Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s the migrating Golden Hollows that lead them to it. Their warping orange-red lines of a vast formation heading somewhere south on the beginning and edge of autumn before it starts to hail every evening and threatens their fragile wings with destruction; they’ve been following them for maybe a week, an expedition longer than most because they can afford it, as the Hollows’ own rest patterns match the ones of a Night Fury near exactly. 

It allows them to rest without ending up too far behind the main flock to discover where they might be heading, the lands where they finally stop and survive the winter free of the barrage of elements. Hiccup has already failed to follow three different migrating species in the last half-year; he wants to see at least where the young and fragile Hollows make their temporary home, if he can’t have any other. 

Even if he’d prefer it.

The Giggling Heronbeaks— with the long, sharp jaws that gave them name and a fascinating sense of etiquette— ended up having too much stamina for either of their dragons to match, and it’s a disappointment he still hasn’t quite let go of, so he’s getting a little cocky about this prolonged expedition. Maybe. 

He merely wants to see the places that only dragons have before; where only they have touched their claws and settled heavy and exhausted and at last at home. 

Even if it means following a less immediately-interesting species; though he’s beginning to learn that he underestimated them. Or misunderstood.

The Golden Hollows are called so for two simple reasons. The first comes from the yellow-orange scales on their sides, arranged in a neat little line that catches even the moon’s light and returns it in flashes of gleaming gold for miles on to see; the second they chose when they’d discovered all their bones are hollow inside and netted like a bird’s. 

For a time, he wrote them off as a dragon too uncooperative and short-lived and fragile to bear a rider’s weight— not a problem of size, given they possessed a wingspan two times a Nadder’s— and much disinterested in it. He’s tried. Many times. 

They’ve been landing on the same rocks, right between the travelling flock as they ate and rested and slept and buzzed their songs into the night; they allowed him to come close with no issue but did not seem interested in returning any attempt at communication, largely ignoring them altogether. Stormfly’s attempts at playfulness gathered mostly a dragon’s form of utter confusion, too, and Toothless seemed to either not care or know better, and never even tried. 

In the end, the Golden Hollows kept to themselves, and Hiccup slowly became used to the fact that the kindest gesture of mutual existence they could give him was allowing Toothless and Stormfly to join their many V-formations— and save energy that’d normally be wasted on fighting the drag of air. 

Something about them, in this way, seemed peaceful. He struggled to explain it— the many times he’d tried, Astrid seemed to understand as well but neither could put it to words. The formation had a sort of stability to it, their one direction in mind and one purpose comforting in the hours and hours spent following them across the changing sky of the nearing year’s end. They flew together and they flew as one, uniform yet chaotic in the complex system of changing leaders at the top of their V’s— this position even, by some chance, falling once on Stormfly— and the days passed easily within their ranks. Golden of the morning falling steady into the golden of sunset and back again, hundreds of golden lines glittering around them.

He never saw them as that interesting— they’ve been unaware of the very existence of the species for years, as Hollows never neared Berk in any significant number and never hunted or raided in general; he’s reconsidering that now. They may not be able to spit fire nor bear a rider nor have bones and constitution strong enough to not get their wings crumpled by the wind simply if it bears on them too strong, but they seemed to have a purpose regardless, something near enviable against the upheaval and unending chaos back home he often avoids when it becomes too much. Too unpredictable. Too noisy and erratic and complex; for that reason he saw this, this much-longer-than-should-be flight, both as a pursuit of knowledge, but also as a vacation well-deserved.

He still remembers, after all, the first time he’d seen them in summer— because the third reason they could not be ridden hid in their lifespans; they died much too soon. Only five years, maybe even less; they grew quicker than any dragon he’s ever seen and then just died. 

They became the hollow, golden marvel glittering over the sea’s water in one exact nesting location and then came into the one and only place to die, all at once, all of those dragons shimmering in the sea as they laid eggs and then fell into the water in great heaps of dying bodies and last flaps of gilded wings. They all were born in one location, one time, all in the height of summer; in five years, they would return to the same shallow gulf at the end of a fjord of an island lonely at sea, and they would die there, and nothing would— or could, he begins to suspect— sway them from that purpose in life. 

Astrid said on the third day of following and becoming used to the shapes and quirks of their formation, that they were like salmon or eels; he’s beginning to understand that, somewhat with mourning. 

“You can’t expect every dragon to want to be trained, Hiccup,” she’d said with faint and soft amusement into the setting sun of the day before as he’d voiced it, some abstract regret wanting to sway the Hollows— to see how they flew and how they would be to fly and to train and to love. He didn’t want her to be right, though he had to say she’s always been good at judging what she observes. If Astrid believed the Hollows to be untrainable, then they mostly likely were.

“Not everything in nature should be that way, I think,” she’d said too, later, in the morning when the Hollows buzzed and chattered by quivering the scaled ends of their tails and prepared for take-off. “Not everything should be tamed.”

“Why?” He’d asked; they knew, at that point, that when the Hollows begin buzzing they are only doing so to make sure all of them are awake and no one is left behind dreaming; they had time. Only once the Hollows went quiet did they leave and move on to other islands and the journey of the day; until then, they could eat their sparse breakfast and talk in relative peace, as long as they would speak loud enough to hear each other. 

(The latter quickly became the most irritating aspect of the Hollows, at least to Hiccup; they were delicate and fragile and yet, wretchedly, unfairly noisy.)

“It’s nature. It should be wild,” she chuckled. “That’s how this works.”

It’s been a week. The same journey every day even if the place they land at always ends up different, more and more south; he’s lulled to the rhythm and she is too. Their dragons seem not to share that longing for serenity nor ability to enjoy it nearly as much, however; Toothless more irritable than usual and Stormfly positively stir-crazy, both of them exhausted seemingly at the soul.

He feels the mark on his body too— he spends most of the day flying, sure, but never in this monotone way that requires one tempo and one flying style except for brief moments when the formation shifts and adjusts. He’s been feeling muscles he didn’t even know he had, and with very little energy to deal with it. They have just enough to make that same monotone journey every single day; not an ounce more. 

He counts it as another dragon-riding experience to add to the pile and complains about it in the mornings and during long nights, but it’s what it is.

It’s a rhythm. It’s comforting. Exhausting. Everything has positives and negatives, and this journey has an end.

The rhythm gets disrupted much sooner than that, however— because it’s the Hollows that lead them to it.

He’s skirting at the very back of a V-formation with seven Hollows in front of him when they first see it; Astrid behind him, so if anything, they could at least talk. The Hollows don’t fly fast enough for the wind to kill shouts or even just a louder, stronger speaking voice, so they’ve been conversing. About Berk, the Hollows, the lands they are headed for; about nothing much, too.

They first notice in glances above, the thick cloud cover beneath them and night sky over them, lit by a wide and pale moon. The Hollows may not fly for long but they fly higher than most, far above the clouds; not much else than them flies here, at least on its own. They met an errant carnage (because even if dragons are no longer thought of as evil, names just stayed) of Nadders day four much to Stormfly’s exhausted delight and a single and seemingly highly confused Timberjack, but that’s all of it. 

It makes it that more exciting. Even with the exhaustion; The Hollows’ rest patterns didn’t exactly align with the cycle of day and night and it forced them to fly through the night quite often. He’s never slept this long on dragonback before; a new experience alright.

