Chapter 13: Sense of Duty

A massive storm had taken hold of the island by the time they made their way back ashore.

The seas were wild, with some waves as tall as trees at times. The winds howled over the massive ragged cliffs and in between the forests and the open grassy hills.

The chaos of it all was enough to overwhelm every one of his senses. Rain hammered the cliffs with the sound of a hundred drums. Thunder rolled in and shook the water in his ears.

His nose caught a thousand smells at once, brine and split wood and wet iron and the bruised green of the storm-torn trees, until they all ran together into no smell at all.

Even the mind-sense that let him feel the shape of the island snagged on the sheer weight of the wind, blind and useless as an eye held open in a river.

Whatever the reason might have been, Hiccup did not stop to look at any of it. He went straight down into the shore of the island like a man starved of fresh water.

He shrank his senses down to a narrow coil at the base of his skull and made for the caves. Down through the long throat of the tunnels, past the murals and the black stair, until he reached the round chamber deep beneath the mountain.

He shut the heavy doors behind him, kindled the lamps, and set to hunting through the shelves before the last of the storm had faded from his ears.

The titan had a name. It took him about three days and three nights to find it. He did not sleep in any of them, and he did not once let his mind off the search, not until the whole of it ran together into a single long fever of pages.

He had gone down into the buried library the moment their feet touched home, before he had eaten, before he had slept, before he had let Toothless do more than press once against his mind to be sure he was whole.

He had sat himself in the cold round room hidden in the depths and he read, and the days had run together the way they always did down there, where his eyes made no difference between noon and midnight.

And there was nothing to mark the hours by but his own hunger and the dull ache of the rib that had not finished healing.

He could not read it all. No one could have.

Most of the library was past saving, whole invaluable shelves gone to damp and rot and the slow weight of the centuries, pages that crumbled to grey meal the moment he breathed on them. So he had to be very careful.

He skimmed past the ruined and the unreadable. The few he could touch with his hands without them turning to dust, he tried searching.

He was hunting any thread that might lead somewhere, and when a shelf gave him nothing he moved to the next, and the next, until at last he had a handful of leads worth the name and sat down to untangle those rather than go on blind.

Red Death.

He found the entry near the bottom of an ancient archive on dragons, half its entries too far worn out to read.

The Red Death. A dragon species that breathed clouds of scorching fire, with six eyes set in pairs, that grew past any natural size and lived not a span of years but rather a whole age of them.

Most important of all, what actually checked out: Red Deaths wielded powers to reach into lesser dragons and take them. To gather a whole flock into a single obedient will and aim it wherever it pleased, the way a man levels a spear.

But not like this.

The book's Red Death ruled a nest. Its own mountain, its own small patch of sky, it could maybe take hold of the dragons that lived and bred within the reach of its call. That was it.

That was the limit the pages set on it. It was a wide limit. It paled beside the titan in the south.

The abomination he had seen was not constrained at all.

It had thrown its leash across a full day of open ocean, out past the edge of every chart, and closed it around the dragons off this island one by one.

He had stood on a bare stone and felt the leash pass over him like an unseen hand.

And he had watched what it dragged: a hundred different species, some he had never so much as heard named, species that should have torn each other from the sky flying wingtip to wingtip in dead silence, all pouring down a single mountain throat, starved and laden and obedient.

No book in all that library had contemplated a thing half so terrible, nevermind actually describe it. The titan he had fled from was worse than anything anyone had ever thought to write.

It was possibly not the only one.

He read on around the entry with a cold in his gut, past the pages too worn to give up their meaning and into the few that were not.

Colossal dragons were rare, the archive affirmed, but there were many in the world. Many species of them.

A white giant wreathed in frost, breathing not fire but ice and raised whole nests of it, and that bent every dragon under the sky to its will with nothing more than being the largest and the oldest and the most terrible thing alive.

A leviathan that lived in the deep salt below all charted water, so vast the pages struggled to give it a shape, and that, more troublingly, was said to speak in the tongues of men.

A pale, near-weightless thing the size of a mountain that nested in the high cloud-banks and drifted with the wind for years at a stretch, seen only in glimpses from the decks of ships.

A slim silver dragon whose scales caught the sun like beaten metal, said to fly faster than its own cry and to punch through the hulls of ships as if they were reed baskets.

Others besides. Old things. Drowned things. Names half-eaten by the centuries.

And a handful of entries whose ink had somehow held, that he made himself set aside without reading, because he could not spend the days it would take to work through them when only one entry mattered right now.

Hiccup sat back against the cold stone and let the metal page rest on his knees and understood, slowly, how small his world had just become.

For the first time in three days he lifted his eyes from the pages and the scratched figures and the guttering light. He looked at nothing at all, and let himself measure the true and impossible size of the thing he had meant to bring down.

It would take total war to kill that thing.

Not a raid, not a clever night and a single Night Fury, but a war, every warrior in the north sea rowing under one banner with every spear they owned, and even then he was not sure.

Could a spear even bite scales like those? Iron did not always.

The pages he had read on lesser Red Deaths spoke of hides that turned axes and hurled harpoons back into the sea, and this one was older by centuries, its plating thicker, its armour grown into itself the way a mountain grows into itself.

