Chapter 04: Edge of the World I

The ravenous hunger had yet to fade by the third day. Even though his lighter injuries were gone, his body still demanded a disturbing amount of food. Meat, especially.

It was unnerving, being so hungry all the time. Alas with little else to do, Hiccup Haddock obliged.

He ate until his stomach visibly bulged, and then he ate more. Some days he ate more than he used to eat in weeks. Sometimes more than a small family.

Most days as much as Toothless.

He didn't have to wonder why for very long. It happened at dusk, while he was trying to light a fire. He picked up a dry log that someone as scrawny as him had no business lifting.

Then he saw them.

Hints of muscle, laying itself down in cords beneath skin that had never held anything but bone.

Over the next few days the changes became impossible to miss. Veins surfacing along his arms when he strained. Shoulders slowly broadening. A chest that felt fuller. A neck that looked thicker.

Well. Cool. I guess.

He shrugged. Truth be told, he wasn't much interested in what his new body could lift or break. That it had stopped being a thing that failed him was enough, and more than enough. It made surviving marginally easier.

No: What caught him harder was the quiet that came in the days after.

The fog of grief and shock that still clouded his mind burned off at some point, and when it did, his thoughts came faster and colder and cleaner than they ever had. Linear. Focused. Well-oiled, like the gears of a machine rather than those of a human mind.

That shook him harder than anything.

Because his mind, the thing that made Hiccup uniquely Hiccup, was not supposed to work this well.

It was wrong.

There were too many changes, too fast, and he didn't recognise his own body anymore.

It was a cold morning when he waded into the shallows after a fish.

Winter had its hand on the island now. The surf was grey and slushed with the first thin ice of the season, a cold that could stop a grown man's heart in minutes, the same cold of the northern seas he'd been taught to fear before he could walk.

He braced for the killing shock of cold he had grown used to.

It barely reached him.

The water closed grey and icy around his chest, ice knocking softly at his ribs, and his body felt it, distantly, the way you feel a thing through thick gloves.

The killing cold that used to fold him in half a few days back simply went quiet. Dulled down to something distant and foreign on his skin.

It was not totally gone. Not yet.

But it was going.

"This... this too," he asked aloud, to no one but the grey water.

He waded back to shore faster than he had gone in.

There was no joy. Not in this. Whatever joy he could feel about living a life without cold was nothing next to the fear of whatever he was becoming. Because whatever the pale tree had changed in him obviously wasn't finished, and the dulled, distant cold was only its newest sign.

Still the hunger never eased.

Toothless was waiting at the tide line and wouldn't stop nosing at him. Chest, flank, the slow-knitting wound at his shoulder, crooning low and anxious, herding him up out of the surf, worried the way he had been worried since the morning they woke.

Hiccup put his arms around the broad black neck and stood a while in the cutting wind, dripping, and let the dragon fuss over a cold that could barely touch him now.

Yet it wasn't all horror.

The good crept up on him the same way the muscle had. A little at a time, while he wasn't watching.

The sharpened eyesight, that stretched for miles at a time as he flew above the sea. The clear stream of his own thoughts. A body that tired less, and felt the cold less, and healed faster than anything he had seen.

He had spent fifteen years as the smallest and most breakable thing on Berk, frail as a dropped cup, forever one bad winter from the grave.

He was less breakable now.

Not by much, but he was.

Some mornings he caught himself at the cliff's edge, staring at the wall of fog, weighed down by what he had become, and by what people who no longer mattered would feel and say and do about it.

But the pride in his own blooming strength, alien as it once felt, felt worth it.

The nights he did sleep, he came to dread, because that was when Berk came back to hunt him.

The cove, every time, in pieces.

The whistle of the axe. The bite of it into bone. The unbearable flash of pain that came with it.

The wash of his own blood going cold down his side. His father's open, uncomprehending mouth. Astrid's half-raised hand.

Every time, the faces along the rock, frowning down at him, baffled, watching him bleed and not understanding. Never once understanding. Never going to understand if he bled for a thousand years.

He woke from those with his heart slamming and his hands clenched and the taste of cold iron in his mouth.

And each time he woke, the flat steady thing underneath the grief had grown a little larger, and the grief itself a little smaller, and the line between them a little harder.

He was, though he had no word for it yet, beginning to turn numb to those memories.

It happened the way the muscle came in and the bone knit closed. A little at a time, in the dark, while he wasn't watching. A degree colder each time the dream replayed. A degree further from the cove.

Some mornings he caught himself at it and was afraid.

He would think of his old voice, his bony arms, the way he used to laugh with Gobber in the forge, and grieve the boy all over again, and tell himself I don't want to become this. I don't want to stop being the one I used to be.

But the dreams came again the next night.

And the cold thing was always there in the morning, a little larger, patient.

There was only one thing that held the line through it all.

One thing the tree had not taken, and Berk had not poisoned, and the long grey years of being useless had never gotten the chance to spoil. The one thing that had always, from the very first stolen flight out of the cove, been entirely his.

He clung to it now the way a drowning man clings to floating wood, because it was the last place left where he could escape the past, choosing his own direction under the stars.

They flew.

Every clear day, and most of the unclear ones, he buckled into the saddle and worked the pedal and took Toothless up off the high cliffs into the open sky.

