Chapter 08: Edge of the World V

The cane was almost a formality by then.

He climbed through the ruins as the light went gold and dimming, with Toothless padding easy at his side up until the broken streets gave out toward the sea at the end of the heights.

He had only seen it from afar.

You could see the massive palace from anywhere in the ruins, from the plaza, from the library steps, from the middle of any of the main streets, you could lift your eyes and it was there.

It was a white structure standing off the seaward shoulder of the mountains, out at the very edge of the cliffs, above everything and above the sea of clouds on most days. So far up and so enormously made that you could not help but blink twice to check if it was real.

It did not stand in the city. In fact, it stood apart from it, out where the land ran out, with its back to the abandoned ruins and its spine turned to the ocean.

And still, Hiccup never dared approach anywhere close.

There had been a hundred good reasons through that winter, and he was aware, climbing now, that not one of them had been the actual one.

The stair began where the main avenue ended.

The steps were cut straight out of the mountain, wide enough for some fifty men abreast, and it climbed away from the city toward the cliff edge in long shallow flights with landings between them.

Hiccup climbed it with Toothless at his shoulder and did not say anything for a long while.

"This must have been built for crowds." Hiccup wondered out loud. "For processions, or battalions perhaps..."

Or dragons.

But Hiccup did not dare say that last part out loud.

There were only the pair of them on it, and the clicking of Toothless's claws on the stone came back off the rock sounding oddly comical.

The more they climbed, the more the mantle of clouds came down over the top of them and the more it did the more the world went white. It lasted a hundred steps. The clouds were as cold and wet as he remembered them to be.

And then they thinned, their colour turned golden.

Hiccup had to stop walking.

He had seen it on every single flight since winter, with almost no exceptions. However, grasping the true scale of things when flying was a difficult thing.

The palace stood before them in the last of the sun, it was made of a stone so white it may as well have been bone, and it was simply enormous.

Words failed to describe the immensity of it.

And not only that. It was beautiful too.

Like genuinely, mouth-gaping, sight-of-a-lifetime beautiful.

With a cloud lying across the mountain behind him and the light coming in flat and low and red off the sea, it went up, and up, and up. Towers. Whole towers still tall and unbroken, with the sun going in at the empty windows on one side and coming out the other.

He climbed the last steps of the stairs with his head craned all the way back, which is a stupid way to climb a stair, since he almost fell on his face a couple of times.

When he stepped inside he had no choice but to stop again.

He had grown up under the roof of the Great Hall on Berk and had thought it enormous, and it had been the largest covered space he had ever stood in. And yet he could have stacked two of it inside the first hall of that palace with room left over at the top.

The ceilings curved away overhead into ribbed arcs that met and crossed and climbed beyond them, on and on down the length of the hall, carried on columns so tall a full grown pine could have stood inside and not reached the top.

And then there was the light.

The whole western side of that hall stood open.

Not windows so much as tall open arches between the columns, one after another after another, the entire length of it, and the sun was going down directly into them.

The daylight came in in long slabs of red-gold laid flat across the floor, one for every arch, with the shadows between them, and the colour of it all bouncing: The whole vault above had gone warm and glowing, lit from underneath by its own floor.

"...Bud."

Toothless made a sort of purr in agreement.

They walked and the halls went on.

One hall opened into another, and that one gave onto a gallery, and the gallery ran the length of a small avenue, and every time he backtracked and chose a different path, there was somehow more.

It stood out to him that almost nothing was ruined.

The floor was sound. The vaults were whole. There was a stone bench along one wall with the carving on its end still crisp enough to read. Nothing had rotted, no trees had come up through the floor, no gulls had got into the vaults, and nothing lived in any part of it at all.

The last main hall gave out onto a terrace, and the terrace was the size of the plaza.

It was open to the sky by design, paved edge to edge in the same white stone, with a low wall running round the far side of it. Hiccup walked out to the edge and sat down with his legs over the drop, and Toothless folded down at his side.

It was a sight to take in.

Below him, and it was below, the cloud lay in a long puffy sheet over the water, white and gold and moving very slowly. The sea showed grey through the gaps in it, a very long way down.

Under that low wall the drop went the whole distance. Palace, then cliff, and then the ocean. Off to his left a corner of the plateau the massive citadel was built upon.

