Grappling with The Inheritance Cycle via an analysis of Murtagh
An utterly exhaustive look at storycraft in a children’s series
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Other analysis posts: Assassin’s Creed Mirage
Character: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Heavy spoilers for The Inheritance Cycle and, of course, Murtagh. Grab some water, this is a long one.
Intro
Since this is going to be about both the Cycle as a work and how my relation to it has shaped my thoughts and feelings and so this analysis, let’s start with the context of me.
Like many 2000s nerdy fantasy kids, The Inheritance Cycle was my favourite thing on the planet.
When I was nine and the movie just about to come out, my mum bought me Eragon. I finished it within a few days and read Eldest equally quickly. Brisingr was the first book I went to the shop to get on release day instead of having a parent pick it up for me, and Inheritance was when I discovered the concept of preordering. I finished it four days after release and was left with pretty mixed thoughts on the whole affair.
Not liking Inheritance felt bad. Amongst other things, I thought it was overly long, I didn’t like that Eragon found the cache of dragon eggs that would allow him to effectively Ctrl+Z the Fall of the Riders, and I didn’t like how he was squared up to fight Galbatorix with a convenient stash of Eldunarya left next to said eggs so it became a battle of slugging it out. I thought Galbatorix was more lame than ever with his comically evil villainy and less than satisfying boss fight, and I was so, so frustrated at Eragon himself for being … him. He was perfect — a perfect Rider, a master swordsman, a master magician, the celebrated son of a great man, and now the leader of the Varden, what with Nasuada’s mid-book kidnapping, all at the tender age of sixteen or seventeen. He was so flawless that he’d become divorced from what made me originally like him; the last hundred pages of Inheritance were a trek and a half. Gak.
But, hey, The Inheritance Cycle was my favourite thing, so it’s fine. I buried my complaints and went on with my life …
And now Murtagh has landed and I have finished it, and it’s unearthed all these half-completed thoughts from my tween and teen years that I want to put to bed. And we’re gonna do it with an analysis on Murtagh as a character over the course of the original series, and everything in this new book about him and Thorn.
The appeal of The Inheritance Cycle
“Eragon bad” is not an uncommon sentiment when you hang around fantasy fiction fans. “It’s just A New Hope but with dragons”, “the writing is bad”, “the plot twists are really obvious”, “the character work is weak”, “the characters are psychopaths”, and “it is cringey”.
And to that I say: sure. Is it good, or is it bad? Yes.
Over the years, I have toyed with the idea of wanting to re-read the Cycle, but never have for a few reasons. The first being that my TBR is an ever-growing monster that I delight in keeping under control, and so picking my re-reads becomes a careful exercise, and secondly, I dread the Suck Fairy crawling all over the series. No thank you.
I want to keep liking Eragon for the rest of my life thanks, and so the only way that I’ll revisit the earlier books in their entirety is through the allegedly in-development Disney+ show. Because if it’s bad, then hey, at least the books were good 😆
The Inheritance Cycle has been a smash hit for twenty years now because it’s exciting, it’s easy to read, and it’s just cool. Dragons are cool, people who ride dragons are cool, and we’re always up for taking down an evil king. And Eragon, like A New Hope, is fantastic at capturing a sense of whimsy and adventure. Eragon is a young man dreaming of bigger things than his life of farming, and after a dragon hatches for him, he gets to go on adventures to magical lands and pursue great loves and become a hero. Altogether, it’s a bloody successful formula.
But most importantly, The Inheritance Cycle has been successful with audiences of all ages and a staple of so many childhoods because it is wonderful at evoking feelings. Excitement, adrenaline, wonder. Because just like it was with Star Wars and You are Luke, it was, with the Cycle, You are Eragon. What nerdy nine-year-old doesn’t want to be whisked away from their life to become a Jedi Dragon Rider?
Or, as Father GRRM put it:
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle-Earth.
For that, it doesn’t matter to many people if the books are objectively “good” if these are the feelings and experiences they’re chasing. They’re certainly what I was after.
It’s when you start peeling back the layers of the books, something that a lot of kids like me weren’t able to do because we were nine and this might have been the first “big kid book” we read, that you run into the problems such as “it’s derivative slop”, “it needlessly abuses the thesaurus”, “Eragon is a Stu”, etc. Kids are really good at ignoring the fact Roran just killed 193 people no sweat for the exact same reasons that kids don’t realise that Aslan is Lion Jesus — they’re good at ignoring messages and context in favour of, “WOW!!! He killed how many guys??? Cool!!!” The experience and abilities needed to, you know, analyse stories only come with age and a want to learn how to do so. And this is why I don’t want to touch the Cycle again and dread the Suck Fairy so much. Because of course I’m going to now realise that Aslan is Jesus without someone needing to tell me first, and I’m going to realise all those negative things I’ve heard about the Cycle are probably true if my experiences with Inheritance, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, and Murtagh are anything to go by.
Murtagh the book: An Analysis
Murtagh is … fine. It’s not great, it’s not terrible. It has bits that made my heart clench up because oh my poor boys, and bits that had me impatient to get back to the good stuff, and parts that made me clap my hand over my face because what. W H A T.
It also has a lot of technical problems under the hood that have to do with pacing and structure and character and so on, and we shall get to these in time.
Let’s do some analysis.
(This takes up most of the essay word count, so you can skip around a bunch if you like.)
So my biggest problem is that this book isn’t really about anything when this should have been a story about something. Redemption; defying pre-determinism; forgiveness and healing; etc. There are so many threads that you can pick at from the Cycle, you’re kinda paralysed by the choices —
Oh, what’s that? Murtagh and Thorn are going to battle a Deep State Cthulhu cult that helped put Galbatorix and the Forsworn into power so they could eliminate the Riders and eventually take over the world for their cosmic horror god that we’ve never heard of until now?
Erm … Sure. Why not.
… Alrighty then.
Murtagh is split into five parts as dictated by geography: Ceunon, Gil’ead, Nal Gorgoth, Oth Orum, and Ilirea (unlike the other parts, the Ilirea section is not named after its geographical location but is instead called Reunion). There’s also an Argument at the beginning of the book like it’s a thesis? I don’t understand why this is called an Argument, because it’s not an argument — it’s a 207 word recap of what happened in the Cycle. What are you arguing for?! Chris!! Words mean things!!
Part I — Ceunon
In the opening section of Ceunon, Murtagh, with Thorn waiting outside the walls (which is a problem in Gil’ead as well in that Murtagh and Thorn are separated for long lengths of time), meets with a contact, Sarros, to learn more about “where the ground grows black and brittle and the air smells of brimstone”.
Umm … Why?
This is referencing the last time we saw Murtagh in the Cycle, where the dragon Umaroth gives him and Thorn some advice about Alagaësia before they head off into their self-imposed exile, of which “the brimstone place” as I’ll call it, was somewhere to avoid. So why is Murtagh deliberately seeking out this place? Officially, it’s so he and Thorn can eliminate a threat to themselves before it becomes a problem. It’s serviceable, but it deals too much with the off-screen that I’m not really a fan. Instead, I would like to have seen this as a path Murtagh collides with … or that fate (i.e., the witch they’ll be hunting in the book, named Bachel) has determined will happen; this would tie in later with Murtagh’s grappling with Bachel’s self-proclaimed powers of premonition. Maybe Ceunon has been having trouble trading with regulars who go about in areas where the volcanic rock is often found, and Murtagh learns about this on a visit to town. Why is he visiting town? Maybe he needs supplies, maybe he needs directions, or maybe he’s sick and tired of living out in the wilds and wants a taste of civilisation again, and maybe he’s been having fights with Thorn about this. Thorn, who wants to keep staying away because civilisation hurts them, and it’s more difficult for him, as a huge dragon who has never really experienced wider human goodness, unlike Murtagh, to participate. But when Thorn’s fears are proven right and civilisation bites back despite his best intentions, Murtagh closes up again and retreats further into the closed ecosystem that is his and Thorn’s biases. Nope, that thing sucks. Hate it. It also means that Thorn needs to grow as his own character too, rather than being a supporting character that follows Murtagh’s lead 😞
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Murtagh, if something goes wrong when you find the brimstone place after being told by someone smarter and wiser than you to leave it alone, it’s your own damn fault.
After Sarros double-crosses him to try and squeeze more money from him by threatening the tavern owner’s daughter, Murtagh discovers a cursed necklace that protects the wearer from magic, even the all-powerful Name of Names; the “witch” who made this necklace is called Bachel. Failing to do anything to Sarros because of the necklace, Murtagh gets into a bar fight with him and his crew and either injures or kills them all. He then flees the city.
Structurally, separating the first act into a different zone to where the rest of the story takes place is great. It creates an isolated look at the status quo for the world and the characters, and, once it gets fucked up for the characters, you can leave that area for the wider map and so attain a “reset” to said status quo very easily. You understand the world, you understand the character/s, and you understand why the situation needs to change.
The problem here is that Ceunon is not properly used as a status quo demo for the characters, only for the plot; it should have done both for a truly effective start to the story. Firstly, Murtagh is by himself. Thorn spends this entire section, aside from the first couple of pages, away from Murtagh even when things start going wrong for him, and we only see them together again when Murtagh’s out of danger and they leave for Gil’ead. It creates this imbalance in their relationship, where Murtagh’s development is prioritised over Thorn’s on a mechanical level. Because it’s Murtagh alone who is left to solve the problems in Ceunon, it’s Murtagh alone who must go about fixing these problems, and it’s Murtagh alone who must deal with the consequences once the problem is dealt with. Because Thorn is outside of the city where Murtagh parked him and can’t do much except commentate on what’s going on.
And the worst thing is, Thorn doesn’t seem to care much about any of this. Sure, he can get huffy and angry about, “Oh Murtagh, you! You always get into trouble when you go into the ant-nest cities of humans! How can you be so silly!”, but Thorn never once points out to him that this arrangement where Murtagh goes off into cities is grossly unfair to him. Thorn isn’t a horse, he isn’t a car, or a dog you can leave outside just please remember to roll the window down a bit; he’s an intelligent being who is supposedly in an equal partnership with Murtagh, and they just … consistently fail to act as the team they’re advertised to be. Granted this is an enduring problem from the first books, but I’d have hoped it would have at least been addressed by this point. Because in this case at least, my complaint is less with the practical “Thorn can’t go into human areas because he’s a bloody big dragon who everyone hates” aspect of this, but the emotional aspect that rings so bitterly hollow.
Why does Thorn never point out that Murtagh going by himself is dangerous beyond a semantic line? Why does he never follow through on the logic of “if something happens to you, which it always does, and I’m stuck out here because I’m a bloody big dragon who everyone hates, how do I help you? How is that fair to me?” And you don’t even have to get into the “how things can go wrong for you” lines of argument; you can just dive straight into an argument that will be a problem every single time: “it is hideously lonely for me to be left out again and again”.
Oh yeah, we’re getting into character motivations.
Character motivations are what make the characters do things: engage in the plot, pick fights with others, make smart or dumb choices that all weave into a collective story, and motivations are driven by core beliefs rubbing up against conflicts and so propel them to an outcome. You might also know this as the desire/wants and needs. The trouble with Murtagh and Thorn is they don’t seem to have any concrete core beliefs about themselves and their lives, only vague gestures towards them. In the Cycle, they had a very clear, mostly consistent throughline: self-preservation. Here, they don’t. Not really. And the most frustrating part of this is we are told they have beliefs about themselves through their ritual of reciting their true names to each other every night without judgement, but the only information we get on this is that oathbreaker is part of Murtagh’s true name, and Thorn’s is affected by his traumatic claustrophobia.
