It's been five years since Stoick the Vast discovered the dragon's nest. For the Vikings of Berk, that meant a new harmonious existence with the scaled creatures, but for the Vikings of Rok, it meant something else entirely. Rok is roughly a third of the size of Berk and nearly four days away if you travel by sea. If you thought Stoick and his people were stubborn, you should try meeting Grimm the Victorious. It's like comparing people from a normal town to those from a small backwoods town. While Rok might be a third of the size of Berk, the people are three times as stubborn, three times as superstitious, and three times less educated. My name is Hawk Grimmson, I'm twelve years-old, and, if you haven't guessed, I'm the son of Grimm and his perfect Viking wife, Nova.
Like in our neighboring Island, Berk, here in Rok, we begin our dragon training at the tender age of ten. The big difference is that we still consider dragon "training" to be dragon "hunting." Like any village of Vikings, we were all thrilled that the queen dragon and the nest had been destroyed. It meant that the attacks on us via dragon express became few and far in between. However, here in Rok, we're a little... stuck in our ways. Instead of befriending the dragons, my father saw the sudden revelation of dragon training as a weakness, a weakness which he just had to take advantage of. Instead of training the dragons, he decided that they had to be tamed. Any dragon left untamed or unbroken was still considered a threat to our village. Dragons were turned into our slaves and treated like nothing. Even as a small child, I didn't agree with how we were treating our dragons, but I knew better than to question a large, tough, unintelligent leader like Grimm the Victorious.
Dragon training in Rok was the closest thing there was to school. You began when you were ten and graduated when you turned twelve. Once you graduated, you were sent out and given seven days to capture your own personal dragon. I had learned all the tricks of the trade when it came to taming dragons. While somewhere deep inside of me I knew it was wrong, I still went about taming dragons at the top of my class. Even as I stood before my village in the ring on the day of my graduation, I wasn't sure if I even wanted a dragon as my own. I was getting ready to depart on my first mission as a man when a large shadow trailed over me followed by a gust of wind that could only be caused my large dragon wings. My wavy shoulder-length brown hair blew this way and that as I shielded my dark gray eyes and looked into the sky.
"No way, what's Hiccup doing here?" I asked as I watched him land outside the large stone building that was my house. My house was on top of the largest hill of the village. The higher your home was, the higher status you held. No house was higher than Grimm the Victorious's. To satiate my curiosity, I made my way back up the hill to my house. As I skid to a stop, Hiccup's dragon, Toothless the Night Fury, spun and gave me a watchful eye.
"But dragons are harmless, Grimm!" Hiccup was exclaiming to my father. I don't know what the boy, only three years my senior, thought he was going to say to my father to make the stubborn man change his mind at all.
"Harmless! That word hardly explains why so many of my men are missing their limbs! Dragons are dangerous beasts that must be kept in check!" my father roared back at Hiccup. The teenage boy from Berk looked slightly crestfallen.
"If they're attacking you it's because you're mistreating them. They don't behave like that back home because we treat them with respect. They're living creatures, too, you know!"
As Hiccup and my father continued to go back and forth with each other, getting absolutely no where, I was busy watching Toothless. I'd never actually been so close to a Night Fury before. While we had plenty of dragons in our pin, no one in Rok was quite skilled enough to capture the ever evasive Night Fury. As if he were able to read my mind, the large black dragon grew a smug look on his face before his scale lip twitched upward. I thought he was going to growl at me or zap me or something, but instead, it looked like he was trying to smile. I just blinked in surprise.
"So... that's how you got your name..." I murmured, placing my hand son my knees as I tilted my head down to get a better look at his mouth. As I did so, Toothless suddenly reared his teeth. They popped out of his gums like daisies popping out of the snow. I hadn't expected it, so I jumped with a start and fell backwards onto my rear. I could have sworn the dragon was laughing at me, but that didn't matter because, with my clumsiness, I had drawn attention to myself.
"What are you still doing here, boy?" my father growled at me. Hiccup turned and looked at me before he shot Toothless a suspicious glance and the dragon tipped it's... ears..? back and grinned toothlessly at his companion.
"N-nothing, Dad," I began to stammer. "I was just wondering what Hiccup was doing here," I explained.
