Chapter Text
Good evening, all! ‘Tis a fine night for revelry, bright and clear under the full moon. Overly warm, perhaps. I’m no Viking, but I travel up that way often enough that I’ve become accustomed to the colder weather. Two degrees South of freezing to death, I’ve heard it said, but that’s a lie. Plenty of freezing to death to be had all across the archipelago!
They’re a funny people, the Norse. Barbaric, uncultured, but they do produce a lot of adventurers in between all of the raiding and being raided. Comes with the territory, I suppose. Their antics tend to make for good stories. That’s what I’m here for, after all. Entertainment to go with the food and drink, something to pretend to listen to when you want to avoid talking to that boring noble from the next town over.
Yes? No? You don’t particularly care what story I tell so long as it’s interesting, full of adventure and sordid drama? Perfect. I have just the one. Drama, violence, hard decisions and high, personal stakes. Curses and Dragons. Rather a lot of dragons. You don’t get many down South, and none at all here on the mainland. Too hot for them, I suppose. Not enough open space. Too far from the ocean or any good fish, and the one good fishing town you do have around here specializes in eels. Eels, of all things! I like a good eel as much as the next girl, but why eels? Don’t you have anything better to do? Is your bait defective?
Sorry, never mind me. I get around. See a lot of things, have a lot of opinions. You want the story. Great!
This is a story about four adventurers, though they wouldn’t have called themselves that at the time. There is rather a lot of backstory as to how and why they came together, but to be brutally honest much of that is rather irrelevant to the adventure itself and would bore many of you. I’ll skip ahead to the part where things get interesting and sprinkle the rest in as we go.
We begin with three of our four adventurers. The fourth comes in later, though I believe that she is by far the most interesting of the group. These three had, through various means, come to be on the same tiny speck of land known as the Isle of Berk.
The first, a young woman named Astrid Hofferson, lived there. She was a very good Viking in training, though not of the boulderish physique you tend to see in adventurers. She was rather more like me in stature. Lean, more muscular than I, and with hair as brilliantly blond as mine is red. You couldn’t call us sisters, but you could perhaps claim I was a distant cousin based on our looks. I can’t describe her much better than that, because I’ve never seen her myself.
The second adventurer was also a Viking, or trying to be one, and also lived on the Isle of Berk. His name was Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, and he was a misfit. Despite the truly iconic name, he couldn’t truthfully be called a good Viking, or a good… anything. Son of a Viking chieftain and a rather famous wandering warrior, Valhallarama. I am sure you’ve heard of her, everyone has. He took after neither of them. Scrawny, brown-haired, quick-witted but easily dismissed and prone to flights of fancy that had no place in a village eking out an existence in the middle of nowhere. He was good with his hands and could turn out a decent sword or anchor, but that was all he had going for him as far as the Vikings were concerned.
And then there was the third who had wrecked – or something like it – rather unexpectedly on their shores. He was, well… You will have to bear with me. He’ll make a lot more sense once we get into it. Magic and Dragons, I said, and you shall have both.
The first time they came together as a trio, several mistakes were made and a myth as old as time disproven. Night Furies, those mythological dragons no Viking has ever seen, so rare that they are little more than legends even in the dragon-infested North…
Night Furies can indeed miss.
And thus was a quest unexpectedly thrust upon our soon-to-be adventurers.
o-O-O-o
The village of Berk slept fitfully underneath a bright, cloudless night sky. Vikings tossed and turned on their wooden beds, the full moon casting shards of pale light through every tiny crack in the walls and roof. Vikings did not sleep deeply as a general rule, but tonight was especially restless for much of the village. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe that they were due for a dragon raid. Maybe some of them knew, deep down, that something was afoot.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock, third of his name, crept carefully around the back of a row of huts not far from the steps leading up to the Great Hall. One hut, as unadorned and austere as the rest, stood at a slight remove from the others, and it was this hut that he stopped at.