No more hints, no more nothing. And the information we do get isn’t effectively seen in their personalities and behaviours until it’s convenient to the plot. Murtagh and Thorn have goals throughout the book, which is just stuff they need to do like, exposure therapy for Thorn, rescue a werekit in exchange for a lead, punch Bachel really hard, etc., but their drives are woefully absent; i.e., why are they doing any of this anyway? We have a single moment in Gil’ead where Murtagh doesn’t want to swear an oath because it delves into his patterns of having to break them, and whilst Thorn’s fear of enclosed spaces does end up getting Murtagh captured by Bachel, his trauma, mechanically, isn’t a motivation that drives his base behaviours (i.e., how he thinks and acts in the everyday) but a problem he needs to overcome (because it only affects him in specific conditions).
Goals =/= motivations. Goals are tasks to be accomplished. Motivations dictate why these goals are important to the characters.
So I’m going to be totally self-indulgent and offer some tweaks for character motivations to fit with certain plot beats. Technically when it comes to criticism, you should be avoiding this because you’re here to criticise the work and not workshop it … but Murtagh is a special exception because he’s my boy.
First, we’re going to completely scrap his commissioning of Sarros to find the brimstone place. When it comes to core character psychology, I can’t think of a good reason Murtagh and Thorn would want to seek this place out when their new status at the end of the Cycle is “we want to be left alone so we can have a goddamn break”. Because so far as we know, nothing has “happened” to these two since we last saw them and so there’s no motivational pressure for them to suddenly want to seek danger out. It’s therefore up to Sarros and crew to disturb the peace.
Hence, they come into the scene knowing who Murtagh is and looking to pick a fight with him. Not because he told them who he is (because that would be really stupid of him to do), but because they either figured it out, or someone else (i.e., Bachel) tipped them off. Then, instead of threatening Essie with a knife as happens in the book, they threaten to tell the tavern who Murtagh is unless he pays them to stay quiet, so it comes down to a horrible choice he has to make of him staying safe but surrendering to someone else’s power — a mirror to his situation with Galbatorix — or him refusing their blackmail and dealing with the consequences of his identity being outed. Most important to the emotional arc here though is Essie, the tavern owner’s daughter who Murtagh gives advice to, no longer trusting her new friend after she just told him she’s betrayed her friend because of a bullying situation. So, in set up for later in the book where Murtagh comes under Bachel’s power, he rejects the blackmail, deals with Sarros, and is chased from Ceunon because he’s Murtagh, son of Morzan, right-hand man to the king, killer of the last of the Old Riders. But before he leaves, he erases the scar on Essie’s arm in an attempt to show people he is not the monster he is accused of being, but, of course, it’s not enough. He is still him.
This tweaked opening scene has the same plot beats as what’s in the book so the outcome of “Murtagh has a Name of Names-proof necklace to investigate” is the same, but it adds the status quo as to what Murtagh and Thorn’s emotional states are post-Galbatorix’s fall, which the book lacks. These two have a mountain to climb regarding their public perception, for the public does not trust them and they don’t know about the truth of their role in Galbatorix’s service — that of enslaved servants — or that they helped kill him and rescue the new queen Nasuada (a point that comes up in the last chapter). And because Murtagh and Thorn are convinced that things will never change, they have concluded exile is the best thing for them. If they are alone, they reason, no one can hurt them, and it sets up a fabulous starting point for their arcs as to why they can’t be alone later.
This could set up an internal conflict between Murtagh and Thorn. Murtagh knows what it’s like to be around kind people, he experienced it with Tornac in Urû’baen and with his travels pre- and post-Eragon meeting, and so cannot help but yearn for things to be like they were before, which is why he’s now in Ceunon. He wants to go to this Maddentide party because, for him, exile is lonely. It’s been a year of just him and Thorn, and he wants to be part of society at some point again. But it’s different for Thorn. The only consistent kindness he’s experienced is from Murtagh and so, he reasons that society is poison to them. These differences of opinion, and the wants that feed them, would be a sticking point throughout the book and reflect the arcs that these two need to go through.
Murtagh, btw, is also troubled that the Name of Names doesn’t affect the necklace he took from Sarros, but it’s not exactly at the forefront of his mind in this version, because he’s an emotional creature first, just by nature of being human, and his feelings got super hurt by Ceunon ☹️
But back to the book.
Part II — Gil’ead
Troubled by Sarros’s jewellery, Murtagh and Thorn fly to Gil’ead to try and find more information on Bachel and the necklace via one of Murtagh’s old acquaintances they never end up meeting (which I find super frustrating because 1) so much build-up is led to it, and 2) I think it’s a really clumsy motivation to get Murtagh and Thorn to Gil’ead, but this book is a series of clumsy motivations so it’s unfortunately more of the same. I would have, at the very least, liked her to make an on-page appearance, even if from a distance). They are instead waylaid by a werecat named Carabel. Carabel proposes an exchange: she will tell Murtagh what he wants to know if he rescues a werekit. Murtagh agrees after some arm twisting, and together they hatch a convoluted plan. A giant, cursed fish called Muckmaw has been troubling the lake on which Gil’ead is built for sixty years, and the person who brings Muckmaw’s head to the captain of the city watch will be invited to join the city guard. This is vital because the werekit is being held by said captain, and the kit will be removed from the city the next day for hitherto unknown reasons; there is a time crunch on this. But Muckmaw, being no ordinary fish, and the lake being absolutely giant, needs special bait to catch, namely a dragon scale. Carabel says that Murtagh must get a scale from the grave of Oromis and Glaedr, who were killed by him and Thorn in Brisingr.
Now, the Gil’ead section holds my biggest criticism of this book in that it feels like a side-quest. This is because Murtagh and Thorn come to Gil’ead with a clear, narrative goal in mind, which is to learn more about Bachel, and they find a character in Carabel who has all the answers they want. Great, we have momentum towards finding out who and where Bachel is, let’s go—
Oh, we have to do this other thing first which is going to take up 1/3 of the word count? Fuck, man.
It feels so bad to read because we’ve been pulled from solving one problem into solving a completely different, unrelated problem. Carabel knows what Murtagh wants to know, and having her dangle it just above Murtagh’s head until he’s been used for her own needs is a super frustrating roadblock; we’ve been driving on this story highway and now there’s a barrier across it for ??? What? To pad out the word count? To set up for sequels? And sure, Murtagh finds evidence of the captain’s involvement with Bachel, but since this revelation comes so late into this narrative thread, and for the fact we don’t see him in the book again, our attention has been totally turned around. So when we actually get back to Bachel and the necklaces, we’ve gotten invested in what’s happening in Gil’ead so we just feel jerked around again! Argh!
Because this stop in Gil’ead could have worked. I don’t hate the fact that we go to Gil’ead and that Murtagh and Thorn help Carabel — I hate how it’s been done. Now instead of worrying about Bachel and necklaces, we need to switch gears and worry about a giant fish, and a baby werecat, and weird animal masks, and a conspiracy in the city police, and Oromis and Glaedr and dragon scales.
(Question: Why can’t Carabel’s Muckmaw catching plan be simplified by using one of Thorn’s scales in lieu of Glaedr’s? The book just says they need “a dragon scale” (I checked) but this solution is never brought up, which is silly because Murtagh is one of three people in the world who has easy access to dragon scales at this point and you’d think, in his reluctance to go graverobbing, it would be the most logical way to squirm out of it. Just ask Thorn! I’m sure he would be more than happy to help, given that he’s been reduced to a supporting character for Murtagh. I would have liked this loophole to have been closed just with something like … “Glaedr was an older, more powerful dragon, and his scales are more infused with magic than Thorn’s, which is more likely to draw Muckmaw out”.)
Cutting back to character motivations once again, it would have been better that, instead of going to Gil’ead in search of leads on the necklace (which, in this hypothetical rewrite, they want to dismiss as “oh weird, but we’re not messing with this stuff again, nope nope, let’s just bury our heads in the sand and hope it goes away”), Murtagh and Thorn go because of Carabel’s cry for help. Why? Well, Murtagh could see this as a chance to balm the hurts inflicted by Ceunon (that he will always be a bad person in the public consciousness and he’s not, okay?), and Thorn as a chance to prove to Murtagh, once and for all, that when this rescue mission goes wrong, they should stay away from society for good. If they don’t go to Gil’ead in explicit search for Bachel and just find her presence there again in the form of the captain, then it allows Murtagh and Thorn to feel the walls of a problem closing in. They can’t seem to get away from this witch; they need to do something about it.
And now back to the book once again. After getting nibbled on by a goat and reminiscing for far too much time on how to set up anti-goat wards, Murtagh gets one of Glaedr’s scales (which has an anti-graverobber curse on it, but since it stops Murtagh for about a page one can assume this is a Chekhov’s Gun for a later book), uses it to catch Muckmaw with Thorn’s help, beheads the fish and takes it to the captain of the guards (who has a creepy occult collection of animal masks in his office), is inducted into the guards, then, after a joyful day of guard training, sneaks below the barracks into an extensive tunnel system to rescue the werekit. But Murtagh is discovered in the middle of this heist and escapes deeper into the tunnels with the kit; he also picks up an energy diamond and an ancient language dictionary, and it’s here we find out Murtagh and Thorn are basically self-taught, which I’d never have guessed from the Cycle; guess faking it ’til you’re making it really works wonders. Following all of this, Murtagh gets the werekit back to Carabel (turns out the kit, called Silna, is her daughter) and we can finally get on with the necklace plot you may or have forgotten about at this point. By the way, Murtagh found a second, identical necklace during his heist, and Carabel has now told him where to find Bachel.
(Aside: I think it’s really cute that Murtagh’s go-to favourite spell is thrysta vindr (compress the air), which is the first one we saw him use; the first spell Eragon uses, brisingr, is likewise his favourite.)
Murtagh and Thorn prepare to leave, but before Murtagh can leave the city, he runs into an old acquaintance, a nobleman called Lyreth who he spotted when he got to Gil’ead and pretended not to notice because urgh, seeing your high school classmates after school? No thanks. Murtagh grew up with (and was bullied by) Lyreth in Urû’baen, and following Galbatorix’s death, he has gone into hiding. Lyreth invites Murtagh for brunch and after some chit-chat (in which it’s made obvious that he has some kind of knowledge about the necklaces), proposes that Murtagh, as the son of Morzan and the closest thing the Empire had to a prince, overthrow Nasuada and install himself as king … and Murtagh seriously considers this. Just keep this in mind for later. Once he runs through what that would mean, namely killing Nasuada and truly becoming the horrible person he’s so afraid of, he rejects it. So he tells Lyreth to go fuck himself, and Lyreth tries to kill him by dropping him into a “tangle box”, which is a trap that immobilises magicians so you can safely stab them. Unfortunately for Lyreth, Murtagh has a soul bond with a very big, very dangerous dragon. Thorn flies to Gil’ead and tears Lyreth’s house to pieces to rescue Murtagh, and it’s here we learn that Thorn suffers severe trauma and fear of enclosed spaces, thanks to how Galbatorix kept him housed in Urû’baen; I picture it like a racehorse’s starting gate. But instead of being in there for a few minutes at most, Thorn was kept in there for days on end, for weeks at a time. Poor baby…. In his mindless panic, Thorn flies out of the city with Murtagh held in his paw and burns parts of it in his best Drogon in Season 8 impersonation.
