Author's Note:
The original form of this story is a couple years old and unfinished. I decided to pick it back up and rewrite it. I'm not sure how long it will be, but I'll be covering Valka's first year or so with the dragons, then bits and pieces of the following twenty years, her reunion with Hiccup, her return to Berk and then a little after the events of the third movie to see how she's doing. All reviews and follows are very much appreciated, and critique is also very welcome!
It was a saying among my people that a child didn't have to be taught to fear a dragon. Perhaps it was so among many children, but there was always a seed of doubt in my heart. I remembered the first time I saw a dragon. Before then, I had only heard them. As soon as dragons were spied on the horizon my parents would safeguard my brother and I beneath their bed before bursting out of our hut and into battle. We would hear yells and see flashes of orange and golden light coming through beneath the door. And we would hear the roars: deep, ground-shaking, seeming capable of melting your bones. My mind conjured images of dragons in my mind, further intensified by the crude sketches from our books, of monsters and teeth and blood. Winged beings of darkness, fire and death. I attended funerals, where a funeral boat would be ignited with the same fire that ended the life of the viking. I saw dragon heads mounted on spears, but my fear would keep me at a distance from that grisly sight. Yes, I thought I feared dragons.
My brother - many years my elder - came of age long before I and trained to fight dragons. Soon he joined the other warriors. Soon, I alone remained in the hut as he fought dragons alongside my parents, forced to tend the fire against the winter night and to clutch my axe in my shaking hands. Forced also to listen. Listen and hope that these monsters would spare the ones I loved - or that my family would kill them first. One of those nights I heard a noise outside the door, and a long shadow stretching through the crack beneath it. I tried to slow my breathing, but my heart surely pounded loud enough to hear. Too late, I remembered the mutton chops curing in the cellar. The whole house rattled as the beast knocked against it, and our door splintered before its strength. My eyes squeezed shut. I heard heavy steps and the sound of another's breath. My eyes opened, and I let out a strangled cry. There were yellow eyes towering over me and staring into mine, so that I could see my own reflection in their depths. In that dragon's eyes I saw myself: small, pale and scared. The beast had flaring, golden nostrils, a sharp horn set into its face, and cruel fangs. The yellow eyes flickered down to my axe. This was the moment in which I was to raise it, and gore the beast. Instead, my axe clattered down to the ground before I knew I had released it. The beast regarded me for a moment longer and then began to sniff out our cellar, knocking down furniture in the process. It was a Nadder, I realized, a Deadly Nadder. I studied every inch of it. Its lashing tail was covered in long barbs that could fly towards me and pierce my heart before I would even know what had happened. This was one of the most aggressive breeds of dragon, I remembered, more volatile than an injured Gronckle. It had purple scales that caught the firelight so that it twinkled as the creature moved. Its whole body rippled and bobbed as it took each step, a motion that would perhaps be graceful if it wasn't crashing into everything. There was a sudden yell outside - a battlecry - and the Nadder whirled around. Four long spines buried themselves in the wood over our doorframe and I gasped. I looked back at the Nadder, which had once more set its sights on me. I noticed a long scar marring the scales along the side of its neck. An axe wound, no doubt. The scar looked wrong - utterly foreign on such a creature. I couldn't call it beautiful, not while my heart was in my throat, but it had an air of highliness that was unbefitting to such blemishes. I wondered if it had killed the viking that caused that scar. I didn't want to know the answer. The Nadder found the ladder to our cellar and returned with one of the mutton haunches in its jaws.
"That's ours," I breathed, intending it as a cry of outrage. The Nadder only looked at me. And then there was another yell and everything became a blur.
"Get out of there, ye filthy beast!" Suddenly there was our chieftain in the hut, three familiar barbs already buried in his shield. The Nadder shrieked and then fell to the ground. The chieftains axe had appeared in the Nadder's chest. I looked away.
"Ye're safe now, lass," he boomed. I wept, and didn't know why.
I never entered dragon training, despite having gained a reputation as a scrappy young shieldmaiden that was as fierce as Yngvar against all but one of her people's enemies. I fought in battle after battle, hoping that some great act of courage would make up for years of cowardice against the beasts that plundered our village. I couldn't even dream of fighting a dragon after my encounter with that Nadder. Time wore away at my initial terror to reveal something peculiar: the beast did not kill me, and I did not want to kill it. In some way I had found it lovely, and worthy of life. Dangerous, yes, and wild, but more fey than monstrous. Even before I had made up my mind about dragons, my conscious could not let me fight. I could not shake the feeling that had arisen in my chest when that Nadder's blood was spilled and the life had left its yellow eyes. Perhaps the deaths of dragons had to be necessary, but they felt bitterly wrong. I could not group them with the other thieves and pillagers that plagued the archipelago. Pillagers did not show mercy. Dragons did.