He’s blinking sleepiness out of his eyes when he notices the blue and flashing white dancing high above them in small spirals; he first assumes it’s a mirage, a hallucination borne out of a traveller’s kind of fatigue, and decides to enjoy the lightshow while he can.

At least until Astrid seems to notice it too, and— at the tail of a yawn— proclaims: “Are you seeing what I’m seeing or is it just—“

“No, I see it.”

Toothless flinches under him; he hasn’t spoken in hours and it must’ve come as a shock, especially given the lull of the journey. 

A concerned— if irritated too, in a way— kind of purr comes after, trapped in the dragon’s throat and making his skin tremble against Hiccup’s own; he responds with a hand against Toothless’ head, watching the dancing shape in the distance as he says: “Sorry, bud.”

The dragon trills; low and amused like his own version of an eye-roll, the noise betraying his tiredness.

“What is that?” Astrid raises her voice from the back.

He doesn’t have a good answer; it dances above them across the sky in graceful spirals and swirls like a miniature of the Aurora Borealis; its colors twist from the deep blue of icebergs to sharp cyan and die in a pale and moon’s own snowy white; it reminds him the kind of dances Zipplebacks performed in the sky to court one another, all flashing tails and wings working overtime to perform the mesmerizing movement quite right.

If it is one being, one creature, it’s too large to be anything other than a dragon and too high up as well. He’s not quite sure it’s a singular being, however; he thinks so from how tightly packed the slivers of light they can see are— even a gaggle of dragons climbing all over one another’s throats would eventually separate. Dragons like personal space; this apparition twirls in the sky like a mass of many, or a mass of one, and remains contained to itself. 

“A new dragon, for certain,” he says. “Nothing we’ve seen before.”

“The movement looks like a Whispering Death’s, but…” Astrid trails off. 

“Too high up. Way too high, and too in the open.”

“Yeah…” she follows; it sounds so uncertain it makes him lean back and turn to see what’s wrong, but it’s really just the travel, isn’t it? The Hollows will land soon; the formation has been slowing down for the last hour or so, signalling the end of the cycle. He has no idea how they know exactly where to find the next island, but they’ve never once been mistaken. 

They’re both exhausted, is the point. He’s been dozing off for so long he’s struggling to remember when he started.

He wishes he could try to get closer— he knows it’s not a good idea, for multiple very good reasons, but he’d hate to miss a new discovery, especially this far away from Berk with no certain way how to find this new dragon again. It glistens and quivers and spirals above them and he can’t do anything else than blink sleep out of his eyes and try to grasp something more than just a dance of light. 

“What about Moondancer?” he shouts without turning, a small smile on his lips.

“Good one!” Astrid calls from the back. “Rolls off the tongue much better than, the, ah, Spitting quilve—Quiver…kestrel.”

“Don’t be so hard on Fishlegs,” he responds with a small laugh, “his names aren’t all bad.”

“That one is.”

A chuckle. Toothless shakes his head with a resonant mrrp. “I won’t argue with that.”

Then he notices something else; the Hollows grouping closer together, a buzz and chatter of their tales here and there and one resonant groaning call. A growing sense of unease.

“They don’t seem very happy about it,” he announces. 

“Yeah,” Astrid’s response feels a small bit uneasy, still filled with a tired hesitation, but more focused than before. “I’ve noticed.”

Stormfly moves closer to Toothless too— her eyes seem half lidded, probably working on a pack dragon’s instinct, reacting to what she’s seeing without necessarily realizing why or that she’s doing it in the first place. The tip of her wing brushes against Toothless’ tail; he knows because the Night Fury flinches with his full body and immediately growls in response, a frustrated and exasperated noise with a keen at the end.

“Sorry, bud.”

The Hollows start descending.

When he glances above where he remembers the shape being, it’s gone— Astrid confirms it too, having gotten distracted by the dragon’s brief not-so-happy interaction as well. 

“There it goes, I guess.”

“The Hollows seem nervous,” he comments. They’re not separating; still flying as closely packed together as their wingspans would allow.

“Maybe it’s unfamiliar to them too?”

He considers it; they seem highly familiar with this route, too familiar— though, perhaps the Moondancer is a stray of some uncommon species and has simply wandered far off course.

The Hollows haven’t reacted the same to the carnage of Nadders or the Timberjack or to them, however. They prefer to ignore all other species— why not this one?

“I don’t think that’s it,” he calls back. “I think they know very well what—“

A tinny whistling interrupts him; a small and nearly indistinguishable noise, were he not focusing specifically to try to gauge what the dragons around him are feeling and searching fusther, for the Moondancer; he lets the sentence go unfinished, prompting Astrid to listen closely, too.

It sounds like the whistle of a Night Fury at full speed. Higher than even that.

“That sounds like—“

He doesn’t get to finish that one either— because something stabs through the formation like a knife, like a javelin thrown from the vast void of stars at speeds higher than they can comprehend, at a speed higher than either of their dragons have flown in a week; it slams into the formation to his left and tears it, mercilessly and brutally, into disorder and when his eyes snap to it, he sees what’s wrong— a missing spot where a Hollow would be, the dragons around it torn out of their rhythm and screeching in voices higher than he’s ever heard a Hollow make. 

Toothless immediately snaps to battle-readiness; he feels all his muscle go taut under him with a noise of panicked confusion— Stormfly caws behind him, and he knows she is ready for a battle now, too.

“What— what was that—?!” 

The hole in the formation is filled; they start packing even closer, the formations overlapping one another from the top and bottom. 

“A predator,” he breathes out in realization, a kind of chill running down his back. “A dragon-killer!”

“Oh, Odin,” Astrid exclaims. 

“We need to—“ he starts, not realizing he doesn’t know what to do until he gets to that point and trails off; both their dragons are exhausted, the flock around them terrified. He doesn’t know how to react. There may be more, but he’s watched how Terrible Terrors hunt jackdaws— the weak links, the ones that separate get felled much sooner.

“Stay in formation!” he calls, trying to look around them, to spot a peek of cyan or white, straining his ears to listen; nothing appears to him. Toothless trills with a worried question; asking for orders, asking for permission to hunt, but maybe a little less eager, more exhausted, like he wanted an excuse not to have to.

“Stay,” Hiccup pats the side of his head absentmindedly, aiming for comfort. With the dragon’s relieved whine, he thinks it does the job.

“What if it comes again?” Astrid voices the question he’s asking himself.

“We take our chances.”

“I don’t like taking chances,” she responds, irritated; he wants to answer a confused Yes, you do? but taking risks is not really what she means; it’s more the fact they have to sit around and wait for the best. Forced inaction. They were vikings; they didn’t just sit around and hope the danger wouldn’t come for them. 

“Me neither, but we really have no choice here; if we leave the formation, it’ll absolutely come for us and our dragons are in no shape—“

“I get it, I get it,” the irritation does not leave her voice, but a reluctance joins it. 

The formation has reached the cloud cover by then; their wings swirl the fog into small smoky spirals until they sink in fully and fly through the cloud; they’ve done this a dozen times before but now, it’s a hundred times more unnerving, the bodies of dragons turning into grayscale dark shadows much closer than they ever were and the hope that nothing more goes wrong beating in their hearts. 

