Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The raids are getting worse,” They said.

“Chief, we cannae survive another raid,” They said.

“Stoick,” They said, pleading.

And they were getting worse, and had, and probably always will. The dragons were vicious in their hunger, the monstrous nightmares with burning scales, and gronckles with their stone-thick skins, and nadders with their spikes, and zipplebacks with their twin heads and twice the margin for error. It was the one thing they had always known about them, long before vikings had ever settled in the archipelago; stories from ancient times and times yet to come, the dwarf dragon Fafnir who poisoned the land to protect his treasure, Jormungandr who would kill Thor come Ragnarok, Nidhogg who chewed the roots of the World Tree.

The village had stood for seven generations, rebuilt from the ground up once a month; once upon a time Stoick would have been able to say that Berk would stand for seven generations more.

Stoick stared out across the sea, from the top of a cliff far from the village. The wind bit at his bare skin, at his rough cheeks and rougher hands. The grey sky stretched for miles, flat and pale; smoke a spreading stain from the village far behind him. From homes and his people both - the ruins of one knocked down and the old, charred wood piled into pyres for all the other, and not all were the warriors under Stoick’s command.

They’d lost few in the night’s raid. Hardly a thing to celebrate, but it was a small victory when the blood of many more dragons stained Berk’s soil than the blood of its defenders and Berk had learned to take what victories they could get. Most of the village still stood, charred black and stained with soot, heavy zippleback gas blowing away with the wind weaving through the streets. Their sheep and yaks were safe and the fish stores had not been broken into; the dragons were gone long before dawn, which was a small victory greater than all the others, though not half so sweet as the death of the final dragon in Midgard would be.

One of the dragon training recruits had died for their victory. All of fourteen years old and just good enough in training he’d gotten cocky. They’d found most of Fishjaws, a bloody streak from end to end of the village square. 

Stoick should have been back there helping, but the autumn had him in its grip and, besides, he had Astrid in his stead. Spitelout might once have been put out by an heir chosen from outside the family, but he hadn’t been able to deny that Astrid had the skill for it. Or perhaps he had quailed beneath the look in Stoick’s face, the one that had been there for years and hadn’t gone away, the one that reminded everyone that Stoick’s son was missing, probably dead, and he would not tolerate arguments.

His chest ached, twin hollows in his heart behind his ribs carved out by the loss of his Valka and his son. Stoick closed his eyes against the thoughts of Hiccup, of that weedy little runt of a boy Stoick had loved so fiercely he scolded him for the danger he put himself in. Harshly, too harshly, perhaps, but Stoick had not known what else to do when in the ways of all children who thought they knew better Hiccup would not listen to him!

Seven years, Stoick thought, dully. Over seven years Hiccup had been gone. Over twenty since Valka had disappeared, too. It was cruel to think that at least Fishjaws’ family had the closure of knowing their son was dead, but war against dragons had taken kindness from them long ago. They had all earned a little cruelty, at least in the privacy of thoughts.

Stoick sighed, and the wind sighed with him, hissing through the grass and across the top of the stone cliffs.

The ice would set in soon enough; there was the bite of winter in the air, a tinge of snow to the clouds. A brief reprieve from dragon raids until the spring thaw, though winter was its own kind of hel. A trade of one set of troubles for the other, but at least in winter the fires in their homes were their own, tamed and small.

Stoick stared out across the dark, churning sea. On a clear day Helheim’s gate was there on the horizon, a wall of dark mists and fog, sheltering the dragon nest; he could organise a raid, take all of Berk and bring the fight to them.

Let them feel fear for once! Let them know the terror of a viking raid! Let them watch the seas in fear for the sight of their longships, armed warriors wild and powerful storming their nest, tearing the dragons from the sky and splashing their blood across the ground like Thor battling the World Serpent!

And if they were to die there then so be it, they would walk the halls of Valhalla with its walls of shining spears and tables of endless food and mead and its fields of endless battle, training for the final war at the end of the world! At least then they would show the dragons that vikings were not afraid of their shadows against the stars! Not to be stolen from to feed their endless hunger, nor rats in the food stores to be killed!

At least then there would be no more Fishjaws strewn across the village square, no Hiccup or Valka snatched away in the night and missing ever since.

Stoick shook away the thought - a raid on the nest only ever ended in more of his people dead. But a part of him wanted to try anyway, if only to silence the nagging doubts that had taken root in his head where once there had been steel.

He’d split a rock on his head as a child. He’d ripped a nadder’s head from its shoulders as a baby. He’d been made chief when his father died to dragons, and as chief he’d watched his Valka miscarry for years only to be snatched away by dragons from their only surviving child; and, nearing what should have been the end of his time as chief, his heir and son had gone missing, probably because of dragons too. And he’d survived that. The people of Berk were tough, worn and weathered and rooted down into the earth like the mountain against whose base they had settled.

But Stoick wasn’t so certain anymore that they could survive much longer. Hiccup was gone, but the village still skirted disaster; Astrid was his heir, but the Berk she was inheriting was char and charcoal. The people of Berk carried the blood of Sigurd, who killed the transformed dwarf Fafnir for the dragon’s gold; but the curse on that gold had killed Sigurd, eventually.

Hiccup was gone. Stoick hadn’t understood him, that weedy little boy who caused endless trouble when Berk could not afford more trouble - Astrid was a better heir in every way, capable warrior and diplomat both - but, still. Still the loss stung, and Stoick closed his eyes against the wind and wondered what Vallka would make of him for losing their son.

The wind changed, smoke from the ash and embers in the village and the houses charred black blowing against his back, and stinging in Stoick’s nose and throat, acrid on his tongue. A village so small against the base of the mountain, bared to the sea wind and harsher sea storms. So little and so much of it that Stoick had to care for, duties he was passing down to the perfect heir he had chosen that he never should have had to choose.

“Whatever it is,” Stoick said to the soft rustling of grass behind his back, crumbling rock crunching beneath footfalls, “I have no need of the council of the gods.”

Gothi, huffing at him, settled by his side leaning heavily on her staff. Half Stoick’s height and hunched smaller still, wizened and shrunken and eyes pearly with cataracts, Gothi’s frown still had Stoick pressing shut his lips to keep an apology behind his teeth; he was not still the young boy who could so easily be chastised by a look from her. She stomped the end of her staff in the ground, too, with an insistent humph.

Stoick watched the sea, and ignored Gothi jabbing him with the end of her staff, and her scratching of the dirt at their feet with it. Speak for the gods as she may, Stoick had been around Gothi enough when Hiccup was a small, sickly babe that he carried little fear of her now. Thoughts of dragons weighed heavier on his mind, besides, than the ire of an old woman.

Until she hit him with her staff, anyway.

“What in Thor’s name-?” He demanded, and refused to wither beneath her thin-lipped glare. “What d’yeh want of me, you old hag?”

She jabbed a skeletal finger towards the ground, her eyes boring into Stoick’s. Or through them, perhaps, past all his armour protecting his body and soul to all the things he would never dare think. Stoick swallowed his revulsion, instinctive, at blind eyes that saw too much of him.

Gothi had drawn into the earth, simple but distinctive - not writing, neither futhark nor even the elder futhark and the power that hummed in their lines, but a picture that rippled down Stoick’s spine like the licking heat of dragonfire. A man, legs together and arms spread, inside a dragon whose wings spread out either side of him as if they were his own.

Stoick closed his eyes against the sight of it, and for a moment it was two decades gone and Hiccup had just been born, too early and too small but such screams! Lively and hale, Valka bedridden but still alive. And with a grim set to her thin, wrinkled mouth Gothi looked down at Hiccup in Stoick’s hands and thrust that drawing of man and dragon at him.

But the drawing made as little sense then as it did now; less, perhaps, when on that paper Gothi could have but chose not to add more detail it would have been helpful to see - when there was space for writings she did not scratch out. Yet she jabbed at it all the more insistently with the point of her staff, thin brows low over her eyes and mouth wrinkled into a snarl of frustration.

The fear curled again, a slower heat than the flash of dragonfire that haunted the dreams of all on Berk. There was meaning there, as there was in all things Gothi chose to share; if it were from the gods or from her own journeys as a young woman, times so long ago none except she were alive to remember, Stoick did not know, but Gothi was not one to make things known without reason.

Yet it was not Stoick’s job to divine meaning from strange drawings, and he did not know much more now than when he had first seen it twenty years ago. And the frustration of Gothi’s expectation that he understand that damned drawing was a heat like dragonfire too; all Stoick knew - all he had ever needed to know - was that he loved his Valka, and needed to protect their only son, and that like greedy Fafnir whose breath poisoned the land all dragons needed to be killed for the good of the world. That he loved Valka and always would, and though he had failed Hiccup Stoick refused to fail at killing dragons.

That the raids had gotten worse and eventually, sooner than any viking had ever thought, Berk would not survive another. The dragons were vicious in their hunger and Hiccup was missing, probably dead, and had been for years. There was nothing else Stoick needed to know, and if it was truly important Gothi would tell him, without all the nonsense of that cursed picture.

So he turned his back on her, and trudged back down to his village. “I havn’ae got time for this,” He said, shaking his head. “I’ve rebuilding to see to.”

But the nagging doubt in the back of his head would not leave him, needling him in the heat lingering in the raw, blistering skin on the back of his neck.

Chapter Text

Brief summer died and winter crept ever closer. Harvests were brought in and sheep herded into pastures and barns with the yaks and goats. Fish were salted and smoked and dried, storehouses filling near to bursting with food for the winter ahead. Stoick doubled the guard at night, but dragon raids were growing rarer through the months as they had always done - chased away by the lengthening nights and growing cold.

Before the ice set in and the seas grew too dangerous to sail, at the village Thing Stoick ordered an expedition into Helheim’s Gate - the last of the year. There were mutters, and dissenting voices, but it was only a single extra ship being sent out alongside the fishing fleets - meant to probe the reaches of the dragons’ domain, nothing more.

Stoick's voice was louder than all others, and he had his way. With Berk safe in Astrid’s hands he set sail on a grey, crisp morning when the sea was flat and the world was deathly still.

At the prow of the ship Stoick rested his hand on the snarling muzzle of the carved dragon head and stared at that dark grey wall atop the surface of the sea as they crept ever closer. Rising taller than mountains and as fathomless as the sea the smoke and fog hung on the air, unmoving whether the skies were calm or the wind was whipping up the waves. Stone and seastacks rose just above the fog, betraying that there was land at Helheim’s heart, but nothing else showed through.

Yet even outside the Gate the dragons could be heard within - a low, droning, chittering hum, rolling through the mists and the water and the mind. It was the only sound within the fog, except for the soft lapping of water smoothed and still beneath the weight of the mist - louder than the roar of blood in their ears, or of dragons erupting out of the gloom. It was a sound that sat heavy and thick over thoughts until even their minds shrank beneath it; cowed by the sheer scale of the mists, stifled into silence until all that was left was the animal fear in their racing hearts.

It was faint, very faint, at the edges of the fog. But it was there, and that slight sound had always been evidence enough that it was here the dragons laired.

Spreading parchment across the top of a barrel, Stoick gripped his pencil and readied himself to try to charter the edges of the dragons’ nest, just as others in the ship did too. “Take us in!” He called, even as his skin crawled beneath the fog’s touch and the ship was swallowed up by Helheim's Gate.

Sailing free long hours later they had not, of course, found the nest, but that was not the point of the expedition. Yet neither could their attempt to chart the outer reaches of the dragon nest be called a success.

With the ship bobbing on the surface of the sea Stoick stared, baffled, at all of the maps before him; not one made any sense! Stoick had drawn one map and the two others on the same ship, charting the same seastacks and juts of rock, had drawn two others; together they should have made roughly the same image. It was with this in mind that Stoick followed the path they had taken on each map, and knew the placements to be true, yet no map aligned with another.

His memory said one thing and alone the maps agreed, but put side by side they said nothing at all. On their own all the maps were true, and all the maps were wrong, and put together Stoick could not imagine any truth could exist within the mists at all.

Frustration boiled in his chest, frothing and raging, as he threw the maps into the sea and had the navigator at the tiller aim them back towards home. Another fruitless attempt! Stoick wondered why he’d hoped for anything different. Vikings were good at charting unknown lands - if making a map of Helheim’s Gate was a feat that could be done, then they would have already done so long ago.

Stoick nursed his anger through the journey back to Berk, staring into the dark waters of the sea and grinding his teeth to powder. Why had he hoped? Why did Gothi’s drawing haunt him so? Why had Hiccup disappeared without a hint at his fate? The doubts gnawed at Stoick’s thoughts like the low drone of dragons in their nest, heavy in his skull until only the fear remained.

-:-

The paths through Berk’s forests were old and worn and winding. Carved out of the damp earth and the spongy bed of dead needles through the centuries, ancient game trails crossed the wider paths made by human feet.

Stoick plodded along them, aimed not towards Berk’s few farms and many lumber mills but the deep, untouched woods of Raven’s Point. The sky beyond the needled crowns of the trees was pale, the light grey and cold in these hours before dawn; no sunlight warmed the earth or burned away the mist hanging thick and low over the ground. Trees were vague, hazy shadows in the gloom, fading into the fog.

His breath rose in plumes of mist and smoke from his mouth and nose; frost rimed the branches overhead and the ferns thick across the ground. The crunch underfoot when Stoick’s step shattered the ice of a thin, shallow puddle in the trail was loud in the heavy silence. The chill would have turned away lesser men, the fog and the depths of untouched wilds others, but Stoick was a viking; he was a chief of vikings, and this was his land. He couldn’t be deterred so easily (preferred the cold to fire in some ways, though skin could burn black and dead from ice just as easily as heat).

Little sound broke the muffling quiet. Boughs creaked as they stirred in the slow, weak breeze blowing in from the sea, needles rustling faintly; the few lingering birds and squirrels scratched through the earth for a meal, chittering to themselves as they worked. But they were muted within the fog, and fell silent as Stoick passed by though he paid them no mind.

The nights had been quiet as winter crept in, too. So were the days, dragons rare in their skies and only a few lone individuals even then. A respite Stoick thanked the gods for, as perhaps the last raid of the year had already come and gone; perhaps this year his village could afford a true Snoggletog feast. They’d had few deaths in raids, at least, since Fishjaws, and that was reason enough to celebrate.

Though, too, had Stoick’s humour had become as weak and brittle as the ice underfoot as the months wore on - it would be another year, again, without Valka or Hiccup.

Stoick trudged ever onwards. The trail began to slope steeply down, Stoick’s feet threatening to slip out from beneath him on the bare earth. The earth had been frozen solid, though - firm underfoot, unlike the soft, slippery mud during the rest of the year; he picked his way slowly down the hill, holding roots and branches, before continuing forward on flatter ground to the cove.

Within Raven's Point was an enormous depression sunken into the earth, nearly a ship-length’s deep, with walls of pale stone and a large tree whose roots hung over the rim, reaching through empty air for the ground far below. Within was a lake fed by a stream whose waters were still and smooth, a broad shallow beach of earth around the water’s edge thick and spongy with moss. The edges of the pond glittered with ice, the fish within the waters driven to the depths by the cold, but there was life here, still - a few birds winged through the air, fleeing mice climbing the hanging roots of the tree.

Stoick had found its entrance long ago, when the world still dawned bright and Stoick was a young and eager man, keen to find a space where he and the woman he loved could be together alone.

The ground sloped further down, and the stony walls of the cove began to rise above the earth. The gap in the rocks had been blocked by a shield the first time Stoick had thought to come back, wedged in solidly but the wood and iron frame rotting away; it hadn’t been difficult to open the entrance once more, tossing the crumbling remains of the shield into the woods to be consumed by the woods and the earth.

Ducking inside, Stoick closed his eyes as he breathed deep. The air was still and mild, here - wind blowing harmlessly across the top of the cove but rarely into it. It had always settled something in him, the blunt smell of pine needles pleasant, though now it brought, too, the bittersweetness of remembering all those afternoons with Valka on the pond’s shore.

There were trails here, too - ones Stoick had found that his own feet decades before had not made, ones he continued to keep worn and clear in the earth for reasons he didn’t know. But he walked along them around the cove, stepping where once smaller feet than his own had stood, dragging his fingers over boulders embedded in the earth and the stony walls rising tall.

There he and Valka had sat for hours talking about everything and nothing, here in the moonlight Stoick had asked her to be his wife. Here Hiccup had been, his small footprints wiped away by the years, but here on a patch of wall sheltered by an overhang Stoick’s fingers flinched away from the stone. Here Stoick’s eyes squeezed shut, and he could not bear to see the fading charcoal lines of drawings there.

Dragons and birds and fish, simple little sketches that his son had put down absently. A rare reminder that he had lived; buildings burned in Berk, often and with little to salvage - Stoick’s house, empty and cold, and Gobber’s forge, which once had a room for Hiccup and his diagrams, were no exception. Nothing of Hiccup’s had survived without him. Few on Berk even spoke of Stoick’s nuisance boy at all.

Slowly, so slowly, Stoick lowered himself to sit and rest his eyes on the little cairn.

It was small, easily overlooked in the shadow of the overhang; a scrap of green fabric hung limp without the wind to make it flutter, an old tunic of Hiccup’s he’d torn for this little marker. Stoick had refused a funeral, or a mockingly empty grave, just as he’d refused them for Valka - what would he have if he abandoned the hope of them ever returning? But he’d built the little cairn here by his own two hands, soon after he’d realised that Hiccup had made this cove his own.

Though it brought him no relief, only a bitterness that crowded his throat when he realised he spoke so much more easily to a pile of stone than he ever had his flesh and blood son.

“Hiccup,” Stoick said softly, because that had never stopped him from speaking before. “I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are. That you’re happy. Things have been… things have been good here, these last few weeks. The raids have been rare, thank Odin. That Fishlegs boy has been doing much better since the lawspeaker took him as his apprentice, and the twins are… well, you know them. Gobber’s been struggling in the shop, though he keeps turning away new apprentices. He... He still holds out hope. We both do. I…”

Stoick bowed his head, eyes sliding shut. “Ah, Hiccup,” He said softly, his throat crushed tight. “Come home, son. Jus’, let me see you one last time, so I know. So I can put you tae rest.”

He received no answer, but he’d not expected one. The cove was filled with silence only, as Stoick knelt there before the cairn asking his boy to come home even when he knew, deep down, that his son was probably dead.

-:-

The year crawled to its end, the sun rising more shallowly by the day until one morning it didn’t rise at all. No dragon raids broke the months long night, and the food stores kept them comfortably fed. Stoick spent his Snoggletog in the Mead Hall with his people, drinking and feasting to celebrate another year that Berk had survived, before retreating through the snows to his cold, empty house atop the hill overlooking the village.

Gothi watched him, those rare days she made her way down from her hut at the mountain’s peak, but she did not approach. Stoick wondered if he ought to worry about that or not.

Drinking alone in his house that was no longer a home, Stoick wondered if he cared.

Chapter Text

The Thing came in the spring thaw with a cacophony of noise. It spilled out from the Great Hall into the streets where all the tribes of the archipelago met and mingled and traded, shouting to and over each other, boasting over feats and bellowing challenges. Brawling and contests of log throwing or eating the most gull’s eggs filled every empty field and square, lawspeakers discussing interpretations of the law its own kind of brawling.

It was no ordinary Thing, after all, the small and local and regular ones for the people of Berk to discuss matters of governing with Stoick and disputes between each other with the lawpseaker. All the clans had journeyed to Berk - or at least the ones who could. A little rowdiness was to be expected.

At the chieftain’s table in the Mead Hall carved out of Berk's mountain Stoick rested his brow between his forefinger and thumb, leaning heavily on his elbow as he shadowed his eyes with his palm. Blood pounded against his skull, stabbing into his eye; between Big-Boobied Bertha’s booming voice and Dagur’s shrieking and cackling, and the noise outside, Stoick half thought of leaving the talks with Astrid and going back to bed. But Astrid beside him was narrow-eyed and keen as she studied the talks, and Stoick wouldn’t do her any good leaving her to fend for Berk and for herself against Dagur and Bertha.

“Such a pretty, pretty skrill,” Dagur cooed, half his red hair spiked up and half flattened down and all the glints of the Berserker madness there in his staring eyes and the teeth bared in his grinning mouth. “Oh, Skrilly! If it wasn’t for that-...that-...” He snarled down at his clenched fists, “DRAGON MASTER ruining my plans with my sweet, sweet, lightningy skrill we could have HAD a weapon to WIPE THE DRAGONS OUT!”

Stoick perked a little. “Dragon Master?” He said, but looked to Bertha a little ways down the table. The Bog Burglars travelled far and wide, living on their ships as they did; she would know.

“AYE!” Said Bertha, only just below a shout, as Dagur drifted off into a tirade for people who weren’t listening, but she lowered her voice a little more as she leaned her bulk in close. “Some dragon rider, targetin’ the dragon trappers. Comes in the night, they say; no one’s e’er seen his face, but dragons obey him.”

Bertha’s daughter, a tiny little scrap of a girl with all the fierceness of her mother, scoffed. “Dragon Master,” Said Camicazi, idly cleaning dirt from beneath her fingernails with a dagger. She pushed back her long blonde hair from her face, exposing the burn scar on her narrow jaw and throat. “That’s all they ever talk about anymore.”

Dagur slammed a fist down on the table. “HE STOLE MY SKRILL!” He bellowed. “I had it; right there in my hands! Such a pretty, pretty skrill, caged RIGHT THERE on my ship! And oh, we sailed for home, we did - I made sure everyone was keeping an eye on it. And WHAT comes out in the middle of the night?” Dagur whirled to his feet, chair clattering to the floor, and he stalked back and forth in short strides. “THE DRAGON MASTER! MY SKRILL OBEYED HIM! My skrill and all the other dragons he brought with him!”

“Aye,” Said Bertha again, nodding to Dagur. “The trappers said they knew the Dragon Master were near ‘cause the dragons in the cages started actin’... strange. An’ when the Dragon Master set them free the bastards stayed to fight ‘stead of runnin’ off.” Beneath Stoick’s stare and pointedly raised brows she shrugged. “Eh, there was talk he’s a demon, or some clever bastard, or a dragon himself. No one knows. There’s no’ much to tell, truth be told, Stoick. No one except the trappers e’en heard a’ him.”

Stoick frowned down at the table, resting his chin on his fingers as he thought. By his side Astrid’s eyes narrowed, keen and clever. “Chief?” She asked.

“What’re you thinkin’, old man?” Bertha demanded, her eyes narrowed too.

Stoick brushed away the thoughts with a flick of his fingers. “Nothing,” Stoick said. A foolish, unviking idea, that was all. He squared his shoulders. “Bertha, is there anythin’ you’d like to bring before us today?”

But the thoughts of the Dragon Master haunted him, still, once the day was done and he was trudging through his quiet village back to his empty house atop the hill. What better weapon against the raiding dragons than their master? Who else had the power to rid the beasts from viking shores than the one who could command them? And if the Dragon Master was behind the raids, better still - they could kill him and be rid of the dragons that way.

If Vikings couldn’t get rid of dragons on their own in over three centuries, then perhaps they could get the Dragon Master to do it for them? At the very least it could mean fewer casualties in the raids if the Dragon Master’s forces took the brunt of the attacks.

At dawn Stoick strode for the docks. Trader Johann was a man Stoick had little patience for, but he brought goods Berk relied on and was tolerated largely for that alone. Among the most vital of his goods was gossip, and as a good deal of his business was trading with dragon trappers as well as vikings he was bound to have heard a great deal Stoick abruptly needed to know.

Perhaps better still was that he could always be relied on to attend a viking Thing, even if he was squeamish about the blood and the fighting and the grisly trophies vikings dragged out to flaunt each year. His ship bobbed merrily with the tides as Johann pottered about the deck, gathering his wares for the day’s trading. Unarmoured and brightly dressed, he cut a small, flamboyant figure among vikings, beard neatly gathered and moustache curling at the ends; he startled at Stoick’s heavy steps on the old dock’s wood, and waved.

“Chief Stoick!” He said brightly, and trotted off his ship and up to Stoick. “My most valued of clients - a pleasure to see you even this early in the morn! Have you come to trade? I’ve some excellent weapons in the hold I’ve been holding onto for you, with the most fascinating tales behind them; I was far out to sea when-”

“Another time, Johann,” Said Stoick, slightly clipped.

Johann wilted a little, but he shored up his smile soon enough. “Of course, sir, of course. Shall I… ah, perhaps I might bring the weapons up for your consideration? There are swords of the finest steel, you know, and a hammer I was personally assured by its wielder clubbed a troll to death - it still has the bloodstains!”

“Another time,” Stoick said again, though a little more gently. “I’ve come for some other reasons; I’ve been hearing talk of a Dragon Master.”

Johann stilled utterly, abruptly and completely. His eyes widened, whites bright against the slight tan of his skin - horror, surprise, perhaps neither - before he scowled. “Where did you hear that name?” Johann demanded, with uncharacteristic force and an unblinking stare boring into Stoick’s gaze.

“He’s all the chiefs spoke of at the meeting yesterday. Why?”

For a long, long while Johann stared, fists trembling slightly by his side. The tides lapped gently at the hull of his boat, a rhythmic splash beneath the creaking of wood and the groan of ropes holding the mast, and the shrieks and squeals of seabirds circling above the bay. Eventually he breathed deep, and pushed the breath out in forceful gusts - once, twice, and a third before he'd settled into something almost close to calm once more.

His jaw worked, chewing his words, as he turned to stare out across the water. “The trappers,” He said quietly, fretfully wringing his hands, “Say that name is cursed. That speaking of him without reason will summon him. The destruction they say he’s wrought upon them, Chief Stoick- oh, I couldn’t bear to see it come to Berk!”

Fear prickled in Stoick’s skin, old burns itching with heat. Unbidden came the vision of that doomed clansmeet, a stranger stalking back out through the doors with armoured dragons burning the hall and most chiefs of the archipelago in his wake.

“We know how to handle a few dragons, Johann,” Said Stoick, but his voice betrayed him.

A squawk of laughter erupted from Johann, quickly swallowed. “This isn’t just ‘a few dragons’!” He said, shrill. “This… thing they speak of, I’ve- well, I’ve never heard its like, chief Stoick, and for a man so well-travelled as I that is quite the feat. But, if that isn’t enough to satisfy your curiosity, then I will give you this: whatever powers he wields that lets him control dragons brings only misfortune and destruction to all that cross him. I beg of you, chief Stoick - put all thoughts of him out of your mind.”

Stoick allowed Johann to speak no more of it, and looked over the weapons he offered before he attended the meeting with the other chiefs. But he nursed his thoughts of the Dragon Master all the same as Dagur ranted and raved, and Bertha’s shouting echoed across the whole of the island.

-:-

A few patrolling guards nodded at him, and greeted him in passing, as Stoick returned home after the day’s end. Stoick greeted them in turn, but did not stop as he made the climb up to his house. The groan of the heavy door echoed as Stoick shouldered his way inside, feeling his way to the cold, dark hearth to light it. He grunted his frustration as he struck the flint and the wood refused to light, and the triumph of the tiny, withered flame that flickered to life was dry and unsatisfying as he heaved himself to his feet.

Gothi watched him from a chair beside his own, staff held loose between her knees as the weak firelight washed over her.

Stoick didn’t startle, but he stared for long, long moments. Gothi stared back, her toothless smile mild and her half-blind gaze heavy on Stoick’s face. “I need a drink,” He said, stomping over to his chair. Obligingly, Gothi gestured to a tankard waiting on his chair’s arm.

The mead didn’t taste as good as it ought when Stoick knocked it back and dropped into his seat; soured by Gothi’s presence at his side. “Alright,” He sighed, watching the flame as it gorged on the logs in the hearth, growing steadily larger and brighter. Burn scars itched as he braced himself. “What is it, old woman?”

Gothi held out a piece of parchment, and the prickling in his scars needled ever deeper as Stoick took it. She folded her hands in her lap, her silence heavy with expectation.

The cool, sinking dread in Stoick’s heart was little warning as Stoick stared down at the drawing. Man and dragon, arms and wings spread together. Stoick’s grip tightened, fingers crushing the parchment in his grip. “Gothi,” He growled, and flung it into the fire, watched it burn; no satisfaction came to him as he watched black ink crumble into ash and smoke. “Enough of this.”

The tap of Gothi’s staff against the floor, a dull wooden knock, was louder than her tiny frame should have been able to make as she mumbled her affront. She rapped Stoick’s knuckles with the end of her staff, a strike quicker than a nadder with twice the sting.

“What d’yeh want of me, Gothi?” Stoick demanded, leaning forwards with his elbow on his knee as he clasped his bruising knuckles, glaring into Gothi’s clouded eyes. “Explain yourself for once, damn you!”

Head tilted, Gothi watched Stoick’s rage as it grew and brightened in his face like the reddened mark on his hand. She sighed, as if disappointed - as if Stoick’s inability to understand was his own failing and not hers - and shook her head. Worse, perhaps, was that it worked - the heat of shame joining the dragonfire that itched at the back of Stoick’s neck, frustration bleeding away into a low simmer in his chest.

Stoick jerked his head away to hide her victory, but Gothi did not demand his attention. A pencil scratched against parchment, and when Gothi tore the page free Stoick glanced over to see her snapping shut a book and tucking it safely within her vest. No dread slithered cold down Stoick’s chest as Stoick took the page Gothi shoved into his hands. It was surprise, instead.

No drawings had been scrawled on this page; only words. Simple futhark, scratchy and barely readable but words. DRAGON MASTER.

“Dragon…” Stoick breathed, and glanced over. “Like the one Bertha spoke of?” Gothi nodded. “Why, Gothi?”

Rolling her eyes, Gothi tapped Stoick’s head with the end of her staff. His helmet rang, dull and small, with each tap from the gnarled old wood. She held out another page, then; a map of the archipelago, shaken insistently at him. Her grey gaze met Stoick’s, finding his eyes easily even in the dim light of a single lit hearth - looking through him as she looked through all, past his armour and himself to the things he never said.

“I’m to find this Dragon Master?” Stoick said, voice made small by bewilderment. "For him to end the raids?" Gothi’s smile was bright and pleased as she nodded. Stoick stared down at the map; the archipelago was large, its islands numerous and distant from one another, and there were many more islets and outcroppings of rock that couldn’t support a village but perhaps could a Dragon Master. Sighing, Stoick folded the map and knocked back the last of his mead. “I’ll speak to the other chieftains tomorrow,” He told Gothi. “Bertha will know where he’s been seen. For both our sakes, I hope you’re right about this.”

Gothi slipped away, only the hushed thunk of the closing door betrayed that she’d left at all. Stoick watched the fire as the sky turned and the night dragged unbroken by dragons, fingers resting over the back of the map. He thought of the Dragon Master, the goods and gold and services they could offer for his help, the amounts of it he might demand and the raids Stoick might need to organise to pay him. The tactics such a man might use against them in battle, and if he were a man at all.

He thought of how far a dragon rider could travel on the back of one of his beasts, and how he must have seen a great deal of the world. He wondered if the Dragon Master had met Hiccup, somewhere in those travels, and if Hiccup had survived that meeting without his father to protect him.

Chapter Text

Bertha laughed at him.

Great raucous booms of giggles shook her heavy frame, echoing within the empty Mead Hall until the stone overhead threatened to crack and fall. To be crushed under the ceiling would have been a mercy to Stoick’s ears if nothing else, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if Bertha’s laughter followed him into Odin’s halls.

The early hour at least left them no audience, except for Gothi, Astrid, and Camicazi in the hall with them. Most vikings were still asleep, or heading out to sea to fish, or else preparing for this day’s games and contests; even Dagur was still aboard his ship, shouting and raving at his men to prepare for the day ahead. Though Stoick didn’t doubt that most of his village was waking because of Bertha.

On, and on, Bertha laughed at him. Stoick weathered it easily enough, even when she began to chortle, “HELP! FROM THE DRAGON MASTER!”

“Aye,” Said Stoick simply when her laughter had faded into something close to silence. “If he can control dragons, then he can get rid of them. An’ if he gets rid of them, then we stop killin’ his dragons. We'll meet the highest price he demands, if need be.”

“PRICE!” Squawked Bertha, a fresh round of laughter. “Yeh’re so sure you can meet his price, Stoick? No’ne even knows what that thing even wants, ‘cept his damned dragons; all we’ve got tae offer is blood and gold, old man, an’ I’m not interested in findin’ out what kind’a blood the Dragon Master’d ask for!”

Stoick’s grip tightened on the map in his hand as Bertha’s shouting voice echoed throughout his mead hall. But he held his tongue, because she wasn’t wrong - Berk had little in the way of gold, and Stoick wouldn’t offer either man or beast if the Dragon Master demanded blood.

His eyes slid closed, a slow blink that he allowed only for a moment. “He’ll get no flesh from my tribe,” He intoned. “But to be rid of these dragons then I will offer him all of Berk’s gold, and steal more if it would buy him.”

Bertha’s mirth faded from her eyes, face growing heavy with the weight of realisation. “Oh Hel’s frozen piss, man, you’re serious?”

“Aye,” Said Stoick again.

He gestured Bertha to the chieftain’s table, watched her drop to her seat with a force that threatened to shatter her chair beneath her. Camicazi moved to stand beside her mother, but neither Astrid frozen in place with wide eyes, nor Gothi watching from the walls, had moved. Bertha watched him too, with wide, unblinking eyes as Stoick spread the map Gothi had given him across the table before her.

Outside the mountain walls and the heavy wooden doors of the mead hall Berk woke slowly. Shouts and the barking of dogs greeted the day's start; curses and the clattering of iron pots, slamming doors and the rhythmic clang of a hammer against hot steel all echoed across the village. Even trader Johann’s voice, jovial and friendly, had raised to a shout as he prepared a market stall for the day’s trading.

Taking a breath deep into his chest, Stoick pressed a finger into the parchment. Gothi’s gaze, blind and piercing and heavy on his back, was approving. “You know the archipelago,” Stoick said, low and coaxing. “You’ve talked to the trappers. Tell me where this Dragon Master’s been, and one way or another I’ll find him.”

"Chief!" Astrid cried, aghast - at last unsticking her horror from her throat long enough to speak. She stormed to his side, snarling, "He's a Dragon Master! And from what I've heard of him he'll turn out to be our enemy as much as the dragons are! And to give him our gold, it's-" She glanced helplessly at Gothi, but found no aid in the old woman's placid stare. Her jaw tightened, teeth grinding, as she leaned close. "He'll be on their side, not ours," She hissed, and her stare was as hard and cool as winter ice. "We should be looking after our own, not... borrowing trouble from whatever this thing turns out to be!"

Bertha, who'd stared at the map all the while, shook her head. Her eyes slid closed as she turned her face away. “Is this about your dead boy, Stoick?”

