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antishurtugal_rebornMurtagh, part 2 chapter 11: The Door of Stone
We are now on page 216 of 624 (not counting the afterword and end matter) in my copy. A little over a third of the way through the story.
So far, Murtagh has:
- had a Random Encounter with some mysterious enemies against whom the Name didn’t work
- beat up and robbed a guy in front of his children
- found an Interesting Rock
- made a deal to rescue a werecat child in exchange for information about the Interesting Rock
- robbed a grave
- slain a Catfish Of Unusual Size
- joined the city guard of Gil’ead
I can’t be the only one with issues about this story’s pacing and plotting. The various elements of the story so far don’t really have anything to do with each other, they’re like a string of unrelated quests in a poorly designed video game.
For contrast, page 216 of my copy of Shadow and Bone is a bit over two thirds of the book. Murtagh does not have twice as much story as Shadow and Bone.
This entire first third of the story could easily be cut entirely, without any negative effect on the second half of the story. All Paolini would need to do is a slight bit of rewriting to make the story open with Murtagh and Thorn on approach to the mysterious perilous place that Umaroth warned them about. How they discovered the location of that place can either be explained in dialogue or flashback, or even not at all. It’s not important how they learned the exact location of it. Perhaps they came across it fortuitously while searching various small towns for local rumours about monsters and such.
Instead, we get this whole convoluted video game style fetch quest of a prologue that takes over 200 pages (actually, if you follow my idea above, over 300 pages) just to get to the start of the actual story.
That said, on to chapter 11:
The chamber inside was totally dark.
No, really? An underground room under a prison, in the middle of the night, in an age before electric lights?
Murtagh conveniently finds a candle in the previous also-dark tunnel, and finds that the room he’s entered is a very generic war room as seen in any fantasy dungeon crawler you’ve ever played.
Paolini horribly underestimates the length of a pike, presumably mistaking it for a spear, by suggesting that a pike would fit into an underground room.
For the record, a historical pike was anywhere between 3 and 7 metres long (roughly 10 to 23 feet). Anything shorter than that is a spear. Pikes are two-handed weapons used in formation. Paolini seems to suggest that an underground tunnel would be guarded by a man holding a 10-foot pike, somehow.
Murtagh places the mini-pike on a table inside the room, which is another weird thing. How big is this table? Even a shorter spear would be around 6 feet. That’s a huge table.
He looked closer. The runes themselves were of an archaic design, and as he tried to read them, he realized that they were indeed runes such as the dwarves used, not humans. He shook his head. He could read many types of writing, but Dwarvish wasn’t one of them.
One of the few linguistic details that I will give credit to Paolini for: although the humans adopted the dwarven runes for their own language, they changed and adapted them to suit their own language, created new runes for sounds that the dwarven system doesn’t have, and dropped runes for sounds that they don’t use. This is consistent with how real languages develop and change writing systems, for example the way ancient Latin writers modified the (Etruscan, and before that, the) Ancient Greek alphabet to suit the Latin sounds they needed to transcribe.
It’s a nice touch of realism that Murtagh recognises the runes, but can’t translate them. It’s not much credit, but credit nonetheless.
After failing to pick a lock because of a clever idea that he fumbled at the last moment and just loudly destroying the door instead (because of course this version of Murtagh is hopelessly clumsy and incapable of stealth), Murtagh continues into a corridor lit by a magic glowing gemstone in the roof, and walls that are supported by dragon ribs. Murtagh immediately guesses, with zero evidence or reason to guess it, that they must the the rib bones of Morzan’s dragon. For some reason.
Murtagh then proceeds to loot the place, stealing a book of Ancient Language words and various other things such as a tiny scrap of yellow diamond, described as "nearly as big as his thumbnail". It is full of energy.
This is an introductory loot-room in a tutorial dungeon, and Murtagh is treating it exactly as if it was a game. Never mind if anyone heard the door breaking apart, Murtagh has all the time in the world to carefully pick through what he wants, and a Bag of Holding to store his new inventory.
He touched one of the ribs along the walls. The bone was cool and smooth against his hand, and he felt a pang imagining it was Thorn’s. But he was not sure how much sorrow he felt for Morzan’s dragon. The creature had chosen to serve Galbatorix as much as Morzan had himself; they were both culpable for their sins. As are we all, he thought.
