness in appearance and demeanour even more pronounced. Yet he dared not remark the likeness too Thorn, who he thought, would not impressed at being though as akin to a small cat.

After he had finished scraping the remnants of the meet from the blackened stick, he tossed it outside, stamped out the fire and pulled out gloves from his small daypack. After making sure that he was mostly covered up, he walked over to Thorn, who opened his wing, inviting him to nestle comfortably in the enclosed space. He fell asleep soon, the warmth from Thorn's body soaking into his, making sure that he did not have to spend too much energy producing heat. The last thought that crossed his mind before he entered the dream world, was the lessons that he had learnt today, always plan before you act.

Saphira watched as her partner-of-heart-and-mind trained on the deck, she had just begun to notice the minute changes in his strength relative to that of the two-legged, sharp-pointed-ear ones, or Alfakyn as her partner-of-heart-and-mind more commonly referred to them as. He was now faster and stronger than almost all of the two-legged-ones except for the Blue-black-wolf Blodhgarm, and even then there wasn't much of a difference. She couldn't tell whether it was down to the spells that the heart-of-hearts kept constantly forcing her little one to perform, in order to strengthen his limbs, or the vast amount of physical training that he did during his mind-breaking-exhausting training routine, but either way he was slowly gaining an advantage over the others. There was only one area where she thought he had lacked, and that was flexibility. Although she had neglected to tell him this because the pride of the two-legged-ones were easy to prick, she could not help but convey a little semblance of this observation to her little one, even though he might not notice it. After all, having a partner-of heart-and-mind, meant that you could not keep much from them, no matter how hard you tried to hide information. One day it would come across in a slip of the thought, and it would be revealed to them.

Getting back to original train of thought, after she had noticed Eragon had stopped sparring with some of the elves and had now taken to conversing with blue-black-wolf Blodhgarm to improve his fluency of the Ancient language, she realised how hard her little-ones training was. At first she had been jealous that her partner-of-heart-and-mind had been receiving all the attention from the hearts-of-hearts, but then she had gradually come to the conclusion that she would rather do her training and not have any attention lavished on her, hard as that might be for a mighty dragon such as comparison, her training had been relatively easy and short, not the back-breaking-labour Glaedr-Elda and Umaroth-Elda subjected her -easily-tired-and-squashed-little-one too. All she had to do was perform aerobatic manoeuvres for a few hours, absorb Eragon's knowledge throughout the day subconsciously and perform a few other titbits. Keeping an eye on Eragon's training as she circled lazily above the elven ship Talita, she though back on the mind-numbingly-boring events which had transpired since they had left the edge of the sea, in short not much at all had happened.

After they had left the deserted-ruined-eyesore town they had embarked across the blue-as-her-majestic-scales inland sea, for the two-legged-pointed-ear-ones had tasted the sea-blue-sparkling water and detected that it was not thirst-exacerbating salty. A day into their voyage they had come across a string of middle-of-nowhere islands, by this time they could no longer see the edges of the enormous-expanse sea. There they had had a few meals, the two-legged-pointed-ear ones and her partner-of-heart-and-mind had eaten untasty-unfilling vegetables and roots, while she had taken to eating some of the small-tasty wildlife, who had previously been unacquainted with shining-scale dragons. In total there were 10 islands, yet they had only stopped at the first and the last, the first sanctuary-promising-island one was the biggest, which was where they stopped for tasty-belly-filling lunch, and the last island was where they constructed a small tower, and around it a small forest. Again, through the growing wisdom of her nest-mate and the heart-of-hearts they had enchanted the light in the Tierm-lighthouse-lookalike, to draw its word-will energy from sparkling-like-her-scales gems, which in-turn drew their word-will energy from the surrounding same-colour-as-Firnen's-scales trees.

It would guide the newborn-hatchlings to wherever they would make their enormous-dragon-haven city-state. She fervently hoped that they would reach it soon, as she was beginning to tire of the endless monotony of flying in head-irritating circles above the slow-wooden-small elven ship. Those events had been a few days ago, and they had seen naught but endless-sea-expanse since then. A few times she had taken wonderful-refreshing-scale-cleaning dives into the sea, but she was unable to reach or even come close to reaching the deep-rock-solid bottom of the sea. Her nest-mate had supposed that the same-colour-as-her-sparkling-scales sea might even a league deep, which was beyond her ability to dive, try as she might.

The two-legged-pointed-ear ones had been occupied for the past few long-monotonous days deciphering the documents using their small music-magic-infused minds. So far nothing of interest had come up; it had only confirmed what the two-legged-pointed-ear ones had already known. The reason it was taking so long according to pine-infused-blue-black-wolf Blodhgarm, was that the documents were written in a range of different two-legged-languages, some of which used words no longer spoken in birthplace-of her-and her-nest-mate Alagaesia. The two-legged-pointed-ear ones had deciphered roughly one third of the paper-thin-easily-ripped documents. These had been mainly to do with the complicated-number-ever-present finances of the deserted-ruined-eyesore town but according to her nest-mate the other two thirds were looking more promising.

Her eye catching hold of the change in her nest-mates-back-breaking-routine, she bought shiny-blue-scales herself back to the instant-fleeting-gone present. Right now, her nest-mate was finishing up with his exhausting-time-consuming training with the Rimgar. Even though the two-legged-pointed-ear-ones were much better than her partner-of-heart-and-mind, her nest-mate was slowly improving; he could now complete it up, if not easily, up to level three, but the fourth level he was not close to mastering. But she thought that wise-sage -Oromis would be proud of him at the way he had thrown himself into every challenge that his back-breaking-exhausting training had raised. Her precious-little-one was learning life lessons by the hour.

A/N Hello again readers. Sorry for the long wait but I have had a lot of stuff on, plus the fact that my whole weekend was taken up, which threw things out of whack. I don't have much to say except that my next update will probably be in a week. Thanks for reading and reviewing and so long for now.