“Mother!” Spat Camicazi, and through the dull roar in Stoick’s head he remembered that she had been his son’s friend.

“What?!” Bertha demanded, rounding on her daughter a moment. She shook her head again. “This is madness, old man, you hear me? Madness! Now I get that your wife and son died to these dragons, that was a nasty bit of business and I’m sorry fer it, but you know damn well that dealing wi’ this Dragon Master’s a fool’s venture at best!”

“This is’nae about them!” Stoick growled, words hissing through gritted, bared teeth with force enough that he couldn’t be anything but honest.

Except that it was a lie, because Stoick’s certainty - once as true and hard and cold as steel - was burned and buckling, shearing under the weight of his doubts now that Hiccup was missing too. There was little in Stoick’s life anymore that didn’t return in some way to them. To Valka he'd loved so dearly, her kindness and compassion in a world where kindness burned; to Hiccup, his clever, weedy boy he’d loved so fiercely and scolded too harshly, and hadn’t known what to do with except try to keep him safe.

Without dragons Valka would never have been taken from them both. She could have made up for Stoick’s failings, filled in all the places his brusqueness and pragmatism and inability to understand his son had left hollow. Without dragons Hiccup would never have disappeared so suddenly, so completely; he would have left behind traces of himself, tracks to follow that could at least tell Stoick that he was alive. Without dragons there would be no more raids, no villages burning in the night. No dragonfire charring flesh, teeth shattering bone. No more violent deaths, no more Fishjaws a bloody smear across the ground with barely enough to burn. No casual cruelty with the thought that at least it was only the one recruit, that he’d died relatively quickly, that at least there was a body.

Without dragons Stoick might at least get to see his village at peace, even if peace wasn't something he could ever find without Valka or Hiccup back home. Without at least knowing their fate, if nothing else.

“Please, Bertha,” He said, low and harsh, as he pressed his hand to the map. “Whatever you think of this path, whatever you think of me, jus’... tell me where this man's been seen. That's all I'm asking.”

Bertha watched Stoick for long, long moments. Her gaze flicked across his face, intent. Her silence lingered longer still. But whatever she searched for she must have found, as she broke the hush with her sigh - a gust of breath harsh and loud. “Damn you, Stoick,” She said, grabbing the map. “You better not die for this Dragon Master.”

-:-

Stoick stared into his hearth’s fire, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and hands clasped together. Unmoving he stared as the hours passed slowly, except for when he reached for his tankard on the floor beside his foot and drank. Around him his house was silent, and dark, and cold. The new timbers had settled over the winter and didn’t groan, though they’d be replaced once more soon enough in some future raid or other.

The night leaned against Stoick’s back, heavy with what awaited. Only the crackling of the fire broke the quiet, harsh in the hush that had fallen across the world; only its small circle of light chased away the gloom, though the shadows yawned all the darker beyond its glow.

Three days and the preparations were done. A crew had been chosen and all of Berk informed, a karve longship waiting in the harbour. There were supplies that would see them through weeks at a time, if need be, and it had been agreed they would not carry anything that could be deemed threatening - no bola, no nets, and only a single weapon each. At dawn they would leave with the tides to search the archipelago, or wherever their search took them; they were unlikely to return successful.

They might not return at all.

Stoick drank, and stared at the fire, for long, long hours into the night. He didn’t look up when his door opened and shut, and smaller feet than most of Berk’s warriors padded across the floorboards - he only grunted an acknowledgement and nodded to the chair beside his own.

Astrid did not sit. Her gaze burned against the side of his face. “Chief,” She said, with quiet, earnest force, “Call off the voyage. This is madness, and we all know it.” When he said nothing, she hissed, “There’s still time! Tell everyone… Tell everyone it was my idea! That I’ve changed my mind, because it exposes the village to too much risk. Just, anything except going through with it!”

The mead was tasteless as ash in his mouth. He set his tankard back down by his foot, and didn’t look at her. “I will find this Dragon Master, Astrid.”

“Why?” She demanded, and there was real bewilderment beneath the anger in her voice. “It’s enough of a risk when you go out to sea as it is, never mind going after this Dragon Master! We should be focusing on our livestock, or raiding for supplies, or finding the Nest, or anything else, chief! Not chasing after this half-myth monster waging war on the dragon trappers.”

“If he can command dragons, then he can command the ones that raid us," Stoick repeated dully. "If he’s human he can be bought, and if he isn’t then perhaps we can bargain with him anyway - the dragons keep their lives if he takes them from our skies.” He watched a burning log break and fall, and remembered rafters overhead breaking much the same as another man who claimed to command dragons walked from the hall his dragons burned behind him. “If we fail, we kill him and be done with it all.”

Astrid scoffed, but there was something almost plaintive in her as she said, “Then why are you going? Send me! Send Fishlegs! Send Snotlout!”

“No, Astrid.”

“Why?!” She demanded, and dared to step closer; dared to take Stoick’s arm in an iron grip and hiss her fury, her bewilderment, her fear. “Why do you need to find this Dragon Master? Why this Dragon Master?!”

Some familiar itch scratched within Stoick’s chest, a dim and muted irritation churning within the cage of his ribs. But it was small, easily ignored; an urge smothered beneath some muffling weight across his thoughts which stifled often his heart, and so he did not rise to it. He only stared at the fire - at the leaping flames, the burning logs, the ash and the embers left behind.

His voice sounded old, even to his own ears, when he said, “Gothi.”

Astrid deflated all at once, weakly releasing his arm. “Gothi told you to…” She breathed.

“Aye,” Stoick said. His mouth twisted bitterly. “Aye. She made herself known, clear enough. Clearer than Gothi ever speaks. It was she who gave me the map.” He breathed deep, thin smoke scratching at the back of his nose and throat, and let it go in a single slow gust. Not quite a sigh, not quite a huff. “If it’s the god’s will I find this Dragon Master, Astrid,” He told her, “Or if it’s only Gothi who believes this is the path to follow, she did’ne say. But she’s never seen us wrong before.”

She was old. Gothi had always been old; she’d been old when even the elders were young, old when Stoick’s own father had been born. It was her medicines that saved Berk’s people and animals from wounds and disease, her knowledge that pointed them to good seas to fish in and when to plant the few crops that survived in the village’s poor soils, her wisdom that guided them the rare times she felt the need to share it.

Gothi didn’t often speak, and she spoke sense rarer still. But Stoick had never known her to be wrong. He couldn’t doubt the path she’d put him on, or at least he wouldn’t speak his doubts (couldn't, as if to speak them would make them real). But he had plenty more doubts about his own ability to succeed at walking it.

“If I fail, Astrid,” Stoick said to the fire, to the darkness of his empty house, to the perfect heir he never should have had to choose, “I fail because I couldn’t succeed. But I will wake in Valhalla knowing that I have left Berk in good hands.”

Chapter Text

The sun burned on the edge of the world beneath a heavy sky, a spill of dawn’s grey light across Berk’s harbour and the ships that tugged on their moorings. The towering seastacks and arches sheltering the bay loomed tall, shrieking seabirds wheeling through the air or roosting on the craggy stone streaked and stained pale, while the calm sea rippled with restless waves.

Stoick watched over his people from the docks as they hauled supplies and weapons, the last few hasty preparations before they set sail. But the numbers had all been checked and double checked, the crew sombre as they said their goodbyes. From atop the cliffs Astrid kept order, reminding the Burglars and the Berserkers that they were to sleep on their own ships for as long as they were on Berk and keeping the crowds from swarming the docks; though her eyes turned often to Stoick, and his ship bobbing with the tides.

The sailors all nodded when Stoick moved at last to board, nodding to him in greetings that Stoick returned, and on the deck Gobber clapped his surviving hand to his, mouth a thin, grim line beneath the hanging braids of his moustache. From the prow Stoick turned to the cliffs where the crowds waited, a smear of wool and metal and shapeless faces at this distance. But his voice would carry, Stoick knew that as he knew that the dragons at the nest needed to die, and that Gothi believed they needed the help of a dragon’s friend to do that.

So he raised his chin, filled his chest with air, and he spoke in a voice that rang clear and hard across the harbour like the ring of a bell, like the clang of a blow from a dragon’s paw against a shield. “Today,” He said, and watched as the smear of his people and those from the other tribes who were brothers and sisters to them, at least in the war with dragons, all stilled, “We search for the Dragon Master’s lair to ask for his aid, or strike him down, to end the threat of dragons once and for all!”

“Vikings-!” Stoick bellowed, and he stalked back and forth across the deck of the ship, the breathless breeze holding his words through the silence as he spread his arms wide to encompass them all, “-Carry the blood of Sigurd the Dragonslayer! And for generations we have carried his legacy! But if we are to drive away the dragons for good, for our children and our children’s children to never know the tyranny of those beasts, we must find this Dragon Master. He commands them, and if he can be reasoned with and told to take these devils from our skies then I will do no less than to try to convince him. And if he kills us, then we dine in Valhalla with all the glory of having cut that devil down with us!”

The cheers and roars of Vikings carried Stoick’s ship out to sea, oars digging deep into the water. The shadows of the stained, towering arches and lines of seastacks curled around the bay where Berk had built its harbour gave way to the open sea and the briny wind that blew cool and stiff across the water; the approval of their people followed them long after the echoes had faded.

Scars and old healed breaks in older bones ached in the damp air, the wind cold enough it cut the inside of Stoick’s nose and bit at his fingers and cheeks. He breathed it deep all the same, touching the haft of his hammer and the familiar leather wrap, before he spread out the map Bertha had returned to him across the top of a barrel. As she’d promised, Bertha had circled islands where the Dragon Master had been spotted or been rumoured to be.

“Chief,” Said Steelhead the navigator, with an incline of his head, as Stoick pointed out the nearest island; under the low, dark clouds and with the waves cutting themselves on the ship's keel Steelhead barked orders and the men obeyed, and the lowering sail filled with wind.

“You think this… ‘Dragon Master’s’ real, Stoick?” Murmured Gobber, lumbering up by his side as Stoick stared down at the map. There were very few circled islands, and a great deal of open water to cover. The chain of islands Bertha had found most promising stretched away into the north, where storms raged and ice filled the waters. “It’s an awfully far fetched tale if I do say so meself. An’ if he is, well…” He rubbed his hairless chin, glancing up at Stoick. ”Men controllin’ dragons ne’er ended well before, did it?”

Stoick rolled the thought over. “You think it’s Drago again?”

“I think it’s a possibility we may need tae consider, aye,” Gobber said. "Among others. Maybe this man does'nae exist, maybe he does, and maybe he's Drago. Maybe he's summat worse'n Drago. Maybe we've been wrong all these years, an' he's behind the raids."

Stoick hmmed to himself, staring at the map. Gobber chewed on his words a moment, his own gaze sliding uneasily across the map too. “I jus’ think you oughta be careful wi’ this, Stoick; more careful ‘n haring off after every whiff and sniff a this man," Gobber said. "Even if ‘e isn’ae Drago vikings kill dragons, an’ any friend’a theirs aren’t likely tae be friendly wi’ us.”

They sailed on under the heavy sky, carving through heaving waves of dark waters. Mouth thinning beneath his beard, Stoick rolled up the map and stowed it safely away in one of the small chests beside the oars. “I know," He said. It was a thought that had troubled him often as they prepared for this journey, almost as often as the heavy weight of futility that crept across him often these days. All the better, then, that he shoulder the risk rather than send any of the young, eager warriors whose futures Berk so relied on. It was only because of Gothi Stoick pursued this path at all. "But if we can't get to those dragons ourselves then we need tae look for someone who can, and I won’t let caution keep us from a solution to the dragons.”

“Damn your solution, Stoick!” Gobber hissed, indignant. “Have you e’en thought about what ye’ll be offerin’ this man if 'e does help us? The price ‘e might ask, the cost to us? What if his help costs too much for us tae pay, eh? An’ what if he kills you? What if Berk loses the best damn man we've got!”

Stoick stepped up to the prow of the ship, a hand gripping the carved dragon head. He held the haft of his hammer, warming his hand where the old leather had been worn down in his grip. “We’ll know,” He said, “When we find him, Gobber. If he is’nae a reasonable man, then we kill him before he kills us. If we fail, then Astrid will make a fine chief.”

And they would find the Dragon Master. If he helped them or harmed them didn’t matter; Stoick held close thoughts of his son, of his Valka, of Fishjaws and the countless lives lost against the beasts, and oversaw the crew aiming the prow to the first of the islands to search.

-:-

Days at sea turned to weeks. They asked after the Dragon Master at every port and village they restocked at but the rumours of him were sparse at best, and said nothing they hadn’t already heard at the Thing on Berk. Islands to the south of the archipelago showed signs of dragons, but no commanding master; no huts or houses or inhabited caves, or at least none where the signs of dragons was not that of destruction. The chain trailing north to the edge of the most dangerous waters, breath visible even in the warmest days with the clearest noon skies, showed more promise.

But that promise was wrecked ships with burned sails and hulls, dashed against the rocks and beaches of hundreds of tiny islands. Others couldn’t really be called wrecked at all, shattered so thoroughly into splinters it was difficult to recognise the charred remains scattered across the beaches as ships at all. The carcasses of forts and outposts lay slumped across the ground or up against cliffs, or half-sunk into the sea; shattered timbers like exposed ribs, empty doorways of crushed buildings staring vacantly back.

And no sign of the Dragon Master, still. There was only the rare dragon, high overhead.

They hauled the ship ashore one night, onto a shallow but wide rocky beach and well out of reach of the water, and made camp by its side sheltered from the wind. The towering cliff facing the sea at their backs cast its shadow far over the water as the sun slid low behind it, roosting seabirds in the crags of its face screeching into the dusk; the rattling boughs of the trees at its top was a distant rustle as Stoick warmed his hands on the campfire’s crackling flame.

He spread the map across the beach, pointing to their next destination. The island chain continued on past Bertha’s map, stretching much further west far beyond the horizon, and the next island was perilously close to the end of the parchment. Already they were further than most vikings dared go; courage and adventure was all well and good, but the sea cared little and even the bravest fools were wise to its temper.

“I’ll take first watch,” Stoick told the men. “Get all the rest you can now, we’ll be facing the deep north soon enough.”

“I think I’ll stay up a while longer wi’ you,” Said Gobber by his side, taking off his prosthetics and setting them down gently - out of the way, but in easy reach - with a groan of relief.

Stoick kept his attention on the map, though it showed him nothing new in the flickering firelight. “No. I need you sharp for the days to come.”

“All the good it’ll do yeh,” Gobber groused, and flexed his shoulders with a groan. “Ooergh, we’re gettin’ too old for this. How long’re we stayin’ out here Stoick, eh? We’ve seen nary a sight nor scale a’ this ‘Dragon Master’, in all these weeks. If he could be found, surely someone would’a done so by now, wouldn’ yeh say?”

The seabirds screeched, still, as the crew bedded down across the ship’s deck or the beach, wrapped up in their furred cloaks. Fists tightened as a dragon’s roar, faint with distance, rolled through the air, and even the seabirds fell silent a moment beneath it. The dragon didn’t call again, and no flames or toothy jaws erupted out of the gathering darkness, but the men didn’t settle until long after the sun had slid out of sight and their campfire burned away a tiny circle out of the night.

Stoick traced again the lines of the map, squinting into the gloom. Only this line of islands held any hope of finding the Dragon Master. “You joined knowing it would be difficult,” Stoick told Gobber at last.

“I joined tae make sure this errand of yours doesn’ae sail you off the edge of the world,” Gobber said, and when Stoick raised his gaze his old friend’s eyes glittered darkly in the flickering firelight. “Damn it man, you know as well as I do that this man will be dangerous if we do find him, or he finds us. He controls dragons, for Thor’s sake; it’s only common sense to fear him more than his damned beasts. D’yeh no’ think he might sooner burn us all to Valhalla rather’n talk to us?”

“We’ll give him no reason to,” Stoick said shortly.

Gobber snorted. “Like Drago?” Gobber said, a pointed, bitter jab that Stoick ground his teeth against. “We’re vikings, Stoick - he or his dragons will know we kill their kind, an’ they’ll not think twice o’er killing us for it,” Gobber told him once more, as if that fear didn't always linger, a prickle of lingering heat in his scars and his skin - as if the thought didn't often come to him at night, staring up at the sky in the silence wondering if he had doomed his men and his oldest friend.

The silence held for long moments; Gobber’s gaze dropped to the fire, and he stroked the long twin braids of his moustache. He sighed, a gust of breath bright in the firelight like a puff of dragon’s fire. “Stoick…” He started, but whatever he would have said burned out before it was spoken as Gobber’s mouth clicked shut. He rolled his tongue across the metal tooth in his gums, chewing idly on his words; sighed again as his gaze found Stoick’s. “Jus’... be careful Stoick,” He said eventually, gaze sliding away as he began to settle down to while away the night with him. “If we ever meet this man, you tread careful wi' him. This Dragon Master’ll pounce on weakness like his beasts, you mark my words.”

Stoick said nothing, turning to stare out into the yawning dark beyond the firelight as he warmed his palm on the old, worn leather wrapped around the haft of his hammer.

Chapter Text

The last port before the icy waters northwest was a small, grim thing in the sheltering bay of a tiny island of bare, dark rock and wispy patches of scrub grass. A tangle of charred, shattered wooden boards and beams were strewn across the dark, jagged rocks of the bay. A collapsed wooden tower lay across the island and a few tiny houses, creaking and groaning unsettled, tangled rope and netting swaying in the wind. The sky hung low, clouds dark and heavy with rain - old healed breaks and older joints twinged uneasily, and Stoick muttered a prayer to Njord for calm seas and brisk winds.

The only other ship as they pulled in was a brightly coloured thing, incongruous against the wood dark with ingrained dirt and the shabby market hall and handful of huts. Its crew was equally odd, bundled up in thickly furred hooded hides and mittens and boots, as they bustled about the deck.

The ship’s twin sails fluttered in the stiff wind blowing over the bare rock of the island, bright dragon skins spilling out from their bundles on the deck. Stoick studied it only a moment as the rest of the crew disembarked; He caught Gobber by the elbow, nodding to the bright ship. Eyes narrowed Gobber nodded back, and Stoick turned his head just enough to order, “Steelhead, see to supplies; get as much as we can carry.”

The large market hall was as dark and dingy inside as outside as Stoick ducked through the open doorway; lit more by the grey light streaming through gaps between the hall’s boards and holes in its roof than the guttering candles at a handful of stalls. It was nearly as empty, too, except for the handful of locals with scarred, weathered skin and haunted eyes manning the stalls. But there was a taproom near the back, with little more than a long table and bench shoved out of the way against the wall, where a dark haired man drank alone.

Tall and broad shouldered, a pelt thrown around his shoulders, but no viking; he turned to watch Stoick and Gobber, brows raised in idle surprise, and his eyes and hair were dark, his chin tattooed. “Well, well,” He said loudly, as Stoick aimed his steps towards his table. “Fresh faces, eh? Don’t see those here very often!” The man waved he and Gobber over, as if they weren’t already heading his way. “Sit, sit! Maybe a couple of vikings’ll liven this place up!”

The locals at the stalls paid little mind to either of them as the crew made their way to the bar and Steelhead settled in to haggle over bread and mead and dried fish. The bench groaned beneath their weight as Stoick and Gobber sat beside the stranger, who knocked back some of his drink.

Slamming his tankard down the man leaned in with a grin. “So!” He said, only slightly more quietly. “What brings a couple of horned-hats out to the middle of nowhere? Run out of people to plunder down south, thought you’d try your luck out here?”

“Restocking,” Stoick grunted.

The stranger rolled his eyes. “That’s the only reason anyone comes here,” He said, tapping the bottom of his tankard against the table. “But no one comes here without going out there !” He gestured northwards with the same hand, mead spilling over the rim. “And there’s slim pickings out there now, believe you me. Even for Eret, son of Eret, the greatest dragon trapper alive!” He took another drink, head tilting back.

Stoick’s eyes narrowed keenly; dragon trappers weren’t rare in viking waters, their services unneeded but they were always good for trading. He'd not thought they came so far north. But, if Bertha was right, Stoick doubted that this one hadn’t crossed paths with the dragons’ master. He glanced at Gobber, who shrugged and nodded back.

“We’re looking for the Dragon Master,” Stoick told the trapper.

Eret spat out his mead, tankard falling from clumsy fingers and clattering to the table. “You what?” He hissed, eyes wide.

“We've been told he might be further north.”

Eret’s wide-eyed gaze flicked to the shadowed corners of the hall - to the open entrance facing the docks and the sea beyond. “Look, Drago’s dead and the new one- The new one controls a night fury. Even Drago never managed that.”

Stoick and Gobber flinched, reflexive; it had been years without that shrieking whistle of wind over wings in the skies above Berk, explosive bolts of fire streaking through the night, but the fear of them had been well earned over the generations. It was Gobber who shook it off first, and reached for Eret’s tankard - knocked back the mouthful that hadn’t spilled across the table. “We’re not interested in his dragons,” He said. “We need him to deal with our own. Have ye seen him or not?”

“Seen him?” Said Eret, tightly. He squawked a strangled laugh, casting his gaze around the hall as if looking for agreement. “He's not like that other rider from the icelands, or that new one with a damned skrill! All anyone sees is what’s left behind after his dragon blasted everything to bits in the middle of the night and took off with our stock!”

His unblinking gaze flitted from Stoick’s to Gobber’s, wide and bright with fear. “Look,” He said, low. “Look, I don’t think you understand what you’re looking for here. You heard of Drago? He used to be the Dragon Master. Made dragons obey him... somehow. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen. He’d been paying us trappers to bring him live ones for his army for years. Now, we were already having a hard time of it because of this other rider messing with our traps, but this new one? This new rider controlled dragons too. Smashed apart the whole operation like it was nothing in, what, five years? It didn’t matter how well we hid or how defended our outposts were, he always seemed to find us. And we knew it was him because the dragons stayed to fight when he freed them.

“Drago went looking for him. Some of the other trappers thought that was it for this new rider, Drago would bend his will like he did every other dragon. But they found what was left of his army a year later, a few hundred ships stuck in ice and Drago’s exploded across the same coast, this bullhook of his stuck in what was left of the mast halfway up the haft.”

There was a stillness in the market hall as the locals busied themselves at their stalls and the taproom, eyes on the skies behind the battered roof. The fallen tower creaked, still; a low, intermittent groan behind the rolling waves bashing themselves against the island’s rocky shore, like the moans of dragons broken-winged on the ground. Stoick’s crew focused on their drink or the supplies they were packing onto the ship.

Gobber’s glance at the side of Stoick’s head was pointed.

But the line of destruction they’d found along the islands was little different to the destruction Berk faced with each attack, and even less different still to the destruction Berk was assured if the dragons weren’t stopped. Stoick held Eret’s gaze, steady and even in the face of what might well be doom; the vikings of Berk killed dragons with greater ease than any other, and if the Dragon Master proved himself little better than his beasts then they could kill him, too. “Do you know,” He said, "Where we can find him?"

Eret stared back, but if he found the weakness in the steel behind Stoick’s gaze, if he doubted the iron of Stoick's will to see his people saved, he didn’t tear at it. His eyes slid closed, head falling. He shook it wearily, head rolling slowly back and forth. “You won’t find him,” He said. When he raised his head again, eyes glancing between Stoick and Gobber, there was resignation in his voice as he added, “ But… if you keep heading northwest his dragons will find you, sooner or later.”

-:-

The sea was a capricious thing - Njord's control was not absolute. It gave vikings fish and distant lands to plunder, but it turned on them just as easily, too.

In the breathless moments after the storm hit and a wave turned over the ship, and Stoick and all his crew were plunged into the heaving, icy water as the wind and driving rain whipped up the seas into a frenzy, Stoick thought that he ought to have known their voyage was going too easily. Four islands into the unknown northwest and the only hint of trouble had been a shadow against the clouds?

He clawed his way to the surface, tumbling in the churning water as towering waves sucked him down and carried him high, deafened by the crashing of the sea and howling of the wind, blinded by the driving rain. “GOBBER!” Stoick bellowed, and sucked in breaths more saltwater than air as the heaving waters thrashed him in its grasp. “STEELHEAD!” But if his crew heard his voice at all then their answers were lost beneath the roaring fury of the storm.

Stoick fought against the tides as he fought against dragons, kicking and screaming back at the black sky sitting low over the water. He didn’t know for how long, didn’t care; he had been a warrior before he’d ever been chief and the warriors of Berk fought long past the point they should have given in, driven beyond the weakness of flesh because dragons did not take pity on the weak.

He fought against a sea that crushed him down and turned him over and filled his lungs long after the burning in his limbs should have forced him to stop - long after the dark water had swallowed his ship down and dragged him down with it. Long after he could not move, limp in the tides and staring after the bubbles that trickled from his nose and mouth, and a dragon grabbed his leg and dragged him through the deep.

Chapter Text

Stoick stared at the wooden boards overhead for a long time before he understood why.

His curling fingers dug into a bed of spongy pine needles and cool, damp earth beneath - a familiar, faintly sharp, smell like the forests of Berk. The dull ache in his bones sharpened as he tried to lift himself; the screech of seabirds drifted faintly on the breeze, and the sound of waves crashing against a beach was fainter still. “Gobber?” Stoick croaked, a cracked and dry whisper scratched near soundless by the salt of the sea. He forced his head to turn to the side, staring at the lump of a shadow beside him. “Gobber!”

“Remind me never to sail wi’ you again, Stoick,” Gobber groaned, as raw as Stoick’s own voice, and Stoick closed his eyes against the relief that struck deep.

Other voices answered too, Steelhead and the crew groaning as they woke to a shallow shelter and watery sunlight, and the rustle of needled boughs just beyond.

Slowly, straining against the bruisy ache that had taken him over, Stoick forced himself to his feet. Their shelter was little more than an old, dry riverbed carved deep into stone, covered by loose wooden boards dark with rot and crusted with barnacles and lichen. It was just barely wide enough for them all, and was much too small for a viking’s height. But, stooping to keep his head from scraping against the ceiling, when Stoick cast his gaze about the shelter his helmet had been there beside him, as Gobber’s was beside him and the crew’s beside them.

Pulling Gobber up to sit and grabbing his helmet, Stoick clutched the old, battered thing close as he studied his men; all sodden armour and wet hair hanging limply, but alive and unhurt. Not one of them lost to the storm and the deep, hungry waters of the sea.

And all of them unarmed. Stoick’s eyes narrowed, a thought scratching at him; there was no birdsong in the woods above their shelter.

He held a finger up to his lips for silence as he crept outside. The surrounding pine forest was bright with life, boughs heavily needled reaching overhead; the land stretched out from the walls of the narrow gorge lined with boulders, rusted by a thick cover of dead needles. Watery sunlight streamed down through gaps in the overhead tree cover, the ground between the trunks thick with the broad leaves of ferns. The smell of the sea was as distant as the sound of the waves as Stoick settled his helmet on his head, the dragging pads of his fingers catching on scratches scraped deep into the metal as his hands dropped back to his sides.

The walls of their gorge melted back into the earth as Stoick’s gaze followed the winding line of the old riverbed, sloping down towards a distant clifftop and up towards a mountain. The trees blocked the shape of the rest of the land, but Stoick saw an abrupt end to the forest nearby, the land falling away into a cliff. Only the distant screech of a seabird, faint on the stiff breeze that blew even this deep into the woods, broke the hush.

A pang struck him just below his chest; this place would almost remind him of Berk.

Almost, if not for the creature that studied him as intently as Stoick did the island. Swallowing, Stoick forced himself not to startle, hand clenched tight by his side against the urge to grab a hammer he did not have.

It sat on one of the more distant boulders like a man, long and lanky and narrow from hips to shoulders. But no man had a hide like dragons, black as midnight stormclouds and swallowing the light; no man had that flat a face, featureless and noseless and framed by a fleshy frill, thin gleaming eyes a cold, unblinking stare. It's head melted smoothly into a short neck melted into a body tapering to narrow hips. The hands on its lap were like a man's, long-fingered, but its feet were short and blunt. Or at least its foot; metal and mechanisms had replaced the other leg below the knee, and dimly Stoick wondered if it would slow such a creature if it attacked.

Perhaps the beast didn’t need to attack at all. There were dragons waiting still and silent between the treetrunks, ones familiar from Berk and ones Stoick had no name for at all; they stared as intently at him as the strange dragon on the boulder. Wings quivering, tail tips twitching, they waited; bound, perhaps, by some command or threat. Dragon eyes gleamed, narrow and keen.

The idea was a creeping, silent thing to Stoick's thoughts, slow and unnoticed like the gathering of fog. But he knew in his bones that he and the crew should have died to that storm; he knew deeper than even his bones that it was that creature and these dragons who had saved them.

Slowly, as small a gesture as he could, Stoick turned his palm to his men and held his hand open stay. There was a nudge at Stoick's mind, a dim pressure - not sound but something almost like a memory of it, yet Stoick knew he'd heard nothing like the slow, deep hum that came so soft and faint to his thoughts. But he shook it off as he faced the creature. “Are you the Dragon Master?” He croaked.

The creature twitched, and the ripple passed from it through all the dragons. It did not speak, but neither did it attack - nor did the dragons. It simply stayed sat, watching as if waiting or deciding, as the silence strained beneath heavy dragon breaths. Even the memory of a sound Stoick had not heard had slid away, forgotten as soon as it had come to him. Perhpas the creature couldn't speak, perhaps it didn't want to. Perhaps it didn’t understand; only a dragon, as mindless as its beasts within the trees.

Stoick swallowed. “We came to ask for your aid, to save our village from dragons. We were told you can command them. We’ll try to meet any price for your help.” It seemed to sigh, then - narrow shoulders rising and then slumping. Still it did not speak. Stoick tried again. “We have gold," He said, "We’ll give it all, and steal what we don't have if you ask for more." The silence remained unbroken. "Or we have the the finest tradesmen in the archipelago - their services are yours." Still, there was silence. "Whatever your demands, we'll meet them.”

The beast still did not speak. The dragons did not move.

Stoick opened his mouth again, a new plea or angle, or maybe just to voice the frustration starting to bubble behind his breastbone, but the creature breathed deep and stood before Stoick could speak. Reaching down for something on the ground, out of sight, it walked towards him almost like a man at first. Almost - an upright, slightly limping gait, steady on the ground but awkward in some way, half-crouched as if its limbs couldn't unbend enough even to pretend at being human.

It was silent, too, on the ground; only the slightest creak of metal betrayed its steps. And it was slippery in Stoick's sight, too - his gaze sliding off of those black scales as if it wasn't anything more than a shadow against the ground, turning to look for the thing that cast it. But the dragons, unmoving, watched as it stalked across the ground; drawn by some pull or instinct or tether Stoick coldn't see. The creature stopped just short of the wall of the shallow gorge, out of reach, and Stoick held himself still with a tightness to his jaw that threatened to crack his teeth. He forced himself to stare, to study the beast, even as his gaze kept trying to leave it; even as every bone ached with the urge to retreat from the creature approaching him in silence.

Its skin was pebbled with dragonscale, tiny rounded bumps that swallowed the light. It had wrapped itself in leather straps, from which hung pouches and satchels and a single hunting knife on its calf. At its full height it was probably only a little shorter than Stoick, though it was only about as wide as his arm - it was lean, almost skinny, though if it had wings they were folded so smoothly to its sides Stoick couldn't see them.

Slowly, just barely within reach of the shallow gorge, it crouched. Stretching its arms out the beast set down a sack and retreated back quicker than it had approached. And it watched him, unreadable, as Stoick took the sack.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting as he opened it. Fish or meat, or some grisly omen and the threat tied to that. Not bread, simple rounded loaves, stale and hard and with slightly blackened crusts; one for each of them. Stoick took one, rapped his knuckles against its bottoms - hollow, as bread ought to sound. He turned it over, but it was still bread; reached into the sack and scraped his fingers across the bottom, but felt nothing except crumbs and coarse weave. He met the beast’s gaze, but there was nothing to see in it - no insight in its flat stare, no emotion on that flat face or in the line of its spine.

"Listen-"

The creature stiffened, fingers clenching and unclenching by its sides; it raised its chin, said, “The dragons will find you a ship. You’ll go, and you won’t come back.”

A younger voice than Stoick had thought, almost nasally, but roughened and deepened by years of breathing in smoke. It came to all on Berk who made it to old age - the Dragon Master sounded too young for it, but he did live with dragons instead of being besieged by them. Perhaps it wasn't even his voice at all.

The Dragon Master did not stay as Stoick wondered which was true. He turned away, to a shadow deep and dark on the forest floor. It stirred, rising smoothly to its four feet. Low-set, but lean and long like the Dragon Master, the dragon's tail swept across the ground; two pairs of fins opened and closed eagerly, one at the base and one at the end, except for the fin on its tailtip which did not move at all, and had a slight creak a little like metal.

"We need your help!" Stoick said, but the eyes that turned to him were big and green, and equally unblinking. A fleshy frill flared around its broad, flat skull, longer ear flaps lifting higher from its short, thick neck. He couldn't even see the Dragon Master at all, black scales against black scales in the dappled shadows of the forest floor, but Stoick felt his gaze and it weighed on him just the same as his dragon's. "Damn you, listen to me! What price do you demand? Berk isn't wealthy but we'll give everything we can!"

The silence held only a moment. "Berk..." Said the Dragon Master, and there was a roughness to his voice that hadn't been there before. The dragon puffed out a single breath more forceful than its others, too short and harsh to be a sigh, and the Dragon Master shook himself off. "No," He said, harsh. "No price. No bargaining. I'm not for hire."

"We'll give you anything you want-"

"What I want," Said the Dragon Master, clipped, "Is for you to leave my island. The dragons will find you a ship, you'll go, and you won't come back. There's nothing else to say."

Wide, broad wings opened and two beasts leapt into the sky as one, those wings and the two sets of fins along its tail a glimpse seen and gone in between moments as the other dragons followed them, lunging into the sky.

Stoick hadn’t noticed that other dragon at all, not before the Master had turned to it. The burn of that knowledge stung at the back of his neck, scratching beneath his skin; worse, in some ways, than the knowledge that the Dragon Master had refused to listen. Stoick stared after the dragons for a long, long while after they were gone. His gaze broke only when he startled as Gobber lumbered up beside him, clapping a hand to his shoulder.

“Well,” Gobber said, staring after the dragons. He seemed vaguely disappointed. “He did’nae kill us after all. I’ll take tha’ as a win.”

Chapter Text

The Dragon Master’s island wasn’t large at all, little over half of the size of Berk, but it was tall and was surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs. Stoick explored it all across the days, finding a stream close enough to where the Dragon Master had sheltered them for water but no food that was not delivered to them.

