They should have known it was too good to be true.
When Berk was first discovered and settled, everything went well. The houses went up quickly and were modernized in short order. Farms were built, the fishing and hunting were found to be good, and trade routes were established. In short, in less than a month the small wild island was completely inhabited and could have stood off the coast of any major 21st-century city.
Trouble, when it hit, came at sunset on the night of the first nearly-full moon. Every power source for every known electronic device started fluctuating at random: strange sounds came from every speaker, as though receiving signals from an unknown satellite or radio. Communications with the fishing boats were lost; one went missing altogether and the rest fumbled their way back to port with meager catches. The sailors had strange stories to tell, of giant creatures in the water that looked like crocodiles but behaved like sharks – but no one believed them, and everyone simply went to bed with the promise to search for the missing craft by day.
The next morning brought more surprises. Animals put out for the night vanished without a trace; trash cans were overturned and anything with obvious plant or animal origins had been carried off; strange, birdlike footprints were found in yards. Communications were working again, so a search was organized for the missing ship. They found it lodged among the nearby sea stacks – completely deserted, every scrap of wood stripped away and all the food and leather supplies gone. All the lifeboats were accounted for, and aside from the broken plastic crates (which could have meant anything) there was no sign of a struggle. The sailors had not willfully abandoned ship, nor had they been the slightest bit prepared to resist whatever had attacked them.
That night the same thing happened again. This time, people stayed up and watched out their windows, looking for the strange creatures that had so brazenly raided them the night before. With the only reliable light being moonlight, all anyone saw were moving shadows – shadows as big as large men, moving rapidly on all fours and twitching long muzzles this way and that.
One man said, about a creature that practically came right up to his house and peered in the window, "It looked like a dragon, or something."
The second fishing ship to go missing washed up on the shore the next morning, completely wrecked and smoldering. Deep scratches marred every floor and most of the walls, and there was blood everywhere. Lodged behind a chair was a severed forelimb – a wing-like arm and hand with a pincer-claw as thumb and forefinger, and covered in green scales.
There was simply no question at that point: these were dragons, or something enough like dragons to deserve the name. And they were hungry, and more inclined to raid than hunt.
The raids continued for a total of five nights, and then stopped. Weeks went by as people looked out their windows in fear that a dragon would be staring back at them; then they decided that the creatures had moved on and went on with their lives, certain that there would be no more raids.
Thus is tragedy written as a pattern is realized too late. The raids had not ended: they simply only happened on the full moon and the nights around it. The Mayor's wife was stolen away on the second night of the second raid; heartbroken, but fiercely stubborn, he legally changed his name to Stoick in honor of what she always called him and declared war on the dragons.
"If they want a fight, we'll be ready for them! Never surrender!"
The war continued for fifteen years. The dragons attacked every full moon, from three to five nights in a row depending on if the nights two days before and two days after were overcast or clear. For the three nights directly surrounding the full moon, it didn't matter if there were clouds. Every raid the townsfolk rushed to meet the dragons in battle (firearms versus firepower), giving as good as they got and refusing to budge an inch.
Between the raids, dragon corpses were studied and classified by the best ways to defeat their living counterparts; tentatively it was decided that there were six classes based on long-range breath weapons and physical characteristics. They stopped using wood altogether in construction, since the dragons kept ripping it off. Organic waste was carted away from town, so that the dragons would stop raiding trash cans – and it took about five years, but the invaders eventually figured out that the fancy cans no longer held compostable (and therefore even remotely edible) materials and stopped digging in them.
Stoick also funded expeditions to find the dragons' nest. If the nest was destroyed, surely the dragons would find another home – one much farther from Berk and therefore not worth the effort of flying all the way out simply to steal food. For fifteen years, there was no luck. The dragons seemed to materialize out of nowhere and vanish without any trace. Putting trackers on captured dragons and letting them escape didn't work – the trackers broke the minute their carriers disappeared.
Some of the more fanciful (or superstitious) believed that the dragons lived on another planet altogether, or in another dimension. Stoick dismissed these notions in public, but secretly wondered how anything like these destructive monsters could exist long enough for their population to grow to its estimated size without being discovered by the original survey team. Or perhaps they had been discovered, and the politicians had given Berk to the people opposed to them so that the local wildlife could kill them off. These settlers were certainly just about the most intractable bunch of hillbillies on the face of the earth as far as personalities went – and there was no answer to the repeated calls for help when they first realized that they were up against something that might require a full military.
The new Berkians were stranded; if they were to survive, they had to do it on their own.
Author's Note: this fanfiction will be written from Hiccup's point of view until further notice.
I couldn't believe it. Hickory Harrison Haddock the third, crushed to death under a pile of meat. The weight was unbearable; I could hardly move. And the stench…the fans weren't doing enough to clear the smell away.
Finally I managed to turn my head enough so that my jaw could move more-or-less unhindered. "Fisher, can you get up? I think it's done exploding now."
