Chapter 06: Edge of the World III

Hiccup could not walk.

At all.

It did not even surprise him this time around.

He had been running the beach that very morning, easy and tireless, when the first wave of dizziness took him mid-stride and folded him down onto the wet shingle.

He sat for a moment to let it pass.

Of course, what did he expect, it did not pass.

The dizziness turned to outright heart palpitations, and it deepened by the minute, a creeping numb heaviness, until his legs had quit answering altogether and his arms soon after.

Great, just, great.

Hiccup cursed his miserable luck as he lay all sprawled and lightheaded in the middle of the shore, surf hissing all around his worn out boots, with his body gone all slack and distant.

Just. Fantastic way to start the day.

Of course, the dragon never let him out of sight, Toothless was there immediately.

The dragon's snout sniffed all around him, next to his ear and his neck and everywhere, as if trying to smell-diagnose the problem.

He found nothing wrong.

So the mighty Night Fury gave his best attempt at a shrug and solved the problem as best he could, which is by dragging his limp body up the beach, up through the rocky landscape, mind you, and finally hauling him back to somewhere in the corner of the cave.

"You could be a little more delicate, you know."

Ah.

I should not have said anything. Should have kept my mouth shut.

Was it the tone? Was it the remarks? Or was Toothless just having revenge for some petty thing?

Whatever the case, having delivered him to safety, the dragon did of course not stop.

He dragged his body from one patch of stone to another, and then back, and then to a third. Fussing, rearranging, nosing him into a better spot and immediately deciding it was a worse one.

Through the whole ordeal there was, Hiccup decided somewhere around the seventh relocation, a certain grim humour to it.

His body had become a stranger in the span of a few sorry minutes, degrading from complete and utter normalcy, to a drunk sailor, to a sack of mead before the sun had even finished rising. All whilst the most allegedly 'fearsome dragon' used him as redecoration.

Can things even get worse from here?

Hiccup rolled his eyes and waited. Tragically, in contrast to what happened with his senses, this time it was not pain so much as boredom, which was its own small mercy and its own excruciating torture.

You know what, nevermind I don't want to know.

Whatever the case may be, through the next few hours there was simply nothing to do and nothing to entertain himself with. Only the lying there and the waiting, hour after hour, and then day after day, while Toothless paced and fretted and nosed at him.

Hiccup was fairly sure the dragon was enjoying himself.

The cursed lizard had taken to walking with a little bounce in his step, a hop between strides, the way he did when something had gone genuinely, delightfully his way.

Anyway, it took far longer this time.

It was many days before he regained sensation of his limbs, and even more days until the thread of sensation turned to actual control.

That day he finally tried to stand up.

Here goes nothing.

3. 2. 1.

Hiccup's mind didn't even think, the muscles fired as they had all their life, applying pressure a normal human would need to stand up. However, his legs put about a dozen times more into it than the standing required.

Hiccup shot straight up off the floor, pitched forward, and met the wall with his entire face, and with a delightful Crack.

I... I think I broke something.

Luckily, he didn't break anything.

He fell to the ground, limp again and not daring to play around with any more muscles. He simply tried again, slower this time around.

"Here it comes... I'm about to stand up Toothless, watch closely."

3. 2. 1.

He reached for a ledge in the cave wall and overshot it by a foot.

Long story short, it was a nerve-wracking affair. In the worst possible way.

For starters, he could not cross the cave without his feet shooting out from under him on the smooth cave floor, he was falling time and time again, like a newborn lamb learning to walk on ice.

Thap, he fell again.

Toothless made a low, huffing sound as Hiccup rolled around, defeated.

He was flat on his back for the quadrillionth time in an hour, turned his head and glared up with what little dignity the position allowed.

"Oh. You think that's funny."

Toothless made the sound again, this time in agreement.

"I will remember this." Hiccup informed him.

By that point Hiccup had come to rely on the dragon entirely as a walking aid. So imagine his joy whenever the reptile decided to get up and wander off toward the back of the cave on some private errand, and did not come back when Hiccup wobbled and nearly fell on his face again.

"Toothless." He shouted. Nothing.

Damnation.

"Toothless, where are you going? Get back here." Still nothing but the scrape of claws echoing from somewhere. "You useless lizard, I am about to die, return at once."

Toothless returned at once.

He came padding out of the black with something clamped in his jaws and dropped it at Hiccup's hand with enormous self-satisfaction.

It was a stick.

A long, straight, sea-worn length of driftwood, very nearly the right height for a cane, presented like the finest prize the whole island had to offer.

Hiccup looked at the stick.

He looked at the dragon, both green eyes bright and expectant.

"...Thank you," he meant it, he bent very carefully to pick it up.

It helped. A little.

He learned to walk all over again, hunched over that stick like an old man, which turned out to be a sound walking strategy.

The work was slow and graceless, his legs lurching into every step a long moment too early and far too hard.

More often than not he gave up before he reached the cave mouth, sat back down, and let Toothless drag him where he needed to go. Mostly down to his charcoal and papers, where at least his eyes still worked and he could sit among the stones and review his notes.

