Chapter 12: Expedition South

He had claimed the buried library as his own without quite noticing he had done it. Back then he had been too deep in the translations to care where he slept, and so now that he was over with them he was too busy with everything else to move away.

So the library had become his home, and the year had filled it with a concerning amount of stuff.

He had hoarded without meaning to.

Stacked leaves of that strange metal that would not rot, fists of charcoal, small bright trinkets dredged off the dead ships, gold from the ruins and gold from his heists heaped in no order at all, and everywhere underfoot and up the walls the sprawl of a year's thinking.

Plans. Columns of figures. Blueprints drawn and crossed out and drawn again.

He kept meaning to tidy it. He kept not doing it, and today would be no different.

He read until dusk, as he usually did, slouched in a corner of the room, in an absolute darkness he barely took notice of anymore, until a great black head shoved itself up under the stack of pages he was holding and a low insistent whine filled the chamber.

"All right," Hiccup grumbled. "All right. We'll eat something."

They ate raw, the both of them, tearing at the cold meat with their teeth and not much else. Somewhere in the year that had stopped being strange and become the norm.

Maybe because lighting a fire for a body that felt no cold and saw past dark was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe because the hybrid body itself was better made now for taking food the way a dragon took it.

Either way, Hiccup had stopped minding, and decided not to look too closely at which was which.

There was lamb, and dried meat, and a fistful of berries, and some water from the wells, and after they were done eating, he climbed up out of the rock the way he did most nights.

To his remade eyes the deep of the night was only a sort of silver daylight, paled to the colour of ash. The small white stars he had grown up under had drowned somewhere in all that grey, which was a shame, because he missed them.

It was a small thing to miss, but even little things could hurt.

Hiccup looked aside, searching for the length of driftwood which was usually close, ah, there you are he picked it up and he threw it, hard, out over the gravel and far over the water.

And Toothless was off the cliff and after it before it even left his hand, snapping it out of the air and wheeling back to drop it, sodden, at his feet.

How many times had he thrown this stick in the past year? He had lost count.

"Again?"

The lack of joy in his voice was clearly communicated, but a bright excited ripple reached him through the bond, and he chuckled despite himself.

"You're perhaps the most powerful dragon left in the world, and you want to play fetch." He threw it again anyway. "Unbelievable."

The dragon flew after it again, delighted, and for a moment Hiccup let himself only watch.

Because once he was left alone the thing assembling itself at the back of his mind began turning, the problem that never fully slept, and his face went still and cold by slow degrees, and the game was over.

His failure to tame more dragons in the eight moons since they began nesting in the island was not some failed whim, or a failed pet project, or a thing he could let lie.

He had set out to tame them for a plain reason: that a single Night Fury and one pair of hands, no matter how strong, could not hold an island this size. Not forever.

The world did not yet know the fog was gone.

It probably did not know the island existed at all, or that it stood now in plain sight miles off its own shores.

Yet still, ships blundered into these waters more often every season, and there would only be more, and one night one would slip past him, or he would hesitate a heartbeat too long, and then the world would know, and there would be no more breaks after that.

His plans for the future required venturing off the island more in the year to come, not less. That was the reason he needed dragons of his own. He needed a force that could hold his shore while he and Toothless made moves.

His slit eyes narrowed at the dark horizon. For a moment the green of them glowed, faint and cold. It barely lasted a moment.

Whatever lays south has ended up taking every single dragon I have managed to tame.

Who is doing it? Why do so? With what means?

The questions kept coming, and they would keep coming. He was familiar with them after so much time failing to find the answers.

So everything came down to the question under all the other questions: Find the source of it. Stop it from doing it, if possible, and do it without being seen, without leaving the ancient ruins bare or unprotected, and without dying.

He had turned the problem a hundred ways and scrapped most of his solutions:

Following a fleeing dragon on Toothless. They had tried, in fact they had tried more than once.

The dragons flew dead straight and fast over open water, on and on past the edge of anywhere he dared range from home, and every time the trail dissolved into empty sea, and every hour of the chase was an hour the island stood open behind them.

Catching one as it turned, and studying it. They had tried that too. Useless. Once a dragon was caught in whatever was taking hold of it, nothing reached it. Not Hiccup's presence, not food, not even sleep. The moment he let it loose it only flew south, the same as all the rest.

Combing the sea himself until he struck the source. It would work, theoretically, at least if the origin of the problem was not too far away, but it would take too long, and the same problem under all of it: every day out was a day his home stood unprotected.