At least the beast cannot see them like this. 

They fly in silence. The Hollows around them cease in their noise too, but it’s no longer the pleasant serenity it was; a tense calm before the storm instead. 

The clouds waver and break and he takes a breath of relief when they exit the clouds and come upon a large, lumpy shape of a forested island right in front of them, lone upon the ocean.

He finally relaxes only once they touch the ground. 

—

They both sleep in fits and a sort of paranoia never letting them rest enough; a dragonhunter was never a good sign.

He’d suspected they might exist ever since he’d first laid eyes on the Red Death and seen it devour that Gronckle without hesitation; the fact that something as majestic and powerful and terrifying as a dragon could become someone else’s prey seemed wrong, seemed uncanny, against the nature of the world— though it only made sense that the only creature to kill a dragon as prey would be another one.

He hasn’t encountered any of these… predators since the Red Death and even with the Hive Queen, he’d assumed the dragon-eating aspect to be more about threat and control than a hunter’s raw need— she seemed more than happy with the scraps and various creatures she’d received from the dragons under her rule and didn’t need to actively hunt them to survive. 

The Moondancer— a beautiful name for a terrible beast— seemed a different sort. A worse sort. Something he’s feared for a long, long time.

If dragons could be eaten by other dragons— if dragons had their own genuine-to-life predators, what did that mean? Berk would never be safe, no matter what they did, if one of these creatures flew a little too north or a little too west and discovered its secret; it’d be the raids all over again, their island a ready-made feast from a hunter’s eyes.

Most dragons could still fight or escape if they had enough warning, but Berk cared for plenty of young, disabled, and aging dragons; dragons could not flee when faced with a danger so absolute, brutal and as mind-shatteringly quick as the Moondancer’s unpredictable attack. Would they have to hide them away?

Worse than that— could Toothless dodge its attack? It seemed so fast, too fast, faster than he could comprehend. 

He doesn’t get much sleep that night.

“It has a to be their natural predator— they clearly knew what they were doing, seemed familiar with it; it has to be some sort of seasonal hunter,” Astrid tries to construct theories in the morning above their breakfast of strips of dried meat and a single flame-cooked fish they managed to catch; the Hollows aren’t quieter. Still chattering as always. Nothing about them seems to grieve much, though he’d seen a few of them mingle about, groaning and heavy and receiving support and nuzzling from the brethren they pass. 

If anything, they seem louder overall.

“What do you mean?” He asks, an edge buried in his voice like a knife uncovered.

“The Hollows take the same route every year, no? An identical flightpath at the same time annually— if you were a predator, that’d be a feast in the making, there and ready.”

“And?” He counters, angry. “That makes it better? What if it hits us?”

She blinks, confusion apparent in her features. “It’s nature, Hiccup. It’s not pretty but whatever the Moondancer is, it’s got to eat.”

He huffs, cutting straight to the point. “Yeah, but what if one of those got to Berk?”

“We’d…deal with it?” She answers, hesitant, trying to gauge where the anger’s coming from. “That’s still a pretty big if, still. This island is more than a week of flight away from Berk.”

He groans in frustration. “What if it follows the Hollows to it? What if it follows us? ”

“Why would it?” She turns it to another question, another point of confusion showing in her features; he feels frustration and anger burn at his insides with her failure to understand , seeing her just accept that something like this could be alright, and more than that, could not mark her awe of this beast’s life that depended on the murder of others. 

“Do you not— get it? We’re meant to protect our own, Berk can’t have that, we can’t have another lifetime of raids.”

She quiets. Something gentle yet firm as steel settles in her eyes as she observes him for long enough that his skin starts to crawl, before she speaks again. “It’s a predator, Hiccup. It has to hunt, it has to eat. That’s nature.”

She uses the word nature like it’s self-explanatory; like it’s the end of discussion, a concept so powerful and absolute it should never be challenged— he hates it. Isn’t that what they’ve been doing all this time? Challenging the conception that cruelty was a dragon’s only purpose as dictated by some law of nature? He hates it, and he fights against it, and she does not retreat, as stubborn as him. 

“No, it’s not that—“

She asks something else, instead. 

“What do you think we should do then? Find this dragon and kill it for the crime of merely hunting to eat? For the chance of the wind ever blowing it our way?”

“The Red Death ate dragons too, and we killed it,” he argues.

She does not waver. “The Red Death was different.” 

“How? Tell me, how is this different? I can only see it as worse, if, if a dragon kills another just like that."

“Not even the fish live at peace, Hiccup,” Astrid counters and he shakes his head in confusion as it seems miles off course, a faint, distant rephrasing of what the fishermen used to say, peace lies with the fish; he doesn’t get how it relates.

She swallows and her eyes fall to the fish that’s nearly cooked as she says: “Salmon are fish that eat other fish; isn’t that what this is? Even for them there’s always a bigger fish, like the marlins and perches and sharks.”

“Are you saying these Hollows deserve to die just— just because a predator happens to exist? What if it hits Stormfly? Or, or…Toothless?” His voice trembles, quietens at the thought— he’s thought of it more and more as the night went on into the morning; his dragon already bore more than enough scars from scruffles and accidents and other battles during his lifetime and those came from dragons his equal; what if the predator struck, and he was not quick enough? It stabbed through the formation like an arrow, invisible during the night and mysterious like the Night Fury once was— it horrified him.

She sighs, one of her hands coming to wrap around her body and holding on to her shoulder, like she’s chilly. It doesn’t surprise him. The wind that blows from the sea is cold and salty and demanding, these cliffs not high enough to break it entirely, leading it to them instead.

She sits, quietly, for a few moments; seems unnerved by that image too. 

“We’ll deal with that but, Hiccup— we don’t know anything about this dragon, this Moondancer— we can’t judge it only based on this. That’d be like…that’d be what we’ve done before.”

“It’s different, it’s— this is worse.”

“You can’t hate a wild creature just because it kills something you love,” she says, her tone low and bothered and imploring him to drop it.

He shakes his head and stands, prompting Toothless to gently purr in expectation, raising his ear-flaps. A gesture has him dropping them again, as he wants him to rest more than anything— so they’d be ready.

Hiccup runs his hand through his hair and sighs, staring out onto the calm, vast sea.

—

The next flight passes peacefully— the hole left behind by the lost Hollow filled like it’d never been there, like nothing had happened— he almost allows himself to relax with the assumption that only that one island was unlucky enough to host a beast like the Red Death’s worst crimes. 

The day after that proves him wrong.

This time, Astrid notices it first. 

“Moondancer,” she breathes out at first, her voice weak, then repeats it again with a warning yell: “The Moondancer!”

It dances above them again, so high above he wonders how much stamina the dragon has to have, how big it is in the first place. He finds himself remembering the empty pages he’s had to fill in their Book of Dragons, its rough and yellowed pages full of missing data that inspired fear before and now awoke awe and the yearning imagination; he thinks this one would bring that fear again, the horror of a prey wondering Just what can this beast do? What is it capable of?

It dances for a short moment yet again in beautiful flicks of a tail they cannot see fully and flapping wings they cannot hear, and he wonders why it does so, why is it presenting itself to its prey— is it a dragon’s arrogance? Is it a beast’s threat, some sick enjoyment that has it mocking the species it will kill soon after?