Oops.
So now that we’re almost halfway through the book, we can finally get onto the main quest of these necklaces and the witch who makes them. During a Paolini Travel Montage™️ to the witch’s village, Murtagh and Thorn try to work through Thorn’s trauma using exposure therapy, visit an old Rider outpost, and Murtagh accidentally invents a laser. I’d forgotten that Paolini likes remaking modern tech with his magic system lol.
Motivation tweaking once again. Before Lyreth enters the picture, Murtagh is high off his success in rescuing Silna and earning the favour of the werecats. Holy crud! Change is possible! (Also: wink wink, nudge nudge, that’s a huge part of his arc in the Cycle! Themes!) Now he wants to push further and find the source of these evil necklaces to squish it, and Thorn begrudgingly agrees because grumble grumble, that did feel good, maybe Murtagh’s right. Then Lyreth finds Murtagh, invites him over for brunch, and tries to woo and kill him as is in the book (the only criticism I have of this scene is that the chapter is called “Duel of Wits” and I didn’t think it much lived up to its name; it’s no Tyrion vs. Janos Slynt, but the instincts to put this here are all correct and I have no complaints on that front) and Thorn stages his rescue. So far, so good. But after Thorn’s trauma response and burning of Gil’ead, Murtagh still wants to squish Bachel, but Thorn is still so emotionally raw and riding out the tail end of his episode that he refuses to fly with Murtagh to Bachel.
In the book, Thorn’s response to this episode is shame and self-loathing. “It is unbecoming for a dragon, much less a dragon with a Rider,” he says, and Murtagh assures him that what happened wasn’t Thorn’s fault, but Galbatorix’s. Then, together, Thorn and Murtagh vow to try and make better on this, and Murtagh thanks Thorn for saving him. This is a really good bonding scene between them ❤️ Buuut … a little later on, after discussing what to do next about Bachel, Thorn says this:
I will go where you want to go. As long as we are together, I am content.
He repeats this sentiment a few times throughout the book, and it drives me nuts. Because again, this doesn’t feel like an equal partnership as Murtagh never says he’ll follow Thorn anywhere no matter what, and it reminded me yet again that Thorn does not function as a main character but a supporting one. God fucking dammit.
So, in my proposed motivation changes, this conversation to find Bachel is less of a conversation and more of a fight. Thorn would again retreat to his safe ground of “No one likes us and they don’t want us in their lives, so let’s stay away from everyone and just be the two of us”, but Murtagh has just made the best progress towards his goal of public acceptance and returning to the best days of his life which were those spent away from Galbatorix that he has in years. Helping people feels good, and dealing with Bachel, whose allies have been kidnapping children, is a great way to keep helping people, and before Lyreth came barging in and messed everything up, Thorn agreed with Murtagh that it did feel good to help people.
So Murtagh’s goals in this scene are to 1) convince Thorn to return to their original plan of finding Bachel and her allies, the Dreamers, because should Thorn disagree, he’s just demonstrated he’s more than capable of manhandling Murtagh however he damn well pleases, and 2) help Thorn through his newly retriggered traumas, especially now that it’s had deadly consequences; Murtagh needs to show him that running away from his guilt and becoming an isolationist is not the answer. I want Murtagh to show his life experience compared to Thorn, as the book keeps reminding us that he, thanks to Galbatorix, is a child in an adult body (even though he’s like, two now, and Saphira was considered well and truly an adult before then, and Fírnen was having sex with Saphira when he was six months old. How does dragon maturity work? Is Saphira a pedophile? Or is Thorn just going to be infantilised forever?).
But they fight because they are equal partners in this relationship. Murtagh should not be the one dominating the decision-making process all the time.
Sure, you could get into some interesting thought experiments such as, “Oh, Thorn is a meek character because of the abuse he suffered from the moment he hatched”, but the story isn’t written like that. It’s not hinted to, it’s not alluded at, because this is how Paolini wrote Eragon and Saphira’s relationship which we can all agree has a much, much healthier starting point rooted in love instead of fear.
Honestly, I think it’s amazing Thorn isn’t totally fucked up, what with spending the first year-ish of his life (the Cycle has always had a bit of a wishy-washy relationship to time passing; Eragon has been 16/17 for about three years at this point) enslaved and abused and only having Murtagh afterwards, who I certainly wouldn’t pick to be any kind of emotional support/therapist candidate, what with his short temper and own anger issues. You’d think that after being born into a situation where his having to kill for food is his norm, and then being shoved off into battle almost immediately, Thorn would be pretty blasé about killing. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded if we saw something like this in his character alongside distrust issues, his PTSD, and trouble in regulating his emotions; give me that delicious angst. But as he stands in the finished product, I admire his mental fortitude.
Good job, buddy! 🐉
(But there’re potentially hints-if-you-squint to Thorn being a bit emotionally messed up when he says he’d happily eat people because meat is meat, but since that was written as comedic banter, it’s like — oh boy. Do we want to examine that at all?! But this is also classic Paolini; see Eragon casually bouncing a fresh human tooth in his palm as he wanders a battlefield musing on how horrible it all is.)
Part III — Nal Gorgoth
So, Murtagh and Thorn are flying north to find Bachel and her necklaces to establish how much of a danger she is to Nasuada’s realm. By the way, Murtagh is hopelessly in love with Nasuada, which are feelings that were established in the Cycle, and he wrote a letter to her with Carabel warning that Bachel’s people might have infiltrated her court; please be careful. After a week, they find an old, old village off the northern edge of the map that has weird architecture and just gives off a cult-like atmosphere. Murtagh and Thorn agree the best way to approach is with “thunder and lightning”, so they put on their best armour and fiercest dragon smiles and land in the middle of the village … only to be welcomed. What the heck?
Some more about this village: all the houses are old as heck and have weird architecture. There are also weird statues around the place that kinda of look like dragons but not really, and other decorations that “… reminded [Murtagh] of the involuted depths of an Eldunarí … or of shapes that appeared only in the deepest of dreams.” The ground is also volcanic and has vapour vents scattered about.
You really can’t scream “this is a weird Cthulhu cult” louder, can you. It is also charmingly diverse, with white people, black people, elves, dwarves, Urgals, what have you. Every race and species who’s ever had a presence in Alagaësia is here, yay!
So, to get this out of the way: I generally don’t like religious death cults in fiction, as they tend to flatten the complexities of faith and religion into a certain screaming, close-minded stereotype. These cultists therefore become unlikeable, morally uncomplex characters who exist to either get blown up as mooks, or to get dunked on by more enlightened, rational characters. Which I find really, really boring. However, you can get me to like your cult if they are 1) “psychologically dangerous” to the characters, like the cults in Midsommar or Midnight Mass (i.e., the character becomes morally vulnerable to the cult), or 2) have a wider cast they effect, because it has a greater chance of seeping into the everyday facets of the characters’ lives; it’s not just you and your dragon vs. them, it’s you vs. them and maybe your dragon, too, or you and them vs. your dragon.
Unfortunately, the cult in Murtagh turns out to be of the former variety rather than the latter, so *sigh* let’s get on with it.
Murtagh and Thorn are greeted by an old dude we later learn is called Grieve; never had a chance in life, that one. He doesn’t like them very much and takes every opportunity to be passive-aggressive.
Bachel then reveals herself. She is half-elf, half-human, and is “the Speaker” for this cult, who call themselves the Draumar, or the Dreamers. They have been waiting for Murtagh and Thorn to arrive at this place, Nal Gorgoth, and not only are they very welcome here, they’ve been expected. Ominous. Bachel also calls Murtagh “my son” and, “my child”, and proclaims that he and Thorn will be the saviours of the world!
Murtagh and Thorn are very, very confused. Murtagh also has a moment where he thinks about Bachel, “You’re not my mum, wtf”, which made me laugh.
A grand feast is called for, and Murtagh sits next to Bachel as she tells him what’s what. Nal Gorgoth is a “place of many dreams”, and the Dreamers themselves follow “the Great Dream”; they’ll come to understand the longer they stay. Murtagh protests that woah woah woah, he and Thorn follow nothin’ and no one, no thank you, we are done with that, and Bachel asks oh ho ho, are you sure?
They’re very sure, thank you.
There’s a Murtagh character moment here that I like when he’s relaxing into getting served dinner — bro hates camping. He likes being pampered, it reminds him that one of the only things he liked about Urû’baen was how he never had to do chores. He also starts getting comfortable with ordering the servers about because that’s just his normal. He’s a son of nobility and a Rider.
Murtagh and Thorn also learn quite a bit here:
The Draumar love calling Murtagh “Kingkiller”, which Murtagh squirms at, but he never actually says for them to stop calling him that? I remember him asking Alín later, but not until the very end of the book. I just found that weird tbh.
Sarros was one of Bachel’s Eyes. Plural? There’re more of them? They’re scattered throughout Alagaësia, but Bachel’s not going to reveal her secrets just yet.
Bachel’s mind feels “distant, desolate, and distorted”.
The Draumar revere dragons but don’t outright worship them. One of the cultists, a girl called Alín, adores Thorn.
Bachel has an affinity with crows. She can also, quite literally, put enough food and drink away to feed a horse.
After the feast is done, Murtagh and Thorn are invited to stay the night, which they accept. It’s perfect for some midnight snooping. So Murtagh’s shown to his room, Thorn makes camp in the main … cult area? Town square? Whatever. He helps Murtagh sneak out of his third-storey room by providing his neck as a ladder. Their destination is a building called the Tower of Flint. It is full of crows.
Murtagh goes inside to investigate and slips in a pile of bird poop. Upon catching himself, he happens to find a brooch belonging to one of the Forsworn. Who’s leaving all this plot-related stuff around for them to conveniently find? First an ancient language dictionary and a powerful diamond, and now just the thing they needed to start building a case against Bachel, all within five minutes of work. But the important thing is, alarm bells start going off in Murtagh’s head that the Forsworn, and maybe even his dad and Galbatorix himself, had ties to the Draumar. And maybe, the Riders had actually feared this place. Uh oh.
Murtagh and Thorn need to decide: either stay and investigate, possibly even fight, or get away and return with backup.
My dudes.
Fucking leave.
The Riders were afraid of this place, and you’re unprepared more than you already were now that you’ve found evidence of the Forsworn having been here. It’s not like you’re stuck there, or worried about giving Bachel an advantage to prepare against a better planned attack. Just. Leave. Just leave. L E A V E. Why are you worried about the safety of dragon eggs that are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away? Why are these two so allergic to using their brains?!
Now, this is a side-question I want to ask: Does anybody else feel like Murtagh and Thorn were over-nerfed with the Eldunarya out of their inventory? Like, they could go toe-to-toe with Eragon for pretty much the entire Cycle. Eragon, who they know was trained by at least one Rider. Murtagh drops the bomb in this book that he and Thorn are practically self-taught Rider and dragon which is … not something I necessarily love on a logic level, even if it made my heart twist up. Does Galbatorix want these two to die? Or wriggle out of their oaths to him, what with how slippery the magic system is? Because at this point, he’s just begging them to stab him in the back, good lord. I hope they get a buff in the next book.