And out past the whole of it, the ocean, the massive wall of fog, drawn back further than he had ever seen it.

Sigh.

Toothless bumped his side.

"You are getting too soft, buddy."

He scratched the dragon's jaw and watched the sun go down and finally let himself feel the full weight of a reality he had to accept.

It was many things.

His translation of the jade tome had finally been completed. It had been a long and arduous process, an ungrateful endeavor, full of twists and turns and one way streets.

And yet, Hiccup could hardly be glad it ended.

Where to even begin?

His fingers circled the pale palms of his hands. He had no answers.

The first of it was the lifespan.

A hybrid was a thing borne out of the bond between a dragon and a human. An anomaly created from the connection of souls rather than a thing that could occur naturally.

It did not die as men did. Most of them could live on for centuries before dying of old age.

He sat with that as the sun touched the water.

There was no doubt whatsoever. Everything in the library pointed to the long lifespan of the hybrids, and a good deal of it came near to saying so outright. He had tried finding any proof otherwise, and he had failed.

Centuries...

The word felt so foreign he could not even feel the weight of it.

For the love of the gods, he had turned sixteen somewhere in that winter. He could have named the number of moons since the cove to the exact one, because he had counted every single one of them and never missed a night.

What he had lost was Berk's calendar, and with it any way of knowing which of those days had been his.

Sixteen.

Decades was too large a thing to fit inside a chest. Nevermind a single century.

It was ridiculous.

It was preposterous.

It was utterly impossible.

And yet he could not quite put his head in the sand and try to dismiss it, because he was not, any longer, fully a man, and the rules that measured men might no longer measure him.

Hybrid, the jade tome named it.

A half of the boy he had once been and another half a dragon, woven through.

It was why his hair had come back the black of a Night Fury's scales, and his pupils the thin slits of Toothless's eyes, and the crown on his skull the very shape of the dragon's own.

The resemblance had not been chance, of course.

He had been made, in some real measure, out of Toothless, and as such he was bound to carry the dragon's long years in his blood along with all the rest of him.

It was a cold road.

He would watch the whole world that had made him grow old and die.

All the people he had met, the people he loved, the people he hated, and the others as well, he would see dead. Every single one of them.

He would still be standing at the end of a hundred years, and perhaps another hundred after that, while everything he ever let himself love went grey and went under and turned to the same ash as the ruins beneath his boots.

All but Toothless.

Because the tragedy of his survival did not end with the long centuries of watching everything and anything around him wilt and die.

There was a second half to it. The second half was worse.

Hiccup's life was no longer only his own.

He had felt the bond between them for months without ever suspecting anything of it.

One day he had simply known where Toothless was, and from that day he always did, the same way he knew where his own hand was, with no need to look or to listen. A steady warm certainty of his presence sitting just behind the raging storm of his thoughts.

He could feel it there. It was still there.

The two of them could find each other across the whole island without even trying. They turned at the same instant. They understood each other in a glance, and sometimes in no glance at all.

He couldn't help but let a dry laugh escape.

His hands had to support his head, the reality of it was too heavy. Hiccup had convinced himself it was only what came of a pair of lonely people living in each other's pockets since the cove.

Yet it was not.

The bond the tree had made ran all the way down. Past the horns and the slit eyes and the body that would not tire, past sense and speech and understanding, down into the very soul, where it had taken his life and the dragon's and twisted them into a single thread.

It went deeper than just sharing a long lifespan, no: If either of them died, the soul bond that made them would shatter and the other would also die with him.

Toothless was no easy thing to kill, of course.

An arrow would glance off that hide like rain off slate. It would take heavier weapons, or the claws of something terrible to truly end him.

But a dragon could be brought down, in the end, by enough of the right kind of hate. If that ever came to pass, Hiccup would go down into the dark behind him, that same heartbeat or the next.

The opposite was also true. The bond ran both ways.

If he died, Toothless died. It was one of the reasons he had not missed a dawn on that beach since the day his legs came back to him, and why the numbers went on marching across the floor of the cave, and most likely always would.

The gods had decided that his weaknesses were no longer only his own to spend.

His frailty, his failure, the smallest carelessness of his own body could now reach straight down the bond and kill the one creature in all the world that he would give his life for. His life had stopped being a small thing he could bargain with like he did at the cove.