And for those hours, and only those hours, he was whole again.

And it was up there, banking out over the grey water with the cold he barely felt now streaming past him, that he was often reminded of everything that had changed.

The distant lights of Berk were no more.

He had always had good eyes for a Viking. Mapping the dark over Berk for the falling shapes of dragons and all.

Yet now, they were sharper than they had ever been. Sharper by the day.

He could pick out things he would have missed before. A seal's head in the grey swell. The shiver of wind on the water that meant a gust coming before it reached the wing. The small movements of the shore sliding by below.

It was not the impossible, edge-to-edge clarity it would one day become.

He only knew that the world had grown a little crisper, a little nearer, as though someone had wiped a long smear off a window he had been looking through his whole life.

Toothless felt it too, he was certain.

The dragon flew differently now beneath him. Surer, as if the two of them shared one keen pair of eyes between them.

For the first time they were free to do as they wished, not bothering to hide, because there was no one left to hide from.

This was the edge of the world, after all.

The wind whipped as the pair dove out of the sea of fog above, the immensity of the island veiled in a night that hid little from their eyes.

Up there, life was still worth living.

That was why he flew every day he could, and most of the days he shouldn't. Because he was fifteen, and he had lost more than he could name, and the question, whether any of this was worth living for, came back, however briefly, as yes.

Then they would land, and the reality of it all would hit, and he would sleep little if at all, and the questions he did not want answered came back.

On gentler days they simply walked.

The island was empty and uninhabited, so it was theirs to learn, and they learned it together, the long way, on foot.

Hiccup picking down through the fog-wet woods and the beaches and the lower hills, Toothless ranging out ahead and circling back, ahead and back, never letting more than a stone's throw of space between them.

Toothless had changed as much as Hiccup had.

Maybe more.

Whether it had been the trauma of watching him bleed to death, or something the pale tree had done, he didn't know.

Either way, the dragon would not let him out of sight. Constantly shouldering in against his legs, butting that great blunt lizard head up under his hand until Hiccup laughed despite himself and scratched the soft scales behind his jaw.

"I'm here, bud. I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here."

And the dragon would huff, and lean his whole impossible weight into the boy's side, and they would go on.

It was on one of those walks, climbing higher than they ever had, up out of the fog-line and onto the wind-scoured heights where the island's spine broke through, that Hiccup first saw the actual abandoned city.

He stopped at the top of the hill.

It was stone. Mostly worked stone, and a great deal of it. Fallen towers. Broken lines of wall. Streets running on into the standing fog.

It didn't take him long to place the strange sense of familiarity. The steep dark roofs, half-collapsed. The great longhouse-bones of it sprawled along the ridge.

This was a Viking city.

Or at least it resembled one.

An old one, perhaps, older and grander than Berk had ever dreamed of being, fallen these long ages into ruin, but unmistakably the work of his own kind.

Some forgotten peoples that had sailed too far north a thousand years gone and built, and thrived, and died, and been swallowed by the fog.

He felt almost glad of it.

After everything strange, here at last was something he knew how to read.

He walked down into the dead streets, guided by a sense of morbid curiosity, Toothless padding uneasily at his heel.

And the murals began.

They were carved deep into the faces of the toppled columns, worked into the broken friezes over every shattered doorway. Figures of men, and everywhere among them, dragons.

Hiccup looked at the first one for a long while, and then he nodded slowly to himself, a hard old bitterness settling in his chest.

Because some things never changed.

He knew exactly what he was looking at. He had grown up under murals like these.

The Great Hall of Berk was hung end to end with them. Men with their weapons raised over beasts, the long proud record of every dragon a tribe had ever put down.

His slit eyes rounded the murals.

Here was a man with his hand flung out toward a dragon's brow. A killing blow, surely. The strike that finishes it.

There a great dragon coiled low over a small human figure. A child taken. A child being devoured, the kind of thing they painted to keep the young ones frightened and obedient.

And over there, on the tallest standing column, a figure stood atop a dragon's back with both arms thrown wide in what could only be a hunter's triumph. The conqueror astride his kill.

So even here, Hiccup thought bitterly, looking up at it, cold and certain.

Even a thousand years ago, on the far edge of the world.

Men and dragons, and nothing between them but killing each other.

It is everywhere. It has always been everywhere. After all, it is the only thing my kind has ever been able to make.

He turned away from the carvings with the bitterness gone hard and flat inside him.

And he did not look closely enough to notice that the man's flung-out hand rested open and gentle on the dragon's brow, not raised to strike it; that the coiled dragon's wing was curled to shelter the small human figure, not to take it.

That the triumphant conqueror on the tallest column wore, rising from his head, plain as anything had ever been carved in stone, a small swept-back crown of horns.

He saw only what Berk had taught him to see.

The truth of the place would have to wait until he learned to read it, and that would come later.

For now he only stood a while longer in that dead street with his dragon pressed warm and worried against his side, looking out over the bones of a kingdom he recognised and did not like.

And he let the cold thing in his chest go on, very quietly, doing the only thing it knew how to do anymore.

"Come on, bud," he said at last, in a voice he had slowly began growing into, turning back toward the long climb down. "There's nothing for us up here."

He was, as it happened, completely wrong about the conclusion he had reached.

But the fog held their many secrets.