(And also, when Brisingr released, Chris said that the plural of Eldunarí was Eldunarya, so why is it never used in the books? Did it get retconned? Did Chris forget? Oh well. It’s too baked in my brain to change at this point.)
This choice to stay in Nal Gorgoth is instinctually fine as it is, but I want a more solid reasoning as to why they made this decision. Sorry, but for the children! ain’t gonna cut it when planes, and so a way to cover thousands of miles of distance in a matter of hours, hasn’t been invented. No, either have better reasons to stay, or have it so Murtagh and Thorn are trapped in Nal Gorgoth by magic or something. Because right now, they just. Look. Stupid. At least, Murtagh does, because Thorn just does whatever he says, remember.
Hiccup and Toothless are still the best dragon and rider that I’ve seen in fiction. *sigh*
Before Murtagh and Thorn sneak back off to bed, they find a mysterious cave that leads into the bowels of the earth. It smells really, really strongly of brimstone. The entrance is also big enough for Thorn to get through, but due to his fear of enclosed spaces, he can’t go in. They also dream that night of getting torn apart by dragons, Nasuada as she was when being tortured by Galbatorix, and Murtagh going on an unspecified battlefield murder spree and thoroughly enjoying himself as Bachel watches.
Now, I read this book in two days, and this was where I stopped for the night. Because 1) it was quite late, and 2) it was here that I was starting to feel really, really bored. We’ve already discussed how Murtagh and Thorn lack engaging motivation, which is the biggest reason why I got bored because why do I care about what these two are doing at this point, but the other problem is … Chris Paolini isn’t great at doing plots.
That’s just the way it is. I’ve felt this about his books for a while; I remember the groan I made when, in Inheritance, Jeod (remember that guy? I don’t blame you if you don’t) ended up finding another secret tunnel (🎶through the mountains🎶) leading into the city of Dras-Leona, just like he did with Saphira’s egg. Fucking really? Are you gonna stand there and tell me that there was no other way to move the plot of that book forward?
Chris said this about the writing process for To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, another of his books which, if you put a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about:
Of course, all the world-building in the universe doesn’t matter if the story itself isn’t sound. And that, I’m afraid, is where I met my greatest difficulty. For various personal reasons, writing the first draft of To Sleep took until January of 2016. Three(ish) years of hard, hard work. Upon finishing, my first reader, my one and only sister, Angela, informed me that the book just. didn’t. work. Upon reading the manuscript myself, I realized she was, unfortunately, correct.
2017 passed in a frenzy of rewrites. None of which fixed the underlying issues. The rewrites were, to put it metaphorically, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, which did nothing to change the fact that the ship’s structural integrity was compromised.
The problem was this: after working on the Inheritance Cycle for so long, my plotting skills had gotten rusty from disuse. The problem-solving muscles I had built while developing the story for Eragon and sequels had atrophied in the decade since.
Look, Chris, umm…. I think you need to get both your plotting and problem-solving skills badly up to snuff because this ain’t cutting it compared to other stuff I’ve read in the past couple of months alone. Your characters keep moving the plot forward either awkwardly, or through being the dumbest mofos alive. Like Murtagh and Thorn are being right now. I think the best book you’ve written is Brisingr, and that’s because it’s the book where you allow the characters to just … do stuff. They’re following through on things that have happened in the first two books and in Brisingr itself, and it’s great fun to read. The tone of the book was decompression, the plot played second-fiddle to the characters, and it is the only book from the Cycle that I will probably re-read at some point.
I want another book like Brisingr. A character study! It plays out the cause-and-effect from the first books that Murtagh so desperately needs. We’re 58% of the way through this book … and we’re still doing set up. Because it’s a plot book whose characters have spaghetti for brains. Not helped by that Gil’ead side-quest from earlier, which took 1/3 of the word count for itself for … why? For sequel stuff obviously, but we don’t have the sequels right at this moment and we probably won’t for a few years yet if the original Cycle’s release schedule is anything to go by. And anyway, binge reading for future audiences isn’t an excuse to do this because the book as it stands is not a solid work! Argh! Pulling my hair out at this point! So let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: what can we do to not be bored? The easiest way is by using the Gil’ead section smarter.
You can either cut it, or integrate it better.
If you cut it, you can claim back the word count and use that space either for investigating Bachel, or for pushing Murtagh and Thorn further towards her. But I think cutting it isn’t the right decision — as we have previously established, we need that decompression space — so I want to look at integration by revisiting my previous point on making Murtagh and Thorn go to Gil’ead for character reasons; Murtagh wanting to help people and Thorn to prove a point that charity doesn’t change opinions. If you make them go to Gil’ead due to the emotional consequences of Ceunon, then Gil’ead turns from being Murtagh passively following a tasklist because it’s in the way of getting to Bachel, to making him and Thorn active characters and build up actual stakes for them to later dash against the upcoming breakwall that is Bachel.
As it stands, we’ve started the story three times now. First is in Ceunon, second is in Gil’ead when we got side-tracked by Carabel, and now a third time because ah shit, we need to hop to engaging Bachel. You know, the antagonist?
… Why are Murtagh and Thorn doing any of this again?
Anyway, Murtagh and Thorn had the same dream. That’s weird, and it seems that the entire village also had the same dream. They tell Bachel when they don’t have the same dream and subsequently become pariahs who are banished to the naughty corner until they’re worthy enough to have the correct dreams again. Murtagh also has a chat with that girl Alín, and as she grew up in the cult, she’s super curious about the outside world.
But, today’s a new day, and it’s time for Murtagh to speak to Bachel. Her office is a big building that she reveals is twin to the Hall of the Soothsayer in Urû’baen/Ilirea (the Hall of the Soothsayer is where Galbatorix imprisoned and tortured Nasuada). Turns out, it was inhabited by a predecessor of Bachel’s many centuries ago, another Speaker for the subject of the Dreamers’ worship. Ahh, but if you thought Bachel was done being coy and we would actually be getting on with the plot, then you were wrong. So I’ll just fast forward to the next interesting bit and leave bullet points as to what happened in between.
Murtagh and Thorn go on a boar hunt in a giant forest of mushrooms, and Murtagh almost dies like a chump because Bachel challenged him to complete the hunt without magic, and he just went at it by himself.
Murtagh gets knocked out and has a vision of a dragon-like creature hanging out on a blasted heath beneath a black sun. Bachel is very excited about this, and hints that it is a vision of what’s yet to come. Dun dun dunnn.
One of the boar hunters is mortally wounded and Bachel kills him, much to Murtagh’s shock and anger. This has minimal impact on the plot because it’s just reiterating that Bachel is weird and has a wonky moral compass, and people call her a super special, sacred title of mehtra (mother), but at least Murtagh and Thorn are finally getting so pissed off at her they might actually do something now.
Alín washes Thorn’s feet with some very Christ-like imagery; she tells them that dragons are important to this cult but won’t explain why. She also sees the big olde scar Morzan gave Murtagh.
Murtagh and Thorn witness the arrival of a bunch of prisoners, some of who convert to the cult, and the rest are led away for
sacrificesmysterious purposes. Murtagh is chastised for his lack of faith in Bachel again.Murtagh and Thorn talk to a crazy old guy who spouts nonsense that will probably be important in a later book. Chris loves his crazy old guys.
Another feast is called, this time so they can eat the boars (which are the most delicious Murtagh’s ever tasted), and Murtagh’s so fed up with Bachel not explaining herself he puts his foot down. He and Thorn want answers! Bachel gets mad and creates an earthquake. My god. Murtagh and Thorn are freaking out because what the fuck, what kind of monster strength does she have to be able to do that? Her magic doesn’t work like the other magic they know.
That tends to happen when you’re hooked directly into the Cthulhu juice.
Everyone goes to bed angry, but Thorn breaks Murtagh out of his room again to investigate that cave they found the previous night.
So, they arrive at the cave, where Thorn stands guard whilst Murtagh goes inside, and he finds … three more caves branching off from the main one. Also, there’s a big well that coughs up brimstone vapour that gives you visions.
Bachel and her right-hand man Grieve are waiting to ambush Murtagh, and Bachel has the Dauthdaert, which you might remember from the main Cycle; it’s the magic dragon-killing spear Arya rammed through Shruikan’s eye. How Bachel got her hands on it is a mystery for somewhere in a next book, but I do wonder why it’s the same Dauthdaert when there are apparently eleven more lying around somewhere. She tells Murtagh the cave isn’t a place for outsiders. It is “the heart of all things, the source of prophecy and power, and those who defile it must die”. But, if Murtagh kneels and swears fealty to her, all can be forgiven. Murtagh tells her to get stuffed, and asks her if the Forsworn knelt to her so willingly. To his horror and surprise, she says yes, and she reveals that Galbatorix, in the expedition that killed his original dragon, was dispatched north by the Riders to scout out the Draumar; it wasn’t the ill-conceived adventure Galbatorix claimed it to be.
*rubs temples*
Goddamn did I hate this.
The way that this is explained is that Galby and Co. were sent by the Riders to scout out the Dreamers so the Riders could come in with force and exterminate them, but Galby didn’t exactly know what he was supposed to be looking for (why the Riders assigned a bunch of graduates with this vitally important mission is weird, and the book acknowledges this and offers the scouting-only explanation which … argh). After his dragon was killed, Galbatorix found Nal Gorgoth and Bachel and recovered there. Bachel then says she was the one to persuade Galbatorix to ask the Riders for another dragon (confirming that everyone in this universe thinks of dragons as sidekicks first and partners second), and after their refusal, Galby genocided them.
“Galbatorix came wandering back through the Spine, alone and half mad. As such, he found us, and it was as such we took him in. At first he distrusted us, even as you have, and he blamed us for the death of Jarnunvösk, but I ministered him with what attentions were needed, and in time, he came to understand that it was the Riders who were to blame for his loss.”
“You turned him against them,” Murtagh breathed. “And then you sent him back to confront them.”
Again, Bachel nodded. “It was a test. Were the Riders as kind and compassionate as they claimed, they would have taken pity upon Galbatorix and given him another dragon. But they were not, and they did not, and so Galbatorix came to understand the truth of them.”
[…]
In a low voice, he said, “Do you mean to say Galbatorix and the Forsworn were your thralls?”
“In part. They were useful instruments to a needed end.”
He cocked his head. “Which was?”
“The eradication of the Riders.”
Why do sequels do this?? “The thing that happened in the first series wasn’t because of the previous antagonist doing it for their own reasons, but for mine! Doesn’t matter if those plotlines and arcs were already wrapped up, don’t care, we’re cracking them open again because of nostalgia or something, idk.”
This essay is ridiculously long, so I’ll just let Jay Kristoff, talking about sequels for The Nevernight Chronicle, take this one for me:
Lovely of you to say. But all stories and characters break with over use.
I like the ending I gave Mia. God knows she deserved a break after all the hell I put her through. If you miss her, she’s only the turn of a cover away 🖤
(x)
Stop breaking your story, Chris. We’ll talk about sequels escalating stakes later.
There’s some more talking about “No! Galbatorix would never do that!” and Bachel saying that “Yes! He totally did!”, and that Nal Gorgoth was the place he and Morzan fled to with the baby Shruikan, and that Durza also used to hang out there, too. Murtagh, sick of their bullshit, attacks them … and loses. Bachel has this other weapon called the Breath, stored in crystals she can crack open, and Murtagh gets a big olde face-full of it and basically becomes a vegetable. Thorn has also been Breath’d. Uh oh.