"Just a minute," the pile of meat answered, "Let the circulation get the worst of the smoke out."
At least he moved a bit, making it easier to breathe.
Fisher and I are buddies. Mostly. At least, I'm better friends with him right now than with the other surviving kids my age. When I wanted to pull out the old chemistry set and make some kind of potent dragon poison, Fisher was the guy to come along and lend a hand. Trouble was, he'd never been all that small, and his recent growth spurt had given him the approximate dimensions of an overstuffed armchair: he was simply more hindrance than help in a laboratory.
Of course, when two ingredients came together and made a massive explosion, he was a very effective human shield.
Eventually Fisher stood up. "I'm pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen."
"Clearly." Not even Fisher was spared from my snarky humor.
"No, I mean," and then he went into a chemical composition spiel that I only understood in the abstract form of some of these ingredients were supposed to prevent these other ingredients from reacting off each other. Then he looked at me and added, "How much soap did you put in?"
I shrugged. "Maybe a quarter cup? Soap cakes don't have dividing lines marked on their wrappers like butter sticks."
"Did you grind it into the measuring cup?"
"Grind it?"
Fisher looked at our workplace, which was covered in greasy black ash. Then he picked up a tool that could have been used to reduce a block of solid oak into sawdust, or stripped the peel off a potato in a matter of seconds.
I groaned. Of course, the soap wouldn't have dissolved fast enough in the mixture while it was still mostly solid, so it wouldn't have been much help with keeping the other agents from reacting. I had wondered about that when I first dropped the soap in – I hadn't even seen the grater – but by the time I thought of it the deed was done, and I couldn't fish it back out again.
"Your dad's not going to be very happy with this, is he?"
I shrugged bitterly. "Of course he's not going to be happy with this. He's never happy with any of my projects. He wants me to turn into Scott and chase dragons with battle-axes and not bother with witches' brews that keep blowing up…" I paused, waiting for Fisher to defend our chemistry.
He didn't speak. In fact, he didn't even move: he stayed perfectly still, staring at the door – that was letting cold air wash over my shoulders.
"…Did someone just come in here?"
He nodded.
My shoulders dropped. "It's my dad, isn't it?"
He nodded again.
I didn't want to turn around. I did anyway – if I didn't, he would likely take my shoulder and turn me around himself.
And there he was, all six foot nine and three hundred pounds of Mayor Stoick Haddock. His beard had grown out to his satisfaction not long ago, and the great red bushel of it made him look even bigger. His face was nearly as red as he looked around the mostly-empty storeroom that had been our laboratory.
"Yeah, I know, this looks really bad," I began, hoping to forestall the shouting, "But we're making progress on the recipe. I think it's even right now – there was just a mild preparation issue when I couldn't find the…"
"You do realize," he interrupted me, "That I have enough problems without having to clean up after your experiments? Winter is almost here and I have an entire village to feed!"
"I clean up my own…"
"Hiccup. If you want to get out there and be of some use against dragons, focus on gaining some muscle and get strong enough! We've never found an effective dragon poison anyway, so you might as well use what we know works!"
I wanted to argue that nobody had ever really looked for one; the closest had been a couple of times when good-old-fashioned gasoline had been dumped over the pile of compostable rubbish (a trick that didn't work for some reason; must be the firebreaths). But the sound of my nickname put paid to that argument before it ever started.
Hiccup. A runt. A mistake in the natural order of the universe. Even my dad thought that of me, and he at least loved me enough to lock me in my room during the monthly raids. Everyone else just wished some dragon would find me and carry me off.
Fisher called me Hick. Not a lot better, especially since I could tell it was a compromise in some ways.
"Clean up this storeroom." Dad's gaze went past me and he added, "Both of you."
"Yes, sir," Fisher said softly. None of this tirade was against him, of course; he was big enough to be the guy my dad was talking about, although he lacked a lot of the necessary aggression.
Dad stood in the doorway long enough to see us pick up mops and brushes and start working, and then he shut us in to finish.
"At least that lecture was in private," I muttered into my mop handle as I worked it over the floor.
Fisher cringed. Then he pointed with a brush at the open window.
I turned and saw Scott's face grinning through the screen.
"What are you looking at?" I snarled, brandishing the mop as though I intended to slap the screen – and his face, which was conveniently pressed against it enough to distort his already ugly features – with the soggy rag-head. I really did think about it; it would be fun, since he couldn't retaliate, and I could cherish the memory for a couple of hours.
Of course, then he would track me down and use me for a punching bag.
"I've never seen anyone make that big a mess! Great job on the storeroom!"
"Thank you, I was trying, so…" I went back to work, hoping Scott would go away if I ignored him.
"You missed a spot."
Fisher threw one of his brushes at the screen. Judging by the sounds it made – and didn't make – it hit the screen bristle-first but didn't hit Scott. He must have jumped back, because Fisher's aim was a little better than that.
