Chapter 07: Edge of the World IV

Toothless slept curled against his side, with one wing thrown over his body even in sleep, and Hiccup had long given up trying to talk him out of it.

It had been this way since they left Berk.

Toothless and Hiccup had been close before the cove, both of them, that's true.

However, something had changed since then.

The Night Fury slept when Hiccup slept, he woke when Hiccup woke, he ate whenever and whatever Hiccup ate.

The cove had changed them both, Hiccup thought. Lying there playing with the pale glow of his night vision, the warm flank of the dragon rising and falling against his shoulder.

That grey morning had cut something out of each of them, and what had grown back in the hollow had not grown back the same.

For Hiccup it had taken everything.

The whole of the life he had been born into was gone, and still going. It had torn up by the roots all the soft and hopeful and naive out of him, and left in its place something quieter, and colder, and angrier at a world that had earned every degree of it.

For Toothless it must have been similar.

A scale of change Hiccup suspected he had not yet measured the true size of, because under the scales and the goofiness, Toothless was a deeper creature than he sometimes let on. Deep enough that even Hiccup lost the bottom of him every now and then.

Back in the cove, when he stepped in front of the axes, he had not once stopped to think what any of it would cost the dragon. He had simply bled, and very, very nearly died.

But he could see it now, in retrospect, if he made himself look.

If it had been Hiccup in Toothless's place. Having to watch the one creature in all the world that had ever cared for him and loved him so deeply, the one that had chosen him.

Take blow after blow after blow meant for him, and bleed, and almost die, and still have it refuse every chance to step aside.

What would I have become after that? What would a thing like that not carve out of you?

It had definitely carved something out of Toothless.

Something fierce and sleepless, a guardian of sorts, or an overprotective mom... Though that comparison was just weird to picture.

Either way, the hollow in each of them was filling, slowly, and the two of them had grown closer in the process than they could ever have otherwise.

Such was the nature of struggle.

Hiccup let out a dry laugh. He scratched the soft scales beneath the dragon's jaw without looking, and Toothless rumbled in his sleep.

It was strange.

He did not need to look. He never quite did anymore.

He had not paid much attention to it. Yet somewhere behind his own thoughts, there was a small steady warmth that was simply Toothless. The weight and the place and the mood of him.

When the dragon shifted in his sleep Hiccup could feel the small ripple of it cross his mind like a stone dropped in a still sea. And when his own thoughts ran cold the dragon stirred and pressed closer without ever waking.

So many mysteries.

Whatever the case may be. He had stopped wondering at it weeks ago, it was only one more thing struggle had drawn tight between them.

He found the room by accident, which was how the island gave up most of its secrets.

It had been in the worst of the last few weeks, when his legs still refused him and he crossed the lower caves on his hands and knees more often than on his feet.

He had put a hand out to steady himself against the wall of a side-passage he had crawled past a dozen times, and the wall had not been a wall.

It was a door instead.

It swung inward under his palm as though it had only ever been waiting to be asked.

And what lay behind it stopped him on the threshold.

"Oh, you have got to be joking," he breathed.

Books.

A lot of them. Nothing like the dozen mildewed volumes chained up in the Great Hall that Berk had called a library and been proud of.

No, here were at least a hundred.

The place was a single round chamber, low and domed, its walls fitted floor to ceiling with stone niches, and every niche packed with the patient hoard of a vanished people.

Scrolls in cases. Tablets stacked like cord wood. Books whose pages were thin beaten metal that no length of years had managed to rot.

He had never in his life seen so much writing gathered in one place.

In fact, it was too much. Hiccup had not known there could be so much writing in the world.

So he stood in the doorway by the silver-grey light of his own dark-seeing eyes and understood that he was the first living thing to breathe that dry kept air in longer than there were words to measure.

And that he was not going to leave it until he had read every page.

The island was like that, he was learning.

It kept things. An abandoned citadel on the plateau above, a tree of pale bark in its belly, a room of forbidden books behind a door that knew his hand.

What next? A hidden treasure room?

It came to him as a half joke. He was fairly sure the other half was simply true.

Because every time he believed he had taken its measure, it opened some new door beneath him, and he had stopped being unsettled by that and started, despite everything, to enjoy the thrill of it.

The library quickly became the place where he spent all of his dead hours after that.

The long days when his legs would not carry him, and later the hours when the day's work was done and the night stretched out sleepless and enormous in front of him.

It turned out to be the best medicine he had.