First, Morzan and Not-Alaion entered Galby’s service knowingly and of their own free will (at least, according to canon taken at face value), they weren’t kidnapped and tortured until they were forced to swear fealty. They are NOT the same.
One point of difference between Murtagh and Eragon: When Murtagh encounters a door that might be magically alarmed, he stops and thinks about it instead of just breaking the door down.
He eventually decides to try siphoning the magic out of the gems in the door into the tiny little scrap of a gemstone he stole from the previous room.
Logically, the dozens of gemstones in the door contain far more energy than the, I remind you, thumbnail-sized fleck of diamond, so Murtagh panics and casts Eragon’s signature spell Brisingr to create a magic light that he channels the gem-energy into.
Point: Murtagh’s magic is supposed to be red, right? So why is his magic bright blue? That’s Eragon’s colour.
Murtagh eventually succeeds in draining all the magic out of the gems, creating a “miniature sun” in the process.
Then he ended his spell, and wings of shadows wrapped around him as the werelight vanished.
I don’t know if someone’s running a count for overwritten metaphors, but this is just silly. Now is not the time for purple poetry, we’re trying to have a tense atmosphere of danger and excitement.
He picked up the gem. It was still uncomfortably warm. Murtagh had never had difficulty storing energy in a gem before. Though now that he thought about it, he’d only really used the ruby in Zar’roc’s pommel, and that was a far larger stone, of finer quality too, and woven through with elven enchantments. The diamond had none of those advantages. It must have already been filled to its limit. That or there had been significantly more energy stored in the door than he’d realized.
And this is where Murtagh gave the shared Paotagonist brain cell to a different character in some other book. A thumbnail-sized scrap of diamond can hold less energy than a significantly larger and purer gemstone? Or several dozen larger stones connected to each other and embedded in a door? No, really?
Actually, what ARE the maths of gemstones and energy storage? Can magical energy even be measured and quantified*? Is there a specific ratio of size to energy capacity, and how does the chemical composition or “purity” of different gemstones affect the maximum amount of magic it can hold?
( * I’m reminded of The Science of Discworld, by Terry Prachett, in which the wizards at Unseen University quantify magic in units of energy called thaums.)
Is it only gemstones that can hold magic? What about quartz, basalt, or marble? Is it only translucent gemstones that can hold magic? What about lapis lazuli, or pyrite? Or gold?
Paolini’s grasp of mineralogy aside, Murtagh tries the door again and… it’s still locked. Because at least someone in Alagaesia isn’t a complete idiot, and thought to use multiple redundancies to safeguard their stuff.
Murtagh opens the door with a spell, because this random side-quest is already stretching on too long without adding a search for a key, and then we get a section break.
The door has led into an underground garden, which could have come straight out of Baldur’s Gate 2, although there are no dryads-in-distress here.
Some of the plants Murtagh recognized: healing plants, poisonous plants, plants for inducing visions and compelling sleep. But many were unknown to him. There was a lily whose leaf and stem seemed made of living gold and whose petals were of a whitish metal. A drooping tree with berries that glittered like beryls. Mushrooms that had purple caps and electric-blue gills.
And he saw a plant unlike any he had encountered before. It had a single stem topped with a fleshy, pitcher-shaped cup perhaps two hands high. And from the cup stood small orange tentacles, which waved gently in the air.
Even as he watched, a frog hopped past the pitcher plant. Two of the tentacles reached out, fast as snakes, grabbed the frog, and pulled it into the mouth of the cup and held it there.
Quoted because I read this as Paolini is trying to show that Alagaesia is a part of his shared Fractalverse world. Tentacles are a distinctive element in the Fractalverse books and stories so far, especially in the Unity Illusion-Of-Choice short story. So far, this is the first major mention of tentacles (where one would not expect tentacles) that I can recall in the Alagaesia books. It’s like Paolini waving the Fractalverse logo at us in the middle of a non-Fractalverse story. “hey look, this is part of my universe too!”
Murtagh continues to be clumsy, and trips on an uneven brick.
[…] he forgot to watch where he was walking, and he caught an ankle on the corner of a brick that stuck out. He stumbled forward a step.