A Viking with a torch walked down the stone steps, patrolling the main thoroughfare of the village. He was big, bulky, and completely unaware of the much smaller figure peeking around the side of one of the many huts as he walked by.
Once the patrolling Viking was safely away, Hiccup carefully opened the back door to the hut. He knew well that it would squeak if he let it swing inward, so he only opened it enough to slip around and tiptoe inside.
This was not a new experience for Hiccup. In fact, he had practice performing exactly these maneuvers, though he tried not to think about that as he deftly picked his way to the stairs, his shadow thrown into a frenzy of disturbing shapes by the guttering fire. If he wanted extra time in the forge or an evening to himself practicing his footwork in the forest, he had to sneak out and subsequently back in later. He was not caught as often as one would think, because the fact of the matter was that his father was an incredibly heavy sleeper and would only wake for a dragon attack or something similarly cacophonous.
A huge lump twice the width of Hiccup’s torso shifted by the fireplace, rolling over. Hiccup froze. Four meaty paws flipped into the air before thwacking down on the wooden floorboards as one of his father’s two truly massive mongrel hounds grunted in his sleep.
They, Hangnail and Hoarfrost, were the ears that he sought to evade with quiet steps and bated breath. They could outrun Snotlout, outsmart the twins, and then team up to flush a Terrible Terror out of a sheep pen, all before Hiccup could unlatch the gate of said pen. They had jointly held down a small Gronckle long enough for Spitelout to stop it from making off with Sven two Winters past. Hiccup suspected, but couldn’t prove, that they were three-quarters wolf and there was a chance the last quarter was Hel’s own offspring. They were vicious, unsettlingly cunning, and only listened to Stoick himself. They would never seriously hurt Hiccup, he knew that from experience, but they could and would bark loud enough to summon his father if they caught him sneaking in, sneaking out, or sneaking anywhere after nightfall. A quarter-ton dog tripping him and standing on his chest to keep him there until he was caught wouldn’t be out of the question.
On a day to day basis, they were unsettling annoyances. Right now, they could be a huge problem. Tonight, of all nights, he had to go unnoticed. If he didn’t, things were going to get messy.
Hangnail snuffled wetly and twitched twice before settling back into a no doubt violent dream. Hiccup stole up the stairs, only breathing once he made it up into his room. Safe, for the moment. Hoarfrost would be downstairs, sleeping in his father’s room. Stoick might be in there, or he might be in the Great Hall despite the late hour. Hiccup wouldn’t put the latter past him, as he did it at least once a month.
Hiccup thought, having snuck into the village and his home without a single hitch, that luck might be with him. That was good because after the week he’d had, and to a lesser extent the life he had led, he felt that he was owed at least a little bit of good fortune. He quickly dropped to his knees to rummage around underneath his wooden-plank bed.
The question of the moment, beyond that of sneaking into his own home, was one of packing. Exactly how many useful things could he find in his room within the hour, and how many of them could he carry out? Anything he left behind would be worthless to him, but anything he couldn’t haul around or fit in a roomy saddlebag would have to be dropped at the first sign of trouble.
“Ha!” he whispered breathlessly, his fingers closing around a piece of rough leather behind the fire-hazard stacks of old parchment and half-finished wooden carvings. He knew he remembered sliding his old rucksack underneath the bed at the end of last Devastating Winter. It would come in handy now.
Hiccup tossed the dusty, roughly-shaped leather sack on his bed and began to pile things up beside it. His notes, his reference drawings, a double-handful of relevant schematics, a pile of various sizes of metal rods, two carving knives and a small hammer, a water skin, and many more little items migrated from all throughout the room into his collection. His sword, an unassuming single-handed straight sword, went into its sheath and on his hip, though it hung down well below his knees and had a nasty habit of tripping him up. He would need a weapon where he was going, no matter how hopeless he was at using it.
He stopped then, momentarily at a loss. Everything in his pile would fit in his rucksack with some room to spare, but he couldn’t see the use in bringing anything else.
