Hello everyone. So, new story. I have a couple of chapters written so far and a lot of ideas for where this will go. Those of you waiting for an update for Hero of the Day, I can only apologise! XD I'm struggling with inspiration for it at the moment, but maybe writing this will kick me back into gear a bit, we'll see. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this - chapter 2 will be up tomorrow at the latest.

A Turning Blade

Chapter 1

"Hiccup! Get me down from here!"

"You have to give me a chance to explain."

"I am not listening to anything you have to say!"

"Well frankly, Astrid, looking at where you are right now, I don't think you have much choice."

Astrid took a moment to consider this. Hanging as she was from a branch of a tree a good fifty feet in the air, and looking straight into the eyes of a jet-black dragon with a boy who she'd spent her whole life not noticing atop its back, both of them perched on the self same tree as her, she realised that, begrudgingly, it was probably best to concede the point.

It didn't mean she had to be happy about it, though.

"Fine. Though I can't see how you can explain this disaster away like you do every other one you cause, Hiccup" she spat out, shifting as she tried to get a firmer grip on the branch, her legs swinging pendulously and precariously beneath her.

His expression didn't shift one inch as he wordlessly, almost disinterestedly, extended a hand towards her. For a short moment she made no move to respond, before she remembered that, indeed, she didn't have much of a choice, and she made to grasp the proffered hand as calmly as she could manage. It wouldn't do to show she was scared.

And of course, her scream as Hiccup gripped her wrist, rather than her hand, and the dragon launched itself from the tree and dove headlong towards the ground, had nothing to do with fear whatsoever. Or so she tried to convince herself, at any rate.

The landing was soft enough, though, and after her mind had fully caught up with events, she found herself sprawled out on her back, looking up at the forest canopy. It was dusk, and gold and green meshed together above her, the leaves swaying gently, rustling as they did, and the peacefulness of the scene utterly belied her own state of mind.

Raising herself to a sitting position, she saw Hiccup stand in the stirrups and swing one leg over the dragon's back, unclipping some kind of elastic cord - joined to what she supposed must have been his flying vest - from the saddle he'd been sat in as he did so. His movements seemed practiced, second nature even, as though this was something he had done a hundred times before, and perhaps for the first time in the whole absurd set of events, Astrid began to fully understand just how vast a departure this entire scenario was from anything that could be considered normal or acceptable, or even possible.

Hiccup was sitting on a dragon and it wasn't attempting to kill him - or indeed her, for the moment at least. Moreover, this dragon and him had flown, together, in that position - she'd seen it with her own eyes. How had he done it - why had he done it?

"The first thing I'm going to say is that I don't really care if you think I'm a traitor or not." Hiccup's words, spoken in an impenetrably even, dispassionate tone, even as he was still dismounting, facing away from her and concentrating mostly on his dragon - his dragon, for the sake of all the gods - shocked her out of her befuddled musings, and the line of her brow creased as she scowled at his back.

"There's no thinking to be done. You are a traitor."

"If I am, then it's of no real consequence. I don't particularly see why I should pledge my loyalty to you lot anyway, but that's not what I want to talk about."

You lot. Those words confused Astrid almost more than anything else so far had. Despite his reputation, despite his oddness and his propensity to cause trouble, surely in the end he was one of them?

Astrid decided to leave that question unasked though, as it dawned on her that it may not have been quite as sure as she thought. If he didn't want to be 'one of them', it spoke volumes about how different his and her respective views of the preceding decade - their childhoods - were. In the pit of her stomach, she felt the first slight twinge of sympathy, but she stamped on it quickly.

"What do you want to talk about?"

Hiccup sighed, and Astrid saw his shoulders drop, slightly but noticeably nonetheless. After a moment's pause, he turned away from his dragon to face her fully for the first time since they'd landed. There was a sadness, a weariness, in his eyes that she'd seldom seen before from anyone, and never from him. It made him seem far older than his eighteen years, and she had to force herself not to dwell too long on how he might have come to look so drained.

Another long moment passed before he spoke, and even now he refused to look straight at her. "I had been hoping to ask you if you could ever drop your prejudice and consider how things really are around here, but it seems I already have an answer to that question."