And dragons - endlessly dragons, wheeling about the cliffs or heading out to sea; sunning on bare stone or hanging from trees. There were small packs hunting mice, and larger groups hanging in the sky over thermals; there were tiny dragons smaller and fiercer than even terrible terrors, and enormous dragons larger than even skrills or monstrous nightmares. There were more breeds and colours on this island than Stoick had ever seen in all the viking lands - far too many didn't even have an entry in the Dragon Manual.

Most, he noticed, were wounded in some way. Torn wings, missing limbs, sightless eyes. Some had been fitted with prosthetics, leather and metal replacing wing fingers and membranes, or had machinery for limbs like the Dragon Master’s own; others managed as they were, clumsy and ungainly but no less dangerous. Rare was the dragon who did not have scars in the Dragon Master’s flock, though the dragons did not seem to squabble or fight amongst themselves.

But the dragons let them be, content to simply fly away if one of them came too close. Mostly, at least; there was a fissure near the heart of the island, a wide crack in the ground and the stone beneath that opened into a great cavern within the island, into which Stoick had peered into. In the moments before the dragons had leapt upon him, beating him back from the edge with hisses and snarls and open jaws lit with flame, Stoick had seen ledges spiralling up the walls and dragons nesting on them, a forge within an alcove, and tunnels that led deeper into the earth.

The Dragon Master had slipped out from between the trees, walking boldly between the dragons’ limbs and beneath their throats, a hand trailing along their flanks. Jaws shut slowly, and the dragons leapt up into the sky after an order Stoick had not seen or heard. “Not here,” The Dragon Master told Stoick, as if he hadn’t noticed the buffeting winds of each dragon’s wingbeats around his head. “You can go anywhere but here.”

"What?" Stoick had said, more out of surprise that he'd shown himself than anything else.

"Well I don't just walk in to your house, do I?" Said the Master, and shooed him. "Go."

It was the last anyone had seen of the Master in the days since, though that wasn’t to say he was gone. Still, it was something, though Stoick wasn’t sure what as he stared out across the sea.

From the cliffs at the south of the island the sea stretched to the horizon, waves choppy in the brisk wind blowing across it. To the west stretched the icelands, a coast of black rock spread out as far as the eye could see and lands frozen solid even this close to the north’s brief summer, but it was distant. More distant still was Berk to the south and east - he stared out into the distance and wondered if their absence had grown too long.

Perhaps not. Perhaps it was only that Stoick had lived as chief too long, left chasing desperate hopes as his people’s plight weighed heavier on his shoulders year by year. The Dragon Master had not left he and his crew to die, hadn’t killed them, but he hadn’t cared to hear Stoick out, either. He had saved them, but hadn’t even the grace to listen to his plea long enough to understand.

Dimly, somewhere in the back of his head where doubt lurked, Stoick wondered why he was surprised. Dragons were pitiless, surely the Dragon Master would be doubly so; the hope of his aid had been foolish from the start.

How many raids had his people faced without him? Would there be a Berk to return to?

Cursing, Stoick kicked loose rock and pebbles over the cliff. Why had Gothi put him on this damned path? Why intervene in this , why push him towards the Dragon Master? Why not use her wisdom, or call on the gods, to deal with the dragons? Why must Stoick chase after some devil who offered him nothing for his efforts? Why show him that drawing of man and dragon a third time, if it wasn’t the Dragon Master? Why at Hiccup’s birth at all? Why was he so plagued with doubt, when years ago his certainty in the way of the world had been unshakeable?

Why, why, why? There were too many whys in Stoick’s life now. It weighed on him, heavy like his bearskin cloak but without the warmth. The certainties he was left with were unbearable, a yoke around his throat; pitiless dragons and the destruction they wrought, his duty to his people and his failures with his family, fewer years awaiting him than those he had seen.

The clatters of pebbles bouncing off the cliff face echoed loudly. Not all were because of him. “I’m sure the cliffs deserve it one way or another.”

Stoick whirled, reaching for his hammer and fingers closing around empty air into a fist; a ways further down the line of the clifftop the Dragon Master, riding his night fury, slowed to a stop; watching him with those narrow, impassive eyes. That black devil dragon of his beneath him growled lowly, not at its master but at Stoick. A lightless mass within the shadows of the trees, but its enormous eyes, those eyes, were so bright against the blackness of its and the Master's scales, its stare unblinking and hateful.

Wide and green, those blocky pupils slitted thin watched with as much intelligence as its master’s. A shiver rippled down Stoick’s back, though the dragon did nothing. It only held him in its gaze, and there were thoughts in the mind behind those eyes but Stoick couldn’t know them the way mice couldn’t understand the thoughts of cats as they were being played with.

But the Dragon Master must have come for a purpose; he patted the broad, flat top of the devil's head, two firm, brisk taps. Those bright green eyes blinked, and turned up to its master. “Quit it, bud,” Said the Dragon Master. Grumbling, the dragon shook itself off, but its gaze didn't lift to Stoick's with quite the same intensity again. It didn't even jostle the Master on its neck, who stayed steady as the dragon shook itself with unerring ease. “Don’t mind him,” Said the Dragon Master, stroking the dragon’s head. “He doesn’t like vikings. Can’t say I really like them much either.”

Stoick forced himself to look away. With the Dragon Master’s gaze on him his hand wouldn’t unclench by his side.

A dragon cut through the sky as Stoick watched the sea; a dark teal Monstrous Nightmare against the clouds, scanning the water far below. With a roar it dove, wings tucked tight against its flanks - down and down it dove, streaking through the sky. In the moments before it struck the sea its wings opened, leathery membrane snapping taut against the air with every wingbeat, and it swung its legs forward with talons spread wide to strike at a shadow beneath the water; it roared again as it struggled for the sky, triumphant as a dolphin thrashed and squealed in its grip.

“I am Stoick the Vast," He said, "Chief of the-"

"Hairy Hooligans of Berk," Said the Dragon Master as he dismounted. Metal creaked. "I know."

Stoick's jaw clenched. "We came to ask for your help,” He said, watching blood flow and drip to the ocean churning far below as the dragon’s talons pierced blubbery flesh deep. The dolphin squealed louder, shrill. “We will meet any price you ask - gold, services, name it.”

“Yeah,” Drawled the Dragon Master, watching his nightmare too as he leaned against his dragon's shoulder. His voice rasped, ever so slightly. “I heard you the first time. Still haven’t really asked yet though, have you? But I guess vikings never really did asking nicely, did you? You’re more used to shouting louder than everyone else to get your way. Or killing things. Whichever gets you what you want quicker, I guess.”

The monstrous nightmare carried its prize over the island, squeals fading as the dragon drifted over the trees for a place to squat and feast. Stoick turned to the Dragon Master, eyes narrowed. “You’re familiar with vikings,” He said. It wasn’t a question.

The Dragon Master didn’t take it as one; the silence lingered a moment as the Master eyed him, and the devil by his side growled softly again, claws kneading the earth, but there was an edge of unease to it. “I… guess you can say that,” He said slowly. “I wasn’t always this… feral dragon riding vigilante, you know. It would’ve been… better, for everyone, if I was. And we travel a lot, me and this big baby right here - isn’t that right, bud?”

The night fury turned its eyes up to its master, and those thin pupils widened as it crooned, rubbing its cheek into the Master’s belly. The Dragon Master laughed, wrapping his arms around the beast’s head and pressing his own cheek against scaled skin. “Yeah,” The Master breathed, but there was a rattle in his throat like a purr. “We’ve seen a lot of the world, haven’t we bud? And we’ll always keep looking for more.”

Stoick swallowed, thickly, as he watched the Dragon Master fuss over his devil as if it was as harmless as a dog; for its master the beast was docile, gentle as it mouthed his hands and wriggled by his side, crooning and groaning something close to adoration, to love. Old burns itched with revulsion and the memories of bites shearing to the bone, of the ragged meat of torn flesh.

Still, Stoick gathered his courage. “Then you know of the dragon raids.”

“I know.”

“Will you help us?” Stoick said, staring hard at the side of the Dragon Master’s face. He was small against his dragon’s side, and with his shoulders mantling he seemed smaller still, shrinking with uncertainty. “People are being killed, or starved. Dragons are being killed. Your aid could turn the tide of this war, save so many lives.”

The Dragon Master’s head remained turned away, though his hands clenched and unclenched, arms swinging slightly. The dragon's gaze, though, returned unblinking to Stoick, staring just as stubbornly.

“Please,” Said Stoick.

Abruptly, the Dragon Master leapt into motion, or perhaps it was the dragon ever by his side who moved first - perhaps it was the both of them at once, Stoick didn't know, but the Dragon Master paced. Short, sharp strides on long limbs carrying him back and forth across the ground; the devil shadowed his every step, crouching low with teeth bared, tail lashing, ribs heaving like the Master's as it growled in short, shallow breaths.

Metal creaked; the Master's leg, and the dragon's tailfin both. "Do you," Said the Dragon Master tightly, while his devil bared its teeth, "Have any idea of what you're asking me? You think, what, I can just...-" His hands waved aimlessly through the air, "-Show up, shout at the dragons until they leave, and make everything okay?"

“Why not?” Stoick demanded, and dared to step closer. "Why not? You're the Dragon Master - they obey you. I've seen them obey you!"

The dragon hissed, wings raising, and Stoick froze in spite of himself. “Obey me?!” Said the Dragon Master, stalling in his pacing, in a voice just as low and dry as the devil's threat. His hand dropped to rest on his dragon's thick neck, black scales lost within black scales, as the dragon's raising wings rested lightly on the Master's shoulder. He turned his head to stare at Stoick at last, a narrow, hateful gaze; Stoick wished he hadn't. “Is that what you think all this is? That I stomp around shouting and waving around a stick to beat the dragons into doing what I want? That might be what you'd do, but they're my friends, and I don't make my friends obey me. Besides, it’s complicated! I know vikings like simple answers, but that’s not how things are! I can’t just… swoop in and sort everything out for you!”

Stoick dared another step; together master and dragon stepped away, keeping the distance even as the Master returned to pacing, while the dragon's gaze remained fixed on Stoick. Still, Stoick dared to demand more. “How? How is it complicated?”

The black dragon peeled its lips back further from its teeth, throat rattling with a hiss, as it stepped away with the Master as Stoick took another step, and another. “Oh for the love of- it just is!” Said the Master, and his voice was like the dry, guttural hiss of the dragon, words slithering as if from between its gleaming teeth and not his own. “I shouldn’t have to explain it any more than that!”

Another step; the dragon snarled, a guttural, rattling hiss as it lunged between Stoick and its master and the Dragon Master leapt smoothly onto the devil's neck. He did not sway in his perch as his dragon jerked to a stop before it slid too close to Stoick; Master and devil moved as one whole, as one flesh, black scale melding with black scale until Stoick couldn't see the difference between them. Perhaps there never had been - there was a gleam of the same green in the Dragon Master's eyes as his dragon's, the same fleshy frill and long ears flared around their heads.

The first stirrings of fear needled at Stoick's scars.

"You come here-!" Spat the Master, shoulders mantling around his ears like his dragon's raised wings, "-Needing my friends to save you! Demanding my help! Demanding answers! You want my help to get rid of the dragons? Well I can't - sorry to disappoint!"

“Just help me understand, damn you!” Stoick demanded - couldn’t help it, rage boiling beside his fear of the unnatural terror before him. Two sets of ribs heaved together, two pairs of eyes gleaming with the same anger, old and wounded; dragon and Dragon Master moved and breathed as one. Stoick bore down on the Master and the devil he doted on so, step by stomping step as he waved a hand at where his home was waiting. “My people are dying to these beasts and you expect me to be satisfied with no answers?”

Wings flared fully, blocking out all the world as the night fury bore down on Stoick in turn. The dragon lunged and between one blink and the next Stoick could not see the Dragon Master at all, just black scales and a mouthful of teeth and those terrible eyes, as he stumbled back from the beast slamming its forepaws too close to his feet. Two voices hissed their anger and Stoick stared at that single wide mouth of bared teeth; two creaks of metal were a small and shrill squeal on the air; two sets of anger burned within the dragon's big green eyes, and all the world had narrowed into a terrible lightless blackness and that stare boring into Stoick’s soul.

Stoick raised his fist with a snarl, instinctive, but a sound came unbidden to his thoughts that froze Stoick before this creature - this Dragon Master; not true sound but something like a memory of it, a deep and rolling hum like a song - but it was guttural, rolling like a growl, like a snarl, shrill and furious and so clear Stoick found himself straining to understand words he thought he could hear in it.

The droning hum of the night fury came to him too, guttural and hissing. It pressed on Stoick's mind, a smothering weight like mist and smoke; it sliced through Stoick’s thoughts and cut him down where he stood, a pressure pouring into his skull like overfilling a waterskin. But it was not fear that he was left with - it was beyond fear, beyond terror, beyond Stoick himself.

It was a vision of a blood red glow and gleaming eyes, teeth longer than spears piercing flesh as a dragon was dragged down from the sky and consumed. It was a bewilderment bordering on panic as the night fury feared a force it had never had to fear before, deafened by roaring heat and blinded by flame. It was a desperation so acute it was agony, as like any animal in a trap the Dragon Master’s devil turned its teeth on itself to chew off its own leg; though dragon teeth did not slice through dragonflesh but pink and human skin, and the pain it felt was both an echo of a similar wound and not its own at once.

But the devil's roar was real. The dragon pounced, knocking Stoick to the ground to pin him with claws at his throat. There was only one thought foremost in its slit-pupilled eyes, pitiless and furious - the dragon spread its wings and raised its head, bared teeth frighteningly bright against the darkness of its scales.

Those two, terrible sounds droned in Stoick's skull, rattling in the bone; he could only stare dumbly, frozen in the dragon's grip.

The devil's gaze did not break, it did not blink, but its ear twitched as that droning song of the Master's interrupted itself with a pattern of notes Stoick couldn't understand but strained to anyway, even though he didn't want to. Hissing its frustration, Stoick squeezed shut his eyes as it was not fire but a scream the dragon blasted into Stoick's face. High and piercing with rage, so loud it wasn't even sound at all but force, a pressure on Stoick's ears and chest as much as that droning hum in his head and the dragon's weight pinning him to the ground. On and on it screamed, bellowing its rage and hatred, until even the dragon's voice exhausted itself thin and hoarse.

Satisfied, dragon and Dragon Master leapt for the skies as one; the buffeting winds from those enormous wings beating hard were so forceful and sharp they stung Stoick’s skin. Together dragon and Dragon Master disappeared between one blink and the next.

Stoick lay dazed in the dirt as they took those awful sounds with them, gasping and trembling in its wake. He strained for each thin breath he could take, chest seized tight and throat closed tighter still. Rock and grit dug into his back, the cool earth bleeding its coldness into Stoick's skin and bones - a damp chill that did not pierce as coldly as the fear left behind. He stared into the sky, ears ringing and head at once so full it could burst and so hollow it threatened to crumble, as the Dragon Master’s power faded and left Stoick shivering with weakness.

It took a long, long while before he stood and stumbled back to the shelter the Dragon Master had given them. As night fell across the world Stoick did not sleep, eyes and ears on the darkness, but no devil and its Master erupted out of the shadows, or an angry dragon of his flock. There was no sign of either of them at all across the slow, dragging days; not even his dragons, though a sack of the usual stale bread was waiting for them each morning.

But that glimpse of the Dragon Master, so in command of a night fury it moved to the Master's thoughts alone - the one that Drago must have seen; that vision of the blood red glow, of those gleaming eyes and enormous teeth, of that flash of sense-memory; those sounds they brought to his thoughts; it did not leave. It haunted Stoick.

If Gobber or the others noticed Stoick’s silence, they were kind enough not speak of it.

Chapter Text

After a week of complete absence the Dragon Master delivered on his promise. Far from the Master's island a ship bobbed with the tides; it was battered, and barely fit for sailing, but it was just enough to get them somewhere that wasn't here.

Dragons had come to them, landing to crouch uneasily nearby; a terrible terror dropped a note at Stoick's feet with scratchy handwriting he could barelly read. His scars crawled, his jaw clenching tight and his fists tighter still, but they had no other choice but to let the dragons pluck them from the earth and carry them in their talons to where the Dragon Master and that black devil of his perched on the mast. “The nearest port is that way,” Said the Master coolly, pointing, once the dragons had dropped them onto the deck and Stoick had picked himself up with a grunt.

The black dragon leapt high into the air with downbeats of his wings so forceful the ship rocked in its wake, and the both of them were gone before Stoick could thank him.

Stoick stared after him, opening his mouth to shout, but Master and dragon were only a fuzzy shadow in the distance already, and were shrinking smaller still. The sea was dark and the sky overcast, and a bank of gentle mists sat low; they vanished as if they'd never been beyond the bounds of their island. Stoick could only see their dragons, a handful of gronckles and nadders and many more unfamiliar ones, following in their wake before they too slid out of sight. “Steelhead,” He called instead, but did not turn his gaze. “Set sail.”

“Chief,” Said Steelhead, and his face as he turned to the tiller was loose with relief.

They limped to the last port at the edge of viking maps only a few days later, hungry and thirsty and never should that bare, ugly rock in the middle of the sea have been such a welcome sight! The crew headed straight for the taproom at the back of the market hall, and neither Stoick nor Gobber lingered behind them.

The bright ship with twin sails bobbed with the tides; its captain and crew in the taproom too, and the tattooed trapper had watched them enter port and buy their drinks with genuine surprise. “Well well!” He said, turning to Stoick and Gobber as they stomped up to his table. “Look what the dragons dragged in! What’s it been, two weeks? Three? Didn’t expect to see you lot alive again - Dragon Master didn’t stop you for a hello?”

“He found us,” Grunted Stoick, dropping down into a seat at the end of the table, well away from the trapper. “He let us go.”

Eret’s eyes narrowed, but only for a moment. He shrugged soon enough. “Anyone else I’d call a liar,” He said cheerfully. “But you’re not trappers, so I guess he doesn’t care too much.”

“No,” Stoick agreed as he stared at the grain of the table, worn deep and shadowed as dark as those devils’ scaled hides. “He didn’t care.”

The trapper, lifting his drink to his mouth, paused, eyeing Stoick. “What’s with the long face, eh? You’re not dead, that’s something! He even left you that wreck you call a ship out there - it’s more than most trappers can say.” Stoick said nothing. Eret watched him a moment longer, before setting his tankard down with a forceful thunk. “Tell you what,” He said, “How about I take you horned-hats back to your village? My ship’s got the cargo space, and she’ll cross the seas faster than that firewood you’ve got bobbing outside.”

Stoick glanced at him, and his smiling, earnest face. “We don’t have the money to pay you.”

“It’s nothing!” Said Eret, waving it away. “It’s on the way south anyway, and I could do with some more dragon hides for the southern markets. Besides," He added, more soberly, and grew grimmer still as he said, "I know that look on your face; no one comes away from meeting that thing without it.”

"What look?"

Eret swirled his drink in his tankard, staring into its depths. "The one that says you saw him."

Stoick's men brought drinks to the table, and drank in uncommon silence. Stoick accepted the tankard Steelhead passed to him, nodding his thanks, but he found his gaze returning to the trapper. There was something haunted to him, as he stared into his drink with dark, shadowed eyes; a look to his face Stoick supposed mirrored the one in his own.

The mead was weak and thin. Stoick drank anyway, and thought of the Dragon Master, that unreal creature on an island far beyond the borders of viking maps. Scaled like a dragon but walking as a man, flat face framed by a fleshy frill and a human, almost nasally voice roughened by years of breathing smoke. A night fury who moved and breathed with him as one, not a simple pet but something more; something for which he had no name.

What was he, that creature? What was that devil to him? Stoick stared into his own drink as he spoke. "He killed Drago, you said. How?"

"Trust me," Said Eret darkly, "Nothing happened that day you want to know."

Stoick looked over to him, his skin crawling with the feel of dragon talons and the gaze of that devil’s big, green eyes whose unblinking stare had bored through to his soul; at the memory of that dragon's he'd glimpsed, the eyes and teeth piercing flesh and the blood red pit. "I can make that decision for myself."

A squawk of strangled laughter erupted from the trapper. “Oh, is that right?” He said bitterly. "Because from where I'm sitting, horned-hat, I'm one of maybe fifty people who saw that battle and has to live with it, and believe you me I've had days where I wish I didn't."

Gobber leaned in. "You were there?"

The trapper barked an unhappy laugh. “Oh yeah,” Answered the trapper, dull and tinny as he spoke into his tankard and heavy with resignation. Eyes sliding closed, he shook his head and put his tankard back down with force. “I was there.

“See, Drago wasn’t exactly happy with us when he found out what happened to all his stock; tossed a good chunk of us trappers in some cells on his ship, and that's not a good place to be." Grimly he pulled at the neck of his tunic, baring the raised, twisted skin of a brand below his shoulder. It was still red and raw, ugly and stark against pale skin. "And this is what he does to his allies," Said Eret.

Dropping his hand, Eret rested his elbow on the table. “And Drago,” Said the trapper, voice flattening as he turned distant eyes to his drink once more, “Had a dragon the likes of which I’ve never seen before and never want to see again. A bewilderbeast. I’ve seen smaller countries than that thing, believe you me. Dragons didn't always submit to Drago, but I'd never seen one that didn't bow down to that one. Well, one day Drago set sail for a dragon nest in the far north. There was another bewilderbeast there, and the other rider who messed with our traps. Drago ordered the dragons to fight, so they fought. Me and a few of the boys managed to escape the ships in the chaos, kept out of it all as best we could while we went to find our ships and go. I watched-”

The trapper abruptly drained his tankard, and held up a hand for a second. One of his crew, with a hard face and harder eyes behind the bristling fur brim of his hooded coat, passed his tankard over. “I watched it all,” Eret said, bitter. “I didn’t want to - I wanted to get my ship and go, but I just-...” He shook his head. “I got stuck, watching all those dragons tearing each other apart while these two mountains crashed into each other. Drago’s dragons weren’t holding out - they were sick and starved, they never stood a chance, really, but that wasn’t the point. The point was for Drago’s bewilderbeast to kill the wild one and take over all the dragons. He’d nearly won when the Dragon Master showed up.”

Gobber leaned close. “An’ what then?” He said, and it took Stoick long moments to realise the hush that had fallen over the market hall. A sombre stillness, filled with turned heads and listening ears, and haunted eyes in scarred faces.

The trapper’s eyes closed, head sagging until his chin rested against his chest. He shook his head, and his laugh was a short, bitter cough. “I don’t know. I don’t- that’s not something you can put into words. I-... Drago called off his bewilderbeast before it killed the wild one and told it to take the Dragon Master's mind. So the bewilderbeast makes this noise, this song that goes right into your head; so clear you can almost hear words in it, like you'd understand if you tried hard enough. And I could tell you the Dragon Master dropped out of the sky because of it, but that's not true because I've got no idea what that... thing was that crashed onto the beach trying not to listen to the singing. It was like... I don't know. I don't know, I don't think anyone knows, except the dragons. But the Dragon Master and his night fury are the only dragons Drago's bewilderbeast couldn't take. And that bewilderbeast of Drago's, you know what he did? He bowed to them; he gave in, and all the dragons in Drago's army turned on them. You can guess what happened then."

"Aye," Said Gobber.

"That battlefield's just ice and broken ships, now,” Said Eret.

Stoick grunted, and asked no more. All people of Berk knew the power of dragons in numbers. Eret, too, refused to speak of Drago again. Slowly talk of other things began. When the time came to retreat back to the ships for sleep he invited them aboard his own, and Stoick thanked him as he ushered his men aboard. And, when dawn began to lighten the sky and the trapper began shouting commands, Stoick ordered his men to help as the twin-sailed ship glided towards Berk across the dark water.

-:-

Stoick watched his home creep ever closer as the days wore on, from that first glimpse of the mountain on the horizon to the morning the trapper’s ship sailed beneath the stone arches and came into port.

People of Berk and the Burglars and even the Beserkers crowded the docks, Astrid before them all with a face loose and bright with relief. The crowd shouted their welcome, rising to a roar as Stoick and his crew waved to them; when he stepped off the trapper’s ship into his people’s midst Stoick closed his eyes, his chest and head lightened now that some strange weight was no longer pressing down.

Questions and greetings blurred together in the mass, and the cacophony grew ever louder when Stoick said, “Eret, son of Eret, is a friend of Berk!” And the trapper and his crew was dragged into the welcome too.

In true viking fashion, of course, there came a feast. In the mead hall the trappers regaled vikings with tales of daring hunts, and vikings regaled trappers with boasts of triumph and of winning impossible battles, or embarrassing one another with stories of slips and falls or soft landings in piles of yakshit and straw. The air swum with the heat and the stench of mutton and mead and roasted fish, and the acrid smell of the smoke that rose from hearths and cooking fires.

Stoick’s failure to secure aid from the Dragon Master was, for now, utterly incidental; that he and his crew had returned from sea at all was something to celebrate.

He spoke little during the long evening hours; content on his throne and among his people to watch and to listen, humming along to drinking songs and chuckling over rhyming contests of wit and insult. Though it troubled him still, that Eret’s story of the battle between two Dragon Masters, even if the man himself seemed utterly untroubled as he threw himself into viking merriment.

The Dragon Master who emerged victorious that day was a man of power, who could bring even dragons the size of mountains to heel; yet Stoick had not met that man. The Dragon Master he had met was unnatural, yes, and Stoick had seen how easily - how quickly - he could become dangerous, but he walked amongst his dragons almost like an equal, like a friend - insisted that they were his friends. He'd saved Stoick and his men, though he didn't care for vikings.

Only that black devil betrayed his power, the hold he had on dragons; only the night fury moved to act on its master's anger, snarling its own rage in answer to his.

Stoick thought of that dragon, that offspring of Lightning and Death. That devil of destruction whose fire streaked across the sky like a bolt of lightning, tamed and docile under the Dragon Master's hand. He wondered how such a beast could be controlled so unthinkingly by the Dragon Master, though perhaps the dragon had always been his and they'd never known a world otherwise. Perhaps it wasn't even controlled at all, not in the way he'd used his power against Drago's army; perhaps it needed no force, no compulsion, no song droning in its head with such clarity it almost seemed to have words, and words that could be understood if it listened just that bit more closely. The Master spoke as if it were a brother; the dragon crooned to him as if it loved him just the same.

What were they, those creatures? What was the night fury to the Master? Stoick found himself grinding his teeth; more questions without answers.

A meaty hand clapped onto his shoulder, jostling him from his brooding. “COIN FOR YOUR THOUGHTS, STOICK?” Bellowed Bertha beside him, but her shouting was scarcely louder than the clamour of the celebration.

“It’s nothing, Bertha,” Said Stoick, reaching for his mead. “The Dragon Master refused to give us aid, is all.”

“ACH! You worry too much, old man!” Bertha told him, waving his concerns away. “You talked, didn’ you? And you’re not dead! That’s more’n most of the trappers could say, eh?”

Stoick grunted, but did not answer her, as he nursed his thoughts. Bertha’s voice was only slightly quieter when she said again, “You worry too much! You Berkians are too damn hard-headed and stubborn tae ever let the dragons win! So it did’nae work - so what! There’ll be other chances to kill them devils off, don’t you fret!” Turning from him Bertha flung a wide, vicious grin at Stoick’s people. “Now which one’a you sad sow livers’ll drink with me!”

She pushed her way into a drinking contest with a few of Stoick’s warriors and the trappers, and had both under the table soon enough. Stoick watched her a while, allowing himself the distraction, but his troubled mind drove him out of the hall and into the cool night air soon enough.

The sky was deep and dark, with few stars as the bright moonlight lit up the village. The heavy wooden doors of the mead hall shut behind Stoick with a heavy thud and the jangle of metal bolts and fittings, leaving him in the darkness and muffling the revelry within. For a long while Stoick stared up at the sky, and old instinct made him strain to see a shadow against the stars - for a lone dragon, or the Dragon Master, or just the first wave of an ordinary raid, Stoick didn’t know. But he looked anyway, despite knowing he wasn’t likely to spot any of them before it was too late.

His skin, heated by food and drink and the warmth of the hall’s many fires, cooled and pebbled into gooseflesh as Stoick searched. For a moment one of the stars flickered overhead, winking out and back again in between blinks, as Stoick turned to head home. He lingered a moment longer, trying to trace out the path any shadow in the sky might have followed, but he saw nothing more and no fire erupted out of the darkness.

Disappointment weighed heavy in his chest as Stoick left for his house.

Chapter Text

The year continued as it always did.

New lives replaced the lost, a welcome joy, and recruits trained hard under Gobber’s watch in the arena. The lambing and calving season came and went, a restless few weeks as dragon raids hounded the flocks of sheep and herds of yak - drawn by the scent and sound of easy, vulnerable prey - though they did not lose enough for Stoick to worry. New squabbles between those with old bad blood between them were brought up and resolved at the tribe’s regular Thing, and during raids when it mattered most Stoick’s people stood shoulder to shoulder even with their most bitter enemy.

Summer swelled thick and muggy, the air heavy and still beneath the damp heat. Berk’s forests grew rich and dark with greenery and new growth, bright with birdsong and life. Sheep were sheared and wool was spun, and Stoick even dared to send out a few raiding parties for goods and gold to shore up their stock. Trader Johann came and went, bringing back his valued goods and even more valued gossip from across the archipelago, and that dragon trapper Eret returned now and then to trade for dragon skins and teeth too.

Raids grew rarer as summer died and winter clawed its way down from the bitter north, though no week came and went without Stoick waking in the night to one. He killed dragons as he always did, with the grim determination of his duty an armour as much as his pauldrons and metal lamellar cuirass and the thick leather wrap around his gut; with a new hammer from Gobber Stoick struck down the dragons without mercy or pause, shattering dragonbone beneath each blow with a wet crunch and spray of blood.

No one spoke of Stoick’s failed voyage at all.

But sometimes during raids when Stoick killed a dragon, caving in its skull or breaking its wings, he saw the Dragon Master with his devil. Saw its broad, flat head beneath its master’s hand, crooning something close to love. Saw the Master on his dragon’s back, disappearing into its scales because Stoick could see no line between them. Saw that gaze, bright and green and vivid with a rage that was and wasn't its own.

Sometimes on quiet nights, when no raid gave him the distraction, Stoick saw that blood red glow and gleaming eyes and enormous teeth. Shuddered with the memory of pain not his own imposed on him. Cradled close thoughts of his wife and son, as he squeezed shut his eyes as he sat in his chair before a cold, dark hearth and their absence echoed all around him.

Gothi did not come to bother him again. She rarely left her hut at the top of the mountain at all, sat on her deck staring expectantly at the sky. Stoick didn’t know if he ought to take it as a victory or not; he knew so very little, these days.

-:-

The year crawled to its end. The last raid before winter was a token effort from the dragons, but because of some fools’ bumbling one of the farmers lost their entire flock of sheep. (Spitelout had not been happy when ordered to give up some of his family’s own flock on account of his son’s stupidity, but between Stoick, Astrid, and the lawspeaker he’d had little choice and even less opportunity to argue).

The days shortened, the sun rising more shallowly in the sky, until one day it failed to rise at all. In the darkness of an early Snoggletog morning Stoick made his way to the cove, stomping through ice and snow and heavy, echoing silence. The little cairn, uncovered by snow beneath the shelter of the overhang, greeted him there as always; and, as always, Stoick spoke of the village and his wish to see Hiccup alive again.

No answer came to him, of course, but Stoick never expected one. He returned to his cold, empty house to drink a mug of mead in his chair, before retreating to bed for the day.

-:-

The failure of his voyage should have been the end of it. There was work to do; repairs and reinforcement and rebuilding, keeping track of stored food and folding in the losses to dragons so that no one went hungry; smoothing over arguments and old, bitter feuds; watching the sky, stomach churning with dread and yearning for the return of the sun, and the raids with it.

Thoughts of the Dragon Master should have ended there. But they troubled Stoick always, nagging and gnawing even in his sleep. He dreamed of that vision of a blood red glow, and the sight of the Dragon Master was there on the inside of his eyelids while awake. More than man and less than dragon, unreal and unsettling and made worse for the ordinary, nasally voice of a man younger than Stoick had thought he'd sound.

He stared at his hands, clasped together on the table before him. Around him Stoick’s house was silent, except for the slight creaks and groans of new timbers as they settled into spaces where the last new timbers had been placed. He twitched and flinched at every sound, even those he knew he couldn’t hear - those especially, perhaps, as the familiar gloom of his house in winter’s eternal night yawned dark and lightless.

Exhaustion tugged at him, even his eyelids heavy with it, but his mind turned restlessly within his skull. He'd stolen snatches of sleep, but his thoughts wouldn't let him take more tonight. Stoick pressed his face into his hands, elbows braced against the table, but in the darkness of his palms and behind his closed eyes he still saw the Master, the devil at his beck and call; remembered that sound, that song - an indistinct, fuzzy clump of notes and noise that slid through his mind so quietly without the Master's power behind it.

It drove him up from his seat and out into the cold, bearskin cloak around his shoulders. In the brittle starlight his village glowed softly, blanketed by deep, mostly unbroken snows. Stoick’s breath rose in thick plumes of fog from his nose and mouth as he trudged along hidden paths, retreating down from his house on the hill.

He glanced at the mountain at Berk’s heart, jabbing into the sky, and his steps faltered when his eyes caught on the path to Gothi’s hut. His troubled thoughts forced himself on.

Gobber’s forge at the heart of the village was unlit, Gobber’s snores rumbling loudly from within. Stoick banged his fist hard against the door, and let himself in as Gobber woke with a start and began to curse. “It’s me!” He called, shutting the door behind him. Gobber swore at him even more loudly.

“Oh you Thor’s-damned son of a troll, Stoick!” Groused Gobber, trudging out from his bedroom. "The Hel are you doing waking me up at gods know when?" The wooden thunk of his prosthetic foot with each stomping step was loud in the winter hush. Though he paused at the open doorway, anger melting into worry like thawing snow. "Oof, I’ve no’ seen you look so bad since… well, you know.”

“Aye.”

Gobber eyed him for a long moment as Stoick trudged to a seat at Gobber’s table, dropping down into a chair to sit with his face in his hands. “Now you jus’ wait there, Stoick,” He said, and began to potter about his home. “I’ll have you sorted out soon enough, don’t you worry!”

Stoick watched Gobber as he lit the hearth, pulling his iron hook onto his stump to strike the flint with it and light the tinder. The small flame gorged on the logs Gobber tossed to it, throwing out light and warmth that chased away the gloom and exposed all the clutter and mess Gobber always found himself happiest surrounded by.