“I guess this is it,” he muttered to himself. It didn’t seem like enough. He didn’t know how long he would be gone, or what he might need along the way. In the face of all that uncertainty, he had to be missing something potentially useful.
Then it hit him. Clothing! Spare underwear, his heavy coat, extra socks – full pairs and a few more sacrificial left socks – and as many tunics as he could fit. He would need all of that!
By the time he was finished stuffing his rucksack with the contents of his drawers and his pile of miscellaneous things, it was bulging and didn’t sit nicely on his back no matter how he adjusted the straps. He felt much better about his preparations. A prepared adventurer was… a prepared adventurer. That was good on its own merits. Though this wasn’t really an adventure. Adventures were meant to be fun and exciting, and they certainly didn’t come with the heaping helping of panicky guilt driving this midnight self-burglary. This was, at best, the stressful precursor to an adventure.
Still, he was ready. He pushed his bedroom door open with a confident shove.
His door swung out on well-oiled hinges, gliding silently until it smacked flat against the wall, the loud clatter shattering the silence in an instant.
Hiccup froze in the doorway. His heart, on the other hand, leaped forward, slamming against the inside of his chest in a futile attempt to shock him out of his surprised terror just a moment sooner. He stood completely still.
A disgruntled growl echoed ominously up from the bottom of the stairs.
Hiccup swiftly yanked his door shut, bursting into motion in the opposite direction. He didn’t stop once there was a solid wooden barrier between him and his father’s hounds, no, tonight he couldn’t afford to stop. He didn’t have the time to wait until morning, and if he was delayed he’d be left behind! That would be a total disaster, not in the least because the one doing the leaving would be terribly unprepared.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. He crossed the length of his room, his mind made up before he really began to think. He needed a way out that bypassed his father’s dogs, and there was something he’d always wanted to do.
Viking huts were built to withstand Devastating Winter. This meant that they were deceptively well-insulated and built to capture and hold heat as tightly as possible. In the few brief weeks of Sweltering Summer, this very same design presented a problem. It was not at all acceptable for a Viking to die of a heatstroke caused by his own sweltering hut, and heat rose, making the room closest to the ceiling the most unbearable.
Thus, the small hole in the far wall, right underneath the start of the roof. There was a similarly-sized chunk of wood on the floor downstairs that fit the cylindrical hole, and in a few weeks Hiccup would be recruited to help fit it back into its rightful place before resealing the hole once more for the season.
Hiccup had at one point tried to design a window that didn’t need to be freshly cut out of the wall every year, but his father had put a firm foot down on any plan that involved him modifying their hut. Thus, the torso-wide hole within reach of his hands if he stood on his toes.
Heavy breathing lurked on the other side of his bedroom door as he hopped up onto his bed. He didn’t have the upper body strength to do a pullup from his fingertips, but if he got a very short running start from an elevated position?
On any other night he would have backed down, but tonight he had to get out. He had to get to the docks. He pushed down his fear, stood atop his wooden bed, and leaped. His arms shot through empty space before jolting to a stop as the insides of his elbows met the rough, coarsely-sanded edge of the opening. The rest of him followed suit, slamming into the wall, and his hands clutched at the outside edge of the window.
The plan, if it could be called that, was to somehow haul himself up from this more advantageous position, up and through the opening, bypassing the dogs stuck inside the hut. The reality was that constantly cutting and refinishing the same piece of wooden wall took a toll on the strength of the wall around it. Worse, the Chieftain’s hut was top priority for the fire brigade and as such had withstood far more of those yearly modifications than most huts ever would before being freshly rebuilt from charred ashes. In that long, undisturbed time, some of the archipelago’s most subtle pests had moved in…
Hiccup clung on for a good three heartbeats, and had just begun to strain to pull himself up when he felt something give in the thick wooden wall. Two loud cracks heralded doom of an entirely different sort than the kind he was afraid of.
