How It All Goes Down
Awakening
- Baby dragon! Cute, right? It's covered in blue scales and is just a little longer than Eragon's forearm.
- It crawls around the room for a bit, bumping into the furniture. Dragon Roomba?
- When Eragon finally touches the dragon, an odd thing happens: pain shoots up his arm and through his body.
- When he finally recovers, his right palm has a white oval burned into it. Then he feels "something [brush] against his consciousness, like a finger trailing over his skin" (5.5).
- Um?
- He touches the dragon again, but this time he's not shocked.
- Eragon feeds the dragon some dried meat, which it chomps down hungrily. After the meal, it crawls onto his chest and falls asleep. Aww.
- Eragon carries his little buddy to bed with him and thinks about becoming a Rider himself. On the one hand, he could become famous and powerful. On the other, the Empire would kill him and his family if he was found out.
- (Is it just us, or is Eragon dealing with this whole baby dragon thing creepily well?)
- Eragon decides that he'll keep the dragon, but how will he tell Garrow about the new addition?
- The next morning, Eragon takes the dragon out to the woods. With some rags and leather strips, he builds a little shelter in a tree for the dragon.
- He uses his mental connection with the dragon to tell it to stay put in the nest. Eragon is sure that it understands him.
- Eragon returns to the farm, where the day passes pretty quickly. And sure enough, when he gets back to the tree, the dragon is still there. And bonus, there are feathers strewn around from where it's been munching on a few unfortunate local birds.
- Eragon gives the dragon a guided tour of the forest, talking to it all the while, before he has to get home.
- He worries about leaving the dragon overnight, but it's apparently a plucky little guy, because it's totally fine when he returns the next morning at sunrise. It leaps down from the tree and into his arms. One more time, all together now: aww.
- This routine continues for a while. Eragon sees the dragon in the morning and then at night before bed.
- In the meantime, the dragon is growing, doubling in size the first week of its life. Eragon has to build a new shelter to hold it.
- Soon, the dragon outgrows even that. Eragon lets the not-so-little-anymore guy roam free, but he tells him that the farm is off limits. Also, he warns the dragon to watch out for hunters. Good call.
- How does he tell the dragon all this? Well, as the dragon ages, Eragon develops a stronger and stronger mental connection with it. It's like he can project his thoughts into the dragon's consciousness, and vice versa. Pretty cool, right?
- The dragon keeps growing, but it still can't do the one trick we're waiting for: no breathing fire quite yet. It does, however, start to leave signs all over the forest that, you know, a dragon lives there. Not only are there huge claw-prints, but there are also piles of dragon poop everywhere—a dead giveaway.
- Eragon knows that he has to tell Garrow and Roran about the dragon, but he wants to chat with Brom about it first.
- He decides to head into town to rap with Brom, but the dragon is not too crazy about that. As he goes, Eragon hears the dragon calling out to him in his mind. Sad!