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Chapter Text

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

North Of Nowhere

Prologue: Irrevocable

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{IRREVOCABLE}

An act that cannot be undone; Decisions that cement one’s fate. 

The door that closes behind you with no handle on the other side.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

They don't tell you how fast life can change, nor how fast it can slip so far out of grasp.

Not just shift, or stumble—but change. Irrevocably. Mercilessly. Like falling through ice—you don't even realize you're sinking until the cold wraps around your lungs and you're gasping on instinct, too late to undo any of it and too heavy to pull yourself out of the darkness.

I used to think the worst thing that could happen to me was being different.

Being seen as weak. As... a hiccup.

And maybe that's where this all really began—with that aching, gnawing desperation to be something else, other than my pathetic and unimpressive self. The fishbone son of the great Chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe, Stoick's greatest disappointment.

If I'd just stopped for one moment—just thought instead of acted—I wouldn't be here now. My body wouldn't be so...Broken. Bloodied and Cold.

Instead, here I was Alone, on the edge of a cliff with my life leaking out in rivulets onto the frigid and merciless stone beneath my bloodied body.

One misstep. One snap decision. That's all it took.

One forbidden door opened... and now the path behind me is ash. And what's ahead?

I'm not even sure it's a path anymore.

Before it had all changed, before that hellish night—my biggest concerns were so small. So laughably human.

I used to lie awake worrying about all the ways I would try to finally make my father proud to call me his son, be an heir he could embrace and look upon with only pride and affection in his eyes . Or about how to win even a sliver of respect from the village that saw me as a walking disaster of a chieftain's son. I fretted over every forged nail in Gobber's shop, every sideways glance from the other teens, every awkward word that left my mouth when she was around—Astrid, with her hurricane-blue eyes and deadly axe swings and the kind of presence that left me short of breath and forgetting how to exist entirely.

And Gobber... gods, I can still hear him rambling while I filed down sword hilts or poured molds. I was his blacksmithing assistant. His moral support. His unsolicited therapist.

And for a while, I thought maybe that was all I was meant to be.

I didn't know that something worse than insignificance was waiting for me. Something far bigger and beyond comprehension.

It all feels so far away now. That life. That boy. That village.

All of it turned to smoke and splinters the day I pulled the trigger on a dragon I couldn't even bring myself to kill.

I'd always had an annoying knack of never following through...Least of all when it was important. 

The day I met him.

Toothless.

A Night Fury.

The unholy offspring of lightning and death itself. The dragon that changed everything I thought I knew about dragons, the greatest and most frightening enemy of Vikings. He had changed everything.

And I—I'm the one who changed first.

I thought I could handle the consequences. Thought I could find a graced balance between two worlds on my thin, trembling shoulders.

But I was wrong.
So hopelessly wrong.

I opened a door I should've left sealed. And once I stepped through, I could never go back.

Not after what happened. Not after the bite.
Not after I started to feel... different.

More dragon than boy. More shadow than son.

I've made mistakes. Terrible ones. And the cost... well.

I'm paying it now.

My fingers are numb. My side is wet. Everything tastes like iron and acid.

And yet... the sun is rising. The clouds are blushing in gentle pinks and golds. The sea below glitters like a spilled dream.

It's beautiful. Breathtaking, even.

I had never noticed how beautiful mornings could be. Not really. I'd always been stolled away in my nocturnal habits of staying in the forge until the dawn first broke through, then I was off to bed. Never had I taken even a moment to simply stop and watch the morning,

Not until this one.
Not until the last one.

And maybe that's the cruelest part of all.

So, if this is the end of me, then let me tell you how it began.
Let me show you where it all went so wrong.

It started with a dragon.
It ended with a choice.

And somewhere in between... I think I lost who I was.

This is the story of what happened.

Of who I became.

And why I had to disappear.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Chapter Text

North Of Nowhere 

ARC 1: Valley Of The Damned

Chapter 1. Changeable

{Changeable}

Not fixed; capable of or prone to change—like weather, mood, or fate.

A soul too eager to please the wind, never planting roots.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

[Three Weeks Ago - Hiccup Age 15]

The night the world ended— for Berk at least —had started out almost… pleasant.

The skies were clear, brushed in watercolored purples and fading golds as the last light of day dipped beneath the horizon for the last time. A salt-tinged breeze rose from the eerily calm sea, cool and crisp, curling over the cliffs like a careless whisper. It ruffled the auburn hair of the boy perched alone on the edge, he was much more thin and wiry, than the average Berkian, barely a blip in the silhouette of Berk’s rugged coastline.

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the esteemed and well-respected Chief’s son, and well the, resident embarrassment of Berk herself. The black sheep in an otherwise very loud and very axe-happy flock of vikings of the Archipelago.

He sat cross-legged on a jagged outcrop of stone, where even the sheep refused to tread, watching the stars blink to life one by one. His people, ancient ancestors passed and faded had once dubbed them ‘Odin’s Eye,’ the blinding fairy lights that would become scattered across the sky without fail eahc and every night.

Tonight, was a rare quiet moment for him. One of the few days the village had merciulously forgotten he existed—which, in his humble opinion, were always the best kind.

No yelling. None of those icy looks and malicous sneers from his people and peers alike. And best of all? The Viking children had been far too distracted by budegoning worms to death for them to set their sights on the young village halfwit, so that naturally meant no chucking yak dung at his latest inventions. No tonight, he was greeted only by the calming silence of it all, the sweetness of the cotton candy sky, and refreshing saltiness of the sleeping sea.

Even Stoick the Vast, his massively broad-shouldered, impossibly busy, and overly overbearing father, hadn’t shouted at him even once today. A rare miracle, he wasn’t so often blessed with. 

For all his brute strength and commanding presence, Stoick was nothing if not devoted—to Berk, to its people, and, in his own frustrating, Stoick-ish way, to his son. 

Overbearing? Always. Overprotective? Absolutely. But today, the great chief (and not-so-great father) had been far too tangled in village business to spare Hiccup even a second glance, and well Hiccup had ditched Gobber’s squabbling hours earlier.

Something about supply counts… or missing sheep… or maybe another house torched by an overeager dragon. Hiccup hadn’t bothered to keep track of such mind-numbing duties in years.

He’d never claimed to be a good heir…But that mattered not with a village that had damned him long before he even had a chance to soar… 

Well, whatever it was, it meant Hiccup got a break.

But peace on Berk never lasted long. Not really. And really how could it? In a world of monstrous dragons here and there for all to see and vikings as Yak-headed as they were punchdrunk. Peace just simply didn’t suit such uniquely brutal lifestyles afterall. 

It had started with the Northern winds. A sudden sharp and biting drop of the otherwise lukewarm summer temperatures, one so frigid and ominous as it curled around his shoulders like the cold clammy hands of Death herself. 

Next came the ear-peircing sound.

A distant, bone-deep shriek , of a dragon, or rather of dozens, if not hundreds of wayward dragons. The sounds of the impending horde thundered, coming from everywhere all at once— high above the treetops, across the faces of the cliffsides, echoing from the towering mountains, as if the very bones of the island were crying out at their arrival. Another monsterous scream followed, followed by a low rumble that shook the stone and earth underfoot. The sky darkened unnaturally fast, clouds spiraling in like ink dropped in water.

Hiccup’s breath caught, this raiding flock sounded worse than any other Berk ahd ever seen. The village bells began to toll, sharp and panicked as a flurry of ram horns were blown to awaken everyone in the village. Fires flared to life and more and more vikings awoke. Shadows sprinted through the streets as warriors armed themselves with axes and spears, shouting orders that barely rose above the howling that rolled in from the forest and seafront.

Hiccup’s legs were moving before his mind could even begin to catch up with his senses. It wasn’t ideal, this flock was much larger than he’d expected, but He’d prepared for this nonetheless. Trained for it, in his own time and terms of course, his father hadn’t had the faith to provide him in true dragon training as of yet, but maybe after tonight the village and his father would finally see how truly bull-headed Hiccup could be. All the sneaking and the endless tinkering, those late nights spent welding in the forge when Gobber wasn’t looking—it had all led to this. To this very moment.

Tonight, everything would change.

He just had to make it to the other side of the island—where his latest invention, his best dragon-trap-yet , awaited with bated breath.

If he could survive long enough to reach it, that is. But you know what they say about Hiccups? They have a nasty habit of staying alive.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

It was the worst raid of the season, or perhaps the worst Berk had ever seen. The sky was bathed in shadowy black abyss that never seemed to end, broken only by the sporatic flicker of running torchlights, that seemed to rage all throughout the desolate and cold island of the vikings. Overhead, the beat of enormous wings tore through the air, thunderous and unrelenting, sending gusts that nearly snuffed out what little light remained.

The air was thick and suffocating with the burning of smoke and filled with the screams of the damned, or those unlucky enough to become engulfed by the flames of Hel herself. Somewhere nearby, a roof collapsed with a deafening crunch, sending embers spiraling skyward like fireflies from Hel’s hearth, as the ruthless titans of the skies descended upon the Berkians. 

Hiccup ducked beneath a crumbling roofline, the inferno flickering across his soot-smudged face, nearly toppling over as he once again tripped over his own feet in his hasty retreat to escape the tickling of the ragging flames. Heat pulsed in waves across his skin, sweat and ash clinging to his tunic as his chest heaved from the adrenaline and overwhelming fear assaulting his veins. He stumbled, tripping again over splintered wood and loose stone he couldn’t hardly see through the thick smog and burning rubble, barely catching himself as he staggered into better cover behind a rather welcoming-looking crumbling wall.

A thunderous blast of flame singed past him a mere second after, close enough to leave his sleeves steaming and drawing a yelp from his throat. The Gronkle that had released it passed overhead in a blur of scales and smoke, grumbling deep in its chest as it moved on in search of far more tempting prey. Hiccup, still scrawny and awkward, was apparently too unimpressive a morsel to be worth the effort.

He tried to not let that little tidbit get to him further. He was sure his father, the grandiose chieftain of their tribe, would be sure to chuckle at the thought of Hiccup being too meager a meal for even dragons. As if he wasn’t already the biggest embarrassment and greatest dissapopoint of Berk ever had the misfortune of seeing. 

Instead he let his mind wonder to other matters, Hiccup felt as if he truly had about ten thousand lives at this point, how many more near misses could one fishbone viking get, before he too get’s burned by the fire?

He sucked in a shaky breath, willing his panic to subside somewhere else deep inside of him. His chest rose and fell rapidly as he steadied himself, ears ringing with the sounds of ragging battle and the constant assault of nearby fire blasts. 

He wouldn’t go deaf would he? That’s all he needed in a world of eat or be eaten…

When he finally dared to peek around the edge of the stone, the square beyond was empty —save for crackling firelight and dancing shadows he’d catch every once and a while. The dragon had moved on it seemed.

Thank Thor.

But he didn’t linger, just because one dragon was gone didnt mean another wasn’t lurking nearby to replace it at a moment’s notice, dragons were notorious pack animals and where there was one there was a hundred more.

No sooner had the path cleared than he slipped from his hiding place and darted back into the chaos, his limbs still trembling and hyped up with adrenaline. All around him, metal clashed, fire bloomed, and wings cut across the sky like fiery typhoons. It was absolute madness . It was always madness.

And yet… he had his mission tonight, same as the dragons. While they came to pillage and consume, he and his people, Hiccup came to prove himself. He supposed that didn’t make them all that different, just two different beasts with different missions to complete before the sun would crack across the sky by the dawn. 

He hoped tonight would be lifechanging, that maybe —just maybe — tonight would be the night he’d finally kill a dragon. The night he would finally cement himself as the true heir of Berk, and become a man worthy of his people…and most of all a man his father would finally be proud of, a son he could finally look in the eye and gleam with pride. 

His fingers trembled on the release of his latest invention, an innovation he’d hope would forever change the village and the way his people thought of him, should he be given the chance.

Unsteadily he finally releashed the killswitch, and then came the aftermath of his impulsions.

An irreversible shot in the night that would forever change life as he knew it.

A deafening whistle of a cry pierced through the cold air of the night, as a living shadow plummeted from the protections of the stars hanging high overhead.

He didn’t believe it, not until he’d seen the trees split open, their branches cracking under something impossibly massive, and something undeniably dragon in shape. It had to be a Night Fury. Thee Night Fury.

And he had brought it down. Now if only he could convince his village of his fleets, his life would be forever irrevocably changed by this night. 

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

[Two Days Later]

Shamefully it had taken Hiccup a whole two days and night before he had worked up enough courage to set out on his own to find the dragon he was so sure he had hit. He’d given his father and his people a day of grace, in hopes they might finally listen to him and believe his words, yet much to his expectation, but also disappointment his people and his father… ignored his words and had even hailed him a liar, a heretic of the tribe and shunned him for his efforts to please and fit in with them finally. By the dawn of the next morning his mind and heart had been set, if not a bit unsteady and uncertain of himself, his tribe and father always ahd a special kind of way of convincing him just how useless they all believed him to be, Gobbler was the only true except to this, but it wasn’t as if he was a gentle coddling type of viking by nature either, no vikings were afterall. So that’s exactly how Hiccup found himself alone in a forest that was deathly still. Even the wind held its breath this afternoon,he tried to ignore the creeping paranoia, but even he wasn’t blind to the unsettling eerilness shiftingthrough the stale air.  It left an especially sour and bitter taste in Hiccup’s mouth, though whether it was from his own nerves or from the rising bile bubbling in his throat, he wasn’t so sure. 

Despite his internal turmoil and apprehension, Hiccup did his best to put on his very best (and very unconvincing) brave face on as he continued to push through the underbrush. Not without his fraying nerves causing him to clumsily drag his feet and homemade bolas blade behind him, as the growing exhaustion of guilt gnawed holes in his ribs. 

Had he really left without telling anyone… Without telling his father? 

Well he had always been the rebellious type…So it checked out he guessed. Even as a babe he had always been one to press all the wrong buttons.

But this was everything he’d ever wanted right? It wasn’t his fault they refused to believe him! He knows the beast had gone down somewhere just off of Raven’s Point!

So why did it leave him feeling so eerily unsettled and filled with a growing sense of guilt? He shoudln’t feel guilt for shooting one less monster out of the sky…

That was kinda the expectation of being a viking wasn’t it? If anything he should be proud! 

Yet he found himself to feel anything, aside from stone cold shame and wrecked with overwelming guilt. 

The guilt only seemed to nip at his insides, digging deeper with every breath and shaky step he managed to take. And it only got worse when he finally stumbled into the clearing at Raven’s Point. 

And oh wow, there it was.

The undeniable proof.

And the weight of it, nearly broke him where he stood.

But this was it, right? What he’d always wanted. The Night Fury— the Night Fury—had gone down. Somewhere past Raven’s Point just as he’d expected it to, there it was tangled in his geniusly cruel trap. 

And every bit the undeniable proof he’d needed. 

So why did it feel like his ribs were caving in?

Where was the all promised validation? 

The clearing only opened wider as he stumbled further into the scene of the massacre before him. There it was.

The dragon.

It was curled in on itself, it’s breathing was shallow and gurgled as it seeming choked on the ropes or maybe it’s own blood, benath it were its wings, the ones that had been crushed beneath its massive weight. The poor beast was tangled in the same ropes he’d engineered, completely trapped in the very contraption that had made him feel— just two days ago —like he’d finally done something right.

But there was nothing right about this, nothing to be proud of to speak.

It was bleeding, heavily. Its body twitching uncontrollably and clearly experiencing tremendous bouts of pain. From the looks of it, the ropes from the steel netting had cut mucher deeper into its flesh than expected. 

The Night Fury wasn’t snarling, neither was it  fighting. No…The beast just lay there , wings splayed awkwardly beneath the weight of netting and metal, breathing in ragged, heaving gasps and terrified eyes. Thick cords bit into its limbs and neck, cutting against scaled skin and drawing blood that darkened the grass below it.

Its sides trembled in what must’ve been severe pain, it’s muscles twitching involuentarily and without any rhyme or reason. Large panicked emerald eyes that fluttered between half-lidded and blown wide open, as it fought against the devasting pain.

Those eyes.

They should’ve been full of fire, of rage, of defiance.

Instead… they looked tired and filled only with hopeless resignation, both looks the young heir of Berk recognized everytime he looked at his own reflection.

And somehow, that was the hardest part of this entire rather fucked up situation.

The dragon wasn’t fighting because it couldn’t . It wasn’t surrendering out of mercy—it simply had nothing left to give . A downed dragon will always be a dead dragon, his mentors grim words echoed through the forefront of his mind and the way his heart clecnehd was suffocating.

The bile only rose higher in Hiccup’s throat.

How could I have done this?

He was supposed to be different. He’d always been much more gentlehearted, sensitive, than all the other battleborn brutes of his tribe, just as his mother, or so he’d been told anyway, he could’t remember her face let alone anything about her personality. But unlike his well-loved, if not ignored mother, Hiccup was most commonly known as the village embarrassment, sure—but he was no killer, or at least he never had been. 

He was the boy who patched up wounded birds, even being determined enough to convince his father, his big gruff rather hard-hearted father, to help him save the tiniest of beasts, because he simply couldn’t stand to see even the smallest of creatures suffer. The boy who cried when sheep froze to death in the coldest days of Berk’s ruthless winters. The boy who turned away during dragon slayings, sickened by the violence his people had called glory. 

He had never had the heart for such violence and suffering and yet…

And now he was the one with blood on his hands.

His unescapable weapons. His brilliantly cruel designs. His ruthless death trap.

He had been the one to have done this.

How could he have done this?

The dragon’s green eyes, they were so piercing,  so vivid— and above all else they were locked onto his.

A sick twist coiled in Hiccup’s gut. What had he done? What had he done? The days of sketching dragons, of building crazy and otherwise unthinkable contraptions, of dreaming of being someone worthy of his father’s praise—they had all led to this. To this. 

And for what? To kill a beast that can’t even fight back? This was but a coward’s game, and he had never loathed himself more than he did today.

As Hiccup continued to fall down a rabbithole of guilt and growing regret, the downed dragon just stared at him, still so obvisously cornered and earthbound, it’s verdant eyes glimmered with uncertainty and pain, showing bits and pieces of a fractured spirit. 

In those eyes, those eyes so much like his own… he was quick to notice and realize the look swimming in it’s depths. Just like his own, this dragon’s hope had long since been wrung dry.

And in them, Hiccup saw something he never expected.

In the dragon’s eyes, despite its precarious and hopeless situation, its eyes carried not a trance of hate, nor fury, no what he saw was something far worse…

Recognition.

