I last updated this story six years ago as a high school student. I am now a college graduate living and working on a different continent. Despite not updating this story in an eternity I still get reviews and PMs expressing interest in Inner Fire. My work can be rather niche, so I am always deeply touched whenever my plot and my characters inspire such passionate reactions in my readers. Even after all these years, you guys still find something in my writing that sparks you, and that's freaking amazing.

Though this story last updated six years ago, I started it nearly a decade ago in 2008 before I even entered high school. The stories I published in that era were started with a vague picture in my mind and a plot that developed only as I wrote the chapter. Most of these stories petered out beyond the first few chapters as I lost my passion and interest, but Inner Fire stuck along a little longer and developed a bit more of this plot. Inner Fire, Sunrise, and Twilight Rider Redux were always intended to be epics, but IF was the least developed of the three. I am a completely person than when I started that fic and at times can't even recognize myself as its writer. While Sunrise is but a few chapters away from completion, and the muse took me by the hands to pump out thirty chapters for TRR, Inner Fire will never be finished as a full story.

I hate authors that tantalize me with the hope of a new chapter after years of silence only to just crank out a lengthy author's note explaining it will never be finished. If I had just intended that, I would have marked this story as complete and noted it as cancelled in its description. I don't want to do that to you guys, not when you've stuck around with me for so long, so let me give you what closure I can by revealing what I can of Inner Fire's plot:

This story was written long before Inheritance came out and would have used nothing from it because I did not care for the last book. To be honest, I was kind of meh about Brisingr too. I didn't like there being a convenient land across the sea to run away to or the Deus ex Machina of dragon eggs sitting on Vroengard. That's why I wrote off all the land outside of Alagaesia as being a forbidden wasteland crawling with eldritch abominations and things too terrible to contemplate. It prevents the characters from running off and explains the massive plot hole about why a peaceful society of Dragon Riders didn't seem to make contact with any outside civilizations or flush out their map beyond Alagaesia's vaguely defined borders. Likewise, there is no secret trove for Eragon and Saphira to rescue on Vroengard. The Vroengard here would have been revealed to be just as forsaken from the last bitter fight between Galbatorix and the Dragon Riders. It prevents there from being a secret horde of eggs to conveniently restore the Riders and is a warning about what a full scale with Galbatorix could end up in - the magical version of nuclear fallout.

Faolin and Aelath are held in captivity at Urubaen as their brutal training and conditioning continues. The trio's first big trial is in slaying a scouting Lethrblaka and Ra'zac, leading a furious Galbatorix to unleash his Urgals into the Spine to flush out the rogue Rider. Roran and Saphira would have wished to remain in training until she was old enough to breathe fire, but Eragon's dreams of Arya suffering drive them into action sooner than intended. Roran and Brom are able to infiltrate Gil'ead. Brom is fully prepared to sacrifice himself when Durza arrives to buy them time to escape, but Murtagh's appearance coincides with Eragon diving out of the sky to roast the Shade and save his damned mentor from a suicidal engagement.

With two dragons there is no need for horses to swiftly escape to the Varden. Arya recovers and believes Faolin dead as Glenwing. Brom's presence prevents Murtagh's imprisonment. Roran and Murtagh bond. Their budding friendship painfully reminds Brom of his own relationship with Morzan. The trio, more cynical than their canon selves, do not play nice with the Varden's attempts to turn them into figureheads and parade them around. Roran gives Elva a blessing in the human tongue and thus does not curse her for life. Instinct whispers Eragon to go deeper into the mountains, but there are greater pressures on his mind. Oromis and Glaedr grant their permission for Arya and Brom to reveal their existence, but an army is bearing down upon Farthen Dur. Faced with the chance to flee to Ellesmera or stand their ground and fight, the trio choose the latter.

Roran and Saphira fight as dragon and Rider. Brom, a fully trained Rider without a dragon, becomes lethally effective when Eragon deigns to become his mount for the battle's duration. From that battle shall spring rumors of two rebel Riders. Durza happily slaughters a large portion of his army, including the last Ra'zac, to twist the surviving Lethrblaka into a monstrous abomination more than capable of fighting a dragon. After a long and difficult battle, the four are on the verge of triumph when Faolin arrives upon Aelath.