And that was only the outside. Ancient as it was, could it still breathe? He suspected it could. The maw he had seen taking tribute did not have the look of a mouth that had forgotten fire.

And under those two, worst of all, the question he did not want to sit with for long: if the fleet ever managed to close within striking distance, would the dragons of its mountain wake to its defence?

Would the same call that dragged them down to feed it drag them up again to shield it?

He had grown, this past year, into something that loomed over normal people, he was stronger and faster and far harder to kill than anything that walked on two legs. And even then, he had felt no larger than an insect.

A creature that size did not lose simply because you wanted it to.

And he had none of it. He had no army. No banners. No engine of war that could so much as scratch a thing that shrugged off the whole sea, because one man, however strong, and one dragon, however rare, were little more than a knife thrown at a mountain.

And there sat the joke of the whole matter, black and perfect: the only army in the world that could ever hope to bring the tyrant down was an army of dragons, dragons freed and gathered and taught to trust him, an army he could only build once the tyrant was already dead.

To kill it he needed the very host that killing it would give him.

He sat with the hopelessness of it for a long moment, because what else could he even do?

Then, somewhere under the cooling despair and the bitterness of finding no answers, he noticed with a flat sort of disgust where his mind had already gone.

To killing. Straight to killing.

The old Berk reflex.

The only answer anyone had ever taught him to anything with scales on it, anything too large or too strange to sit down and try to understand.

He almost laughed at the irony of it.

Yet for all it disgusted him, he did not take it back. Because he had tried to understand that thing, he had tried for days.

In this one case the reflex was right.

Hiccup had seen the Red Death's eyes. He could still remember them vividly. There had been nothing in them to reason with.

They were made of an ancient arrogance and a deep mad certainty that only age, and ages of getting its way, can pour into a thing. It would not be gentled. It would not be turned. It would sooner perish than kneel or be tamed, or so much as abandon a single one of its whims.

He could not wall its influence out either...

He had spent everything he had hunting the trick, the clever angle, the third path he always seemed to find, and there was simply none to find.

He could not shield the island, there was no recorded way to do it. He could not just hide a few dozen dragons from a call that could cross the entire sea. Hells, he could not even feel the thing by which the Red Death reached out and bent dragons, let alone block it.

The harder he looked for the way past the problem, the more certain he grew that there was no way past at all. Well. There was one.

He supposed, that ought to count for something.

Hiccup could, he realised, simply outlive it.

The book gave the Red Death an age measured in many centuries. However, this one was clearly an ancient specimen. It was no young thing in its prime. It was an elder, old past the reckoning of the men it preyed on.

Hiccup would eventually outlast it.

A hybrid's years ran on and on, year upon year, decade upon decade, until even the titan's remaining life would fall short beside his own.

He could wait.

He could hold the island for sixty years, eighty, a hundred, and one grey morning the call would simply stop, the thing at the far end of it would have finally grown old and died alone in its mountain, and he would still be standing there.

He laughed out loud, once, in the dark. It was a short dry laugh with no humour in it.

Three days and nights in the deepest reaches of a library that held most of what the world had ever learned about dragons, and the best plan he had found, the surest road to victory over the tyrant in the south, was the very plan he could have named in the first hour:

Be patient for a human lifetime, and let it die of old age.

The size of it pressed down on him until he could hardly breathe. Every other road led to the same dead end.

Every plan that had him strike at the thing, burn it, bleed it, bring it down, ran into the same wall and shattered against it.

He could not win a war he had no army for, against an enemy that could turn any army he raised against him with nothing but its will. Worse than that: the sky above its mountain would not be empty when he came.

Every dragon that had ever bent to the Red Death's call already lived within reach of that call. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands.

The moment he lifted a hand against it, every wing above that peak would turn on him as one body, driven by a will that was not their own, and it would not matter what he had brought or how well he had planned.

He would be pulled from the sky long before he ever laid eyes on the beast itself.

And yet.

On the other side of the scale, the prize was larger than anything he had come to expect. In fact, the consequences were so enormous that they were almost too heavy to bear.

Three hundred years of war.

He made himself see it for what it was, and not just the number.

Three centuries of burning villages and burning ships.

Of mothers dragging children out of the smoke. Of men going up against the night sky with axes and not coming home, and dragons falling out of that same sky with spears in them, starved down to the bone, dying for a hunger that was never even their own.

Three hundred years of both humans and dragons bleeding into the cold sea over a war neither of them had ever wanted, the dead heaped on the shores of a hundred islands, and no end to it that anyone living could see.

He was perhaps the only living person who knew the truth of it.

The only one who had stood on that rock and watched the tribute fly down a mountain's throat and understood that the dragons were not the enemy and never had been, that every axe Berk had ever buried in a dragon's skull had buried it in a slave.

Kill more dragons, nothing would change. The bodies would go on piling up on both sides forever.

Kill the Red Death, and it ended.

It was not just a matter of winning the island, or gathering a guard-force able to defend it from any threats, or about the dragons he would finally be able to tame and keep.