I’m… struggling to understand how that works. Just, the physical blocking of it. Where is this brick, and why/how did he only catch his ankle on it? Is it sticking out sideways from the wall, or sticking up from the ground? If it’s sticking out sideways from the wall, where is Murtagh in relation to the wall?
This scene would work SO much better if he tripped on an uneven paving stone, instead of the corner of a brick that stuck out. Stuck out from WHAT? WHERE?
Anyway, Murtagh finds an “evil-looking egg” which everyone who has read the previous books should immediately know is a ra’zac egg, but credit to Paolini he remembered that Murtagh hasn’t seen a ra’zac egg before, and possibly doesn’t even know that ra’zac hatch from eggs.
I haven’t actually read ahead, but let me guess: this is sequel-bait that we will never see again at least in this book. Let me know in the comments if I’m right.
Murtagh finally opens the last door, and we get another section break.
In the final room, Murtagh finds an empty prison cell containing only a blanket and a candle. Murtagh has a moment of PTSD flashback which is honestly written decently well, as far as Paolini can:
For a moment, it felt as if he were back in Urû’baen, in the dungeons beneath the citadel—he and Thorn both—listening to the screams of other prisoners while the overpowering weight of the king’s mind bore down upon him. The walls seemed to close in on him, and he had a sudden feeling of being deep underground, alone and isolated, trapped in the airless dark.
His breath caught in his throat, and an oppressive grief collapsed upon him. Then a terrible rage began to build atop the grief, and his hands closed in fists, and he set his teeth and ground his jaw.
They would pay. They would all pay for what they had done to the werecat youngling, and he would teach them to fear him as they had feared his father.
“Curse you,” he muttered, and spun around to leave.
And then as he turns to leave, Murtagh is attacked by the werecat.
End chapter.
Main take-away: Lemon chicken with special fried rice. And a bag of prawn crackers.
Secondary take-away: This entire subplot is unnecessary to the story as a whole, and reads like a roleplaying game side quest. This would be decent as a video game in the tradition of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, or even Morrowind. As a story, it’s not great structure. As I said at the start of that chapter, the entire story arc of the first half of the book is basically irrelevant to the second half. There is no organic follow-through of themes or consequences from the earlier chapters, except for the stupid magic-breaking talisman.
None of what has happened so far matters, and none of it makes sense for the overall story.
Is it one continuous narrative where every element builds up toward the climax, or a series of vignettes in Murtagh’s life? I think this would have been better as a Tales of Alagaesia sequel featuring small unconnected moments of Adventure from Murtagh’s post-Inheritance life. Aside from the parts that were already in the first Tales of Alagaesia. Hunting the fish, dungeon crawling under Gil’ead, rescuing a kidnapped werecat child, visiting (but maybe not robbing) Oromis and Gladrag’s burial site. All of these could have been interesting stand-alone short stories as part of an anthology. As part of a novel, they just don’t fit together.
Worldbuilding wise, it feels like a completely different world than we got in Eragon and Eldest. And I mean that quite emphatically, it’s not merely a more mature perspective on the same world, but a completely different world with different rules and foundations. Magic gems, underground gardens, potions and philtres, dungeon crawling… it simply doesn’t fit in with the “magic is tied to the Ancient Language and that’s that” story about dragon-riding and uncle-avenging that we started with.
Which is a problem of progressive worldbuilding. Paolini did not stick with the worldbuilding he established in the first books, but continued to develop and change the fundamentals of how his world works in each book, until the magic presented in Murtagh is basically incompatible with the magic introduced in Eragon.
That can be fine between drafts of one book, or between separate unconnected books. But for a series that is supposed to act as a single narrative within one consistent world, it’s really sloppy and poor form.
Next up: Part 2 Chapter 12: Pathways Into Darkness, with the one and only Epistler.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-21 09:32 am (UTC)The fuck is it with Paolini and rocks anyway?
That's exactly what this is, and it even came up in that interview Paolini and his stupid hat gave. He dragged all this out on purpose because he thought it was the right way to make it harder for Morontagh.
Like, totally dude!
I just pictured the pike immediately rolling off the table and landing on his foot.
I don't remember that coming up in canon. Is it mentioned here? Also Eragon reads dwarven inscriptions in Tronglebongle and doesn't have this problem.