His house had always been small, taken up almost entirely by the forge beside it. Longer than it was wide Gobber had shoved his table into the corner to make space for his cupboards and stores, though he still had to squeeze himself past it as he collected tankards and a weak beer. Herbs and jars hung from the ceiling and the walls, bola and netting abandoned in heaps at the corners of the room for when raids struck. Spare hands lined a wall, always in easy reach.

Gobber dropped down into his own seat before Stoick with a grunt, setting down the tankards for them both. He unstrapped the hook from his stump and set it on the table beside him, rubbing the mangled flesh with a wince. The firelight crawled across the floor, a spreading stain chasing away the shadows and the cold.

Stoick knocked back mouthfuls of his drink, and wished his thoughts could be chased away so easily. “I keep thinking,” He said. “Of the Dragon Master.”

“Oh, aye?” Said Gobber. He drank a mouthful of his own beer. “An' what is it about him tha's bothering you?”

"I don't know," Stoick said, rubbing the side of his face. Though the lie was thick in his mouth, slick against his teeth, and he breathed out harshly and said, "I talked to him, on that island of his. Asked for his help, and spoke wi' him. He was familiar with vikings, and the raids. He was... bitter. Frustrated."

Idly, Gobber drank again. "Aye," He agreed mildly, and if it surprised or hurt him that Stoick had not spoke of this before then he was too good a man to let it bother him for long. "Aye, I imagine he would be; seein' as we kill his fellows an' had the gall tae show up at his home too."

"Aye," Stoick agreed. "But, there was more to it than that. He didn't know of vikings, he knew us. And... I angered him," Stoick said, staring into his beer. The pale smear of his face stared back. "I didn'ae mean to, but he wasn't giving me answers. An' I keep thinking of them, he and that night fury of his."

Drinking deeply from his tankard, Gobber listened intently as Stoick spoke of the Dragon Master and his night fury. Of how the Master had come to him riding it, and the ease of him on its neck and shoulders; not as if riding a horse, practiced in the saddle, but as if each motion of the beast beneath him was as much his own as the dragon's. Of they way they moved and breathed together, steps following steps and motion mimicking motion, even when the Master dismounted; the way scaled flesh disappeared against scaled flesh, two sets of rage in a single pair of a dragon's big, green eyes.

He spoke of that song, that deep and rolling hum in his thoughts but guttural like a growl, shrill and furious. The guttural hiss of the night fury's, smothering like mist and smoke. "Like the one that trapper Eret spoke of," Said Gobber.

"I heard it, Gobber," Said Stoick, leaning onto the table. "Clear as I hear you now. I didn'ae want to, but I kept thinking-" He shook his head at himself. No - no, he hadn't been thinking. All that was in his head was that song, and the mad urge to try to understand it even though he didn't want to. "I don't know. I sound mad."

"Not mad," Said Gobber, immediate and certain. "A little crazy, maybe, but not mad."

It should have soothed - smoothed over the ragged edges of the fear and the doubts that always lurked in his head - but it didn't. The weight of Stoick's thoughts were the same as ever as he watched Gobber heave himself to his feet and potter about his home making breakfast in pensive silence.

He'd always been a quick and efficient cook, humming tunelessly but cheerfully to himself as he set porridge to cook over the fire and changed his hand to a cleaver to chop cooked blood sausage and pork. Stoick watched him broodingly, and drank the last of the beer while Gobber scraped the meat into the pot to heat through. Wispy steam hovered above the bowl when, satisfied, Gobber served them both their meals and sat once more.

Stoick warmed himself with spoonfuls of Gobber's food, a suffusing heat through his blood; a welcome familiarity as Gobber replaced his cleaver for his spoon. Stoick didn't look up as he asked, "Did I do the right thing, Gobber? Finding the Dragon Master?"

Gobber didn't answer for a long while. "I'm no' exactly the right man tae ask, Stoick," He said slowly. "I didn'ae think it was a good idea in the first place."

"I brought us to his attention."

"Aye," Said Gobber. "You did. Too late tae worry about it now, eh? Eat up! It'll make yeh feel better."

Chapter Text

Winter faded into spring, and on the first moonless night after the thaw the raid struck.

The night erupted into noise, habit and instinct driving vikings out of bed and into armour before the first tolls of the warning bell had faded. Fires chased away the dark, great columns of smoke billowing from burning houses as wood creaked and groaned, ash and embers falling like snow from the sky. Dragons slithered between the streets, bold as they smashed their way into storerooms, barging their way into homes.

Stoick charged into the fray, shouting orders as he lifted his new hammer and shattered a nadder’s ribs with it. “WATER!” He bellowed over the dragon’s screech of pain as it crashed to the ground. He silenced it with a second blow, caving in its skull with a wet crunch and a spray of blood. “CATAPULTS, TAKE AIM! PROTECT THE STORES!”

The air swam with the heat of dragonfire, burning Stoick’s skin red and raw as he ran down any dragon in sight. The acrid smoke scratched his nose and throat, stinging his eyes until they watered and the world was wobbly; as wavering and uncertain as Stoick often felt. The village narrowed into single streets, further still into just the ground beneath Stoick’s feet, as the fires spread from roof to roof and smoke choked the world.

But battle he knew - battle against dragons he had been born to, and he bared his teeth back at the beasts as he hacked at wings and heads.

Nadders, he thought to himself, ducking behind a shield wall as a pale green dragon flung its tail spines at them; one struck a man just below his shoulder, a wound that would cost him the use of his arm if it didn't cost him his life first. Gronckles, he added to the count as he smashed his hammer into one’s wing, a satisfying crunch of bone and a growl of pain as it crumpled like parchment; Stoick hammered on its ribs and head until even its tough body caved in, shattering ribs piercing its lungs until it was gasping wetly into Berk’s mud, clawing and thrashing for breath it could not draw. Monstrous nightmare, he thought bitterly to himself; he thought of the dolphin squealing in a teal dragon’s grip as a boulder sent it crashing into one of the burning homes, pinned and screaming in rage.

A normal raid. A part of Stoick hated himself for looking for two devils amongst their numbers - for unfamiliar breeds never seen on Berk. He hated himself even more for his disappointment when he saw no green eyes bright against black scales, no dragon that walked like a man.

Still, he fought as all viking warriors of Berk fought. “FOR OUR HOME!” He roared, hefting his bloodied hammer over his head, and his heart raced with eager savagery as his people roared back. “VICTORY OR VALHALLA!”

He stepped over blood and rubble, over the bodies of men and dragons. He swung his hammer with force and fury unmatched, roaring challenges back at the beasts. The crunch and snap of bone, the give of tough dragonflesh into a spray of blood, the heavy iron taste and stink of it on the air beneath each blow; it settled the constant churning of Stoick’s thoughts. He sank into the flow of battle, directing his people and killing dragons, until some weight was lifted from his soul and his mind was as smooth and calm as the surface of a lake in a distant cove.

Berk burned against the night, sheep bleating and yaks lowing their terror at the skies. Shouts and screams echoed over it all - warriors streaming blood from talon slashes, or with skin blackened and burned, or the unlucky few who would not survive this night. People stumbled from their burning homes, coughing and blind with smoke, or were trapped beneath fallen walls and timbers; the children fought the fires as best they could, shouting their own orders at one another as they raced to and from the well.

“FIND EVERYONE YOU CAN!” Stoick ordered, pushing each of the few unarmoured vikings stumbling through the streets, “GET THE INJURED TO SAFETY, NOW!”

But Berk knew raids - the few who could not fight, the young or the old or the pregnant, had fled for the safety of the mead hall already. Livestock careened through the streets, herded towards the safety of the hall too, as Stoick and his people fought the dragons.

The rhythmic clang of a hammer against hot steel rang out from Gobber’s forge as he unbent swords, blade edges sharpening against the spinning grindstone a shrill and thin whine beneath the din. Dead and dying dragons lay sprawled in the streets, broken and bloody and glassy eyes staring unseeing, but more swarmed the skies; so many wingbeats the air thrummed like the fluttering tinnitus in Stoick’s ears.

So be it, Stoick thought grimly to himself. For each dragon he killed two more took their place, but dragon bones were brittle and their fire didn’t last forever - Berk would outlast them this night. It had to.

On he fought, there in the midst of his burning village as he stood with his people and screamed their defiance back at the dragons. On and on and on, as all vikings fought - Stoick’s heart hammered against his ribs, throat and chest scratched raw by the stinging smoke, limbs burning with dragging exhaustion, but still he fought on. Between the darkness and the fires and the smoke Stoick didn’t know how long his people had been fighting, or how long until dawn - still he fought, grabbing his weary men by the elbows and snarling at them to defend their homes until they returned to the fray.

“Hold them back!” Stoick ordered, swinging his hammer upwards in a brutal strike at a monstrous nightmare as it flew over his head; it shattered the delicate finger bones of its wing, and it crashed to the ground with a squeal. “For the love of Thor, HOLD THEM BACK! MAKE SOME NOISE! SOMETHING!”

The monstrous nightmare lay dazed in the mud for only a moment - a moment was all it needed to pick itself back up, lunging at a nearby viking with a snarl. It kicked him to the ground, pinning him with a foot pressed against his spine; long talons dug into the man’s lamellar cuirass, only denting the leather scales but the nightmare’s yellow eyes were narrow and calculating, its head raising and jaws opening.

Stoick raced across the span between them, smashing his hammer into the nightmare’s face as the beast turned its head before it could bite or spray its fire. Bone crunched and its muzzle crumpled beneath the blow, but it didn’t die - it staggered off the man, who picked himself up and nodded his thanks to Stoick before charging a downed gronckle hemmed between two other warriors with a yell.

Shifting his grip on his hammer, Stoick bared his teeth and struck the dragon again, bringing his hammer down on the top of its skull - once, twice, and a third, until the body went limp and Stoick tasted the spray of blood and viscera on his lips.

He turned to find his next foe, but a shiver rippled through the battle. Flames flickered, dragons hesitated; a shrill, distinctive whistle shrieked in the sky, and the swarming dragons in flight scattered before an unseen force. Dread washed across them all like a blast of dragonfire’s wave of blistering heat, as across the village a woman shouted, “NIGHT FURY!”

On instinct they all ducked behind their shields, or behind fallen houses as Stoick did; braced for its shot.

None came. There was only the heavy beats of dragon wings loud in the abrupt hush, and the thump of a weight dropping to the ground. Yet it landed almost softly, its steps astonishingly quiet against earth packed hard by generations of feet. Grounded dragons cringed away, glancing uneasily between themselves, while in the sky the others circled silently. Stoick, against the instincts all his years had taught him, peered around the blackened wall he’d hidden behind.

The night fury was a terrible shadow against the firelight. Darker than even the lightless spaces between stars it stood, stark and eerie - only its eyes and teeth were bright, holding the firelight until it seemed they glowed. Enormous wings folded neatly, a soft and leathery rustle, head held low and eyes watchful; a droning, chittering rumble rolled through its throat, a wash of cool, heavy weight like mist and fog, a weight on the mind that stilled all thought.

No fear itched at Stoick’s scars as that low thrum filled his village, nor as the raiding dragons landed to stare, uncertain, at the mythic dragon who had interrupted their raid. Not even as a shadow peeled away from the night fury, rising from its neck as if he'd always been there; he crouched for a moment on the devil's shoulders, before sliding to the ground to walk almost like a man, with slightly uneven steps even softer against the earth and the slight creak of metal from a single prosthetic foot.

A dragon moaned, low and uncertain, as the Dragon Master's feet touched the earth; a monstrous nightmare, bigger than any other of its breed in the raid. Stoick found himself staring as it crouched low against the ground beneath the Dragon Master’s gaze. It shrank in on itself, jaw digging into the ground and eyes averted, in fear - no viking had ever seen fear from raiding dragons, not even the ones about to die.

The Dragon Master's fleshy frill stayed flared around his flat face, but his shoulders sank as he wilted a little. “It’s okay,” Said the Dragon Master softly, holding out his hands as he crouched low too - soothingly, but a thread of something more beneath his voice. A weight, a truth to his words from an authority he did not use but all dragons knew he held. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be afraid, it’s okay. See? You’re okay.”

The nightmare hunkered ever lower, as all the raiding dragons did - it turned its head and gaze wholly away from the Master, shrinking ever smaller in on itself before him. Yet still the Master lowered himself, crouching down onto all fours and slinking forwards with an eerie, crutching gait - one that should have been awkward but carried him too smoothly, too easily across the ground. A line of spikes stood out in sharp relief down his spine. Opening his mouth he spoke again, low and soothing, but it was not words that came from him; it could hardly even be called a sound, as it came not through the air but through Stoick’s thoughts, like the memory of a sound.

A song, low and soothing, that filled the empty places in the guttural hum of the night fury's.

Hairs rose from Stoick’s skin, flesh prickling, as that sound spread like the gathering of mist and fog, a quiet, seeping bloom like blood in water. But the fear was dim and distant beneath that sound, that soothing rumble; blunted by the Dragon Master’s smallness as he crouched before the cowering monstrous nightmare and told it that it was all okay.

Not a command, or a threat, but a promise. The Master’s hand hovered over the nightmare’s nose and moved no more; it was the monstrous nightmare, eyes closing, who leaned into the touch. Who accepted that it was okay.

The song slid away, unneeded. Beneath that touch resting so gently on its snout the enormous monstrous nightmare softened, melting like wax into the Master’s hands and ranks; so too did all the raiding dragons relax, giving themselves up to the Dragon Master’s control. Slowly, so carefully, the Dragon Master rested his other palm on the nightmare's nose too; he cradled the dragon's skull as if it were delicate, as if those enormous jaws couldn't bite him in two. He dragged his palms across its scaled skin, walking along the side of its face and neck and trailing a hand along it.

"There we go," Said the Dragon Master, soft and pleased, as he trailed a hand along the monstrous nightmare's throat. The dragon's delight thrummed in its chest. "See? You don't have to be afraid of us. We're not like Her."

The nightmare shook him off, but only so that he could raise his head and roar at the heavy sky hanging low over the village. As one the dragons raised their voices and wings to the night with it, triumphant and joyous as the Master retreated to his devil just as the night fury returned to its place close at its master’s side. As one the raiding dragons leapt into the air, obeying some command the Master had given that no viking could hear. As one they disappeared, and in their wake fires still burned.

The Dragon Master and his devil alone remained, staring after them.

He did not startle as Stoick stepped out from behind his shelter, but together he and the night fury stepped away, keeping the distance between them. “Put the fires out,” Stoick said, turning his head but not his gaze. Beneath the crackling roar of the flames consuming his village, and the silence louder than even that, his voice seemed very small, and very weak. “Now!”

Slowly, staring at the Dragon Master and his night fury all the while, Stoick’s people obeyed. “I didn’ae think you'd come here,” Stoick said.

The Dragon Master did not speak for a long, long while. His silence was filled with the groans and hisses of dying dragons, too injured to have accepted the Dragon Master and flown away with the raiders. Berk’s butchers cut their throats to silence them, eyes on the Dragon Master all the while as they went about their grim, grisly work, but the Master didn’t stop them; he watched, unflinching, as one by one the remaining dragons were killed.

“Neither did I,” Said the Dragon Master eventually, and his voice was heavy, sorrow hidden just behind. He rested a hand on his night fury’s head. “Guess a certain someone’s just more persuasive than you are.” He rubbed the dragon’s head fondly, who chuffed. He remained silent for another long, long while, as slowly the fires were put out and the ruin was exposed, and the last of the dying dragons were killed. “But,” The Dragon Master sighed, and his fingers curled around the edge of the night fury’s broad, flat skull in a gentle grip, “Maybe we should have come here sooner. Maybe we’ve been running from this for too long.”

“You’ll help us?”

“I’ll help,” Agreed the Master. But there was a hardness to his voice and the night fury’s eyes as they turned their gaze on Stoick. “On two conditions. I can use your forge, and you do what I say.”

The doors of the mead hall ground open, fresh hands pouring out to deal with the aftermath of the raid while Stoick’s warriors stumbled inside to have their wounds tended to. The two met, and stopped - speaking in hushed, urgent whispers of how the raid had ended, and of the devils from myth or mad dragon trapper tales standing in the middle of the village. In the open doorway a blind gaze pierced Stoick deep, even across the span between them, and Gothi’s gaze was expectant.

Slowly, reluctantly, Stoick said, “Aye.”

Chapter Text

The uproar was immediate, loud, and directionless.

“Why’d ‘e change his mind, eh?”

“Well we have’ta try somethin’ new tae get rid of them damn dragons!”

“I won’t trust a damn word out that thing’s mouth!”

Dawn bloomed on the horizon, sunlight exposing all the burned ruins and dead dragons within the village, and the blood soaked dark into the earth. Any other day Stoick’s people would be rebuilding, knocking down burned timbers, scrounging through the ash for keepsakes and tools, dragging dragon bodies to the cliff edges to throw into the sea. Any other day wood would be cut and houses repaired, livestock counted and losses noted. Any other day except this one.

Every viking had packed themselves into the Mead Hall, pressing themselves in wherever there was space, and yet more spilled out through the doors straining to listen over the crowd; every inch of the floor was taken, except for the wide circle around the table of Berk’s chief where beside Stoick the Dragon Master sat with his night fury.

They shouted to and over one another, jostling and shoving to hear and be heard; they shouted at Stoick most of all. In his throne in the middle of his table Stoick weathered it in silence, nodding thoughtfully to each and every argument whose words he could not hear, as he ran his fingers across the grain of ancient wood.

The throne and the table had been sheltered by mountain walls for generations, and had never faced dragons before; some of the few things on Berk to have never burned.

Yet now the Dragon Master sat at it, a creature from myth or nightmares as much as the night fury beside him. Away from the wilds of his island he stood out against the world more starkly than ever, incongruous to the point of discomfort against furniture and the hanging tapestries showing Sigurd’s triumph over Fafnir, and a hall carved by human hands. An uncanny thing made all the worse for his vague shape of a man; he was nothing and no one, nameless except for his title.

Had the dragons named him? Had he a name already that he shared with only them? Had he a name at all, borrowed or bestowed? Did the dragons call to him in their times of need, and did they answer him in his? Or was he only force made manifest - Dragon Master not as his title but as his being, just as his night fury was Lightning and Death? Stoick wondered if he bled, and fear rippled up his spine like dragonfire at his wondering.

Black scales bled into black scales as his devil remained close at the Master’s side, large green eyes with thin, blocky pupils sweeping back and forth across the crowd. Its long, finned tail lashed back and forth, a hiss of heavy flesh and small, thin scales dragging across the stone floor. Now and then its teeth flashed, gleaming and cruel, as its grumble rose higher and louder in its throat; though when its snarl grew too loud the Dragon Master silenced it, shoving it fondly.

On and on Stoick’s people argued amongst themselves, without slowing or quieting; Stoick sighed to himself, and pushed himself to his feet. “ENOUGH!” He roared, and his people fell silent at last. Though his skin prickled with the night fury’s thin, hateful gaze on his back, a needling sting like a fire’s heat. “One at a time!”

Astrid stepped out from Stoick’s other side. Her glare was sharp, piercing as a spear, as she eyed the Dragon Master. “Chief,” She said, “We can’t trust this… thing!” Murmurs of agreement rolled through the crowd.

The Dragon Master idly showed his palms. “None taken,” He said, as dry and cool as the sunless stone of mountain caverns. His night fury hissed softly, silenced only when the Master elbowed it; it turned its affront on the Master, narrow-eyed and growling, but its snap at his wrist was a mild thing, teeth closing far from flesh, and the Master didn’t even flinch at the click of its jaws.

“You journeyed to find him,” Said Astrid. “You risked your life for the chance to ask for his aid. And he refused you. Why should we trust him now, when he’s changed his mind? How can we trust him not to change his mind again?”

“How can we trust anyone?” Said Stoick, sweeping his gaze across the crowd of his people. “Every one of us in this room has lied at one point or another. Sven, you lied about Hilda’s new haircut suiting her; Gobber, we all know it isn'ae trolls; Mulch- well, what don’ you lie about, old man?” A few scattered, smothered titters broke the silence, quieted quickly as Stoick met each gaze in turn. “But each one of us trusts each other to do what’s right for this village.”

A man within the crowd stepped up onto one of the benches. Meadgut, one of the butchers; a thick and portly man with a brace of knives glittering and cruel on his belt, who whirled through battle with eerie fearlessness. “Aye,” He said, toying with the handle of one of his knives as he eyed the Master’s night fury, “We’ve all lied, I won’ deny it. But we’ve all earned our trust with time and blood, chief. What’s he done to earn it?”

“He ended the raid now,” Said Stoick, meeting Meadgut’s gaze, “And sent away the dragons. He could have waited for the fighting to end, but he didn’t.”

“So we should be impressed by that little display, eh?!” Hissed Spitelout, stepping forward from his place at the end of the table, well away from the Dragon Master. His voice rang out across the crowd. “He could have set it all up! Sent in a fake raid tae show off, and win us over! Well I’m not impressed - I think he’s afraid, I think ‘e knows we could take him on! And the nest! Another wave of agreement rolled through the crowd. Spitelout nodded to himself as voices rose once more, joining him in his derision. The tide of it rose, a heaving, shouted mass of noise filling the hall as all of Berk began to shout to and over each other again. Spitelout raised his fist with his voice, and bellowed, "He knows we'd win!"

Stoick glanced at the Dragon Master as he waited for the noise to fall away for a second time. The Master met his gaze, and rolled his own skyward with a weary shake of his head. He stood; all at once the Mead Hall fell quiet. Only the crackle of flames filled the silence, torches and firepits burning brightly, but even they were muted and hushed as the Dragon Master raised his chin and his voice.

“You should know,” He said, clear and strong in the abrupt quiet - a hush broken only by the crackle of firepit flames, “That you were never going to ‘win’. Dragon flocks are led by an alpha, or a king or queen if the dragon’s powerful enough. They protect and care for their flock and hold a nest where they can all live safely. We-” He gestured at himself and his devil, “-Are the alpha of ours. The nest at Helheim’s Gate isn’t a nest, though, and the dragons there aren’t a flock.”

From a satchel hanging from one of his many belts the Dragon Master pulled free a large roll of parchment; across the table he spread out a map of Helheim’s Gate - intricately detailed, but Stoick found his gaze sliding across it to the waters outside the boundary of mist the Dragon Master had drawn, the sea stacks and tiny islands too numerous and difficult to remember, the Gate’s heart smudged and indistinct.

Still, the Dragon Master pointed to a volcano, and Stoick found himself focused on it - though he couldn’t make out how deep within the mists it was, or see a path through the seastacks. “Only dragons can find this island. Well, and me , but I don’t really count. There’s a dragon here that controls the others,” Said the Dragon Master, and his dragon growled low as it stared at the map. “A queen, or I guess maybe a parasite queen. She’s old - older than the archipelago, we think. She controls the dragons, makes them bring food to her; if she can’t control them outright then she uses fear, because if the dragons don’t bring her enough food then they get eaten themselves.”

“And you’ve seen this queen?” Said Stoick. He didn’t mean it as a question, but the Dragon Master took it as one.

From his satchel he pulled out more parchment, sheafs of it; he spread them all across the table, and a shiver of fear rippled down his and the night fury’s spine. “The Red Death.”

There were sketches and diagrams, estimations of sizes and anatomical studies. They were only of a dragon’s head and shoulders, noting details and listing inferences. But Stoick found himself staring at one in particular; a drawing, unlike the others, that was less clinical and more fearful - one that showed an enormous dragon clawing from a volcano pit, with a round head as long as a warship and heavy jaws lined with teeth as long as spears, crowned by a coral-like bony frill.

Six bulbous eyes stared from the page as frightened dragons took wing around her head, fleeing a bearlike paw with overgrown talons slamming down on a wide ledge, but her hateful stare was not on any of them - it had been on the Dragon Master once, but now Stoick was in her sights too.

A blood red glow and gleaming eyes, teeth longer than spears piercing flesh as a dragon was dragged down from the sky and consumed. A bewilderment bordering on panic as the Dragon Master's devil feared a force it had never had to fear before, deafened by roaring heat and blinded by flame. A desperation so acute it was agony, as like any animal in a trap the Dragon Master’s devil turned its teeth on itself to chew off its own leg; though dragon teeth did not slice through dragonflesh but pink and fragile skin, and the pain it felt was both an echo of a similar wound and not its own at once.

The Red Death.

“She and I didn’t exactly get along well,” Said the Dragon Master dryly, but his words were empty of humour; there was only old fear, and though his night fury still hissed it leaned against its Master’s side, too - tail curling around him as if to shield him. “She, uh… Tried to control us, too.”

Astrid whipped her gaze up from the drawings. “It controlled you?” She cried, and Stoick remembered those old raids they’d not had to face in nearly a decade, a night fury’s plasma fire streaking across the sky like a bolt of lightning - a dragon never seen, with no known shot limit, and which never, ever missed.

“Oh it didn’t take,” Said the Dragon Master; attempting cheer, but it rang hollow with the fear which still lingered in the arched line of his dragon’s spine, the set of the Master’s shoulders. “Not for long, anyway - she didn’t even have us for the night. Cost me a leg to get us out, though, didn’t it bud?” He rubbed his devil’s brow, before sticking his hands in its mouth to grip its lower jaw and jostle its head. Fingers folded over teeth and gums, and the dragon’s pupils blew wide and soft for its master. “You couldn’t save all of me - just had to make us even, huh?”

The dragon crooned and groaned, almost fond; it seized its master’s hand between its teeth and dragged it back and forth through the air. It coughed out a noise when it let go, a repeated and rapid hough as if it was laughing, and its face was so clearly, unsettlingly amused as it stepped away with a false limp and a lifted foreleg.

“Oh yeah, very funny,” The Dragon Master groused. “Arm and a leg. Who told you your jokes were good?”

Revulsion crowded Stoick’s throat, heart hammering and hands trembling with the instinctive fear of a dragon’s jaws gripping flesh - even the Dragon Master’s, whose skin was scaled too. The people of Berk shuffled and cringed away in their own fear, their own disgust as the Dragon Master spoke to his dragon as if it were a brother, as if it were loved and it loved in turn.

“No,” Said the Dragon Master, turning from his devil with a last rub to its head. “She didn’t take us. She can control the minds of most dragons, but we're not exactly a normal dragon. We broke her hold over us and tried to kill her. Didn't go well,” He added, lifting his metal leg and gesturing to it. "Turns out it's not easy to fight a dragon queen the size of a mountain inside a volcano, and we weren't exactly prepared, but she didn't kill us so I count that as a win."

Stoick stared down at the drawing of her. The Red Death stared back, hateful and ravenous, climbing the walls of her home as if to tear free from the page to devour them all. A shiver rippled up his spine, a lick of dragonfire, as he pressed his palms to the table and leaned on them. “You'll fight her again?”

“We're here, aren't we?" Said the Dragon Master, shrugging. His night fury shook itself, brisk and with a derisive snort as if it were shrugging too. "We just... need to make sure we're prepared this time. We were lucky, but we can't count on luck."

Spitelout stepped forward once more, lips curling. "An' what price d'yeh ask, eh? A damn sight more'n we can afford, I bet!"

Agreement rolled through the crowd once more, but the Master didn't spare them a glance as he leaned over to the table to catch Stoick's gaze. "I'm not doing this because I expect anything," He said, and a part of Stoick hated himself for believing the sincerity in the Dragon Master's voice, the honest frustration. "You can't give me the things I want. I should have done this-" He gestured at his drawings and study and map of the dragon nest, "-A long time ago. All we're asking you to do is trust us."

Stoick studied the Master for long moments, but those thin eyes were as impossible to read as ever. But the dragon's betrayed the truth, and Stoick turned to face his people. "All in favour of accepting the Dragon Master's help?"

He raised his hand. Gobber hesitated before he raised his hook, and Astrid hesitated longer still before she sighed to herself and lifted her hand too. A few others raised their own among the crowd, but most wavered - shifting and glancing about uneasily. Gothi, smiling to herself from her place hidden beside the doors, caught Stoick's gaze before she raised her hand; the uncertainty in Stoick's people faded with it, steeled as they settled into their convictions, and many joined her. Many more, like Spitelout, did not.

A few hands more than half had lifted. A majority, if only by a few, but a majority still.

"Aye," Said Stoick, "We'll trust you. What now?"

"I need the forge," He said. "And maybe some food here or there if I'm working late. Our equipment failed us before and nearly killed us, we can't afford it to fail again. For you?” The Dragon Master turned his head to Stoick, just as his dragon’s did. “Nothing. The queen knows we’re here, and she knows what we are; she knows that we can free her dragons. As long as we don’t challenge her outright she won't move against us. And she won’t risk sending raids here anymore - she won’t want to provoke us, or lose her dragons.”

“You’re certain?”

The Dragon Master sighed, reaching up to rub the scales at the back of his head. “No,” He said tiredly. His gaze was on his drawing of her, on those six bulbous eyes staring at him; another shiver of fear rippled through him and his dragon. “No, not really. But, it’s the best guess we’ve got.”

Chapter Text

Berk rebuilt itself after the raid almost as it always did. By the end of the first week the houses that could be repaired were whole again, and by the end of the second those that had been destroyed were remade. Gobber spent all his time in the forge making nails and sharpening saws, and Stoick spent all of his helping with the busywork. Livestock were counted and returned to their owners if they were alive, or burned if not; the wounded were tended to and the few dead were buried.

Almost as it always did. Almost.

A strange, shivering restlessness had taken over Stoick’s people. Eyes were always turned to the sky, or trained on the darkest shadows. There was a title on everyone’s lips, the dreaded name of an even more dreaded dragon spoken of in hushed whispers as if to voice it would summon it. Little else was ever spoken of as they all waited for some axe to drop.

It wasn’t fear. Not quite. It wasn’t anxiety, or anger, or any number of things. Stoick walked his village’s streets each day, listening to the talk, bending his ear to all who stopped him; what he heard was all of that. It was fear and anxiety and anger, and any number of things, all at once; his people’s thoughts were a jumbled mass, contradictory and sometimes strange.

It was doubt, most of all. Who was that thing? What was it? What did it want that Berk couldn't give, what payment would it demand when its seeming altruism failed? Why was it intervening now, and why was it intervening at all? Why had it changed its mind, when before it had refused? Was it human? Was it dragon? Was it neither? Did it bleed? Could it die? Was the night fury tame, and how tight was the Dragon Master’s control over it?

Why had Stoick sought it out? Why was he working with it at all?

Stoick didn’t begrudge them their thoughts. They were much the same as his own, which plagued him often since that raid. Few agreed with the Dragon Master’s presence, and those who did either only begrudgingly or for the potential such an ally brought; but Stoick was their chief, and he had earned their loyalty and earned it well over all his years serving his people - they didn't ask him to rid them of the devils who had come to their village.

-:-

Astrid took him aside one evening, her marching steps brisk and certain on Berk's worn paths and her eyes as hard and keen as the gleaming edge of her axe. They walked the village together as the sun slid beneath the sea, the damp air cooling to a chill as the sky purpled with the dusk; Stoick nodded to the guards in passing, though Astrid seemed not to notice them as she chewed intently on her thoughts.

The breeze swept in from the sea, briny and sharp. The darkening skies had only wispy streaks of clouds, stained a lovely pink by the sunset's lingering light; Astrid did not speak until long after the light had faded and the moon had risen.

"We need to keep an eye on them," She said, abrupt but steely - certain. She didn't need to say who; her eyes were on the skies too.

Stoick rolled the thought over. "Aye," He agreed; it was always a good idea to keep an eye on strangers to Berk, especially those who could become dangerous, and there were none stranger or could prove dangerous more than the Dragon Master and his night fury. "But just watch them - we don't need tae borrow trouble provoking them. They can be..." He thought of that day on the Master's island, by the clifftop. The night fury's claws at Stoick's throat, and the rock and grit and cool earth beneath his back after the Master had spared him. "...Unpredictable."

"And as much as I hate to say it, if this 'dragon queen' of his is real we're better off keeping him on our side. Or at least letting him take all the risk." She nodded. "I'll spread the word."

-:-

All of Berk thought of him and spoke of him, and many feared him. But the Dragon Master didn’t reappear in their midst again. Sometimes the shadow of he and his dragon were spotted in the skies, or late at night the forge was still lit and iron was being hammered even when Gobber was asleep. Sometimes parchment or bread loaves went missing, or the birds were silent in Berk’s forests. Sometimes Stoick awoke, and heard a groan of metal and a creak in his rafters, heavy steps on the roof shingles. Only sometimes. More often than not there was no sign of him at all.

-:-

Stoick's thoughts troubled him still. His doubts nagged at him - what had he done, inviting that thing to their island? Why did he agree to work with it, when it was only Gothi's will that he had put himself on this path?

His house was cold and dark, Stoick's feet restless as he paced its floors. His heart drove him out into the cool, black night where dew glittered on the grass, and all of Berk was dark as it slept. All the village except the forge, whose fires burned bright and warm, its light spilling from its doors to pool in the streets - the echoes of a hammer against hot steel rang out, rhythmic and clear. An urge seized him, and Stoick fetched ale before he obeyed that whim that took him to Gobber's door.

The walk was short and Stoick was eager, but he found his steps slowing as the forge's open door approached and the warmth from the coals washed over him as he ducked inside. The bare earth of the forge's floor was packed hard beneath the soles of Stoick's boots, the clutter in the corners making strange shapes of the shadows; forgotten rope hung in loose coils over scrap wood, broken tools abandoned in heaps with unfinished projects. A comfort, usually, but the rhythm of the hammer strikes were wrong, and it was not Gobber who grunted with the effort of shifting steel; a dragon purred, a guttural rumble so deep and soft that it rolled more through the earth than the air - felt more than heard.

Hammer strikes stopped. A nasally, younger voice mumbled to himself as steam hissed. "Don't warp, don't warp, don't warp-" The ting of fracturing steel rang out, and the Dragon Master cursed. "Shit!"

The night fury had curled up neatly beside the forge's hot stones, a black mass darker than the lightless shadows as it basked in the warm glow. Its large eyes followed its master as they always did, but Stoick's own did not rest on the scaled back of a dragon that walked like man. Not the whole of one, anyway - most of him was scaled, still, with spikes down his spine, but there was no flat-faced head melding smoothly to a thick neck melded smoothly to narrow shoulders, no fleshy frill. A human head sat atop those narrow shoulders, with a short, choppy mass of fluffy hair cropped in uneven clumps instead of the frill.

Stoick's heart hammered uneasily within his chest, skin crawling as the thought came to him that this was not something anyone was meant to see. He turned to go, but for the first time Gobber's clutter betrayed him and the horns of his helm struck tools and spare hands hanging from the rafters. The cacophony of iron against iron rang out through the hush, the clanging and clattering echoing in the silence.