Faolin, whose primary objective is to secure Saphira and her Rider, is fighting his oaths as hard as he can. The minimal action they do take is still nearly enough to cost the rebellion the battle. Durza is spiteful enough to trying getting Saphira killed 'by accident' in the battle so that Faolin is punished for it. In an act of wild magic Eragon is able to intercept the blow, dragging Brom along with him. Brom deals Durza the fatal blow at the cost of his own life. Saphira's first flame, coupled with a desperate burst of wild magic to save Eragon, creates a magical backlash that consumes Durza's mount along with everyone else in the air. Faolin's spellwork shields them from death, but leaves himself, Roran, and all three dragons wounded. Reasoning any further engagement would cost the life of a dragon, Faolin is able to bend his oaths enough to order a tactical retreat with the surviving Urgals of Durza's army, who have no wish to die.

Eragon remains poisoned by the wrathful spirits that puppeted Durza. Were it not for Oromis's intervention, he would have been devoured as Carsaib once was. Eragon is not grateful. Brom is dead. So is Ajihad and Orik, King Hrothgar's heir. His loved ones were nearly killed in a battle Oromis and Glaedr would have been able to change if they stood by their sides.

The aftermath of the battle reveals the Twins turned traitor and dragged Murtagh off with them. Brom, fearing he would not survive the battle, leaves behind a final message to his students in the form of a gem containing his last words. He reveals his life of regrets; of not being able to save Morzan from his path of destruction, or Saphira from dying beneath him, of leaving Selena pregnant with a stillborn child and desperate enough to leave her eldest child behind. Brom reveals Roran's blood ties to Murtagh and apologizes for being the one to tear their family apart. He tells his students how proud he is of them, his stubborn and proud apprentices who had proved themselves beyond his greatest hopes.

Zar'roc is the blade wrested from Morzan's dead hands. Riders did not often marry and sire children. Those not buried with their blades imparted them onto someone worthy. Theirs was not succession by blood, but succession by student and ideal. Brom won Zar'roc to turn such misery upon the Empire. That misery is now Roran's, to use as he wills.

Brom then reveals his own tumultuous relationship with Oromis and Glaedr, those who were once his mentors and those who had now locked themselves away from the world. With his death, there is no one else but them to complete Roran's training. If they wish to stand their ground and fight for this land, then he begs them to put aside their personal feelings and tolerate his old masters enough to finish their preparation for the long battle ahead.

Lastly, he pleads with Eragon and Roran both to protect Saphira, for a life without her is not a life at all.

Roran wishes to abandon his training to search for Murtagh, but Eragon and Saphira urge him on to Du Weldenvarden. Orik did not bond with Roran as he did with Eragon in canon, and now he is dead. Hrothgar does not adopt Roran into his clan. He stonily turns down the dwarves who want to accompany them in a slow progression on land. His heir and surrogate son is dead, but one of many lost to the war. Roran shall master his role and he shall not be delayed. Arya, torn between rage and grief and betrayal over Faolin's fate, is the only one to join them on their flight north. She and Eragon form an odd friendship.

In Du Weldenvarden the elves push for celebration and act at times as if the war outside their forest does not exist. Roran and the dragons refuse to indulge them. Their lives are dedicated to vigorous training and learning all they can to figure out Galbatorix's weaknesses. Oromis and Glaedr try to ease their new charges into their education and grant them the time to mourn. Roran hounds them for what happened on Vroengard - the magical fallout in the last days of the Fall was so intense it left a cursed wasteland in its wake. An outright assault on Galbatorix threatens the same outcome, perhaps consuming the rest of the habitable world. Vanir's attempts to take his bitterness out on Roran are squashed by Eragon, who has no time for such petty shit.

Thorn hatches for Murtagh and his own training from hell begins. Faolin and Aelath are there to slightly soften the blow of it.

From there my vision becomes a lot less cohesive. Eragon eventually follows instinct deep into the Beor Mountains, where the last of the wild dragons hide away at the edges of the world. Their leader is a close relative of his - his grandmother, perhaps, bitter at all that the war and Riders took from her. Her only egg given to the Riders turned out to be Aelath's. Another daughter of hers was hunted down like an animal when the Forsworn ripped her heart of hearts from her, but was able to protect the egg that would become Eragon.