What the fuck makes him think he has the right to just waltz in here and start taking things? That is some next level arrogant entitlement right there.
An underground room made out of a dragon's ribcage is actually a really neat image. So of course Paolini won't do anything with it. And how the fuck did it get down here anyway? Another question which will go ignored. Naturally.
Paolini has some very weird ideas about accountability and when it does or does not apply.
FFS, this is the exact same alien pitcher plant that ate us alive in the Unity book. Or, in the alternative chapter I wrote, Angela and Serious Ass.
We really should have had a count of just how many times Morontagh randomly trips. From memory, the count would currently stand at at least five times so far including this one.
Gosh, how did you know?
How does an egg look "evil" anyway? Does it have devil horns and a frowny face?
Shocker of the century, this never happens. And why is he assuming whoever they are were afraid of Morzan? He doesn't even know who they are!
Things this mighty dragon rider who repeatedly defeated Eragon has so far been pwned by:
-A goat
-An enchanted dragon scale
-A big fish with no teeth
-A fucking kitten
And this last was because despite being a fully trained warrior with all those special senses and shit, he didn't check the room properly and wasn't watching his back
*headdesk*
It really doesn't and absolutely reminds me of an unrelated RPG. The underground garden of magic plants immediately put me in mind of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where if you get the Frostcrag Spire extension that gives you a cool wizard's tower to live in, it comes with an indoor garden with pretty much every magical plant and fungus growing in it. Bad enough that the original series started reading more and more like an RPG; this is orders of magnitude WORSE.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 09:45 pm (UTC)Interesting timing Eps, because today Bethesda announced and released a remastered version of Oblivion, and its already available to buy.
If I wasn't in the process of collecting all my savings to buy a new bed, I'd buy Oblivion right now.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-23 01:20 am (UTC)I sporked the next chapter last night and the Oblivion parallels just keep stacking up.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-21 02:11 pm (UTC)(Qua word count, it's 32,7%; that's a bit more accurate, I find, since it isn't influenced by, for example, the amount of paragraphs on a page.)
Once again, I think this could have been a good stand-alone story; it ties into the conflicts from the previous books, at least, unlike Nal Gorgoth, and it would be a good opportunity to see Murtagh "redeem" himself.
It isn't even the first time he's made this error; we got indoor pikes in Dras-Leona, too, I see. It'd be easy enough to see from a picture, I'd think.
Yeah, the runes are nicely done, though I have to point out that his problem isn't with the "type of writing", but with him not knowing the Dwarvish language; he can recognise the runes just fine, after all.
After failing to pick a lock because of a clever idea that he fumbled at the last moment and just loudly destroying the door instead (because of course this version of Murtagh is hopelessly clumsy and incapable of stealth),
And because trying to open the door with the standard unlocking spell was beyond him, apparently, and because he couldn't imagine that the pressure needed to form a plank into the shape of the mask is enough to break the door. (Come to think of it, why not use air to push on the impression?)
(We've also got some apparent clues as to what's going on when it's noted the wood from the door comes from the Beors.)
Murtagh immediately guesses, with zero evidence or reason to guess it, that they must the the rib bones of Morzan’s dragon. For some reason.
I highly doubt that's true, given the trouble associated with bringing these bones down here (the chamber would not to be dug up, I think), and there'd be rumours about that, at the least.
The bone was cool and smooth against his hand, and he felt a pang imagining it was Thorn’s. But he was not sure how much sorrow he felt for Morzan’s dragon. The creature had chosen to serve Galbatorix as much as Morzan had himself; they were both culpable for their sins.
And what "sins" did Krovogon commit, then? I'll need a bit of evidence for just what he did wrong if I'm to accept that he was "bad".
Point: Murtagh’s magic is supposed to be red, right? So why is his magic bright blue? That’s Eragon’s colour.
Counterpoint: Eragon can make his werelights red, so there's no reason Murtagh can't colour his. That said... given that this werelight is supposed to give off unbearable heat at one point, I get the feeling that it's supposed to be because of black-body radiation, and then the werelight would be
ten times as hot as Orodruinaround 30,000 K, so I hope Paolini forgot about the magic colour.For the diamond, I see that yellow diamonds have a tiny bit of nitrogen in them (up to 0,05%), while rubies have about one percent of chromium impurities, so this diamond is considerably more pure than Zar'roc's ruby.
