Durza (The Inheritance Cycle)

“	Do you really think to defeat me, Du Sundavar Freohr? What a pitiful name. I would have expected something more subtle from you, but I suppose that's all you're capable of.	„
	~ Durza gloating to Eragon.

Durza is the main antagonist of Eragon.

His Evil Ranking[]

He has no real loyalty to King Galbatorix and is frequently wondering how to overthrow him.

He kills a group of bandits as a child (although they deserved it).
He is shown in the novel's epilogue to have burned down many cities in the past, butchering their populations and leaving stacks and stacks of corpses in a series of harrowing flashbacks. He either struck them down or ordered them destroyed, all for his own twisted amusement.
He teaches King Galbatorix secrets of black magic to give the malevolent tyrant leverage over the righteous Riders.

He tries to steal the last dragon egg, so his king, Galbatorix can enslave Saphira from infancy. When the heroic elf Arya defies him, he kidnaps her and callously burns the surrounding forest to the ground.
He tortures Arya grievously and graphically, leaving numerous wounds on her arms and the rest of her body, inflicting dozens of bruises, cuts, and blisters which she only survives due to her elf physiology, although she is unconscious for several days after her rescue and would have expired if Eragon hadn't gotten her to the source of the right healing treatment.
He imprisons Eragon when he comes for Arya, nearly poisons him, and later tries to cut him down with his sword.
He leads the Urgals into Farthen Dur to annihilate its population.
He tries to corner Eragon and penetrate his mind, and when the latter backfires, he furiously deals him an atrocious scar on his backside.
With Eragon defenseless from his unspeakable injury, Durza dishonorably raises his sword for the kill, only to be stopped at the last second when Arya rides Saphira and they sacrifice the Isidar Mithrim. Also, his exploding corpse would have skewered Eragon if Lord Oromis hadn't intervened.

The heinous wound dealt by Durza on Eragon's backside continues to haunt him for months to come and severely impedes his ability to do certain things.

He has a tragic past, having grown up with parents who were banished from their native tribe and having lost both of them in his youth, with the child being left alone in the desert to die, leaving him with suicidal thoughts. He was taken in by Haeg, but he was very reluctant and gruff and they lived on lizards. The same bandits who had previously killed his parents and stranded him returned to the desert and murdered his new mentor, and the teenager became obsessed with vengeance, which made him vulnerable to dark spirits which led to his fall to villainy. This, combined with being partially controlled by them for years and dying brutally during the Battle of Farthen Dur, makes him a scapegoat.
Much of his actions are committed under the possession of the dark spirits. He even tried to resist their influence at times but was easily overpowered.

He is the only character from The Inheritance Cycle to be Inconsistently Heinous.
His film adaptation is a Preserved IH, even though his status as a scapegoat is broken (to the point of his death being played for complete satisfaction) and no indication of him being against the idea of demonic possession is ever given; nevertheless, he is still a Generic Doomsday Villain, unlike the mainstream version who has a tragic backstory and a two-dimensional personality.