It does not dance for long.

That day, they’re only halfway through their journey when they see it— Toothless has enough power in him still to give chase if need be. 

“Watch out, bud,” he tells him; he doesn’t need to, as he's already noticed what has disturbed his rider so, tuned into his emotions better than anyone else he knows.

The Hollows around them start flocking up closer and closer again, uneasy calls and warning groans; they’ve gotten stuck in between five and five of them in this formation and that doesn’t bode well for maneuverability, but it’s what they have and what the Hollows expected of them. They need to manage.

He thinks he almost sees something block out the stars a few times— just like watching out for the Night Fury all those years ago, the same mix of fear-eagerness-impending doom. A little more experience this time. He killed the Red Death in a great explosion of brilliant flame and scent of burning flesh less than a year ago; he can take down the Moondancer, whatever it is, if he trusts himself and finds out enough.

A few strange caws ring into the night, followed by a resonant noise like a seagull’s giggle thrice-louder; Stormfly caws in response and then seems embarrassed she’s done so and rather unnerved.

He watches the sky through the grouping silhouettes of the Hollows and waits for it to strike. 

It takes its time with it. It whistles above them a few times, the faint noise of a powerful flap here and there. 

It does not wait forever.

He is more ready for it this time around; he hears the whistling, bends down in the saddle and feels all of Toothless’ muscles tense up in preparation for another battle of their lives; hears Astrid have to comfort Stormfly in the back; a simple: “Don’t worry, girl.” and an answering caw, a clicking noise of a Nadder’s spikes bumping against one another as they are raised.

The rushing air betrays it more than anything else. They cannot see it. They cannot hear it, only for the devastation that it leaves behind as it cuts through the sky.

It strikes much farther.

Not as perfectly, this time— because instead of blowing a hole in the formation, it barges in and rams into several Hollows at once, losing its momentum, and he can see it, this time— can see its massive pitch black wings against the Hollows’ golden lines glinting in the Moon’s pale light and its movements, albeit unclearly, fast and sure and ravenous, terrifyingly beastly. 

Toothless roars and snaps at the Hollows surrounding them, scaring them off to allow it space, and lunges— flying forward, full speed ahead, claws ready to tear into that enormous shape making the formation spin out of control, Stormfly close behind.

The air whistles around them, the confused and terrified cries of the Hollows disturbing the calm of the night; The Moondancer before them, and as Hiccup nears the beast, only then he realized how truly enormous it is— just in time for it to notice with a shriek so sharp he flinches with hands over his ears, and for it to flee.

It simply dips, hitting one of the Hollows out of its place with its wings, and vanishes below— its dark shape evident against the clouds as it passes, massive and two-winged, an enormous and strange tail stretched wide; thin and long in body like an arrow, a winged spear, its wings sharp-ended like a falcon’s instead of broad.

He’s about to follow it, to finally catch up to it no matter what and end its threat; then Astrid yells: “Let it go!” 

He stops Toothless in his tracks; the Night Fury gives out a confused-enraged growl in response.

“Why? We can catch up to it— we can finally find—!“

“The Hollows are wounded, Hiccup!” She shouts, and that stops him short. “We need to help them!”

He glances back down to the clouds and the dark sea’s surface that the gaps between them reveal, and does not find the Moondancer’s shape any more; it’d simply vanished, disappeared back out into the night like a monster of the dark, like a nightmare in a sun’s waking rays. 

He nods at Astrid and returns back to the formation, its wobbling, wounded members lagging behind. 

—

It’s a devastating blow that the Moondancer left behind. They can’t save them all, can’t help them enough; one Hollow falls behind too far and eventually flaps its wings one last time with a defeated cry before it drops out of the heavens altogether; Hiccup has his hands full with another at the time, Toothless at the brink of complete exhaustion from having to help the wounded dragon near-twice his size stay in the air, no matter how lighter the Hollows were with the bones that gave them name. 

He can only watch the dragon die behind and vanish in the dark, rowdy, gaining waves of the sea.

They land sooner than before, just at the brink of dawn, having made only a little over half the journey they should’ve; he’s only thankful, because the Hollows they’re both trying to help are losing the last of their strength and Toothless is barely managing to flap his wings fully anymore.

They crash more than land. At least the island is a beautiful one, a lush, strange and thin forest stretching over its grassy fields speckled with white-barked and thick-leaved trees; mountainous with solid, angular rock forming enormous irregular towers like a child’s stacked toys. 

Toothless collapses under him and he immediately dismounts and lets him rest, making the straps of the saddle a little looser to allow him more space to breathe; then he goes for his many bags of supplies and starts taking out what he needs. Taking the dragon-grade bandages he has left into one hand, letting them hang a little underneath, slightly loose, and a steel needle the size of a sickle with the corresponding ball of thick fishing line in the other. With a steadying breath, he turns and runs to where the collapsed Hollows lay, groaning in pain and exhaustion.

Astrid joins him with her own supplies; he gestures at her to look for other wounded, and she nods and begins searching, vanishing from his view behind the body of the felled dragon he approaches.

He freezes once he gets close enough to see the damage the Moondancer has inflicted on the gilded skin of the Hollow. Once he sees its true extent. 

The Hollow is barely alive. Two massive bleeding fissures run the side of its flank, angry red against its skin gleaming in the sun of the early morning, its eyes half closed and murky and bloodshot, staring at the ground where it lies, collapses on its belly with its wings haphazardly half-curled at its sides.

He walks up to its head first— knowing to do so out of courtesy as dragons like to know when they are being approached— and expects it to flinch as most wounded dragons do once they see a human near them from trauma or experience or both; even Stormfly flinches and screeches sometimes when hurt. 

It doesn’t. As he lays his hand on its snout, its copper-red eyes glance at him for a brief moment with no emotion hiding within them except for a soul-deep fatigue, and then return to the ground with a deep, deep sigh.

“It’ll be alright,” he says to the heavily-breathing dragon and hopes that he’s telling the truth.

He loses a bit of that hope once he starts preparing to sew the scratches back together and realizes the injury goes deep, almost too deep, into its flesh. It’s a horrible, clean line, long and dark and wretched, scales torn off or skewed out of position along its edge; completely unlike the scratches he’s seen on other dragons from the claws or teeth of their equals. 

Nothing should pass this easily and this deep through the firm and thick scales of a dragon. 

He thinks of the claws; tries to imagine how curved and sharp and enormous they must’ve been to inflict such damage, and a chill runs down his spine at the thought, something terrified and small inside him crying out in horror. 

He keeps thinking of eagles. Of the devastation their talons left on the bodies of fish, and what Astrid said the day before.

Dipping his head, he chases the thought off into the dark corner of his mind it belongs to and slips the fishing line through the eye of the needle.

To sew a dragon’s wounds is a delicate affair needing a gentle touch and a strong resolve; a slow and laborious process of stabbing the needle between scales and sometimes having to help it go through with a small hammer. It always takes long and it takes his all, and that’s only for the comically small wounds he has experience with and not gashes the length of an eel and deep enough for him to sink his entire hand into it up to the wrist when he loops the thread. It takes him an hour. The Hollow’s breathing falls and falls, slower and weaker with every passing moment, every new stitch. The dragons around them settle to sleep.