I presume that any material with a good crystal structure (such as diamond, quartz, pyrite, and even salt) should work; I guess that gold could hold it, too, but it would be hard to put in and extract? I'd quite like to know, but I can only think Paolini would mess up the science.
There was a lily whose leaf and stem seemed made of living gold and whose petals were of a whitish metal.
Ooh, there's Eragon's "gilded lily"... which makes me wonder who knew of it, and bothered to transport it here. My first idea of this garden was actually that Angela's got something to do with this; it would certainly be something for her to have her own hidden garden.
Even as he watched, a frog hopped past the pitcher plant. Two of the tentacles reached out, fast as snakes, grabbed the frog, and pulled it into the mouth of the cup and held it there.
How sturdy are these tentacles that they can catch a frog hopping past (and it then seems to kill the frog at once)? This seems rather unlikely to me!
Oh yes, I've noticed quite some of those moments in this book.
[…] he forgot to watch where he was walking, and he caught an ankle on the corner of a brick that stuck out. He stumbled forward a step.
I guess that it's a brick sticking out from the wall around the flower beds, and he caught himself on the blunt end? What bothers me is that he stumbles while walking rather slowly; that should be easy enough to recover from.
Oh, this egg itself isn't sequel bait, since Carabel will arrange to have it destroyed.
(In the cell, there's also a note about an outline of a door on the wall, which I have little idea about. It's probably more foreshadowing.)
In the acknowledgements, he talks about wanting to write an "old-fashioned adventure novel that Edgar Rice Burroughs might have produced", and I have the idea that that influenced his writing considerably more than it should have.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 05:05 am (UTC)Which begs the question... why would he even bother? Paolini actually did say in an early interview that your magic isn't set as a single default colour and you can have different colours if you want, but of course he rarely sticks to what he says in his interviews and back then he was even worse at it.
Or they got a seed off the original, which was my assumption.
I hate how it still hasn't been explained how she has the power to do that, or indeed anything else. Also yay for more infanticide.
As usual he's imitating (or attempting to imitate) stuff that's hopelessly out of date.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 05:17 am (UTC)Probably because red light helps with keeping your night vision, and Eragon used it in the dark? That's something I do find reasonably smart.
Or they got a seed off the original, which was my assumption.
That might be it, though we don't know if it was fertile. That still makes me wonder who would have found out about these plants; they're in a rather thinly populated region, after all.
I hate how it still hasn't been explained how she has the power to do that, or indeed anything else. Also yay for more infanticide.
If she wants to destroy the egg, she could probably send a werecat down to do it for her, so I don't mind that. Come to think of it, the werecats have been to this chamber before, haven't they? I don't think the implication is that the egg was placed there recently, so why haven't they noticed it?
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 06:11 am (UTC)Eragon doing something smart? It must be a blue moon.
It's stated in that book that yes, it can produce viable seeds. Though as you say it's rather insane that anyone actually found the damn thing.
Paolini Retcon Syndrome strikes again. What was this random magician planning to do with the egg anyway? Methinks it would've just eaten him when it hatched.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 06:20 pm (UTC)It's stated in that book that yes, it can produce viable seeds. Though as you say it's rather insane that anyone actually found the damn thing.
Not exactly:
(And Arya's got no way to know for sure at the moment.)
Yeah, whoever picked up on this would have had to listen in on Eragon's conversation with Jeod, where he obliquely referred to it, or have been very lucky. Either way, it's all too convenient.
Paolini Retcon Syndrome strikes again. What was this random magician planning to do with the egg anyway? Methinks it would've just eaten him when it hatched.
I suppose the group behind the kindnappings must have known of it... but I indeed doubt that they were planning to do much with it, since raising a Ra'zac would be difficult indeed.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-23 01:22 am (UTC)Ah, but Arya is an elf and a main character and therefore always right about everything.
And why did he tell Jeod anyway?
It's not as if the Dreamers have any connection to the Helgrind cult that we've been made aware of either.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 05:06 am (UTC)Good question. Something something you will be leaving your mind open to the enemy spellcaster? Nope, that doesn't hold water either.