The Master whirled to face him, and cringed for the darkness within the night fury's flank just as quickly. The low growl of the devil slithered from between its bared teeth, claws curling into the earth and digging deep furrows; but the Dragon Master was scaled once more as he stepped out from behind his beast, with his narrow eyes in a flat face that melted smoothly into a short, thick neck melted into its body. But his voice was just the same as before as he took up his place once more by the anvil, reaching for a bar of steel in the water trough.

"Uh, hi," He said. The steel bar had warped in the quench, and a crack shadowed deep and dark had nearly split in in two.

Stoick had already caught a glimpse of pink flesh and wide, bright green eyes. It hovered above the Master's featureless face, ghostly and unreal like the afterimage of bright light in his eyes. "I came to see Gobber," Stoick said, and pretended not to have seen.

"Right, yeah," Said the Master, stooping to take up a fresh piece of metal from the ground and tossing it into the forge to heat. "Well. He's asleep right now, so..."

"You came to an agreement?"

"Oh, yeah, we uh. We worked something out, didn't we bud?" The dragon snorted, and shook itself off before it lay its head down on its paws. "Are you still pouting about it, big baby boo?" Cooed the Master. "Just because he didn't want you in his shop?"

"Blahh," Said the dragon disdainfully.

Staring at them, at master and dragon, Stoick wondered which was the Master’s real face. Pink flesh, or black dragonscale? Man or monster? Where did his dragon, his devil with the same black scales, go when the Master didn't need its wings or its fire? Did it leave of its own accord, or disappear within him just as the Master seemed to disappear within the dragon? It exhausted him to wonder, to be so afraid, but his mind wouldn’t let go of either.

He should leave. Gobber was resting, and Stoick's need wasn't so great tonight that he would wake his oldest friend; and he didn't want to be near the Dragon Master and his devil dragon who he doted on so, with the pink flesh behind the scales and a clear, discomforting love for the beast that shadowed him so faithfully. The night was long, and there was longer still until dawn - perhaps Stoick could still find some rest of his own.

Stoick uncapped his ale and drank, an uneasy courage blooming beside it in his gut, and didn’t dare turn his gaze from the night fury when he asked, “Why did you agree to help us?”

If it surprised the Dragon Master, it didn’t show. He didn’t even twitch or flinch, but his sigh was a weary, heavy thing as he pulled glowing steel from the forge. “If I could give you the honest answer,” He said, and when Stoick glanced at him from the corner of his eyes the Master was staring intently at the metal on the anvil as he readied his hammer, “You wouldn’t need to ask in the first place.” He spared a glance of his own at Stoick, and raised his chin when his gaze caught on Stoick’s. Annoyance heated his voice as he said, “I did tell you it was complicated.”

“Try.”

“You’re demanding again,” Growled the Dragon Master. He shook his head as he began his work. “I don’t have to tell you anything, you know. Isn’t it enough I’m helping you?”

He began to shape the steel, ringing strikes of the hammer against hot metal. Showers of sparks glittered with each blow. “You know my reasons for seeking you out,” Said Stoick. He drank again, though heat prickled in his scars, an uneasy itch, all the same. “If you’re to work with us, I want to know why you agreed.”

“No,” The Master said quietly, entirely to himself. But he seemed more resigned than angry as he added, “No, of course it wasn’t enough.”

The surface of the metal cooled into dull, ugly scale that cracked and was knocked loose from the whole with each strike of the hammer. The Master returned it to the forge to heat once more when its glow had faded from a bright, vibrant yellow to orange and the tone of his hammer strikes had gone from ringing to dull and harsh. Stoick flinched despite himself as the master handled the hot steel with his bare, scaled hands, reaching fearlessly into the flames to retrieve it or combing blithely through the bright coals.

The Master shaped steel with clear skill, though he wrestled with the bellows to stoke the forge's flames. His hammer strikes were precise and true, moving the metal with ease.

The silence lingered a long, long while as the Dragon Master worked, unbroken except by the ringing strikes of the hammer and the gusts of air from the bellows. “I told you, didn’t I, that I wasn’t always a dragon riding vigilante,” Said the Master at last, so softly and so thinned by the rasp breathing smoke had left him Stoick had to strain to hear him at all. “I was born in a village. A viking village, actually. They… had dragons raiding them too. So I know what it’s like, to wake up one night and see your whole world burn down.”

“And yet you allied yourself with them,” Said Stoick, nodding pointedly at the night fury docile behind him. “You protect them.”

“It surprises me too, sometimes,” Said the Master. “But they’re not what you think they are, the dragons. They’re… they’re people. They make friends and enemies, they have families. They think, they feel, they love and hate and they do things just for the fun of doing them. And the dragons that raid you, they’re afraid too.”

“Afraid.”

The Dragon Master turned his head, and his gaze was heavy on the side of Stoick’s face. “You forget I was one of them?” He said. “It wasn’t for long, yeah, but I was one of them. I nearly died fighting the queen the first time, and do you know why I'm not dead?” He didn't wait for the answer, tossing the steel into the forge to heat with more force than needed. "Some of her dragons saved us. They risked their lives to carry us to- to someone like us, another rider."

Stoick hummed his doubts to himself, if only to show that he had heard. But instead of the pointed reminders of how many people had been killed by dragons, or any number of other jabs, he remained silent. The Dragon Master shifted restlessly in the dragging, heavy quiet; restless enough he turned back to the metal and pulled it from the fires, raising his hammer to begin shaping it once more.

His hand tightened on the hammer haft, readying himself to bring it down, when the urge struck Stoick to say, "I met Drago, once. Long ago."

The Dragon Master's hammer struck the anvil as he startled at this as he had nothing else. A stillness came to him as the harsh ringing of iron against cold iron stabbed through the silence; his night fury, too, had frozen, its ribs falling still as it held its breath. The small bumps of dragonscale swallowed most of the light, but there was still a soft glow across his flank and the side of his eerie, flat face; his eyes gleamed brightly, though - a vibrant green burned yellow.

His voice was as flat as his face, equally as unsettling, as he asked, “You know Drago?”

"No," Stoick said. The coals of the forge burned bright, throwing out a heat as thick and heavy as a wall just as the timbers of a viking hall had so long ago. "There was a Thing, where chiefs of every clan met together. In the middle of the talks he came to us; a strange man, from a distant land, who told us he could control dragons and would rid us of them if we submitted to his rule. We laughed, of course - men, controlling dragons? It enraged him; Drago commanded his armoured dragons to burn the hall behind him as he left. Most chiefs of the archipelago died that day."

The Master said nothing. The night fury did not move.

"A trapper told us you killed him," Said Stoick, watching the Dragon Master as he remained frozen, hammer hanging uselessly by his side and steel cooling on the anvil. "He was there at the battle, where his bewilderbeast fought a wild one; where you took control of the dragons from them both. But you failed to defeat this dragon queen?"

Slowly, hesitantly, the Dragon Master placed his metal back in the fire. His shuffling steps were soft, even against the hard earth of Gobber's forge floor, but it was with a slight limp; made uneven by a replacement foot whose metal creaked ever so slightly. Scales hissed against steel as his fingers dragged across the metal when he turned back to Stoick. "Do you always beat the dragon raids?" Said the Master bitterly. "Sometimes it's a win if we just survive."

Stoick bit back the words beading on his tongue, rattling against his teeth. Vikings needed the Dragon Master, however much that rankled; Stoick had failed to get his help once already, he refused to allow himself to cost them this second chance. However much it hurt to swallow the pointed jab that his cowardice had cost hundreds of lives, man and dragon both.

He held the Master's gaze steadily, and in silence. The night fury let go of its breath at last as the Master blew out his own, harsh and forceful, and slumped, turning his gaze away.

"We didn't mean to get caught by her," He said. He wrung his hands, fingers flexing anxiously. "We were... we were leaving my village, for good, years before I even knew about Drago. We strayed too close to her nest, and she took our minds; made us fly to her. We'd still be stuck under her control if it wasn't for us both not exactly being the types to do what we're told. We broke free, and she really wasn't happy about that."

Master and dragon shuddered together. "She came up for us," He said. "So we fought. It didn't go well," He said dryly, gesturing to his metal leg, "If you couldn't tell. We're fast flyers, and he's a night fury, but against a big dragon, in a cramped volcano - it's not exactly ideal is it?"

Eyes narrowed, Stoick grunted. "And you've avoided her," He said. It wasn't a question.

The Master didn't take it as one; he bristled, shoulders mantling as if he had wings to flare like his dragon's, and the night fury's tail lashed - striking the earth and the walls, metal creaking and groaning and leather rustling. "Yeah," He said, sharp and cold as winter wind. "We've avoided her. I know it's a real inconvenience for you, but we barely survived her the first time. Don't blame us for not wanting to push our luck."

"But you'll fight her now?"

"We're here, aren't we?" Said the Master. "And we know so much more now than we did then. We know what we are."

Turning his gaze away he looked up, beyond the rafters and the roof to the sky beyond. The dragon looked with him, and its croon was considering, its head tilted. The Dragon Master sighed, nodding to himself, and the night fury lowered his head to watch Stoick. Shaking his own, the Master lifted his hands to the satchels hanging from his many belts and buckles, fumbling and searching.

”The world is old.” He said at last, slowly and carefully, as he pulled a small book from one of his belts. His gaze was sharp when he turned it on Stoick for a moment, not bladed as if to cut but a discomfort all the same. “Older than vikings and dragons. I’ve seen bones in rocks of fish that aren’t fish, and lizards that are only mostly dragons. I’ve talked to sea serpents whose parents spoke of times when all the world was covered in ice and prey was big.”

He leafed quickly through the pages as he spoke, a blur of pale parchment and black charcoal lines, until at last he’d found the page he wanted. Holding it open, the Master held it out for Stoick to take before he turned back to his steel; fear licked up Stoick’s spine like dragonfire’s heat as he took it, a warning and his horror as he turned his gaze to the page.

“There are caves,” Said the Dragon Master as Stoick stared at the drawing of a man, legs together and arms spread, inside a dragon whose wings spread out either side of him as if they were his own. He did not turn his head as he began shaping it once more. “Where people used to live. They painted on the walls. Animals and dragons, mostly.”

There were other drawings on the page - all dragons, or mostly dragons. There were simplified lines of dragon breeds Stoick recognised and breeds even the Dragon Master had marked as unknown, and the simplest drawings of all were men. Men with dragon heads and tails, or riding on dragonback with spears held aloft; men kneeling to dragons, or making offerings, or sheltering beneath their wings. Men who lived with dragons, and dragons who lived with men.

But Stoick stared at that one, tucked away near the corner of the page. That one damned drawing, and he twitched with the immediate, reflexive urge to throw the little book to the forge's fire and watch that damned drawing crumble to ash. Only the devil's gaze on him, and the Dragon Master’s night fury seal embossed on the leather cover beneath Stoick’s fingertips, stayed his hand.

Men who were not dragons, and dragons who were not men, but who were bound in some way all the same.

“Humans and dragons weren’t always enemies,” Said the Dragon Master, cautiously taking his book back from Stoick’s hand. It slid from his nerveless hand with a hiss of parchment dragged beneath the callused pads of his fingers, and they clenched into a fist around empty air. The Master closed the book, and returned it to his belt. “And some of us, we’re…” He blew out a breath. His dragon crooned softly. “The first time he let me touch him," He said, stubbornly intent on shaping steel, "Was the first time I ever felt like myself; like I knew who I was, who I'd become. And I knew who he was, and who he'd become, because somehow we were the same. I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine, and we saw ourselves. The Red Death, Drago - no one can't take that from us."

It wasn’t any kind of answer, and shouldn’t have made as much sense as it did. But that sense-memory of the dragon’s haunted Stoick still - that flash of its teeth biting through a leg whose agony was his own and the flesh pink and human that was not. More still had always unsettled him; dragon and master moving and breathing as one, scale blending into scale until Stoick couldn’t see the line between them. Prosthetics on the same side, left tailfin and foot, and the same matching creak of metal.

The silence stretched, growing long and deep as the Dragon Master shaped metal and spoke no more; broken only by the ringing of a hammer against hot steel, the rushing air of the bellows when the Master stoked the forge's flames, though it was muffled in Stoick's ears. He left the Master to his work, but that drawing of man and dragon didn’t leave so easily; it haunted him, there on the inside of his eyes each time he closed them.

Chapter Text

The months passed. Berk came to life with the sap swelling through tree trunks and grasses, wildflowers blooming in fields and the forests bright with birdsong and life. Clouds of gnats hung over water, squirrels busily foraging on the forest’s floor. The sheep had their lambs and the yaks their calves, and few were lost to poor births or disease or inexperienced new mothers; a good season.

The Thing came with a cacophony of noise, all the tribes who could travel arriving in Berk as they all met and mingled and traded with one another. Stoick spoke of the Dragon Master, that he had promised to rid them of a dragon queen behind the raids - though neither he nor his dragon attended any of the meetings, they were seen often in the skies. Dagur ranted and raved once more about his skrill, and Bertha had little to say on it at all. Johann refused to come up from the hold of his ship once he’d seen that shadow against the sky, staring out through the doorway at all hours.

They left as soon as they came, once business was concluded, and life returned to calm once more. Ships were sent out to fish or to raid, and some came back sitting low in the water with the weight of their successes; fortifications and minor repairs could even be made, catapult winches oiled and their towers reinforced, pasture fencing rebuilt where it could and replaced when it could not.

Brief spring melted into briefer summer - days full of muggy heat, short nights still filled with lingering daylight, and frantic work before the frosts of autumn and snows of endless winter. Sheep were shorn and wool was spun, Berk’s few hardy crops growing quickly with the long hours of light. They fished and hunted and foraged, they maintained fencing and walkways, and no one commented on how no dragons had raided since the night the Dragon Master came to the village.

The food stores were fuller than Stoick had ever seen. No one commented on that, either, but Stoick listened as talk of the Dragon Master grudgingly thawed.

-:-

The skies turned and summer began to die. There was a taste of the coming cold on the air, like the blunt smell of rotting grass beneath the new growth; a slight wilting of the world as the swell of summer reached its peak and the grasses and the trees struggled as its tide began to wane.

The Dragon Master came and went, often little more than a flitting shadow. Stoick stared after him broodingly, those few glimpses anyone caught of him at all.

It churned within his chest, a restlessness that seized his limbs and filled him with an urge to act, that the Dragon Master had yet to bring them the head of that queen. What did he fill his days with? What was possibly stopping him from killing the dragon queen? It chewed at him, gnawing on his bones; an end to the war in sight at last, if only that damned thing would act!

He nursed it quietly, like a tankard of mead in his empty, silent house or a wound that bled but wasn’t deep enough to bother Gothi with. A bruise he often found himself pressing on just to feel the ache - to feel something other than the wearing weight of his thoughts. If this was Gothi’s path then it was a winding, dragging thing, and he did not care for it.

Yet still the weeks marched on. No dragons interrupted their nights and their days were peaceful as ever. Even sickness was only a mild hazard this year, sweeping through a few viking households and swept away just as quickly by Gothi’s medicines. Stoick walked his village helping where needed, tending to repairs and to arguments, and in the evenings sometimes he ate with Gobber instead of retreating to his own cold house.

“I hate tae say it Stoick,” Said Gobber one day, dropping into his seat with a grunt. He unscrewed his carved wooden hand from his stump and fixed the prosthetic with the sideways mounted spoon to it, “But that Dragon Master’s done some good for us.”

His narrow home was filled with clutter, as always. Spare hands on one wall and cupboards and stores against the others, bola and netting abandoned in the corner. Jars and herbs hung from the rafters and beams as ever, but there were tools here or there too - set down and forgotten without the haste of waking in the night to repair weapons. Heat bled through from the forge beside his house - a welcome warmth as the sun hovered over the horizon and the evening chill crept in.

Stoick breathed in the thick, rich smell of Gobber’s stew, familiar from a hundred thousand evenings like it before, but the scent and the warmth of the wispy steam rising from its surface didn’t settle him as it should. He ate spoonfuls of the stew in silence as Gobber started on his own, chewing his frustrations with the chunks of meat and vegetables.

“I worry it’s taking too long for him to deal with the dragons,” Said Stoick at last. He fished out a chunk of mutton from his bowl, and stared at it grimly, before he set it back down and idly stirred his meal. “He fears that dragon queen. The Red Death.”

“Aye,” Gobber agreed. “And I don’t doubt not wi’out reason.”

Six bulbous, staring eyes gleaming from the blood red glow of a volcano pit, clawing from its heated depths with rage and hunger. A monster queen with a round head as long as a warship and heavy jaws lined with teeth as long as spears, crowned by a coral-like bony frill. Who dragged dragons from the sky to consume them, and brought fear even to the Dragon Master - even to a night fury.

“And if he’s too afraid of her to face her?” Said Stoick, dropping his spoon into his bowl, and all those years of uncertainty they might face loomed dark over his head, his heart brittle with dread like char and charcoal at the possibility of having to face the raids once more. “What then? The dragons havn’ae raided, true, but how long will that last? She’ll tire of tolerating him sooner or later.”

“Aye, aye,” Gobber agreed again. He continued to eat his meal, spoonful after spoonful, with utter unconcern beneath Stoick’s stare. “Thing is, Stoick,” He said eventually, “I think yeh’re worrying after nothing. Either this Dragon Master deals wi’ the queen, or he doesn’t. We live wi’ the consequences either way - I say we enjoy the peace while it lasts, and pray tae Odin it lasts a good long while.”

Stoick growled wordlessly, dropping his heavy fist to the table with a forceful knock. “I’m the chief !” He hissed. “It’s my job tae worry!”

“Well then what d’yeh want me tae say, Stoick?” Gobber demanded, waving his spoon and hand before dropping both to the table with equal force as Stoick’s. “You asked my opinion, and I gave it! I’ve got as much of a clue about all’a this as a yak does marriage law! If you’ll not listen tae me take it to Gothi, or wave down the Dragon Master and his devil and ask him!”

“Bah!” Said Stoick, waving it away. “That Dragon Master’s as unhelpful as Gothi. He’s… temperamental - half the times I’ve spoken to him he’s taken offense, and I cann’ae say over what. I’d sooner deal with that dragon queen.”

Gobber snorted, but shook his head too. “Look, Stoick,” He said, “You’ll think I’m mad for sayin’ this but I think tha’ Dragon Master’s honest. He’s been working in my forge making Odin knows what most nights, an’ when he leaves in the morning he’s done half the busywork for me! He’s the one making nails for the repairs, you know.”

“You speak wi' him?”

“Oh aye,” Said Gobber, beginning again on his meal. “Knows his way around a forge, I’ll give him tha’. Damn good wi' the metalworking too, though I admit 'e makes me uneasy, reaching int'ae the forge an' handling the stuff wi' bare hands. But he's got this steel, like nothing I've ever handled before - lighter than anythin' like it, an' twice as tough! Says only he knows how tae make it, an' e's been tweaking the recipe tryin' tae make it more fireproof but still workable. Doesn'ae want to risk his dragon's gear melting if the queen catches them in her fire.”

Stoick’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Gobber narrowed his own; pointing his spoon he said, “Don’t you go gettin’ ideas there Stoick. Metal like tha's hard tae work with an' even harder tae make, an’ I don’t think the Dragon Master’ll give up tha’ kind of secret. I wouldn’t ask him to.”

Grunting, Stoick began once more on his stew. It was thick and rich and filling, as all of Gobber’s food; a comfort, usually, though it sat heavy at the bottom of Stoick’s gut with all this talk of the Dragon Master - with the thought of the long months stretching behind them all where he had not acted against the dragons’ queen, and all the long years ahead where still there was the threat of dragons if he did not kill the queen.

They spoke no more of the creature haunting the skies and the forge, and Stoick returned to his house in the cool dusk of summer night. The pale sunlight stretched long across the world as Stoick trudged along the old paths, answering the greetings of the guards he passed by with a nodded greeting of his own in turn. His hall loomed atop the hill.

Stoick reached for the heavy wooden door, and a staff struck his back with bruising force and nadder-like speed.

He whirled on Gothi, whose ancient scowling face stared back. “What in thor’s name, old woman?!” He demanded, rubbing his smarting shoulder. She didn’t answer except to smack him with her staff again, and shove him aside as she made for his door.

She left it open behind her as her stomping steps took her to Stoick’s hearth. Baffled, Stoick followed her as she lit his hearth, coaxing the flames to life with ease - she did nothing else except tend to it as Stoick shut his door with a thud that resounded in the silence and move to sit in his chair, feeding it and growing it into a bold, bright flame that chased the shadows into the corners of Stoick’s house. But her face was pinched in anger, still, shadows dark in her wrinkles and the spaces beneath her furrowed brows, and so Stoick sat in silence.

When at last she was satisfied with the brightness of the fire Gothi turned on Stoick once more, her wrinkled, lipless mouth pressed thin and her brows low over her clouded eyes as she stared through him to the thoughts he did not think. She slashed a hand through the air with a noise of wordless anger as if to cut whatever she saw in him.

Stoick raised his brows at her, “What?” He demanded, baffled.

Gothi tapped his head with her staff, only slightly more gently than when she’d hit him with it, and offered a drawing. No dread slithered through Stoick’s spine like dragonfire as he took it, and his bewildered gaze dropped to a simple drawing of the Red Death.

Tapping her foot impatiently as she waited for Stoick’s gaze to rise to hers, Gothi slashed her hand through the air once more, shaking her head just to be clear. Slamming the end of her staff against the floor she planted her feet, and blind eyes glared at Stoick with piercing force. For a long, long while she glared, before abruptly nodding to herself, satisfied, and storming from his house as quickly as she had come.

Bruised and battered, Stoick shook off Gothi’s visit and retreated to bed. But he couldn’t quite shake off his thoughts so easily, and he wondered many things as he stared up at the rafters. He wondered, most of all, what it would take to kill a dragon queen.

Chapter Text

Stoick was still nursing his fading bruises from Gothi’s staff when Astrid told him of the twin sailed ship gliding into their harbour.

The world was dawning grim and grey as winter crept down from the north, though the ice still had yet to reach them. The sun rose more shallowly by the day, dim behind an overcast sky; glittering frosts rimed the grasses and the branches each morning, and the nights fell across the world sooner and sooner as the year began to creep to its end. The harvest had gone well, and the fields were full of livestock after a year without dragons snatching them up from the pastures.

It was the best year Berk had ever had since the first huts were built at the mountain’s foot, seven generations ago. Stoick made his way through his village to the cliffs above the harbour, heard his people talk amongst themselves with a cheer he’d never heard before; an easy winter ahead, they marvelled, not so lean and trying. Snoggletog would celebrate more than just the yearly absence of dragons.

He found Eret breaking free of a group of idle vikings eager to share gossip, swaggering up the dock and the ramps to Stoick at the clifftop, but his uneasy eyes were on the low skies.

“Well well!” He said brightly, “You horned hats don’t seem to stop surprising me! Managed to get the Dragon Master on side then, did you?”

“We did.”

Eret slowed to a stop before him. He looked well, unchanged by his time further south for good or ill. His ship was whole, at least - its sails still bright against the dark sea, its odd crew bustling about the deck as they hauled crates onto the docks and Stoick’s people flocked to trade. “Didn’t think he had it in him,” Said Eret brightly. “I won’t stay long, though - the Dragon Master might like you, but, uh… I don’t know if he’ll remember me or not, and I really don’t want to give him the reminder.”

Stoick grunted, sparing him a glance as he watched his people at work. They swarmed the docks like ants, busily exchanging goods and gold with Eret’s crew. Grains and gossip changed hands, iron ores and ingots winching up the cliffs with stories from bustling southern markets. Bolts of cloth and wool earned them good money, one of the few things that did.

They mingled well, eager to speak with one another. Good, Stoick thought - even without dragons they relied on trade, and all of Berk knew to treat their traders well.

“There hasn’t been a raid in months,” Stoick told him, apologetic. “You won’t be getting dragon parts today.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Said Eret, waving it away. “Turns out the south has dragon rider problems of their own. That’s the third damn one I’ve come across now, and this one’s on a skrill; anyone he catches trading in dragons or dragon parts don’t get seen again.”

“Did he catch you?”

Eret grimaced. “No” He said, “But it was a damn near thing, I’ll tell you that. Stopped at a port for a few supplies and got given the warning, next day I dumped all our stock in the sea and not an hour later that thing’s on my deck sniffing around. And that rider," He shivered. "I thought I was scared of the Dragon Master. Well I am, but that one-...  I’ve heard talk he used to lead one of the biggest dragon trapping operations around, you know. Before the Dragon Master smashed it. I don’t believe it, though. Still, trading’s safer. Doesn’t pay as well, but it’s better than fighting… whatever these riders are.”

The sky was shallow and grey overhead, dark with dense cloudcover. Seabirds wheeled above the harbour and around the sea stacks and cliffs where they roosted, a large flock screeching and screaming to one another. The damp wind blowing off the dark, restless sea was briny and pleasantly cool; far overhead a shadow glided across the sky, too high to see if it was shaped like a dragon or like a bird.

Stoick handed Eret a pouch of gold for the supplies he brought, the iron ores and grains and vital gossip. Eret weighed it in his hand, before nodding, satisfied, and stowing it on his belt. “Always appreciate the business,” He said with a dip of his head. “I’ll try and be back before the first winter ice.”

Eret left as soon as he had come. Stoick watched him go broodingly, before returning to the village to walk and speak and smooth over all the petty squabbles and real concerns, and lend a hand where needed. Thoughts churned inside his skull, chafing against bone, and even the lingering ache of bruises Gothi’s staff had left on him couldn’t chase them away.

-:-

Rarely was the Dragon Master seen in their village, but Gobber said he was often in the forge at night. Working on prosthetics, Gobber said - machinery for he and his night fury that wouldn’t burn, so intricate and complicated Gobber could barely make sense of the designs even when the Dragon Master walked him through it.

Gobber liked him, his quick wit and quicker mind.

Stoick’s thoughts ground together, scraping like rock on rock. They weighed on him as heavily as stone, too; why was it taking so long to deal with the dragons’ queen? Was this truly Gothi’s path for them? What doom would befall them if Stoick failed to see it to its end?

-:-

Summer crept to its end and the cold autumn rains began sweeping in. Grass died back, browning with the creeping cold and ice crawling down from the north. Birdsong faded from the forests as night returned and the days began to grow short. Stoick watched the sea often from the top of a cliff far from the village, the wind’s teeth growing sharper day by day when it nipped at his rough cheeks and rougher hands.

Stoick’s certainty in Gothi’s path failed him at last. He called a Thing.

“This Dragon Master is taking too long to deal with this dragon queen,” Said Stoick, once Astrid had dragged in the last stragglers of the village into the Mead Hall. “We’ve waited months for him to act, and he’s done nothing!”

Torches and firepits burned bright against the darkness of deepest night, the span between the setting of the moon and the rising of the sun. The heavy doors were shut tight against the world beyond; the high ceiling of Berk’s mountain hall shadowed black, timber columns and supports stretching into the darkness.

A thin wave of agreement rolled through the crowd, murmurs hushed in the resounding silence, but he heard no dissent either. Stoick met his people’s gazes in turn, as many as he could catch. “How much longer should we give him, when he’s done nothing ?” He said. “He asked us to trust him, and we have. We’ve let him into the village, allowed him to use our forge and take the supplies he’s needed, and what have we to show for it?”

“We havn’ae been raided!” Called a voice near the back of the hall. “Tha’s somethin’!”

Many eyes turned to look for him, but he didn’t speak again. “Aye,” Stoick agreed. “We havn’ae been raided. But that dragon queen, that Red Death, isn’ae dead either. What good will it do us if she’s still out there? Sooner or later the Dragon Master’ll tire of us, or the queen will tire a’ him, an’ where will we be when that day comes?”

Heads nodded, and the wave of agreement was stronger.

“We are vikings!” Stoick said, standing tall beneath the tapestry of Sigurd’s victory over Fafnir. “We don’t sit and wait for others to battle our enemies - we chase it! And if this Dragon Master refuses to deal with this queen, then we will chase battle with her ourselves!”

Cheers echoed off the mountain stone, a roar of pride. “He says we can’t win?!” Stoick bellowed, “What does he know of vikings! For seven generations we’ve stood against dragons, survived every raid; who else kills dragons as we can? Who else carries the blood of Sigurd the dragonslayer?”

Loud roars answered him.

“He says only he and dragons can find the nest?” Said Stoick. “So be it! We’ll use a dragon of our own to find it! An’ we’ll tear every devil from those skies if they stand between us and their queen!”

The relief of certainty at last washed through him, a heady weightlessness in his bones that carried him high on the wave of his people’s approval. And it soothed him, the planning and the arguing and the hunting down of flaws in his plans to make sure it was as solid as iron, unbreakable as steel.

This was a viking’s path, not the slow, winding thing Gothi had him walk; not an easy path but a straight one, carved through the earth step by bloody step if need be so long as it took them where they needed to go.

He organised raids to plunder gold, and told the fishermen to roam further than usual in search of Eret, son of Eret; he ordered the loggers and mills to cut lumber, as much as was demanded of them, and Gobber design and make catapults and trebuchet they could build quickly when they landed on the nest’s shores. He ordered a weapon they could use to end a beast with a head as long as a warship, once it was brought low.

He and his warriors made tactics to deal with the dragon’s queen, with the Red Death. Ways to bind and to break, weak points they could exploit. There could be no doubts to their plans, no attack that dragon could make that they could not counter or weather. Her breed was not known, their weakness undiscovered; so long as the weaknesses of all dragons were true even to her kind then they would prevail. They had to.

Astrid raised the queen’s dragons as a concern, the untold numbers they might face greater than any raid before. A good concern; dragons in any number higher than none were dangerous, never mind facing a whole nest at once. But Stoick doubted the advantage of their numbers away from the village - on Berk Stoick and his people had things to protect and people to save, hemmed in by the care they had to take, but at the nest they had no such weakness, and it was on the dragons to protect their home and save themselves.

Gobber spoke of the island. What land would they fight on? Would it be firm underfoot, would they have the space to fight? Could they spread out the warmachines or would they have to be built uncomfortably close together, and would there be sea stacks and rock in the way even on the beach? Another good concern, but no answers they could have before they landed. If they landed.

Spiteloud stared down at the plans. Did they prepare for siege or brief battle? If they could not defeat the nest quickly then sooner or later their supplies would run out, and with the mists it would be impossible to resupply and maintain pressure on the dragons. The answer was clear, of course, though it was a grim thing that went unspoken; either they would be victorious before the day’s end, or they would be dead.

Stoick kept his own concerns to himself. What if they couldn’t kill the Red Death? What if the Dragon Master came for them?

Gothi watched him speak from her place hidden near the doors. All through the Thing and all through him discussing their plans for war, she watched Stoick speak. Her blind gaze caught Stoick’s near the Thing’s end, when they could plan no more and all was set in motion, and she shook her head as she turned her back and left.

Chapter Text

Gothi watched the preparations through the weeks, glimpsed at the edges of the bustling crowds like a ghost. Her eyes were dark, her lipless mouth pressed into a grim line, as she clutched her staff and shook her head those moments she knew Stoick had seen her. More often Stoick didn’t see her at all, that wizened little shadow haunting him.

Stoick paid her little mind as he oversaw the work. Lumber was cut and shaped, and Gobber worked hard to make them machines of war that could be packed flat on the ships. Rations were prepared and allocated, enough to last them the journey and a good week beyond it. Weapons were sharpened and repaired, talismans for good luck clutched in fists or hanging around necks; prayers and offerings were made, to Thor and Sigurd for victory and to household gods to watch over those left behind.

It was only because of the months of quiet, peaceful nights they had the resources to spare. (Stoick paid that little mind, too).

Berk bustled, busy from sunrise to sunset as the days shortened and the nights lengthened, and the frosts lingered longer and longer each morning. Every ship was conscripted, except for the fishing fleet that could not be spared; they filled Berk’s sheltered harbour, bobbing atop the dark waters with the tide beneath the long shadows of seastacks and arches. Small traders’ karvi were dwarfed by raiders’ snekkja, and those too were small beside swift skeids and powerful drakkars. Calling in the Bog Burglars and Berserkers was considered and quickly dismissed - they would not mobilise in time, and Stoick couldn’t bear the thought of waiting until spring.

But there were preparations for winter, too, that could not be spared. Meat and fish to be salted and smoked, enough firewood piled beneath shelters and beside hearths to last the long, sunless months. Homes were to be fortified against the cold, roof leaks fixed and gaps within the walls to be sealed. Hay needed to be set aside for the livestock, and the sheep and yak to be driven to the fields closer to the village. If they fell in battle so be it, but they could not afford to neglect life afterwards should they succeed.

Stoick worked with his people tirelessly through the days, and his mind was blessedly quiet as he hauled lumber and sorted livestock, and oversaw it all. But he found himself straying to the cliffs above the harbour often, watching the horizon for a twin sailed ship, and his thoughts bubbled uneasily beneath the calm in his head.

-:-

Stoick’s house was dark and silent. The wood and timbers had been replaced so often through the years but the layout had not changed.

Some nights he lay awake, staring at the ceiling with a palm pressed over his trembling lips. There was no one left in his house to hear him, but he could never quite stop himself these nights where his doubts and his fear clawed at the inside of his skull, tearing at his soul. He didn’t often think of Valka, but sometimes he let himself remember; dug his fingers into that old wound until it bled because a part of himself couldn’t bear the thought of letting it heal, of admitting that she was gone.

He wondered, sometimes, what she would think of his failures. She had loved him once, as fiercely as he still did her - loved him for the secret shy, gruff young man who once stammered admiration for her boldness, her bravery in standing up for dragons even when he argued with her over it; for the gentleness he did not know he’d had; for his devotion to protecting his people, even when they disagreed about his methods.

Would she love him now? Would she love him in all his doubts - in all his slaughter of dragons, beasts she had always tried to save, for a moment’s calm he could not keep? Would she love him even though he had lost their son? He hoped she wouldn’t hate him for it all; that she would understand he needed a conclusion, no matter the end, because to live without that certainty would kill him sooner than dragons or hunger ever would.

-:-

The fishermen didn’t find Eret, but one ship did find the Bog Burglars; after robbing them of some of their catch and asking after Stoick Bertha agreed to find the trapper and send him their way. “We need a dragon,” Said Stoick without preamble, when at last Eret sailed into Berk’s harbour and Stoick met him on the docks.

The man nearly fell into the water when his swaggering steps faltered. “You what?”

The sunless sky of dusk was dark and grey, clouds heavy and fat with rain hanging so low they swallowed the peak of Berk’s mountain. The sea heaved restlessly, choppy waves throwing themselves against rock and wooden supports and the hulls of many ships filling the bay. Berk was used to battle - preparations for war took no more than a month when others took many.