“Hold on, hold on,” he begs the dragon once he’s done, once he reaches for the bandages and starts tearing them, preparing to cover the wounds and hope for the best. 

The Hollow only groans and collapses further, losing all strength in its limbs in its next exhale. Hiccup’s heart sinks.

“No,” he breathes out. “No, it’s going to be alright, it’ll be alright, just you wait, I’ll cover these gashes and you’ll be as good as ever in no time.” He’s not sure he even believes it.

Hollows were too fragile for this; the fact this one lasted so long was already an achievement of resolve. It could not go to waste; Odin, do not let this go to waste.

He starts putting on the bandages, working faster than ever even as his own limbs ache and shake with weakness brought on by exhaustion; he keeps working despite it. He needs to do this; he needs to save it. He’d never forgive himself.

Much less the beast that caused this to happen.

“No, hold on, please hold on,” he pleads, more with desperation than with the softness he’d desire; his hands red and slick with drying blood and leaving red marks on the bandages as he clumsily applies them. 

It does not seem to help. Nothing changes when he finishes the work; the Hollow simply lies as if accepting its fate, its impending death in the waking sun that shone warmer here down south. 

He stares down at it, hesitant and afraid and angry, and remembers; recalls the day he watched the massive flocks of Hollows return to that cold fjord the color of labradorite to die, flapping their wings like mayflies for the last time in their lives and letting the sun shine through them and color them a veined copper; he doesn’t know what it makes him feel, other than that the sight of this one—weak and dying so far away from both of its homes— feels unbearable.

He kneels next to its head and lays his hand on its snout again, running his fingers over the majestic line of it, feeling its skin stretch and press into his palm with every slow inhale, the small wheeze forming in its nostrils. His eyes, at last, falling to its own, half-lidded and pained and unfocused. 

He can’t bear to look, so he doesn’t; clenching his other hand into a fist, thinking of that shape, that beast, that creature that’d caused this; when he opens his eyes again, however, it's to find the Hollow’s gaze has fallen on him. 

He’s met eyes with a Hollow many times and always found them disinterested and cold and evaluative, insect-like or fish-like, never anything close to the feeling of connection, the reflection of the soul that other dragons could hold in their gaze— this time, it’s different. 

This time, he feels like he’s truly meeting their eyes. Like the dragon finally acknowledges him, finally reflects his soul back up in the lines of regret and fear and grief— but more than that. Its eye stares back and it is clear and focused and wise and old in a young body, serene and almost amused, and he feels the miles that it has flown and what it has seen and the endless miles of the cold, vast sea that its gaze flown over for just a few short years before its death; it stares at him like it’s seeing him for the first time, like it’s finally noticing him and imploring him to understand— not to worry and not to grieve— and above all thankful, letting out a deep, husky whine and a small, weak chatter of its tail like a goodbye.

Then it closes. The Hollow exhales one last time, and breathes in no more.

He feels tears forming at the corners of his eyes and lets them run down his face and drop into the grass. 

Astrid finds him like this later; once the sun has already risen past the sea and shines at them all and makes the sleeping Hollows’ forms gilded and luminous, their shadows stretching long in the quiet, yellowed, moving grass. 

He stares into it, eyes empty, and tries to reconcile what has happened with what to do now, and everything feels just too little for what was lost. 

“Hiccup?” Astrid asks, gently, noticing that something is wrong. 

He sighs and lifts his head to answer, but nothing comes out.

She realizes anyway. “It didn’t make it.”

“No.” His voice sounds rough with tears. 

“I’m…sorry,” she replies lamely, unsure with what to do, as painfully unsure as him, entirely inadequate— for a dragon just died and they could not help it. 

He keeps coming back to the memory of staring into its eye ever so briefly and understanding it; for the first time seeming who the Hollows were and what they believed in and what souls hid underneath those golden scales and amidst their hollow, netted bones and grieving that this has died, this has gone and vanished into the far halls of Hel as it did not die in battle. 

He keeps thinking of its claws. Its talons. He picks up the blood-coated surgical needle into his hand and realizes he’s most likely looking at a mimicry. 

Anger awakes, and it does so hot and regretful and sick. He grips the needle in his hands and clenches his fingers around it and struggles out: “Do you get it now?”

“What?” She asks, noticing the shift in tone.

“The Moondancer—“ he says and cannot find any more words to describe this, this quiet, red-hot seething at his core.

She cuts him off anyway. “This changes nothing.”

“It killed them. They dared to live and it killed them.”

“It’s a predator— it needs to eat.”

“So you’re just going to excuse this? They died— does that not mean anything?”

Her lips form a thin, displeased line. “This is still a tragedy, yes, but Hiccup, everything has to eat.”

He growls and forces himself to stand, stumbling a little once he’s done so, muscles straining to hold his weight.

“The Moondancer did this,” he stabs a blood-coated finger down to where the dead Hollow’s head lies in the grass, and thinks of the wound and of the claws and of the dragon’s last, dying moment and the quiet nonsensical amusement in its peaceful eyes. “You saw the wounds, you saw the damage. We need to kill it—“

Her eyes widen in shock. “Woah, no—“

“— or chase it away. Far, far away.”

A beat of quiet. He drops his hand, letting her stare at him; something complicated making home in her features.

When he turns— to go wake up Toothless, to do something, see what he can assemble together to hunt the beast— she says: “I won’t let you.”

“What,” he asks, flat, without turning.

Steps rustling within the grass.

She comes around the body, stepping over its collapsed tail. “You heard me. I won’t let you hunt it down.”

“Why?” 

“Our dragons need the rest, Hiccup, and we do too, for one—“

“No, I mean why? Why do you care so much about this…this monster? ”

She does not fall quiet to reconsider her words this time. “Because who else will?”

He blinks at her and falls back, hearing the echo of a hundred other conversations— Why do you care so much? Someone has to.

A small smile, or something that tries to be one rising the edge of her lips. “Months ago, I would’ve killed a Nadder if I saw one up close. Months ago, I would’ve called Stormfly a monster, for the exact same reasons.”

The sunlight falls on them both and stretches their shadow into misshapen lines in the grass, and the dragons sleep soundly around them and around the body of the dead seeping blood into the soil.

She smiles as she says: “Then you came along.”

—

He can’t sleep. He’s angry and frustrated but above all afraid, a bubbling and bothersome kind of fear underlining every waking moment and thought and driving him to a brink where overthinking meets the void of thoughtless decisions that’ll only bite him later down the line. 

He paces instead. No matter the exhaustion in his legs, the faint tremor of his hands.

He’s had to wash the blood off them; they still look a little red to him no matter what he does. 

Then you came along.

The implication was clear. 

Eventually, he leaves the meadow with its lone and pale-barked trees behind and walks away, aiming for the hills and their sharp towers and small, bright creeks that split into diamonds in the sunlight, small rainbows forming below their waterfalls. 

The sea prepares for a storm.

Who else will?

It was a beast. A monster. A terror. A horrid curse sent by Odin from the sky, hiding in the shadow of the night as it flew and struck like Thor’s own wrath and bore no mercy, left them trembling in the vain hope that it won’t strike them, that it  won’t find them; breathe deep, the monster will leave . 