"It's none of your business what this twig of a boy is doing here! Your time is already slipping away! Get your rear end out there and make me proud before I disown you!" he growled some more. Hiccup gave me an apologetic smile. I'm not sure why, but I think it's because he knew what it was like to be in my position, but I quickly just nodded to my father and scrambled to my feet and back down the hill. By the time I got to the tree line head off into the forest, Hiccup and Toothless were soaring through the sky. They obviously hadn't made any impact on my father.
A sigh escaped me and I turned to go on with my quest to capture a dragon for myself, but as I turned, I found myself started again. Standing not five feet away from me was Sula, a girl that had also graduated from dragon training alongside me.
"Why the long face, Hawky-poo?" she asked me with a wide grin on her face. Sula's mother was a pirate from a far away land who ended up in Rok somehow. Because of that, Sula and her family (aside from her father) looked completely different from the rest of the Vikings. They were smaller and faster, and I'm pretty sure a lot smarter. I think Sula believed that, too, because the look on her face was always confident, like she knew something I didn't, even though I finished at the top of our class and she finished second.
"What long face? What are you still doing here? Shouldn't you be gone already?" I asked her, furrowing my brow.
"Shouldn't YOU be gone already? What was Hiccup doing here?" she asked, pushing herself off of the tree she was leaning on as I walked past her so that she could follow after me.
"I don't know, something about us not treating dragons with respect. It sounded pretty lame to me," I said, shooting a suspicious glance over my shoulder. I had never voiced my doubts about our methods of dragon training to anyone before, but that knowing look always plastered on Sula's face made me nervous.
"Oh yeah, totally lame. Who does that Hiccup think he is? Discovering the nest... Destroying the Green Death... Being the first Viking to ever ride a dragon! He's gotta be totally clueless, huh?" she went on, her voice oozing sarcasm.
"If you don't like it, why don't you take up your mother's occupation instead and sale away? No one told you that you had to tame dragons," I spat at her, even though I really just wanted to agree with her.
"Eh, I guess I just like it here," she said with a shrug as if my words hadn't stung her at all. Really, she was used to getting treated like an outsider. Had I mentioned before how stuck in our ways we were? "So, what kind of dragon are you going to track?" she asked, her dark eyes suddenly full of excitement.
"I don't know," I said, digging into my bag for my small dragon manual. I had made my own travel-sized copy back when we started training so that I didn't have to sit around with the others. One dragon manual for a hand full of students just didn't make sense to me. When Viking youth got together, we got easily distracted. "I was thinking about a wyvrern, like a Timberjack or something," I said with a shrug.
"A Timberjack? No one's seen one of those in ages and they're twice the size of any of the traditional riding dragons," Sula observed.
"No kidding? The bigger the better," I said dryly.
"Or the bigger the target. How are you going to be at all stealthy with a dragon like that?" she asked skeptically.
"Why are you asking me so many questions? Shouldn't you be worried about which type of dragon you're going to get instead?" I grumbled.
"Oh, I already know I'm going to get a Night Fury. I have no doubt in my mind," she said arrogantly.
"A Night Fury?" I asked, stopping to give her another dry skeptical look. "Hiccup's the only person in history to manage that feat," I added, rolling my eyes before I continued walking.
"Which means that it's a feat that can be managed, and I plan on doing it, you just watch!" she said, but I had drown out her voice already. We walked on for a long while and she made an attempt to get me to talk, but I didn't want to argue with her. I guess you could say I got moody from time to time. I really wanted the quiet of a solo journey so I could concentrate on what sort of dragon I should get for myself, but I couldn't think with her going on and on.
"So where are we headed anyway?" she asked finally.
"I am headed towards the northeastern coast where all the rocky caverns are. I don't know where YOU'RE headed," I seethed pointedly.
"Oh! I bet that's a great place to find all sorts of rare dragons. You know dragons migrate, right? So different types of dragons one through our islands at different times of the year. Did you know that Night Furies aren't the only dragon in their direct line? They have a cousin species called Daybreakers. They look about the same except they mimic sky during the day time instead of night time, like the Night Fury. Daybreakers come in whites and silvers instead of blacks and grays. They still shoot lightning, I think, but I don't know much else about th-"
"Do you always talk so much?" I interrupted. Like I cared about a Daybreaker or whatever she was going on about.
