Murtagh

He tried to rise, tried to shout, tried to focus his will on a word or spell, but the world was dissolving around him, and his thoughts were as scattered as seeds before that horrible howling wind, and again he saw the black sun and the rising dragon, and an inexorable foreboding of doom crushed any hope he had.

Bachel’s face materialized before him, wisps of vapor wreathing her angled features. Her eyes were glowing with fevered ecstasy, and her lips were ruby red as if painted with blood. And she said, “You cannot win, Kingkiller. I serve the power of dream and He whose mind conjures dream. Sleep.”

Murtagh fought with all his might, but blackness descended, and Bachel and the chamber and all that he knew vanished.

CHAPTER XIII Nightmare

Black sun, black dragon, and an eternity of despair. He was falling toward the bottom of an incomprehensibly large void, and at the bottom lay slumbering a mind of impossible size, whose thoughts moved as slowly as the currents within an icebound sea and were just as black, cold, and hostile. He felt a presence that made him shudder and shrink to insignificance, and all of human endeavor seemed of no more importance than the accomplishments of a colony of ants.

He searched for Thorn, but the bond they shared was no longer to be found. He was utterly alone, without recourse, resource, or hope of rescue.

Then he was spinning through space, and all around malevolence pressed against him with crushing force. He saw dragons tearing at his flesh, and the bodies of his foes laid out across the mortified earth, scorched with flame, charred with soot. He saw the darkness beneath the mountains, and felt the coolness of the earth firm against his sides. Worms fed off his putrefying limbs as the smell of death wrapped him in its charnel embrace.

The void yawned wider. Amid the despair and screeching horrors, a bloody dawn spilled across a brazen land, and he saw himself triumphant: a golden crown upon his head, Zar’roc in his hand, Thorn by his side, and Bachel too…and a world at his feet, bowing to him as they had bowed to his father and Galbatorix.

A vision. A premonition. A dreadful promise.