Those fractured, pain-glossed eyes mirrored his own in a way that shook him to his very core. That hollow, tired ache of a heavy and miserable life, or rather existence. That crushing feeling of loneliness and forced isolation. That quiet, unscreamed grief of never being understood. Of never being enough.

They were the same.

When Hiccup took a single step forward, the dragon flinched—barely—but it flinched nonethless.

But the reaction was not one of fear, but an instinctive reflex of a being used to an existence of uncertainty and tragedy. Rejection.

Even in the sea of hopelessness, a single spark of determination and stubbornness remained. Just a flicker of instinct that had survived everything else as it had been stripped away and torn from it’s grasps. Even against the odds, this dragon wanted nothing more than to survive, just like Hiccup. 

And that— that —was the moment something so deeply inside Hiccup broke.

Not with one singular sound, not even when the salt from his eyes burned his cheeks.

But with a raw, internal snap—like an invisable tether that had been holding back years of pain finally snapping free. 

His knees buckled. Not because of his body's sudden weakness, but from the weight of realization that drowned him, demanding he fall deeper into an already emotionally devasting void. 

He dropped to the dirt, blade shaking in his hand, his breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a choked sob. Everything he’d ever buried—every insult, every failure, every shameful little wish to be someone else—came crashing down like a landslide inside his chest. 

Everything from then on broke, just like a damn and everything he’d ever held in, so close to his heart and locked deep inside, collapsed in a mangled heap of years of emotional conspation and soical isolation. 

Just how many years of trauma and abuse had he hidden away, with every intention of it never seeing the light of day? 

He had never felt more like a monster, or a real failure of a human being. 

And the dragon, this supposed unholy offspring of lightning and death itself, didn’t look like a monster at all. 

It looked broken.

And it looked scared.

S o much like him that it made his heart ache.

What kind of man kills something that can’t even fight back?

Only one answer came to mind.

A coward.

And that was the one thing he refused to become, but maybe sparring his supposed mortal enemy was just another form of the word, at least he wa ssure his people would think as much. 

His grip on the damned knife loosened, the weight of the weapon far too heavy a burden he dared to carry even a moment longer. And even if his arms did miraculously work, he knew the strike would never land. 

Those beastly  emerald eyes peered back at him with such intensity, it felt as if they were calling out and piercing his soul with it’s own. He couldn’t explain it…But he and this dragon were a lot more alike than imaginable. 

His father and tribe be damned, he couldn’t kill murder a beast that looked just as scared and broken as him. 

He should have dropped the accursed thing.

But instead, he took a deep shaking inhale, like the kind you take right before you jump off a cliff when you grow so desparte to feel something, anything even if it’s excuraiting pain. 

And then, hands clumsy with both panic and purpose, he reached for the ropes.

going to be easy, he’d been the one sure to engineer the damned chains to hold the deadliest dragon known to man.

They cut into his fingers, bloodiing his palms and hand sin the process.

Well that was Odin’s karma for ya, he thought bitterly.

Let it hurt, it's what I deserve after all.

It was the least he could do for straying so far from his morality.

The dragon watched him in silence, eyes narrow and alert, but not overtly hostile. There was something in that gaze—cautious curiosity, maybe. A flicker of intelligence that rattled Hiccup’s last thread of certainty.

He worked faster, unwilling to process such observations and speculations any further.

Some of the ropes were embedded deep in the dragon’s scales and muscle. Some clung to upturned and torn scales slick with blood. And still, he kept sawing at the bonds like a madman as he muttered broken apologies under his breath—to the dragon, to himself,  or to the boy he’d nearly become, he was wans’t sure anymore, his mouth was moving on it’s own and in it’s own undiscernable language.

Each snapped strand felt like a chain breaking inside his own chest, releasing the accumulated guilt and stress of the day. When the final rope fell away and the dragon shifted, Hiccup instinctively froze. Rasingin up his hands with open palms, and nearly bowing his head in what he hoped communicated a silent offering of sorts to the beast. The last thing he wanted to do was irritate and challenge it further, he’d already caused enough irreversible damage as it was. 

When the last binding fell away and the dragon tensed, Hiccup did his best to not openly show any sign of weakness, doing his best to not flinch away or cower like his instincts were fighting him to. He only looked up, hands open and palms facing upwards, breath still catching, as he hoped with all his heart the dragon wasn’t wanting a Hiccup-sized snack anytime soon.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice barely audible. “I’m not going to hurt you…”

He paused cutting himself midsentence as his gaze fell to the blood oozing from the angry bala wounds marring the dragon’s legs and the deep neck gashes. 

To the young viking’s immediate shock, the dragon as dark as obsidian and as notorious as the night seemed to consider him. Its bright and electric emerald eyes swept over the boy’s meager body. After a moment, it snorted a puff of smoke from it’s scaly nostrils as it made a low huff-like hiss, a sound Hiccup imagined was the dragon equivalent of a deep sigh. 

Never once did the beast eyes leave the scrawny boy’s form, though it’s gaze wasn’t necessary openly hostile either, malice didn’t dance in it’s irises anymore, but a certain caution still remained at the forefront. Somehow he felt as if, the dragon might have actually believed him.

But that was unthinkable, right?

And in that fragile moment, beneath the golden leaves and cooling evening sun, it felt as if everything he had ever known had began to shift. His world suddenly felt so incredibly small and his knowledge so meager, he was realizing just how much more he’d haave to learn and that there was still so much he didn’t understand. 

This was no victory and not the victory he had imagined, not even in the slighest.

But this couldn’t exactly be considered a truce either.

As their gazes remained locked in place, it felt as if a piece of their souls had splintered off from the rest, and been exchanged in a way neither could’ve ever guessed. It was faint and subtle, but the beginnings of a bond neither had expected, began to take root. Fate had always been a funny kinda thing afterall. 

Tonight had not gone the way Hiccup imagined. It hadn’t brought him the guts and glory he thought he needed, nor the approval he’d spent his whole life chasing. There was no roaring crowd standing over the corpse of a slain dragon in the center of the village, nor the sounds of spilt ale and shouts of pride. No father’s proud hand on his shoulder or the bashful but impressed look on the face of berk’s youngest and most impressive warrior, who made his heart race just a tad bit uncontrollably. 

Instead, there was an aching pain and a deafening silence. And in the center of it all—there was the consequences of his traitorous choice to spare his enemy, the very enemy of his tribe…of his people. 

And somehow, in the face of everything he’d been taught, everything that had been burned into him by a village that feared the unknown, Hiccup had made that choice, even if it was a real spur of the moment kinda decision, it was too late for take backs.

He had spared a beast amongst the most feared creatures in the known world.

The Night Fury , the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself.

And in doing so, he had crossed a line that no Viking before him ever had.

He just didn’t know it yet—but that moment, that spontaneous breath of unexpected mercy, had cracked open the door to something far greater than he could ever imagine. 

Something that would one day change not only him, but all of Berk… and beyond.

Forever.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Chapter Text

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

North Of Nowhere 

Chapter 2. Slip

  𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{SLIP} 

A brief lapse with lasting impact; one moment that changes all.

One misstep on a narrow ledge, and the whole world tilts.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Hiccup’s chest began to rise with a tentative sigh; his whole body was trembling in a strange cocktail of awe and relief. The Night Fury hadn’t bolted, and most importantly…it hadn’t incinerated him on the spot. 

That had to mean something, right ? 

A hesitant flicker of hope and infectious curiosity stirred in his gut.

Maybe… just maybe… 

His foot shifted forward without thought—just a single impulsive step, born from a moment of recklessness and curiosity. The dry dead leaves beneath his boot crackled faintly in protests.

And that was all it took to strike the match and fan the inferno.

The explosion that was triggered was instantaneous; the Night Fury’s pupils shrank into slivers in an instant. That still, spellbound look vanished from its face completely, replaced by a sudden, razor-sharp tension as it bared its frightening teeth at the boy (and possible threat) before him.

And just like that, everything they might’ve had previously was shattered in an instant. And all because Hiccup, as per usual, just simply couldn’t help himself and pushed just a bit too far. 

He’d never been one to respect other people's boundaries, even when it was for his own good. He just didn’t know when to quit. 

With a velocity too fast to follow, the dragon as dark as night pounced.

The air was knocked clean from Hiccup’s lungs as he was slammed onto his back. The earth cracked beneath him, stones digging into his spine as his ribs groaned under the force and weight of the twenty-ton beast. Massive claws pinned him to the ground, digging deep into his shoulders with unflinching precision—hot pain flaring up instantly as if he’d been struck by burning irons. Not even all his time nursing angry burns from accidents at the forge and the other teen’s ‘roughhousing’ could compare to this moment. 

He tried to scream, but no sound aside from a gurgled grunt escaped.

Then came the monstrous roar.

It wasn’t made up of noise alone; it felt as if the sound had a whole presence and pressure of its own. A deafening, soul-rattling shriek that tore through the woods and shattered the very air around them. Trees shuddered, while birds and terrible terrors alike fled from the treetop canopies and rocky cliff sides in a frenzied haste. The cliffs echoed back the same thunderous roar. 

The sound didn’t just blarringly scream danger.

It said: Move again, and I’ll really kill you next time.
Back off.

Hiccup’s ears rang violently, the force alone causing his teeth the chatter and vibrate in his gums. His eyes squeezed shut under the force of it, tears springing foreward to the corners of his lashes. His heart thundered in his chest, faster than it had ever beaten in his life. 

Would he even still have one beating after this encounter? Each breath felt like it scraped against broken glass. 

Surely after that, his ears were bleeding…or maybe his hearing would just be lost entirely. 

And then, without any kind of warning or preparation, the weight was gone, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

The claws released him, taking the ample heat of the dragon’s body with it, and disappearing as suddenly as it had come.

Gasping, Hiccup blinked through the pain and light-headedness, just in time to glimpse a blur of inky black vanishing deeper into the forest, wings slicing the air with an almost spectral grace as it leap through the treetops. Hiccup had never heard of a dragon that used treetops as springboards, but he supposed he really didn’t know nearly enough about dragons anyway, and well, maybe he should get to fixing that. And just like that, the forest was silent again. The dragon vanished just like wisps of smoke in the wind; it was there for a moment and then just gone…

Just like…

A ghost. Or maybe a shadow, he guessed.

For a long moment, everything stayed eerily still in its silence, not even the wind blew for a few moments as if it too was scared of the mighty offspring of lightning and death herself.

Hiccup lay sprawled in the dirt, chest heaving as if it too would fly away and never look back, his mouth felt as dry as a desert. He was a bit surprised by how brief the entire interaction had been. He couldn’t believe how different his world had become in the span of a few minutes. He blinked slowly, as if coming back to himself from some awful daydream.

He even thought for a moment that’s really all it had ever been…

But t hen the pain made itself known with a burning fury. 

“Augh—!” he gasped, clutching at his shoulders. His tunic was torn through and was now soaked in deep, varying shades of crimson.

Ah, he was bleeding by the looks of it. Quite a lot, actually . 

The searing heat of the wounds burned beneath his fingertips—four clean gashes, deep but not fatal (or so he guessed at least), left by the dragon’s claws. His fingers came away slick and stained with his own blood.

Well, that’s a bit alarming, he thought nervously.

The dragon hadn’t left him untouched. But then again, he hadn’t left it untouched either.

It seemed as if the Night Fury hadn’t left him without a gift of its own; Hiccup might as well consider it the proper compensation for shooting it down in the first place. He hadn’t missed the blood seeping out of the dragon's own angry wounds. 

It was real. All of it was…

Undeniably, agonizingly real . 

Wow.

That was… a lot more than he was ready to deal with.

Gothi . He needed Gothi. She’d know how to patch him up better than Gobber ever could, and more importantly, she wouldn’t ask questions. She never did—at least not out loud. That was part of the deal. She’d heal him, then he’d take the rest of the day to figure out all the lies he’d managed to cobble together, and they both go about their day while pretending they hadn’t seen the truth in each other’s eyes.

Yeah. That would work.

He just needed to get back to Berk before the Night Fury changed its mind, realizing it was hungry enough to try a little fried hiccup on the side, or maybe even return to finish what it started—or maybe what he had started. 

Because really, this was all on him, wasn’t it? He was the one who’d set it all into motion. No one else had held a dagger to his back, forcing him to pull the trigger. And no one else had told him to reach out and approach his mortal enemy because he’d been lost in the wanderlust of it all. 

Why was he always like this? For someone who had thought himself rather smart, he was rather muttonheaded. 

Gods, it was no wonder his tribe hated him so much. His peers, his elders, his father—they’d all been right . They’d always been right . He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t smart in the ways that mattered. He was the embarrassment of Berk, always making the biggest mess out of the smallest things. Always tripping over the biggest taboo no other viking had dared to touch.

And now? He’d broken far more than just the rules.

He needed to get out of here. Now .

He needed to get out of here before he found himself in even deeper in the yak dung. First, he’d go and find Gothi, the village elder, who would get him all stitched up, and he’d let her work her quiet magic before pretending this whole night never happened. It’s not like the old healer was known to talk… At least not out loud… 

So that meant the plan was simple enough: he’d get himself all stitched up, then walk it off and pretend this entire night never even happened. It wasn’t like anyone else had seen anything. He was positive there were no witnesses and no real damning proof of his heinous and traitorous actions. 

Well, aside from the bloody tunic, but it wasn’t uncommon to see, especially when it came to Berk’s well-known local screw up of a heir. 

V ikings got hurt all the time; it was an occupational hazard for Odin’s sake! And well dragon-related attacks, they were commonplace and nothing any viking worth his salt would even bat an eye at... 

And as far as the rest of Berk was concerned, this was just another one of Hiccup's harmless missteps. One more stupid accident.

He could sell that. He had to.

If he played it right, stayed calm, and acted normal (His socially awkward and unassuming self of course) —everything would be fine.

Yeah, everything would all be perfectly fine .

…Except how could he pretend? He was far from a good liar! 

How would he ever face his father?

Chief Stoick the Vast, the mist viking of the vikings, and the already disappointed father of said viking fishbone.

Nothing got past him. Not when it came to all things Hiccup. The man knew all his most-damning tells, his every little fidget, the way his voice cracked and changed in pitch when he lied or was caught red-handed. 

He’d always see straight through him, just like always.

What was going to happen when he found out?

Hiccup’s chest seized.

His lungs locked up, breath catching halfway between a suffocating gasp and a broken sob. His pulse roared in his ears, louder than the wind, louder than the crickets and leaves. He gripped his chest like he could hold his heart in place before it inadvertently ripped itself free from its failure of a husk.

Gods— what had he done ? Why had he done this? Why couldn’t he just be a normal viking, for gods sake!

All of this…This wasn’t just harmless disobedience anymore.

This wasn’t of the same caliber as sneaking off to tinker with a new invention or testing one of his dumb ideas behind the forge.

This was literal treason . 

Betrayal of his tribe, of his people, and to his father, their chief. 

He’d taken a weapon that had been forged with the sole purpose of killing dragons… and he’d used it to save one, the worst and most dangerous of them all. He’d spared the enemy without a second thought. He’d even taken it a step further and touched the beast. He’d been a true goner, the moment he’d met its magnificent and terrald eyes. And from it…They’d somehow formed a twisted and fragile connection.

And worst of all?

He’d chosen the dragon.

Over Berk.

Over his people.

Over the safety of the tribe. 

Over his chief.

Over his own father.

Over everything .

What would they do to him now?

Would they banish him? Hang him? Or maybe they’d even offer him up to the very monsters he now refused to harm?

Would even his own father… He couldn’t even finish the thought.

His throat burned. The panic came back worse this time, clawing through his skull like wildfire. Once the match had been struck, there was no going back, and before long, every rational thought was burned to ash.

Maybe… maybe the dragon should’ve just killed him.

Burnt him to cinders and saved him from this steaming yak pile of shame and betrayal, and guilt.

He could still hear Gobber’s voice ringing in his head, clear as day. Stoick’s too. Over and over:

“If you come across a dragon, kill it before it kils you. Always choose  to kill the beast before it’s given the chance to return the favor.” 

“Never hesitate, and always choose your own life over any other. A mindless beast will always be a mindless beast, so use it against them.”

But he hadn’t. 

And that was the problem, wasn’t it?

He’d chosen the beast over himself .

Why?

Why would he do something so stupid ? So reckless ? So selfish ?

They were going to hate him even more now.

If that was even possible.

Could he survive it…? More hatred, more isolation..? 

The way they already looked at him like he didn’t belong… that was already crushing enough as it was; he wasn’t sure how much more weight he’d be able to hold up before his legs collapsed out from under him.

He stared at his hands, trembling, smeared with blood. His blood. But not all of it was his. Some belonged to the dragon. The Night Fury had left its mark—deep, angry gashes, burning and raw. They pulsed with pain greater than any burn he’d ever experienced from his years of being Gobber’s clumsy assistant, and the aftershocks of adrenaline weren’t very pleasant a feeling either… 

He found that he couldn’t stop staring. The longer he looked, the more blurred it all became. His vision swam, thoughts spiraling as he fixated on the stains  pooling in his palms like they held all these invisible answers of sorts.

He knew he needed to be rational above all else; he’d need to break it all down and reconstruct it from a more detached perspective if he was to find the answers his mind was so desperately crying out for. 

Okay, so if he remembered it, it all went something like this:

• The dragon had lunged.
• Then it had screamed in his face, nearly deafening him.
• After that, it had torn into him.
• But it hadn’t killed him.
• It had let him live.

Looking at it like this led to one major and lingering question that stood out amongst all the rest…

Why?

Why would it decide to spare him?

After everything he’d done… after it had every right to return the violence…

  Why?

His life wasn’t even worth that kind of mercy. Not really. And certainly not by any dragon standards, not after vikings had killed so many of them over and over again.

He wasn’t the son his father had wanted. He wasn’t even the heir Berk needed. And he wasn’t strong, or brave, or viking enough to lead anything but failure. He was a pipsquench and weakling in comparison to even the smallest of vikings…

All he ever did was cause trouble—for his tribe, his family,  and himself.

That should’ve been the worst part. That imposter guilt.

But it wasn’t.

No—true to his very Hiccupy nature (and not very vikingy at all), the worst part was something else entirely:

He didn’t want to fight it anymore.

He didn’t want to fight any of them.

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III  didn’t want to kill dragons.

He didn’t even want to run from them. That felt just as cowardly as slaughtering them. 

No, what he really wanted… It has become so blindingly clear now.