"I was just saying, if would be even cooler to get a Daybreaker than it would be a Night Fury. My mom's told me stories of the Daybreakers that she's heard from her travels. That's one of the reasons she came to Rok originally. She was tracking some. Wouldn't it be nuts if you caught one?" she laughed, like it was hysterical- the thought of me catching a rare dragon.
"Yeah, well, I'm planning on getting a dragon that no one in Rok has, so it wouldn't be too nuts. Alright, now will you shut up?" I asked. Twelve years-old might have been the age of a "man" in Rok, but it didn't necessarily mean I was mature. Sula just blinked and me and shrugged.
"I'll be quieter after lunch. I'm hungry, can we stop?" she asked, blinking at me with large eyes. I scowled at her for a moment, but there was just something about girls and those faces they made that I couldn't say no to. I groaned.
"Fine, whatever. I still don't see why you're following me. We're supposed to be doing these hunts alone," I said despite the fact that I was starting to grab sticks and twigs to start a small campfire for lunch.
Lunch came and went and I had to admit that I felt a lot less hostile towards Sula with a full stomach. By mid-afternoon, we could smell the salt of the ocean as we neared the rocky shoreline of the northeastern edge of our island. I immediately began to lay traps. I wasn't going to waste anymore time. I only had seven days to catch myself a rare dragon. Sula just laughed at me and continued slacking off.
That's pretty much how it went for the next four days. I had managed to catch a few dragons in that time, but I wasn't satisfied with any of them, so I released them and reset my traps. Sula complained about being bored, but she really wasn't making any effort to catch a dragon. It didn't make sense to me why she was slacking off. If she didn't return by the end of the seventh day with her own dragon, she wouldn't be allowed to ride one ever again. It was like a rite of passage into adulthood and she wasn't taking it at all seriously. It was dusk that fourth night that changed everything, though.
"Sula, are you going to set a single trap?" I asked as we sat around my fire. It was getting cool outside and the sky was turning a deep orange.
"Eh, it doesn't really matter to me, to be honest. I'd rather not use dragons as war machines. If I don't catch one, I don't care about not being allowed to enslave them for the rest of my life," she said, once again with sarcasm pulsing through her tone.
"Then why did you try so hard during training?" I asked her. At that, she just looked at me for a long moment.
"I AM half Viking, too, you know? If I didn't try hard, my dad would have been really hard on me, so I figured once I graduated, I'd just fail to capture a dragon. I could be a blacksmith or something, I don't really care. What about you? Why did YOU try so hard? Your heart obviously isn't in any of this," she said nonchalantly.
"W-what do you mean? Of course my heart is in it!" I scoffed. "This is what I was meant to do! I don't know what you talking about," I continued to lie. She just gave me a droll stare.
"C'mon, Hawk, you don't have to lie to me, you know. I can tell, you're way too smart for this big brutal Viking thing," she rolled her eyes as she dug into her own bag for an apple. It was just as she sank her teeth into it that a blinding light filled the sky. A few seconds later and the ground not too far off exploded as if something massive had fallen from the heavens. Then the unmistakable cry of a dragon met our ears.
Sula and I both rose to our feet and dashed to the crash site. We skid to a stop as the dust cleared, and what met out eyes made both of our jaws drop. There, wrestling around in the large crater, was two dragons. One was black, the other was silver. It was a Night Fury and-
"A Daybreaker!" Sula gasped. I looked from her down to the dragons that were roaring and snapping at each other. If there was one thing I learned in dragon training, it was not to get in between two dragons having it out amongst themselves. I looked from the black dragon to the silver one. Then, the stubborn look returned to my face. I nudged Sula and pointed down at the more rarer of the two dragons.
"Dibs," I said simply. Finally, I managed to make the girl scowl at me. I grinned.
Author's Note
Thanks for reading my first chapter of my How To Train Your Dragon fic! It's been a while since I've written anything for a male character, so please forgive me if the perception seems a little off! I really like Hawk's character so far. Here's a ref pic for him: .com/albums/r198/Jordan_Nichol_the_ . Anyways, I really hoped you enjoyed it. Reviews are loved 3 (Ps: Sorry if there are typos or grammatical errors! It happens...)