Chapter 05: Edge of the World II

He ran the island every morning now, before the light came up out of the seas.

It had begun out of a whim marinated in boredom.

That is to say, one cold dawn he had simply found himself moving, down the shingle and along the tide line at a jog, because the sleepless nights were long and the cold thing in his chest went quieter when his body had work to do.

And his body, to his slow astonishment, had taken to it.

The first morning he managed the length of the near beach before his lungs caught fire and folded him over his knees. Three mornings later he ran it twice and barely noticed.

His stamina had crept quietly back up to what it was before his injuries and the blood loss, and then kept on past it, and he had not even been winded enough to mark the moment it crossed.

His route hugged the coast and kept low.

The boy who had left Berk would have died out here. Winter had the island now, and the wind coming off that water had long stopped being a thing that beat him and become only weather.

So he just did it.

He ran near the coast, mostly because the sound of the waves eased him, but also because he did his best to stay clear of the ruins.

He had yet to see a single dragon.

The skies over the unmarked waters of the island stayed mostly empty. So whatever this island was, the wild dragons of the north gave it a wide and silent berth, banking away from the fog as though the place itself were something they dared not cross.

All of them, that is, but the one black shape that paced him along the beach.

"Toothless- don't dare-"

Hiccup rolled his eyes as the dragon ran into the waves, splashing salt water all over him.

The wounds were all but gone.

Healed, sealed, smooth, as though they had happened to someone else a very long time ago.

Only the shoulder had made him wait. The deep wound, the bone wound, was still not closed, weeks behind the rest where the others had taken days, and he already knew it was not going to close clean.

Still, he would take it.

He had seen men die of far less than any of it: Hiccup had grown up on a Viking tribe, a place where a bad cut in a bad winter could become a death sentence.

And here he was, three weeks out from wounds that should have killed him a few times over, running laps on an island at the very edge of the world.

It was nothing short of a miracle.

"Miracle..."

The word felt sour in his mouth.

He could not help but distrust it, because miracles always turned out, on closer inspection, to carry other price tags he had simply not yet found.

So he did the only thing he knew to do with what he did not understand.

He studied it.

Which was how he came to be sitting in the back of the cave that afternoon, with a stub of charcoal in his hand and a swept stretch of stone in front of him.

He had brought very few things north, but among the almost-nothing he had brought were a few stained leaves of vellum and that stub of charcoal. They held none of his precious designs or prototypes. They were clean and blank, albeit a little bit wet and salty.

So he used the floor instead, and he started with himself.

He had carried almost nothing north with him. His trinkets, his materials, most of his more recent notes, his journal, all of it left behind in a life that had ended in a cove...

Trinkets, materials, my notes, my journal...

Silence.

My journal.

Journal?

His hands started frantically searching for the godforsaken journal.

Oh gods, the journal.

The memory of it stopped him mid-step.

The journal he had filled, in his own careful hand, with a truly heroic quantity of drawings of everyone back at Berk, and of notes on the precise colour of Astrid Hofferson's hair, and the shape of her smile.

And a few drawings he was now deeply grateful no one was reading over his shoulder.

And, gods help him, that one damned poem.

Shit.

Who could blame him? He had been thirteen. It rhymed.

What, he wondered, had he been thinking.

'O blonde damsel,'

'You are like the flames.'

'Wild and untamed-'

He felt the urge to pull his hair out.

Why is the memory of it so fresh?

For one entirely genuine moment he weighed flying the whole way back to Berk to burn his own house down before anyone could read a word of it.

Then the rest of it caught up with him.

That it had been months he had spent unconscious. That they had surely found the thing, or burned it with the rest of his belongings, long ago.

And that the risk of a thousand-mile arson run rather outweighed the reward of defending the dignity of someone everyone believed dead.

Or worse than dead.

"Well," he said to the empty cave, with great feeling.

Toothless cracked one eye at him, supremely unbothered, and went back to sleep.

Hiccup huffed out something between a cry and a stifled laugh, picked the charcoal back up, and bent again over the marks on the stone.

Right. Back to the topic.

Maybe it was because entertainment on the island was... lacking. Maybe it was because of genuine curiosity.

