Blue Brick Commentary

[mara_dienne459]

 Time for the first chapter. Let's see what adventure awaits us today.

 

DISCOVERY

Eragon knelt in a bed of trampled reed grass and scanned the tracks with a practiced eye. The prints told him that the deer had been in the meadow only a half-hour before. Soon they would bed down. His target, a small doe with a pronounced limp in her left forefoot, was still with the herd. He was amazed she had made it so far without a wolf or bear catching her.

 

The sky was clear and dark, and a slight breeze stirred the air. A silvery cloud drifted over the mountains that surrounded him, its edges glowing with ruddy light cast from the harvest moon cradled between two peaks. Streams flowed down the mountains from stolid glaciers and glistening snowpacks. A brooding mist crept along the valley’s floor, almost thick enough to obscure his feet.

Now, I’m no hunter, but I do know that you can tell how fresh tracks are by the way they look compared with their surrounding environment. I’m pretty sure, though, that you can’t be as accurate as he is here, so certain that these tracks are only a half-hour old. To be that accurate would mean that he needs to have some sort of internal clock and weather system. And how could he pick a single animal’s tracks out of a herd of them? The doe’s tracks, unless she’s behind everyone else and thus walked over older tracks, would have been obscured by every other animal trampling on her tracks. You can tell that the animals have been through recently. And another thing, if the moon is a harvest moon, the light is orange, which makes shadows deeper and more pronounced. Unless his face is so close to the tracks that he’s literally sniffing the earth, seeing individual tracks would be near to impossible. Also, being amazed is fine, but why not tell us why you’re amazed? This deer must not be that injured if she’s keeping up with the herd. They would’ve abandoned her already if she was slowing them down.

 

Eragon was fifteen, less than a year from manhood. Dark eyebrows rested above his intense brown eyes. His clothes were worn from work. A hunting knife with a bone handle was sheathed at his belt, and a buckskin tube protected his yew bow from the mist. He carried a wood-frame pack.

 

The deer had led him deep into the Spine, a range of untamed mountains that extended up and down the land of Alagaësia. Strange tales and men often came from those mountains, usually boding ill. Despite that, Eragon did not fear the Spine—he was the only hunter near Carvahall who dared track game deep into its craggy recesses.

The only hunter brave enough to go deep into the forest? The other hunters - of which we never see - must wait for their prey to come to them, or something. Otherwise, he’s the only idiot that hunts and goes wandering in the woods, which is especially strange considering the whole village seems to fear the mountains. And how can strange men come from the mountain? Obviously they’re trappers, and they’d have had to pass through the village, unless they skirted the village entirely (which is possible, considering where both Carvahall and Therinsford are located geographically on the map) and only came down for supplies. Otherwise, the only other “strange men” are from the village Narda which exists across the mountains and down by the sea. Roran and the village travel there via a mountain pass.

 

It was the third night of the hunt, and his food was half gone. If he did not fell the doe, he would be forced to return home empty-handed. His family needed the meat for the rapidly approaching winter and could not afford to buy it in Carvahall.

Which doesn’t make much sense, really, for both sentences. He could’ve set snares while tracking the deer to catch squirrel and rabbit. Three days is a long time to leave a snare, granted, if it catches something. Nine times out of ten it’ll often be empty. The second sentence makes no sense, either, as Carvahall is an isolated village out in the middle of nowhere. The villagers rely on each other to survive. Money is useless in villages like this. More, we know his family has money to buy shit, because later on, Garrow will pull out a small sack of coins and Eragon will go and buy sweets to snack on. If you don’t have money to survive through winter, then why the hell are you using it to buy snacks?

 

Eragon stood with quiet assurance in the dusky moonlight, then strode into the forest toward a glen where he was sure the deer would rest. The trees blocked the sky from view and cast feathery shadows on the ground. He looked at the tracks only occasionally; he knew the way.

 

At the glen, he strung his bow with a sure touch, then drew three arrows and nocked one, holding the others in his left hand. The moonlight revealed twenty or so motionless lumps where the deer lay in the grass. The doe he wanted was at the edge of the herd, her left foreleg stretched out awkwardly.