He wanted to understand them.

This path… even if it meant ruining the future that had been laid out for him since his birth, and even if it meant unraveling everything Berk had ever believed…

Even if it meant forsaking and setting the future that had always been carved out for him since birth, completely ablaze without looking back. Even if it met he’d be sent into exile, disgraced by every meaning of the word, and ruined beyond repair—he’d walk that path. He’d chase it, barefoot if he had to, even if it burned him down to the very last of his bones. 

He’d never stop fighting for this impossible dream. 

Because somewhere in those tumultuous moments, when the world as he had known it had frozen, and burned up in a crispy inferno, in that single moment of silence after the initial had fury passed… he’d looked into that dragon’s eyes and seen something terrifying and revolutionary.

Something so achingly familiar .

Something that felt a little too much like looking at his own reflection. He’d seen himself in that dragon, and he’d been irrevocably changed forever, igniting a spark in his soul he hadn’t even known and now would never forget .

Even if it meant becoming the enemy of Vikings. And his father.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

The wind had seemingly resumed, despite the raging storm still ravaging through the young heir’s mind, as it whipped through the trees again. It was much cooler now, as though the world had shifted into a more subtle quietness, as if it too was in a frenzied state from all that had transpired and trampled on its roots. Somewhere in the distance, waves struck stone with the usual lazy indifference. 

Life goes on and no one is the wiser, Hiccup thought bitterly, unsure if he should feel offended by such indifference or relieved that everything continues. 

No one had heard or seen a thing. I could’ve died and no one would’ve even noticed, or maybe even cared to, Hiccup thought to himself, still feeling stuck somewhere between bewilderment and melancholy. Neither feeling was new, but today their bite stung a little deeper. 

 Hiccup, despite now being bruised, bloodied, and infinitely breathless, tried to rise to his feet; he’d be dead from blood loss sooner or later if he didn’t get his head on straight and drag himself back to Berk.

His arms trembled with overwhelming fatigue beside him, his elbows buckling, as his nerves twitched from a mix of adrenaline high and paralysis.

“Okay…” he croaked, half to himself, half to the void. “Okay, we—”

He never finished.

The world spun sideways as his knees folded beneath his weight.

And he collapsed, facedown into the dirt, the copper taste of blood mixing with the bitter tang of moss and forest grass. His eyelids fluttered, as the last image he saw before the world went black flicked through his vision, it was a sliver of sunlight breaking through the canopy, as it seemed to dance amongst the dust like a distant, and unreachable star. It was sorta beautiful, Hiccup thought as his eyelids grew heavier and heavier before they closed completely. 

Then, there was only the overwhelming darkness.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

[Five Days Later]

He called him Toothless , though the name turned out to be wildly inaccurate. 

He was fast, faster than any creature Hiccup had ever seen. Prouder than even the most confident of vikings. And on top of it, he was silently hilarious, much funnier than the twins (but don’t ever tell them that). 

It took three days for Toothless to stop snarling, or at least to stop baring his teeth, not so much snarling, rather than acting intimidating. 

One day, for him to accept fish, (hunger was something no one could outlast, regardless of one’s stubbornness). Another for him to save Hiccup from drowning after the first saddle test went terribly wrong.

Attempting to sneakily ride on the back of a wild dragon was much more difficult than Hiccup thought it would be. 

Toothless just thought the boy to be mad , but was quick to realize how fun it could be to tease the silly wingless two-legged. He’d never thought two legs could be so entertaining , and he found himself beginning to like this specific wingless … much more than he’d ever expected. He’d even taken to calling this two-legged his . 

The only problem was his human never seemed to appreciate his gifts. It was a bit disheartening to the offspring of lightning and death; he just didn’t understand why his human didn’t enjoy the best part of the sea beasts. 

By the end of the week, they had taken their first flight together. And it was beyond words, unlike anything Hiccup could’ve ever imagined; it was truly magical. And well, it had all happened a lot faster than either had expected, but despite that, it felt like a natural progression; their bond was undeniable, and it only seemed to grow by the day. 

Hiccup’s world had tilted on its axis, and he was quickly realizing he never wanted it to go back to the days before he had met Toothless. They had become fast friends, even faster brothers. 

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

[The Start of Dragon Training]

It wasn’t long before Hiccup was told (ordered) he’d be joining the other teens in Dragon Training 101. Before Toothless, Gobber’s lessons used to be terrifying, so much so that Hiccup would often have nightmares of them, terrified of the implications and responsibilities that came with them. 

Not to mention the required socializing he’d need for them…

But now, they were a joke. 

Terrible Terrors rolled over like lazy puppies if you showed them the barest of kindnesses, and if they grew feisty, light tricks from shields would appease them all the same. They were among the more ‘harmless’ of the dragons, but even they had devastating firepower if cornered, and they often had rather rebellious personalities. 

Certainly not a dragon for the faint-hearted, but Hiccup liked them all the same, even if they were rather clingy…

Gronckles were much more docile than you’d expect with so many rough edges to them; they loved a little doting, and offering them fresh dragon nip could make them your new best friend for life. 

Toothless certainly wasn’t a fan of that particular detail... 

They also surprisingly loved a good pampering. Deadly Nadders were similar in that regard; they loved preening and basking in the glow of their own beauty, plus chicken turned out to be their greatest weakness. Hiccup had discovered that little secret purely accidentally, he’d been out with Toothless one especially early morning, when they’d flown to one of the larger and more far away sea stacks (Hiccup unwilling to risk the pair being seen out in the daylight) to stop for a short breakfast, when a more brave (or maybe just hungry) young nadder had paid them an unexpected visit. The little con artist had come up to them looking all innocent and cute, before it had made a mad dash for the chicken leg, Hiccup had been holding midair, pausing only when he’d been distracted by the little charmer's cuteness.

Toothless had been quick to snarl and snap at the hatchling, the sound pulling Hiccup out of his stunned state to quickly scold Toothless for bullying the baby dragon, even if it had just stolen half their lunch. Hiccup had never seen such a look of ‘betrayal’ on the night fury’s face, the sight making Hiccup fight off a very impolite snort. Toothless’s frown only deepened at the sight, a plume of frustrated smoke blew out of the dragon before he retaliated in his own way and playfully smacked the back of his ridiculous (and rude) two legs’ head with his tail, which stopped his rider’s poorly contained laughter real quick. 

“Really, Bud?!” Hiccup cried out, rubbing the back of his head as he glared at his dragon with a playful rage. 

Toothless’s gummy smile greeted him, as did the dragon’s warbled laughter. Hiccup groaned and flopped backwards into his dragon's side, looking up at the terribly useless reptile mocking him in his clear ‘pain.’ He only managed to hold the mock frown for a moment before he too burst into uncontrollable laughter and gave his best friend the brightest of smiles. 

Toothless cooed at the sight, his heart filled only with warmth, seeing his usually anxious and downtrodden rider so carefree and happy. The sight of such pure joy on his companion's face was the best gift his two leg had ever given him; he only wished his boy would learn to smile more. 

Maybe one day he’d have much more to smile about, and maybe the only way for that to happen would be the day Toothless took his two-legged far away from berk, far away from his boy’s undeserving flock, far away from the pain and the violence, and far out of the Archipelago. 

  𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Fishlegs called Hiccups' sudden quirks talent. Snotlout called it cheating. While Astrid called it suspicious. The twins simply enjoyed the chaos Hiccup’s presence brought out of the tribe. They could always count on the village's local fishbone to bring them the very best entertainment. 

Hiccup just called it Toothless. 

   He’d never have learned dragons to have such incredible complexities without Toothless, after all. His best friend had taught him more than anyone, and he couldn’t be more grateful to his silly scaled best friend. 

And every night after training, he snuck back to the cove to test the new tail-fin prototypes and tell Toothless all about his day. Toothless would make a lot of exaggerated and animated sounds and motions in return. Hiccup suspected Toothless was telling him all about his day, too, but without any true way of communication, Hiccup was often left guessing what his dragon had to say. 

Somedays, he’d even sketch dragons in the margins of old maps he’d secretly ‘borrowed’ from Berk’s archives, and when he wasn’t drawing dragons, he was writing detailed notes in a journal he’d started to call The Hidden World of All Things Dragon .

A real Book of Dragons, one that he’d been curating on truth, and not old fears and half-remembered legends of biased predecessors. Vikings were amazing storytellers, sure, but they were also amazing embellishers, and that made for very unreliable narrators. And their stories, regardless of how grand, were almost always all the more harmful for the dragons; there weren’t stories that the dragons weren’t painted as the overarching evils of the known world. 

So in order to combat such falsities, that’s what Hiccup was writing. He was sure Toothless couldn’t understand a word of what he’d spent so many a night to painstakingly write, but the dragon was always there to act as Hiccup’s second pair of eyes, and his eyes never left the pages that Hiccup was working on. Overall, the night fury seemed surprisingly curious about the book, or maybe it was just like that with anything that had Hiccup’s focus that wasn’t said night fury himself. 

The book wasn’t like the generational one of Berk, it was not a guide for slaying, but a manual for understanding and learning about the amazing creatures, dragons truly were… and not the demonized version vikings held of them. A record shaped by his every observation, and empathy, and by the belief that knowledge should always be used to protect , and never destroy. 

This book wouldn’t teach how to kill dragons. It would teach how to know them and how to live alongside them. Not that he would ever let anyone read it of course. There were simply too many secrets of the dragons that could be used against them, should the book fall into the wrong hands. 

It was crafted with the intention of providing proper education on dragons and the the possibility of coexistence, not to be used as ammunition for senseless wars. 

And if anyone ever tried to twist it, or tried to use his work to harm the creatures it was meant to defend—Hiccup would sooner burn every page. 

He’d made a promise to Toothless the day their paths first crossed.

And he would never break it.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

[When Stoick Left]

Stoick the Vast was off chasing ghosts—something about a hidden Dragon Nest that lurked somewhere on the shores near Berk. A sense of foreboding came with Stoick’s booming declarations and promised bloodshed. 

A feeling that made Hiccup’s chest sink with impending dread, as he watched the great long boats and the back of his proud father disappear into the ocean’s mist. He found himself unable to shake the feeling that everything was shifting beneath his feet.

  It was only a matter of time before he felt himself sinking into it. 

Now that his eyes had been opened, Hiccup wasn’t sure he could ever stomach watching the raids the same way ever again.

He didn’t want to see the dragons die, but he didn’t want to see his people die either. 

He couldn’t bear the thought of the dragons being brutally torn out of the skies just to be killed for simply existing and doing what dragons did —but he didn’t want to see his people suffer either. 

He was stuck in the widening chasm between two worlds, one foot in each world, with each step forward dragging the weight of a truth he hadn’t been ready to carry. A truth so heavy, it felt like it might crush him . 

And the worst part? He had no one to share it with— no one but Toothless.

And even then, there were limits. 

Toothless watched him often, tilting his head in that small, questioning way when Hiccup would get that vacant, far-away look as he grew too quiet. He circled close when the boy’s scent turned sour with stress or fear, always quick to offer his best support, as he nosed at his human’s side like a worried clutchmate. But there were still limits, lines between them that had been drawn by their respective worlds and customs that didn’t always translate so easily. 

Toothless understood pain quite well, having experienced both the physical and mental drain of it, so that he could relate to it as easily as breathing. He also understood loyalty and loss, and even more so, loneliness, and the feeling of isolation and the toll that it carried. But what he couldn’t for the life of him understand was why Hiccup continued to stay. 

To Toothless, the answer was simple: if somewhere brought you such great harrowing pains, you’d naturally leave, fly away, and be free. 

Effectively freeing yourself of further pain and suffering, the world was mighty big, and so much of it had yet to be claimed or explored.

So that led to his most burning and confusing question: 

Why did his two leg insist on remaining grounded in a place that always kept his wings clipped?

To Toothless, it was as plain as day; he could see what his boy wouldn’t or maybe just refused to say: 

Berk made him smaller. They didn’t see his inner fire or the brilliance of his mind, his never-ending kindness, or his great resilience. They seemed blinded only by the ways he didn’t fit the expected mold of the flock. If his flock rejected him so greatly, why did he stay somewhere that only ever asked him to be something he wasn’t?

When Toothless looked at him, he didn’t see a mistake of a Viking—he saw a kindred soul with quiet eyes and trembling hands, a creature who had been shackled in his own way, just by different chains.

And still, Hiccup stayed.

Toothless didn’t understand it. He truly couldn’t. Dragons by nature didn’t cling to nests that hurt them, not unless they were under the influence of the Alphas and even then.. There was always a breaking point when they, too, would spread their wings and leave their nests without ever looking back. They didn’t try to earn the approval of those who’d rather see them caged or cut down. Dragons lived long lives, much longer than that of your average wingless two-legged, but even as such, they refused to waste their precious time in a nest that intentionally hurt them. 

  So why did two legs insist on punishing themselves so often, just to seek the approval of the flock? 

Couldn’t they simply find another more welmcoing and less cruel flock?

But humans… humans were strange that way, he guessed. He hadn’t been around them close enough to fully understand their strange customs, but after meeting his twin flame, he knew over time that would change, and he would continue to grow more and more familiar with the strange customs of the wingless.

So for now, the Night Fury did what he could. He stayed and he listened, even if he didn’t always understand all the words or strange phrases his twin flame used, he wanted to, and was always eager to further his own knowledge. He found himself quite lucky to have pairbonded with such an exceptional human; his boy was clearly far above the other two legs, and that only served to teach Toothless all the more. He didn’t always understand all the wounds Hiccup carried, but he recognized the weight of them and how heavy they wore on his rider’s shoulders. So even if he didn’t fully understand his boy’s fears and inner pains, he did everything he could to share and lift the burden from his other half’s shoulders, while doing his absolute best to bring as much light into his human’s otherwise unfulfilling life at any given opportunity.

The longer the pair spent together, somewhere along the way, both boy and dragon learned the same painful truth:

Sometimes, the cage that cripples us wasn’t always made of wood or iron.

Sometimes, it was made of people.

And staying meant choosing to fight a war not only from the outside, but also from the inside.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Chapter Text

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

North Of Nowhere 

Chapter 3. Ensnare

 𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Ensnare}

To trap or entangle—often with unseen threads or subtle lures.

A silver thread stretched across the threshold, glinting only when it’s much too late.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Present - This Evening} 

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

He never should’ve followed the sound.

The forge’s fires had long dwindled to a low, hissing glow, shadows curling along the stone walls like smoke made solid. Hiccup sat hunched over his workbench, every inch of him smudged with soot and sweat. 

The replacement tail fin gleamed faintly in the low light; this latest attempt was sleeker, much better balanced than the last three prototypes. It’d make their turns tighter than ever. He imagined Toothless’s eyes lighting up at the sight of it, and he couldn’t wait to see the dragon’s initial reaction. They’d test it tomorrow, should the day permit it. Hiccup was more than eager to test drive his latest invention, a sentiment he was sure Toothless would share once he saw it. 

With a bone-tired sigh, Hiccup leaned back on his lambskin stool as he looked at the Milky Way of stars blinking in and out of existence outside. His thoughts shifting to Toothless, as he wondered if his dragon was asleep like the rest of berk or if he, too, was wide awake and staring at the stars, thinking of Hiccup too. His hands were trembling with exhaustion and pride, but he didn’t care.

The silence of the night was a welcome escape, one where no one barked orders or laughed behind his back. No, when it was just him and the forge,  he knew he was safe to just be himself and take a breath, cleanse himself of the burdens of the previous day. It was quite cathartic, and after a few nights like this, he felt his soul heal. 

Gobber had tried— rather half-heartedly, really —to kick him out hours ago, knowing full well he could never get the boy to change once he’d made his mind up.

“Yer father’s off chasin’ myths of dragon queens, and you’re still tryin’ to out-stubborn a yak,” he’d muttered with a sigh. “You’re his son all right, bullheaded and as stubborn as a yak, but even you need to sleep eventually, kid.”

And then he left, muttering something about bad backs and worse ideas in his own unique brand of ‘Gobber grumpin,’ but Hiccup only felt warmth from his mentor's words, regardless of how crude or offensive they might be. Gobber was one of the few (if not the only viking) who’d always had Hiccup’s back, even if it came off a bit crude at times. There had been many a time when Hiccup had wished Gobber had been his father instead of Stoick, other days he’d even ponder on how different his life could’ve been if he was a simple blacksmith's son instead of the chief’s, but that was always rather wishful thinking and he loved his father, even if he hadn’t always (or ever) been all that easy to understand and coexist with. Hiccup sighed, shaking himself out of his rather melancholic thoughts, no use wasting time on a reality that would never belong to him, he had too much to busy himself with as it was. No need to add daydreaming to the already rapidly growing list of things he was only growing more and more behind on. 

A hiss of steam curled from the quenching barrel. The forge pulsed with heat, but a sudden cold breeze brushed the back of his neck; the sensation was strange and biting cold. It felt as if fingers made of ice had been tracing every last curvature along his spine.

  It was chilling in more ways than one.

 He shivered and wiped his brow, as the other rested on the anvil, before he froze, having heard that almost indiscernible sound again. He’d heard it minutes earlier, but had chalked it up to be his imagination, but now that it had seemingly happened twice, he wasn’t so sure.

The sound was soft, almost whispered, but was eerily familiar. 

“Hrmmm.” 

“No, it couldn’t be…” he muttered aloud, as flashes of Toothless raced through his head, nearly as fast as his heart was racing. 

He stiffened, turning toward the dark woods. He didn’t have to wait long before it came again. This time, the trill sounded much lower and uneven, but still undeniably the cry of a night fury. 

He just hoped it wasn’t coming from his night fury. 

 “Toothless…?”

But no—there was something very wrong about it. It just felt off . It sounded like him, yes , but only in the way a mockingbird mimics a melody it fancied. It was just too gravelly, something undeniably uncanny about it, almost as if it wasn’t made from Toothless at all. But that tone, that familiar call, it was so uniquely Toothless. Hiccup had never heard another dragon make the same sounds; they all had their own unique tone of 'voice,' even amongst the same species.' 

A chill needled down his spine once more. His heart stuttered.

Toothless was supposed to be in the cove near Raven’s Point. That sound—it definitely wasn’t from the cove. It was coming from the woods, or somewhere close to the woods. Echoing somewhere just past the forge and far too close for any injured dragon to be this close to a well-known hostile viking village. If it were injured, and someone found it, Gods forbid…

 He stepped outside, letting the forge door creak shut behind him. The night swallowed him instantly; most of Berk’s torch had long since blown out from the merciless winds of the night. Fog coiled around his boots, dense and wet. The moon, usually bright over the island, was veiled behind thick clouds tonight, making visibility of the island even denser. The light from the forge flickered and died as he reached back and snuffed it out with a gloved hand.