The ships bobbed eagerly in the water. Some sat heavy with the unbuilt warmachines, others with their supplies. Still others were unburdened for now, with space enough to carry scores of Berk’s people when the time came to set sail. There was space enough to carry them all, except the pregnant and those too young or too old.

The Dragon Master visited the forge often, Gobber said; testing and rebuilding and testing and testing his prosthetics, meticulous in his methods and driven to seek absurd perfection by the fear in his eyes. But he watched the water often, too - searching and intent for something he didn't name. Waiting, it seemed. Always damned waiting instead of acting!

“Something small,” Said Stoick as he waited for Eret to hurry close. He fished out a pouch full of gold from his belt. “Easy to hide and keep under control. We’ll pay half now, of course.”

“Are you mad!” Eret hissed, eyes glittering darkly in the low light. He jabbed a finger at the sky, “He’s not going to be happy if he catches us at this, and believe you me I really don’t want to make him angry!”

“Then be discreet.”

“DISCREET!” Eret squawked, strangled. He shoved himself close, pushing his words through his bared, gritted teeth. “Are you forgetting that I’ve seen what he does to people that trap dragons? I watched him kill Drago, chief. Drago! It might just be a story for you, some…-” He waved his hands uselessly, “ -... Mad dragon trapper afraid of the monsters in the dark, but it was real. It was real, and I have to live with what I saw for the rest of my life.” He turned his head away with a weary shake of his head. Darkly, he said, ”He might have been protecting you from those raids of yours all this time, but at the end of the day he isn’t like us. He’d turn on you without a second thought if you hurt a dragon again.”

“Then we will deal with him,” Said Stoick.

They could kill him, if need be - even with all his dragons, and his power over a night fury. He was dragonflesh on human bones, weedy and lean; he was nothing more than his dragon, and he would be less than nothing without it.

“And the skrill rider?” Demanded Eret. “You haven’t seen him, chief, but believe you me you don’t want to cross that one. I’m afraid of the Dragon Master, and I’m not ashamed to say it, but that one -” He shuddered. “He’ll tell you black is white and he can make you believe it too, and the whole time he’s talking that skrill is by his side just, watching. And that one in the north isn't any better - never says a word, but she's got a way with the beasts like the Dragon Master.”

Stoick’s jaw tightened. “We can deal with these riders,” He insisted.

Eret pushed a breath through his teeth, eyes sliding closed as he rubbed his forehead. ”You still think you can kill these things!” He hissed, mostly to himself. The glare he cast at Stoick was fierce, the whites of his eyes wide and bright, as he waved his hands uselessly and said, “These riders aren’t just people who got lucky and found a dragon they can control, chief! Whatever these things are they come from something old, and forgotten - something that should have bloody well stayed forgotten.”

“I’m not interested in hurting the damn thing,” Stoick told him impatiently. “We need it for a few days, that’s all - the Dragon Master will never know.”

Eret sighed, stepping away to run his hands through his hair. He shook his hanging head, rocking on his heels with indecisive swings of his arms. A wordless noise of frustration erupted from him as he turned back to Stoick. “A small dragon, you said? How much are you offering?”

Stoick offered the pouch. “As much as a full shipment,” Stoick said. “Half now, the rest when you bring a dragon to me.”

Mouth pressed thin, Eret eyed the pouch. He reached for it, but his fingers hesitated, curling uselessly around the air, as he spared a glance at Stoick. “Do I even want to ask?” He said, but didn’t wait for an answer; his sigh was a forceful thing, a gust of breath full of weary resignation, as he took his money. “Give me a week, I’ll have something for you then. Send a ship to meet me on that island dead south of here, I’m not tempting fate by coming here with it. And if I come back after winter to find your village all ash and ruins, well - don't say I didn't warn you.”

Stoick did as he was bid, and sent the rest of Eret’s payment with the men when they sailed for the island near the end of the week. The dragon they brought back was a terrible terror that thrashed and hissed within its small cage, but it couldn’t bite or burn with its mouth tied shut.

He brought it into his house, smuggled through the village shielded from the skies above by the lay of Stoick’s heavy bearskin cloak. Slamming shut his heavy door behind him, Stoick set the cage down on his table and breathed out a breath of relief, a heavy gust loud in the hush. The dragon hissed at him uselessly, and despite himself Stoick turned to it; found himself watching the little beast as it clawed at the bars and bashed its skull against the door, scrabbling at the latch.

It was a tiny, green little thing -  utterly unremarkable in all ways except for the wart on its nose; little different from any other terrible terror infesting the village. Stoick had killed many with poison or traps when they crept into his stores, and most children’s first kills were terrors. Often they were barely worth the effort of butchering for hides and teeth and horns.

They were not big dragons, but in the tiny cage it seemed even smaller. It panted its fear, ribs heaving, like a rabbit in a snare. Bulbous eyes rolled wildly, sightless with terror. Even its wings had been bound, and it kicked uselessly at the rope holding them flat to its flanks.

An odd twinge struck him, just behind his breastbone, as Stoick watched the little dragon drown in its fear. He stepped towards it, reaching out, and it cringed from his shadow - huddling in the corner of its cage and hissing its harmless threats.

The twinge didn’t leave, needling deeper. Stoick could kill the thing with little effort - it wasn’t even worth the boast that he could kill it one-handed too, most vikings could. He could leave it in the cold, or set dogs on it, or simply throw the cage into the sea. He wouldn't even that much; a tight enough grip, or a quick snap of its neck, or a knife at the base of its throat where life fluttered so visibly beneath thin skin.

He looked into the dragon’s rolling eyes. It trembled with the same knowledge.

Stoick turned from it instead. He moved to his chair before his empty hearth, staring at the ashes and the stone, but a restlessness kept him from sitting. It was done; soon they would sail for the dragon’s nest and be rid of the devils, one way or another. But he rubbed idly at the bruises Gothi had left on him, which had not healed.

Chapter Text

The paths through Berk’s forests were old and worn and winding, game trails crossing wider paths made by human feet. Stoick plodded along them - aimed not towards their few farms or many lumber mills but for the cove sunken into the earth, and the calm that came to him beside that deep pond and the cairn he had built.

The moon hung full and large in the sky, its blueish light so bright and the black shadows so solid the world seemed to be at a stark midday rather than midnight. Dew glittered, as if the stars had been chased from the dull sky by the moon and came to rest on Midgard’s soil; frost began to settle, riming branches and the delicate leaves of ferns. The night was cool, and still - calm beneath a silence unbroken save for Stoick’s steps against the hard ground.

Deep within the forests of Raven’s Point the cove waited, sunken into the earth. Needled boughs rustled faintly overhead as the ground sloped down and stone walls so pale they were an unearthly white in the moonlight rose up. The entrance yawned, darkness a mass so solid in that gap between the rocks Stoick almost felt surprise stir in the back of his head as he passed through.

He waited for the calm to wash over him as his steps were muffled by spongy mosses; yet none came to him. His burn scars itched with lingering heat, his hand moving to grip the hilt of his hammer as he crept out into the bright moonlight - a creak of metal, so soft but so loud in the silence, broke the stillness. A creature as black and stark as the shadows walked here too, upright like a man with a slightly limping gait - but there was a ghost at his back, a faint afterimage of a dragon flickering and unreal in his wake seen only because the moonlight was so bright.

The Dragon Master stood before Hiccup’s cairn, reaching out to touch the old scrap of green fabric that hung limp across the stones without the wind to make it flutter.

The rage took him, an abrupt and mindless wave of heat as Stoick drew his hammer and stormed towards the Dragon Master desecrating this place. “NO!” He bellowed, startling the Dragon Master. The devil stepped back from the cairn, but only a step. “Not here!” Stoick snarled, grip tightening on the haft of his hammer until the leather creaked. “Poke around anywhere else, but not here!”

Fear clawed at Stoick’s scars (he needed this man, this creature, he couldn’t afford to threaten him; neither could Stoick see his dragon but he felt the devil’s gaze piercing through him - imagined the sound of it so clearly he heard it draw the breath to hiss and snarl in defence of its master). But it was dim, lost behind the dull roar in Stoick’s ears and the pounding of blood through his veins.

He waited for the Master’s hiss, his fire and his claws, for his dragon to erupt out of the blackest shadows and destroy him for threatening its master; a part of Stoick bayed for it, eager and raging against the weight over his thoughts and the doubts that had taken root in his head. He was near to panting with the force of his rage, breaths hissing as he pushed them through his bared, gritted teeth.

And oh, the gall of it! How dare he come here of all places on Berk, how dare he desecrate this place!  The unfairness of it all crowded his throat with snarls of his own; that Hiccup and Valka were missing at all, and that Stoick had nothing with which to even guess at what had befallen them; that Stoick’s one place of calm and stillness had been taken from him tonight; that the first eyes to see Hiccup’s cairn that were not Stoick’s own were the Dragon Master’s instead of his son’s!

And a part of him needed to know - did this thing bleed? Could it die? What would happen to it and its devil if it did? Were master and dragon bound together? Were they one life shared or two entwined? What madness awaited Stoick if he killed this creature so many feared, and what madness had already taken him if he did not?

Yet the Master only raised his hands, showed his empty palms, and stepped back from the cairn. Step by step by step he retreated from it, and his feet were too loud against the earth; heavy in a way he'd not been before. “Okay! Okay…” He said as Stoick stepped between he and the cairn, driving him back ever further. “Okay,” He said, as calm and gentle as if Stoick were a beast that could be soothed, a monstrous nightmare that could be tamed at a touch. “You can, uh- you can put that down, now. I’m not poking around anymore.”

Stoick shrugged off the devil's attempts to soothe, but his anger cooled and slithered free of his grasp even so; it ran from him like water even as he tried to hold onto it. He growled wordlessly at the Master, but hung his hammer back on his belt - though his palm itched with its absence. “There’s nothing for you here,” He said, gruff and cold, turning to the cairn. “Go.”

The Dragon Master, of course, did no such thing. Though he at least kept his distance. “Strange place for a marker.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s it for?”

Stoick rested his hand on the haft of his hammer once more, soothing the itch in his palm, against that damned man's canny guess. Frustration curled and churned in his chest, burning through his blood and heating his face as he snarled, “Why do you care? This has nothing to do with you, or with dragons - leave!”

“Call it morbid curiosity,” Said the Dragon Master dryly, but there was something dark, something raw and bleeding, that was betrayed in his voice. Some old sorrow he could not keep hidden.

The air was still and mild, wind blowing harmlessly across the top of the cove. The life here was dormant, for now - sluggish or sleeping with the night. The blunt smell of pine needles was pleasant, the pondwater glittering gently in the bright moonlight, and the cove was otherwise silent and empty. Not even the Dragon Master’s devil, stark against the world, dared to darken the earth here with its shadow, though Stoick felt its weight all the same.

No calm came to him, but even Stoick’s frustration bled out here. The weight that came often to his head and heart crept over him, and Stoick found himself lowering himself down to sit before the cairn beneath it. What did it matter, anymore, if the Dragon Master knew this weakness? Neither Valka or Hiccup were here to be used against him, and their memories could not hurt him worse than they already did.

And Stoick had grown so tired of waiting for answers and solutions to come to him. He had decided his path at last, a viking's path that marched forward instead of dawdling for help that did nothing, and he may not live to see beyond its end. Come dawn the nest awaited, and the horror that dwelled within. What did it matter anymore?

“My son,” Said Stoick shortly, staring at the stones he’d built up and the scrap of fabric hanging down. “He’s been missing, for many years now. Perhaps he lives - more likely he’s dead.”

The Dragon Master remained silent for a long while behind Stoick’s back, though still he didn’t leave. “You still…” He murmured thickly, “...Hope he’ll come back.”

“I hope that someday I’ll learn his fate,” Said Stoick. “Whatever it might be.”

Soft steps padded across softer earth, nearly silent except for the slight creak of metal. A little ways away the Dragon Master slowed to a stop, and lowered himself to sit too; his metal foot curled beneath him, his other of flesh and bone stretched out. Yet his gaze remained on the cairn all the while, unbroken and unblinking; it shone in the dark like his dragon's.

“What was he like?”

“Like his mother,” Said Stoick, and blinked away the memory of her face, blurred with tears and time. “Clever. Kind. Too kind for war, but they never lost it. Neither of them were fighters, but Hiccup tried. Odin, how he tried. Couldn’t swing an axe or throw a bola to save his life, and I-” Stoick’s throat turned tacky, his words thick, “-I feared for him. He couldn't even protect himself, never mind the village - who would keep him safe when I died? I was harsh with him - too harsh, maybe, but he was too damn stubborn for his own good - always putting himself an' the whole village in danger with his antics, every raid.”

It gnawed at his scars, the thought that he was speaking too much of his son - too much of their bloody conflict with dragons, and speaking of it to the dragons’ master - but it bubbled out him despite himself. He couldn’t swallow his own words as he stared at the cairn he had built for Hiccup and spoke to a horror whose steps should not have come to this place.

“When he succeeded in his training, I was proud - more proud than I could ever tell him. I was going to give him his helmet - made of his mother’s breastplate, a matching set with mine." He tapped it, iron ringing beneath his nail. "To keep her close, you know. But he vanished, that night. I’ve lost them both.”

Slowly, the Dragon Master’s head lowered, twisting until his face was turned away - from Stoick and the cairn both. There was sorrow in the dark shadow of him against the world, though Stoick could not say how he knew. A grim, bitter regret that bowed his spine and lowered his shoulders.

He seemed small, alone in the cove. More human without his dragons, the power he wielded over them unneeded, though his skin was scaled still and there was nothing human about his eyes or his flat face, or the spikes along his spine. Revulsion itched and scratched at Stoick’s scars, but the thought came unbidden all the same; Stoick wondered who he had been before the dragons made him their own, that boy born to vikings before the dragonflesh took over his bones.

What had the dragons done to him, when that devil he loved like a brother stole him from his people?

The Dragon Master hugged his raised knee. “No one misses me,” He said bitterly, quietly and to himself. “Me, not whoever I had to keep pretending to be.”

“I’m sorry.” Stoick surprised himself with the apology. He surprised himself more by meaning it, too.

The Dragon Master snorted, more venomously than Stoick had heard from him yet. “Yeah, well. Don’t be. It’s better for everyone if they never know.” His gaze dropped to his scaled hands, his fingers fidgeting in their loose fists. "I was never what they wanted, anyway. I wasn't a viking, and I was never going to be one - I was just the last one to work that out. But..."

The cove was still and silent at their backs. The pondwater glittered brightly, needled boughs high above rustling softly in the faint breeze that never slipped within the pale stone walls. Even the moonlight was bright enough to touch the Dragon Master, a thin shining line along the curve of his back and outlining a few scales; it even betrayed the ghost whose flickering shadow had settled low over the Master's scaled skin, slowed into its own stillness and almost impossible to see if Stoick hadn't already noticed it before.

In a heavy gust the Dragon Master breathed out, not quite a sigh, as his shoulders slumped lower. “I’m sorry too," He said. "For what it’s worth. I-... I don’t think he meant to hurt you. Your son.”

“Aye, well,” Stoick said, staring up at the cairn while his people rested for the coming battle. “I never meant tae hurt him when I scolded him as harshly as I did, but that does’nae mean I didn’t. It’s too late now for those kinds of regrets.”

Chapter Text

A dark, heavy sky hung low over Berk, low enough it hid Gothi’s hut and Berk’s mountain’s peak - it smothered even the dawn sky burning at the horizon. Little light crept across the world, weak and grey. Seabirds swarmed the sky, chased in by the promise of a storm in the stiff wind and choppy waves; they screeched and squabbled for a place to roost on the craggy stone, streaked and stained pale, of the seastacks and towers that sheltered Berk’s harbour.

Stoick watched over the last of the preparations as his people hauled weapons and supplies. The docks bowed and groaned beneath Stoick’s feet, protesting all the heavy steps hurrying back and forth. In grim, uncommon silence Stoick’s people worked or boarded the many ships, sitting on the benches for their shift of rowing or watching the skies with bows drawn and arrows nocked and bola at the ready, for dragons.

Few were to be left behind, the young and the old and the pregnant. From the dock at the base of the cliffs, out of the eay, they watched over their family who may not come back with dry eyes.

At last, when all was done, Astrid made her way to Stoick’s side. The terrible terror in the cage under his arm hissed and lunged for her, a mock charge stopped short by the bars, but she didn’t grace it with a flinch. “We’re ready, chief.”

“Good,” Said Stoick.

He boarded the leading ship, while Astrid moved to her own. Stoick stepped up to the prow with the gazes of all his people heavy on his back, a weight and a comfort, and clapped a hand to the neck of the snarling dragon’s head. “Today, we sail for the dragons’ nest!” He said, and he knew his words would carry just as he knew that his people didn’t need to hear them to know what he said. He held up the terror in its cage. “This dragon will betray them, and Odin willing we will be the first to land on the devils' nest! For the first time in seven generations vikings can bring the war to the dragons; for the first time we can bring an end to the raids, once and for all! TO VICTORY OR VALHALLA!”

War cries answered him, and the terrible terror cringed and whined at their roar. At Stoick’s word the oars dug deep into the water, carrying the ships from the safety of Berk’s harbour and out to the open sea.

Scars and old healed breaks in older bones ached in the damp air, the wind cold enough it cut the inside of Stoick’s nose and bit at his fingers and cheeks. He breathed it deep all the same, touching the haft of his hammer and the familiar leather wrap. The sails were unfurled and filled with wind, carrying the fleet swiftly across the sea to Helheim’s Gate; as the sun rose and the sky struggled to lighten Stoick stared at that dark wall of smoke and fog sitting atop the sea.

Rising taller than mountains and as fathomless as the sea, the smoke and mist hung on the air unmoving despite the brisk wind. Stone and seastacks rose just above the fog, betraying the land at the Gate’s heart, but nothing else showed through.

Stoick lifted the cage to his face, staring at the terrible terror within. The dragon cringed into the furthest corner it could, hissing and snarling and posturing all the while. Unlatching the door Stoick grabbed the little beast and pulled it from its cage, though its scrabbling, grabbing claws dug furrows into the wooden floor as it resisted him. Its bulging orange eyes rolled as it panted in Stoick’s grip, thrashing wildly in his hand, but it stilled when Stoick pulled a dagger from the sheath on his belt - its gaze caught on the iron, and its gleaming edge.

Carefully, Stoick cut the bindings around the dragon’s wings. It began to thrash and struggle all the more, wings beating frantically as it strained for the sky; but it was only a little dragon, easily held in one hand, and Stoick had no trouble looping rope around its skinny neck and tying it to the snarling head of the ship’s prow. The mists of Helheim’s Gate began to reach for them. “Lead us home, dragon,” He said as he released it.

The terror flew to the end of its line immediately, and the rope snapped taut as it tried every direction it could to pull itself free. Satisfied, Stoick faced the mists and the gloom as the sails were closed and the oarsmen carried them on. “Take us in!” He called, skin crawling beneath the mists’ cool, damp touch as Helheim’s Gate swallowed his fleet.

To victory or Valhalla, Stoick thought grimly as the low, droning, chittering hum of dragons rolled through the mists and the water. Whichever came first.

-:-

Helheim’s Gate was deep, and dark. The smoke and fog choked the light, throttling the sun; the gloom pressed in, grey and grim, and the sea was lightless and still beneath the ships. Spires and stacks jabbed into the sky like dragon teeth, black stone rising from blacker water. The world grew darker still as the day came slowly to its end, as thick as tar; they didn’t dare light torches, here, but they didn’t dare stop and wait for dawn, either. The oarsmen rowed slowly, and in silence.

The terrible terror guided them through the night, straining against the rope to follow an instinctive path with empty eyes. Its wingbeats were loud in the muffling fog, its ribs heaving as it panted its fear.

Water lapped gently against the hulls - a mindless, intermittent sound jarring in the silence beneath the terror’s wingbeats, jangling along their nerves. Now and then the sound of other wingbeats came to them, at once both muffled and clear - impossible to say where they came from or from how far away. Stoick’s people stared up and out from beyond their ships, hands gripping the hafts and handles of their weapons, but no fire or gaping, toothy jaws erupted out of the darkness.

They slept in shifts, with eyes always turned upwards. They might all have slept better if a dragon had attacked, if only for the relief of putting the nervous energy of fear to use.

-:-

By morning the dragons' nest loomed out of the mists. Black stone jabbed into the sky, the jagged peak scraping at the low, soot-black clouds. Lava beaded along cracks and rolled down the rocky flanks like blood. The mists were thinner over the water, here; dim sunlight stained the world, tinged a sickly yellow-grey.

The low, droning, chittering hum of dragons filled the air, so loud and so thick it leaned against their skulls, pressing against their minds until it drowned out all sound, all thought, and all that they were left with was the animal fear in their racing hearts. Staring up at the volcano nest as they sailed to its pebbled shore Stoick’s scarred skin crawled, itching with lingering heat in his burns, as he remembered all the deaths he’d seen because of dragons.

But there was another sound beneath the dragons’; a slow, soft, droning song that came to Stoick’s thoughts like the memory of a sound, so clear in his head he could almost hear it in his ears, too. There was a sweetness to it like carrion, like rot, and a voice that pierced Stoick’s mind so deep that he thought he almost understood it.

The terrible terror shook off the trance that had taken it as the oarsmen drove the ships up the beach to rest on the pebbled shores; it shrieked and squealed in fear as Stoick stepped up to the prow beneath it, though it strained to get away not from Stoick but the dragon nest.

Its bulbous eyes bulged and rolled, wingbeats so frantic the air thrummed. All four of its legs flailed as it clawed uselessly at the air. The rope dug into its neck, a noose tight around its throat it choked against, but it didn't stop the terror from trying to flee with as much desperate force as it did.

Mouth pressed thin, Stoick yanked the little dragon down from the air and cut its bindings; it had done its duty. The dragon flew free immediately, without even a cursory snap at Stoick’s fingers or a puff of flame. Grimly Stoick watched it disappear into the mists, as at his back the nest chittered and droned at a higher, agitated pitch.

The drone of dragons stopped when Stoick vaulted over the side of the ship, landing heavily on the pebbled beach. The ground was warm, even through his boots - the rounded pebbles clattered beneath his feet, jarringly loud before the echoes faded; only smothering silence, and the soft lapping of water smooth and still, remained; silence, and the slow, droning song buzzing deep in the bone of Stoick’s skull, humming carrion-sweet words Stoick didn’t know that had a terrible meaning he almost thought he did.

He blew out a breath. The first viking to land on the dragon’s shore; a triumph that would be beaten only by the death of the dragon queen.

But as he marched up the beach with his people at his back and Astrid by his side, all with shining eyes wide and bright with terror, Stoick found none of the pride that should have kindled in his chest. As he and Astrid orchestrated the preparations, the building of the war camp on the beach and defensive lines of sharpened spikes aiming outwards jammed into the earth, he found no warm glow of victory. No delight in success at last as the artillery were quickly assembled along the shore, no eager thrill in his blood for the coming battle.

When all was done Stoick faced the dragons’ nest alone, while all of Berk waited at his back, and he found only dread. The loaded trebuchets towered tall, dwarfed by the rocky spires and seastacks, and the volcano whose base seemed to stretch endlessly into the mists; ballistae manned and guarded aimed harpoons and waited, hands gripping winches and levers tight; warriors dug in their heels, battle-ready as they held their weapons at the ready and murmured prayers.

At his gesture orders were shouted and the men at the trebuchets hauled on the pulling ropes as one, roaring their effort; the long arms and slings flung boulder after boulder at a crack in the volcano’s base, one after the other in a continuous assault as the slings were reloaded and the arms winched back into position while the others launched. Black, brittle rock cracked and crumbled, and eventually shattered into the yawning mouth of a deep, lightless chasm leading deep into the volcano.

No cheers greeted the rubble and the plume of dust. Stoick climbed the loose, jagged gravel to the chasm mouth and stared into that black abyss. There was a dim, blood red glow in its depths, deep at the volcano's heart, and the song echoed through the stone clearer than ever before - a sound that seemed almost to have words slid through his thoughts, and despite himself Stoick found his mind clawing at itself as it strained to understand.

He shivered, dragonfire licking up his spine. His scars itched and crawled, and a terrible, cowardly part of himself wanted to turn back to the ships and abandon this battle. No viking had landed on the nest's shores before, perhaps for good reason; even if they had, they hadn't come home afterwards.

But Stoick had been a warrior of Berk long before he’d been its chief. He raised his head, planted his feet, and held the haft of his hammer tightly as he waited for the call from Astrid further down the beach that the ball of woven reeds painted with pitch had been loaded onto a catapult.

His eyes slid closed when her voice echoed across the beach, “Ready!”

The dread only grew heavier as he hesitated. The doubt crept in, creeping across his thoughts like char; what doom had he led his people to, if all his plans failed them? But what hope did they have if the Red Death wasn’t killed, either? He muttered a prayer as he raised his hammer over his head, signalling.

Far behind him the reeds were lit and launched. Stoick heard the roar of its flames long before it sailed over his head, singeing the stone of his hammer as it passed. The reeds sailed down the endless chasm, down and down until even the glow of its flames was swallowed up by the hungry darkness within, but its light touched the backs of dragons covering the walls. The beasts were crowded so tightly Stoick couldn’t even see the stone beneath their claws.

For a single breathless moment Stoick’s gaze met the dragons’, and a brief swell of utter terror struck him. It wasn’t his own, but it crushed him down and turned over his mind and seized his lungs all the same; the thudding of his racing heart deafened him as much as the beating of hundreds of dragon wings as the dragons streamed from the chasm, winging past Stoick’s head.

The dragons screamed. Eyes rolling, swarming so thickly the air thrummed with the frantic beating of their wings, above the roars of vikings the dragons screamed. Blindly they fled for open skies, clawing and scrabbling over rock and men and each other; loosed arrows tore holes in wings and pierced scales, downing dozens of the beasts, while the catapults flinging boulders knocked down many at a time as they sailed through the swarm.

Yet even on the ground - even as vikings charged at them, crushing bone and hacking at flesh - the dragons didn’t attack. Blood rained down from wounded dragons who struggled to fly, and downed dragons clawed pitifully to follow, scrabbling and thrashing on the loose pebbles of the beach. In moments all dragons were gone, except the dead or dying beasts strewn across the beach, and the silence in their wake weighed heavier than before. Even the song had gone quiet; its absence hurt worse than its sound, like the sting left behind when an arrow was pulled out.

Stoick slid down the gravel slope before the chasm’s mouth. “Get ready!” He called, ushering his people away to make room, before he spun to face the queen.

A growl rolled through the earth, guttural and deep like the grinding of rock against rock in landslides. The world trembled with its rage, pebbles rattling all along the beach with the sheer, droning force of it. Stoick found his breath stilling in his lungs, chest seizing tight and gasping as the sound of it pressed against him like a physical weight.

The scrape of claws against stone was muffled behind the sheer wall of the volcano’s face but loud, the thump of heavy dragon steps and heavy hiss of dragonscale louder still. Rock split and shattered like the thin ice of springtime beneath enormous, bearlike paws; she tore her way free, forcing herself out of her home and into the world with a landslide as the volcano face crumbled around her and slid down the beach to crash into the water, taking out one of the trebuchet as the men fled it.

Six small, bulbous eyes stared down at them all, jaws bristling with teeth as long as spears opening with a snarl that rattled the water until its whole surface rippled and splashed. Dull red spikes peppered her blue-grey skin, while the dull, blood-red glow of the volcano’s heart bled through the enormous hole she had torn and stained her too. Crowned by a bony coral-like frill she held herself tall and proud, easily twice the height of the trebuchets.

Her song returned, not sound but her and her alone, and this time Stoick understood it. The Red Death.

Chapter Text

For a single, absurd moment Stoick stared at the dragon queen; stuck somewhere between awe and utter horror.

She stared at them too, narrow-eyed and calculating, and her thoughts struck theirs with her roar as if turning over their minds and plunging them into the sea. They tumbled in the churning force of her will; deafened by the crashing of rock into rock as the shattered face of the volcano slid to a stop across the beach, blinded by terror as the mist and fog leaned in - swallowing up all the world as if they’d passed into Niflheim.

Stoick opened and shut his mouth, but his voice was strangled in his throat; a witless fish as the great, bear-like queen of dragons lowered her head to smell the meat that had so helpfully breached itself on her shore. Her bulbous eyes alone were as tall as Stoick, thin pupils so large a man could fall through them like a yawning doorway. Huge, arched nostrils opened and closed as she sniffed, great gusts of breath that scattered the pebbles and kicked up plumes of the dust beneath. Her throat rippled - all muscle and tendon and sagging, scaled skin - with her pleased growl, but life pulsed there too; blood forced through large veins with each beat of her powerful heart.

“Ballistae,” Said Stoick, soft, as he stared their death in the eye; but he had found his voice, and raised it with his hammer as he bellowed, “BALLISTAE, NOW!”

The fear the queen brought was strong, but viking wills were stronger and Stoick’s people fumbled to obey, forcing their fear from their heads as they focused on the battle. Stumbling and staggering Berk’s warriors leapt into motion; levers were pulled and the harpoons aimed and launched, sinking deep into the Red Death’s flesh all along her neck and flanks on both sides. She threw back her head with another roar, one that wasn’t sound but force, so loud Stoick’s heart stuttered and his lungs seized in his chest, and she marched down the beach with her bellow of rage at the gall of it.

Blood dripped from her pinprick wounds, splashing across the pebbles far below and a few unlucky warriors. She lunged for them, clearing ship lengths in single strides, biting and snapping; she stepped over Stoick, and her body alone blocked out all the sky.

The men scattered before her, staggering as her every step jarred the earth and threw out pebbles that struck their legs and backs. Some who stumbled were caught beneath those enormous, bearlike paws - crushed beneath the fat, cushioned pads and the heavy flesh and bone within, or beneath her overgrown talons. Bone crunched wetly, shouts of terror abruptly silenced; she paid as little heed to the dead dragons beneath her heels as the living vikings who slashed at her paws or scrabbled helplessly over the pebbles, pausing only to lift a paw and lick the blood and meat from her skin.

She snatched up others, snagging them in teeth as long as spears and tossing them back into her mouth, gaping jaws snapping shut with a sound like a thunderclap. Their screams were shrill before they were muffled by her closed mouth, and were silenced in fits and stretches as her throat squeezed tight with her crushing swallows.

Loosed arrows whistled through the air in loose flocks; most bounced off her scales, others stuck only shallowly, but still others plunged deep - minor wounds but a sting even so, an irritant like the stinging of bees or wasps. Small oozes of blood trickled across her skin. She shook herself irritably, precious moments to scrabble into place.

Stoick forced himself across the beach in her wake, stumbling into her deep footprints and slipping on blood-slick rock. “The ropes!” He snarled, fear boiling within his chest and throat like leaping flames. “GET THE ROPES!”

The men scrambled for the ropes as thick as fists hanging from the harpoons lodged in the Red Death’s skin, dragging across the ground. Stoick grabbed the end of the one lodged near her head, and Gobber by his side dug his hook and his fingers into the fibres with him; they hauled on it, groaning with the strain, but their heels were only dragged through the pebbles for their effort as the queen swung her head at one of the trebuchets.

Long teeth and powerful jaws crushed timber as thick as tree trunks like toothpicks, and with a snarl she swung her head heavy with its bony crown at another to topple it. But others had grabbed the ropes too; over a dozen of Berk’s strongest at each. “QUICKLY!” Stoick bellowed, and they hauled on the ropes. The queen grunted as rope after rope was yanked taut, the barbed harpoons hooked on her flesh holding fast.

Coarse rope scraped Stoick’s hands raw, palms burning with the sting. His arms and knees shook, sweat beading on his skin, an ache in his knuckles and shoulders building to an agony. He panted in heaving gusts through bared, gritted teeth, blood pounding hot at his face as his heart hammered against the inside of his ribs.

The dragon queen roared again, trying to throw her head back once more, but she was struggling too - groaning with the strain as force matched force and they stayed locked, the stalemate they had hoped for.

“NOW!”

Trebuchets were aimed and boulders launched, striking the Red Death’s skull and breaking on her bones. She stumbled, head dropping and unable to lift it again as Stoick and his people kept the ropes taut, gave her no ground; even as she growled, guttural and hateful, with the effort of trying to move, dragging them a foot or two across the beach as she turned her head to hiss.

Astrid and the others just as quick and light on their feet darted in, racing across the beach and beneath the queen’s jaw and throat. Stonemasons took shortened harpoons and drove them into one of the Red Death’s wrists, hammering them deep into flesh and bone as they would chisels into rock. She whipped her head to the side, dragging Stoick and the men with him off their feet, as she lunged to catch them in the cage of her teeth; another volley of boulders subdued her and her head swung back, hung dazed and swaying between her powerful forelegs.

More men came forward, grabbing the ropes lodged above her paws; as many on the ropes of the one foot as the ropes in her body that held her bound. They groaned as they hauled on it, heels scraping furrows into the beach, as Astrid’s group ran clear of the queen. Slowly, so slowly, they dragged that enormous paw across the ground - inch by inch, step by step, until at last her foothold gave out and her paw slid out beneath her.

With a groan the Red Death crashed onto her shoulder, forelimb pinned beneath her. A wave of pebbles struck them, stinging and bruising; a cloud of dust rose, thick enough to choke. An enormous web of netting sailed over her back and was grabbed and weighted with heavy stones hurriedly dragged from further up the beach before she could take the chance to rise. They held onto the ropes and nets, too, just to be certain.

For a few dragging moments they waited, and then they breathed out. They had done it; sprawled across the beach Stoick and his people held the Red Death, bound and pinned as her sides heaved and her eyes rolled across them all with a rage as cold and black as the very depths of the sea.

Stoick gave his place at the rope to two others who trotted up to take it. He flexed his hands, wincing at the sting of the raw, reddened skin of his palms and the ache in his bones as he rolled his shoulders. He met the queen’s many eyes, and his scars itched and crawled with dread as she regarded him coolly. A dry, guttural hiss slithered between her long teeth as Astrid came to his side with the spear Gobber had made for him. The fire-blackened haft was smooth and comfortable in his hands, the gleaming blade of the spearhead sharp.

Fire clawed at the inside of Stoick’s skull, charring his thoughts, despite it all. The spearhead had seemed big while Gobber had been making it, the haft tall; all through him shaping the blade over his anvil and carving the haft with a tool he mounted on the stump of his missing hand it has seemed grand. It was taller than Stoick, even, and about as sturdy - a fine weapon he’d thought as Gobber laboured proudly.

Stoick nodded his thanks to Astrid, but didn’t dare turn his head; what could he and this spear do to the dragon queen, when he wasn’t much bigger than one of the red spikes in her skin?