He had discarded all these options many times before, and he discarded them again today, until only a single way was left, and he did not like it.

He would not let himself say it.

The only way of doing this was doing it alone, and going alone meant leaving Toothless behind.

A year ago the thought would have been unbearable, because he had no one else in the world and nothing else mattered.

That was still true. In many ways.

Yet he had learned better in others, and he was nearly certain now of what he had only lately confirmed, in the days since the new prosthetic had given the Night Fury his independence back:

The bond between them hardly thinned with distance.

Toothless flew free more often than not these days, and needed no rider to hold the sky. So for the first time the idea of leaving him alone did not stop his breath.

It only sat in his chest, cold and heavy, a thing he would have to do, and sooner than he would otherwise have wanted to.

The island was too precious to gamble. That much was certain.

It was not only a massive island full of unexploited resources, it was not only rock and ruin. It was the knowledge on the libraries, and the murals, and a thousand answers still locked in the oldest pages. It was the pale tree, and the kind of powers it could birth.

Most of all, it was the one place in the world that had not tried to kill him. Somewhere in the year this island had become, simply, his home, and he would not leave it open to be picked apart by savages off a ship.

There is no other way.

So it would be him. Alone. Whether he liked it or not. His decision was made.

He had learned, over the year, to read the dragons the way a fisherman reads weather, and with senses like his it was not, in truth, very hard.

He knew now what ordinary looked like for each of the few species of dragon that had settled here, the everyday grammar of their feeding and squabbling and sleep.

And he had learned the other side too.

The small wrongness that came just before one of them was taken over. The sudden stillness that fell over the flock around it. The way it stopped answering its own kind. The faint nervous tremor in its wings, as though it were listening to a sound no one else could hear.

Both halves of that knowing were what let him try the mad plan.

His stretched-wide senses were kept on constant awareness for days on end, searching for the right cues. The hush. The wrongness. A Nadder on the far ridge gone suddenly deaf to the world.

They were in the air seconds later.

He timed it to the launch. The Nadder came up off the mountains in that straight blind line that ran out past the horizon, and Hiccup brought Toothless in above it, aligned it, and jumped.

He came down hard between the Nadder's spines in midflight.

Hiccup was heavy now. Half again the weight of a grown man, all of it packed lean and hard into a frame that carried no waste, dense as the creature he had been remade to mirror.

And whatever had hold of the Nadder's head had no influence whatsoever over mass.

The animal went down a hundred feet in a sideslip, fighting the air the whole way, while he lay flat along its neck with both fists locked around its spines and his heart hammering in his chest.

Still, the dragon did not even fight him off. In fact it seemed to not mind him at all. Which was ideal.

The infected Nadder did not take long to stabilise its flight and finally find its line again, lower than it had been and beating harder for it, and set its blind head south.

The wind tore his long black hair off his face as he settled low between the spines, and he looked once over his shoulder.

"Toothless."

The Night Fury was already shrinking behind him. Smaller, and smaller, a black speck wheeling over a cloud, and then the cloud itself going small, and for the first time in more than a year the two of them were coming apart.

It frightened him as badly as he could feel it frightening the dragon.

So he shut his eyes and pushed it all down the bond, hard. His steadiness. His resolve. Everything in him that did not shake.

I'm all right. I'll come back. Hold the island.

And Toothless pushed it back, the same and fiercer. The distance took the last sight of him, and the journey south began.

The night was the longest he had known.

He could not sleep braced upright between the spines, could not read, could not do one thing to make time move faster. He could only stand, breathe, and try to settle his mind while the oceans rolled by beneath him.

By the next morning he was still standing braced over an ocean with no edges, half of him on a knife of unease, the other half, absurdly, bored to death.

The flight took almost a full day, longer than it would have taken the dragon if it wasn't carrying an uninvited guest. The Nadder's spines were a misery to stand among without a saddle, and for most of it nothing happened at all.

He had told himself to treat it as an experiment, and he noted, with sour satisfaction, the one useful thing it proved.

The bond did not weaken.

Not over open water, not over hours. He could still feel Toothless plainly, a warm fixed point at the back of his mind.

He could also feel the dragon fire off a bright pulse of triumph every few hours, probably over some seagull he had caught, and he noted, with rather less satisfaction, that it was becoming genuinely annoying.

More hours passed.

The ocean went on and on, grey and unending, as wide as the sky above it, until he could no longer tell which of the two he hung suspended in.

Then the light began to fade.

Fade... In the middle of the day?