The sound of the few remaining embers was too overpowering amongst the otherwise dead silence of the night, and he needed to hone in on the sound to better understand it. 

The minutes that followed were deafening; the silence was even more unsettling now that not even the familiar crackle of the forge could be heard. Another minute or so passed before a sudden, blood-curdling shriek ripped through the trees without any warning.

Hiccup nearly jumped out of his skin at the shriek, his heart hammering in his throat.

Then came the agonized and furious roar, one that sounded so primal and monstrous it violently shook the trees. Not even a moment later, another ear-piercing shriek cut through the air. Those were two completely separate cries, that meant there was more than one dragon out there, two dragons at the very least, and by the sounds of it... 

They were fighting.

As the throbbing in his ears eased up, curiosity turned into ice-cold realization that sound… one of them—his breath caught in his lungs—one of them sounded just like Toothless.

His stomach dropped, and his heartbeat stuttered before adrenaline flooded every inch of his senses in the next. 

“No—no, no, no, no—!”

He was moving before he even had a chance to think. His hands scrambled for a weapon. His first instinct was to grab the axe by the doorframe—one of Gobber’s old training axes.  It was heavy, solid, and would definitely give any dragon one hel of a headache should it make direct contact. But the moment he lifted it, the weight nearly dragged his shoulder from its socket. He wasn’t that kind of Viking. He never had been.

Swearing under his breath, he dropped it, nearly shattering the floor of the forge as he did. Hurriedly, he snatched up a much more weight-friendly short sword instead. This one felt much more manageable; it was lighter and faster, but was still sharp enough to commit some real serious carnage should he need it to. 

He didn’t want to hurt another dragon—he really didn’t. But if it came down to Toothless’s life or another's… he’d choose his dragon every time. Even if that choice branded him selfish and hypocritical.

He tore off toward the woods.

Branches slapping at his face with fury, brambles caught at his boots and tripped him at least a dozen times, it was amazing he was able to get up each time, if not for the burning adrenaline he not have. The fog thickened as he went, pressing against his legs and chest, like the whole forest was trying to hold him back. He cursed himself for not grabbing a lantern or at least a damn torch. He could barely see three steps ahead, and even that was being rather generous. The trees were twisting shadows, and the moon was nothing but a blur behind the clouds.

Another roar. Then a screech that shattered the night like an explosion.

“Toothless!”

His throat burned from the shouting and the gutting panic. His heart hammered against his ribs like it wanted out. He could hear the sound of claws tearing earth. Flesh against scales. Screams that didn’t sound like roars anymore—they sounded like broken sobs and death wails.

God’s he’d never heard such a horrifying cry. The dragon’s cry of pain was physically breaking him.

And it sounded like Toothless.

“I’m sorry,” Hiccup whispered hoarsely, stumbling over a fallen log. “I’m sorry. I did this. I made you weak—I made you like this. Oh my gods, Bud, you gotta, you just gotta be okay.” Hiccup fought his own sobs. 

He kept moving.

Then his foot slid out from under him on something thick and wet pooling in a pot-sized hole. His legs gave out beneath him, and he went tumbling, skidding down a heathered slope slick with blood and moss. He hit the bottom hard, pain lancing through his elbow and hip. He groaned, breath fogging up into smoky plumes in the air.

But he didn’t stop, nothing could ever stop him from reaching his dragon. 

Shakily, he pushed himself to his feet, spitting dirt from his mouth, and staggered forward again, cursing the limp now in his left leg.

And then—like thunder cracking open the world—a massive plasma blast, bigger than he had ever seen, exploded ahead of him.

He screamed, throwing his arms over his ears as he fell into a crouched position, his legs nearly stabbing his chest, the reaction had been purly instinctive. The blast wasn’t like the others, or like any he’d ever seen. This one had some real teeth to it. So overpowering it rattled the air. It screamed back at him. A monstrous, guttural sound that didn’t belong to any dragon he knew— and yet…

He knew it had to be Toothless. 

He had never heard him sound like that.

The forest fell eerily quiet. A final echo ringing like a dinner bell. Then there was… nothing.

Still, he followed the residuals of the sound; there was nothing he wouldn’t do if his dragon was in trouble.

Then—through the trees—he finally saw him.

A blurred silhouette perched right up there on the distant ridge. The distance was far, but the shape was unmistakable; only one dragon could have such a familiar form. Though the details were hard to make out, Hiccup could tell the dragon was sitting low on its haunches. His large, scaly chest heaving as his shoulders seemed to tremble, either from overexhaustion or the aftershocks of adrenaline. Smoke was still curling from his maw.

“Toothless,” Hiccup breathed, half relieved and half still just as worried as before, but at least he had visuals on his dragon, and he appeared to be in one piece.

He was quick to step forward, huffing breathlessly as he did, before his blood grew as cold as ice. 

The dragon looked… wrong. His wings were low, and his breathing was coming out wet and ragged. He looked— injured, but with little light to rely on, he couldn’t be sure til the rest of the distance between them was closed.

But just as Hiccup began to make a mad dash to his dragon’s side, a sudden blinding flash of white cut through the sky above, flashbanging him temporarily in the process.

It had been so fast and sharp he’d have blinked and missed it. It was just gone in a flash. If that’s the case, it must’ve been a rogue bolt of lightning, or a falling star, maybe? No other possibility came to mind; it definitely couldn't have been a dragon…

He stared up, dazed, with his heart thundering and his breathing ragged. It hadn’t looked like a star either, and those tended to fall slower. And it hadn’t even made a sound. 

How strange… he thought, his brows furrowing into a deep crease.

But then Toothless let out a low whimper.

And Hiccup forgot all about that strange white streak and the white dots dancing in his eyes.

He once again tripled his efforts as he ran toward the ridge.

Nothing else mattered.

Not the blood he’d rolled down and nearly broken his neck on. Not even that strange flash that had crackled in the sky. And certainly not the paralyzing fear twisting at all his insides.

All that mattered was just Toothless.

Always Toothless.

The sounds of Terrible Terrors and the various chirps and songs of other dragons had stopped somewhere along the way through the pitch black ridge, until only the uncertainty of the night remained. No insects even dared to chirp now. Eerily, not even the wind moved through the trees in this part of the woods. 

Well, that's even more strange. 

The usual living breath of the forest had gone utterly still, as if holding itself in anticipation or hiding itself far away from whatever lurked just over the ridge. It was as if everything had abandoned this part of the woods in an instant, running and never daring to look back. 

Each hurried step only served to deepen the unbearably eerie silence surrounding him.

His breaths came shorter, and his gasps sharper as his legs pumped far beyond their limit; he’d never been much of a long-distance sprinting. His boots sank into the mossy ground, wet from the heavier early rains and encroaching fog. The only thing that moved was the moonlight—slipping in through branches like cold, silver knives biting at his exposed skin. 

Maybe he should've left his apron on, or maybe grabbed a heavier jacket. 

Then, just ahead, no more than 20 feet or so, he finally saw it. 

Half-bathed in moonlight, crouched in the clearing ahead, was the sleek silhouette of what he’d been sure was his dragon. As black as the shadows of the night, its massive wings folded as it now sat in a familiar hunched posture.

A Night Fury. 

Relief and dread warred inside him. “Toothless…?” he called gently. “Bud? You okay?”

The dragon, however, gave no response. Hiccup’s heart only beat harder at the unexpectedly strange and sterile reaction. 

His dragon had never given him such a cold shoulder, not even when he'd shot him out of the skies. 

The dragon remained unmoving and completely unresponsive. He didn’t even flick an ear appendage either; it was almost as if the beast hadn’t even noticed him (Or perhaps it had simply ignored him). And the silhouette didn’t chirp or tilt his head in the usual way Toothless always did when he heard Hiccup’s voice. Instead, it remained unnaturally still, as if it were made of stone or rooted to the ground at its feet. Tense.

It was far too still. It was almost as if the dragon wasn't breathing at all. 

Despite the growing butterflies in his stomach, Hiccup stepped closer, one cautious foot after the other, dragging through the underbrush and as heavy as lead.

He knew he shouldn't get closer, but the fear for his dragon outweighed all sense of reason.

“Bud? How’d you get out of the cove by yourself? Did something happen? You shouldn’t be out here—this part of the woods isn’t safe, you know that…”

Still, his words fell on deaf ears; no response ever came, and that injected his veins with even more coldness, violent chills raced up and down his spine. Something about this entire exchange…was incredibly wrong. Everything felt incredibly wrong. 

But then, it did. 

The head turned—slowly, stiffly—like it wasn’t entirely sure how. The neck cracked faintly as it twisted a bit too far, like it had never quite learned the limits of the body it wore. The vertebrae cracked, loud in the otherwise deafening silence. 

Too loud. The sound…It was all too loud.

“Toothless?” He tried once more, whispering breathlessly, his eyes unwilling to accept the horrors laid out before him. 

Its eyes met his.

And they certainly weren't the bright and vibrant green he’d been expecting.

These eyes, if you could even call them that, were certainly not the intelligent green irises he knew them to be, the ones full of mischief and life —but instead were four glassy and voidless pits arranged in a malformed diamond-shaped pattern, like those akin of a spider. One that was incredibly large and scarier. The lower pair was much paler in color, rimmed with an almost glowing pink, almost milky, as if they had been blinded by something unnatural. Now, looking at it dead in the eye, Hiccup was reminded of something dead that had been left out in the sun for far too long, just like the fish they'd leave out to dry for the long, ruthless winters ahead. 

 Or maybe those eyes, too, were impostors, an illusion used to lure in other unsuspecting and naive prey, just like how they’d done for him. 

How foolish, how reckless, and how very Classic Hiccup of him.  

The upper two blinked out of sync, one twitching closed while the other simply dilated, wide and staring. The inner irises of the eye were a bloody crimson shade, while the outer eyes that should’ve very much been white, were a dark and voidless black that seemed to make the beast (he couldn't call it a dragon anymore) only all the more nightmarish. 

His throat dried instantly, as his instincts screamed violently and colorfully at him.

Hiccup’s stomach flipped with the worst of butterflies, the ones that felt as if they would tear through your stomach should you move incorrectly. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

Still trapped in his own illusion of denial, he stepped half an inch forward on shaky, trembling legs. “Bud? Are you hurt? I can help. Let me see you. Come here, T-toothless… you look sick, Bud…” 

Its limbs uncoiled like wire pulled taut— too long in some places while being too jointed in others. There was no fluidity at all in its movements, even in a resting state; there was no weight or rhythm to it. Only that nightmarish twitching that seemed to almost replace its breathing, as if it were being puppeted from something lurking deep inside.

Its skin rippled.

Hiccup froze again, this time, every joint and muscle in his body locking in place as a bitter coldness seeped in and paralyzed his veins, while also shutting down his racing mind. 

The scales weren’t smooth like Toothless’s—many were fraying at the edges, rough like bark stripped from a dead tree, or as if someone had used too much sandpaper on their latest leather work. In other places, they peeled back in sickly flaps, exposing black and red muscle that writhed as if alive on its own. Thin spines jutted out from its back like broken splinters, piercing through thick platted scales and hide alike. Barbs pierced the membrane of its wings and legs, their tips still wet with fresh and darkened crimson.

Then it finally moved .

A subtle shift forward— unnatural. The way it unfurled its limbs was just as wrong as the rest of it. The skin stretched too tightly over limbs much too long for its body, like a suit worn inside out. Its ribs showed, some even piercing through the skin in places they certainly shouldn’t. Not in a way a starving animals would, but like they were pushing outward and had become completely misaligned altogether. The closer it became, the more jagged, the needle-like spines that jutted from its back at warped angles appeared, some of them were still slick with rot, some looking more new or old than others.

The grin that followed wasn’t one of recognition or joy, but one straight out of the depths of Hel. Its mouth parted—not to smile or snarl, but to gape wide and horrifyingly, slowly, like a door creaking open and exposing all the demons it had hidden inside. 

It was a slow, unnatural curl of its lips, and in that too-wide maw: too many teeth. Thin, curved, glassy, glistening black, needle-thin teeth slipped into view—dozens, no, hundreds, each one longer than the last and all the more deadly. Under the dimming moonlight, they glittered like fractured slivers of fobsidan. Never had a viking seen a dragon with such hellish teeth.

Hiccup staggered back a step, as if the ground beneath him had shattered, coming undone and unreliable for even a moment longer. The illusion, that had already been so fragile and askewed, was shattered all at once, and he found himself unable to defend it any further. 

For this…he couldn’t rationalize a single clever explanation, nor could he go through any more mental gymnastics that could shield him from the hellish nightmare that was undoubtedly staring him dead in the face.

Not when the situation had suddenly become all too real and dangerous. 

He faltered, his eyes wide and nearly bursting out of their sockets as his breathing became shallow and broken. Whatever lies he'd been feeding himself to make the truth easier to digest— to justify and soften the edges —died right there and there on his trembling lips. There was no justifying any of this anymore. No pretending it wasn't the exact nightmare hovering right before his eyes. 

His mouth opened, but the words caught on his tongue as if he’d swallowed a thousand splinters, his throat unbearably dry. “That’s not— you’re not—”

And it was looking directly at him, all sets of its demonic and hungry eyes.

The sound it made was wet and sickening. 

A low chitter, clicking that gurgling like bones rattling around in a blender. And then—it shrieked, not like a dragon, and certainly not like anything that should have ever eevn been alive .

The world split apart.

The sound blasted through Hiccup’s skull like a warhorn shoved directly into his eardrums. His vision blurred, stars exploding behind his eyes and momentarily disorienting him. He turned to run—but excruciating pain found him first.

A colossal weight slammed into his side with impossible speeds, the impact cracking ribs upon impact, as he was mercilessly thrown backward and pinned. Before he could scream, let alone breath properly, the creature’s jaws had already latched onto his shoulder with a relentless bite force. Not like that of a dragon bite, but like something trying to forcibly invade him.

A sickening crunch.

Pain erupted through his body—molten, roaring, and immediate. Blood flooded his tunic in hot, pulsing waves. His veins felt like they were igniting, lava pouring through every inch of him; the pain was so much more than the brief taste he’d experienced from his and Toothless’s first rather clumsy meeting. His first injuries hadn’t even fully healed, either; he couldn’t imagine how these ones ever would. 

This feeling…This pain was far beyond even the realms of Hel. It could only belong to the cold, dead reaches of death himself. 

It was at this moment that it finally sank in…

Maybe there was no making it out of this one after all. 

He tried to thrash and he tried with all his dying might to scream, to do soemthing other than die at the hands of this monster—but his body wouldn’t obey him. His limbs were locked into place, binded by invisible and unbreakable ropes that only wished to suffocate him. His tongue turned to stone in his mouth, and his tear ducts dried.

He was paralyzed. 

The venom—or whatever it was—hit fast and more brutally than any fist ever could. And he'd experienced a many fists in his short span of existence. 

It was just his luck to come across a dragon that was not only unbelievably dangerous but also venomous. 

The creature just held him in place, teeth buried deep in muscle and tissue, as it painstakingly, slow dragged its long serpentine tongue across his cheek in something that felt mocking. It was a true display of indomitable power that so clearly showed just how vast the levels between them were. It worked its course, and he felt beyond the realm of hopeless.  

Its breath reeked of rot, the burning scent of sulfur and decay, that carried a fresh tang of piping hot iron. It smelt of blood. His own blood. 

A moment later, a second jaw unhenged itself and opened menacingly wide. From the darkness within, a hidden set of inner fangs, as thin and vaguely resembling spider legs, that twitched with an impatience and glaring hunger. They unhinged from beneath the first, descending slowly and deliberately, before plunging into the torn flesh of his already seeping wound, and repeatedly piercing into the already seeping wound.

Hiccup choked on his breath as the barbed tendrils invaded deeper, and grew more exploratory, mercilessly teasing its prey. The young viking could do very little as the burn in his veins only intensified further. 

Violating. Every single moment of the attack felt violating, bringing the young heir to the brink of insanity and numbness. 

Every heartbeat was agony, every conscious second stretched into an eternity of helplessness and regret. His limbs had long since betrayed him, but his mind—his screaming and spiraling mind—was trapped wide awake all throughout the horrors his body was forced to endure, with no hope of escape. His skin crawled, and his soul recoiled. It was as if something was inside him now, learning him, hollowing him out from the inside.

The young heir could do nothing but endure such a horrid fate—if it could even be called endurance—while the fire in his veins roared higher and more blistering. 

He stared blindly at the sky, its vast peace mocking him. The stars bled together, blurred into streaks. The trees bent at wrong angles, as if mirroring the unraveling of his body and mind. Blackness chewed at the edges of his vision like rot. His heart slowed. Sensation ebbed.

The world began to fold in on itself—quietly, mercifully—leaving only the memory of the pain and the thing that had crawled into him to stay.

Hiccup could only stare at the night sky above, his vision failing him more and more, as darkness chewed at the edges. The blackness filling his eyes was all-consuming. The stars swam and the trees warped in all the wrong angles, as his heart rate grew slower and slower as all other feeling of sensation ebbed. As the minutes and stars overhead passed, his body felt more and more numb.

 The world began to fold in on itself, as it quietly and mercifully left only the memory of the pain and the thing that had crawled into him, with every intntion to stay and take root.

Was this what death felt like? This hellish and unbearable feeling?  

Did the dragons his people killed over and over again feel this way right before they, too, closed their eyes for the last time? 

His last thought before the blackness took him completely into the arms of the valkyries was not a scream or a plea, as it would be for most, no…  

It came as a broken whisper, one stricken with panic and heavy with devastation, knowing what (or rather) who he’d be leaving behind…

 How would his dragon survive without him?

Toothless… I’m sorry.

 𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

 𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

~ “Regret is such a short word…and yet it stretches on forever.”~

{Ranata Suzuki}

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Chapter Text

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

North Of Nowhere 

Chapter 4: Cascade

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{CASCADE} 

Something arranged or occurring in a series or in a succession of stages so that each stage derives from or acts upon the product of the preceding. 

One domino falls, and a world crumbles with it.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

~ “A true friend is one soul in two bodies. Find the person who completes you.” ~

{Aristotle} 

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Hiccup Minutes After The Bite} 

He lay powerless in his forced paralysis, feeling more and more of his life’s blood fleeing out of his body and feeding the monster torturing him. It did so, however, it pleased, as his consciousness danced around him, stuck in a constant state of fading in and out of black, that lasted for shortened and blurred bursts.