Didn’t he say that about the Night Fury? Before Toothless— before everything?

He kicks a rock in frustration and watches it tumble through the grass.

His mind always returns to the blood. To the dying Hollow, settling there with justification for his anger and then appearing conflicted again when he remembers its gaze, pained but at peace. He doesn’t understand it. He cycles through it and never arrives anywhere useful, stuck in the spiral of anger and fear and the mental image of the talons and what they could do if the beast would target his dragon or Astrid’s. 

He hates it.

Then you came along.

He loathes it. It came from the sky like a spear, and he loathes it.

The mountains loom over him; stopping to observe them, he can only think of Do you hide there? Do you sleep there, soundly, snuck in your nest? 

He shakes his head and takes another step forward—

Only for the ground to cave under him.

It gives him no time to react, no chance to save himself; it merely happens, sudden and loud and painful. He falls down, way down, landing with most weight on his metal leg and crying out in the brief and white-hot agony it tears through him. 

The sound echoes.

When he finally gathers his bearing again with heaving breaths, he finds himself in a cave; the spot he’s fallen through a small sanctuary of light, its glow reaching him through swirling dust in G-drays and vanishing on gray rock, dotting it with spots of gold. It’s less a cave and more a vast tunnel running underneath the soil, pockmarked with light where its ceiling breaks and collapses inward, the matter collecting within its womb. The shape of it seems strangely circular, almost too even the whole way through; not like something nature would make. It makes him shiver with the memory of Whispering Deaths, and hope that he’s wrong.

He considers calling out and does so, not expecting much of it— not getting any response exactly as he’d feared. He’s walked quite a bit before falling and Astrid would be fast asleep by now, both their dragons as well.

He sighs and runs a hand over his face, staring into the mouth of the cave, and decides the only way out is through.

It still feels like it takes hours before the cave even changes; he can’t properly tell how long, as the patches of sunlight gradually grow rarer and rarer and eventually disappear entirely, telling him he’s crossed into either firmer soil or deeper into the heart of the hill. 

When it changes, it widens. 

Explodes, almost; the maw of the tunnel leading to the top of a massive cave like the cavity of the mountain, other caves just like his one leading into the rest of the core in a net almost like a rabbit’s hole or the veins that all run back to the heart. 

It’s enormous. It’s so big it could fit a house or three, or a small village— possessing a single massive entryway at the top that gives it enough light for him to see without exhausting the candle he carries for emergencies such as this. 

It also hosts a nest.

A beautiful, giant, elegantly woven nest; braided from branches and bone and string like the women in the village spun from river-soaked nettles tying it all together, keeping it in shape, circular and the size of a house’s foundation, deep like a lake is deep. 

He knows whose nest it is; not only because of the size of the kicked up scales of black and blue, but also when he notices the tapestries.

It’s the only way he can describe them, and that’s generous, too. Many sewed-together skins of Hollows gleaming in the weak, redder glow of the sun that lie around the nest and hang from the sides of the cave exactly like pieces of art— it forces a memory into his mind, a difficult and uncertain argument over the tapestries in the Great Hall and whether to keep them or get rid of them, stash them away to not remind themselves further of what they once praised as universally good. 

They agreed to keep them. As art. As a part of their culture and the history that should not be erased but questioned, expanded upon, developed further— to better futures and grander battles to come.

Where they once fought with dragons, where once dragons stood in the corners as fire-spitting demons of Hel— in the new ones they fought alongside them.

His eyes trail the edges of the room and their dragonskin decoration and there’s something morbid about it he can’t quite put his finger on but which disturbs him regardless, makes his breaths tremble with nervosity. The wind whistles through the nest and makes them flare like sails of ships, only much heavier. 

“Who taught you to knit?” He asks the dragon that is not here to listen and refocuses in stubborn anger once he notices the awe that has snuck into his voice.

When he takes the first step down the tunnel and towards the nest, he thinks of its claws. 

The edge of it reaches his chest but the skins and bones and knitted remains make walking up to it almost trivial as long as he balances on them properly, as long as he ignores the bile rising in his throat at the sight of the carnage and the putrid and heavy smell of iron hanging in the air.

He climbs over the countless nettle-wrapped-bones and finally sets his feet in the moss-lined ground of the nest that mutes his steps. 

His hand reaches for the dagger at his side with hesitation.

A single egg rests within the nest almost comically vast for it— it’s roughly his size and would’ve confused him were he not keen enough to notice the black-blue iridescent scales surrounding it, for the color of it spans browns and yellows and only a slight blue sheen and not much more. 

Most dragon eggs reflected their dragons in a number of ways— size and shape and color and nest, the second and third being often the most distinguishing factors; the light green eggs of most Terrors, the spikes sprouting from the eggs of Nadders, a Golden Hollow’s precious sheen hatching deep underneath the water’s surface. 

The Moondancer’s betrayed itself by its size, but not the color nor shape, not really. It seemed…too ordinary, almost bird-like, in color like a quail’s; the draconic aspects apparent mostly in shape and in the strange ridging like the layers of an onion or a bud of a flower, ending in sharp petal-like offshoots at the top.

Standing in front of it, half in its shadow, he tilts his head back and sees the dragon within through the shell for just a brief moment of staring against the light.

He grips the knife and thinks of its claws. Of the Hollows. The smell that surrounds him— blood and copper and rot. 

The knife hangs heavy and foreboding and familiar in his hand.

He’s always known how much power a knife has, how useful its edge is when put to the right cause and how much can its tip stab through when held with terror; he was a blacksmith’s apprentice, he’s held more swords and axes and blades in his hands than he’s ever touched dragons. 

A knife was essential. For cutting ropes of forgotten traps tangled around the wings of Terrors. For cooking food on the stops between long flights on an island no man has ever been before as he watches the smoke of a fire rise into the heavens. For defending himself when he has to.

For culling the spawn of a beast.

He rises the knife and tries to chase away the tremor in his hands and thinks You’ll be a beast. You’ll have horrible teeth and a demon’s claws.

He needs to strike. He needs to bring the knife down so no more Hollows have to die.

The image of the eye of that dying dragon, not judging, not pleading, sneaks into his mind; he closes his eyes. He holds the blade above his head and ready to strike, and remembers something else.

A dragon’s body under him, tangled in the rope and rock of his own making; a beast’s thrum, a deep and layered noise that betrayed the hopelessness and fear and acceptance of the creature faced with its fate, the glint of a knife, dim-green, enormous cat-like eyes staring back and saying: Is this what you want? So be it.

Astrid’s fond smile in the wake of the rising sun as she’d said: Then you came along.

He can’t do it. 

He’s always been a coward, after all.

A snap of a bone behind him. He turns so fast he almost loses his footing; and it’s good he doesn’t.

Because when the human instinct searches for eyes and finds them, the Moondancer stares back.

It’s much bigger than he’s expected it would be, even in his own nightmares of a monster of the night that’d devour him and his dragon too— it hangs from the tapestries and the woven supports of the nest and Toothless would’ve seemed like a pet in comparison. It’s enormous; all muscular limbs and black-blue scales and folded wings and that strangely-shaped, segmented tail waving in the little space left for it and brushing against the dragonskins. Two wings with a single finger on their wrist that it dug into the supports and held itself up with; four limbs, the two frontal folded in front of its chest as if in prayer, the back legs muscular and fitted with nightmarish claws worse than what he’s imagined yet exactly, wretchedly that, an eagle’s talons from the view of a fish— and the eyes.

