Golden Dreams: Eragon, the First Dragon Rider

Chapter 1

The night was eerily dark, void of even the stars the Elves once used to guide their way across the seas to this land. To the young Elf Eragon, the sudden silence seemed a heavy and suffocating thing.

They were coming...

He glanced fearfully at the night sky, his stomach clenched sickening tight in the pregnant moment before the mayhem he knew would soon follow.

An ear-piercing roar split though the eerie sky as fiery flames billowed like clouds above him. The sight and sound nearly blinded and deafened him.

DRAGONS!

He shuddered and stumbled in a run. He hears his old father's uneven gait running behind him, struggling to keep pace with his young son. All around him, Elves fled in panic, and he could barely distinguish the shifting, running forms from the smoke and ash surrounding them. The panic was too much.

A spurt of flames nearby revealed a large rock that lay ahead. Without breaking stride, he leapt over the boulder and continued on his mad dash away. He began to hope, but he heard his ailing father's grunt and the sound of his stumble and fall.

Father!" Frantically, he turned back, but his father pushed him away.

"Go on without me!" he wheezed.. "I cannot make it."

As he gazed down at old and weakened Elf, Eragon's heart flooded with despair. Even if he could bring himself to leave his beloved father, he knew he couldn't out-run the menacing Dragons. Gritting his teeth to hold back the tears that sprung to his eyes, he reached for his father –

And felt the heat of flames too close. Screaming, he lifted his arms and froze with fear as he saw a great white Dragon diving out of the ashen sky directly towards him. Opening its frightening jaws, the Dragon spewed fire.

But it was not too hot...

The flames flowed above him, around him, beneath him to the ground, but left him untouched and unharmed. Once the flames ebbed away, he slowly lowered his arms and looked around him.

Everything was gone...

Everyone was gone.

He stood alone, no longer in his village in the beloved woods of DuWeldenvarden. Instead, he stood upon a high grassy plain overlooking the ledge of a cliff and to the alluring sea beyond. The morning sun's first rays crept across the last of the melancholy night sky, casting its glittering light upon the glassy sea. The sight of the sparkling sea, caused his Elven blood to run hot and excited. His heart yearned to stand upon its peaceful shores, to take in the salty scent on the wind, to feel the gentle lapping of water over his feet.

Caught up in his thoughts of the sea, he nearly missed the chuff whuff sound of Dragon wings upon the wind. Up over the ledge of the cliff a white Dragon rose. A Dragon with white scales like the foam on the waves of the sea. Its wingspan covered the sea from his site, and it hovered there over the horizon with measured, lazy flaps of its great wings. Frighten, Eragon cried out and covered his face with his arms, tense for the moment when the magnificent Dragon would surely sink its sharp claws into his tender flesh.

Cringing, he waited as nothing happened. Blinking open his eyes, he lowered his arms and met the white eyes the Dragon. The great Dragon did not move, just continued the slow, steady flap of its great wings and stared... stared at him with its great, opaque eyes, eyes as deep and reflective as the sea.