#thorns character arc has been the trickiest but im making progress on it

[alagaesia-headcanons]

A snippet from my draft of Clear Horizons! I think I might post a handful of these over the next week or two

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Thorn waits above the city while Murtagh traverses the caves until he can drop out onto the roof of the old citadel and quickly make his way in. The place is abandoned and desolate, a result of the magical miasma generated by Galbatorix’s suicidal spell. But his wards protect him as he makes his way; the structural damage makes it challenging, but he manages. By some very uncharacteristic miracle, his quarters are largely unscathed. To his discomfort, it looks as though someone has rifled through things, but he can’t tell if much is missing. Murtagh collects a small assortment of little practicalities, extra clothes, pens, writing tools and as much paper as he can find, a large stack of sheet music he’d penned back before, and the violin stowed under the bed. He resolves to come back eventually and hunt down any other instruments he can find, bemoaning that he doesn’t have the means to steal a piano. He also shamelessly takes a very hefty sum of money, considering it the damages owed for the shit he went through.

They don’t stay long. Murtagh returns to Thorn and spends a while cleaning his pilfered bounty of the magic contamination. He replaces the violin’s broken E string and tunes it, but the bizarre echoes rebounding through the caves make Thorn wrinkle his nose with a huff, so he waits until later to play. After that, they sit together at the edge of an opening and watch the city, as they did before. Murtagh gazes down at the new castle and thinks of Nasuada. He will come back and meet with her, he decides, but not now. They watch until nightfall, then leave before dawn the next morning.

They return to their routine after that. Murtagh constructs a little ramshackle building for storage more than anything. I thought you told your brother you were going to build a huge castle, Thorn mocks as he struggles with the construction.

“Oh fuck you, you know I’m too stupid to manage that.” Thorn snorts a plume of smoke.

In that and many other little ways, the wild, northern expanses become a sort of home. Murtagh’s constant wanderings through valleys and around mountains have started to leave faint trails along the routes he favors most. Snow doesn’t cling so long to the clearing where Thorn sleeps, where the heat of his body has warmed layers of the earth. They fit into this place without questioning their belonging or fearing rejection, for nature will always allow for anything determined to survive. Even so, the isolated peace of their surroundings does not always lend them peace of mind.

The cold shadow cast by the glow of dawn hidden away behind the mountain where they had slept the night reminds Murtagh of the same dark cast the overhang draped over Uru’baen’s citadel in all but late afternoon. Thorn shifts uncomfortably at the observation; he had slept very uneasily. This shade is much more welcoming and soothing than it was there, Murtagh says to him, hoping to assert more appreciation of the present than resentment of the past.

It doesn’t work. Anything is better than the way things were there, Thorn replies bitterly. That place was a prison, where even the earth itself pinned us in. You knew that to begin with; you had already lived so long trapped in the dark shadow of Uru’baen before you escaped in search of freedom. The dragon turns away to look at the backlit silhouette of the mountain. ...Freedom that I took from you.

Murtagh can’t restrain a tight sigh. Rearranging himself stiffly, he braces for the emotional toil awaiting them, an effort he might usually worry would cause offense, but this guilt has grown so cyclical that Thorn himself is preparing himself with even greater exasperation. It doesn’t stop the guilt from seeping up through their cracks anyway. Murtagh rubs his eyes. “You know I don’t feel that way, Thorn.”

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[I'll update this post with a link here when the fic is published ❤]