While the rest of its body covered scales the color of the night— black and blue and gray— its head holds so much more than that. A moss’ gentle green, the bright azure of the lagoon where Hollows went to die, the pale and clear white of the Moon’s surface when it hangs at its peak, the silver of the clouds when seen from a dragon’s back and which hid in the scales of fish as they danced in the depths of the sea; and the eyes, those eyes, red and copper and golden and exactly what he’s thought yet more. 

It moves towards him cautiously, slowly climbing down the net of its own making in an elegant movement not unlike a Night Fury’s and staring at him the entire time; two eyes on the side of his head and one on its forehead and two times as large. 

Its gaze felt wise. Truly wise. Curious. Questioning. Aware like no dragon seemed to be before— staring into him and through him, straight to his soul and judging it like a g-d. It glared through it all and bore into him with all the experience and age and size of a beast that ruled the sky like no other, of a dancer of the Moon called so for it knew, truly knew, how the celestial bodies moved across the sky and their names whispered by the highest of winds. 

Its red eyes meet his and whatever it finds in them, it seems to like— for after a moment, it lifts its head and tilts it like a raven faced with a new and shiny gem and he wonders: Why aren’t you attacking?

A Monstrous Nightmare would’ve murdered him were he to near its eggs. A Nadder would’ve dragged him through its nest until he was nothing but meat and bones and tatters of skin, and fed him to its hatchlings for dinner. 

The Moondancer calmly approaches and examines him like the most curious of insects and he can only dumbly breathe out in realization: “You’ve never seen humans before.”

It pauses at that, blinking its wide and focused eyes, the sharp snake’s pupils dilating into the squares of the eye of fish. It gives out a smooth and gentle purr right after, a murmur from its closed jaws— its teeth are yellowed and long and wicked, its claws gray and just as sharp.

“You don’t know what I am,” he addresses the beast and forgets about the knife and the claws and the dying Hollow for some other feeling awakes within him at the realization— a quiet and strange form of reverence.

The Moondancer walks around the nest in smooth and careful strides like a cat, like the lynx whose eyes glinted yellow at night in the mountains. It purrs again and this time, leaves its jaw slightly open, letting the sound ring clearer past its throat; he feels the air vibrate with it against his skin.

When it finally approaches, it hides behind the egg from its view for a second or two, the wrists of its wings stopping where it holds itself up against the nest’s edge; he tilts his head back and finds it looming overhead, its breath a loud and powerful thing ruffling his hair, its three eyes most of all.

The beast bends down and takes the egg into the claws of its frontal limbs— four fingered and eerily near-human— and cradles it like a mother would a babe, and he watches and blinks and understands.

Its limbs— however long the gray claws and however sharp— were a knitter’s hands and they held its egg as only a parent could, caressing and examining its top in protective love; it pauses for a moment and then turns back to him, sinking its head to his level and revealing just how incredibly, truly gargantuan it is compared to him, the two spikes at the front of its snout the length of an arrow and its teeth longer than his knife. It breathes out at it and narrows its eyes and he sees no threat within, only curiosity and a slight wariness. Its nostrils widen and narrow again in a few shorter breaths; sniffing. 

“Hi,” he says, awkwardly. A little terrified. A little excited.

The dragon dips its head and moves it towards him so the eye at the top can see every detail and every small feature of him, moving faintly like a fish’s eye would move were he to stare back long enough to notice— he sees himself reflected in it and he remembers .

He spent days dreaming about dim, veined green eyes and narrowed snake’s pupils and didn't understand why that thought bore more and more yearning and less and less fear. 

To stare into the eyes of a dragon is to see your soul reflected back at you.

The Moondancer— horrid beast of the night, terrible nightmare sent from the heavens, claws of the mightiest of eagles and teeth of an anglerfish and wings of a demon— stares back and he finds himself there, finds himself as viewed by this creature that sees him for the first time and as he saw it and does not see him as a threat nor a bother but rather a living being, a full and realized creature, something new it has never seen before and can only react to in a dragon’s awe.

The knife falls into the bone-nettle-moss of the nest and the Moondancer only blinks at it, glancing there once and not again.

Hiccup lifts his hand and watches the dragon refocus on it. Wordlessly keeps it there, waiting for it to come to him, to lean into him; to feel the cool and rough texture of its scales and know he is understood.

It doesn’t. 

It does something else, tilting its head there and back to see his hand from all angles and giving out a deep and final breath.

Then it gently lowers its egg back into the soft moss of the nest and brings out its frontal limb, stretching out its clawed fingers, and he can only stare in shock as it reaches out and copies his movement, and touches its palm against his.

It trills, deep and amused and questioning as if to say Did I do that right? and he chuckles in disbelief and joy and something complicated he cannot name. 

His hand isn’t big enough to even cover the dragon’s palm. 

The Moondancer sighs and relaxes and kneels, lying down right after; he lifts his other hand and this time reaches for its head, and it lets him, its scales cool and wind-streaked and smooth like a snake’s.

It purrs. Content. Calm. Joyful.

His breath comes out as a choked exhale, a surprised sort of huff, and he has to try a few times before he finally gets out a weak: “Woah.”

Running his hand over its scales as he says further: “You aren’t so bad after all,” and chuckles at how lame it sounds, so silly, how incredibly dumb all of it felt when made to face the truth of the matter, the truth of the beast, beautiful and strange and new; the dragon closes its eyes with contentness and its exhale makes sure he’s never getting his hair back in order. 

Then it giggles. That’s the only way he can describe it, a repeating series of quick and deep noises layered with something high and playful.

“Moondancer,” he says. Addressing. Asking. Ruminating.

Its eyes open and stare into his soul as if to confirm it and set it to stone.

“Yes,” he answers with a smile. “Moondancer.”

Its tail slides against the sides of the cavern and he keeps wondering what it’s shape is for, divided into two triangular sections and ending in four thorns. He can imagine himself drawing it now. Filling the empty pages. Moondancer. A hunter. A beautiful beast. 

He sits down and its head sinks with him; he keeps petting it and spots movement in the rays of light, a passing bird in the world above reflected with its shadow. The light is waning; the night approaches. 

The Moondancer follows his gaze and lifts its head, turning it to glance to the glow of the evening as well, huffing to get rid of stalks of dried grass that have stuck to its face.

Then its gaze falls back on him, and passes between him and the hole in the cave’s ceiling several times as the beast visibly thinks and wonders.

When it blinks at him, something about it seems almost mischievous.

Like a dare. A challenge. A you know what I’m thinking about.

He, in fact, unfortunately, doesn’t.

It gathers its bearing and stands up, spying him all over again with narrowed eyes— and he can’t even really react when it figures out what it wants and reaches for him with its frontal limbs, picking him up like a kitten and depositing him— more like dropping— just at the base of its wings.

He just kind-of freezes.

It has to have realized that we’re dragon riders. It must be copying what it saw.