More skipping and summarising, because this next bit goes on for a while and the essay word count keeps inching up towards 20k.
Now Murtagh and Thorn are fully subjected to the powers of Bachel and Nal Gorgoth. Murtagh dreams of the black sun and blasted heath again, and we get flashbacks to parts of Murtagh’s life in Urû’baen. This first one details Murtagh’s return to Urû’baen after the Twins captured him, and Thorn’s hatching; these flashbacks were pinpointedly targeted for the nostalgia buttons, and as such I just like them, even if they’re functionally filler. Firstly, damn, Thorn’s egg was enormous. Galbatorix tells Murtagh that if he doesn’t swear loyalty to him in the ancient language, he’ll strip this minutes-old dragon of his scales one at a time, so Murtagh swears loyalty to him in the ancient language before Galbatorix enslaves them fully with their true names. A couple of pages later, a second flashback details how Thorn, at four days old, was forced to fight wolves for his first meal whilst Murtagh is made to watch.
Back in the present, Murtagh has been drugged to stop him using magic and is escorted to a cellar prison where he meets another inmate, an Urgal called Uvek. Uvek is a shaman that the Draumar captured and were torturing until Murtagh showed up a couple of days ago and distracted them. Murtagh is further haunted by weird dreams, passes out a bunch (because it’s a Paolini book and there’s no other possible way to do a scene transition), and eventually, Bachel summons him to the not-Hall of the Soothsayer so she can begin torturing him into service just like Galbatorix tried to do with Nasuada, slab and chains and all. During this process she wears a dragon mask like the ones the captain in Gil’ead had on his wall, and they’re enchanted to make the wearer look bigger and scarier. This is the worst trip of Murtagh’s life.
Then a couple of chapters pass back-and-forth where Bachel graphically tortures Murtagh physically and mentally to try and get him under her power; if she has to crack Murtagh’s mind into madness to get her way, then so be it. Chris Paolini writes violence like GRRM writes about food: reliably, and with much detail. I guess I lied about remembering nothing from Sea of Stars, because I do remember that one scene where the protagonist gets cut in half and much time is spent describing the exact colour of her intestines and how they fly about in zero gravity. Ick. Murtagh resists and refuses Bachel, Thorn is also chained up and totally out of it because of the Breath thing, and during the nights, they dream about being on top of the world, with Eragon and Arya and Nasuada and everyone else kneeling before them as they should because he’s a Dragon Rider and a prince, and in the background is the black sun and blasted heath with the Cthulhu dragon creature. Bachel reveals that this creature she and the Dreamers worship is called Azlagûr. Once Murtagh and Thorn are under her thrall, Bachel will use them to destroy the unbelievers, install them as puppet rulers, and make a world for Azlagûr.
Who hasn’t seen this coming at this point.
After several days of getting tortured by Bachel in the not-Hall of the Soothsayer, Murtagh finally gives in and Bachel takes full control of him, rendering him fully docile to her whims. She and Grieve inspect their new prize and force Murtagh to strip naked in the throne room. I wouldn’t call this one of my favourite scenes, but it has stayed with me unlike so many others because of how impersonal it is, and how powerless it makes Murtagh. Once again, he’s been reduced to an asset for someone else to use. It’s very striking imagery. Bachel calls him handsome, but there’s no desire there. It’s clinical. It made me feel all of the things. She also sees the scar on Murtagh’s back and is just like, “Hmm — interesting. Let that remind you that your fate is to be under someone’s power, and that power is now Azlagûr’s and mine.”
Poor, poor Murtagh and Thorn.
For the next several days, Bachel hangs out with Murtagh sitting at the side of her throne and oversees the cult doing your typical evil hedonistic cult things. Then one day, she announces that the time of the Black Smoke Festival draws near. Now, Murtagh being under Bachel’s control lasts for almost 10% of the book and I’m conscious of how long this is running, so I’m going to say that my main problem here is that Murtagh and Thorn spend most of this time going around in a daze and just doing what other characters tell them to do quite literally. It’s not the fact that they are zombie-servants in and of itself that annoys me, but that it exacerbates the problem of Murtagh and Thorn being passive protagonists throughout the book (i.e. the plot happening to them instead of their choices “making” the plot); it feels less devastating for these two than it should, which is frustrating.
Also remember how I said before to remember that Murtagh considers Lyreth’s offer in Gil’ead to depose Nasuada and become king? Murtagh should have immediately rejected it out of hand there so when Bachel presents the same question here, he has done some character (de-)arcing and so put him in a space where the world challenges his values. Murtagh is a character who wants to be free, and that instinct for freedom might be bending his morals. Because ironically, becoming his father might be the only choice he can make for that freedom instinct. Freedom through authority and power, no matter the cost.
It’s really the little things in this book that rub like sandpaper :(
In preparation for the Black Smoke Festival, things happen like Grieve riding with Murtagh and Thorn to do some raids in which they slaughter everyone, including kids, and bring back the supplies. (Aside: Murtagh has a strong streak in this book about protecting children, which I get because he was horribly abused as a kid and doesn’t want other kids to go through what he did, but due to the enduring, pesky problem of this book not doing its character and motivation set ups properly, it feels less like Murtagh wanting to protect kids and more so the book telling you that protecting kids is important.) During this time, a bunch of outsiders arrive for the festival. They’re all rich lords and influential people from across Alagaësia, and one of them is Lyreth, who gloats over Murtagh and Thorn’s current predicament. Murtagh also vaguely recognises another of the guys, but because his brain is so muddled with the Breath and drugs, he can’t pin him. This dude leaves before the festival starts.
The rest of the time when Murtagh’s not going on raids or hanging out as Bachel’s pet, he’s locked up in his cell having flashback-dreams (when he killed his first man in a duel because Galbatorix felt like ordering it, and his escape from Urû’baen during which his swordmaster and father-figure Tornac dies) and having Uvek the Urgal engage one-sided conversations with him.
After the before-described raid incident, Murtagh has enough willpower to whisper, “… help”. And thus, we move into the final stages of the book.
Uvek hears him, and the two begin hatching an escape plan. Turns out Uvek has an empty healing charm with him, so if Murtagh can get access to the charm and fill it with energy, it can be activated and clear their bodies and minds of both the magic-suppressing drug and the Breath. But they need to get the drug out of their system enough first to access a sliver of magic. Luckily for them, Alín is the one delivering Murtagh’s food. After Murtagh does some puppy-dog eyes at her, she agrees to help them escape and stops bringing drug-laced food. Step one complete.
But, Uvek won’t give Murtagh the charm until they become blood brothers, because Uvek wants assurance that Murtagh and Thorn won’t go and kill Urgals later. So they do that, and Murtagh remembers the diamond that he picked up in Gil’ead that’s full to bursting with energy, but before the magic-drug is fully out of his system, the festival starts. Murtagh and Uvek are called up along with those other prisoners from earlier, and they’re taken to the festival, which is being treated as the marking point of a new age. The Dreamers have Murtagh and Thorn under their control, let’s go and remake the world.
(Why they didn’t do this when Galby was still alive? Wasn’t he on their side? Or did he go rogue and I just missed that?)
Murtagh is brought up as Bachel’s +1, Lyreth sniggers and gloats, and Uvek is put into the line of sacrifices. Murtagh is desperately trying to get into the diamond so he can put some of its energy into Uvek’s healing charm. Bachel sacrifices one of the prisoners, and then directs Murtagh to do the next one. Murtagh almost stabs them, then, with one last, mighty push from himself, Thorn, and Uvek, he gets into the diamond, puts energy from it into the healing charm, and breaks free. Boom! Roar! Thorn and Uvek are also healed, and now it’s payback time.
Thorn starts burning stuff and stomping on the cultists.
Murtagh retrieves his gear, including his armour and Zar’roc.
Alín goes to get Thorn’s saddle and stuff at Murtagh’s request, but she’s captured by the Dreamers who bring her to Bachel.
Murtagh pursues Bachel, a bunch of her lieutenants, and the captured Alín into the creepy cave from before. Murtagh also finds Lyreth there and kills him.
Murtagh has a mini-boss fight with Grieve, and he and Uvek end up killing him.
Awesome, we are now in the last 10% of the book.
Part IV — Oth Orum
Murtagh continues into the bowels of the cave, whilst Thorn and Uvek stay up top. This cave system is big and stinky and frightening, and it’s not long until Murtagh is attacked by things he calls fingerrats and giant beetle-spiders. I have no idea what they look like despite them each being described for a whole page. Less is more, Chris.
Murtagh runs through the tunnels and murders them all, sometimes after yelling at them to go away (which does work once lmao), and he starts associating the darkness and the fear with memories from his childhood. We reach the final flashback in the book, which is the day when Morzan threw Zar’roc at Murtagh. This was my favourite of the flashbacks: it was short and sweet and to the point. Murtagh has a not great reaction to this being pulled out of his head by Azlagûr as it’s not a memory for anyone but him, and fuck this Cthulhu thing for looking at it. He feels disgusted by Zar’roc now held in his hand, and he realises that he doesn’t have to be chained to Misery. He has the Name of Names — he can rename the sword.
So Murtagh does the funniest shit imaginable: he pulls out that dictionary he picked up in Gil’ead, in the middle of a hostage rescue situation, to rename his sword.
Uhhh … buddy? I get that it’s thematic and all, but really? “H-hold on, Alín! Let me just … just look something up in my dictionary real quick. You’ll be fine, right? It’s for character development!”
*wheezing*
So Murtagh renames Zar’roc to Ithring — Freedom. The Murtagh fan in me is so happy with this because my boy is growing and healing, but the Inheritance Cycle fan in me is crying because man, it’s Zar’roc. It’s so much cooler than Ithring. Would I be happier with this if Murtagh had an actual character arc in this book to reflect his growth? Yes, but he doesn’t have a real arc so this, overall, felt bleh and meh and just more shit happening because.
(Opinion: Freedom is a silly name for a sword … no matter which way you slice it *ba-dum-tss*)
Newly armed, Murtagh continues forward and finds Bachel and her guards, who have Alín as a hostage, deeeep underground. They’re just hanging out waiting for him in a cave covered in big crystals and with a spooky lava well in the middle. Are you like, not gonna try and ambush him or something? But it looks cool I guess. Bachel is dressed in armour made of dragon scales and has the Dauthdaert. Apparently this place is called Oth Orum, the “hidden heart of the world”, and Murtagh’s being a bad, bad boy for stepping foot here without being an acolyte of Azlagûr. Bachel is mask-off. She’s spittin’, she’s raving, she’s throwing out those zingers — “blasphemers”, “desecrators”, “defilers”, you know the drill — like there’s no tomorrow.
So, remember how I don’t like cults. This is why. It’s an issue I have in general with religious fanatics in media, mainly that they’re very likely to be yelling at people who don’t subscribe to their beliefs like a certain breed of retired Evangelical who spends sixteen hours a day on the picket lines. Not only is it boring at this point, it makes these religious fanatics less interesting as characters, and, paradoxically, it makes them feel less dangerous. I sure as heck don’t listen to what my local Abrahamic street preachers shout at me from atop their milk crates, so why should I take this cult seriously if all they do is yell at Murtagh and Thorn that they’re blasphemers and that Azlagûr will take his revenge and whatever?