 

Eragon slowly crept closer, keeping the bow ready. All his work of the past three days had led to this moment. He took a last steadying breath and—an explosion shattered the night.

 

The herd bolted. Eragon lunged forward, racing through the grass as a fiery wind surged past his cheek. He slid to a stop and loosed an arrow at the bounding doe. It missed by a finger’s breadth and hissed into darkness. He cursed and spun around, instinctively nocking another arrow.

So basically an explosion happens right on top of the deer, but there are no dead deer. Not even signs that some had been incinerated before they had a chance to wake up and flee. There aren’t even injured deer. What’s more, our intrepid hero, instead of dropping to the ground or ducking behind a tree to shield him not just from the fire, but the panicking deer, runs towards and into the fire, and has the wherewithal to shoot at the escaping creatures. And this doe, who has a pronounced limp, is able to bound away at such a rate of speed that he misses?

 

Behind him, where the deer had been, smoldered a large circle of grass and trees. Many of the pines stood bare of their needles. The grass outside the charring was flattened. A wisp of smoke curled in the air, carrying a burnt smell. In the center of the blast radius lay a polished blue stone. Mist snaked across the scorched area and swirled insubstantial tendrils over the stone.

 

Eragon watched for danger for several long minutes, but the only thing that moved was the mist. Cautiously, he released the tension from his bow and moved forward. Moonlight cast him in pale shadow as he stopped before the stone. He nudged it with an arrow, then jumped back. Nothing happened, so he warily picked it up.

Yes, let’s just pick up the strange object that nearly killed us and act like nothing bad is going to happen. Poking something once is always a good indicator of whether the thing is going to murder you or not.

 

Nature had never polished a stone as smooth as this one. Its flawless surface was dark blue, except for thin veins of white that spiderwebbed across it. The stone was cool and frictionless under his fingers, like hardened silk. Oval and about a foot long, it weighed several pounds, though it felt lighter than it should have.

 

Eragon found the stone both beautiful and frightening. Where did it come from? Does it have a purpose? Then a more disturbing thought came to him: Was it sent here by accident, or am I meant to have it? If he had learned anything from the old stories, it was to treat magic, and those who used it, with great caution.

What kind of person thinks they’re meant to have something if it just magically appears in front of them? If anything, a smart person wouldn’t trust it and try to get as far away as possible from it. How selfish do you have to be to think this thing belongs to you just because you happened to be there when it appeared? But, of course you’re meant to have it, otherwise we wouldn’t have a story.

 

But what should I do with the stone? It would be tiresome to carry, and there was a chance it was dangerous.

Well, you already picked the stupid thing up, so you might as well keep it now, right?

It might be better to leave it behind. A flicker of indecision ran through him, and he almost dropped it, but something stayed his hand. At the very least, it might pay for some food, he decided with a shrug, tucking the stone into his pack.

 

The glen was too exposed to make a safe camp, so he slipped back into the forest and spread his bedroll beneath the upturned roots of a fallen tree. After a cold dinner of bread and cheese, he wrapped himself in blankets and fell asleep, pondering what had occurred.

Comments

[epistler]

This was when Paolini's writing was at its most amateurish - see how hopelessly clunky the descriptions are? No flow. Short. Choppy sentences. No sense. Of flow. Very distracting to. Read.

[glimmerfox]

The thing I hate about this is how long he keeps his bow knocked. He's fourteen and has used it many times, but you are pulling back a lot of weight on a bow and he holds it ready to loose for several minutes of caution.

One of my peeves in fantasy (or history stories) is that bows are not the equivalent to guns and you just can't hold them at ready for a long time. You are using your chest and arm muscles to keep the bow taught and if the bow doesn't have a many pounds of pressure to pull back it's kind of a shitty bow that won't loose an arrow far since it isn't transferring much kinetic energy from the pull of the bow to the arrow.

So either Eragon has a terrible bow, or this wasn't researches as much as it should.