Eragon is disgusted by this cowardice. The survivors eke out a living on the outskirts of the habitable world - many are sick and starving, with no hope for the future beyond a vague hope of outliving Galbatorix. The lack of food has rendered them infertile - no new eggs have been laid in years. Cannibalism of the dead sometimes means the difference between limping along for a few more days. Rather than seize what little chance they have to rage against the dying of their kind, the dragons have decided to fade away in the dark.

By the time of the final battle at the gates of Urubaen Eragon has shaken the dragons from their malaise. Their presence is what turns the tide, but by the time the dead from a long and bitter campaign include Islanzadi, the Twins, Blodgharm, and King Orrin. Oromis and Glaedr are felled in the battle that almost breaks the rebellion's will to continue fighting. Infuriated by the defeats, even more so by Faolin twisting his oaths to slip out of Farthen Dur, weaves spells into his servants that will ensure the most gruesome demise imaginable should one ever weasel their way out of his whims again. His increasing carelessness with his spells results in wrecking havoc across the kingdom, from blights to natural disasters to things twisted beyond reality or else things that slipped in through the cracks Galbatorix left in his wake.

Faolin and Aelath have little personal connection to our trio. The elder dragon submits to taking Arya as a rider for the battle so that they are both at their deadliest and have a fighting chance of putting their loved ones out of their misery. They succeed at the cost of their own lives.

The rebellion seems to have a real chance of winning when Galbatorix decides to take his Empire, and the rest of the habitable world, along with him. The surviving dragons present at the battle, Roran and Murtagh with them, lunge at Shruikan. Zar'roc silences Galbatorix, who was but a scant three words from unmaking the world.

...But not before Galbatorix's death throes get one last bit of vengeance in. Saphira's act of desperate wild magic to save her most precious one comes a moment too late to save Roran, her Rider, already dead. It is enough to spirit Eragon away from his demise when Galbatorix's spell collapses upon itself and takes Urubaen with it.

Eragon knows in his heart of hearts he never acted to save Roran. His intended sacrifice was for Saphira, and Saphira alone. It will be the one secret he forever keeps from her.

Thorn and Murtagh drag their master down with them, as they dreamed of.

Galbatorix did not die easily. By the time the dust clears assassination and battle have claimed Nasuada and Hrothgar. The lords of the surviving, if devastated, Imperial cities retreat behind their walls and fear genocide from vengeful rebels. The tattered remnants of the Varden are led by a reduced Council of Elders. Surda is led by a cousin of Orrin's. The dwarves, sickened by so much dead and destruction, return to their mountain holdfasts. There is no place for humanity with their walls. With those closest in line to the throne all dead, Vanir inherits and does his best to unite the elves, and returns with them to their forest to mourn their thousands dead. For a race so long-lived and lacking in children, the death toll is devastating.

Jeod Longshakes never imagined himself surviving Brom, even the very war that began long before his birth. He is among the grizzled old veterans left to broker peace, for the bright new generation that seemed destined to succeed them has been cut down.

The furor of the dragons burned themselves out like a supernova in that final battle. The elder dragon's successor, still young during the Fall, leads her people back into the Beor Mountains. Their close ties to humanity severed, Eragon and Saphira retreat with them.

But first they fly to Teirm, to one man old long before his time awaits proper closure. Eragon presents him Zar'roc and Saphira the ashes of his son. No words are spoken. Eragon does not shy away when the man he called uncle raises the sword against him. The gash across his snout is but one more upon his soul.

Like a broken bone set wrong, the world will never be the same again. Galbatorix did not unmake magic, but the damage he wrought will echo for eternity. It takes far more than a word and a will to kill. The spirits wielded by the Shades and sorcerers are pale ghosts. The pact is as dead as its Riders, as dead as the era where Alagaesia knew only two factions, the Empire and those against it.

The human kingdoms sometimes stretch across the western half of the continent. Sometimes they are little more than city states. Without a central power the differences that have long grown in them are allowed to blossom. Over the centuries new tongues and people dawn, their allegiances as varied and shifting as human nature.

Without the dragons to bolster them elves once more know age, though slower than their human neighbors to the south. The laughter of children soon joins the laments of their elders. Du Weldenvarden shrinks to a fraction of its former grandeur. Its enchants are no longer for formidable. As the elves grow beyond their boundaries, so too do the humans push inward. Sometimes their races meet in peace and other times in war.