A voice slithered through his mind, coiling and crawling through him like maggots burrowing into thought and spreading an infection he couldn’t hope to fight. It wasn’t heard so much as it was felt. He'd found himself deafened and with ears ringing since the roar, so at least he couldn’t hear the nightmarish sounds of himself being devoured by the monster that had been so keen on taunting and torturing him. He’d never met or heard of a dragon (Monster) with such vindictive and cruel behaviors; usually, dragons and even wild beasts alike were eager to finish off their prey as quickly as possible, and yet this creature showed no such behaviors. 

The presence of it was penetratingly cold and almost acidic, and every kind of wrong imaginable.

“Flesh so tender…”

Hiccup’s pulse spiked, doubling his efforts to try and thrash his limbs harder, or at least he wished they would, but the venom kept them static and unmoving. The inability to use any of his motor functions caused even more panic to bloom and burn in his chest.

“Tender flesh… good… so good… addicting… need more… yes… yes… delicious…”

He’d heard the distorted and wicked voice, its terrible and heinous broken sentences, but none of the words had been spoken aloud. There had been no breath to move them and no phyiscal sound carried. It felt as if they had been forcefully implanted into his very subconscious, where they then burrowed straight into the marrow of his bones, whispering and gnawing at his insides with a ravenous and starved hunger. Their infectious infuence continued filling his skull with deafening and incomprehensible static, until nothing but violent and assaulting white noise and blank space filled every corner of his mind. 

Something warm and slick dripped against his neck. The reek of rot and blood stung his nose. Darkness kept tugging at the edges of his already dying sight, threatening to drag him under for the last time. And as his consciousness slipped in and out like water through his fingertips, one thought burned hottest beneath the overwhelming terror:

This thing isn’t even hunting me… It’s savoring me.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Toothless - Two Hours Earlier}

The stars had begun their quiet bloom across the sky, faint embers that scattered along the northern edge of this side of the world. Down in the cove, where the nights settled their heaviest, Toothless lay curled low to the earth, instead of dangling from his usual branch above.

He just couldn’t bring himself to sleep up there tonight, not when elsewhere still held onto the fading warmth of his boy. One wing lay draped over it protectively, his chest pressed as closest to the mossy indent as his massive body would allow. 

Maybe this way, the weight of his own body could keep the last of that warmth from vanishing completely.

He told himself it was practical —that he was only protecting it until his boy could finally return to him once more.

But deep down, even he couldn’t believe that lie.  

He needed that warmth just like he needed the air to breathe. But a much darker, and more selfish part of him, whispered of awful things… it whispered that if he let this last trace disappear… it might truly be the end —that maybe his boy would never return. 

And if that happened…  

Toothless wasn’t sure there’d be anything left of him at all.

Every time they were apart, it left a hollow ache in his chest—a restless thrum that only calmed when Hiccup returned. It was the bittersweet truth of finding and being separated from one’s twin flame , as he was finding out the hard way.

The thought clawed at him as he tucked his snout closer to the mossy earth. 

But tonight, that ache burned sharper. Even the night felt longer . And colder… so much colder. 

He missed him. Missed the way the boy’s laughs that would rumble against his side, or the gentle scratch of his hands at the base of his neck, the place he could never quite reach and that had always frustrated him eternally.

The warmth had already begun to fade, and with it, something inside Toothless ached mercilessly.

It had only been a few measly hours. Before his favorite two-legged had left, he remembered hearing him groan something about “needing to go to the forge or class.” 

Honestly, he couldn't remember which ; their time together had long since blurred to the point that sometimes Toothless had forgotten that they hadn’t actually spent their entire lives together already. 

He had never known silence to feel so loud.

His boy had left not long ago, or maybe it had been a while — maybe minutes, or maybe hours. Toothless didn’t keep track of time well ; his priority was doing everything he could to keep the comforting warmth his rider had left. 

All he knew was that it had been too long. Hiccup was gone, and he missed him .

Toothless let out a low, mournful croon that reverberated against the stone walls of the cove and faded unanswered into the rest of the very long night.

Dragons did not measure time the way humans did, but even for one of his kind, tonight dragged on ruthlessly. Without Hiccup beside him, and without his scent, or his voice, and his heartbeat to keep the dragon at peace, the cove felt heartbreakingly hollow.  

Without Hiccup, everything felt hollow. 

Toothless pressed his snout further into the moss, inhaling the lingering traces of his rider, his other half, and shut his eyes as a low, an especially long and lonely rumble echoed through his chest. 

He wished he’d be more productive with his time, do something that would silence the overwhelming loneliness instead of just moping about it, but he just couldn’t will himself such energies. 

Above the cove, the forest stood abnormally still, the atmosphere filled with an almost uncanny silence, even in comparison to the hour or so earlier in the night. The skies had darkened considerably, with the moon now hiding beneath a storm of thick cloud cover. The fogginess of it had nearly blotted out the stars, leaving only the occasional blink of starlight to pierce the otherwise overhelming darkness. 

The usual sounds of night had been smothered—no Terrible Terrors quarreling in the tree branches, no seabirds crying near the cliffs, not even the distant hum of wind rolling down from the northern peaks. He couldn't even hear sounds of life, no matter how small, no chittering of much smaller beasts or cries of the hungry predators that chased them. 

It truly felt as if the world had been emptied and hollowed out by a presence unseen.

That was certainly unusual.

The kind of unsettling that made every last of his scales stand and rise to attention, as his spines trembled under the weight of creeping dread. His body and instincts screamed that something was most certainly wrong and imbalanced.  

Instinct slithered beneath his skin, curdling his blood, his every last nerve left prickling and igniting as his body prepared for what was awaiting him just above. He wasn’t the only one feeling suffocated under the oppressive night, as even the woods themselves seemed to cower under the weight of whatever monstrous presence lurked through their soils. 

For a moment, the all-encompassing unease bled over to other thoughts and worries, as Toothless’s thoughts returned to Hiccup. Surely his boy must be safe in the warmth of his flock’s roost, maybe he’d even be asleep, having fallen asleep and bent over one of his strange metal contraptions as he usually was. 

After all, he had no reason to be out in this mess . Clinging to the reassurance, the images of his other half fast asleep and safely resting, steadied him and worked to ward off any further spiraling for now. 

Well, that was until a rancid stench rolled in on the winds.

Rot. Unearthly gods-awful Rot. 

This stench was something else entirely—an abomination of smell and natural decay. It slithered into his nostrils like acid, searing its way down his throat until every breath felt like he’d been spending the day swallowing burning coals. The rancid foulness was thick and wet, clinging to his sinuses, and coating the back of his tongue with a sour, metallic tang that tasted like spoiled blood and old death.  

It was wrong in every definition of the word. Fundamentally wrong.

The scent itself seemed to crawl beneath his scales with an unnerving and infectious sentiency that made his muscles twitch and his belly roll with a fury. His throat convulsed in a warbled gag of a sound, the sensation so vile he swore his windpipe might just shrivel up and die from the mere contact of it. Every instinct in him screamed to flee and claw his own snout clean of its evil, rotting spores.

Kill it before it kills you. Something in the back of his mind warned.

A violent sneeze ripped through him, causing his wings to violently snap open in reflex as he reeled back, pawing and scraping desperately at his muzzle with a fury unlike any other. 

Though it did nothing , the stench clung stubbornly, burrowing deep inside like a pesky and unwanted parasite. His lips curled, teeth flashing from his gums in a silent snarl of disgust as he pawed at his snout once more in a final attempt to force the miscreant out of his system. 

His last attempt seemed to bear some rather meager fruit, the scent dissipating ever so slightly, as his body was wracked with a furious growl that rumbled up from his chest and vibrated through the mossy floor beneath him.

The inner fire in him seethed.  How dare something so foul and grating taunt him like this!

Then, without wasting even more of his time and growing all the more agitated with the turn of tonight’s events, Toothless slowly rose up to his feet, every muscle coiling tight beneath his dark hide. His tail swept low, his sole remaining tail plate dragging along the earth, as every step made was calculated and soundless as he angled his body into a proper prowling form. 

As he crept across the cool ground, his ear appendages flicked sharply, swiveling with twitching precision to catch even the faintest tremors of movement from beyond the tree line above. 

But the night had simply been emptied of all life, well aside from those left behind and the predator who’d stayed. But he couldn’t pinpoint said predator just yet, but it was only a matter of time. 

A low growl rumbled in his chest, quiet but tense, as he crouched lower still. Each silent stride pressed his belly closer to the damp moss as he moved along the edges of the cove, his senses sharpened to a razor point. His earflaps rotated, twitching at every phantom rustle he’d almost sworn he’d heard. 

But there was nothing. Just the eerie silence wrapping tighter around him.

Something horribly troublesome was upwind.

He considered turning back—curling up beside the last warmth of his boy, he’d temporarily left for the sake of chasing out ‘pests’ (just for a moment). He’d also thought of burying his nose in that fading comfort until sleep could find him and smother this creeping dread poking and pawing at him. 

Maybe tomorrow it would be gone, he’d reasoned, insisting it’d been nothing more than forest rot that happened to be near his nest.  

The explanation seemed reasonable enough. 

But even as he considered such fleeting thoughts, something primal rooted his paws to the ground. An unbelievably frigid ripple ran up the length of his spine, one so cold it sliced through his insides with a blade carved from ice and unrelenting paralysis.

It wasn’t a sudden break, not like the daunting ‘snap’ branch failing under pressure or a predator lunging through brush. 

No, it was as if an invisible string had been yanked tight somewhere deep within his chest, one that was insisting on pulling him toward a very specific something in the woods. 

Something that felt as if it should’ve never existed. 

A something that had managed to split up the worlds between realms, and had brought all of Hel’s fury and demons with it. Sounds bled out of the darkness in violent, choking spasms, hemorrhaging into every shadow.

It had really started faint , haunted cries that had just barely pierced the horizon, but even those were swallowed in time and replaced with jagged, guttural shrieks that threaded through the distance. They slithered closer with every second, growing louder until they ripped through the forest and split the air apart with a vengeance. 

Claws clanged against unseen stone with a metallic shriek, like iron raking through bone. Massive wings slammed against the canopy, bone-snapping and brutal, felling trees as if they were nothing more than brittle stalks of grass. Roars detonated in the dark, only to warp mid-pitch into bloodcurdling screams—so twisted that even the night seemed to recoil from them.

It was impossible to tell if the creature making them, fought to kill or merely fought to die.

A wet, rasping keening rose like steam, high and drawn-out, fraying into a cracking and brittle pitch that stretched far too long —as if the furious creature making it had forgotten how to breathe between the screams.

 It was met by an even more monstrous roar, guttural and raw, like the monster making it had torn its own throat apart just to force it out. The echo of it was wrong in every way, splitting apart and doubling back, layered over itself as if it hadn’t come from one mouth, but hundreds.

All these voices and tones forced into a single , monstrous body, as they all cried out in a desperate and deranged unison of the damned. 

Toothless froze mid-step. His earflaps twitched madly, as they swept through every vibration with a much finer-toothed comb, pulling in sounds his eyes might’ve missed. The air seemed heavier, thick with the weight of what he was hearing.

Then— like a trap springing shut —they slammed against his skull so tight against his skull with a force that hurt and caused his ears to pop. His pupils quivered violently, caught between bewilderment and a horror he didn’t want to name, before narrowing into razor-sharp slits against the glow of his emerald eyes.

Every scale along his back lifted in a slow rippling chain reaction, as his spines shivered, jittering with the fragile control of fraying nerves. Instinct screamed at him to flee —but his body had forgotten how to obey. His feet had become stone, nailed to the earth by something far stronger than fear.Even his own heartbeat sounded foreign to him, like it belonged to some other creature, cornered and helpless.

Few creatures could rattle a Night Fury down to their marrow like this. 

This wasn’t the sound of dragons he knew, had ever known . 

Maybe it was one of them…

Was there one of the ‘nestless’ hunting nearby?  

He hadn't seen one of those since that horrific Red Alpha, and he’d been lucky (Very narrowly) enough to escape her cold, cruelness without losing any of his limbs. He’d known many other winged kin who’d not been so lucky. 

That might explain the desperation and fury in the other dragon’s cries, sure… 

But everything else… 

That was still unexplainable…

Even the cannibalistic Nestless , savage as they were, had a pattern to their bloodlust, a twisted rhythm of hunt and kill, anything to soothe their endless hungers. Even if that came at the cost of a more brutal and blood-maddened frenzy, they weren’t a forsaken species of his kin without reason…

But this sound didn’t belong to them. No dragon’s voice— murderous or otherwise —could ever twist and split in such a way.

He wasn’t even sure these nightmarish wails belonged to anything with living flesh…

This…

This sounded like something that had never even been alive at all.

Of course, he knew the roars of the winged (and other classes) kin intimately— he wasn’t new to the fierce bellows of dominance, or the snarls of hunting packs, nor even the victorious calls of those locked in territorial skirmishes. He’d heard of many dragons before, ones at war with the two legs, during high-stakes hunts, at times of fear and frustrations… 

But these cries… these… were nothing like that. Never like this.  

These ones… they sounded so twisted and wrong. These roars were cracking mid-scream as if the throats that made them had suddenly been torn open or slashed by the cold metals of the more violent of the two legs. 

The forest stirred around him in subtle, insidious ways. Leaves trembled without any wind prompting them. Branches swayed without any real sense of reason. And somewhere far off, a trunk splintered with the sound of a muffled shriek. Shadows moved against shadows, stretching into impossible shapes, slipping just beyond the edges of his night vision like predators pacing the bars of some invisible cage.

The night was alive, yes —but alive in a way that gnawed, crawled, and slithered beneath the skin. And its restlessness mirrored his own.

Two dragons in combat—that's what he'd first heard. Just two.

But now... more voices emerged. One by one. Then in clusters. 

He strained his ears, his heart quickening. Had he missed something? No. Impossible. These new voices were materializing from nothing, as if the very darkness birthed them. Two became five. Five became twelve. Twelve became forty, until he’d lost count, all of the echoes blurring together and messing into one singular awful wailing.

The night air thickened with their choruses of agony and wrath, until he could barely breathe through it, the vibrations growing too overstimulating and disorienting for his senses and mind to keep up.

And then everything was returned to tensed, dead silence.

For three heartbeats, the world held its breath right there along him.

Then reality itself was shattered , nearly taking the night sky down with it. 

A single shriek cut itself apart from the sea of corrupted voices, with the force of a thunderbolt,  and so sharp that the air itself seemed to splinter under its weight. It rang with the violence of storms, fileld with a violent and wrathful force that could topple mountains and fracture the unseen bones of the earth.

But it wasn’t the raw strength that stopped his heart.

It was the recognition .

The cry bypassed his ears and struck directly at something buried deep within his chest—a chamber of memory he'd sealed shut and abandoned long ago. The walls he'd built around his years of overwhelming loneliness and solitude crumbled away like sand. And just like that, all those painstaking years of carefully cultivated numbness albeit dissolved in an instant.

And with it, he’d found himself dragged back to a time when the sky still beat with the wings of his flock, of his kin, and of the days when he was a fledgling again.

He was suddenly small again, so incredibly small, and so very vulnerable. 

He was reminded of the phantom sensation of his broodmother's wing curved protectively over him and his nestmates, and their soft, gentle snores that had once pulsed against his sides. He remembered the warmth of his flock's bodies pressed close together in a huddled pile of bodies and scales, during the especially cold and biting nights. It forced him to remember the security he'd convinced himself he no longer needed after his flock had fallen and he’d lost touch, and been hidden away from all the evils of the rest of the world.

His heart was split between the desperate longing he’d carried alone for far too long and the absolute terror curling in his veins. The sensation burned through him with equal parts rapture and dread , leaving him in a state of incapacity. 

Then, without fail, the cry came again.

His heart stuttered between beats, threatening to stop completely. Dread and desperate hope warred within him, each fighting for dominance. He didn't dare believe . Couldn't bear to allow him to feel hope once more. And yet...

Only one creature in all the world made that sound.

Another Night Fury.

For a single heartbeat, hope flickered violently in his chest—a fragile, burning light he hadn’t felt in over a decade. Foolish and delicate though it was, his heart refused to smother it.  

And for an instant…he saw not the crippling darkness but the sky…One full of the kin he had lost , and the aching emptiness inside him flared with a suffocating kind of yearning, as the festering wounds of his past losses all came rushing back into the present.

But even then… that ember was drowned as quickly as it ignited.

What came next was even more horrific.

Something else had answered back.

An ungodly shriek detonated across the forest, rattling not only the trees but every fiber of Toothless’s skull. The sound was so piercing it felt as though his eardrums might burst, his eyes ready to bleed from the pressure alone.

The wails that followed carried no comfort. They were pure violations, sounds torn from the very fabric of what a dragon’s cry should’ve been. 

It wasn’t a unique voice born of flesh and breath alike, but of something mangled and diseased . Its tone dripped with a hatred that felt older than the sands of death itself, slithering through the clearing like an invisible and all-consuming rot.

Whatever creature had unleashed it was not of these realms. 

And whatever it had stolen from his kin… had been twisted i nto something unholy and heinous.

Pure and festering evil.

The noise chased after the anguished Night Fury’s cry, growing more and more warped as it stretched on for far too long—dragging it into something monstrous and unrecognizable to what it had once been. The butchered imitation of the other fury’s call sounded as if it had been forced through a blender and shredded through the rusted metal teeth of the two-legs deathtraps.

And because the Gods clearly spited him , even more madness came from the chaos, and breathed life into his worst nightmares. Through the howling and shrieking, a sound much fainter and more broken came a voice that barely pushed through, and eerily sounded like that of his twin flame.

“Toothless!”

The voice was cracked and distorted—tangled in the static and monstrous roars—but it was there. 

Hiccup.

The world tilted as it suddenly felt much harder to breathe. A worried and frantic warble wrecked through his throat, as instinct nearly choked him dead and roared through him: Find him. Now.

Every muscle coiled tight as live wires as he launched himself toward the cove’s rocky walls, as he too was overcome with the madness of the full moon. 

His claws despartely raked through the oppressive stone, as his wings flared wide as he mercilessly scrambled upward. He’d never been more desperate to escape the mossy prison of rock and stone. The cove had never felt more like a prison than it did as his heart bled and trembled with adrenaline and fear. 