Hiccup fell outward in a rain of sawdust, wooden shards, and other unidentifiable things. He tucked and rolled, a well-practiced maneuver to one constantly knocked out of the way by accident and on purpose, but his room was at the top of the hut and no amount of tripping could prepare him for falling all the way to the ground, step two of a plan that hadn’t really been thought through beyond step one.
Hiccup hit the ground hard, landing atop a pile of termite-chewed wood that, luckily for him, didn’t have any particularly sharp shards pointed his way. He barely noticed his narrow escape, more focused on the full-body bruise already developing as he shakily picked himself up.
One of the few Vikingly traits Hiccup shared with the rest of his tribe was that he knew how to take a beating and keep going like his life depended on it. Glancing back at the suspiciously Hiccup-shaped hole in the wall, he suspected it very well might. His father was going to kill him!
Hiccup ran off into the night, tripping twice over his now very scratched-up scabbard. The barking of two incensed dogs rang out behind him, but he was well away. They were trapped in the hut.
Behind him, he heard something that sounded remarkably like four paws smashing into a pile of termite-eaten wood from a short fall. Then something else that sounded like a massively muscular dog crashing right through the back door. The renewed barking only confirmed what he already knew.
Hiccup sprinted like his pants were on fire, his rucksack smacking against his back as he ran, down the back of a row of huts and out into the street to descend a set of steps carved into an otherwise deceptively high cliff. Down into the village proper, away from the rows of huts arrayed along the path to the Great Hall.
Hangnail and Hoarfrost were barking loud enough to wake Thor himself, and a belabored wave of Vikings began to tumble out of their huts as Hiccup passed, many pulling on their clothing even as they waved weapons about. “Raid!” one cried, mistaking the tumult for an actual raid, and such was the readiness of the village that the warning was swiftly echoed far ahead of Hiccup. Vikings rushed out to light the torches, to defend the livestock, to find dragons and drive them off.
One skinny Viking teen running through the village at full speed quickly became a tiny, unremarkable piece of a chaotic routine. The streets filled with bodies. A few Vikings called out to Hiccup as he ran past, but he didn’t stop or even slow.
His luck tonight was intent on giving with one hand while taking with the other, and he expected the dogs were still entirely focused on catching him. He wasn’t faster than them, they could run down dragons without wings of their own, but he was smarter. Hopefully. Raids were exactly where the dogs shined, and where Hiccup had all of his most humiliating failures. This wasn’t a real raid, but–
“Dragon!” The cry echoed from another part of the village, and the crowd surged toward a line of huts as a dark shape flitted upward, away from the searching lights of hurled torches.
Maybe it was a raid! Even worse, but Hiccup was making good time and he hadn’t heard the dogs in a little while. They might have been distracted by an actual dragon.
“Someone get me my ax!” Elsewhere in the village, his father began bellowing orders.
“Over there!”
“Slippery buggers!”
“Sheep secured!”
Vikings yelled, torches flared up, and Hiccup ran, panting and flinching every step of the way. He took erratic, unpredictable paths through the village, and by some stroke of good fortune made it through without anything stopping him. He arrived at the top of the docks in good time considering that he felt like he might heave his own stomach up through his mouth if he wasn’t careful.
The docks were built at sea level, seeing as not even Vikings could build a dockyard away from the sea, and as such were at the bottom of a long, back-and-forth procession of ramps used to haul fish and other goods up and to bring fishing supplies down, the sheer cliff separating the sea from the land. Hiccup had just made it to the top of the first of many such ramps when a muscular torso body-checked him from the shadows, knocking him away from the cliff edge and the ramp.
Hangnail snarled in Hiccup’s face as Hiccup scrambled to avoid being sat on, and lunged to grab his tunic with teeth that routinely disemboweled Terrible Terrors. Hiccup rolled over, accidentally deflecting the dog’s bite with his rucksack, and in a moment of perfect coordination stuck his left hand back to grab the dog’s muzzle, just like he had seen his father do countless times, with one disgusting modification.