No, the best religious cult people I see in stories are the ones who try to emotionally manipulate and abuse you into doing what they want, whether it be in getting you to join them, or just fucking kys. Because it’s not God, or Cthulhu who are on the frontlines fighting with the characters — it’s the zealous priests and the acolytes. It’s them I want to be motivationally dangerous to the main character/s rather than a “I promise they’ll getchu!” threat.
But, no, we’re just falling back onto the Westboro Baptist Church stereotype again and again. Urgh.
I find that these trite, copies-and-pastes of the WBC speak of a fundamental misunderstanding of what fanaticism is and how it works. If you look beyond the WBC to how other deeply religious people and organisations talk to and about non-believers, it’s not with that fire and brimstone, burn in hell, raging against the world language. They Debate™️ you, they cherry pick platitudes and stories, and they display that you, unbeliever, are not in the in-group like them, the morally superior person with the correct religion who is going to have a better life and afterlife than you. Because it’s not about you being wrong for not believing like they do, but in telling themselves that they’re right. By following their faith, they’ve made the right choices in life that will secure a desired result for them, most commonly in the form of a salvation (Heaven, nirvana, etc.). If you listen to how an Evangelical talks about the Rapture, it’s most likely to be along the lines of, “I’ll be saved whilst you’re stuck on Earth paying for your sins”. So when it comes to outsiders, why would you be shrieking like a mad thing and attacking an unbeliever for being wrong when you can just Debate™️ your opponents with righteousness forever? You might not have convinced many people to attain Heaven by standing on a milk crate at the train station and preaching the Word of God … but you preached the Word of God, so your soul is clean.
Belief has a goal of looking for something better; you’re trying to find what is best for you (and probably your loved ones), and most would agree that better comes in the form of comfort and security — physical, spiritual, communal. So why would anyone want to worship and have faith in something that’s going to destroy the world like this Azlagûr cult does? To quote the benevolent and wise Peter “Starlord” Quill on the matter: “What has the galaxy ever done for you? Why would you wanna save it?” “Because I’m one of the idiots who lives in it!”
If you really want to change people’s minds, yelling that they’re blasphemers like Bachel does at Murtagh won’t do it. Hurting them, fighting them, torturing them won’t change their minds if you’re not digging into who you are; those kinds of wounds, especially in a world with magic healing, will disappear. Both in fiction and in reality, the truly effective proselytisers are gonna hit you where your stakes matter (your friends and family, your community, your past), and that is the scary shit.
(If you haven’t watched Midnight Mass, do it.)
(EDIT 03/01/2024: I came across this video which has put more thought than me into why so many fantasy cults don’t ring true, Fantasy Cults Are Pathetic, by The Grungeon Master, and whilst I highly recommend the whole video, here’s the part that stuck out to me in regards to Murtagh and the Draumar.
Much of the modern fantasy industry — gaming, writing, etc. — exists from an American perspective, and from the 70s, American popular culture has been awash in a clash between New Religious Movements and anti-cult activists. From the Satanic Panic, which nearly killed D&D in its infancy, to the rise of beliefs in brainwashing and deprogramming. Beliefs that members of these movements are somehow mentally reprogrammed by their charismatic leaders. The media scrutinises New Religious Movements with a distinctive fervour.
Of course, this is all in the background of some awful and tragic mass losses of life, often premeditated, amongst some of these fringe groups. But the fact remains that essentially in the US, due to mass panic, concern, and a media feeding frenzy around these awful and horrific worst-case scenarios, “cult” is synonymous with some of the worst and most depraved examples of human coercive control. And due to the mainstreaming of Christianity in modern US culture, these are often perceived as acts of the Devil. Or at least, thus influenced.
It’s no small wonder, then, that despite aesthetic influences from Aztecs, voodoo, Lovecraft, Weird Tales, and other pulp magazines, a cult, in modern fiction, always seems to be in the process of summoning or worshiping some ancient evil that will ruin the world. It’s often down to this quite binary, Christian sense of good and evil; that anything that is abhorrent is demonic, devilish, or summoning some dread, horrific entity.
End edit.)
But back to Bachel. For all of Bachel’s yelling, Murtagh’s never going to join her! She’s going to die for what she’s done! Both to him and Thorn, and to everyone else she’s hurt or manipulated!
Round 1. Fight!
After some scuffling in a mind battle, Murtagh kills the acolytes with Alín’s help, but Bachel stabs him in the lung with the Dauthdaert, which starts filling up with blood. Oh shit, oh fuck, he’s gotta win this ASAP.
So after some more back-and-forthing, Murtagh drops a giant crystal on Bachel’s legs and she gets squished, and he finishes her off by performing a Fatality and splitting her skull with Zar’roc-Ithring.
Cool.
But the cave is collapsing, and Murtagh’s too weak to heal himself or flee. So Thorn swallows his traumas and goes into the cave, climbing down the well like a bug. Good on ya, Thorn!
But Murtagh’s like, a mile down or something crazy, and so near the very bottom of the well. So of course he’s gotta go look into it. Inside this well is a Lovecraftian something, and Murtagh has a little tiny peek into its mind before deciding that it’s so awful he must use the last of his strength to blast Azlagûr-Cthulhu right in the face with the laser he discovered how to make earlier. Thorn rescues a dying Murtagh and escapes the collapsing Oth Orum; Alín and Uvek are also clinging to his back.
Part V — Reunion
Murtagh wakes up some time later in a comfy bed and wearing clean clothes. He’s been healed from his injuries, and he recognises where he is with a shudder: Urû’baen. But it’s not Urû’baen anymore, it’s Ilirea, and who’s that in the corner? Why, it’s Nasuada! Thorn flew as fast as he could to Ilirea to get her help in saving Murtagh’s life, and Murtagh has a bit of an Error 404 BSOD moment. Umm, he’s in the capital … And Nasuada’s right there … Are they gonna get arrested and their heads spiked on the gates? Nasuada assures him that no, no one knows they’re there except for a trusted few who swore to her in the ancient language they wouldn’t say a word about Murtagh and Thorn’s presences. She herself won’t say anything unless they give her the thumbs up. This prompts Murtagh to ask how much the general public knows of his and Thorn’s role in killing Galbatorix, and Nasuada says, “Ehhhhh, pretty much nothing.” Which is disappointing, because it’s like …
*sigh*
The Murtagh and Nasuada romance. Hmm.
The truth of it is, I’m always going to like these two as an idea because they were one of Baby’s First Ships. I like them, at least, the idea of them. They’re the children of two mortal enemies; it’s Romeo and Juliet. I want them to kiss and go to bed. But their on-page romance is pretty bare bones. These two have a shit-ton of history they need to sort out before they start dating. Murtagh still helped torture Nasuada for several weeks, and before he came to Galbatorix, he and Nasuada barely knew each other. They met once. I checked. In fact, every interaction they’ve had up until this point is where one of them is imprisoned by the other’s allies.
I really want this romance to work out, but it’s still a bit weird that Nasuada’s as soft on him as she is when he’s killed someone she thought of as an uncle because he was angry, put hot irons to her, and then spent a lot of time being a Negative Nancy, a maudlin drunk, and having angst tantrums around her whilst she was being strapped to a slab and tortured. Because of him, mind. I’m amazed that she can stand the sight of him at this point because sure, it might not be his fault for what happened to her, and he might have saved her life by bringing her in to be tortured instead of Galbatorix straight-up assassinating her, but the trauma memories would still be there.
They must have really gotten on that one time they met in Tronjheim, ey. At least, Murtagh obviously had a giant crush on her from way back then; maybe she did too. One of the hallucinations Galbatorix tortures her with is a life where she’s married to Murtagh and has kids with him, and she’s distraught when it turns out to not have happened.
So before they get together, I want to know why they like each other beyond, “He’s just a boy, and she’s just a girl”. Like, what do they complete in each other? Why do they like each other? Are they nerds about the books Murtagh read in Tronjheim? Does Murtagh help Nasuada out with bridging the gap between the nobles of Surda and the nobles of Urû’baen? Does Nasuada teach Murtagh how to be a person with healthy emotions? Or is it just a trauma bond where Murtagh has a crush on her and she just feels sorry for his situation? I hope that “why do they like each other?” question is answered in the future before they kiss. In the meantime though, I shall be watching from the bushes 🌳👀🌳
Anyway, Murtagh and Thorn are safe in Ilirea. And guess who’s also safe? Alín! Yay! I’m happy for her. Uvek was dropped off enroute to Ilirea, so he’s still in the mountains hunting the Draumar. It was thanks to a charm of his that kept Murtagh from dying on the way back, and Murtagh respects him very much and is glad that they’re blood brothers.
Nasuada asks if Alín wants to work for her now that she’s escaped the Dreamers, and Alín says she would like nothing more. But don’t mistake this for an act of charity: Alín is the closest link they have to the Draumar, and they might be in need of her knowledge and connections later down the line.
After Alín has left the room, Murtagh and Nasuada talk about the Draumar and Azlagûr, tells her about the man he saw in Nal Gorgoth that is a part of her court (my guess is this is either Jörmundur, Nasuada’s advisor … guy … someone who does the admin at least, or Orrin as he and Nasuada started to have severe disagreements in Inheritance and he resents she became queen instead of him becoming king), and of his plans to hunt down the remaining Dreamers as well as Azlagûr, as he has the horrible suspicion that he didn’t kill it with the laser. Nasuada, on the other hand, asks him to leave it to her agents and that he stay with her in Ilirea.
Murtagh’s thrown back by this. She’s wants him, Murtagh, son of Morzan, to stay with her? She does. He tells her he’s not going to swear loyalty to her magicians like every other magician in the land has to. She says she knows, and that’s fine, and still asks to stay, and Murtagh says yes.
And that’s the end of Murtagh 🎉 I give it a 5/10.
Overall, my biggest frustrations with the book were in the character work. I don’t hate that Cthulhu exists in this universe — though I dislike that Azlagûr has apparently had its Eldritch-dragon fingers in all the pies since forever and this is the first time we’re hearing about it — and I don’t hate how magic keeps getting weirder and weirder so much that the purported all-powerful Name of Names doesn’t work on some stuff — though I dislike that it failed the first several times we saw it, because it’s just moving goalposts. But as you’ve seen, my beef is in how stuff was just being done because. There’s no pressure, either internal or external, to partake in any of these 662 pages, so it just feels like the book exists to exist. You know, for money Murtagh and Thorn simps like me.
There are also little things in the writing that really irked me; things like Murtagh tripping over far too much in order for scene dynamics to change, whether it be finding a clue to help solve the central mystery or to give him a disadvantage in a swordfight because God forbid he make a mistake or runs afoul of someone better than him. I used to have the complaint about Paolini abusing the thesaurus, but now that I’m wizened and more wide-read and know what words like alacrity mean, I didn’t find it to be so much of an issue this time around; but I remember tripping up a lot as a kid and I can see it happening with this book, too.
There is still a looot of filler going on here. Flying around filler, random musings filler, random worldbuilding filler, descriptions that are so lengthy that they become, for me at least, ineffective. This book could have easily been 100 pages shorter if the filler was either cut or strictly edited down.
(GOAT WARDS.)
Paolini still cannot write poetry and verse. I automatically skip these now because they’re the reading equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Guy, it’s been twenty years; how is there still no rhyme or metre going on? Have a look:
Fragile is the flower that grows in darkness.