When he bent the whole of his focus to the puzzle of the ancient books, the roar of his overgrown hearing sank to a murmur, the worst of the overload pressed back and held at arm's length.

And the other things that still hunted him; the cove, his father, the whole weight of everything behind him, sank along with it.

He worked with what he had, which was not much at all.

The few stained sheets of paper he had carried north he was hoarding for the things that mattered.

The rest he scratched in charcoal straight onto the swept stone of the floor, an alphabet growing around him in a widening ring, smudged out and written again a dozen times as he got it wrong and then less wrong.

He had not seen daylight in days. He noticed it somewhere in the middle of the work, and found that he did not care much. Down here there was work, and that was enough.

Even if it wasn't...

In those first weeks he could not have climbed back out of the room on his own.

So that was that.

Hiccup would set the pages aside when even he tired of them, which was seldom, because his new physicality wore down about as easily as the stone he sat on. And he would try, stubbornly, to walk, and more often than not it would come to nothing.

His legs would tremble and overreach and put him face-first into the wall, and in the end it was always Toothless he leaned on. The patient black shoulder under his hand, ferrying him the few yards from his work to his makeshift bed.

His body was coming back to him a little at a time. A little further each day before the dizziness took him, mending slow while his mind raced ahead.

For all of the excitement, in the end, most of the room had not survived the centuries.

The dry air must have helped keep the pages intact for a while. And still, time got its teeth in. Whole shelves crumbled to grey dust at a touch. Scrolls broke like old ash.

He learned to handle them with care after a few failed attempts, and most of the few he did save gave him nothing but fragments of a much bigger picture.

One he had yet to piece together.

Argh! For the love of Thor!!!

The book he had been carefully extracting from the ancient shelves literally turned to dust under his new strength.

He shook his head in defeat after sulking at the loss.

The 'organic' books of the library were clearly a lost cause. However, that still left the ones cut into that strange metal. Those had come down the ages whole, and through the course of the next few weeks, those were the ones that taught him to read.

One stood out among the others.

He felt the way you feel a stare across a crowded hall. It was the oldest thing in the chamber. He knew the moment he first lifted it, though he could not have said how.

Its covers were bound in stone he vaguely recognised as jade. So pale and so pure it might have been carved from frozen moonlight.

Worked into the stone cover was a shape he knew intimately.

A tree, with its branches spread wide and high, its bark cut in the same drowned-moon white as the thing that had closed over his head and given him all of... this.

He rolled his eyes.

The tree and Hiccup were not on the best of terms to put it lightly. Still, whatever these ruins had most wanted to keep, he was certain it had kept in this tome.

Ahh.

He could not read a word of it.

To his considerable irritation, and to some smaller and far less reasonable part of him that was thoroughly delighted, the jade tome was written in some older, denser hand than all the rest, and it turned away every attempt he made at translating it in those first few weeks.

To be fair, his reading had not truly begun in the library at all.

It had begun out in the open, in the early days, before his legs failed him. Hiccup had sworn never to set foot in that citadel on the heights again, and he had kept to it, and he had also found a loophole in it roughly the size of a coastline.

Long story short, there were ruins on the shores too, not many, but when his morning runs had become longer he had inevitably stumbled into them and well... curiosity happened.

Every morning he would stop to drag a hand across the engraved face of a toppled column and find the marching script under his fingers increasingly, maddeningly familiar.

He could not read them though, not yet.

But here and there a single word would be similar enough in Norse. A word for water, a word for sky, a word for fire. Only a handful.

But enough to tell him the thing was not gibberish, and not foreign either.

Either way, the real work came later, in the depths of the library.

The slow grinding labour of it, taking the best-kept tablets, the ones where a clear mural stood beside a lone word, and setting them one against another, and raising an alphabet out of those letter by letter, then working with a sentence, then a paragraph all at once.

The dictionary he made was a clumsy, half-guessed thing, full of holes and blind alleys.

He mistook one word for another for weeks on end, built whole meanings on a symbol he had read backwards, and had to tear them down again when some later page made a fool of him.

But it grew. Slowly, crookedly, it grew.

And it told him one thing past any doubt: this dead tongue was the grandfather of his own.

Somehow.

If you stripped away untold centuries of drift, the soft worn sounds and the strange old letters, and the words of Berk were this language's far-flung, broken-down grandchildren.

It was only a theory. He had too few pages and no proof. But the thought sat in him for a long time, and it would eventually be proven right.