Hangnail let out a muffled yelp as Hiccup’s fingers clamped down around his mouth, one slipping to jab inside his flaring nostril, and in his hurried rush to shake free let Hiccup up. Hoarfrost had just arrived on the scene, partially tangled in what looked like it might be someone’s hairy knickers, but Hiccup had no desire to be tackled by either of them again and neither dog was fast enough to stop him from doing something incredibly stupid.
The dock ramps were one way to get to the docks and the deep water far below. Jumping off the sheer cliff they were built into was another, reserved only for foolhardy Vikings rushing to cool off after a long day’s work in Sweltering Summer.
Hiccup had jumped before, on a dare from Snotlout. It had been that or be pushed. This time he went of his own volition. He kept his head enough this time to hold his breath, which was a marked improvement. It was pure luck that guided his plummet toward the water, instead of one of the docked boats or the dock itself, but thankfully for him he had no time at all to think about the alternatives had his jump been aimed slightly differently. The impact of hitting the water from such a height drove any thought whatsoever from his brain, and the icy cold that enveloped him made sure he had only one priority. Not drowning.
Hiccup broke the surface of the water with a pained gasp and flailed around for a bit before he caught a trailing line from the closest longboat. The docks were empty, so there was no one there to see him hauling himself out of the ocean like a drowned rat…
But that would soon change. He could hear barking as the dogs raced down the ramps. They would be a little while yet, enough time to sprawl out at the far end of one of the many extensions of the dock, and once he had his breath back, to get to his feet. He had a few moments, and in theory that was enough time that he could be away before the dogs arrived.
This was where they were supposed to meet, but no one was here. Not even the one he’d left here with the understanding that they wouldn’t go anywhere in the meantime.
He looked up and saw that the Vikings of Berk were raising their massive pole-mounted braziers. Even with those huge lights, bonfires illuminating the night sky, he couldn’t see any dragons. There was a lot of shouting, but no gouts of flame lancing out of the shadows.
Hiccup felt curiously detached, shivering alone on the dock while his village fought a phantom threat, that one dragon notwithstanding.
Wait.
One dragon?
Oh, no.
“You were supposed to wait!” What was he meant to do now? Go back and find her, somehow? The dogs were getting closer, the only way up was past them, and while he’d actually done okay at evading them until now he lacked any handy cliffs to throw himself off. His other way up was nowhere to be seen.
Hiccup was at a loss, but his lack of options didn’t stop him from wearily wringing out his sleeves and preparing for the oncoming dogs. He would solve that problem first, and then go back into the village to figure out what was happening.
It was at about that point in time that a dark figure slunk out of the water to his left, emerging onto the dock like some deep-sea monstrosity. Sleek and black as tar, the water dripping from its bulk was the loudest part of its smooth ascent from the ocean. The only break in its dark, slippery hide was a soaked leather apparatus on its back, and a brown discolored fin contrasting against its other, black fin at the end of its tail.
Two months ago, Hiccup would have screamed. Two weeks ago, smiled. Today?
“Uh… Hey.” He ignored the hurt look cast his way. “Why were you–” He stopped talking as he made the obvious assumption. He’d fallen into the water and flailed his way to shore, but the latter half of his escape could have ended with him drowning, not breaking the surface.
He hadn’t known that Night Furies could swim.
Some of the things that had happened recently made him hesitate, but in the end he knew what he had to do. “Astrid’s up there, I think she’s been delayed,” he said, though he knew he wouldn’t be fully understood. Pointing up at the chaos above hopefully made enough sense on its own. “We have to go get her!”
Hangnail and Hoarfrost rounded the last ramp switchback and jumped in tandem, landing on the docks in a flurry of nails scraping wood. They immediately ran toward the distant dead-end, barking like mad as they raced toward their quarry and an unknown dragon.
Said dragon snorted dismissively and blew up the dock between them and the dogs.