Astrid was instantaneously enraged. "My prejudice?! Hiccup, I've seen hundreds of my clansmen killed by these wretched creatures, how on Midgard am I being... prejudiced," she spat the word out, "if I think you're committing an act of high treason by riding one of them, for Odin's sake?!"

She heard Hiccup exhale forcefully, and he pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying as hard as he could to keep his temper in check. "And who," he ground out, eyes fixed on the forest floor, "struck the first blow in this war?"

Astrid, livid as she now was, had already opened her mouth to fire back a retort, before the full weight of his words hit her and she snapped it shut again. Truth be told, she didn't know who had started the conflict between the Hooligan tribe and the dragon population of the Norse archipelagoes. It had just been a part of her life since before she could remember, that dragons were the enemy, pests and vicious unthinking creatures that were to be destroyed on sight. The old stories of fighting and killing dragons, the sagas and the unwritten lore passed down by word-of-mouth, stretched back hundreds of years, but she'd never yet heard anyone relate the tale of how their war had actually begun. The concept of there having been a starting point at all had always been taken to be a distraction at best and an irrelevancy at worst, and certainly there had never seemed to be any sort of end in sight - Stoick's foolhardy and inevitably futile forays into the northern mists notwithstanding, it seemed to all concerned that humans and dragons were destined to hate, and fight, each other for time immemorial, and there was nothing to be done about it.

"How is that important?" she shot back after the briefest of pauses.

"Well, what if I told you that three hundred years ago, a certain Ragnvald Haddock encountered a new island, one nobody'd ever mapped before then, while out at sea on a trade mission? This island was teeming with nesting dragons and newly-hatched young, and the first thing he did on finding this out was jump ashore with the rest of his men, and he started killing every single dragon, including the young, that he could find. He even shattered the eggs."

Astrid's eyes widened. She opened her mouth to speak again, but Hiccup cut her off before any sound could pass her lips, his voice rising as he spoke. "This was before any dragon had ever killed any human, but within a month, dragons were raiding Berk almost every night and it's carried on like that ever since."

It felt like someone had punched her in the gut. She'd never heard anything of this before now and, though she wouldn't have admitted it to anyone at that point, it shook her. Her voice, when she eventually found it again, was smaller than she ever remembered it being.

"How... how do you know all this?"

Hiccup gave a derisive snort. Behind him, the dragon nudged its snout gently against the boy's hand. "I went and looked for it. A novel concept, I know." His voice was dripping with scorn.

"I don't think anyone had been in there for years, but I broke into the archive and found an old poem that recounts the story. It was written by Ragnvald's brother, who was there as well and who had, I'm sure, far more of a conscience than he did. I'm not surprised that nobody knows about it if I'm honest, it's the sort of thing my father would probably want to keep hidden."

"Why would he -"

"Because it shows how one of my ancestors started this whole damn war", he cut her off, and she could hear - and see - his anger growing with every word. "He wasn't even chief then. He dressed his story up, claimed he'd been attacked by hundreds of vicious beasts and had come away unscathed, and he covered himself in false glory and usurped the throne about a year afterwards. Nobody ever realised that what he'd really done was doom the tribe to hundreds of years of warfare because he couldn't control his bloodlust. Of course my father wouldn't want anyone to know about that."

Now she really was speechless. All she could do was wait and see if Hiccup would say anything further, but he'd already said enough to seemingly root her to the spot.

"We started this, Astrid, not them", he growled, his eyes peering up at her from beneath a low, angry brow, his face twisted into a snarl that was utterly alien on him. "And I'm standing here now, in front of you, and you're looking at the only way we possibly have of ending it. If you don't want to listen, I'll leave right now and you'll never see me again. But if you have any sense in your head, you'll hear me out."

For the first time, among those trees and their long, foreboding shadows, she really looked at him, and what she saw unnerved her. Events would in time make things crystal clear, but for now, her mind was a whirlwind of conflicting thoughts and loyalties, and maybe it was forgivable, with hindsight, that the only thing she could think to do at that point was to pick herself up off the forest floor, and run.

So, there you go. Hope you enjoyed, please read and review, and as I say, I have big plans for this story.