Precious is the flower that blossoms at night.
Their gardeners absent, blind, or uncaring.
But bent and broken petals still have beauty
All their own. Have care where you tread, lest you
Trample the treasures scattered before your feet.
The basic pattern with a Paolini poem is that the first two lines work, and then the rest falls to bits.
As for the rest of the writing, I thought it was fine, if a bit over the top in trying to be pseudo-archaic. Whilst we’re on the subject of dialogue, can we stop with the written accents please. It’s so frustrating to read these “not-quite-Cockney-but-aping-on-something-vaguely-East-London” accents, and I wish this style had stopped with Stoker. That’s enough.
One thing Paolini’s always been strong with, at least for me, is that his prose zips very nicely by. It’s really easy to read, when it’s not trying to be overtly archaic with the whene’ers and the O Exalted Dragon, I would ask a question of you, and it is thises, you can knock a hundred pages over without much effort.
And also on the positive I-won’t-change-this-for-a-million-dollars side of the scale, I very much enjoyed Eragon just. Not being here. Hallelujah! 12/10. I’m so tired of that guy I swear. I hope he stays off in exile because *urgh*.
Let’s talk about structure and characters now.
The Cycle’s structure and characters
Paolini is what I like to call a set piece writer: you have an idea about a Cool Thing, or a Cool Event, or a Cool Showdown, etc., that you want to put into your book. Excellent! This is how a lot of stories are made, except you then have to go back and make sure that these set pieces work in the context of the overarching plot and the character psychologies. In the Cycle, for example, we have Saphira breaking through the Isidar Mithrim (the Rose Star, which was a giant jewel set in the floor of Farthen Dûr — the Varden’s base in the mountains, for those who don’t recall) in the first book when Eragon is about to be killed by Durza, breathing fire for the first time and providing enough distraction that Eragon can kill Durza. This is Han coming back to save Luke during his trench run in A New Hope, and this set piece works like gangbusters in both stories because they’re the same story it’s the culmination of a set-up and payoff. We are told in the first third of the book that Saphira will start breathing fire when she’s six months old, and the Rose Star is a giant jewel set into the floor through which you can see the storey below; Han is all about himself and doesn’t want anything to do with this Rebel business, please leave him out of it (once he’s been paid by them, that is). Then when — oh no! Eragon and Luke are about to die! — the Star is broken with fiery spectacle, and Han comes back because he cares about his friends, and Eragon and Luke are able to escape death and complete their tasks. Hooray!
They’re really exciting moments, but this structure breaks down when you don’t have the correct set up. As I refuse to re-read the books at this point (except maybe Brisingr), I can’t say if the trouble started in Eragon, but it’s in full swing by the time we get to the second book in the Cycle, Eldest (which has a sick title that I still love to this day). Predominantly, my thoughts land on this with Murtagh.
In my honest opinion, Eragon getting published and then becoming wildly successful for Chris at such a young age means he’s never really learnt how to structure books and do character arcs properly. Why should he at this point, it’s working out for him — he’s sold 40 million books (very jealous). Yet it makes his books frustrating experiences as he’s 80% of the way there for good beats, but that last 20% consistently falls short.
Also by “properly”, I mean it in covering the bases, because so much of storytelling is done by instinct. There’s a reason why by-the-numbers stories that were written with The Anatomy of Story open at the elbow can still feel awful. This isn’t meant as a jab at Paolini, but more as an observation.
Why fix what isn’t broken when you can sell 40 million books as is.
After Eragon, we don’t see Murtagh much until Inheritance. From memory, he appears in a total of four and a half scenes across Eldest and Brisingr — his capture in the first pages of Eldest, then his reveal as Galbatorix’s new Rider at the end, and in Brisingr, his and Thorn’s confrontations with Eragon and Saphira just before Roran and Katrina’s wedding, and then at the end when he and Thorn kill Oromis and Glaedr; Eragon also briefly spots them when he’s running back from killing the Ra’zac to the Varden. In Inheritance, we of course see him and Thorn defending Dras-Leona and during Nasuada’s torture at the hands of Galbatorix. In each of these appearances across the books, Murtagh seems to … shift according to what “fits best” with the feeling of a given scene, rather than what best fits him as a character.
So as we’ve already covered, Murtagh doesn’t feel like a consistently motivated character in Murtagh. After flicking through the Cycle a bit I’ve noticed this has been happening for a while, and in this new book, he flops between wanting to run away from the danger, to wanting to squish the danger, to wanting to support Nasuada, to imagining himself taking the throne (pre-cult arrival), before reasoning with himself that no, that would not be good for him because it would put him in a place he doesn’t want, make him a second ageless human ruler, and it would mean he has to do something about Nasuada.
However, I would probably call Murtagh in the main Cycle the most consistent of the “main three” as described by Paolini (Eragon, Roran, and Murtagh) — bar one glaring point — because he has the least screentime and we never see his POV. But for now, his character motivation throughout the Cycle is pretty straight forward: self-preservation.
Murtagh has had the shit thrown at him his whole life, and it’s only with Galbatorix’s death that he, and now Thorn too, have some semblance of freedom. Murtagh has been aware for most of his life that his position has caused him to be targeted, and the best way for a kid to survive in as hostile a situation as this is to curl up and hope the world stops kicking you in the gut. He got away from it for a while when he met Eragon, but then he’s dragged back and trapped more thoroughly, and, worse this time, he has a dependant and become an invaluable asset to Galbatorix. So he just digs deeper into his survival mode, which is why he can agree with all of this authoritarian shit about “oh Galbatorix isn’t that bad” …
The look on Murtagh’s face answered [Nasuada] well enough. Then he said, “Would it be so bad if Galbatorix remains king? The world he envisions is a good world. If he defeats the Varden, the whole of Alagaësia will finally be at peace. He’ll put an end to the misuse of magic; elves, dwarves, and humans will no longer have cause to hate each other. What’s more, if the Varden lose, Eragon and I can be together as brothers ought to be. But if they win, it’ll mean the death of Thorn and me.”
— Inheritance, Small Rebellions
… and still be consistent to who he is. He’s not saying it because he believes it, but because it’s the path of least resistance. He and Thorn have tried to win free from Galbatorix before, and in Murtagh’s case multiple times, only to be denied again and again. It is totally hopeless, Galbatorix is too powerful, and so he’s given up. He’s Galby’s slave forever, and if he does what the king says, then he and Thorn won’t get blown up too badly. But for all of this pessimism, at the heart of who Murtagh is, he’s still the guy dreaming of freedom from Galbatorix as when we first met him in Eragon.
“Wait!” cried Eragon. “I know of a way you can both free yourselves of your oaths to Galbatorix.”
An expression of desperate longing transformed Murtagh’s features, and he lowered Zar’roc a few inches. Then he scowled and spat toward the ground and shouted, “I don’t believe you! It’s not possible!”
“It is! Just let me explain.”
Murtagh seemed to be struggling with himself, and for a while Eragon thought he might refuse. Swinging his head around, Thorn looked back at Murtagh, and something passed between them. “Blast you, Eragon,” said Murtagh, and lay Zar’roc across the front of his saddle. “Blast you for baiting us with this. We had already made peace with our lot, and you have to tantalize us with the specter of a hope we had abandoned. If this proves to be a false hope, brother, I swear I’ll cut off your right hand before we present you to Galbatorix…. You won’t need it for what you will be doing in Urû’baen.”
— Brisingr, Fire in the Sky
So, we need to talk about the outlier of Eldest Murtagh.
The importance of relationship between plot and character
i.e., Do as I the author/s need you to do, not as you the character would do.
In Eragon, Brisingr, and Inheritance, Murtagh’s main motivation is in protecting himself, and later Thorn. But because Paolini is a set piece writer and the end of Eldest was originally supposed to be the point of the Darkest Hour, following a classic three-act structure as imposed on a trilogy epic, you need bombast and spectacle because drama, baybeeee. And so, enter Eldest Murtagh, with his evilness and zingers.
Eldest Murtagh and the rest-of-the-Cycle Murtagh are completely different people. Eldest Murtagh seems to be, at the very least, partially on board with what Galbatorix is doing.
Pity and disgust welled inside Eragon. “You have become your father.”
A strange gleam leaped into Murtagh’s eye. “No, not my father. I’m stronger than Morzan ever was. Galbatorix taught me things about magic you’ve never even dreamed of…. Spells so powerful, the elves dare not utter them, cowards that they are. Words in the ancient language that were lost until Galbatorix discovered them. Ways to manipulate energy … Secrets, terrible secrets, that can destroy your enemies and fulfill all your desires.”
— Eldest, Inheritance
(As we later learn in Murtagh, Murtagh being a student of Galbatorix wasn’t really true beyond being fed table scraps; it would not be the first time Chris has done some small retcons. Galbatorix is remembered by Murtagh as being a neglectful master (his treatment of Murtagh is a whole other can of worms, because it seems really dumb from a purely practical standpoint) and a general sadist.)
In this scene, which is his one proper scene in that book, Murtagh’s driven by what’s cool and badass from an audience perspective rather than what’s true to him. Which I, on a personal level, find to be a shame because Eldest Murtagh is my favourite Murtagh. Not because he is the evilest version of Murtagh we’ve ever seen, but because he’s been corrupted into the worst version of himself that would be a treat to see him character arc his way out of. What can I say; I knew even when I was eight where my tastes well and truly lay.
… Okay, maybe a part of why Eldest Murtagh is my favourite is because of his unapologetic shittiness. Look, I enjoy characters who are fallen good guys and own it. I was very influenced as a child I guess. In the two years between me reading Eldest for the first time and the release of Brisingr, it’s … what do the kids say. It altered my brain chemistry. I loved Murtagh being bad. He didn’t have a choice to serve Galbatorix? Then fuck it! Let’s put everything in! Let’s be evil! He doesn’t have a choice on the matter, so may as well get what he can out of it and have some fun. Catastrophise! Commit to the bit! Because then he could either get better or die a tragic death. DRAMA.
But since Brisingr confirms that Murtagh is reluctantly serving the Empire, he doesn’t have much of a reason to be gloating over Eragon like he does at the end of Eldest. He should be pretty conflicted because aw man, I’m fighting my friend who’s turned out to be my brother, and I’m stuck being a slave to a guy that I hate and argh. You could be charitable in that he says all of this because he’s angry, which is how Murtagh explains it in this new book, but I like how the Epistler described the motivational weirdness of this shift in their analysis of this chapter, just by pointing out Eragon’s reaction to all of this in contrast to the first book.
I also refuse to believe these two [Eragon and Murtagh] were ever friends, because when Murtagh insists that he had no choice [Eragon] just tells him Ajihad was right to throw him in a cell and he should have stayed there, and then when [Murtagh] reiterates that he had no choice and that he’s been magically enslaved to [Galbatorix], Eragon… well, he says this.
“You have become your father.”
Okay, wow. Fucking wow. The guy’s been tortured and mind-raped and turned into a slave and [Eragon] knows damn well he’s sensitive about having an evil father, so what does he do? Throws it in his face at the very moment Murtagh most needs his help and sympathy.