“Toothless!” Hiccup cried out. “Berk needs that!” A swift blue fireball had detonated a five-pace-wide section of the strong, carefully-arranged wooden plank surface, leaving a huge, menacing gap between them and most of the docks. Their little wooden island swayed dangerously, supported only by a few pillars sunk into the sea floor deceptively far below, but held up.
This did, finally, stop the chase that had started at Hiccup’s home. Hoarfrost stopped short of leaping into the water to close the gap, while Hangnail quailed and skidded to a halt far away from the jagged edge of the dock. Both dogs barked like mad, but that was all they could do. If Hiccup was in their place he would have run far away from the dragon who had just shown he was capable of killing them with a single bolt of fire.
Then again, he was still here and he’d faced that same terrifying blue maw. Maybe he and his father’s dogs had something in common.
A renewed noise broke out above, in the village. Cries of alarm and crazed shouting as something crested the cliff and soared down, shaking from side to side. Hiccup’s mouth dropped open as another sleek dragon, this one not purely black but rather liberally streaked with tan whirls of color, dove and spun to throw off a Viking clinging to her back. Said Viking soared in a beautiful arc before crashing into one of the longships, but Hiccup’s eyes were drawn to the dragon as she landed on the dock.
She dropped down on all fours, sleek and deadly, and shot him the most murderous glare he’d ever seen in his life, bar none.
Then Hangnail barked, his courage renewed by an enemy he could reach, and she startled like the dog had bitten her tail. Both dogs rushed her. Hiccup had to admire their suicidal courage even as he cringed, anticipating their grisly deaths, but they didn’t get anywhere near her. She took to the air once more, her mottled tan and black tail to Berk, and Hiccup hurriedly clambered onto the soaking wet saddle beside him, trying not to think too hard about what was underneath it. He’d been comfortable in that saddle once, and he might be again some day soon, but right now there were too many important questions left unanswered.
Toothless took to the sky the moment he felt Hiccup flare his brown tailfin via a foot pedal on one side of his saddle. Their ascent was quick, and with a little bit of effort they caught up to the other dragon, falling in on her left.
Pale blue eyes gleamed dangerously as the other dragon stared straight ahead.
“So… uh…” Hiccup reached back and awkwardly patted his leather sack. It now weighed almost as much as he did, seeing as he was soaking wet, but it felt like it was still as stuffed as when he packed it, so he didn’t think he had lost anything. The parchments, though… Hopefully they would be fine. “I got everything I needed. How about–”
The other dragon snarled loudly.
“Right! Sorry. We’ll be back though. Once we fix all of…” he gestured helplessly in her general direction, “uh, this. I promise, Astrid.”
Two dark silhouettes flew past the guardian statues, leaving the Isle of Berk behind.
o-O-O-o
And so our three adventurers set out, leaving an island in chaos. Their departure wouldn’t be noticed for several days, and then only because Stoick the Vast finally had time to go home and notice that the damage to his hut had obviously come from the inside. The raid, for Berkians to this day believe there was a dragon raid that night, did a lot of damage for having no confirmed kills on either side. As it turns out, many of the fires that characterize a dragon attack are self-inflicted! Those big braziers they have don’t provide enough light, so desperate Vikings often resort to hurling torches, which must of course fall back to the ground, or to the roof of a neighbor’s hut. I hear that their home repair industry is one of the most advanced in the world though, so it’s not all bad–
What’s that? None of you give a single, solitary fig for a Viking’s tale of home repair? You want to know more about how a runt of a Viking came to be in the company of two dragons, one a cursed Viking maiden and the other a complete unknown? About the quest they’ve just embarked upon?
It sounds to me like you do care what story I tell after all. Fear not! Tonight, I will tell their story in full, or as full as a story can be coming long after it happened. You will have to fill in some gaps yourselves, but I am nothing if not a storyteller and I promise you I will not disappoint!
I have titled this story ‘The Burning of The Thousand Blossoms’, and by daybreak it shall be done.
Now, where were we? Two dragons and a Viking teen bound for places unknown…