It was weeks, not days, before he was back on his feet for good.

For most of them the dragon was the only thing keeping him upright and the only thing keeping him fed, ranging out alone over the winter island and coming back with fish and seal and crooning at the boy until he ate.

The food, naturally, arrived thoroughly coated in a fine layer of Toothless's saliva.

Which was obviously delightful.

Then, one grey morning, Hiccup finally crossed the whole length of the cave on his own feet without falling once.

It was the stupidest-looking accomplishment for a grown teenager. It was the equivalent of giving ten steps back and then one forward. And yet, it meant everything.

By that point winter had taken the island completely and utterly.

The snow came and stayed and softened the black rock and filled the dead streets on the heights, and the cold of it would have killed an ordinary man in an afternoon.

However, it did nothing to him at all.

Which was good news, because there was one small thing he could actually do something about.

His old shirt had gone so stiff and caked with his own dried blood that he could not stand the smell of it, so that night he fed it to a fire and watched the last rag of his Berk life curl up into smoke.

His trousers, mercifully, he kept.

He spent that winter half-bare to the snow, all horned and pale and slit-eyed, his breath smoking visibly in the freezing air, and after a while he stopped thinking of it as strange.

The charcoal and the vellum were easily the most entertaining things on the island, save for flying.

Hiccup had filled the few blank papers in a matter of days, so he began scratching neat columns of figures straight onto the cleared stone floor of the cave:

Dates by the moon, distances, counts, the careful accumulating measures of his body. And the more he measured, the more the numbers began painting a picture he could scarcely credit whenever he sat back and read them whole.

The morning shuffle with the cane had become, in the span of weeks, a careful walk. The walk became a light jog. And the jog, hard-won and graceless, eventually brought back the morning runs.

None of it came easy.

He drove himself at it every grey dawn, falling and rising and falling more times than he would admit, and what ground he gained he paid for in spills and bruises and long stubborn hours.

It was ironic.

Hiccup had never appreciated physical endeavors. In fact, he despised them. All his life. However, it was not about appreciating or despising anymore. Not at all.

His inhuman body was voraciously urging for movement.

Every hour of the day, every single minute and second of it. The hunger for physical exertion had become equal if not greater than the hunger for food.

So the nearby beach soon grew too small.

The circuit lengthened by a couple of miles, then by a dozen, until it ran a sizeable perimeter of the island.

His speed was nothing to brag about, in fact he was average at best.

However, he could feel there was a raw and untapped strength behind his stride that had not been there before. A heaviness and a power in each footfall he could only set beside those warhorses he had read about in books as a boy.

He wouldn't know for certain though. He had never seen a horse, nevermind a warhorse.

Back to topic, the form was all wrong.

He had to learn it again from nothing, drilling it out of himself dawn after dawn, experimenting each time around, measuring and recording every pitfall along the way.

Until his stride had become more controlled.

The force of the strides channeled to recoil rather than raw impact. And that made him even faster, and faster, and faster.

And finally one morning, without ever quite noticing the moment it happened, he found Toothless running beside him. Bounding low and fast across the open ground the way Toothless did when the mood took him. And Hiccup was keeping pace.

Wh- Wha-!?

WHAT!?

His slit eyes turned to his legs, then to Toothless, then to his legs again.

He was matching him, stride for stride, the snow flying up behind both their heels and the cold sun coming bloody out of the sea, his lungs heaving and his heart slamming, but still keeping pace.

Somewhere in all those dawns, Hiccup had stopped being slower than his dragon.

And the numbers scratched across the cave floor grew stranger with every passing moon. The distances he could run. Then the weights he could shift, when he reluctantly started measuring those.

And then numbers that stopped sounding like a person at all.

And if not for the fact that he had lived them, Hiccup would never believe any of this to be possible.

This is actually, like actually insane.

He gave a vague gesture at the whole of the floor. At all of the numbers and the tables and the lists with projections and averages and everything else.

Ah. Obviously the matter did not end with running, or speed, or stamina. That was the thing about it. It didn't end at all, because it was everything.

Everything he could do, everything he tried to do, he could do better than should even be physically possible.

The first one was to jump. No, not what you are imagining.

Not the way a human jumps.

He would crouch at the foot of the tall pines along the high meadow and spring, and clear the lowest branches, and then the next, gouging each new height into the bark with his thumb, which was a thing he had only recently discovered he could do.

Until the marks climbed past all sense. Until a standing leap carried him level with the third tier of limbs on a full-grown pine, three times his own height into the cold air, then four, then five.

He came down light in the snow and stood there laughing at himself, plainly disbelieving of what he had done, and then crouched and did it again.

He learned to climb, also.

Mostly because most of the island was cliffs, and it was quicker to climb than to walk at times.

On the sleepless nights he took to the high cliffs and went up sheer black stone hand over hand, fingers finding holds a gull would have refused, his grip biting hard enough to leave the rock crumbling behind him.

When he misjudged and fell, forty feet, sixty, he twisted and landed in a crouch, faintly annoyed more than hurt, brushed himself off, and went back to the wall.