He stared into her eyes, and he saw how the Red Death hated him; hated him as much as she yearned to destroy him, a hunger to humble him as much as the ravenousness always clawing at her gut. She pressed it onto his mind, shadowing his thoughts with her own - with the truth that he was a morsel, barely even a meal. Meat armed and armoured before the hungry queen who ruled the archipelago.

Stoick faltered beneath it, as they all faltered beneath that weight in their skulls, the terror that clouded their thoughts like the creeping wall of mist and smoke. But he held close thoughts of Hiccup, of Valka, of Fishjaws and the countless lives lost to dragons, perhaps even this dragon, and he marched.

His people’s gazes rested on his back, a weight and a comfort, as Stoick walked around the beast and didn't dare move past the front of her. Beneath the groans of the men holding the dragon queen bound, and the Red Death’s gusting breaths, pebbles crunched startlingly loudly beneath his every step. He stared up at her, up and up and up, as he fell beneath her shadow; her bony crown hid the sky, and her shoulder and flank rose taller still. Her hunger dwarfed even more, spread across all viking lands where dragons raided.

Her gaze weighed on him too - following him on his path alongside her head, down her neck to the base of her throat where the skin was thinnest and life drummed so visibly through her veins. Stoick found himself pressing a hand to her jaw, dragging across her neck, as he walked, and they both shivered their revulsion at the warmth of each other’s skin against their skin. Small, rough scales scraped his palms just as the rope had, the living heat of her near scalding. He felt the passage of her breaths rushing through her throat, and the silent echoes of each slow, cacophonous beat of a giant heart against his hand.

Stoick’s own tiny lump of flesh in his chest beat louder, drumming against bone and blood roaring in his ears.

At the base of her throat, where her neck joined her body, Stoick pulled away and slowed to a stop. Hefting the spear Stoick levelled its sharp blade at the hollow at the base of her throat, where the skin was thinnest and her blood flowed most. Closing his eyes he steeled himself with a breath; jaw gritted, teeth bared, Stoick plunged the spear deep.

Scales and skin dented beneath the spear’s point, and then yielded, but only a thin coppery ooze sweetened the air. The Red Death growled, pained, head dragging across the beach as she turned to snap but Stoick’s people scrabbled to contain her once more; Stoick did not retreat, as deeper and deeper he drove the spear. Skin a finger-length’s thick gave way to meat and muscle, and the Red Death growled in earnest, the pain of the wound rolling through them all. Stoick sucked a breath through gritted teeth at the phantom sting, the imagined weight of a tiny spear sliding through his throat, but he squeezed shut his eyes and pressed ever onwards; digging the spear through her flesh as he sought the artery. “Come on,” He growled to her, trembling with a hatred that was and wasn’t his own, and she growled over him in turn - an echo and an answer. “Come on, damn you!”

Straining against the ropes that held her bound the queen threw herself against their might and their ropes. Stoick stumbled and his people stumbled and fell with him, footing loose on the round, wet pebbles underfoot; netting scraped across her scales, a harsh, grating rasp.

“STOP HER!” Stoick ordered, scars itching as fire clawed at the inside of his skin, churning in his mouth. He wrestled the spear deeper, throwing his weight against the haft to sweep the spearhead through the queen’s flesh even as she shoved him back, throwing herself against the ropes once more. Desperately he searched for that vein, that artery - to leave just enough of a nick on those walls full of life to bleed her of it. “HOLD HER STILL, SOMETHING!”

“MAKE NOISE!” Astrid bellowed.

They did; shouting, stomping, roaring, bashing hammers and the flat of axes and blades against shields, the people of Berk raised a din that could have sent a raiding party of dragons tumbling from the sky. Even the queen faltered, head swaying, but it wasn’t enough. Inch by inch she raised her head, heedless of the men who threw all their weight and strength against the ropes that bound her. Her other foreleg, the one not pinned, dragged through the pebbled beach, overgrown claws flexing; boulders from the trebuchets bought them no time - she dropped her head as they launched, and they sailed harmlessly over her crown.

"HOLD HER!" Stoick roared. "FOR THE LOVE OF THOR HOLD HER!"

Vikings ran for the ships and the supplies kept safe on them. The sharpened spikes embedded in defensive rows were pulled out and thrown, but they bounced off the Red Death's face and left only scratches - she barely graced them with a flinch. Bola with rope the length of ships and weighted with stones the size of gronckle skulls were brought out, two men needed to carry just the one racing back up the beach while others searched.

The Red Death's gaze rolled across them all, keen and cunning and furious. She drew breath, ribs rising and throat fluttering with the air rushing into her lungs. Her breath whistled through her teeth as she opened her jaws, heat and the muffled roar of fire building in her throat until the air swam. Stoick hissed as his skin reddened and blistered, sweat stinging his face and his slippery hands as he shoved the spear ever deeper; her blood flowed at last, a small spurt, and the Red Death’s thoughts were warning enough that Stoick’s people fled either side of her.

A few couldn't run far enough; fire billowed from her jaws, a great column of flame as long as the Red Death herself. The air boiled, churning and shimmering with the raw heat; water burned instantly to steam, even the sodden wood of the ships catching. The rope netting blackened, charred brittle. Stoick cried out as he stumbled from her, driven back, but it was lost beneath the roar of heat - a blistering sting needled deep in his skin, sharp and merciless as if brambles had wormed their way beneath. His hands and the side of his face had been burned red and blistered, leather and wool smoking and blackening around heated rivets and beneath scaled mail.

Smoke billowed from the burning ships, a black column rising into the sky like the seastacks within the mists, and brought with it a murky, acrid haze that settled low over the beach. The dull glow of the fires and the volcano’s lava filled the world with a sickly, fleshy light when the Red Death swallowed her fire - scattered axes and blades lay slumped across the pebbles, glowing and melted across the stone, wooden shields and rope a thin smear of ash.

The stench of burned flesh sweetened the air - beneath the roar of flames consuming their ships, and the Red Death’s guttural rumble of pleasure, a few cries of agony echoed over the beach at the handful of twisted bodies left behind in the dragonfire’s wake. They lay withered and shrunken on the beach, stripped of skin and flesh until only thin strings of wilted, charred muscle clung to blackened bone and melted metal. They had curled in on themselves, arms raised to cover their faces - for futile, desperate protection as they burned. The teeth in those grimacing, lipless faces were startlingly bright in the hazy gloom.

Charred netting broke and half-melted harpoons fell from her skin as slowly, languidly, the Red Death heaved herself to her feet and shook herself off. Drips of blood flew from the tiny harpoon wounds and rolled down from the stab at her throat, the spear tumbling uselessly from her flesh with a melted, mangled blade. Wreathed in black smoke that swallowed what little light came through the mists and fog her eyes gleamed, as brightly as the dead warriors’ teeth.

A noise rolled through her throat, deep and guttural - a repeated, slow hough as if she were laughing.

Chapter Text

The sea glowed as the ships burned. Wood cracked and crumbled into char and charcoal, hulls sinking slowly beneath the waves. But behind the dirty yellow haze, and beneath the clouds of black smoke hanging low over their heads like the shadow of the great Red Death, the rippling surface of the water glowed bright with the fires’ light. Stoick stared, helpless to watch; their only escape consumed by a burning sea.

The air swam with heat, as much a weight against his skin as his armour and his bearskin cloak, and his eyes watered against the stinging smoke that scratched the inside of his nose and throat until even his chest burned; the world wobbled and wavered, a smear of dull light, as Stoick’s eyes watered against the sting.

Ash and embers fell like snow, settling softly on Stoick’s skin and hair; as softly as the knowledge that he had doomed his tribe.

It was Astrid who rallied first; Astrid whose shout echoed over the beach, ringing and clear like the tolls of the warning bell of Berk. “Run!” She called, faltering only to cough, “RUN! RUN NOW! FALL BACK!”

But her voice was muffled in Stoick’s ears, distant and indistinct - even when she raced across the beach to him, grabbed his wrist hard enough her nails broke skin and tugged uselessly. “Chief!” She cried, and behind the blurring in Stoick’s eyes the side of her face and arm was a mottled patchwork of the shiny, exposed flesh and black char of deep burns. “Chief, come on! We’ve got to run!”

Stoick’s people fled along the beach, blind and stumbling in smoke too thick to see more than arms-length before them. They tripped over the charred and mangled bodies of man and dragon, or fell into the enormous footprints the queen had left behind; her great head swung to follow them, her dry, hissing growl slithering from between her teeth as she turned from the ships.

His eyes fell on the mountain’s face, and the black, brittle stone full of cracks and tunnels. He turned his arm in Astrid’s hold and gripped her own in turn. “Aye,” He agreed, and pulled her along with him for a few long strides across the beach before he pushed her ahead of him, raising his voice above the roaring of flames and the Red Death’s heavy steps. “Get to the volcano! Look for tunnels tae hide in!”

If ever the gods had favoured Berk, they did now; the volcano’s slopes of brittle black stone loomed tall, riddled with faults and fissures and caverns where dragons had dwelled for ages beyond counting. It didn’t take long before someone found a fissure they could all fit within. Astrid and Stoick stumbled blindly towards that ringing cry, grabbing hands and necklines in passing and dragging the faltering back to their feet and towards safety - together they ushered the last of their people within while the Red Death followed closely on their heels.

Its entrance was narrow, just barely wide enough for them to pass through, but the fissure was deep and wide beyond the mouth. They crowded within it, bunched up like sheep staring witlessly at the dull glow of the fires beyond the stone. Stoick had barely slipped inside himself before the Red Death’s jaws snapped shut where he had just been.

They all cringed deeper, and Stoick’s heart hammered against his unmoving ribs as he held his breath and stared too. The Red Death growled her frustration as her mouth closed on empty air; her shadow darkened even the dim light that came to them, her long teeth crossing the mouth of the fissure like cage bars. The stone shook as she slammed her claws against the volcano’s face above them with a roar, dust and loose rock crumbling beneath her might to rain over their heads, but it held. It held. For now, and not for very long as the Red Death dug at the volcano’s slopes, but it held.

Stoick let go of his breath in a heavy gust.

Hundreds of pairs of wide eyes bright and stark with terror stared at him from burned and soot-blackened faces - too many more weren’t there to stare at him at all. Stoick turned his head away from them all, fumbling for the stone wall to lean against and press his face into his palms. Grit and soot itched at his skin - there was heat even in the stone, here, hot against his back, and Stoick’s chest ached with grief that held the same heat. Guilt tugged at his heart, like the Red Death’s claws at mountain stone; the ache of it twisted and churned, slithering behind his ribs until he was sick with it. He trembled.

“Chief?” Said Astrid, a voice so small in the darkness of the fissure, with a bewilderment bordering on terror.

The dragon queen’s claws tore rock from the fissure mouth, shearing through stone like talons through flesh, but they were still too deep for her to reach. Still unreachable, still, still, until she’d dug through enough of the rock, teeth piercing flesh as she dragged them from the stone to consume them.

The fear black and fire-heated leaned on him. His eyes watered and stung with smoke, skin burned and blistered, and he had watched the Red Death eat some of his people. Heard their screams, and heard too how they were muffled by her throat - silenced by the crushing pressure as she swallowed, and silenced by the walls of flesh.

Stone shook and rock crumbled. The Red Death hissed her frustration, but she crooned her song, carrion-sweet, too; called them to obey, to give up and submit to the will that was greater than their own, to leave their hiding place and let themselves be eaten. Stoick crumbled like the rock; he shook and trembled and choked on his fear, burned dry and cracked and hollow, as the horror of what he had done crashed through him.

What had he done? What had he done? What stupid ambition, what madness, what arrogance, had gripped him when he thought to kill the dragon queen? How much time did they even have left, hiding in this fissure like rats in the storeroom, waiting to be killed? What was it even worth, the seconds or minutes they might have to spend watching their death dig her way ever closer?

Was it worth it, sailing to the dragon nest to bring the fight to the dragons? Stoick had only wanted to put an end to the dragon raids, but all he’d done was doom his people. He didn’t want to walk the halls of Valhalla, with its walls of shining spears and its tables of endless food and mead and fields of endless battle; not yet, he wasn’t ready yet! How many warriors chased a place in Valhalla? How many were ready when they earned it, and a valkyrie came for their soul? Did they stare at teeth or blades in terror, or joy, as they waited to die? Had they doomed other lives with them or had they the grace to die alone? Stoick failed in the face of the doom he’d brought to them all, trembling with the terror of the hungry death he’d brought them to.

Gobber’s lumbering steps were distinctive, the echoing tap of his false leg against the stone dull and wooden. He said nothing as he squeezed close to Stoick’s side, he didn’t even open his mouth or draw the breath to speak; he groaned, though - heavy and weary - as he slid down the wall to sit beside him. He clapped a hand to Stoick's shoulder and gripped him tightly, and didn't let go as another shower of dust rained down.

Stoick didn’t want to lift his face from his hands, some terrible cowardice that had taken root ever since they’d sailed to this damned place blooming at last, but he reached across himself and rested his hand over Gobber's. The silence echoed with the Red Death’s claws against the rock overhead.

“Chief…” Said Astrid softly, plaintive. She crouched before him, ginger and careful - hissing at the pull on her burned flesh, shiny-raw down her arm and the side of her face. “Maybe we can still-”

“Lass,” Said Gobber, sharp.

“Well we shouldn’t just sit here and do nothing!” She snapped. “There’s hundreds of ships wrecked around this island, if we can just get to one of them-”

“We can what?” Spat Spitelout, as brittle and rough as the grain of burned steel. “Get caught on the beach the second we leave here? Even if we make it past her - no small feat, which shouldn’ae need sayin’ - we’ll still have’tae sail out of these gods damned mists!”

Another voice came from deeper within the cavern. “An’ what’s your plan, then, Spitelout?”

“Try again.” He said. Uproar greeted him, anger swelling within the stone walls. Spitelout whirled on them, snarling, “Ach, leave off yeh cowards! We brought her down once, we can do it again!”

“Oh, aye?” Said a woman from deeper in the fissure. “How? Run tae the trebuchet all the way on the other side of the queen, an’ hope she doesn’ae notice us?”

Spitelout flung out his hands, demanding, “Well what’s your idea then?”

On and on Stoick’s people argued amongst themselves, retreading the same arguments without tiring or slowing - stopping only when more rock crumbled free from overhead, or the Red Death growled particularly loudly. On and on they argued, until at last Stoick sighed and heaved himself to his feet. “Enough,” He said, weary. “Astrid, lead everyone to the northern shore, as far as you can get from her,” He nodded to the shadow darkening the mouth of the fissure. “I’ll buy you a few minutes of time.”

The protests rose immediately, of course, but Stoick took no notice of them; but he whirled on Gobber, whose lumbering steps followed his. "No," He said. "No, I'm not lettin' you-"

"Well it's a damn good thing you're not lettin' me do anythin'!" Said Gobber cheerfully, tightening the straps of his hook on his stump. "You buy us a few minutes, an' I'll double that time."

Together they strode from the fissure, edging out beneath that great shadow labouring overhead. Stoick's hand clenched tight around the haft of his hammer, every muscle clenched tighter still as he stepped out beneath the queen and waited for her jaws to snap shut around him as they had countless dragons.

Her barrel-like belly heaved with every breath high overhead, a black crust of char and stone caking the paler scales of her undersides. Hindlimbs as thick as seastacks trembled as she leaned her weight back on them, balancing against a thick tail whose clubbed tip smashed into the beach or left long gouges as long as ship-lengths as it lashed. Long claws on powerful, densely muscled forelimbs scraped through brittle volcanic rock, tearing boulders free from a tunnel above their fissure as she dug her way to them.

Stoick and Gobber took up positions either side of her, but the Red Death didn’t even spare either of them a glance. Not even when they shouted at her, but she noticed; Stoick knew she noticed - her song faltered, just a moment, before she scoffed and returned her attention to her work. Stoick and Gobber were morsels, when there was a meal of meat in the fissure helpless and afraid.

Stoick stooped to grab a fistful of pebbles and stone shards to throw - anything to irritate her - but his gaze caught on a glitter of warped, blooded steel. Gobber’s spear, abandoned but mostly whole on the beach. Its weight was good in his hand, perfectly balanced; the spearhead gleamed, cruel and sharp and eager despite the way the metal had warped and melted. Stoick’s mouth thinned into a grim line, as thin as the bladed edge of the spear, as he cast a glance and a nod at Gobber far on the Red Death's other side.

He threw it, launching the spear as the long arms of the trebuchet launched boulders, and the spear flew as swift as arrows.

The Red Death squealed as it sunk deep into her shoulder, flinching away from the volcano face to whirl on Stoick with a roar that was more rage than pain. The earth shook with her fury, flames still consuming the ships guttering and leaning away from her in fear, as her many eyes focused on Stoick and Stoick alone. Jaws lined with teeth slid open, a growl rolling free of her throat to rumble through the earth and against Stoick’s feet. “Run!” Stoick ordered, baring his tiny, blunt teeth back at the queen. “RUN, NOW!”

Air rushed through the Red Death’s fluttering throat as she drew breath, and the air before her mouth rippled and churned with the heat and flames gathering at the back of her mouth. But a stillness came to Stoick’s thoughts as he faced his death and watched his people flee; he drew a breath of his own with his hammer, fingers tight around the familiar leather wrap of the haft, and it settled like steel in his bones.

He didn’t close his eyes, and he didn’t run. He wouldn’t have the time to escape the flames. Stoick watched the fire billow and churn within the Red Death’s throat and listened to the shouts of his tribe as they dashed up the pebbled beach, far from the queen, for the salvation in the water and wrecked ships beyond. The first viking to step foot on the dragon’s nest; the first to fight its ruler.

A good death. Stoick wondered if he would see Valka or Hiccup in Valhalla. He wondered how long it would be before he saw the rest of his tribe in those shining halls. 

Fires consumed the remnants of the ships, a dirty, hazy glow beneath dark clouds and behind thick, heavy smoke. The flames guttered, wavering, and Stoick’s gaze faltered; a shrill, distinctive whistle shrieked in the sky, and the clouds and smoke curled as if sliced by an unseen force. The faintest stirrings of hope swept across Stoick as, across the beach, Astrid shouted, “NIGHT FURY! GET DOWN!”

Instinct had Stoick ducking behind his hammer, braced for the shot.

The bolt of purest, brightest blue streaked through the air like lightning, striking the Red Death across the face with a burst of fire like a thunderclap. The boom echoed across all the sky, crashing into Stoick’s chest with such force his heart stuttered and he stumbled, breath shoved from his lungs with a helpless gasp. The Red Death’s head swung away, her great column of fire billowing out harmlessly over the water and into empty air, but the shrill whistle of air over wings didn’t end; claws caught Stoick’s cuirass and arm and yanked him into the air, a jarring lurch that left his guts behind on the pebbles.

The air screamed past, a physical weight - the beach a blur far beneath Stoick’s feet. But the Red Death’s pain was louder - her agony shook loose rock from the volcano’s face, her howl a ragged, screaming thing, hoarse and raw.

The night fury didn’t take Stoick far - leathery wings turned against the air and they began to slow, almost to a hover above the beach. It set him down almost gently before his people, before heavy beats of those enormous wings carried it away to land nearby. The thump of its weight dropping to the ground was as loud as the clap of its wings, but its feet were astonishingly quiet as it advanced on the Red Death a step or two and roared, wings flared.

The Red Death groaned, a low creak like metal straining beneath too great a weight. Her hateful gaze settled on the night fury like the falling ash, and sharpened, as she lowered her head to snarl. Her crown smoked, scaled skin burned away to bare thin flesh, raw and red and weeping, over the white bone within.

Blood poured down her face and the side of her neck, a dark, wet sheen over her pale scales.

The night fury hissed, and began to sing. It was as much a real sound as it was the memory of one, rolling through the air and the mind - low and strong and resonant, and made whole by another, almost nasally voice that filled in all its empty spaces. Deep within its fires glowed, burning bright through its mouth and spines - a purest blue, like no colour Stoick had ever seen. And the beast's power resonated - not a tremble in its voice, though there was a slight hoarseness as it strained to sing ever louder, ever clearer, but as if the air itself churned and rippled with it. It spoke and the sky boomed, it sang and the stone shuddered.

Its tail swept back and forth, two pairs of fins opening and closing - even its false fin, painted leather and metal moving as if alive. It raised its head and its voice of two voices, and there was no saddle or rider on its neck and shoulders.

But it spared a glance back, and the eyes that met Stoick’s were green, still, but not the dragon’s own. For a brief moment the eyes of a man looked at Stoick, softened with a moment’s concern and dark with old bitterness, but even as Stoick watched something else bloomed in its place. Not man alone, and not wholly dragon either; both at once, filling in each other’s empty spaces just as their voices did.

The Dragon Master’s scaled lips peeled back to bare bright, white teeth as his gaze slid back to the Red Death, and his song was defiant beneath the queen’s carrion-sweet voice.

Chapter Text

The Red Death's terrible song fell silent as she lowered her head to meet the Dragon Master's gaze and hold it unblinking. Through the smoke and dull glow of the fires and lava her long teeth gleamed, cutting through the heavy gloom. Her tall, arched nostrils opened and closed with her puffing breaths, scenting the air; amusement rattled in her throat, dark and guttural, and she opened her jaws slightly to snap them shut with a thunderous clap.

The Dragon Master loosed another bolt of fire at her face in answer, a weaker burst of flame against her hide. Scales burned, an acrid stink of charring flesh and hair; she flinched, but she recovered quickly. She lunged, all mouth and teeth and a long throat shadowed dark, before her face crashed into the beach. Her jaws closed around pebbles and sand as the Dragon Master leapt to the air with powerful downbeats of his wings.

Black scales were lost immediately in the smoke and darkness, wingbeats silenced beneath the crackling roar of flames as ships still burned, and the Red Death’s heavy, mincing steps were loud in the hush as she searched the skies above her. Stoick watched with her, helpless to scan the clouds and smoke for a beast he knew he’d never find.

There was only the thin, high whistle of air screaming beneath wings. The old reflexive flinch had them ducking behind their shields and hands as once more a shadow dropped from the sky, and another bolt of fire struck the great queen.

The blast to her hip sent her crashing to the beach, where she lay for terrible, breathless moments. But the Red Death’s ribs rose and fell, still - gusting breaths stirring the clouds of dust and ash that had risen around her. Her growl rolled through the earth, felt more than heard; Stoick stumbled back as she rose to her feet, limping on a hindleg whose powerful muscles twitched against the stinging air, bloody and raw and betrayed by the hole burned into her skin whose charred edges smoked faintly.

The Dragon Master was gone on silent wings. The Red Death shook herself, shedding blood and dust, and hissed her hatred at the sky. Heat and gathering flame roared in her throat, and when she loosed it that column of fire carved through the mist and smoke, highlighting a tiny shadow deep within by its terrible light as it sped through the air.

Again the Dragon Master struck her, but the Red Death dropped her head and the blast erupted across her crown instead of her face. Her head swung away by the force of it, but she recovered as quickly as the Dragon Master swooping in for another strike; six cunning eyes narrowed, her head turning to the whistle of air screaming at the Dragon Master’s sheer speed, and loosed her fire once more.

Black wings and two pairs of fins spread wide, leathery membrane taut and shuddering against the air as he tried to slow himself and evade. But it was too late; the Red Death’s fire caught the Dragon Master, and his roar was two voices shrill with the same panic as he passed through that great roaring column of raw, churning heat.

It was only for a few moments, but a few moments was all it took; scales and leathery skin smoked faintly as the Dragon Master fled the billowing fires, deep wingbeats quick and frantic. But he was slower in the air than he should have been - the false tailfin glowed, metal gears and iron bone bright with caught heat, and the painted leather of the fin riddled with embers.

The Red Death’s triumph was low and guttural. From her sides two great wings unfolded stiffly - wider than she was long they spread across the sky, grey membrane as thick as a fist and as tough as boot leather. They beat with such power that even she, with all her size, lunged into the air; each wingbeat boomed, like the powerful burst of a night fury’s fire - deafening as a thunderclap.

And she was swift in the air, swift in a way no beast of such size should be; swift enough even a night fury struggled to keep ahead of her.

Out over the still water they raced, the Red Death's wingtips smashing the surface of the sea into glittering spray with every cacophonous beat. The Dragon Master folded his wings and dropped moments before the Red Death’s jaws snapped at his tail; he sped just above the sea, too low for the queen to bite him without risking the water; he flung himself between the many seastacks, darting between spires of stone as if he didn’t notice himself skimming the rock.

Yet the Red Death simply followed, ploughing through the seastacks as if they’d never been in her way at all. Crumbling rock crashed into the sea, the water churning white in her wake; stone shards were thrown ahead of her, small and sharp enough to cut the delicate skin of a dragon's wings. Her bulging eyes were narrowed on the Master, and the Master alone.

Black wings tilted and between one moment and the next the Dragon Master cut to the side, swift as a blade, and plunged through a crack in the volcano face into its heart with such speed Stoick flinched before he could stop himself. The Red Death turned with him, enormous wings shuddering and stalling in their beats as they strained against her own size; blindly she smashed into the volcano’s face, shattering the rock as she scrabbled for purchase and roared her rage.

Those long talons hooked on brittle stone and she clawed her way to the summit, her lashing clubbed tail shattering a few seastacks on the shore as she climbed. Her spread wings filled with heat and air as the updraft from the vent caught them, but as she peered down with an open mouth and a throat filling with flame a flash of blue shot from the volcano depths.

The Red Death howled; Stoick clapped his hands over his ears and curled in on himself but he could do nothing to silence that sound, that bellow so loud it stopped being sound and became pressure. It pressed on his ears and the heart and lungs in his chest, a weight that crushed the air from him in a helpless wheeze, eyes watering at the ache within his skull. His heart stuttered weakly, tinnitus a shrill, piercing whine not half so agonising as the Red Death’s fury.

He staggered when it ended, deafened by her agony and half blinded by the watering eyes from his own. The Dragon Master was gone when Stoick could look for him - disappeared into the black clouds and heavy smoke high above - though the shrill, distinctive whistle of air beneath wings betrayed that he hadn’t abandoned them as he swept in for another blow. But Stoick saw the queen, there at the volcano peak - saw smoke and blood pouring from between her teeth, the flicker of flames not her own in her throat.

She groaned, a low, trembling sound like straining metal, sharp and agonised. A shudder rippled through her, head to clubbed tail. Muscle trembled and twitched beneath scaled skin, and her hanging head swayed slightly.

But her wings began to beat once more, deep and powerful, and when she raised her head her eyes were clear and sharp, bright with loathing. Lunging once more into the air she strained for the sky high above where the Dragon Master waited, and the clouds were so dark and thick even she was lost in their depths. Her roared challenge resounded through the world, unmuffled by distance - the Dragon Master's answer rang even further, twin voices speaking as one.

Whatever it was he said the Red Death snapped at him for it, a clap of her jaws like the crack of a whip. Blasts of a night fury’s fire flashed through the clouds like lightning, booming like thunder; for moments no longer than blinks the Red Death’s shadow could be seen deep within, her great size and enormous wings nearly blocking out the light. It betrayed her, her stalling wingbeats and frantic flailing as she bit and clawed at mists and clouds, scrabbling at all the empty air surrounding her - trapped in the realm of the night fury, of the offspring of Life and Death. Of the beast greater still it had become as the Dragon Master.

Stoick wondered, briefly, if this was what Ragnarok was to be like - to be small, helpless mortals hiding in the shadows of fissures and caves watching a battle between gods whose power they could never really understand. He wondered if the queen’s dragons were watching too, and felt the same.

But maybe it was poor luck, an accident; maybe it was deliberate from the queen. Maybe only the gods would ever know for certain, but in a brief flash of fire Stoick saw the Red Death’s flailing clubbed tail lash out, and a tiny shadow began tumbling from the sky. Guttural triumph rolled through the queen’s throat as she plunged through the air after it, wings folded flat to her sides.

Agile in the air, the Dragon Master stopped tumbling and steadied, but his wings were folded too and he didn't swoop out of the dive. Down and down they plunged, falling together towards the earth; the air shrieked past them both at their speed. Down and down they fell even as black rock reached upwards; great jaws opened, teeth as long as spears close to clipping the Master's finned tail, and together they dove past the volcano’s peak, beyond the tips of the very tallest spires peeking above the mists.

It was only in the breathless moments before the Dragon Master crashed into the pebbled beach of the nest that his wings opened and he swept away, skimming harmlessly over the earth. The queen’s head followed him but her own wings opened too late; she smashed into the beach, and a terrible crack of bone echoed off the stone and the mists.

Her neck folded, bone crunching and flesh crumpling wetly, as her own weight and bulk drove her into the ground. A wave of pebbles lashed out, striking so hard even those blunt, rounded rocks cut skin, and a plume of ash and dust rose from beneath her. For a moment she remained like that, upright on the beach, but soon enough her heavy tail and her own bulk began to tip; slowly, so slowly, her body began to fall and the rest of her crashed flat onto the shore with another plume of ash and dust. A single breath stirred the cloud, hot with fire and dark with smoke - a long, slow wheeze - but another did not follow it. The ash and dust began to settle.

And there she lay, dead.

Stoick waited for that cavernous chest to rise and fall with gusting breaths. For a growl or a snarl or even a roar to come from that long throat. For claws to scrape through the beach, for that great head to lift and release that billowing column of flame.

But she was still. Limp and broken across the beach she lay, teeth snapped in half by the impact oozing blood from the jagged ends. Her bulbous head rested at a terrible angle to the rest of her, half buried within pebbles and the ash and sand beneath. Bulging eyes stared blindly, glassy and unseeing. Flames consumed her body from within, a dull glow through her throat and half-open mouth; smoke streamed from her nose and between her jaws, bringing with it a thick, acrid stink as flesh and guts burned.

Stoick trembled, breaths thin and shallow as he stood on the beach and stared at the body of the Red Death.

Labouring through the sky, the Dragon Master landed heavily on the beach. Wings half-raised, crouched to leap and fly, his mincing steps took him to one the queen’s paws half sunken into pebbles. Cautiously he bit it, teeth scoring deep lines, and leapt back; she did not move, a harmless corpse.

Black wings unfurled fully, then - flared proudly above his back the Dragon Master raised his twinned voice in triumph. His song rang out, a deep and resonant call; dragons melted out of the mists, winging over viking heads to land on the beach, and their chorus bolstered his cry. The flock crowded to be near him, a heaving mass wild with terror and with joy, but a wide circle of respectful distance remained empty of dragons as they swore allegiance to their king, sang of their faith in the one who felled their hated queen.

Stoick’s skin crawled, gooseflesh prickling. There was a wrongness squirming in the base of his skull; an animal urge close to fear that seized his limbs, though he couldn’t move. One thought echoed above all others in his head - this was not something vikings were ever meant to see.

Folding his wings and lowering his head the Dragon Master didn’t allow them faith. His song softened, a low croon beneath theirs that asked only for friendship if they wished to join his flock, and to enjoy their freedom if they did not.

The mass faltered, splitting into clusters and clumps and just as soon reforming as they wavered. Confusion soured the song; his fire and his voice were the strongest of dragons’, why did he offer freedom instead of demand obedience? Did he not want them? Were they not good enough? There were some who knew nothing except subservience, and their fear was bright.

Calmly, gently, the Dragon Master sang - he gave no command, made no threat. The strong, resonant hum thrummed on the air and in the mind, more than memory and less than audible; it was okay, he said, to go - it was okay to stay with him. He was only glad to offer them the freedom to choose at all.

Many broke rank and took to the air, ceasing their song, but their roars were joyous and relieved as they left. Many stayed, heads bowed to a power the Dragon Master didn’t use. The mass melted, flowing in to meet their new master and the Dragon Master met them, greeting them in turn. His song slid away unneeded, but its echoes lingered far longer than it should have.

As one the remaining dragons raised their voices to the sky, roaring their joy and their triumph. As one they leapt into the air, obeying a command no viking could see or hear - a circling swarm of so many dragons the air thrummed with their wingbeats. The Dragon Master alone remained on the beach, and his gaze slid to Stoick’s.

Wide pupils shrunk to pinpricks, a hiss slithering through teeth, as the eyes of a man met Stoick’s once more.

Leaping to the air with forceful downbeats of his wings the Dragon Master caught Stoick in his claws, yanking him from the ground. The flock descended on Stoick’s people, plucking them from the beach and following their new master from the nest with vikings in their claws.

As they glided over the water Stoick watched the limp body of the Red Death, abandoned on the shore by her flock as beached whales were abandoned by the sea. She seemed small in death - shrunken from the monstrous queen to one of any number of dead dragons Stoick had seen, remarkable only in the size of her corpse.

From the mists a seabird glided out of the gloom, and from the water a few crabs scuttled across the pebbles. The bird alighted on the fallen queen’s throat, and stalked imperiously across scaled skin towards one of the wounds where a harpoon had fallen out. It pecked and pulled at the flesh, feasting, while below it the crabs sought the spear wound Stoick had made. Far above them all the smoke and mists began to thin; gentle sunlight touched the black rock and ruin, and tucked away in the crags and cracks was the delicate curling fan of a small fern, green and bright.

Chapter Text

The journey home passed in silence.

The Dragon Master led the way with Stoick in his claws. Facing the swarm of dragons following in his wake Stoick was helpless to stare at his people hanging from talons, to see the soot and burns and blood on them - to see what he had inflicted on them, and remember that there were faces who were not among them of those who wouldn’t be brought home at all.

He watched the mist and smoke of the nest begin to lift, bowing at last to the stiff winds atop the sea; he remembered the path they took back out of its depths.

And he found himself watching, too, the end of the Dragon Master’s tail. The metal and mechanisms and leather painted black; tiny gears turning like the clenching of muscle, metal supports spreading dead leather like the delicate bones opposite spreading the fin. A single toothed metal bar controlled it, shifting the gears as it moved up and down the prosthetic; the slightest shimmer of a shadow just beneath it betrayed how, though Stoick didn't want to know more. A shiver rippled across his skin, leaving gooseflesh behind.

The metal had been warped, though - holes burned into the leather fin. It fluttered in the air rushing past in a way the flesh fin didn’t, jostling the Master and Stoick hanging in his grip as he made constant, tiny adjustments to compensate. Gears squealed against gears, the teeth scraping over the tops of each other instead of locking. But the mechanism had survived, if only barely - the Master didn’t grumble as he laboured to stay steady in the air.

Thunderdrum and scauldron and dragons of a breed Stoick had never seen before breached far below his hanging feet, calling to the Master. It wasn’t the Dragon Master who answered, though the gruff reply came from that black-scaled throat; Stoick shuddered despite himself as the sea dragons slid back beneath the waves.