What the words could not yet give him, the pictures did.

The murals were everywhere, cut into the curved walls of the room and the passages around it, and they were mostly pictures, which meant he could read them long before he could read the script beneath them.

So he did. Panel by panel, night after sunless night, and slowly the truth of the ancient kingdom assembled itself in his mind.

It had been a whole civilisation. Old, bright, vast.

A civilisation built on men and dragons. Together. Not master and beast. Not hunter and prey. Some of them bonded to each, soul to soul, the two kinds building as one.

In all those endless carved panels there was not a single chain, not one pen, not one killing-ground.

There were dragons curled around cradles, and dragons hauling stone for towers, and dragons and their riders flying out together over a sea that had not yet learned to be afraid of them.

That would explain why it's possible to tame dragons...

Not once, anywhere, had the old kingdom depicted any man raising a blade against a dragon. It had simply not occurred to them. It would have been like carving a man at war with his own fingers.

It would also explain beasts can't, but dragons can.

His expression turned dark.

The joke was there, once he had both halves of it. Bitter enough to taste.

The fact that these had been a people who loved dragons better than anything in the world, to the point they seemed to be considered as equals.

And yet, in all likelihood, the grandfathers of his own. The Vikings. The tribes who burned dragons in their rings, and nailed their skulls to the rafters, and would behead what used to be their equals, on sight.

The thought of it, sick and twisted and entirely possible, turned his stomach over hard enough that he had to put a hand on the wall and wait for it to pass.

How.

How can this be possible...

He refused to believe it, but he had to, because the similarities could not be explained any other way.

That somewhere down the long cold centuries a race of dragon-keepers had become a race of dragon-slayers, and so completely and utterly forgotten they had ever been otherwise.

However, if it is possible... How much deeper does the rabbit hole get?

The intensity of his study doubled since that day. And as the weeks passed and his reading sharpened, he began to notice patterns in the patterns, and in those, that a few select words came back more often than any others.

The same few glyphs, recurring under panel after panel, carved larger, carved deeper, set apart from the rest.

He followed them the way you follow a current, and every time, they led him to the same place.

To the heart of it all, throwing light in panel after panel, stood the ancient tree.

It was not, he came to confirm, only a tree.

The texts spoke of it the way men speak of a deity, or a god. It listened. It chose. It had intent.

It had a will of its own and a long patient mind behind that will. When they named it, plainly and over and over, they named something along the lines of pale tree.

The white-barked tree was no mere wonder. It was the source of the far gone kingdom, the heart of it in a sense.

The more he read the more he understood, with a slow cold certainty, what it had done to him and Toothless in those lost months encased inside the bark.

It had not healed them.

Healing was not the thing it did. It had no power to mend a body back into what it had been.

What it did was join.

It had taken the pair of them, half-dead and tangled together by love and dying, and stitched them into one new thing. Something the old tongue had a single word for, a word he met again and again once he knew to look.

Hybrid.

Not quite a man. Not quite a dragon. Something in between. A creature that in the bright age used to be created on purpose, its fiercest warriors, its wisest elders, its rulers...

They used to be all Hybrids.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them at a time. Hiccup didn't know what the requirements or rituals involved were, those had not survived the passage of time, but he was certain that process carried an enormous risk of death.

Both for the dragon and the human vessel.

And yet the pale tree had survived, and waited through long ages in the depths of the forsaken edge of the world to do it all over again.

But why? Why did the tree wait all this time? Why us? What even is it? Why and how has this place gone undiscovered for hundreds of years!?

He did not have the answers, so he read on, and the more he learned, the wider the gap around the edges of his knowledge seemed to grow.

At the end the jade tome was what drove Hiccup back out into the daylight.

It was this or driving myself insane.

Yeah...

Hiccup had begun to translate a few lines out of the jade tome, yet what came out of it was so impossible that he was certain he had it wrong.

The things he was translating could just not be true.

So the fault was clearly his. His crude dictionary had failed him, or maybe the ancient tongue had simply broken somewhere across the centuries into nonsense.

So he simply set the thing down for the first time in a while and went looking for plainer truths in the open air.

He walked slowly, the carved length of driftwood for a cane in one hand and the other supporting some of his weight on Toothless. The pair of them climbing together out of the dark and into the grey of the ruins above.

The signs had always been there.

He had simply never seen them, because his eyes had gone straight to the murals every time and never dropped to the ground beneath them. To the melted stone and the crumbled stone towers...