The dragon’s neck is much too broad and thick to gain any sort of bearing and the wings aren’t helping either; he grabs the spike growing from one of ridges of its spine and holds onto it for dear life as he realizes how high the dragon’s withers are relative to the ground. The dragon starts moving under him and begins to crawl and then climb; every vibration going through its muscles back to him and showing him a whole new perspective of what it means to ride a dragon, or rather, to be on the back of a dragon with the beast commanding itself.

It climbs and quickly turns vertical in its effort to reach the fading sunlight and he uses the spikes on its neck to move forward as it does, and finds a better spot to settle, just behind its neck with its feathered horns at each side for stability. 

It’s good he does so, before the wind hits them head-on when they finally reach the ground and he’s met with a view from the very base of the mountain where the whole island stretches in grays and greens and yellows and the endless and serene blue of the ocean forms the whole of the horizon with the sun dipping into it, hesitant and heavy and tired just as he is. 

The Moondancer breathes in the salty and cold ocean air and roars and is it less a roar and more a wail or perhaps a shriek, a howl, a calling— its wings rising on both sides of his body and revealing their sharp and black skin iridescent with all shades of the rainbow like a starling’s feathers and then—

The Moondancer starts to run, and it’s quick and powerful and brings Hiccup mainly the utter panic of almost getting thrown out of his seat— and soars.

A flap of its wings so powerful he swears he can feel the pressure in the air drop sharply and again, and again and it soars bravely, boldly, vertical in the column of the sky and rising further like all it was made for was to rise higher than any being ever has, faster than an arrow shot straight up and gaining speed instead of losing it to the wind and to the powers of the sky that roar around then almost in anger at it daring to disobey their rules— it rose and the island grew ever-smaller below them, the sky vaster than ever before and smooth and so, so blue; it rose and didn’t stop, didn’t waver, until they reached where the clouds ended and the air got thin and there—

It danced.

They described it as a dance before as they did not understand it; not comprehending what the movement meant or what it represented, what its logic could be to the mind of a dragon. They called it a dance because that’s what it looked like— a quick and chaotic and elegant movement, a glittering line of luminous scales flashing like the tongues of fire.

It dances and he knows, truly knows, that that is what it is.

Not a dragon’s arrogance. Not a beast’s mockery. Not a threat or a courting— the Moondancer loops and spirals and thrashes and turns and waves and wavers and springs and soars and whirls and it does so because it wants to, because it brings it joy, and it laughs.

A dragon’s sort of giggle full of wild and incoherent joy, a bright and bubbly and resonant noise that escapes its throat. It laughs and laughs and he does too, disorientated, no longer knowing where the sky or the clouds or the sea ended or met or began, only that the wind whistled around them and that they were free.

A crackle from within. A soft and ringing tone. 

He stares under and sees as its scales light up against the dying evening, something under its skin bursting with light; the dragon dances and its skin glows like the moon glows as if it had a pure, liquid Aurora Borealis running through its veins and Hiccup holds on and lets it take him along for the ride.

It takes its time. It shows him its all and once it finally settles and flies calmly, evenly, so stable that the feels like he’s suffering sea sickness all over again, it caws a resonant triad into the void of space and shakes its head and peers back at him.

He has a grin plastered all over his face. He knows that.

It giggles, satisfied, and then folds its wings.

He’s able to get out a panicked: “Wait, what—“ before it drops.

They fall. It’s a parallel of its soaring and just as daring as he keeps passing points and speeds where any other dragon would reconsider and stop out of the dive for its own safety but the Moondancer keeps going, head straight and body falling like a javelin to some destination he cannot understand and wings folded at its sides and reaching speeds higher than he’s ever flown, than Toothless ever dared to— before it slowly begins to open its wings again instead of all at once and turns the fall into a controlled but no less fast spiral, the wind roaring in retribution and the sea passing underneath them so quickly it gives him vertigo. 

It aims back to the island, to its lone and fragmented shape within all the blue and white of gaining waves, and it flies fast and sure and smooth, letting out a caw or two ever so often, and he feels like he’s a few hundred meters behind his body and playing catch-up even as it finally slows and redirects its flight to aim somewhere else.

To the fields where the Hollows settled. To the faint but recognizable shapes of Toothless and Stormfly and Astrid somewhere close.

With powerful beats of its wings it begins to near the edge of the fields and starts settling down and he fully expects the Hollows to panic but none of them do, not really, most still asleep; the ones awake screech and groan and move out of the way with respect but land not that far and still among its brethren; like a raven scaring off a pack of sparrows who couldn’t be bothered to care further than moving a little ways away. 

The Moondancer touches down— a minor earthquake for Hiccup, even if the dragon itself does not see it as such— and walks the rest, supporting its weight on its wings’ wrists and holding its front limbs in front of its chest yet again.

Stormfly is the first who wakes. She does so with a croak and a caw that never stopped being a little adorable, her spines lifting in shock once she realizes what disturbed her and screeching the second she lays her yellow eyes on the incoming Moondancer; who slightly wavers in response, yet again more curious than hostile. 

It wakes the other two.

Toothless has a no less shocked reaction— though his roar shifts into something much more confused once he finally recognizes Hiccup waving at him from behind the Moondancer’s head.

Astrid is the last to realize this part of the equation.

She wakes up with a flinch and her eyes— still narrowed from sleep— widening with a start and a soft, terrified: “Oh, Odin—!” leaving her lips as she scrambles for a weapon.

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” He calls from his seat and goes to dismount before he realizes that might not be the brightest of ideas— the Moondancer jerks its head away from the noise and seems to realize it, or just want him off it, dipping his head closer to the ground.

It’s still a struggle and a fall of a meter or two, maybe three, but he’ll take it.

He lands in the grass and meets Astrid’s uncomprehending stare, an axe ready to swing in her hands, frozen on the spot.

“It’s okay,” he repeats, holding out one of his hands.

She blinks at him. Toothless growls and the Moondancer retaliates with a flash of its teeth and it’s the first time he truly sees his dragon reconsider and have to backpedal and retreat; the Red Death was bigger, much bigger than even this, and Toothless seemed less scared of it than he does now of the Moondancer, but strangely enough, Hiccup gets it.

Astrid’s stance rapidly relaxes, all at once; then she blinks like she’s having to run several realizations in her head one by one and finally huffs with an eye-roll at the ready as she says: “You befriended it after all, didn’t you.”

He scratches the back of his head and glances to the grass. “...Yep.”

A snort. “Typical.”

He’s about to say something along the lines of: “I’m glad you’re having fun, but—“ before he realizes she’s taking a hesitant step or two forward, towards the Moondancer that’s now studying her too— and that awe has made home in her eyes, the kind of reverend look that feels new on her every time he sees it.

He moves out of the way and lets her get close— much to the terror and confusion of Stormfly’s caws— and watches her be entranced by it, by its eyes and calm and curiosity, and feels oddly proud inside; a little warm, a little awkward, but proud.

The Moondancer lets her touch its snout and run her hand to its smaller eyes and touch its feathers and he thinks: Then you came along.

Toothless finally finds the courage to run to him and almost throws him to the ground by bumping his head into his side at full force; it makes Hiccup playfully protest on instinct but Toothless, too, seems to refocus on Astrid and the Moondancer right after as if sensing the gravity of the moment, ear flaps raised in interest. 

Hiccup lets a smile play on his lips, and understands.