It mattered now. It had to matter now, for better or for worse, whether he wished it or not.

It had taken him many weeks to process all of this.

In fact, he still hadn't. The circle around his eyes had grown from the long nights he skipped sleep entirely and such was the weight of the many things he had come to learn.

Right, there was something else... something about the fog.

The great standing wall of fog that ringed the massive island had not been natural. The pale tree had something to do with it, apparently.

The older tomes vaguely pointed that if and when the will of the tree held no living hybrid to guard it, there was a chance it would wrap the range of its roots in a veil.

Whether through the tides or the currents or the winds, that veil could somehow turn every ship and every dragon away.

Which finally explained why the whole island had been down off the maps and out of reach of the world. The pale tree had been waiting for another strong bond to lay claim to it.

Should I curse my luck?

Whatever the case, Hiccup shrugged, this time frowning.

The question had nagged at him since he first watched the fog begin to draw back off the shore. Why it was thinning. It finally had an answer.

And the answer was him.

He sat on the edge of that terrace and asked himself, plainly, what he meant to do with all of it.

It was easier, he found, to think about almost anything than to keep staring straight at the years and decades ahead of him, which he would probably spend in solitude, on this very island.

So he just let go, and let his mind slide and drift to something, anything, he could bear look at. And for the first time in what felt close to many lifetimes, he let himself daydream.

Perhaps it was the view of the distant ruins, or maybe it was the longing. Either way, Hiccup Haddock could not but wonder what it might have been like to be born there.

Back when the halls at his back were full of light and people, and the sky was full of wings, and a boy and his dragon would not be hunted and seen as a horror to be put down, but the most ordinary and blessed thing in the whole world.

He would have belonged here. He could see that with clarity.

It's gone though.

It's long gone.

That was the truth of it. It couldn't be helped.

"Hey." there was a stick by his hand, Toothless had bumped into him with it. "Uh. You want to make yourself useful, or are you just going to lie there looking handsome?"

He threw it over his shoulder, hard, in through the tall mouth of the hall behind them.

Toothless was up and gone after it. All five hundred ridiculous pounds of him scrambling and skidding away down that enormous floor like an overgrown puppy, in and out of the bars of moonlight, with the noise of him echoing as he trailed off.

He chuckled, out loud and alone at the edge of the world.

"Careful with the priceless ancient palace, bud," he called, and did not mean a word of it.

Toothless came back with the arm-sized stick and dropped it back onto his lap with enormous pride, and shoved that great blunt head up under his hand.

And for the first time in longer than he could remember, sitting up there under the moon and stars with the one thing left to him, Hiccup breathed, and let himself look forward instead of back.

The horizon past the fog was clearer than it had ever been. Drawn further off the shore, baring more of the island to the dying light.

The ruins lay below him through the gaps in the cloud in the last of the sun, beautiful even broken, the bones of a world that had once gotten right every single thing his own had gotten wrong.

It existed once. The whole of it. It was real, and it worked. A place where men and dragons could live in it without fear.

They are the reason why dragons can be tamed.

So why not again?

The question frightened him with how simple it was.

Because Hiccup Haddock had every reason to chase it, and nothing at all to hold him back. He had no home left to be exiled from.

No father to disappoint, no village to become a failure to, no future anyone had marked out for him, and apparently, centuries in which to make one of his own.

For the first time in the whole of his life the road ahead was not a wall but an open and endless blank slate, and he could lay it down wherever he chose.

So he let himself wonder again what it would even feel to live in such a place. And then, helpless not to, his mind went where it always went. To the next problem, and the one behind that.

What it would take. What it would cost. What would be the odds?

This is ridiculous.

However, the thought was still there, and so, how a kid turned half-dragon living in the middle of nowhere might begin, even begin, to drag the whole of it back to what it used to be.

The size of the task was mountainous.

Hiccup shook his head, he couldn't help it, he laughed again and shorter this time, because it was absurd. It was the most absurd thing he had ever thought.

And he had a track record of those.

...

I do have a track record.

He was brought back to the first time he had imagined flying a dragon. How back then it had been the most absurd thing too. And he had a saddle and a dragon and a whole new body to show for it now.

Impossibility, he was learning, was a very vague word.