The subtle change in lighting sprung him from his meditation. The ash came first. It bled the blue out of the clear sky shade by patient shade into a sick dark grey, and the smell of it reached him next, ash and melted stone, sharp and sour in the back of his throat.

Then the islands.

They began as scattered specks below, small bare rocks, and as the miles passed they thickened and drew together, a scatter becoming a cluster becoming a crowd, all of it gathering inward toward some centre he could not yet see.

An archipelago, and a huge one. His read of the sea told him that much.

Then a smear of smoke across the horizon, a plume of grey almost black. Then, beneath it, the low red glow of rivers of moving rock. And then the peak itself, vast and volcanic, crowned in rings of ash, rising and rising out of the murk until it filled half the sky.

Dragon Island.

He knew it in his bones before his mind found the word.

This was their nest. The one his father and every chief before him, and every chief of the other viking tribes, had spent their lives hunting and never actually found, the lair behind the fog that no Viking ship had ever sailed back out of.

They had flown south, and onto Helheim's Gate.

And so had every dragon he had touched this year.

Every Nadder he had eased off a ridge, every Nightmare he had steadied with his voice, every small Terror that had begun to trust him.

Sooner or later each of them had gone blank-eyed, taken the same straight line, and vanished into this horizon.

Now he knew where the horizon led. Whatever waited at the throat of that mountain had wanted his dragons badly enough to reach an ocean wide to take them, and it had, one by one, without ever once showing itself.

He was too shaken by the idea to feel the tingle of unease creeping up the back of his skull.

Then it bloomed. All at once, terror, the flat animal certainty of being watched, of standing in the open in front of a thing old and treacherous and wicked beyond his fear of it. Every instinct he owned screamed the same word. Run. One wingbeat nearer that mountain was death.

Go. Now.

He gritted his teeth and jumped.

The Nadder could not be steered out of its path, he had learned that much, it was too far under the pull to answer a rider. There was nothing to do but leave it.

They were high. Terribly high. The truth of it only struck him once he was falling.

The seabirds below were specks and the white surf on the rocks was thin as torn paper, and the fall would have killed the younger Hiccup Haddock a dozen times over.

However, he had spent careful afternoons learning exactly this off Toothless, throwing himself into rougher and rougher landings until he found the edges of what would break him, and he was nearly sure those edges lay further out than this.

I hope.

He spread himself flat against the air as he fell, letting it drag and slow him as much as possible, and at the last instant, with the grey sea rushing up vast beneath him, he folded into a tight ball and hit.

The water closed over him and something in the side he fell over gave in with a deep wet crack, and the pain of it tunneled out the world, a rib stove in, the whole of the impact driven up through one point of his ribs like a spear.

Luckily in that same breath, the watching presence lifted off his mind, drawn back like a hand off the back of his neck.

It was worth it.

Even folded around the pain in his side, gasping salt, he knew it was worth it. This warning had been the loudest of any he had ever felt, and it had not eased until the sea closed over him.

He swam for the better part of an hour, every stroke a fresh white pull through the broken bone, away from the mountain, toward the nearest bare scrap of shore.

And only when he was dripping and alone on solid stone, only after he had pushed a long steady reassurance down the bond so that Toothless would not come tearing across the sea after him, did he let himself begin, at last, to wonder what he had found.

Or what had found him.

It was a week, and it felt like a month.

He stood on the peak of his half-drowned scrap of volcanic stone, with nothing on it but him and the wind, and watched. And each grey day, what he watched took something solid out of him and left less of him standing than the day before.

He was hurt still. The rib gone in the fall from the Nadder had not set right, and every breath and every turn reminded him of it. He did not resent the pain. The pain was the price of a right choice.

He had jumped off a dragon three miles above the sea. The younger version of him would have argued the odds, weighed the drop, hesitated a heartbeat too long, and died with the Nadder in some throat of stone under this mountain.

The remade body had not offered him the room to argue.

It had shoved a single word into the back of his skull and he had obeyed before his mind had caught up, and every day spent watching this place confirmed, more surely than the last, that another wingbeat under that pull would have been the last one of his life.

What he saw opened a part of his past he had spent a year trying to bury.

The raids.

Or rather, the three hundred years of dragon wars.

Dragons coming down out of the night sky on Berk, and on every other settlement strung across the north sea, season after season after season, carrying off the sheep and the winter stores, burning the boats, inevitably killing men and women and children in the process.

The endless grinding war that had made his people into what they were, that had taught every child of Berk to hate before it could walk and to kill before it could read.