Gravel rained down, pelting the ground below with a dark vengeance. He leapt again and again, each attempt wilder and more frantic than the last, but his body continued to fail him as his claws slipped miserably. One especially tragic slip forcibly slammed him backwards into the earth with a bone-jarring force that robbed him of all breath. 

A hopeless warble ripped from his deflated chest, and breathing was so difficult that he nearly found himself unable to pull himself back up. The scent of his boy had been his only reason to continue. 

He could smell it now—Hiccup’s scent, faint but undeniable , carried on the stagnant winds. But to his fears, it wasn’t alone ; somewhere along the Northern Winds, it had become twisted with that other unearthly stench of the rot, charred flesh, and blood too old and too fresh all at once. 

Death walking, as he’d since dubbed the vile stench. 

A feral roar ripped out of him, raw and furious, shaking the cliffs and scattering a spray of loose stone all around. He lunged upward with a fire filling his veins, his body was mercilessly scraped against the craggy stone as he painstakingly hauled himself higher . His claws dug deep, scraping against the cliff face with ear-splitting shrieks.

Then, before he could blink, a blinding agony flooded every inch of his consciousness, piercing through the desperate rage he’d been relying on to bring him closer to what he desired the most. 

Upon realization, he was able to notice that a shard of stone had managed to impale his left back flank in his haste to escape. It had seemingly torn through scales and muscle alike, a little bit deeper and it might’ve even grazed bone. 

Agony lanced through him, molten and blinding, as the stone tore and shredded through his flesh with every tug of movement. His pained cry split through the night, guttural and bellowing, as its mocking echo made its way around the cove and back to him. 

The unexpected miscalculation forced him to lose all further progress and slide back down. The fall was as painful as it was graceless , the sudden imbalances causing his internal equal liberum to fail as he rolled down the cliffs and across moss and dirt alike. His injury leaving a hot and bloody carnage trailing behind him. 

By the time he hit the bottom again, his scales were slick with curdling blood, his breath hitching and shuddering with a deep raspiness. But even as every nerve screamed for him to stay down, and his body cried out in pained protest, as one thought screamed louder than all the rest:

Hiccup needs me. His boy needed him, and dammit, that meant he couldn’t give up before then, no matter how scorching the pain. 

With a battlecry of a snarl that tore itself from the pit of his chest, Toothless heaved his battered body upright. Blood streamed down his foreleg, painting even darker streaks over his scales, but he didn’t care.  

He launched himself at the cliff again, teeth bared for war and fileld with a promised carnage that left his eyes glowing an acidic green that bathed the night around him in an ominous green. This time, he dragged himself even higher , each scrape of his claws tearing stone free as he hauled his own weight, fighting his hardest against gravity and the imbalances it birthed.

At last, he collapsed over the lip of the cliff, chest heaving in pathetic, wheezing huffs. The sound barely resembled the breath of an apex predator, and for a brief, fractured thought, he really hated himself for it.

What kind of beast — what kind of protector —couldn’t even scale a cliff when his boy needed him?

But there was no time to dwell on such tragedies .

Before his breath could return and before the blood drying on his flank could even come to a cool, Toothless hurled himself headlong into the endlessly dark woods ahead. At speeds on par with his aerial velocity, he tore through underbrush in a reckless and determined sprint, not caring in the left what dared to try and stop him from reaching his boy. 

Beneath his ravenous claws, loam and roots alike were shredded as he galloped with fiery purpose, his limp turning into a violent lurch that only served to push him harder.

Far ahead of him, but growing all he more closer with every slam of his paws against the forest floor, came the false Night Fury’s shriek, as it bellowed again and again . The closer to the bloodbath he grew, the more warped and furious the sounds became. 

Just ahead of him, still far but closing in fast, the false Night Fury’s howl split through the night again; this time, the beast's possessed shriek had grown louder now, and had echoed for even longer. 

It’s demonic wails vibrated through the earth, through his bones, and seemingly directly through his own mind, until he wanted for nothing more than to claw off his own ears just to escape from it.

He hadn’t heard any sounds of the other Night Fury for a time, and a part of him felt hollowed out because of it. In either context and any scenario his mind had conjured up in his plight, all led back to the same heartbreaking conclusion. One, he really never wanted to be faced with again.

Had that cry—the familiar voice that had nearly shattered him to his core—been nothing but another illusion? 

So was this another cruel trick from this monster that paraded in his kin’s skin and voice?

What if it had stolen more than just that?

He’d already realized that this monster clearly had a nasty knack for imitation and stealing the voices of others… So it wasn’t a far stretch to think it could take so much more…

What if it had stolen Hiccup’s , too?

How could he trust his own senses anymore when every sound, every scent, could be nothing but lies ?

What if everything…all of it was nothing more than cruel lies used to lure him in? 

What if the monster wasn’t just stealing voices… but scents, too?

Surely not even the gods could be so merciless…

And yet…

That strange, indescribable tether their souls shared—that unbreakable pull towards his boy—only yanked harder the deeper he ran into the forest. It coiled sufficatingly tight around his heart, dragging him forward with a promise to lead him directly to his other half, no matter the distance and no matter the cost.

Because if Hiccup was out here—if even a shred of him still breathed —

Toothless was going to reach him first… or die trying.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Berk 1 Hour Before Toothless’s Escape} 

Elsewhere on Berk, about an hour before Toothless finally clawed his way out of the cove, Gobber jolted awake with a snort, the distant, ungodly shrieking rattling the insides of his longhouse. Hastily, he threw off his thick bed furs, grumbling under his breath as he fought off a yawn and shoved his stump into his nearest spare peg leg. He grabbed a hold of the crude, dimly lit lantern closest to his bedside. 

“By Thor’s hairy armpits… can’t a man get one night’s sleep without the blasted beasties singin’ their death songs at such ungodly hours?”

He yanked his skivvies on backward first try, cursed angrily, before spinning them around, and shoving his thicker furlined tunic over his head,  as he hobbed toward the door with a deep, frustrated grumble. 

“If this is another couple o’ Terrible Terrors squabblin’ over fish guts, I swear on me good hammer I’m eatin’ dragon stew for breakfast… and using the lil’ beasties head as a dart mount.”

It wasn’t the usual distant roars of dragons squabbling over territory or food. Not the telltale signs of an impending dragon raid either. No, this sounded like something else entirely—an unnerving shriek in the night that made the old blacksmith’s gut clench ominously. The deafening shrieks and haunting wails echoed through the mountains like the cries of something demonic that had crawled up from Hel itself.

“What in Odin’s name…” he muttered, tugging his tunic over his broad shoulders. 

Acting chief or not, he’d seen enough dragon trouble to know when something just wasn’t all that right , and tonight his skin crawled like it hadn’t since the last of Berk’s worst raids itself darkened their skies. Even the echoes of those lingering nerves and fears couldn’t hold a candle to this dark omen.

He hobbled out into the cool night, squinting toward the dark treeline that framed the village. The wails had come from there, obviously, but how far he couldn’t tell ya, it was as dark as yakballs out here tonight. For a brief moment, his gaze slid toward Stoick’s home. To no one’s surprise, he found the hearth dark. No smoke or light for all the eyes to see. Gobber’s chest tightened uneasily. 

Of course. 

Hiccup.

He forced the thought down, reassuring himself with a grunt. 

The boy was likely still in the forge, working himself half-dead on whatever mad project had his attention tonight. That, o r fast asleep over the smithing tables and barrels again, and with a face full of soot like usual. No need to jump to conclusions— not yet.

By the time Gobber reached the village center, other lanterns around the village were flickering to life. Doors creaked open as wary faces peered out. Fishlegs stumbled into view first, pale and trembling like a leaf in a gale, as usual. The Thorston twins popped out next, eyes bright and always eager for trouble . Astrid was already up, her battleaxe already in hand, as she scanned the treeline with the sharp focus of a seasoned warrior, just like Gobber had. 

Gobber silently thanked the gods for that girl —smart, and fierce, and above all else, always the most dependable of the teens. A far cry from his own walking disaster of an apprentice, who, if he was awake, would probably be tripping over his own yak fur boots by now.

There was somethin’ endearing about the sorry sight anyway.

The crowd swelled as more villagers spilled into the square, causing even more restless murmurs to rise through the tribe. Gobber knew now was the time to put on the the proper mask of ‘acting chief’ and do what was needed: stop the risin’ panic before it up and stirred all of Berk in a maddened frenzy of sorts.

“Back to yer homes!” he barked, voice booming as he planted his wooden peg in the dirt with a thud. “ No raids tonight. Just a couple o’ dragons fightin’ in the woods. Bloody, noisy business, aye, but nuthin’ to be frettin’ over. Now off with you lot!”

He prayed to the Allfathers; his words carried more confidence than he felt. Inside, his heart was hammering. Whatever those screams were, they weren’t anythin’ like any fight he’d ever heard before.

Fishlegs opened his mouth to speak, eyes wide, but one sharp glare from Gobber had the boy shrinking back into his house with a squeaky “goodnight.”  

The twins tried to slip away amongst the commotion, but Gobber spotted them real quick and barked, “All right, back to yer beds now ya Muttonheads. Now .”

With equally dramatic and cursing grumbles of “buzzkill” and “no fun,” the two tricksters slunk back into their home with a great and deafening reluctance. Gobber tsked, shaking his head at the troublesome twins sworn to the way of Loki.

Such a troublesome God.

The square emptied until only Astrid’s shadow trailed Gobber’s toward the forge. He didn’t call her out—he’d trained her too well to miss the silent footfalls of a hunter. But right now, her stubborn vigilance wasn’t his greatest concern.

Finding his apprentice was.

The sinking dread solidified the moment Gobber reached the doors of the forge; they should’ve been closed by now closed even if his apprentice was still working, as he knew the importance of keeping the warm in, yet here they were, albeit flapping in the wind. The inside of the forge was even more alarming, cold and dark, sure, but even worse, it appeared to be completely empty . And if that wasn’t enough to put the fear of the gods in him, the next sight only made his concern grow and transform into fear.

What made his heart sink further was the state of the place.

Hiccup might’ve been a scatterbrained artist at times (all the time, really) , his ideas sprawled across any piece of parchment in sight and every table with the barest minum of space, but the boy was nothing if not responsible . No matter how late into the night he worked, and no matter how exhausted or soot-covered he’d get himself, he’d always stay even longe r into the night to clean up after himself. 

Gobber had tried in vain countless times to wave the lad off, telling the kid to leave the mess for morning, but the boy never listened. Stubborn yak-headed runt always insisted the forge be cleaner than Gobber himself had ever kept it.

But tonight…

The sight that greeted him was nothing else than ominous. There were buckets toppled over in every other direction, tools all scattered about, and even the smothered embers of the fire were left improperly drenched, still glowing faintly and clearly abandoned mid-burn. His apprentice’s leather apron was flung aside in haste, that alone told a story all its own… 

No matter how he looked at it, the old blacksmith could see nothing short of a rushed and frantic exit.

And then Gobber noticed something else.

The shortsword. His shortsword. The one that had hung by the entryway for years— one that was certainly not sharp, nor was it ever truly maintained for battle. In all honesty, it was nothing but a sentimental relic of his younger days as a young lad himself. It had always been the first thing his eye sought when he entered this place.

The layer of dust on the wall framed its missing shape perfectly, as if mocking its deep absence.

 The blade, as silly as it sounded, carried a hefty weight of comfort and familiarity to it, one he never wanted to forget. Or rather, the person who’d given it to him decades ago.

And now it was gone. Along with his rogue apprentice. Great. 

Gobber’s stomach dropped. Something awful must’a happened here. 

It must be, if it was something bad enough to make Hiccup abandon his forge—his second home —and run headlong into the night with a weapon he’d never even held before.

The blacksmith tugged anxiously at his braided beard, a nervous habit that had been with him since his boyhood with Stoick. When it came to the Haddock family, he only seemed to do it more than ever.

Stepping outside, he scanned the ground for any other clues to fill in the vast gaps in the story. And there they were— bootprints, small and familiar, pressed into the wet soil. At first, they appeared light, as if the boy had been attempting to be more careful and cautious in his approach, with small indents on the more shallow of soil levels. But upon further inspection, they grew deeper and wider apart, unmistakably the result of the boy deciding to sprint somewhere in a hurry.

Hiccup had run.  

And by the looks of it, straight into the dense and unusually foggy woods beyond Berk’s borders. The nights of the full moon were always the darkest, despite thinking them to be brightest with more light, but even the moon was hiding away tonight. 

Gobber stared toward the darkened tree line, every instinct screaming that his boy had chased himself straight into trouble again.

“Gods help me…” he muttered under his breath, grabbing a more reliably sturdy lantern from the forge’s wall.  “Looks like I’m ain’t sleepin’ tonight.”

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Chapter Text

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

North Of Nowhere 

Chapter 5: Wane

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{WANE} 

The gradual fading of strength or vitality.

A pale light in a window, dimming night by night.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Back To Toothless} 

Toothless barreled through the forest, claws ripping deep furrows in the damp fog-logged earth, as his lungs fought to intake enough air, as he desperately chased after the thin thread of Hiccup’s scent. It pulled at him like a lifeline—so close now he could almost feel his boy’s warmth against his scales.

But just as he thought he might finally reach his boy—

A sound cleaved through the dark.

A shriek.

Not from the same cadence of mimic monster's usual warped howls, but from the other Night Fury he thought he’d heard earlier—a sound so broken and ragged it scraped the air raw. It was the kind of scream he’d only heard dragons on the cusp of taking their last breath make, that awful foreboding sound when death truly came a knocking, already having fixed its ice-cold clutches around the other’s throat.

And that sound, it tore something open inside him.

He didn’t want to remember. He never wanted to remember. But the sound ripped through him, as if the talons of this very same monster ahead had dragged its talons through his tender insides, ripping through his soft underbelly and mercilessly collapsing all the years of silence. Breaking through the hardened scabs of all his fledgling traumas, he had buried his memories so far beneath to cope with such devastating losses.

He was a hatchling again. Weak and small, even smaller than his two older nestmates. One who’d just barely even learned the art and freedom of flight, or the skills necessary for the hunt.

He remembered being crouched beneath his broodmother’s chest as he was uncomfortably squished against his two other much broader siblings, as each of their hearts hammered with thunder and fear, doing everything they could to make themselves small while the world they knew all came crashing down, above them, everything burned and shattered. 

The air of that fateful day had stunk of hot metals he didn’t recognize, as the burning flesh of his flocks' charred hides wafted through the smog, which was thick with the shrilling wails of his kin as they were ruthlessly hunted and torn from the smoky red and orange skies.

The beautiful cerulean skies of his birthland had been swallowed by the overwhelming smoke and falling ash, devoured completely by the cruelty of monsters he’d never known, but would now never forget. 

And beneath the suffocating skies and toxic winds that filled their sense—worse than even the sounds of his flock screaming—came the gruesome and wet clicking .

The rattling, clatter of the crimson and black nestless (Death Grippers) skittering across stone and soil, their barbed exoskeletal limbs slicing into dragons who had barely gotten their wings open before being dragged down into the heart of the carnage. The almost rhythmic stutter of their tails striking, and forcibly injecting their venom into the falling members of his flock. 

Even as his broodmother tried to hide such evilness from him and his nestmates, he’d still see snippets of the hell befalling his precious kin. That was when he’d seen the first true evilness lurking in his world, his first encounter with death, with loss, and overwhelming violence. 

He’d watched as it stole the flight and voices of his kin before his very young eyes, his heart breaking every time he’d see the way the vibrance in the eyes of his downed kin would fade, and become just as foggy as the smoke-soaked skies. 

He remembered one of the flock’s eldest, the way his roar had been strangled into a wet gargle, remembered hearing the way his wings had thrashed weakly against the ground before snapping like meager reeds beneath those beasts’ crushing claws.

He remembered the hate in Broodmother’s furious scream turning to nothing but a choking rattle as her body was violently slammed to the earth beside him. He remembered the silence of his nestmates tangled beside him. T heir bodies had all been so limp, so cold.

And tonight… tonight … the forest sounded exactly the same.

Toothless stumbled mid-run, claws scoring deep lines in the earth as his wabbled sprint faltered suddenly. The massive black trees towering above and surrounding him blurred, his ears flattened so tight against his skull they ached. The forest wasn’t the little island of Berk anymore.

  It was the nest, and it was that very same slaughter.

A snarl tore from his throat as he shook his head violently, fighting to pull himself free from the ghosts clawing at his mind, forcing himself to remember— Hiccup . 

He’s why you’re running. Not the past. Not the ghosts of an old life. 

You must remember, but also never forget. 

Your boy needs you now .

 The ghosts will wait, just as they always did.

But before he could fully steady himself—

An even grander and more deafening shriek ripped and curdled the night.

This one wasn’t filled with the same pain and injury as before. No, this was filled only with wrath. Piercing and penetrating through his very sense of being. A sound like steel spikes being driven straight through his skull. His spines shot upright as pain detonated in his head, his hearing scorched and unbearable until static roared in the backs of his skull.

The ominous sounds of phantom pains filled his senses a moment after, blistering and infectious clicking made up the entirety of his consciousness. 

This time, the sound didn’t exist in memory alone; it felt real. It was real and it was  close by. The same bone-chilling reverberation that forever antagonized and haunted the shadows of his past, that unnatural clatter of segmented limbs shifting and grinding against each other, echoing off the trees as though the monsters that had massacred his kin so long ago had returned to stalk and devour him. 

Perhaps they were here after all this time, had finally found him and come to finish what their hellish master had once started. 

He gagged, stomach knotting so violently it felt like it might rip itself apart. His limbs buckled under him, trembling too hard to hold his weight, and he collapsed into the freezing dirt and drowned moss. His breath rasped, ragged and shallow, while his vision swam with black and white snow, nausea clawing up his throat with an annoyingly vicious persistence.

But through the throbbing fog of his injured flank, and the frequent blood loss, and the dizzying haze rattling the insides of his brain, the thought of his human counterpart echoed again. Hiccup. 

With great effort and even greater pain, he forced himself to get up and move; his lethargic claws scraped furrows in the earth as he dragged himself in a barely recognizable upright formation. Every muscle screamed out in protest, and even if every heartbeat pulsed with agony through his body, he staggered forward anyway, driven by that invisible tether that refused to let him give in to the pain and void of hopelessness. 

There, somewhere through the fog in his head, a blinding flash tore across the sky above—a bolt of white way too fast, too deliberate to be a mere act of stray lightning. It seared his vision, blotting everything else into a haze and painting the forest in a blinding white wash. 