I met my husband on the battlefield and married him soon after. There was much teasing about Stoick the Vast, future chief of Berk, marrying a skinny little warrior maiden. We both laughed heartily about it. There was also teasing about the man who popped the head of a dragon off its neck as a babe marrying the girl who could not lift a weapon against them. Neither of us laughed at that. Though our views differed, his love for me was emboldening and I tried to stop the bloodshed. I tried to help them see what I saw. They did not, could not. At their bitterest, they joked that I had been dropped on the head as a child, that I was irreparably different. I began to believe them. I wondered if I had always been that way, if I had been born that way and never realized it until that Nadder encounter. I first loved the people of Berk - and then wished I could love them - as the vitriol against me grew harsher but I found myself separate from them time and time again. Even Stoick tried to convince me to change. I doubt he had ever forgiven me for believing what I did, but he still loved me more fiercely than any differences we had and that for a time was enough. We tried to build a family. We had a son, Hiccup, and the mutterings against me grew worse. Hiccup took after me to a far greater extent than I had ever wanted. He was sickly and weak; I had heard the people say that he was not the son of a chief. Stoick loved him just as fiercely, though, and that too seemed enough. We would build a family and be happy. That was the promise we made to each other when it seemed like the whole world wished to seperate us. It never would, we promised each other. We never thought it could.
It took a single dragon raid for everything to change. I had left Hiccup in the cradle as I tried to save what dragons I could, sometimes succeeding. Then I saw it. A dragon, breaking into our home, going after Hiccup. I rushed after it with a sword in hand. In that moment, I came the closest I had ever done to killing a dragon. In that moment, it would've been more than possible for me. But what I saw confirmed everything I believed about dragons. There it was, calming the cries of my oft-fussy babe, bringing laughter out of my precious son as it played with him. It turned to me, and my sword clattered down to the ground. It was not even a beast. I saw the intelligence in its eyes, its gentleness in the way it approached me. It bore no scars from the attacks of humans, and acted as if my son and I were the first it had ever met. This was a dragon that had remained unmarred from the cruelty of humans. This was a dragon in the truest sense of the word, and I saw that its soul reflected my own. I could not even be angry for the accidental cut it had left on my babe as it whirled to meet me. All I felt was wonder. And then, just as before, everything changed. Stoick rushed in with a mighty roar, and threw his axe at the beast. Startled, it set fire to the ground around him.
"Valka, run!" Stoick yelled, heedless of my cries for him to stop. He rescued our babe from the flames as the dragon turned once more to me. It stepped forward as it studied me. I stumbled back. Still, I saw no malice in its gaze.
"No," I murmured. It had to go. It would die. And then with a great beating of its four wings, it rose and grabbed me in its claws. I screamed Stoick's name as it bore me into the sky. It bore me away from my home, away from my husband, away from our wailing son in Stoick's arms. My burning hut shrunk as we rose and became only a speck of flame and smoke. Soon even my hut disappeared and all of Berk became but a fire-wreathed pebble in the great, dark sea. I screamed and fought until I only had the strength to lay limp. I had let myself become prey. Worst of all, I had let this dragon burn down our home, endangering my husband and son. They nearly died, all because I couldn't kill a dragon. The chill air grew thin, the feet of my captor the only pulsing warmth in the great cold. We flew with a flock of raiding dragons where terrified sheep and yaks - the other prey - hung helplessly beside me. I pitied all of us. Then the dragon that held me deviated sharply away from the others until we were alone. The ocean froze beneath us as we continued on and my shivering became uncontrollable. The moon was dipping low when we finally approached a mass of green ice the size of a mountain. The dragon dove down and into a hole in the mountain. He glided through a series of caves, covered by a roof of ice, until he reached a larger one. In the strange green light I could see sleeping dragons of all colors and sizes. Was he bringing me to them as prey? He dropped me onto my feet, where I stood helplessly, and then landed next to me. Smoke fluttered up from the nostrils of the sleeping dragons and fangs jutted from their mouths. How would they kill me? My captor lowered himself to the ground and extended a great wing. He covered me with it and pulled my freezing body closer to him. I stumbled and fell on top of him, but he only wrapped all four of his wings around me and settled into a more comfortable position. He was warm, smelling of smoke and of fire, but not of the usual fire-smell of burnt wood or burnt flesh. It was a different smell altogether. I trembled, though I shivered no longer from cold. Would he eat me come morning? Would he fatten me up like we would a boar? Would he eat me at all? I wept for hours until I discovered myself exhausted. Exhaustion piled onto exhaustion until, at last, I was overcome by bitter sleep. My dreams were dark, but indecipherable in the morning. All I could recall were the cries of Stoick and the wails of Hiccup. Years after, those same cries would continue to haunt my dreams.