The war that had, in the end, put a bleeding boy on a night fury and thrown them both off the edge of the world.

In all the years he had spent living in Berk, in all the nights he had spent crouched in a smoking house with the screaming of dragons overhead, he had never once asked the only question that mattered.

Why. Why do they do it.

He was probably the first in three hundred years to ask that question.

For the vikings the dragons were monsters, and monsters raided, and that was the whole of the answer, and the whole of the lie.

However, Hiccup knew better. He had the real answer now.

Day and night they came in. Dozens. Hundreds. Dragons of every kind.

Nadders and Nightmares and Gronckles, Zipplebacks, Scauldrons, Whispering Deaths, Terrors in their thousands, and things he had no name for, kinds that shared no nature and no shape and should by every law have been tearing one another out of the sky.

Instead they flew together.

They flew like ants, in vast rivers that streaked above the grey, wing to wing, all of them silent, all of them laden, dragging lambs and fish and whole sides of cattle by the ton, pouring down into the open mouth of the mountain.

Yet the dragons themselves, for all they were bringing, were too thin. Ribs stark under scale, wings worn to rags, dragons starving themselves to fly more food down the throat of the mountain.

And not, very often, pouring back out.

It was wrong in a way that went down past reason and sat in the gut.

He had spent a year learning that no two species could share a cliff without a quarrel, and here a hundred kinds moved as one thing. And once that impossibility was in the sky above him, the rest of the picture he had carried since childhood turned itself inside out.

It was not a raid. It had never been a raid.

It was a tribute.

The raids on Berk had not been hunger, and they had not been malice, and they had not even been survival.

They had been a performance, played out at the end of an invisible leash.

Dragons starving their own and flying onto Viking spears, and Vikings answering with axes and fire and three hundred years of fury, charging into the flames to die for it, both sides of the war played like pieces on a board by something neither of them had ever seen.

The one thing every dragon in that sky had in common was that not one of them was flying for itself.

Everything else, the self-preservation, the instinct, the small particular soul of each one, had been scraped clean out.

In every blank-eyed shape that vanished down that throat he saw what Toothless might have been. What Toothless very likely had been, before he was brought out of the sky and a cove made them something else.

He had not yet laid eyes on the thing in the mountain.

But whatever it was, it was a tyranny with an army of the enslaved at its command, and the bottom of the rabbit hole he had found was far, far deeper than anything he had let himself fear.

It was dusk, and he was crouched over a small fire, relearning the half-forgotten habit of cooking his food, when it came.

The sound reached him, a slow growl, so low it was felt before it was heard, resonating up through the stone and into the hollow of his own lungs. It had a physical weight to it. It was titanic, it was horrible, it turned him to stone where he knelt over the flames.

From the hollow of the mountain he had watched for a week, hoping for nothing more than a glimpse of what lived inside, the thing came out.

It was colossal beyond sense. A moving mountain of scale and bone hauling itself up into the dying daylight, and there was nothing graceful in it, nothing easy, it was only enormous, and terribly fast. Six eyes, set in pairs, pale and cold and blue.

It did not fly so much as fall upward and then hurl itself back down.

It went into the sea like a dropped cliff, and the ocean did not splash so much as flee, a wall of grey water flung outward in every direction, the whole surface recoiling from the place the titan went under.

Then it came up just as fast, steaming, vast, the sea pouring off its flanks in rivers.

And before it folded itself back down into the mouth of the mountain, it turned its head, and for what felt like an age, all six of those pale eyes settled on the vast ocean beyond, and then on the pebble he had been living on for a week, and then on him.

Hiccup Haddock would thank the gods for the rest of his life that the titan had not thought him worth the time.

Because in those few seconds he understood that it had known.

Whatever its name was, whatever it truly was, it had known. Not only now. All along. It had known there was a small watching thing on the little rock, and it had let him watch, the way a man lets an ant cross the back of his hand.

And only now, at the very end, had it troubled itself to lift its head and meet his eyes and let him feel exactly, precisely, how small he was.

Then it was gone, the mountain swallowed it, and Hiccup did not breathe again until it had.

Toothless could not have come fast enough.

He had already put every span of distance he could between himself and the mountain. He swam off his sorry little rock with the half-healed rib grinding at every stroke, and waited on the farthest shore the archipelago would let him reach.

And when Toothless finally tore in low over the water Hiccup did not so much climb onto him as seize hold of his paws as he passed by.

And the Night Fury was already turning, already flying for home, already carrying them both away from the titan as fast as his free wings could take them.