His balance faltered once more from the kickback of the blinding flash, that caused his ears to ring even more violently as the world spun sideways, watching as the sky and the trees switched sides. 

Disoriented and half-blind, he stumbled forward with a desperate and forlorn roar that he barely had time to process before he slammed himself face-first into a tree with a splintering crack. The trunk toppled with him, and Toothless slid limply to the forest floor, darkness swallowing him whole as the forest mocked his incompetence with the clicking of monsters that haunted him and the agonizing voice of his boy being devoured. 

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Elsewhere In The Woods} 

Elsewhere in the woods beyond Berk, a weary Typhoomerang mother was startled awake from her spiral and ashen nest. The ignitor, caused from the sounds of dragons fighting and by the sounds of it, two who’d been locked in a death battle for some time. 

Their screeches were quite guttural and unlike any battle cries she had heard before. The sounds alone were enough to put her nesting instincts on their highest alert. Her massive crimson-and-gold wing swept protectively over her nest, shielding her three slumbering hatchlings just a bit tighter.

For a moment, she cooed softly, eyes half-lidded as warmth swelled in her chest at the sight of her most recent brood safe beneath her wings and protection. But as her gaze lingered, a chill pierced through her scales. 

Something was wrong.

Her sharp, molten-yellow eyes swept over her young once more, this time with much sharper eyes: the shimmering blue-green hide of her eldest and sole female hatchling, the golden and yellow hued hide of her smallest male hatchling…

…but what her eyes couldn’t find was a crimson and orange-tinted hide.

The middle hatchling, and her most troublesome of the offspring, a mirror image of herself —was gone.

A furious snarl ripped from her throat, rattling the trees and startling the other two hatchlings awake. They squeaked in confusion until she lowered her head, issuing a series of sharp grunts and guttural growls as she reached out to her offspring and spoke:

  Your nestmate has wandered off again. We must find him before trouble does.

Her eldest huffed irritably, clearly sharing her mother’s frustration with their adventurous nestmate, while the youngest male only yawned, wobbling as he tried (and failed) to stay awake. The mother Typhoomerang exhaled a deep, smoky sigh before gently lifting both remaining hatchlings onto the top of her folded wing.

With a heavy push of her claws, she rose from the nest. Trees groaned and bent beneath her weight as she lumbered into the darkened forest, her sheer size and strength warping the landscape with every heavy stride. Snapping trunks and crushing undergrowth as she searched, nostrils flaring for her hatchling’s scent.

The Typhoomerang mother pushed through the dark with her two accounted-for hatchlings clinging to her wings, their tiny claws hooked tight into her dense armored scales.

In the distance, the roars and screeches of the other dragons’ battle grew louder and all the more violent . Instinct told her to stay alert, but she kept her focus on the task of finding her runaway hatchling. The fight was none of her concern—not when one of her own might be wandering too close to danger.

A sharp, familiar sneeze reached her ears in an instant.

Her head snapped toward the source of the sound, and with a powerful sweep of her wings, she surged through the foliage. Branches splintered and earth shook beneath her raging charge until she skidded to a dead halt just before a clearing filled with fields of gold.

 She followed the familiar chirps and rustling grass until she spotted a flash of crimson darting through the golden fields.

And there he was.

Her missing offspring.

Her crimson hatchling sat gleefully batting at a tall cattail, chirping and headbutting it so that it bounced comically against his horned snout and back.

The Typhoomerang let out a long, low huff—equal parts exasperation and reluctant adoration. 

Troublemaker or not, his bold, curious spirit mirrored her own.  

After a moment of indulgence and adoration at her adorable hatchling, she strode forward and, with a sharp, smoky snort, she called out to her rebellious middling. Her voice echoing through their telepathic bond— There you are, little flame. You’ve wandered far enough.

The hatchling spun toward her, eyes bright and unbothered, as he chirped happily in greeting. From the backside of her wing, the youngest male yawned, still barely awake, while their blue-scaled sister squinted down at her wayward brother with an annoyed hiss through their bond—

You’re in big trouble now. Mom’s gonna eat ya this time. 

She even added her own sharp little snort for further emphasis.

The crimson hatchling’s joy faltered immediately. Realizing he’d been caught, he let out a guilty squeak and bolted, vanishing into the tall grass again.

A furious growl rumbled in the mother’s chest as she pushed after him, knocking aside saplings in her wake. But as her irritation built, something else cut through it—a blood-curdling, piercing cry.

It had come from her son.

Every scale along her spine flared in alarm as she crashed through the clearing. There she found him sprawled in the dirt, having been slammed aside by a sickly, foul-smelling dragon unlike anything she’d ever encountered. The stench hit her first— aged rot and rancid blood. The kind of corrupted scent that set every instinct in her body screaming wrong .

Her hatchling sat frozen, wide-eyed and shaking as he stared up at the monster before him.

The Typhoomerang shrieked, the sound booming and defensive as fire licked at the back of her throat and built to an inferno in her chest, smoke radiated off her body shortly thereafter. She called for her offspring, voice sharp and demanding through their bond—

Hatchling, come to me, NOW .

The crimson hatchling turned, tears welling in his wide, frightened eyes, his tiny body trembling and chained by paralysis. Her heart shattered. Softening her tone while still keeping firm, she urged him again— It’s alright, Little Spark. Run to me. I’ve got you. All you must do is hurry to me.

With a desperate chirp, the little one launched himself into the air and collided against her upper shoulder, scrambling up her massive wings until he disappeared into the safety of his siblings. His sister curled around him protectively, while the youngest cowered and wide awake as he clung to each tightly, the three of them shaking as they huddled together.

The mother, fearing she had no other choice, planted her talons in the soils of the field, as she stared down and faced the monster before her. It was only then that she took notice of the young two-legged (and very bloodied) held under its massive talons, the monster's most recent prey, it seemed. That explained why it hadn’t immediately preyed upon her vulnerable hatchling, who’d albeit offered himself up to the beast’s maw in his recklessness.

We have no interest in your prey, nor do we have any desire to interrupt your feast further. She spoke, hoping her voice hadn’t trembled as violently as her nerves had. 

Without daring to show any further vulnerability before this monster, she rose to every last inch of her full intimidating height, every foot of her bulk radiating dominance. Normally, this display was enough to silence any threat—predators, rival dragons, even some two-leg contraptions. 

Yet with this… monstrosity…

It didn’t so much as flinch.

Instead, it stared back at her with no fear (almost as if mocking her).  

You think you leave? No…Hungry…Still so hungry…, Its voice crackled back, the uncanny sounds of distortion and static overlapped it’s tone, making it’s words and voice heard to comprehend. 

The sound almost pulling her in, as her body nearly buckled under its will alone. 

Its amorphous and unsettling body seemed to grow even more twisted. Its monsterous amalgamation of scales and sinew looked horribly unnatural and misshapen, as though it had been torn apart and crudely stitched back together too many times to count. 

It spoke no other words, but the mother watched in rapt horror as its nearly torn and scaleless neck moved, as if something was writhing just beneath the bare surface of its sickening skins. 

And then… it chirped.

Her stomach turned to ice, heavy with molten stone and fear.

The sound was identical to her hatchling’s voice—every note, every pitch, all of it had been stolen perfectly.

The mimic repeated it again, this time slower, and agonizingly deliberate . It wasn’t a wavering plea, and it wasn’t an act born of fear.

It was pure mockery .

The forest itself seemed to hold and freeze, as they stared the other down. For the first time in her life, the towering Typhoomerang felt powerless. 

Overwhelmed.

Despite being massive enough to crush it with a single wingbeat, she had never been so afraid of another creature in all her decades.

And the worst part, worse than the mimic’s stolen chirps, the haunting sound of her baby’s voice echoing back at her, was the sudden recolization of how truly dire her situation had grown. Her most primitive of instincts finally told her exactly why.

This wasn’t just any other dragon, nor was it even one of those deplorable Nestless beasts either, no this monster was in a whole different class of its own. She wondered if it had been born from a corrupted Alpha species, that she’d simply had the fortune of never meeting…well, until now that is. 

Whatever the case, this was something else , something so vile and unnatural, an imbalance in any otherwse understandable world. And even worse, it appeared to be a creature that feared nothing… 

Yet it was a creature capable of striking such fears in everything else.

The forest was silent aside from the rasping sound of her ragged breathing and the low, mocking chuffs  of the abomination hunched over the rattling near-corpse before her. The Typhoomerang’s talons dug trenches into the soil, her tail as rigid and unmoving as walls of stone. 

Even in her fear, her maternal instincts outweighed all others and held firm, with her wings flared high and wide to shield her trembling hatchlings from the monster’s penetrative gaze. 

She wanted to move. Gods above, she wanted to move. Every instinct screamed for her to scoop up her young and take to the skies with absolute haste. But something much older and wiser told her otherwise:

If she tried to run, if she tried to fight… this thing would tear her apart before her wings even left the ground.

Her chest burned with trapped fire, unable to properly expell, while her throat hitched with a frustrated growl she couldn’t dare release. She had stared down many predators in her life. She had survived two-legged hunters, the vicious raids of trappers, even those black and red death snappers (Deathgrippers), and a handful of Nestless during her youth. 

But never— not once —had she felt such true, helpless fear until this moment.

Then, as if summoning a miracle from the woods beyond, a distant and piercing shriek from the midnight skies cut through the striffling tension curddling between them.

A sound like nothing she had ever heard before, its pitch so high and metallic, and erratic as it cut through the sky and stars alike, aimed purposely at the ‘false skinned’ dragon before her. Its wrathful shriek tore  through the air in violent bursts, each note jagged and stabbing at her eardrums. 

The Typhoomerang stiffened in disbelief, the insides of her mind and ears throbbing painfully as she tried and failed to recognize the other beast’s cry.  What kin could make such a deafening roar —but before her mind could even process, she realized with surmounting horror…

The mimic had heard it too. How she’d nearly forgotten about he true monster hunched before her was as foolish as it was incomprehensible. 

Its body never moved. Neither had its stance shifted. But then—above the first set of pale, cloudy eyes that had pinned her in place… another pair blinked open .

The Typhoomerang’s chest tightened, a violent shudder rolling through her massive frame as her mind struggled to process what she was seeing. How?

There had been nothing there before—no ridges, no hint of any hidden eyelids—and yet the second pair of eyes emerged as if the creature’s skin had simply peeled apart to make room for them.

Milky white and faintly glowing, streaked through with sickly pink veins like cracks in old earth. They blinked once, slow and deliberate, before both cloudy new pupils snapped off to the side, swiveling with unnatural speed toward the origin of that hideous cry.

Even as the new set of eyes focused outward, the first pair never strayed from hers. They remained locked in place and unblinking, with that same overwhelming suffocating stillness—it was as if the creature had two minds working together in tandem, one watching her every twitch while the other hunted something else entirely.

The Typhoomerang’s heart hammered against her ribs, wings twitching with the instinct to bolt. She thought— maybe this is it, maybe while it’s distracted…

But she didn’t dare take a step.

Because that first set of eyes… never left her.

They bored into her, cold and pitiless, pinning her to the earth as surely as if its talons were already around her throat. Every time her muscles tensed to flee, those eyes seemed to dare her to try.

The sight made bile creep up her throat. The monster’s face was already wrong: its blackened scales were faded and flaking, peeling back around deep fissures that leaked faint pale and festerous fluids. Its brow was shattered and warped, jutting out like broken bone, and its muzzle seemed partially collapsed, as if crushed long ago and never healed, at least not fully.

Or maybe it just hadn’t perfectly disguised itself underneath whatever (or whoever’s) skin it had stolen. 

But the eyes…

The eyes made her blood run cold. No dragon alive bore such unnatural sight. Nothing truly living could look at another creature that way—with that unnerving and perfect, patient stillness, like death itself had its claws on a physical body. 

Just when panic threatened to swallow her whole, salvation ripped through the night.

The air thickened, growing heavy and charged, until every breath felt weighted with the arrival of a new an unseen threat.

High above, something moved, slipping through the sheet of darkness with ease and blending amongst it just like a shadow. A distant rustle at first, then the deep groan of timber under sudden strain. Branches cracked high overhead, splintering with violent snaps that sent bark and leaf-litter tumbling through the gloom. 

Somewhere in that shrouded canopy, a piercing trill began to form, metallic and shrill, rising like the scream of something unforgiving and furious. It swelled until it split the air, a piercing whistle laced with venom, so penetrating it rattled her very bones and sent her hatchlings whimpering beneath her wings.

And then—without warning—the world erupted compeltely.

From the blackened ceiling of leaves, a shadow dropped like a rogue thunderbolt. It hit the Mimic with a force that made the ground shudder and crack under it, causing soil to burst upward in golden sprays as tall grasses bent and rippled outward. Claws and teeth met corrupted hide in a blur too fast to follow, the first strike tearing deep and leaving a jagged ribbon of torn flesh and severed tendons in its wake. The Mimic reared back, torn from its position over the grounded, bloodied two-legged it had been poised to devour—its prey snatched away in an instant of chaos.

Heat flared, boiling the cool air in a miniature heatwave that nearly melted the earth at their feet. The attacker’s breath ignited at point-blank range, a flash of blinding blue that seared through the shadows and left the air tasting of scorched meat and ozone. The blast’s light painted the Mimic’s slick, veined eyes—eyes that at last broke their fixation on the Typhoomerang to snap upward, locking onto the black shape above it.

It lasted only seconds.

The shadow tore itself free, wings flaring like hooked scythes as it launched upward in a single, violent thrust. Leaves and debris spiraled in its wake, vanishing into the canopy as abruptly as it had come, leaving behind nothing but the faint rustle of disturbed branches and the fading tang of burnt air and fading ozone.

The Typhoomerang did not hesitate a moment longer, finally finding the distraction she needed to escape.

A guttural snarl ripped from her throat as she crushed her hatchlings tighter against her back, muscles locking around their trembling bodies. Flame roared from her jaws, spiraling in a wide arc as she kicked off the earth—golden stalks erupting into fiery spiral beneath her. She tore through the dense fog-laden air, her wingbeats battering it aside in heavy gusts, as the heated sparks of her own fire trailed in her wake.

She didn’t look back. She couldn’t find the strength to.

Wings tearing the fog as she fled with her trembling hatchlings pressed against her, however, what the Typhoomerang failed to realize was the dark truth she’d left behind, something she would surely grow to regret in time.

 That is, if she ever lived long enough to know it .

The Mimic stood amidst the burning field, the embers licking harmlessly at its long, disjointed limbs. Its eyes—those milky pink-veined voids—narrowed as it tracked her fading silhouette through the fog, an expression of patient hatred etched across its distorted features. 

From between jagged, needle-like teeth, its barbed tongue slithered into the night air, tasting the path she’d taken. It drank in the scent of her and her young, rolling it across that unnatural muscle before pulling it deep into the rotting vault of its throat.

The monster didn’t roar or give chase. It didn’t need to. It never needed to. 

Prey always came back—one way or another.

It stood unmoving, almost bored, watching the flames dance and curl around it, committing every last trace of her to memory: the heat that clung to her wings, the quickened pitch of her breathing, the trembling weight of her fear. 

It carved them all into its internal vault of scents and flavors it would soon savor, come another day, each was carved deep, like claw marks baked into stone, and filled with an unbroken promise of the hunt to come.

Because creatures like it did not simply forget those who’d wronged them.

And they never forgave.

Only when the ground disappeared into a thick and protective wall of cloudfall and mist did her hatchlings’ frantic croons break through her adrenaline. Their tiny voices shook with terror, pressing questions through their bond all at once—

What was that, Mother?

Are you hurt?

Was it going to eat us?

Will we escape in time?

The Typhoomerang swallowed thickly, keeping her wings steady as the memory of those pink-and-white eyes burned holes into every fiber of her mind.

“No,” she finally rumbled, voice trembling but strong enough for her children. “We’re safe now. But what we saw…”

She glanced once over her shoulder into the smothering fog behind them, her tail lashing with unease and the dregs of her adrenaline high.

“That was no kin of ours,” she admitted grimly, pulling her hatchlings closer. 

“That was death—and we were but a breath away from it.”

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Back on Berk} 

Gobber was already throwing together what he liked to call his “Hiccup rescue kit” — which of course referred to an old and worn satchel he’d mercilessly stuffed with every tool and salve he might need to patch up his reckless, troublesome apprentice (Surrogant son more like).  

Inside there was also a few other mentionables: A small coil of sturdy yak hair rope, an old (but well loved & reliable) dented lantern, poultices he’d commissioned from Gothi for varying burns and cuts (the boy would very likely get just by breathing) , and— most importantly —a sturdy and rather handy iron frying pan, that’s sole purpose was for knocking some actual sense into the boy if the Gods spared him long enough for a very warranted (and probably very foul) lecture.

All the while, he’d been muttering to himself and clattering around the forge, 

“Odin’s beard, Hiccup lad… always in a bloody mess. One of these days, boy, I’ll be haulin’ yer scrawny hide back here in a damned basket…”

Gobber wasn’t alone; however, he’d picked up a ‘shadow’ pretty early on. Astrid had been tailing him since they’d left the village in all honesty; her footsteps were as quiet as a stalking Nadder’s. 

Had Gobber been any other less dragon-versed viking he might’ve even missed her creeping up on him. But sadly for his star student, he wasn’t any ordinary run-of-the-mill viking.  

Eventually, he finally stopped, figuring the charade had gone on long enough; the lass had determination, he had to admit. With a deep, tired sigh, as his shoulders squared, he called out without turning:

“Go on an’ step out, lass. I know ye’ve been sneakin’ after me since the forge. Serious now—back to yer bed before I’ve got to give you a talkin’ to as well.”

Astrid emerged from the shadows, axe drawn and battle-ready, her eyes scanning every dark corner of the surrounding woods. Gobber caught the moment she glanced back at the dim forge, and the way her brow had furrowed at its wrecked state. That alone told him more than he wanted to know.

Even she had noticed something wrong with the boy she spent most of her time pretending didn’t even exist.

Sweat beaded on Gobber’s brow as he rubbed his braided beard, his gut twisted with more dread. Stoick would have his head on a real nice pike if anything happened to his fragile, stubborn boy while under Gobber’s watch.

But Astrid, as was to be expected, wasn’t budging in the least.

She lifted her chin, blue eyes as sharp as the edge of her battleaxe. “Rule number one of dragon training,” she recited without missing a beat, her voice low but firm, “Never go out alone. Always have a sword and someone to watch your blind spots.”

Gobber opened his mouth to counter but found himself faltering. 