[…]
Apparently Paolini didn’t realise just how horrible a thing that was to say, probably because the line is only there due to I Just Really Wanted To Use That Line Disease (cousin to I Just Really Wanted To Write That Scene Disease), because instead of staring at El Douche in horrified disbelief and shocked betrayal, Murtagh just goes off on a Villain Monologue about how he’s way more powerful than his daddy and how [Galbatorix] has taught him all this secret stuff about magic.
Because in taking in Eragon’s dialogue too, the whole scene truly shifts from Murtagh “being angry” as he says to “it’s a cool scene to write”. Murtagh being like he is on his own could have worked. In 2005, we didn’t have enough information to properly assess this new Murtagh; I know I thought Galbatorix had mentally broken him as he laughed in Eragon’s face with “an edge of madness”. I thought his new characterisation was born from equal parts despair and desperation. I thought this, on top of coming into the vast new power of a Rider, a pinch of Stockholm Syndrome, and aspirations to be like Morzan, had well and truly killed the Murtagh we’d met in the first book, and that all of this had created, well, the Vader to Eragon’s Luke. But when discounting Murtagh’s on-the-face evilness in Eldest, Eragon’s immediate condemnation mucks this interpretation up when wider context is considered.
Wider context is so, so important to writing because you can do as many mental gymnastics as you want to explain why X character was reacting in a certain way, but in taking into account the rest of what’s going on … ouch.
So let’s pivot to another Murtagh-like character. You know him, you love him. It’s Zuko.
ATLA spoilers.
As of Season 2, Zuko is in the process of change. Not only is he an outcast as when we first met him, but he’s now at moral odds with the Fire Nation; he’s spent the season running and hiding from them, and he’s increasingly troubled by the position he’s now found himself in, because this isn’t supposed to be happening to him. He’s a prince! The eldest child of the Fire Lord and thus his heir! It’s hard to walk away from. He does begin to walk away from it. Yet in the season finale when Zuko has a choice between teaming up with Azula and the Fire Nation, or his uncle and the Gaang, it’s his grappling with the safe option of falling back on everything he knows, or listening to his moral consciousness and making the hard choice of going against his father, sister, and nation. This dilemma digs directly into Zuko’s two conflicting instincts and my god, it’s so delicious.
But, he’s not ready for the hard choices. His father still has his claws too far into him, because at this point, Zuko hasn’t seen the “after” of him capturing the Avatar and regaining what he lost. It’s all been longings, dreams, and hypotheticals, and he knows what lies in wait for him should he choose to listen to his morals: being in exile, running a tea shop with his uncle, and not knowing what could have been. So it’s no wonder he chooses to align with Azula at the end of Season 2. And it hurts so much because we’ve seen the person Zuko is capable of being and was in the past before being ensnared by his father’s politics and ambitions. We’re far enough removed that we can see the bigger picture, we know what the Gaang have been doing, we’ve seen Iroh’s devastation for what the Fire Nation took from him and what Zuko means to him. Zuko can’t; it would be turning his back on his privilege and his family. His whole life.
Murtagh has been faced with these same dilemmas throughout his life — choosing conscious over family — and he’s made his choices. But after Thorn’s hatching, he needs to make those choices all over again, but has more to lose. There’s also the problem of him swearing loyalty in the ancient language to grapple with, but that’s something you can character arc your way out of.
All this juicy motivation is lacking in Murtagh … and I cry. You’ve just read many thousands of words about it. Murtagh has so much potential to do a character arc that packs punches like Zuko’s, and it just … doesn’t happen. Whyyy.
The other Zuko-related thing I want to talk about here is the episode Zuko Alone from the second season of Avatar.
As any ATLA fan knows, Zuko Alone is one of the best episodes from the series. It’s so good that it’s one of only six episodes from the original series that has its own Wikipedia page, and four of those are for Season 3’s four-part finale. The episode is structured like a Western and its core conflict is the way Zuko, as a wandering traveller, helps a family from the Earth Nation with soldiers abusing their power, and the tragedy that ensues when the family and their village find out that their new friend is none other than the prince of the Fire Nation. Like Murtagh, Zuko Alone is structured along a present timeline and flashback sequences.
Honestly, I wanted Murtagh to be a book-length Zuko Alone but with less of a bittersweet Western ending. The proposed character motivation changes I made way back up at the beginning of the essay in the Ceunon section are a heavily condensed version of Zuko Alone — a wanderer, disguising their identity and abilities, arrives in town and then, after integrating with and gaining the trust of the townspeople, has their identity forcibly revealed by troublemakers, resulting in violence; the townspeople then reject the wanderer because what they’re perceived to stand for is a much stronger part of their identity than the person underneath.
Man, that last section of Gil’ead is what I was expecting a Murtagh and Thorn sequel to the Cycle to be….
Maybe it’s just my recent bias for political fantasy speaking, but this is what I was really interested in exploring with Murtagh and Thorn. With Galbatorix dead after being the sole head of government within the living memory of humans — which, as the story takes place entirely within the human lands of Alagaësia, is all that really matters here — you’re going to have a faction of people who are unhappy with the change of government, and we got the barerest look at this through the newly introduced character of Lyreth. He seeks Murtagh out after seeing him in Gil’ead and proposes that he become king as is his right as the heir to Galbatorix and Morzan. Basically, I wanted what Pierce Brown has done with the continuation of his Red Rising series — a story about ramifications to the events in the Cycle. The after of the successful rebellion/revolution.
So, I want to pivot from this to the other problem that I’ve been building up to which is the instinct for writers, in making sequels for their works, to have them be bigger, badder, and with higher stakes than the first time by introducing a bad guy with a bigger health bar.
Firstly, this is not always a bad thing. The problems tend to come in when the audience feels cheated by the goalposts being moved, which is the difference between the boss fight of the Lord Ruler in the original Mistborn trilogy escalating into the actual final boss in books two and three (where the goalposts were not really moved because we’re told upon Vin’s defeat of the Lord Ruler that it’s not over yet), and the approach of Stranger Things’ later seasons where they’re fighting a neverending, unalluded to Matryoshka doll of bad guys (because Netflix doesn’t know when the ST train is going to end but by God, will they keep making more until it stops going). In these sorts of cases, the non-meta problem of battling against the BBEG is that it’s not being treated as a force to be grappled with, but it’s effectively saying that there’s nothing interesting going on without some sort of status quo of an evil boss for the heroes to kill.
Let’s talk about Star Wars once again. This time, about the sequel trilogy.
If you’ve been anywhere within the nerdy circles of the Internet in the past decade, you’ll have no doubt seen the vitriol directed towards the Star Wars sequel trilogy, whether warranted or not. I’ll be interested to see if these movies are embraced in the years to come just as the Prequels have been. I hope they have some kind of Renaissance because there is some good stuff in there; personally, the Sequels brought one of, if not my favourite, entries to the franchise in The Last Jedi (tangent link: here is a fantastic article musing on the whys of this movie’s reception). But for everything the Sequels did right, they did a lot of wonky things on a story level, and many of these problems were introduced right out of the gate with The Force Awakens.
Yes, The Force Awakens is just A New Hope again, and because it’s A New Hope again, it has brought back a faceless antagonistic force for our new cast of heroes to fight against in The First Order. Not only have we brought back the Death Star for the third time in the new form of Starkiller Base, but the twist is it’s now as a whole planet that can blow up multiple planets at once. Oh God! This is a well trod path of criticism, but I want to ask: what does it mean for the status quo of the galaxy? That it’s always going to be going through these cycles of fascist forces using a giant, planet-destroying laser to gain power and rise as a serious political and social threat? That everything Luke and Co. went through in the Original Trilogy was for naught because here we go again for Round 2: Electric Boogaloo?
And so for Alagaësia, is it only interesting when there’s a BBEG to defeat? Are the everyday forces and political machinations so dull that we need to bring Cthulhu cultists into the mix for the Riders to fight? If anything, it speaks to a lack of confidence in the material which I find quite sad :(
My biggest fears with the next books in this series are that they’ll turn into “using Umaroth’s warnings of what not to do, as a checklist of stuff we’re going to do”, i.e., the upcoming book/s will be about the King of the Urgals tomb and Vroengard, and that Azlagûr will be at the heart of those warnings. But if that’s the case, why has Umaroth told Murtagh and Thorn about this and has, seemingly, been content to let them deal with it whilst he, Eragon and Saphira, and the other Eldunarya fly off to the east to leave those suckers with the problem? It’s baffling.
Final thoughts
This has been an essay a couple of weeks in the making, and I didn’t expect it to spill out to the length it is when I started writing. I kinda ended up vomiting out a lot of my feelings for the Cycle, and if you made it all the way down here, through all my going-in-circles thoughts, I appreciate you.
I think Murtagh is fine, and there are bits that I really liked even if I wish it was something more than it ended up being; on enjoyment levels, it was about what I expected. It was a nice world to immerse myself back into for a couple of days, and I had enough of my emotional buttons pressed to remind me what I liked so much about Murtagh and Thorn when I was nine and why I spent every waking hour of my early-teen years hanging out on Shurtugal.com’s now defunct Inheritance Forums … It’s a candy book.
But I still wanted more substance to it, because the situation that Murtagh and Thorn found themselves in at the end of the Cycle is a rich, rich bed to till. I’m in no doubt that the arc they’re being nudged along is for them to become A Real Dragon and Rider so they might join the ranks of Eragon, Saphira, Arya, and Fírnen as equals, but we’ve already done that with Eragon and Saphira. I want Murtagh and Thorn to remain a bit rough around the edges, a not-quite traditional pair who are more up to being anti-social vigilantes instead of Official Law Enforcement for the Land. Besides, it’s not something I had imagined Murtagh and Thorn wanting to do only a year after winning free of Galbatorix. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded this book having a five, maybe even a ten year timeskip between it and the main Cycle.
I’ll always have a soft spot for Murtagh and Thorn. They’re a fundamental part of my tastes in media and characters, and I’ll always want to stay up to date with them because they’re my boys. My boys who went on to foster my love of other dark-haired loners with parental issues like Loki, Rin, Moon, and Kylo Ren, and without Murtagh, I can definitely say my own characters and my own writing wouldn’t be what it is.
Other than that, I don’t really have anything else to say about the book; I’m ready to get back to thinking about other things I love. As for the next book, I will read it because Murtagh and Thorn are my boys forever and ever, but I hope, perhaps foolishly, that it will be an improvement over this one.
…
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Also, who the fuck made the decision to have the world map at the front of a travel book be labeled with made up runes? I don’t remember where Ceunon is, goddamnit.
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EXACTLYYYYYYYYY to all this!!! waited so long to read this book and what a let down and you put all my frustrations with it into words!!!
Excellent, very thorough review of the character and the book named after him. I tend to think that Murtagh's many personality transplants through the series were a reaction to fan reception. Murtagh was more popular than Eragon, so Paolini made him "evil". Evil Murtagh was still more popular that Eragon, so Paolini made him pathetic and mostly off-screen. And then after a decade of playing with unrelated sci-fi projects, Paolini forgot how to write Murtagh at all. At several points in the book Paolini clearly forgot that he wasn't writing about Eragon (for example, Murtagh's magic suddenly being blue rather than red).
Whether it was forgetfulness, incompetence, or a deliberate change, the result is that Murtagh's characterisation is very inconsistent across books, which makes for a not great reading experience.
Edit: I also really liked your point about motivation, and completely agree. Paolini has always been a plot-focused writer, his characters don't affect the plot so much as get dragged along by it.