Not anymore. It was deeper and wider than that. It was everything.

It was the war itself. The end of three centuries of raids. The piles and mountains of dead that would, after three hundred years, stop rising.

All because the tyrant calling for them would be gone.

Once it was gone, the dragons under its yoke would be free. None would have need to be hostile anymore, no need to steal from men.

And if they stopped stealing and raiding, then, somewhere far down a road too long and too blurred to see the end of, once men and dragons had learned to let go of their differences, what the murals had promised could be raised again.

Men and dragons under one sky, and no chains on either.

It would save the Vikings.

He sat with that, with the many feelings it evoked, and waited for the old wounds to throb, and they did, and it hurt as much as they always had. The bitterness and the loneliness and the pain had only deepened with time, set hard as cold iron.

He hated them.

He noted, detached, that he hated them as much as when they parted ways in that cove.

Not only for the boy they were willing to set aside and let watch. No. It was because of what they had tried their bloody best to do to Toothless.

There was no longer any line between the boy and the dragon to set the hate on one side of, and he realised there never had been.

Toothless was not something beside his soul but part of it, woven so deep into the shape of who Hiccup now was that a blade meant for one had always been a blade meant for both.

The axes Berk had raised at Toothless had been raised at him.

The death they were so willing to deliver the dragon they had intended to deliver him, in a way. It was all one wound now, and one creature carried it, and that creature loathed every soul on Berk with a single whole heart.

And still.

Hiccup set aside the bitter feelings, the personal grief, the pain. On the other pan of the scale sat the thousands.

The men and women and children up and down the northern seas who had never lifted a hand against him, and who would go on dying for as long as the titan drew breath.

And the dragons. The thousands of dragons who would go on being scraped hollow and flown onto spears, slaves to the last, the way Toothless might have once been.

He weighed his hate of Berk against those thousands, and it was plain that the scale did not so much as tremble.

It was not about forgiveness. He would forgive them nothing.

But he was the only one who could do this, he was the only one in the world capable of it, and so it fell to him to do it, whether he wanted it or not. Even with his grief still very much raw. Even if the gods themselves were standing against him.

Even seeing, as he did, no way under heaven it could actually be done.

Killing the Red Death was the only way. More than that. It was his duty.

The certainty of it settled into him and held him steady, and that steadiness let him draw one long breath and let it out slow.

And with it went all the terror he had been carrying without knowing, the cold animal weight of the titan's eyes that he had packed down and buried under three days of reading, until for one quiet moment he was simply empty, and clear.

That was the moment Toothless struck the bond like a hammer.

A single sharp jolt down the thread between them, wordless and urgent, and with it a stolen fragment of what the dragon was seeing far above: a break in the chaos of the storm, and through it one hollow clap of wood against the waves.

Because while he had been buried in the depths of this mountain, the world had decided to come ashore.

A ship.

Hiccup came up out of the rock into cold night air with heavy strides and the knowledge certain on the back of his mind.

A galleon.

A great deep-bellied ship built for long crossings. For big crews and bulk cargo, far too much vessel to have come this far north for any honest reason. Grounded, by the feel of it, on the rocks of the eastern shore where the seabed shelved too sharp for sand.

People on his island.

They had not yet reached the ruins, those stood high above the cliffs, on the plateau. They must still be down on the shores.

Fuck.

His senses had been shut. Three days of storm-noise had made them worse than useless, everything drowned in the same wet roar, and he had chosen the closed door over the deafening one.

He had blinded himself by his own mistake, the way he had blinded himself a year ago, the night the first man he killed had sneaked in behind him.

Again.

The fury came up his throat faster than any fear, hot and bright and almost scorching. The more ire the more pain. The more anger the less he needed to think, the less he ended up thinking, the easier the next part would be.

If Toothless had not been outside.

If Toothless had not been awake and circling and watching the water the way he always watched it now, the ship would have come and seen and gone, would have carried the secret of the island back into the wide world, and Hiccup would never have known.

He would have gone on reading while strangers drew his coastline onto a map.

The dragon had flown the dusk circuit alone. He had been flying it alone for weeks now, dawn and dusk, ever since the new fin gave him back the sky without a rider, and Hiccup had let him, because it spared the trouble of flying for many hours, many times a day.

That was the whole of their net against the sea. Half a day of blindness between one pass and the next, and a stretch of grey water no ear on earth could cover.

The secret he had killed so many to protect would simply have slipped out of his grasp, in silence, behind his back.

The thought only fed the heat higher.

His jaw set hard enough to ache. The slits of his eyes thinned, and the green of them caught the night and flared brighter.

He was going to have to do it again.

His strides were already carrying him down toward them, sure but hurried, before he had decided to move.

He hated it.

He hated it and the more he did, the more he hated the men who made him do it, and the more he hated them the harder the cold glad creature in him strained toward them, the loathing and the ire winding tighter and tighter around each other until they became a single feeling.

This was my mistake.

He would not make Toothless pay it. These were men, and the killing of these men in particular would be his to carry. A long unhappy pressure nudged at him.

Stay, he pushed down the bond, harder than the dragon deserved. These ones are on me.