All the rest of it.

The kingdom had not faded.

No. It had been purged, killed, and finally abandoned.

The signs were everywhere, once one knew to read them. Whole walls thrown down and scattered like kicked sand. Towers snapped clean across. Places where the stone itself had run molten and frozen again, glassy and grey, under a heat no forge in the world could throw.

There were many bones where the snow thinned.

Drifts of them mostly, ashen and old.

And they were lying exactly where they had fallen, out in the open, in the middle of the streets, with the snow blowing over them and nothing else having touched them at all.

That was the part that took him a moment. Because loose bones in a street are not what a dead city leaves behind. A dead city leaves graves, or it leaves a pyre, or at the very least it leaves the tidied ground of whoever came afterward and could not stand the sight of them.

Nobody had buried these people. Not their own, and not the ones who came next, and not anybody at all in the long centuries since. Which meant there had been nobody of their own left to do it, and nobody had ever come next.

Hiccup looked around, picking up details he hadn't before.

At a side, men and dragons fallen together in the same grey heaps, as though they had died side by side against a thing that neither could stop.

He examined closer: Claw marks on the floor, sword dents on the walls, stains of scorching fire.

They fought on the streets.

But fighting... what?

Hiccup did not know. He stood a long time over the rivers of ancient liquid stone, and attempted to stitch together the scale of the damage, and then felt the colour go out of his own face.

He tried to picture a thing that could do this, and he could not.

What can walk up to a city of dragons and dragon-riders... a whole people armed with wings and fire, and leave nothing behind but abandoned ruins, and a tide of molten stone?

It had been one thing. Surely something vast.

Something that could break the titanic walls that rose around the plateau of the citadel, and melt rock, and that the few panels brave enough to depict their own fall all rendered it only as a darkness with slits. A shape too large to frame.

A foe the survivors had plainly been too fearful or too dead to draw whole.

The pieces began, slowly, to fit, and the picture was enormous, and not yet finished.

The days went on, sunless and snowy and strangely full.

The reading, the puzzle of the tongue, the slow taming of his own body, the long flights out over the oceans that surrounded the massive island.

All of it, he came to understand, was a way of escaping everything that had gone wrong.

The distractions worked, most days. But not all of them.

In the quiet between the flipping of pages and the flights and the morning runs and everything else, his thoughts would slip, as they always did in the end, back to Berk.

It happened more than he liked, over those long months, and it never stopped hurting.

Gobber would surface, the smell of the forge, the ring of a hammer. His father, that great yet helpless man standing at the rim of the cove with his axe hanging slack.

But most often of all it was Astrid.

It was always the same frozen image of her, exactly as he had last seen her. One hand half-raised toward him, her mouth open around a word she never said, shrinking away as the dragon took him.

Do not misunderstand, it infuriated him, each and every time the memory of her slipped into his mind. After what she had done.

No. After what they all did.

Every single one of them.

And yet, he couldn't just expect fifteen years of memories to not matter anymore.

People don't work that way.

Hiccup had chosen to at least try be the better person, and that began by letting go of the hate he was carrying.

Not because it wasn't justified. The hate and everything else was justified.

But because as long as there was hate, he would never be able to forget. The memory of them would make him bitter, and resentful, and twist him, and in the end make him a slave to the same people who had wronged him.

So he had no choice but to make peace with his past, because he was strong enough for that, at last.

That peace helped him accept it.

Hiccup loved Astrid.

He used to think it was just a crush, an inconvenient crush. However, in hindsight it was clearly not just that.

Hiccup leaned back as his gaze settled on the sky.

Hiccup Haddock had loved a face, and a fierceness, and an idea of her, and never once the girl underneath them.

It was, he thought with a strange cold clarity, the very same way his own father had loved him.

Stoick the Vast had loved the idea of his son, the broad loud fearsome heir who would kill his first dragon and lead the village one day, and never once the strange small boy who had actually been standing there.

How ironic. Hiccup had done the exact same thing to Astrid.

He had worshiped the idea of her and never learned the person underneath, and the person, when the moment came, had reached for her axe and done precisely what he had been blind to see she would.

A child's love, both ways.

Blind on both sides.

The truth hurt. The fact that it hurt meant that it was truth. Hiccup turned it over a few times and found, a little to his own surprise, that he had no tears left to spend on it.

That well had long run dry, and so he began, at last, to let go.