Either way, a week into his new life he began measuring his height against marks scratched into the rock walls for entertainment. That habit stuck, and from there he started measuring other things. The rate of his own heartbeat. The measure of his own breathing.

The hours it took for a shallow cut on his thumb to close.

What are you.

What can you do.

What are the rules.

He was a long way to accepting what he had become. Gods, maybe he would never accept it.

However, that didn't mean he wasn't curious.

And for a little while, being curious felt almost like being himself again. The old Hiccup had always been happiest with a problem in his hands, and besides, it was a good distraction.

It was close to a full moon after awakening into his new body that it began.

It started with his ears.

He woke a little before dawn to the distant humming of a sound he could not place. A noise that rattled his skull and would not quite fade.

He lay in the mouth of the caves, listening to it build, hour by slow hour and then minute by minute.

For a while he could fight it.

He pressed his hands flat over his ears and the worst of it dimmed, and he breathed, and told himself it would pass.

It did not.

Each time he thought he had it muffled the sound welled up past his hands again, fuller and nearer than before, until clamping his ears did nothing at all.

So he kept retreating to the mouth of the cave, certain some storm was rolling in, or some other cataclysm had begun.

What he had taken for one great noise bearing down on him was not one noise, and was not bearing down on him at all.

The thundering and distant chirp of birds gave it away.

He was somehow hearing every single sound the island made at once, all pouring in through a head that had lost the wall that used to keep most of the world out.

The boom and drag of every wave on every beach. The wind in a thousand separate trees. The drip of meltwater in caverns a mile off. The heartbeat of the dragon sleeping beside him, suddenly as loud as a drum against his skull.

And threaded through all of it, a thousand smaller sounds he had no names for, arriving together, all the time.

"Stop-" he tried to protest.

His own voice went off inside his skull like a hammer brought down on an anvil, so vast and so near that he flinched from the sound of himself and clapped a hand over his mouth.

Even that. Even his breath. Even the wet click of his own throat when he swallowed.

There was nowhere left in his body the noise could not reach.

Beside him Toothless woke to the smell of his fear and came up fast, keening, pushing that great anxious head against him, crooning low and deep the way he did to soothe.

It was the worst thing yet.

The sound went through Hiccup like a flat blade laid against the brain, and he cried out and shoved blindly at the warm bulk of him.

"No, don't, please don't," the words spilling out as close to a whisper as he could manage and still far too loud in his own ringing head. "You have to be quiet, bud, I can't, everything's too loud, please, please just stop."

Toothless did not understand.

How could he.

He only heard him begging for mercy, and so he crooned louder, pressed closer, until Hiccup could do nothing but curl away from him, press his face to the cold stone, and shake.

But his eyes were worse.

What had come to him that first night out of the tree had only been the front of the thing. A thin grey clarity, barely, gone to nothing past a dozen paces. This was the rest of it arriving, all at once, and the rest of it did not ask.

When the grey light of dawn finally came, it came like a blade. He cracked his eyelids the barest sliver, and the dim daylight of a winter morning drove into his skull like a spear of white fire, and he cried out and screwed them shut.

It did not help. He could still see it burning on the inside of the lids.

For days he could not open his eyes at all.

He stumbled deep into the caves like a wounded animal, far enough in that the worst of the sound should not have reached him.

It reached him anyway.

There was no hole deep enough to bury himself into. All he could do was wall the world out from the outside, hands over his ears, face to the stone, and wait for it to pass.

It did not pass.

So at some point he simply stopped fighting. He ran out of the strength to struggle, and in the not-fighting, despite himself, he began instead to bear it.

And that was how it began to fall into place.

The more he bore the noise instead of clawing at it, the less it behaved like chaos.

Slowly, the way shapes resolve out of fog, the noise sorted itself, and each strand began to mean something. The drumming was a heartbeat, and the heartbeat was Toothless. That long sighing rush was the tide drawing off the western shore.

That faint dry rhythm was the wing beats of a flock of gulls he could not have picked out with a spyglass.

But his eyes would not be reasoned with so easily.

Even in the pitch-black throats of the cave they worked, and worked too well, and anything that was not absolute darkness lanced into him with a pain his old wounds had never come close to teaching him.

He could not face both at once. So he chose, took a long breath, and went one thing at a time.

He spent hours, and then days, sitting motionless in the bottom of the caves, doing nothing but listen.