Blast it, the lass was right—and he’d be the worst sort of hypocrite if he sent her away now. He grumbled something under his breath before nodding sharply.

“ Fine . But stick close, lass. Ye wander off an’ get yerself hurt, an’ I’ll tan both yer hides—yours and the chief’s boy when we find him.”

Astrid allowed herself the faintest smirk of triumph, puffing her chest slightly. She knew she’d just been trusted with a task nearly as weighty as guarding the chief himself.

As they moved deeper into the woods, their lantern flames fought against the biting northern winds, flickering in and out of existence. Gobber cursed, cupping a hand around his flame. 

“Northern Winds are in a rather’ foul mood tonight… By thor’s belly, it’s like they’re really tryin’ to snuff us out.”

Astrid hissed softly as her own lantern flickered again.

Not long after, Gobber’s peg leg squelched into something thick and wet . He froze, already hating every bit of the sound he’d just heard. Lowering his lantern, his face went grim as the warm light revealed a wide, glistening pool of crimson staining the earth.

Astrid gasped, her grip on her axe tightening. “Well, is it—human or dragon?”

Gobber bent down slowly, his hammer haphazardly sliding into his beltloop. He dipped two fingers into the blood, rubbed it, then sniffed, before bringing the red stain up to his mouth, tasting it.

Astrid grimaced. “That’s… disgusting. ”

He spat to the side, shaking his head. “ Too bitter. Dragon’s blood’s sweeter, aye… this ain’t theirs.”

Astrid’s voice wavered. “So… it’s—”

Gobber cut her off with a heavy sigh. Rising stiffly to his full height, he wiped his hands on his woolen trousers and muttered, “Afraid so, lass. Seems the boy’s gone an’ found the worst kind of trouble this time.”

He looked out into the dark, foreboding woods, his jaw set tight. “Let’s just pray to Odin, it won’t be his last.”

Astrid said nothing, but Gobber saw the slight tremor in her hands, and the flicker of fear in her eyes. She wasn’t as indifferent to the heir as she had always liked to pretend.

A sad, bittersweet smile tugged at the old blacksmith’s mouth.

“My Hiccup… if only ye could see this. Probably would’ve had a heart attack right here on the spot…”

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

Chapter Text

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

North Of Nowhere 

Chapter 6: Bitter

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{BITTER} 

Anger steeped in grief and regret.

Fruit left too long in the sun, turned sour to the seed.

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪

{Toothless- An Indefinite Time Later} 

Toothless drifted up from the depths of his distorted subconsciousness, struggling to take in breath. It felt as if he’d been left to drown in an endless void. He’d been left fighting with every fiber of his sense of self to batter and claw himself back to the surface that was waiting for him. His mind swam in currents of static and throbbing pain that made it even harder to breathe, let alone think. His thoughts were in a constant and endless cycle of breaking apart and reforming into fragments of what they once were; everything just felt broken.  

As if one of te monsters stray maggots had wormed into’s slithering venom into his very wiring, infecting it with something corrosive and starving. 

The pounding in his skull made it feel as though an axe had been wedged right there between his head appendages and left there for an eternity, throbbing with every heartbeat.

The acrid stench of burning timber and scorched grass hit his nostrils hard enough to jolt him back into a more grounding consciousness. His pupils contracted sharply, even if they struggled to adjust and unblur, he finally felt somewhat back in control of his body, even as his lungs dragged in a ragged breath as his instincts screamed danger of the highest possiblity. 

Stray ash drifted lazily from the blackened sky above, its live embers glowing faintly as they fell from the eternal night, fluttering down to the ground like dying fireflies. Each flake that managed to clung to his scales reeked of char and ruin, stinging his nose and eyes with the hazy smokiness they brought.

How long had he been down? What had happened? Was the forest on fire? 

A low, keening whine slipped from his throat as he scrambled to his feet too fast, stumbling sideways as his still-bleeding flank screamed out in protest. The throbbing in his skull continued to make the world spin and tilt beneath him. He pawed desperately at his own head, claws brushing through bouts of soot and damp, ash-streaked across his scales. As he pawed at himself, he tried searching for any new wounds he might need to acknowledge before further action, but all he found was the burning live embers beginning to melt against his hide.

Not ideal, but better than expected, he digressed. 

In his brief bout of distraction, he felt a new voice tickle at the ends of his mind, one that was weak and threadbarren, barely eevn comprehensible. 

“Toothless…hurts…”

But as he dissected and took in the entirety of the pitch, he recognized it as Hiccup’s voice, weak and hollow. 

And this time… it wasn’t carried by the wind. But instead, it had echoed somewhere inside his mind. The sound was just as faint as the dying embers falling around him, but still so unmistakably his boy that it shocked the Night Fury to his core.

When had his twin flame learned the language of his kin? It was impossible; he hadn’t taught him the basics yet.

 So how…? When?

He staggered forward, limbs trembling but refusing to fail any other time tonight. The world tilted and bucked beneath him, yet with each uneven stride, his determination only solidified. His boy was still alive— hurt, but alive — and Toothless would burn the entire world to ash before letting their story end here. Or ever…

The scent of his boy’s blood grew stronger the further his paws took him.

He crested a ridge and froze, his pupils dilating into slivers of bottomless black.

Toothless had chased shadows for what had felt like eternity.

Every ridge he crested, every glint of movement in the suffocating dark had mocked him with promises it never intended to keep. At least the gods-awful clicking of ‘those’ had finally fallen deaf.  

Solely what kept him going, and not just falling over and accepting the warm, inviting arms of eternal rest, were the promised whispers of his boy just ahead. Their serpentine tongues would be quick to reassure his efforts, just a few more heartbeats away, a few more determined footfalls, and then there he’d be, waiting for him to finally close the unbearable distance between them..

Toothless wasn’t sure what was real, if any of it , or if everything was but a cruel illusion of what his heart most desired and the fears that kept him enslaved. 

Or maybe he had simply gone insane, having perfectly fallen into the trap of the monster out in the woods, they kep calling to him. 

And yet, those venomous promises…They’d all been pained lies, because every time he lunged forward, he grasped nothing but an empty night and an even crueler silence. The gods were laughing at him, playing with his mind like pesterous carrion birds circling a dying beast with no time nor place left to spare. He hoped he wasn’t said ‘dying beast,’ cause there were certainly moments he’d nearly succumbed.

But this ridge… this one reeked more than the rest. It even felt different. The wafting of heavy clouds of smoke and fresh burning embers, ironically, burned the brightest here.

And amongst the smog, the stench of curdled and freshly spillt blood was overwhelming, so thick and metallic it scraped down his throat and burned in his lungs with a whole other type of poison. His boy’s blood. He could feel it in the very marrow of his bones.

 The air itself was choked with char, smoldering fires still hissing faintly and devouring all that was nearby. Beneath it all was that other smell —that rancid and suffocating rot , a stench that curdled the very insides of his stomach and made his lips curl in disgust and fill with fury.

A strangled cough tore from his throat before he even realized it, claws digging deep into the soil as he tore downhill in a blur of frantic desperation. 

He’d always been fastest amongst the skies, but even he could be a menace on the cold grounding terrain should the need arise. 

That was when his eyes finally saw it.

Silhouettes rose before him like the darkest of omens. One was massive, carrying something rotten about it. Even hunched, its size was staggering, and its bulk monstrous. It had the rough outline of a Night Fury, but its form was warped and bloated around the edges, as if it had been stretched into something unnatural and astray.  The air around it smelt of burning flesh, overwhelming infection, and something acidic in nature.

High above the other beast, another shape tore jagged streaks of what almost appeared to be light through the thick, black, and ashen sky. White lightning darted in and out of existence, as a phantom dragon too fast to fully glimpse, went about carving blinding paths that split across the darkness with vengeance. The movements spoke of a blazing and unquenchable wrath, unlike anything Toothless had ever seen.

  Whatever the dragon, it was filled with suffocating hate for the monsterous abomination at the root of its bitter ire. 

Below, the golden fields that once swayed softly in the night wind now burned like a sea of dying suns. Fire devoured the tall golden and green stalks, turning them into curling and charred embers that rode the updrafts, before they’d inevitably rain down in molten flecks that tinted the night in violent reds and molten golds. The air faltered under the intensity of the flames heat, as the world below was painted in a hellish glow that warped the horizon and made the shadows writhe and holler.

The two dragons screamed and shrieked within that inferno, their rage and hatred tearing across the ridges, every clash splitting the night apart and shaking the forest into a bloodstained battlefield.

But Toothless barely registered any of it.

Because there, in the fiery hellscape below, he saw him.

Hiccup.

His small, fragile, human body lay sprawled on the steadily growing, inflamed wheat floor, twisted unnaturally in a shallow pool that glistened crimson and near black. The boy’s bloody ad butchered chest barely moved, his breath so faint it was indistinguishable from death itself. Blood soaked the earth like rain falling into parched sands, the scent of it slicing through Toothless’s soul with a jagged and merciless edge.

And hunched over him… was a waking nightmare .

It mocked his kin , wearing the torn and disfigured disguise of none other than a Night Fury, but this creature was no Fury. The thing was an abomination , a grotesque patchwork of rotting scales and stretched flesh stitched together only through jutting barbs and misaligned bones. Its body twitched with an unnatural, jerking rhythm, like a corpse piloted by an unseen force. 

Its milky, clouded eyes rolled independently in its skull, bulging and unsteady, like a drowned beast dragged from an ocean grave, drenched in rot and decay. Along its neck and back, serrated spines jutted out like splinters of bone fragments, that were all slick and wet with its own blackened ichor and chunks of rottenness.

The clicking started then, its nightmarish cries came disjointed and rapid, as its rattling clicks slithered through the dark like knives scraping against bone. The sound once again dragging half-buried memories back and screaming to the surface. Those unforgivable Nestless, as they mercilessly tore his flock apart wing by wing, their venom sizzling through veins, as the screams of his kin shredded the skies and corrupted his eardrums and tainted every memory of the flock he’d once held so dearly. 

The mimic’s barbed, worm-like tongue slid out from its slack, drooling jaws, lapping greedily at the entrails of bloody visceral running from the depths of Hiccup’s wounds, as it finally managed a moment of recess from the battle with the white lightning overhead. 

Its teeth— too many and  too needle-like—snapped wetly, strings of dark crimson drool mixed with black sludge stretching and breaking as it flexed its monstrous maw with a dark purpose.

Something inside Toothless came shattered completely, and just like a switch, the world as he’d seen it moments before had irrevocably transformed and grown askew. Corruption began flooding and infecting his veins, as he felt more and more of himself, lost to the endless void of wrath and bloodlust. 

The sounds of the ongoing battle resumed, the shadow darting through the skies, the alien cries that tugged annoyingly at his memories and darkest traumas—it all drowned beneath a sea of white-hot wrath and bleeding grief. Its taste was acidic and bitter, burning his chest hollow, tainted. 

Hiccup was still now. His chest stalled, and his breath broken. 

Bleeding, he was bleeding so much. His other half. Bloodied and broken, death was chasing him at inescapable speeds.

They had just barely begun their life together—a lifetime promised and snatched away before it even had a chance to fully bloom.

Toothless felt the venom coursing through him, corrosive and just as inescapable.  

That same gaping pit he’d known when his flock had been slaughtered, when his family had been ripped from him. The same despair—but this time it didn’t drag him down. This time it only ignited.

Without thought, and without a plan. Without a shred of mercy.

He took a blind leap of faith, and he lunged with the wrath of a thousand.

Toothless hit the abomination like a bolt of black lightning, ferocious and feral in his claim of revenge. His claws tore furrows through its disgusting and decaying hide of an imposter, peeling scales and rancid flesh in long, steaming ribbons of black and red muscle. His jaws locked onto the mimic’s throat with as much bone-crushing force as he could muster; he wasn’t fighting to win, he was fighting to kill. 

His fangs sinking so deep in the false night fury’s that he was met with the taste of sour and chemical-laced ichor, that flooded and burnt his tongue. The ungodly beast of Hel screeched—a sound so loud and inhuman it blasted his eardrums, leaving his hearing a ringing and empty void—but even deafened from the proximity of it, Toothless tore harder, his every thought, every intention of ripping, thrashing, mangling this monster as much as he possibly could.

Chunks of gore tore free in his claws, slick and stinking. His tail lashed like a bladed whip, slashing through the abomination’s legs, severing tendon and joints alike with wet, sickening pops he couldn’t hear over the sound of his own bloodlust. The monster’s spines raked across his flanks and abdomen, carving deeper and more searing gashes, but Toothless didn’t flinch. 

He didn’t even feel a thing. 

He was a dragon possessed, driven by a bloodlust so all-consuming it drowned all pain and fear, drowning every thought except one:

No one touches my boy and lives.

Black ichor sprayed in violent arcs, hissing as it burned holes into the dirt. The creature shrieked again, a warbling, rattling death-cry, as it thrashed wildly, attempting to shake the other beast off, it’s claws finding purchase as they ripped at the other’s ribs, its needled teeth snapping inches from the Night Fury’s face.

But the tactic did little to ward the other off, as Toothless only clung to it harder like a god of vengeance, his dark maw a crimson vise tearing the thing’s throat open, his claws flensing its flesh until nothing but ribbons and splintering bones remained. The shadow dragon above cried out again—words of warning or plea, he didn’t know. Not that he’d be able to hear them to begin with, but even if he could, he wouldn’t…

Not until the monstrous abomination stopped moving.

Not until its body was nothing but a mangled, twitching carcass staining the earth in the same shades of crimson as it had with his boy.

Not until his boy was safe, no matter the cost.

He would never stop , not until this monster was returned to the depths of Helheim it belonged for committing such unforgivable sins. 

Through the roiling heat of their rage and the flaming fields around them, Toothless’s world narrowed to one desperate truth— he had to reach Hiccup, he couldn’t keep this up forever, his boy surely wouldn’t be able to last if he did.

With every savage thrash of his body, every bone-rattling impact as he repeatedly slammed the mimic into the scorched earth, his fury drove him like a current in the storm. The nightmare shrieked and twisted under his claws, its sickly flesh splitting wetly where his teeth had managed to tear through its stolen, scaled hide. 

At last, in a final surge of every ounce of his most primal of strengths, Toothless heaved the creature off his boy and threw it into the flames licking the ground closest.

For a heartbeat, there was a moment of silence. The golden inferno hissed and roared around him, smoke clinging to his throat as Toothless finally turned his gaze downward…

And his breath stopped.

Hiccup lay twisted on the ground, his small frame soaked in blood and blackened by a sheet of ash and other awful things. His tunic was shredded, sticky crimson soaking the fabric to his pale and freckled skin beneath. His chest rose in shallow, fragile gasps like each breath fought against the cold clutches of death.  

One hand was bent unnaturally, mangled by a force Toothless couldn’t even guess. For a single, paralyzing moment, the Night Fury could do nothing but stare, frozen as a fresh and shattering wave of terror and grief choked him where he stood. 

He’d known it was bad , would be bad , but this…This was even worse than he’d ever imagined. 

That single second was all the monster needed.

From the flames, the mimic lunged and slammed into Toothless with the force of a falling mountain. Its claws, like hooked sickles, raked across him, tearing deep gouges that split him open anew, hot blood spraying in glistening arcs of red. Before he could counter, barbed teeth clamped onto the tender flesh at the base of his wings. The sensation stuttering his senses as the False Fury held him in a paralyzing vice grip, before it suddenly deiced it had every intention of hurling him like discarded prey into the belly of the forest.

The world became blurry and claustrophobic as the wind and flames whipped across every plane of his being.

He crashed through the field, his body smashing and splintering tree trunks like brittle kindling. The final impact shattered a massive century-old pine clean in half, the cracked trunk folding around his weight as it too tried to bury him alive. Flames licked greedily at his back and tail, singing his scales and spines as pain flared so scorching it nearly tore a scream from him.

Even dragons weren’t completely fireproof. A lesson hard learned.

Toothless coughed violently, blood pooling in his mouth before spilling out the corners and down his maw. The frenzy that had kept him standing moments ago, receded like a dying tide, leaving nothing but unbearable aches and trembling that left his limbs unresponsive. Every muscle in his body screamed as he tried— and failed —to push himself upright against the half-snapped tree trunk that held him hostage, his claws digging deep trenches in the scorched dirt.

Through a blur of smoke and tears, he saw the monster .

The mimic stalked toward him with slow, deliberate steps, its hulking silhouette framed by burning fields. Broken trees lay scattered in its wake all like bones of its past victims. Its pink milky eyes glowed faintly in the firelight, glinting with predatory delight.

If there was ever a silver lining, it was that this monster was now focussed on maiming him and not torturing his boy further. 

It loomed over him now, standing just as it had over Hiccup’s frail body minutes before. Toothless’s chest convulsed with another wet cough, spattering blood across the earth as his lungs burned and wept. 

The monster tilted its mangled head, and from it came an ungodly sound—a rattling chorus of Death Gripper clicks meshed with horrors far more grotesque. Toothless only snared, the sounds haunted him, but his raging hatred for the beast weighed heavier than fear ever could.

Not receiving the rise it seemed to crave, the mimic leaned in closer, its milky gaze unblinking and mocking, its breath rancid and hot against Toothless’s bloodied snout. Then, like a festering wound tearing open, its voice slithered into Toothless’s mind— Hiccup’s voice, but warped, guttural, dripping with venom and hatred:

“…always hated you… useless… should’ve let you die…” 

Toothless’s lips peeled back in a snarl, hatred boiling deep in his gut. He wanted to sink his fangs into the monster’s throat once more, rip it apart once and for all, for daring to wear his boy’s voice like one of its stolen skins. 

He tried to summon that same old wrath again…

But the words, they just didn’t stop.

“…you ruined everything… so patheic… can’t even protect me… should’ve killed you… you’re nothing without me… nothing at all…”

Each word struck harder than claws, worming deep into the cracks of Toothless’s resolve. His chest heaved with shallow, ragged breaths, his body trembling—not just from pain now, but from an even more crushing emotional pain.

He tried to growl and deny its cruel lies, shove the awful and vicious voice out of his mind forevermore—but it clung to him thicker than tar, dragging his thoughts into an endless dark, that carried no true light at the end of the tunnel. 

“…I hate you, Too-th-le-ss… “ It mocked the precious name he’d been given, with a corrosive and acidic hatred, with a maliciousness he’d never seen any dragon capable of. Even the Nestless hadn’t mocked their victims before preying upon them; they only followed instinct and what they were told. They didn’t incite such violence with such purpose and cruelness.