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It did not remember much from what was before.
It was hatched on a rock. In a cave. In the dark.
Mother was a figure. A shadow of impression. Red and food and feed.
The first meal was something red, blood seeping through talons. Scorched and burned. Green scales, dropped at its feet by the murky memory of Mother and torn apart by the smudged remains of Siblings.
It did not care for what happened before. The Queen asked it to watch now.
The Horned called themselves fire. Lighting torches, lighting arrows. They wanted to compete with the dragons. Best them at their birthright.
The Queen wanted what was hers.
Dragons were fire, except for it. Death was in the dark.
It didn’t like to eat the Horned livestock. It didn’t need to gather for the Queen.
The Queen asked it to monitor. To watch. To keep track of raids and those who tried to escape her call. To hunt down offenders.
That was what it was for.
It was already stalking its own prey. The stray spiked crown, the slow bouldery hide, wily split heads. A skittish flame jacket that would beacon itself into the sky after its pupils widened in awareness. The stars blotted behind the fire, but they also disappeared in the dark.
Tucking in wings, screech whistling long, the dark dove and slammed into the spindly dragon’s skeleton and took them down into the ocean. Teeth unsheathed and bit through scales into something red. It was extinguished. It was dark again. The stars could breathe.
The Queen was pleased.
Those in the air cowered. They hid from it, eyes rolling, hissing, biting. Straining against what they couldn’t see. The dark was relentless. It always chased day into the ocean, smothering the sun, to watch. To hunt. To kill. It was inescapable. It never missed.
Nights were to feed. It knew this. It was the only time it may eat. It didn’t know the last time it had eaten fish.
Fire burned. The dark whistled, shooting liquid lightning from its throat that exploded into white-hot plasma. The Horned livestock were tenacious.
They always rebuilt their beacons.
Wings tucked in, head went down, tail flared. The dark herded its prey. Dragons moved away from it and the beacon, kept alive for the Queen’s slaughter, burning houses, roaring and scraping up yak and sheep. Running from it.
The dark twisted and spun, faster than its stars, a blot in front of the sky.
A whistle, like its wings.
The dark’s sky clamped and its tail flattened and its head was jerked straight and it all went silent. Fire snapped up its nerve endings through its tail to its spine and to its wings, and something was wrong. The dark screamed.
The sky met the trees at the horizon. Herded there by the sun, drowning in the ocean’s depth. Blood was made of splinters and gouged earth, dragging shadow and something red.
Rope and stone bound its body, keeping it down, its face buried in the dirt as if shoved there. Look at what you’ve done, the Queen’s eyes only tasted red, I can no longer trust you, the Queen knew his hunger as her own.
Clouds hung between trees at this depth. Hunger ached. It had been days since its last raid of the Horned before the previous night.
A scrape of a small boot. The Horned would have found it by then. Herd it. Hunt it. Kill it.
The dark opened its eye, expecting an imitation of fire, like all before.
Instead, the dark saw a scared reflection. A human boy with green eyes and a worried frown, fretting over raising a dagger and proving himself to whatever was called a father.
The dark closed its eye again. The sun always drowned.
Ropes snapped.
Wings untied, tail loosened, claws freed. A burst of fury and up and down the Horned livestock went, under the weight of Death.
The dark stared at its reflection. Scared green eyes. Like its own.
It sucked in a breath, intending to bite down, hide in the cave and slink back to the red but instead, it screamed.
The human boy didn’t react past freezing, and the dark spun from him, running. Leaping into the air, screeching as its balance tilted. The world wouldn’t right, the sky met the trees at the ocean. A small cove, slippery walls of a perfect tomb.
It was the dark trapped in day.
The human boy returned to the dark.
He had crept above the rock, content to lord over the distance of freedom to Death, outlined in sunlight. Hunger tore at its lungs, yet the dark could not fire.
The human boy tilted his head, watching, and the dark did too.
A fish. Cleared of blood and offered fresh.
Mother and Siblings tearing at scales and melting into shadows rippled at its mind. The dark unsheathed its teeth and ate the fish right out of the skittish human boy’s hands.
Babbling. The dark did not like the noise.
It regurgitated the fish, setting it in front. It waited.
The human boy felt no hunger. The human boy was not a killer, a hunter, a herder. He was not the Horned nor livestock nor a beacon, nor the Queen or its prey. The human boy picked up the fish and twisted his face, biting it and swallowing it as he shuddered.
The dark watched him almost smile. The dark almost smiled too.
The Horned-
The dark- the Night Fury- it was something not to the human boy. Not fire. Not Death. Not a predator. Not the dark.
The stars were blinding overhead at night without it to fly amongst them. Calls of dragons were louder, less afraid. The human boy gave them names. Nadders, Gronckles, Zipplebacks, Nightmares. The dark knew less about its own kind than it did its prey.
The human boy was persistent. The human boy wanted it to understand the dark was something not.
The Night Fury did not want to learn.
Collecting his rejections, the human boy grasped a stick, poking it through the dirt as he sat on a stone. The Night Fury watched him. It got closer. The sun dusted the sky low.
The Night Fury unsheathed its teeth, used only before for pinning down, snapping necks, and snapped a tree branch instead, dragging it along the dirt too.
The human boy walked the maze, eyes reflections trying to catch the dragon’s, understanding it not. He reached it with his back and the Night Fury snorted.
Hesitating, the human boy reached out his hand. The Night Fury growled, tilting its head away.
The boy moved his head down, averting his eyes, and tried again.
The dark was called something not to the boy. Not teeth. Not hunger. Not alone.
He pressed his nose into Hiccup’s small palm and let the shadows leap from his heart and into the cracks of the cove’s stone walls, letting the sun chase them away from its stars. For once, his mind held clear open sky, and he breathed in deep.
He was something not to Hiccup. He was the Night Fury, the dragon, a friend. Toothless.
Toothless watched Hiccup almost smile. The dark almost smiled too.