At least he wouldn't be warping the screen anymore. Even Scott wasn't stupid enough to put his face on something dripping with strong detergent and who-knew-what-else.
"It was the Hiccup thing, wasn't it?" Fisher finally said a few minutes later.
"What?"
"You didn't go back to defending your poison."
"Oh. Yeah."
"Are things…worse at home?"
"Nah, no worse; we still barely make eye contact – and when we do, he's always got this disappointed scowl, like someone skimped on the meat in his sandwich."
"You're going to do the thing again, aren't you?"
I hadn't been – but it seemed like one of my better ways to blow off steam. I straightened up, puffed out my chest, and deepened my voice into a…okay impression of my dad's. "Excuse me, Waitress! I'm afraid you brought me the wrong offspring! I ordered an extra-large boy with beefy arms, extra guts-and-glory on the side! This here – this is a talking fishbone!"
Fisher chuckled dutifully at my impersonation. "I guess what it is, is…there's the warrior's way and there's the nerd's way. Your dad's a warrior; you're a nerd. And with no translator in the house – which is probably what your mom would have been – you two just don't have anything to talk about."
"Thank you for summing that up." I tried hard to keep the sarcasm out of my voice; just because I'd figured all that out a long time ago, doesn't mean I needed to take it out on Fisher. "How do you get on with your…" fortunately I managed to choke back the word parents before it came out; he didn't have any at all, and was raised by an aunt and uncle.
"Not too bad; I'm kind of…both a warrior and a nerd, so at least I can talk their talk."
I shrugged. "Pity you don't live at my place. You could be translator."
Fisher made a noise that could have been a laugh. If he was a sick seagull. "Your dad scares me. He always looks so…angry."
"He's looked angry since the day I was born – but I'm sure there's no connection." Despite the implications my sarcastic tone gave that pronouncement, it was actually a slight exaggeration: he didn't look angry in the photos of him, Mom, and newborn-baby-me.
It was in photos taken after Mom was taken away that he started looking angry all the time.
On the south coast of Berk stands a house where nobody lives. The outside is entirely brick and slate with metal doors, and I've heard that the only wood inside is a few doors hidden from the view of the small, reinforced windows. It's two stories tall with, I've heard, a basement floor; a nice respectable size for a family to live without bashing elbows at every turn. There was a deck – but it was made of wood, and was torn away by dragons less than six months after it was built. Which is a shame in some ways, because that house has the best views of both sunsets and sunrises; most places in town only have charming views of the sunsets.
It's a nice house.
The place has been empty since the death of its first tenant.
I never knew Borden Belden personally, but I've heard that he had very bad luck. It's amazing his house is still standing. He was no kind of farmer – his flocks and crops were all stolen by dragons almost as soon as he had anything worth harvesting. He didn't have any talent blacksmithing, either, and had to give the forge to his brother. When he moved into that house on the coast, he had chosen to become a fisherman.
No one has ever been able to tell me exactly what happened to Borden. All anyone knows is that, one day, he went completely mad. He wandered aimlessly around town, like he was trying to carry out his weekly shopping routine but could no longer remember what he was supposed to buy. He'd stopped sleeping; stopped caring for himself; started muttering about flying skeletons shrouded in black, appearing in his living room. The Night Fury, he said – a dragon that no one could kill, for it was already dead. A dragon for which locked doors were no concern, because it could waft through solid walls.
Saying that no one believed him was perhaps an exaggeration; too much had happened to everyone for something like that to be considered completely impossible. But they did say (in low voices) that perhaps he'd been left alone too much and he was starting to hallucinate that some unseen dragon was capable of more than it was.
Then one night everyone heard screams. Borden's screams, more animal than human anymore but still a voice raised in terror and distress. It was during another raid and no one was free to investigate at the time, but everyone wondered about his "Night Fury." The next morning when they went to check on him, the house was empty. Not even Willy, his last sheep, was anywhere on the premises. And there was no sign of forced entry.
The thought that an undead dragon really did exist and had penetrated this lonely house was more than anyone wanted to deal with. The house was left alone and rumors abounded that it was haunted by Borden's crazy ghost. A new entry was added to the dragon encyclopedia, with no pictures and only a few words:
"Night Fury: power, armor, and accuracy ratings unknown. The unholy offspring of morning mist and Death Itself. Never engage this dragon; your only chance is to hide and pray it does not find you."
I don't know if there is a Night Fury: no one has ever brought one down. Of all the dragons to show their faces, none of them look like "flying skeletons" and they all tend to leave evidence of their passing. If there is such a creature, though, it would undoubtedly be the greatest prize – worth far more in status, in sheer bragging rights, than all the other dragons put together. Whoever does that would be called Hero.
Maybe that's why my wanderings have been taking me closer and closer to that house.