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“Oh, great Odin’s ghost!” Astrid shouted. Again. There was no-one to hear her, not when she was being carted across open oceans. She was shouting so that she could at least say she died a warrior. Brave to the very end, even when the ‘very end’ involved a deadly nadder and a kidnapping.
A kidnapping that spelt trouble for Berk.
The dragon raids were meant to be over. They’d stopped almost ten years ago, and the beasts hadn’t touched Berk since. So, why her? And why now? And, what if it meant they were coming back (Astrid shuddered to think of that. Training, especially training anywhere near the kill ring had practically stopped after the raids ended, Berk all too happy to let their guards down)? Berk had barely been making it through the war before, she’d known that even as a girl, and now, as a warrior, she knew they would not survive if it turned back upon them. Berk may like to say that they’d won the war, but Astrid knew better. It was not a victory when your opponent turned tail and fled. It was a warning, a warning that something worse was to come. This might very well be the start of the worse.
She tightened her grip on her axe, despite the almost painful buzzing that travelled up her arm at the movement. The dragon’s claws were digging in where they were wrapped around her arms, cutting off her circulation and turning her fingers a purplish blue. Although that could’ve just as easily been the cold. It had been raining for at least the last hour and the dragon just keep flying further into it. Astrid was soaked to the bone and almost wishing the dragon would get struck by lightning just to give her something to do.
There was nothing else for her to do, nothing past cramping her fingers around her axe hilt in a grip she didn’t think Odin himself could break, and steeling herself for whatever was going to greet her on the other end. She was going to go out fighting. Even if she… very much wasn’t spending the journey doing anything of the sort. Cutting one of the beast’s legs off (or flailing her axe at it in general) was a stupid idea. She knew that. If she hit the ocean from this high, it would knock her out cold. Loathe as she was to admit it, the safest place she could be right then was nestled in the dragon’s claws.
Where was the dragon even taking her? No-one on Berk who’d been taken had ever returned, and ‘being taken’ in general had become a bit of a sore spot amongst the village after Stoick lost the second half of his family to dragons.
(Astrid could remember, when the raids had ended less than a week after Hiccup’s disappearance, her parent’s quiet voices wondering if a sacrifice of the chief’s runt of a son was all they needed to end the war, if Stoick shouldn’t have just sent him away sooner, if all the rest of the loss they had faced, 300 years of torment, could have put to rest by way of sending away the chief’s son, or if was Hiccup specifically they had been waiting to eat. She’d run back up the stairs and straight out her window at hearing that. It was a horrible thing to imagine, Hiccup, tiny, annoying, useless, weak, foolish, brave, insane Hiccup out there as the final sacrifice to end the war. That there were people in the village, in her village, who were so convinced the village would be better without Hiccup, without an heir to the throne at all, that they were gad he was gone. She’d stayed out there for three days, long enough that when she returned, and her mother had found that it was a voluntary escape, she’d shouted until she had turned blue and boarded up Astrid’s window. The boards hadn’t been taken off until nearly her fifteenth birthday, and only because the twins had burnt her house down and the new one had no windows at all.)
A crack of lightning lit up the sky, leaving dark spots flickering across Astrid’s vision and every hair on her body standing on end. The dragon did not look upset. Less than a second later a boom of thunder so loud it left her ears ringing. The dragon’s claws loosened almost all the way as it startled, sending Astrid dangerously close to hurtling towards the ocean before it recovered its grip, claws tightening enough that it had Astrid letting out a yelp of pain. The dragon loosened back to an ‘uncomfortable but not damaging’ grip and chirped something that sounded almost apologetic. That was insane though. And definitely absolutely just the rain and her almost delirious state of exhaustion and discomfort making her hear things.
This entire experience was ridiculous.
When she got back, and it was a when, she was going to gut to Snotlout with his own sword. If he hadn’t been incessantly following her all day she wouldn’t have been hiding on the roof of the forge and then she wouldn’t been fresh picking for a dragon-napping. As it was, no-one would even know she’d been gone for hours, and she’d be already eaten before a search party was even suggested. If a search party was even suggested. She doubted there would be anyone calling for that other than Snotlout. Certainly not her parents, not when every discussion she had with them ending in shouting and a bruised face and slamming doors.
There’s a thud somewhere in the darkness beyond Astrid. Then the sound of a very human, very boyish laugh.
“Stormfly! You can’t take people. It’s unkind and it frightens them.” Definitely a boy. His gait sounded uneven, every other step landing with a metallic clink.
The deadly nadder standing over Astrid, Stormfly, lets out a series of chirps and clicks, nudging at Astrid’s axe. She still can’t see the boy, circled by dragons as she is.
“I don’t care how shiny their axe is. We don’t steal people.” Astrid gets the distinct feeling that he’s only speaking Norse for her benefit.