So he did not stop thinking.

Yes, it whispered of something too large to say out loud. A people who numbered possibly in the hundreds of thousands. A free people, open to thought, and to dragons, and to the future.

That mad and impossible dream put down a root in him, green and hopeful and for once, good.

The fog was thinner than he had ever seen it. He was running along the shores when it came to him: The first grey light breaking cold and clean over a sea he could see further across than any living man. The dead-white coast pouring past.

He noted it down to memory. But his stride kept long and even and wholly inhuman, the ground-eating gait of a warhorse and not a man, mile on mile with no burn in his legs and no catch in his chest.

He could not feel the cold. He could feel everything else.

The wind in his teeth. The snow flung up bright behind his heels. The huge easy strength of his body answering without a word of complaint, and under all of it the steady hammer of his own heart, alive, alive, alive.

Hiccup had spent a good part of the season finding the edges of what he was. And in the process finding, too, where those edges stopped.

He had taken so much from the Night Fury that some stubborn corner of him had reasoned he might as well have taken the rest. So he had tried, in the privacy of the empty heights, a few things he was very glad no one had been there to see.

He had stood on the edge of a cliff with his chest full of air and strained, red-faced, to breathe out a Night Fury's blue fire:

Here we go, watch closely Toothless.

Only to then produce a series of sore coughs.

He had spent an entire week certain that if he only understood the muscles of his own back well enough, wings would answer. Then he had thrown away a whole afternoon trying to fly by himself. Which left him a wrenched shoulder and a deeply unimpressed dragon.

Fine. No flying. I can live with that.

A dozen other quiet failures besides.

He was a hybrid and not a Night Fury, the line between the two was something the jade tome had insisted on, and that he still had to learn the hard way.

His body had begun to slow its changing, too.

Not stop, never quite stop, but the great leaps of those first months had stretched out into something weaker, gains measured now in degrees rather than in breakthroughs.

He had also grown taller again over the winter, the last of childhood had been stretched out of him, and the lean wiry frame had morphed into the build of a growing man, and not the half-starved child he had once been.

How tall is this now? Five feet and nine inches, near enough?

Either way, whatever he had been was finished.

Whatever he was now had very nearly arrived.

Berk still came to him sometimes. However, the days between the rememberings stretched wider and wider apart, and into the empty space something else had moved in. Something that did not hurt and would also not leave.

It was the question. Always the question now.

What will it take to bring this place back. How do I, of all people in the world, actually even begin.

Every time he let himself dream it, reality met him at the door with its arms folded. Dreaming was an easy thing to do, and the reality of it was not.

A kingdom needs food to last through winters, it needs trade for goods it lacks, it needs rules for order, and so many more things.

Crops to farm, cattle for meat, water to drink, and so many abstract things one could not measure: An economy, security, and craft, and knowledge, and a king.

Most importantly, it needs people.

And people need a reason to show up and an even better reason to stay and settle and then have their kids stay as well.

Even worse, this one needed dragons.

And dragons came with the long slow patient work of teaching two kinds that had been at war for some three hundred years, to share a single sky.

In summary, his mad dream had a whole iceberg inside of it and Hiccup was barely beginning to scratch the tip of it.

It's impossible.

The distance between the dream in his chest and the bare cold ground underneath his feet was so wide it should have killed the dream outright.

And yet, it did not.

Thought by thought by stubborn thought, problem by problem, a path began to lay itself down in front of him, faint and vague at the sides, but it was there.

And the more the path took shape the more the vision became clear, clearer and clearer until it was so vivid he could almost step into it.

Streets that were not silent. Children he could hear before he could see, shrieking with laughter, chasing one another on the streets.

Dragons and men together in the crowds, tables under a roof, loud with people, and food enough on them that no one bothered to count. No dragon killing rings. No skulls on the walls. No chains, and no one too small or too strange or too useless to belong.

A place that might simply let him belong.

The one thing fifteen years on Berk had never once given him.

And then finally, one night, with the fog drawn back and the citadel bathed silver under the moon, he simply decided to try.

He smoothed a fresh stretch of the library floor, and took up his charcoal, and after a moment's stillness he began, in the same careful hand that had once sketched saddles and tail-rigs by candlelight a world away, to dream.