It didn’t take long before the nest had shrunk on the horizon - it took even less before they all were carried over Berk. The handfuls left in the village ran for the safety of the mead hall, or raised weapons with arms that trembled beneath the weight, but the Master and his dragons took no notice of either; the dragons set Stoick’s people down gently, while the Master threw Stoick.

He struck the earth hard, breath knocked from his chest, bones jarred and flesh bruising. Small rocks and pebbles cut his skin, a small sting, as Stoick tumbled to a stop; he lay there for a moment, more shamed than hurt, before Gobber lumbered to his side and offered his remaining hand.

Gothi was already wrangling those who had been left behind into tending to the wounded as Stoick was pulled to his feet. She didn’t look at Stoick at all, or flinch as the Dragon Master landed nearby, as she swept past him. The Dragon Master looked, though; his stare was unblinking, teeth bright against black scales, wings still raised over his head as he hissed his fury. Those blocky pupils were thin slits, but shorter than they should have been - the voice slithering from between those bared teeth was two voices, and what was only anger in one was hatred in the other.

Stoick faced him, unarmed and alone. He didn’t reach for his hammer, or clench his hands into fists, and he didn’t look away.

Leathery wings beat once, shallow, and that long tail lashed like a cat’s across the ground as the Master’s head lowered. Black scaled lips peeled back in a snarl, but it wasn’t the Master’s nasally voice - it was the dragon’s alone. Its stare didn’t break, either, but Stoick watched it split; smaller pupils than the dragon’s tall slits cut off from the whole and disappeared behind the lids as a shadow began to lift from its neck.

No. No, not a shadow - not a shadow alone. Stoick shuddered, torn between revulsion and awe and trapped between the two, helpless to watch as it was flesh peeling from the dragon’s back. Bloodlessly the Dragon Master rose from his beast’s bones like the sliding of shadows from shadows. The dragon didn’t even shiver, its eyes didn’t flicker, as so, so carefully its master pulled himself free of it. Metal scraped dully against metal, gears jangling and leather rustling, as the Master pulled his metal leg free; the dragon’s tail lashed again, and the bar controlling the false fin was gone.

The Dragon Master crouched on his night fury’s neck and shoulders as if he’d always been there for the moment it took before he seemed to come back to himself. Sucking in a breath deep into his chest, as if he’d broken through the surface of water, the Master dropped to the ground to stand beside his beast. In place of his prosthetic foot was a toothed bar before he dropped his hand to the wooden cup cradling his stump and twisted one of the gears there, and the bar retracted into the wood and was replaced by the true metal foot.

There was a terrible, breathless silence beneath the Dragon Master’s glare and his night fury’s hateful gaze. The dragon’s flesh was whole and unmarred on its neck and shoulders, as if the Master had never been within it at all.

Stoick opened his mouth, though there were no words in it.

“No,” Said the Master tightly, but there was a roughness to it that shouldn’t have been there; a lingering echo of the devil by his side. His hands clenched into fists by his side. “No, we don’t want to hear it.”

“I’m s-"

“Don’t apologise!” Hissed the Dragon Master, as dry and animal as any dragons’. “Don’t you dare apologise to me for this! We’re not the one you wronged with all-!” He waved his hands wordlessly, whipping them through the air like the lashing of his night fury’s tail; strangled by his own anger as he gestured at all the burned faces behind Stoick, at the soot and ash and blood staining them all.

The dragons brought the last of Stoick’s people home, or at least the ones who could return; the swarm of them massed high in the air, all thrumming wingbeats and a blur of colourful scales. The Master didn’t even need to voice a command to dismiss them - they left of their own accord, dissolving into the clouds in clumps in every direction. Their wings took them northwards, swift on the steady winds, and it was not long before the great cloud of them was a small, distant shadow in the sky; it took less time still before they had vanished.

The night fury and the Dragon Master alone remained, there in the middle of Stoick’s village. “One thing,” He said, and he and his dragon trembled with the force of their anger as he spoke. “We told you to do one, simple thing! We asked you to trust us. To not do anything and let us do what we needed to! And what do you do? What do you do?!”

Stoick bowed his head. The night fury hissed its disgust as the Master turned his back on them all, throwing his hands up. A short, thin seam of metal gleamed at the back of the Master’s neck.

“I don’t even know why I’m surprised,” He said to his dragon, shaking his head, but he turned on his heel once more - wavering and indecisive in his rage. “Do you even have any idea how lucky you are? We could have completely missed that terrible terror! I might not have finished making our gear! It barely survived as it is! What were you thinking?”

Stoick said nothing.

“No,” Spat the Master, “No, you weren’t thinking, were you? That’s the problem - that’s always been the problem. Gods forbid someone ever has any idea that isn’t ‘kill on sight’! ‘Rush blindly in and damn the consequences’! We were waiting for the winter because the dragons leave on their migration, when the queen is weakest - you know, not rushing headlong into battle with a dragon the size of a damn mountain? We’re the only ones that even know what she’s capable of - we needed to prepare, we needed to make damn sure our gear wouldn’t fail us again! And you forced us into fighting her before we were ready, for- what?! For glory, for spite? Out of pig-headed stubbornness?”

Still, Stoick said nothing. The silence echoed through the village beneath the Dragon Master’s voice. Spitelout, though - brash and bold - raised his own to break it, demanding, “An’ where were you then? Why didn’t you stop us?”

The night fury snarled, raising its head with a short lunge and snapping at the air. Its frill and its wings flared, paws thudding into the ground with the jarring force of its stop; a threat, only a threat, but Spitelout pulled back sharply all the same. “Oh don’t even try it!” Said the Dragon Master, whirling on Spitelout with a snarl of his own. “These were your choices! We’re not babysitters, and you’re not children! Act like it!”

“The responsibility is mine-” Started Stoick.

“Yes,” The Master agreed, though his gaze didn’t turn from Spitelout. “But they all followed you.” His hands clenched and unclenched restlessly, like his devil’s claws kneading the earth, but his shoulders slumped and his head fell, shaking wearily, as he let go of his breath. “What a waste,” He muttered to himself. “What a damned waste this has all been. I thought that you could change, you know - I thought that if you could come to see us and not kill the dragons, that maybe I should have… I don’t know, tried to get through to you somehow. But you’re all still the same.”

The dragon growled its agreement, a low rumble through the earth. The Master’s hands clenched again as he turned to it. “C’mon then,” He said, reaching for the beast. “I’m tired of all this.”

But the Dragon Master’s words needled, deeper than his barbs and his anger should; discomfort with this stranger’s familiarity with Berk scraped at the inside of Stoick’s skin - words all on Berk knew by heart echoed in the Master's voice, an edict generations old no dragon friend or dragon rider or stranger from islands beyond the borders of viking maps should know. 'Kill on sight' said the Dragon Manual, on all pages except one. All vikings of Berk learned its wisdom from the cradle.

The weary sorrow beneath the Dragon Master's rage was years old - as old, perhaps, as the time since the last sighting of a night fury in the skies above Berk.

A mad thought, but Stoick had indulged in many these last long months. And a thin seam of metal gleamed at the back of the Master’s neck, still, as he bent his head to his beast; another mad urge seized Stoick - the latest of many that would doom him.

The night fury snarled, guttural and terrible as its raising wings spread wide, as Stoick grabbed the Dragon Master. He seized a skinny arm and dragged him back from the devil, and there was more fear than pain in the beast's voice like the Dragon Master’s gasp at Stoick’s bruising grip - and rage above it all that was entirely its own.

The Master was lean and light, helpless in Stoick’s hand; but he thrashed all the same, kicking and pulling and straining to return to his beast, once the limp shock fell away. “The Hel are you doing!” He snapped, tugging uselessly against Stoick's hold, and there was fear there; not of harm but of something worse, something deep he did not want found. His night fury lunged, forepaws slamming too close to Stoick’s feet but the Master was between he and those gleaming teeth and no fear clawed at Stoick’s scars now.

Was it madness? Was it knowledge? Was it a damn fool's desperate hope, held between he and his doubts like a Dragon Master against a devil; was it hope, stirring old memories he did not know he held to rise like silt in water? Stoick grasped the Dragon Master by the other arm and in his grip the Master leaned away, baring a flash of pink and human skin at his throat.

A hood. A masked hood, fastened to a full body leather suit tight to his skinny frame with metal buckles beneath the hem, the whole of it blackened with dragonscale. The faceless mask had eyeholes covered with transparent scales - like a snake’s, lidless. Bright green eyes rolled wide with terror behind them, the frill was only fleshless leather, loose around the Master’s head.

No monster but a man dressed up in costume. Was it madness? Was it hope?

The Master flinched like a man all the same as Stoick gripped the two longest flaps of the hood’s only decoration, that false flesh imitating the night fury’s own ears and frill - his blood buzzed with giddy terror at the rough bumps of dead dragonscale against his palm. “Don’t!” The Master snarled, thrashing, and he struck; weak blows that lacked leverage and force, barely even bruising. “Don’t you dare! NO!” He snapped, and his dragon snapped with him - desperate mock leaps and the click of jaws and teeth as it sought its master.

Stoick ripped the masked hood from his face. Stitching tore and loose buckles and straps dangled as Stoick held aloft the hood like a severed head.

The young man hanging in Stoick’s grip cringed, falling still as he curled uselessly in on himself in Stoick’s grasp. An uneven mass of fluffy, auburn hair had been cropped shorter than Stoick had ever seen it. The face beneath it was harder, harsher than it should have ever been; slightly gaunt in the cheeks with sunken, tired-bruised eyes, and roughened by wind and hunger. An old, twisting burn scar mottled the skin on his left side, across his throat and jaw and disappearing beneath the neck of his suit; another scar was raised and knotted and deep, an unlucky slice through his cheek from a sword tip. A dozen other tiny nicks and cuts marred him, too.

He’d grown into his ears and his self; no shame bowed his shoulders even now, even as bright green eyes slid closed and he twisted his face away as if he could hide it still.

“Hiccup,” Stoick breathed.

Chapter Text

His son pulled free, or maybe Stoick’s grip fell too loose; he didn’t know which but Hiccup stumbled back all the same. Stoick’s fingers curled uselessly into his palms - the dragon snapped to Hiccup’s side, tail curling around him like Hiccup’s arm over its neck.

The devil’s hiss was low and soft with lethal hatred, but the beast could inflict no pain greater than what roiled behind Stoick’s ribs now. “Hiccup,” He breathed, helpless as his eyes burned hot and overfull, stuck between the urge to grab him once more and never let go and the disbelief that said Hiccup would vanish if he tried - that the madness had taken him for good and it would only be the Dragon Master, unreal and frightening once more.

But no. No, he had to be real - the name echoed across the village in hundreds of hushed whispers, and even madness couldn't make Stoick imagine his son with that lean, weathered face and those scars. Hiccup’s head lowered beneath all the voices echoing his name with disbelief, twisting away as his shoulders mantled around his ears, and his eyes slid shut, face tight as if in pain. His voice was heavy with resignation as he said, “Hey, Dad.”

“You’re alive,” Stoick said, hushed; a whisper through a throat closed too tight to speak loudly. A heat was beginning to bubble beneath his skin. “All this time you’ve been alive.”

Hiccup scuffed the earth with his metal foot. “Guess I have,” He said.

Stoick’s jaw tightened, clenching like his fists as he demanded, “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“No,” Said Hiccup flatly, and at last he raised his gaze. Stoick wished he hadn’t - his eyes were as bright a green as his dragon’s, and something of the devil’s lingered in the faint yellow-green shine to his pupils when the light struck them wrong. “No, I didn’t. You weren’t meant to find out at all. So just give me my mask back and we can go on pretending that I’m no one to you, and we can all go back to our normal lives.”

“Normal lives!” Stoick snarled at the gall. “There has been nothing normal about my life, for all these years! You are my son, Hiccup! My child! Do you have any idea of what it was like to lose you? For ten years I grieved you, believing deep down that you were likely dead, and all this time you were…-!” He waved his hands uselessly, “Gallivanting around without sparing me a thought!”

The night fury hissed again, but Stoick’s gaze was locked on Hiccup’s. His son’s burned with a flash of rage, as bright as dragonfire, and his own voice was as dry and lethal as the devil’s as he hissed, “What did you expect me to do, Dad? I didn’t have a choice - I had to protect him from you!”

“So you chose a dragon over your father,” Said Stoick, “Over your people?”

“Yes I chose him!” Hiccup said. “Or I chose myself - it’s more or less the same thing!” His bared teeth were as bright as his dragon’s, jaw tight and fists clenched tighter by his sides. He flung out a hand, gesturing at them all. “You all made it very clear I wasn’t one of you! Hiccup the Useless, Hiccup the Fishbone, Hiccup the Failure of Berk! I was a child, and I was trying - but none of it was ever good enough for you!”

“It was war!” Stoick snarled, as fiercely as any dragon too, as he bore down on Hiccup in turn. The night fury slid between them with another throaty hiss, jaws gaping as if close to calling its fire or as if showing off its teeth, and its tail lashed. “We needed warriors, not…-”

“Not me,” Said Hiccup, as cool and cutting as a blade.

Stoick flinched, opened his mouth, but it was too late and had been for many, many years.

Hiccup said no more. His words hung on the air unchallenged, a smothering discomfort they all squirmed beneath. Beside him his dragon shut its mouth, ears and fleshy frill smoothing against its head, and it turned to nudge its nose against Hiccup’s fist. Hiccup’s fingers loosened slightly, knuckles turning to drag along the dragon’s brow; gently, very gently, the night fury grabbed a hold of his hand, crooning so quietly even Stoick, closest to them of all in the watching crowd, could barely hear as the beast let Hiccup go.

The worst of it, perhaps, was that he couldn’t even pretend that it wasn’t true. How many times had he lamented Hiccup’s weakness? His frailty? The disasters in the wake of his creations? He had hoped Hiccup would grow - up, out, in whichever direction it would take for him to become another strong warrior the tribe was always in need of.

And now he had, and Stoick wondered why he had ever wanted Hiccup to be more when this was what he had grown into; long and lean with a hardness to his eyes, a fire in his throat, a dragon by his side that was as much a shield brother as it was Hiccup himself.

“You put us all in danger,” Said Stoick, but the truth rang hollow - the words a gritty ash on his tongue. “You put yourself in danger.”

“So you shout at me in front of everyone,” Said Hiccup, with bitter mercilessness. His dragon growled once more, “Instead of helping me. Instead of working with me on the things I can do.”

Stoick’s jaw tightened. “To waste wood and metal on contraptions that failed? To let you experiment on artillery that destroyed half the village?”

Wordlessly Hiccup held out his hands, and the night fury lay its tail in them. The false fin hung limply, unpowered and unmoving. “My 'failed contraption' shot down a night fury,” He said. “I got a downed dragon no one had ever seen to fly in the three weeks it took you to fail to find the nest. I built my own foot two weeks after losing it. I’ve made prosthetics for dragons ripped apart by traps - wings, legs, tails, all of it. How’s that a waste?”

The dragon pulled its tail away, or maybe Hiccup let it go - more likely it was both at once, dragon and rider moving as one whole, one self. Hiccup’s jaw tightened, hands clenching around empty air as they dropped.

“But no,” He said. “No, I wasn’t doing the right things, and I wasn't doing anything the viking way, because that’s worked out so well for you.”

“You watch your tone.”

“I’ll watch what I damn well like, Dad,” Spat Hiccup. He threw his hands out with a shrug and false cheer as he said, “I’m not a viking!” His hands dropped, and his mouth twisted. Darkly, he added, “I was never a viking, and you all made that perfectly clear. I was just the only one stupid enough to think I could change.”

I was never what they wanted, he had said only a few nights ago, a dragon scaled devil small without his dragons and bowed by old regrets. No one misses me, not whoever I had to keep pretending to be.

“Well,” Said Hiccup softly. “Guess I did change, just not in ways you'd like.“ He shook his head, asked, ”You want to know how we killed Drago?” And didn't wait for an answer. “We learned about him. We chased down every lead we could find, frightened trappers into telling us what we wanted to know. And we found out that he was like us - that he and a dragon shared a soul, once. He killed her, you know - too afraid, I guess, or too angry to see dragons for what they are - but he carried her with him for the rest of his life as his cloak.”

Hiccup turned his head away, swallowing hard as he stared out at the water. “Do you remember what I told you about us?” Said Hiccup, and there was the slightest tremor in his voice. “That we're the alpha of our flock? You remember that I said the Red Death controlled us, for a little while? Turned out we could control Drago, too." He licked his lips. "Most dragons can't refuse an alpha's order, you know," He said. His hands clenched and unclenched restlessly, and he and his dragon trembled; a shiver of an old fear rippling through them both. "I don't think I really understood what that meant until we told Drago to die.”

For a long moment Stoick stared at him, at his hard face and harder eyes, the scar on his cheek and the dozens of others that marred him now. “You commanded a man to die?”

Grimly Hiccup nodded, and Stoick's people pulled back sharply in breathless silence. “Yeah,” He said, turning his gaze back. Stoick wished he hadn't. “We did. We fought his bewilderbeast to a standstill and set him free, and we stopped Drago's heart with a word. Broke the biggest dragon trapping operation in the north before that, too. Now we've killed the Red Death, no thanks to you. How's that for a warrior?”

Stoick bristled at the barb. “If you'd told us,” He said tightly, “If you'd trusted us-”

“Trust you?!” Spat Hiccup, and his dragon's tail lashed once more as he flung out his hands to gesture at them all. “After everything you've done to me? Everything you would have done to us? Did you really think we couldn't hear you all talking about how to kill us if we put a step wrong? Or we wouldn't notice everyone watching every move we made? We told you everything you needed to know.”

“And you asked us to trust you,” Said Stoick. Hiccup twitched, not quite a flinch. “A dragon riding stranger who hid his face, and told us nothing of plans. We gave you everything you asked for, and you gave us nothing for months!”

His rage rallied. “How is it my fault that I don't trust you?” He demanded, and his night fury hissed with him, voicing Hiccup's anger from its own throat. “How is it always my fault when something doesn't go your way? I never asked you to come find us, or beg for our help! And haven't we already done plenty for you? Who saved you from that storm? Who gave you food and shelter and a free ship to go home? Who came here and stopped that raid? Who's been keeping the raids away all this time? I mean- come on, Dad, is that really nothing to you?”

The silence hung between them, taut and thrumming. Slowly Hiccup wilted, head dropping and eyes closing. He turned his head to the night fury ever by his side. “You know what, I don't care anymore,“ He said, though his anger frothed just beneath his voice. ”We've done what we came here to do. Come on bud, let's go home.”

Anger and resentment and hurt roiled beneath Stoick's skin, scraping his bones. He opened his mouth - to argue? To plea? He didn't know - but he found no words in it. Yet all the while, shaking his head, Hiccup turned to his dragon who crouched low for him, a hand resting lightly on its neck. It vanished within the scales, not as if consumed by the dragon’s flesh, embedded like an arrowhead in bone, but as if Hiccup and the dragon had always been of the same flesh but in different forms; twin shadows cast upon the world, merging into one or splitting apart equally as naturally.

But no matter the heat clawing at his skin and his scars, all the accusations and barbs Hiccup had spat, watching his son begin to meld with his beast needled deeper than all the rest. He found something to say as he watched his son prepare to leave him once more. “I’m sorry,” Stoick said. Hiccup stopped. “I’m... I'm sorry. For… everything.”

For long, long moments Stoick thought that Hiccup would continue to meld back with his beast, and disappear for good; or that they would remain frozen forever, the three of them locked in a stalemate until Hati swallowed the moon and Skoll the sun as Ragnarok ended the world.

Hiccup’s shoulders tightened. Slowly, so slowly, he turned; his hand pulled free of his dragon but a slight shadow lingered over his skin, some small part of himself left ghostly and unreal as he pulled back into himself. He lifted it as a fist, eyes closed tight and mouth pressed thin. He wavered, jaw working, but abruptly his fist dropped as he let go of his breath in a single heavy gust, and his shoulders and head dropped with it.

“I know,” He said tiredly, and perhaps he too was remembering that night in the cove, of Stoick staring up at Hiccup’s cairn as he said, It’s too late for those kinds of regrets. “I know you're not sorry about everything, but. I know you're sorry. And I hate that you’re sorry because I can’t be as angry with you as I want to be.” Hiccup lifted his gaze, and his eyes were unbearably sad as he said, “I'm sorry too, for what it's worth. But I'm not sorry I left.”

“Would you have ever told me?”

Immediately Hiccup's face tightened in a grimace. “No. Maybe-” He blew out a breath, arms swinging anxiously. “I don't know. I just- I don't know. Don't ask me questions you won't like the answer to.”

Stoick dared to step close, and for once the night fury didn’t snarl. Its large green eyes only watched, lips covering its teeth and pupils thin and keen. “Stay, Hiccup.”

Hiccup’s face tightened ever more, close to pain. “You don’t want that,” He said, reaching for his beast again; his hand didn’t meld into its flesh. “You only want me, not us, but there’s no me without him.”

“I can try,” Said Stoick. “Let me try. I've lost you once, don't make me-. Don't go, Hiccup.”

Hiccup turned to look at his dragon. The dragon’s large eyes looked up into his, pupils wide and blocky and soft. Its low coo was softer still, head tilted and considering. It purred, too - a thrum in its throat, earnest and adoring, as it pressed closer to Hiccup’s side, close enough it began to dissolve into shadow to meld with him. Even Stoick didn’t need to understand the dragon to know what it meant.

He didn’t turn his gaze from the beast. “What about what I want?” Hiccup said. “I couldn't stay, before. Having to hide what we are, having to hide his half of us because you'd kill him if you ever found out. And when we left, suddenly we could just, be. We were ourselves and we were us, and we felt alive in a way we never got to be before.” He lifted his hand to the beast's neck, palm resting gently on its scales. Quietly, Hiccup sighed. “I’m tired,” He said, low and weary, “Of being angry with you. Of always wondering if maybe I should have tried to show you what dragons are really like. Of being so afraid of people.”

He rubbed the dragon’s neck, fingers sweeping absently back and forth. A certainty not its own stiffened the dragon's spine.

“Next year,” Hiccup said. “I-... Next year. We've been meaning to check on some friends of ours anyway. See if he's getting the hang of what they are, the... turning into our dragon thing we can do. Maybe we’ll stop on the way south, to talk. I'm not making more promises than that.”

Without a glance Hiccup hopped up onto his dragon’s shoulders just as his dragon knelt down to accept him. Flesh sunk into flesh and bone dissolved; the dragon’s eyes slid closed as Hiccup faded into him, a faint shadow briefly hovering over the dragon's scales before it sunk out of sight too. Metal scraped against metal as prosthetics locked together, and when those eyes opened they were not the beast’s or Hiccup’s alone but both at once.

They turned to the cliff, wings unfolding with a leathery rustle. The membrane fluttered lightly in the brisk wind blowing in from the sea, and with a powerful leap and forceful downbeat they were in the air, carving through the sky. Turning their head northwards they soared over Berk even as the false fin flapped and their wings made constant adjustments to keep level, and between one blink and the next they were gone; hidden behind the mountain at Berk’s heart.

Stoick watched them go, long after they had gone. They left behind silence and all that Stoick had inflicted on his people in his desperation to end the raids once and for all; his final damning failure, after all those that had come before. There was a hollowness in Stoick’s chest, newly raw once more after so long having scarred over.

Silence did not sit well with vikings. The murmurs started first; scattered whispers in an unmoving crowd grew into eager chatter and jostling to make way to one another. Stoick alone remained still, and quiet; Stoick alone could not move, staring after his son and the dragon who was as much Hiccup as it was its own beast.

Astrid lay her hand on his arm, squeezing his wrist. Her palm was rough, callused by years handling axes, and if Stoick looked down he would see some of her scars; he would see the new burn on her face, there because of him and his damn fool choices.

“It's okay, chief,” She said, as if it could ever be so. "I just-... What do we do now?"

Stoick turned away from the sky. They wouldn’t come back. Not yet - perhaps not ever. He faced instead his people, his tribe who had followed him to Hel and only returned because of a Dragon Master’s, because of Hiccup’s, intervention. “No,” He told her.

He hadn’t meant for it to draw the attention it did, but something in his voice drew his people away from their eager chatter; he found himself with hundreds of pairs of eyes on him. He raised his head and his voice, loud for all to hear - they fell quiet once more as Stoick spoke.

“For thirty years I’ve served this tribe as its chief! I’ve done my best, but my best’s served us poorly these last few years. I’ve failed you.”

Shouts began, disagreement and dissent and all the things it wouldn’t be Stoick’s duty to listen to any longer. He turned to Astrid, whose eyes were wide. “Astrid,” He said over the clamour, “You have been a fine heir, one I am proud to have chosen. You will make a better chief than I have been. EVERYONE! See to the wounded, mourn the dead, and hail the new chief of Berk!”

“Wait, what...?” Said Astrid faintly, but Stoick had already turned his back on them all. “Wait, chief! STOICK!”

Stoick didn’t listen, and he didn’t turn his head or slow his steps as he trudged to the Mead Hall to await the ceremony to come. Beside him were the smaller steps and shorter strides of a tiny, wizened old woman as Gothi walked with him too. Despite it all he found a weight sliding off his shoulders, and a stillness creeping through his thoughts, as he slowed his walk to keep pace with her. Gothi's hand reached for his, so small atop his knuckles, and the squeeze she gave his fingers was approving as they walked side by side.

Chapter Text

“Ye cannae’ change the past,” They said.

“What’s done is done,” They said.

“Stoick,” They said, gently.

And they were right, of course; the past was the past, unchanging, immutable as mountain stone. Everything knew that one truth, from mortals to gods. The Norns could be cruel when they wove a man’s fate, his lifetime written out at his birth and never knowing what his steps would lead to, but what was done could not change and what was to come could not be known. Even gods sometimes had to walk blindly and hope.

Stoick had never known. Even as a young man, with all the confidence of youth and the certainty in his bones, he’d never known.

Stoick stared out across the sea, from the top of a cliff far from the village. The wind bit at his bare skin, at his rough cheeks and rougher hands. The cloudless sky stretched for miles, deep and lovely above a glittering sea. Wisps of smoke trailed from the vents in house roofs, the clattering and chatter of the day distant and wordless at Stoick’s back.

No raid had struck since the dragon queen’s death. No dragon had been seen in the sky or the forest, and the sea had only shown them a glimpse of a scauldron far beyond Berk’s shores. The year had come to its end and the endless night of winter took hold, but the spring had brought no dragons either; even the lambs and the calves born to the warmth of the returning sun and the kindness of new grass, growing dense and vibrant over the brown-dead shoots of last year’s growth, failed to draw them.

A weight had lifted that Stoick hadn’t known was on his back, but shouldn’t have been surprised to find. Seven generations of dreading the return of the raids with the thaw and the sun; seven generations of waking to blooming greens and fire; seven generations of war. Of course the habit was there - of course they didn’t trust the peace, though peace it truly was.

And Hiccup had brought them that peace. The weedy little thing, the runt of Berk, Stoick’s son he had grieved because he was gone and grieved because he never truly understood him.

Astrid walked the village paths, keeping order and hearing complaints, a helping hand where needed. The first chief of Berk to rule in a time without war, without fear; the first chief to plan Berk's future, rather than merely survive it; the first chief for many, many years to come to her title without the death of the last. She’d learned well through all her time as Stoick’s heir, the successor he had chosen that he had never had to choose; if she’d feared the full responsibility Stoick bestowed her, doubted her strength to bear the full weight of the tribe on her back as Stoick had done for so long, she’d said nothing of it. Silenced, perhaps, by some weary look on Stoick’s face that had been there since Hiccup flew away from Berk for a second time.

His bones ached, joints and scars tight with the lingering cold of winter. Grey streaked his beard and his hair, his face lined and weathered - he’d not noticed the wear of the years before, too trapped by the war against dragons to have the time spare to notice. He wondered when he’d become this weary old man, like so many other warriors of Berk had so abruptly become. He wondered what purpose he could have now, when all he had ever known was battle.

Eleven years, Stoick thought. Eleven years his son had been alive and he’d never known; eleven years with dragons, learning them and studying them, helping them and healing them. The thought wouldn’t leave him be, filling all the places where his doubts had once crowded; eleven years he had lived when Stoick thought him more than likely dead, eleven years he’d thrived away from Berk, waging war on dragon trappers and mad dragon kings and winning.

Dragon Master, not as his being but as his calling. A grander title than Hiccup Haddock of Berk would ever be, but Stoick found himself mourning that Hiccup that could never be. Would he have found his place among them, if he’d had the time and the chance? Would he have made a better chief than anyone had ever given him credit? Would he have been happy with his humble lot, Hiccup the chief of Berk?

Stoick sighed, and the wind sighed with him - hissing over the grass and across the top of the stone cliffs.

No. Hiccup wasn’t a viking - he never had been. Hiccup was never meant for Berk. That night fury of his would have found its way to his side, one way or another; Stoick could have killed every dragon on Midgard, smashed every egg, torn that devil from the sky and killed it with his own two hands, and still it would have been Hiccup’s - still Hiccup would have been the dragon’s. He never would have stayed.

Perhaps that was why Stoick had never understood his son. Hiccup had always been searching for a part of himself that was missing, even as a boy - more than something to make him whole, something that belonged. Who except the norns could have known that the piece he was searching for was in the sky?

He stared out across the deep, glittering sea. The dragon nest could be seen on the horizon, black volcanic stone rising into the sky, the seastacks and spires growing far from its shores; bare, now, without the mist and smoke of Helheim’s Gate to shroud it. What would he find, if he sailed to it now? Dragon bones and an empty volcano? A thriving nest of dragons who didn’t have to raid? Peace to call his own?

Would he find Valka? Stoick had seen so much of her in Hiccup, perhaps she was like him? Perhaps she was another rider, more than human and less than dragon? Kept away from her home as Hiccup had been kept because no viking of Berk would understand that the other half of their selves were dragons?

Slowly, Stoick’s eyes slid closed. He breathed the cold air deep into his chest, and breathed it out slowly with his doubts. Hiccup was alive, and Stoick cradled close that warmth in his chest where the certainty of it warded him against the world. His son was alive and had promised to return, at least to talk, and his doubts had brought nothing but destruction and agony; let it lie, he told himself.

He needed the reminder less and less as the months passed and the peace remained unbroken.

“Gothi,” Stoick said, turning his gaze to the crunching of crumbling rock and the rustle of the grass at his back. “Why am I not surprised, old woman?”

Gothi huffed at him, but settled by his side to stare out at the sea too. She leaned heavily on her staff, shrunken and wizened and so small by his side. Eyes pearled with cataracts flicked back and forth, intent beneath thin brows that furrowed slightly. Stoick wondered what her blind gaze sought across the sea; the world was calm and quiet.

Stoick turned his gaze back to the water. A thunderdrum breached far from the cliffs; it twisted in the air, scales and seaspray glittering, in the breathless moment it hung suspended above the waves. It crashed back down into the water with an enormous splash, but a little ways away another thunderdrum breached too, and another - straining to leap higher than each other, or maybe to make the bigger splash.

They were people, the Dragon Master had said - they loved and hated and did things just for the fun of doing them. Stoick hadn’t the space in his head at the time to understand it; weighted down by his doubts and his fears and the years looming ahead, still, where dragons threatened them all. But he could see it now, as the thunderdrum played their game far across the sea; he could even see beauty in them, in the space that peacetime had brought him.

The night fury loved Hiccup. Stoick saw it in his eyes, even when he mistook that love as a beast’s adoration for its master. He loved Hiccup as a brother and he loved Hiccup as Hiccup himself; and Hiccup loved the dragon just the same. Flesh melded with flesh, metal matched metal - not consumed in one another, but as if they’d never been different at all. He was a dragon as much as he was a man; the night fury as much a man as a dragon. Stoick’s son was never a viking - he’d never even been much of himself before he found the night fury.

“I lost him,” Stoick told Gothi, “Long before he left. And I did’nae even notice.”

Her hand on his arm was a slight and fragile weight, and her smile was gentle as her gaze pushed past his body and soul to the feelings churning in his heart. The squeeze of her hand was gentler still, the two pats she gave him before it dropped a soft tap papery skin against skin.

It… helped, in some way Stoick couldn’t name; easing a tightness in his chest he’d not known he’d been carrying. Of course Gothi understood - of course she didn’t judge him for his failings. She was Gothi, old when even the elders had been young, and she’d seen the mistakes parents made with their children countless times before. Generations had failed their children before him, and generations would fail them long after; Gothi had seen most of them, and would see many more.

They watched the sea in easy silence for a long, long while. Gothi’s fingers flexed idly around her staff as she leaned on it, boney and gnarled like the roots of trees; her face placid and calm, at ease as always.

“You always knew,” He said. The knowledge didn’t sting as he watched the thunderdrum play. “You always knew what he was, what he would become.”

Smiling mildly, Gothi turned her blind gaze up at him and didn’t answer. Calmly, she scratched a drawing into the dirt with the end of her staff and stepped back; that damned drawing that had haunted Stoick for decades looked back as he turned his head to it, the man with his arms spread within a dragon as if the wings spread out were his own.

The old stories came unbidden to Stoick's thoughts - fylgja, the spirit of a man's soul and the reflection of his being that accompanied him always. The animal a man transformed into, like berserkir into bears and ulfhednar into wolves. Though Stoick had not heard of a soul made of flesh, instead of a beast seen in dreams, and he wondered what it meant for a man to have his fylgja, the beast he transformed into, be a dragon of flesh and blood which walked beside its master like a thinking beast.

He wondered if dragons had fylgja too, and if Hiccup was the night fury’s as the dragon was his.

Stoick supposed it didn’t matter, and scuffed away the drawing with his foot - though with less force than he meant. Perhaps there was no word for what Hiccup and the night fury were, not in all of midgard; the truth of it was plain enough to see, and did not need a name. Hiccup loved the beast as a brother, and the beast loved him just the same, and together they were as much one whole as they were distinct.

Sighing, Stoick gathered the breath to speak again. His voice was at once old and weary, and as plaintive as when he’d been a small boy at her feet, as he asked, “Will he ever come back?”

Gothi’s mouth pursed thoughtfully. Her fingers flexed idly around her staff, and absently she scratched a few symbols into the dirt at their feet. Eventually, she shrugged. Stoick snorted to himself, only a little bitterly.

“Aye, well,” Said Stoick, looking back to the sea. Hiccup never was one to do what was expected of him. But a stillness was coming to his thoughts, his mind settling until the calm of a distant cove was in his head; he found a small piece of himself content. knowing that his son was alive at all.

Hiccup was alive. Stoick cradled close the relief of it as he faced the clear, bright day and let the cool, damp breeze sweep away his nagging thoughts and the heat that prickled in his scars.