He also actually learned to listen.

Hours sitting on the cliffs in the dead cold middle of the night, eyes shut as he read the whole dark world by sound. The impossibly distant flapping of scales, and the firmness of the presence, and the rattle of their spines, and their low growls.

"Five Deadly Nadders," he muttered into the black, mostly guessing this time, and without opening his eyes. "South-east. Wait no, those are actually out past the far point."

Beside him Toothless lifted his head and scented the wind a long moment, and dipped his great skull once.

First actual time I get something this far away, right.

Hiccup let out a long sigh.

His gaze turned far south, to the distant flock of dragons.

It is strange... their behaviour.

The dragons had been drawing closer every week since. Not quite approaching the island, but closer and closer anyway.

The question was, why wouldn't they?

The island had no dragons. It had an almost endless supply of fat dumb food, the cliffs were perfect for a nest... So why keep the distance?

Hiccup frowned, he had yet to find an answer.

That night, he caught himself laying a fire out of pure habit, kneeling over the cold pit with the driftwood stacked before he stopped and realised he had no idea why.

He did not need the warmth, and he had not needed light in longer than he could remember. The void of the cave stood open and complete to his eyes, every stone of it, all painted in a silver tone his mutated eyes could pick up on.

So he left the wood where it lay.

Right... No more fires.

He recalled, crouched there, being very small. Four or five years old, jolting awake in his pitch-black room with his heart slamming on his chest. And bolting on bare feet down the cold hall to scramble up into his father's bed, certain something was going to eat him in the dark.

Uh.

It struck him then that the fear of the darkness was perhaps one of the most human things.

And that somewhere along the way it had quietly gone out of him.

All of the night's secrets hid nothing from him anymore.

A thing you can see coming is not a thing you can fear.

Hiccup shook his head as a bitter smile formed on his lips. His arms hugged his knees and his gaze settled on the sand at his feet.

It had all frightened him, at the start...

Everything.

Losing what he used to be. Morphing into whatever he was now.

Alas, fear could not last very long in a body that could do these things.

After so many months of it, he just caught himself feeling at home in his own skin more often than he didn't, and all the things he used to be, the smallness, the flinching, the careful habits of fifteen years, seemed foreign to him in hindsight.

As though it had belonged to someone else entirely.

He could not have said when the change had fully taken place, or whether it was even finished.

He only wondered, in the quiet, when it had begun, and where, in the end, a path like this one was meant to lead.

The ruins were where he spent the rest of his free time.

Which was a thing he had sworn, on that first climb, never to do.

He had walked out of that dead street with the murals at his back and meant it, because he had known exactly what he was looking at and had wanted no part of another people's long proud record of killing.

And he had kept to it, more or less, all through the weeks his legs would not carry him.

What broke the promise was not the pictures. It was the writing under them.

Because now that he could walk up there again, he could not stop noticing that the marching script beneath every carving was almost, maddeningly, nearly something he knew.

He had turned it over on the cliffs and turned it over on the runs and it would not leave him alone, and in the end a puzzle was a stronger thing than a grudge had ever been.

So he went back up. And he sat, day on grey day, in the snow-filled streets of a city that no living soul remembered, and he set himself against its silence the way he set himself against everything, and tried to make it talk.

As said, almost all walls were covered in various murals.

Not Berk's runes, not the traders' scratch, nothing he knew.

And yet there was a teasing half-familiarity to the structure, the figures and the script beneath them, something at the edge of recognition, like a word on the tip of a tongue that will not come.

One he could not recall, but could not ignore either.

That hook of almost-knowing held him there through the worst of the winter, copying symbols onto the rock and sorting them, hunting the patterns, getting nowhere most of the time and still unable to stop.

The more time he spent among the dead stones, the larger the questions grew.

What were these ruins? Who had built them, who had lived in them? And had they been, a whole people, a whole grand city greater than anything Berk had dreamed, and not one word of them surviving in any song, or book, or tale he had ever heard?

And what had brought such a mighty thing to ash?

And stranger than the ruins, why was the whole of it so whole?

Cities that die are looted, burned, carried off stone by stone by whoever comes after.

Yet no one had ever come after these. Not yet, at least.

The dead streets stood almost as their makers had left them, sealed and preserved and waiting, as though the world had simply agreed to forget the place existed.

Which, he was coming to understand, it had.

The island was on no chart. None he had seen in his arguably short life.

And the suspicion that the unnatural fog surrounding the island had something to do with the mystery kept nagging at him.

Was the fog, perhaps, what was keeping the wild dragons off, and the maps blank, and the whole island hidden out of the world entirely?

Was the wall of pale fog a made thing, then?

A guarding thing.

He could not be sure. Not unless he could find the source of it.

However, he could be sure of one thing: That the mysterious, impossibly thick fog surrounding the island was beginning, very slowly, to thin.

It was a little more ocean showing each week.

A little more of the island letting itself, after an age, be seen.

Shrugging his shoulders, the puzzle kept growing, and the thing that used to be Hiccup Haddock did not yet know what any of it meant.