He went at the flood of it the way he went at everything. Patiently. Naming each thread as it came and setting it in its place, learning all over again how to tell the sound that mattered from the sound that did not.

One by one he named them. Every living and moving thing for a great sweep of country around him, laid open like a map drawn in sound.

Never the whole island, and never far past the surf. Perhaps a third of it at a time, on a still day, if he was patient.

It was a thing he aimed rather than a thing he simply had. Turn his attention north and the south of the island went dim and quiet, and whatever happened out there happened without him.

It was enormous, and it had edges, and he would spend years learning exactly where they fell.

The madness, he understood at last, had never been the hearing. It had only been the panic of a mind handed more of the world than it could hold and never taught how to set any of it down.

So he taught himself to set it down.

There was no word for the thing he learned in that dark, and no teacher for it. It was simply the only door left, and he was desperate enough to walk through it.

He found that if he sat very still, and breathed slow, and drew his attention inward off the screaming edges of the world and down to a single quiet point behind his own ribs, the roar would gentle.

Not stop, for it never again entirely stopped, but receded, until he was the one who chose what came back through the door and what stayed out.

The first time he managed it, and the island's thousand voices sank to a bearable murmur, he wept, alone on the floor of the cave, with the plain animal relief of it. And Toothless was always close, curled around him, and did not understand, and did not need to.

Only then did he turn to his eyes.

He went at them the same patient way. The only medicine was the wound itself.

Exposure. He would crack them a single heartbeat against the faint grey of the cave, the shortest flash he could bear, then shut them and let his spinning head settle, and then again.

A heartbeat became a breath. A breath became a slow count. The white fire dimmed each time, until holding his eyes open in the dark cost him nothing at all.

It took days to work his way back toward the daylight, but it came.

The pain thinned out of his sight the way it had thinned out of his hearing, less every hour, until one morning the dark of the cave did not trouble him at all, and the daylight at its mouth, though it still stung, stung less than the day before.

He was not grateful. Not yet.

It had been abrupt, and uncalled for, and more painful than anything he had ever imagined a body could be made to survive, and for days he had been certain it was simply killing him by inches.

He had made his peace, more or less, with never walking out of that cave.

So now that it had passed, the loudest thing in him was not wonder. It was a flat, wrung-out, thoroughly ungracious relief that it had finally, mercifully stopped.

"For the love of Thor," he muttered to no one in particular, dragging both hands down his face. "Never again. I mean it."

It was real, though, whether he wanted to admire it or not.

He walked out on the last of those days, stood squinting in the cold open daylight, and made himself, reluctantly, look.

He could see. He could see a lot.

From the cliff he could count the pebbles on a beach a mile down the coast, read the shiver of wind crossing the water long before it reached him.

He could shut his eyes and hear a gull bank three valleys over, name the tide and the wind and the small secret movements of every hollow and treeline within a good long reach of him, going quietly about their day.

Not the whole island. He had tested that, and found his range was not wide enough to encompass the whole massive island. But he could hear as much of it as a mind could hold at once, and a great deal more than any man was ever meant to.

It was so immense and so unreal that he half wondered if he was still dreaming.

He was not.

Gods help him, it was real, every impossible inch of it.

And still he could not, in those first forsaken days, make himself be glad of it. It had hurt too much, and too recently, for him to stand on a cliff admiring the view like a man handed a present rather than one beaten flat across an anvil.

Mostly he just kept very still, and was grateful only in the small grim way of someone who has finally stopped being on fire.

It took a couple of days more. It took, in the end, getting back into the air.

The first clear morning he buckled into the worn saddle and worked the pedal and Toothless took them up off the high cliffs, and the whole impossible reach of it opened beneath him at once.

The island. The grey curve of the sea.

A hundred miles of sky laid out sharp and complete from edge to edge, every gull and whitecap and wind-shiver of it his to read.

And somewhere up there, with the cold streaming past and his best friend's wings hammering under him, the memory of pain turned blurry, and the thing finally turned over in his chest from something that had happened to him into something he had.

A gift.

The most extraordinary gift anyone had ever been cursed to pay so dearly for.

"Okay," he admitted, very quietly, to the wind. "Okay. That's... that's actually incredible."