Firelight glowed cozily in the hall of Grimbeard's castle. Shrieks rang out, echoing into the towering ceiling as a tiny green dragon darted after a girl with wild red hair, who was desperately trying to protect a raisiny biscuit from his greedy little toothless jaws.
"Na, na! NA BITEY!" she screamed.
"T-toothless will eat! Toothless a p-p-poor starved dragon, h-had no d-d-dinner!"
"That's because you had MY dinner!"
"Was only a l-little taste!"
Toothless neatly dodged the boot she sent sailing towards his head. The girl used that moment to shove the entire biscuit into her mouth, grinning saucily at the dragon and accidentally letting a few crumbs fall out. Toothless pecked grumpily at the crumbs.
"N-n-not even a raisin in here."
The massive door at the other end of the hall swung open, and battles and biscuits were forgotten as the girl and dragon threw themselves at the man who stepped into the room.
"Father!" the little girl squeaked, jumping into his arms.
Toothless flapped around the man's head, swishing his tail at the man's face in a kindly sort of manner. "T-toothless very hungry. Need some w-w-winkles or something, Hiccup's mean little m-mollusk has no manners."
Hiccup smiled. "Don't worry, Toothless, I brought you two a snack." He reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a veritable treasure trove of biscuits. Toothless snatched a mouthful, and the little girl two handfuls as Hiccup walked toward the fireplace and seated himself in a chair.
"Father," said the girl, settling down on his lap and taking an enormous bite of biscuit, "tell me about when you were little."
Toothless curled on Hiccup's shoulder for a nap, having already finished his biscuits. "Well," Hiccup began, "there were dragons when I was a boy..."
A small boy ran into his hut, out of breath, flushed, and excited. "Guess what?"
His older brother looked up from the boot he was cobbling. "What is it?"
"I saw a dragon! Not just a nanodragon, a really big one, at least four feet long with greenish-brown spots!"
"Oh?" His brother stood up. "Let's go see!"
The boy shook his head. "It flew away when it saw me. But it was right there at the edge of the woods, really it was!"
Ready to get back to work again, the older boy sat down. "Wow. I haven't seen one since Great-Grandpa died, when I was your age." He picked up his awl, but instead of placing it against the leather, he looked at his younger brother again. "You're a lucky kid."
"Great-Grandpa had a dragon, right?" The smaller boy pulled a stool next to his brother and climbed onto it. "Mama said they could talk to it. Was he crazy?"
The brother laughed. "No, no. Great-Grandpa was a dragon whisperer. I think he taught Mama how to do it, too. But back then they actually had dragons to talk to. They say there were great seadragons that would make Grimbeard's castle look like a doll's dollhouse, dragons that could swallow your four-foot Common-or-Garden without thinking."
The boy's eyes looked ready to jump out of his head. "Bigger than a cow?"
"Much, much bigger."
"I wish Great-Grandpa could tell me about them, or even Mama."
The older boy turned back to his work. "Me too," he sighed. "But I do remember a story Grandpa told me once. I think it started like this: 'There were dragons when I was a boy...'"
Many, many hundreds of years later, a girl in a nightgown crept silently down the corridor of a very old, very large, and very grand stone house. It was dark as pitch, but she carried a single candle, carefully, so as not to accidentally light her long red braid and make it more fiery than it already was.
Quietly, she pushed open the nursery door. If the small sleepers in the next room heard anything, it would be over. Her slippered feet padded past the bookshelves. Past schoolbooks, picture books, dictionaries, and that horribly dull Thompson's Book Of Etiquette For The Modern Young Lady Of Propriety she went until she came to a few dusty books crammed in the corner.
"You're much too old for fairy stories," her mother always said.
"H'm, h'm, yes very nice, rubbish, of course," said her father.
Her governess was the worst. "If I catch you with one of these trumped-up nonsense tales ever again, I'll burn it!" She slapped the book out of the girl's hands and tossed it under an end table. "What a great baby you are."
So in the dead of night, she stole her forbidden stories.
Tonight, she chose a small, worn volume, one of her favorites. The Conquests of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, read the title page, An Old Norse Saga Retold and Translated by Snerlik Svensgaard. The poetry was bumpy in places, a great deal seemed to have been left out, and some of the events couldn't possibly have happened exactly as written. But something shone through the little old tale and touched her.
She set the candle down and curled into an armchair, gently opening the book. The first words were familiar, and she mouthed them as she read. "There were dragons when I was a boy..."
A boy digging on a beach. It's a simple picture, but about to be very important.
"I'm a pirate," he said to himself. "Arghh, I know the scurvy rascals buried me treasure here."
He was in somewhat of a hurry, for yesterday he had filled his canvas shoes with pink shells and buried them under a large X made of sticks. The shoes would have stayed there until he had voyaged for years and could come back to collect them, but his mother was wondering where they were that morning and not even the most fearsome of pirates would want to face her when she was cross.
"Haharr!" There was one. He dumped out the sand and shells, setting it aside so he could continue digging.
Where was that other shoe? He knew he'd buried them in the same place. Maybe he should've tied the laces together, or-
Thud.
It was a small thud, but certainly not a shovel-hitting-shoe thud. His eyes widened, and he forgot to talk like a scary pirate. "Real treasure?" For the next ten minutes, he dug like mad, knocking more sand into the hole than he dug out, but finally he managed to free the box.
It was almost disappointingly small.
That's all right, he figured. You could still fit a lot of diamonds in there.
The box was wooden, so old that the wood was rotting in places and you could see the metal underneath. He pulled off the dilapidated ropes tying it shut, but it had lain untouched for so long the lid was stuck. A couple whacks from his shoe fixed that problem. Inside, instead of treasure was...
An oilcloth bag. Tied around yet another box. A locked box. Talk about security.
He wiped his forehead and ran his sweaty, sandy fingers through his red hair, sticking it up even more than usual. Then picking up the smaller box, he ran back to his house, shoes completely forgotten. If this was treasure, he could buy roller skates instead! His arms ached from carrying the box, but he didn't care. A large rock and his dad's awl got the lock off quickly enough.
And there, inside the box, lay his treasure.
A stack of papers.
He wrinkled his nose.
Well, people left weird stuff on the beach all the time. This wasn't the first time he thought he'd found something only to be disappointed.
He squinted at the scrawly writing. This wasn't even written in English. And the box was awfully important looking. He brightened. Maybe papers could be important, too, but how could he know what they said?
"Miss Cressida!" That lady came here on holiday every summer, and she knew lots about words. Carefully he picked up the box again, and within a few minutes he was on Miss Cressida's porch ringing the doorbell.
She opened the door and smiled. "Hello-"
"Miss Cressida, I found this on the beach and I think it's really old but I don't know what it says except I thought maybe you could tell me because you know that kind of stuff and is it treasure?"
She took the box from him and opened it, examining the pages ever so slowly. The boy bounced a little impatiently.
"I think it's a story, in which case it would indeed be a treasure. I'm going to have to spend a lot more time studying it, though."
His face fell. "And you don't know what it says?"
She looked back down at the first paper. "Not much. But the very first line reads,
There were dragons when I was a boy."
A/N: I had to edit this for section dividers. It was a bit confusing without them.