The dwarves were never content under a central authority. Without an Order to press unity upon them or an Empire to inspire safety in numbers, they fragment again. Brief bursts of nostalgia or conquest that sometimes crowns a new king or warlord never last for long. In time their children shall forget the bitterness of their elders and once more venture down from the Beor Mountains. The goods of the human kingdoms inspire outreach among the bold even while the conservative hardliners shall always urge total isolation.

With the Empire's decline the Urgals are able to establish a firmer hold in the Spine. Their relationship with their human neighbors has enough highs and lows to inspire generations of bards and storytellers on both sides.

Werecats, as always, lurk on the boundaries of it all. To the peoples of Alagaesia they are more phantom than hard truth.

If werecats are the subject of wild rumor, than dragons become utter myth. Were it not for their bones, later generations could almost reason they never existed in the first place. They believe the dragons dead with the Riders, as all the other legendary heroes that perished in the Age of Ash.

When the races first begin to extend into the east, generations after their numbers were replenished and flourished further, there are whispers of cursed ground and fire-breathing beasts. Beyond those first pioneers, these are dismissed as fabrication. Sure, the soil might take more effort to till, but it still bares fruit. Fish and animals are seldom sighted, but they still exist and grow by the year.

When there is no more Alagaesia to be explored and exploited, the descendants of those who once burned their ships or shunned the sea altogether rediscover ship and sail. Those that sail into the west never return.

Those that sail into the sunrise eventually reach shore after a long and treacherous voyage. Expecting virgin land, they instead find long-crumbled ruins. Though whatever races built those ancient cities are long dead, game is not as abundant as first thought and well wary of predators.

It does not take long for that first curious dragon to stumble across that ship and its intrepid crew. She has heard of these folk only in stories and ancestral memory, but she knows them all the same. Her ancestors came from that land. When the magic that nearly ate the world started to recede, her ancestors raged against it with flame and power of their own, reclaiming what was long lost for them and their own.

Her senses scream both ally and enemy to these strange foot-footed creatures. But this young dragon is loyal to her clan first and foremost. As commanded by order and instinct, she flies for her elders. They are the oldest dragons alive. They were hatched centuries before her people left the sunset lands, in age remembered in infamy. All dragons in this land descend from them. For, in that age, there weren't a great number of dragons at all.

Those first sailors are stunned when their minds are filled with voices that are like none they have ever felt before. These words, if they can be called words, echo with flame and fang, pride and peace, a desire to meet on equal terms.

After much trepidation and heated debate the crew's captain agrees to meet this mysterious pair.

So descend the dragons. The larger is a grizzled male. His brutal face is marred by the red wound slashing across the snout, for Zar'roc's misery and his own guilt have left their mark. At his side is a female. Beneath numerous scars her scales are still a lustrous sapphire.

They introduce themselves as legends.

And so ends Inner Fire.

If that's not how you thought this would end, neither did I when I wrote that first prologue a friggin' decade ago. Aside from the initial set-up, I try to let stories organically and flourish on their own. When trying to come up with an end that gave me (and hopefully you readers) some closure, this thing took on a mind of its own

In my mind this story took on a much grimmer chapter when I first devised What Lies In the West, but I knew from very early on Roran would not survive the final battle. In the end it felt poetic for the scope to be far greater. After all, the Fall is implied to have devastated Alagaesia and devastated populations. In comparison, the deaths in the main series felt like very little beyond the 'usual suspects.' And, considering how our heroic rebel leaders wanted always to lead the charge... Well, it kills morale downright quick if you kill the idol first.

It's not the old that get slaughtered in war, it's the young and brave that get sent out to defend them. Some survive their world falling apart, and, bit by bit, raise up a new one. It's easy to go out in a blaze of glory, but a true fire can burn long and low without choking on the ashes.

This the ending my heart and hands wrought. This is the 'canon' ending to this story. The wonder of fan fiction allows us to dream up divergences and entire new realities for the worlds and characters we love. My muse just happened to show its appreciation through letting the horrors of war and the fridge horrors of Inheritance Cycle magic loose.

To everyone, thank you for years of continued interest and excitement in this story. I hope I gave a bit of closure to you all. And if I just triggered a burning desire to write a different story... Well, we're fan fic readers for a reason ;)