LIGHT ➼ Eragon Fanfiction

Welcome to the Sky

Ari lay awake in his room in the tent that night.

While Autumn had managed to recover from the attack several hours previously relatively quickly, Ari had been left shaken. And now, while she snored in her cot just a thin canvas wall away from him, Ari found himself unable to sleep. He hated not sleeping. Back in Teirm, he had used to despise every waking moment. Now that he'd left, it was different.

But, in that moment, he would still prefer to be sleeping.

Ari raised a lantern off his bedside table and sat up. The light flickered about his small room. The room only contained 3 things: Ari's bed, a small cot pushed up against the back wall; the bedside table, a small fold-out wooden affair; and the large Dragon-basket, which dominated the majority of the room. There, nestled directly in the centre of that basket, was his dragon egg, shining a beautiful, iridescent blue-green in the lantern light. A girl, Fiolr had said. His dragon would be a girl. Ari smiled to himself as he watched the egg. Judging from the look of the egg, she would be a beautiful girl. A very beautiful girl.

Ari wondered when she might hatch. Yaela had told him that it might be anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months after she sensed his presence. It was several days since the dragon had chosen him in Teirm. She could hatch at any time.

He hoped it would be soon.

Ari climbed out of his bed and walked over to the Dragon-basket. He sat down next to the egg, and studied it. The dragon egg shone with some sort of bluish-green glow that dominated Ari's vision. It was beautiful. Really beautiful. For a long while, Ari just stared at the iridescent shell of the dragon egg, his dragon egg. It was among the most beautiful things that Ari had seen, shimmering all of the different colours if the night sky in a display of everything right in the world. It was as pure an clear as a mirror. Ari shifted himself so that he could see his reflection. The egg immediately cracked.

Ari stared with his mouth open as more cracks and little seems erupted from the edges of the first crack. He leapt to his feet.

"Fiolr?! Yaela?! Autumn?! Anyone?! My dragon, she's hatching!"

Almost immediately, Ari heard the flap of canvas as people came rushing out of their little bedrooms, but he didn't focus on them. He was watching the egg.

The egg looked like it was breathing. The shell rose outwards, then back in, outwards, then back in, like the baby dragon inside was pushing against the shell with all of its strength. The cracks spread still further until they dominated the egg's previously crystalline surface. The motion of the egg became so great that it fell over onto its side. Ari reached out to reposition it quickly, but was interrupted by a shower of egg shell and sticky goo as the Dragon egg apparently exploded.

Ari yelped and covered his face with his hands as the egg burst outwards in a disgusting mixture of broken pieces of blue eggshell and gross translucent goo. The stuff covered everything, including a disgruntled Yaela, who had just come in through the canvas flap to Ari's room. 

"Yuck!" Ari cried, wiping the stuff from his face and hair furiously. Yaela remained impassive, just smiling.

"Look, Ari. Look at her," Yaela intoned. Ari turned back to the Dragon-basket, and saw... a baby dragon, exhausted from the effort of escaping its egg, curled up and snoring in the centre of the dragon basket. Ari gasped. She was even more beautiful than the egg she had come from.

The dragons body was covered entirely in midnight-coloured scales from her head to the tip of her tail. Different shades of purple, black, blue and grey. Ari gaped. A line of tiny, midnight black scales lined the dragons spine. A pair of small, leathery wings of the same colours were tucked in by the sleeping dragons sides.