A Viking child wandered off one day. The disappearance sent the entire village into a frenzy, for they feared that the boy had been taken by a dragon. It was rare, but not unheard of. Every warrior available spent the morning and most of the afternoon searching for the missing child, spreading all across the island.
The boy had indeed been taken by a dragon, but it was not how they had feared. In the mid-afternoon, a group of seachers heard the laugh of a child and knew the missing boy was still alive. They found him in a shallow gully with walls too steep for the child to climb. With him was a young dragon, a green Nadder the size of a horse. From a distance, the Vikings watched the boy play and laugh with the dragon, clearly filled with the joy only a naive child who has no idea of the danger he is in can have.
Despite their knowledge of dragons' volatile nature, the Vikings rushed forward, determined to rescue the child and kill the dragon before any harm could befall the son of the Chief. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the dragon flew and escaped long before the warriors arrived, leaving the boy behind, unharmed. The searchers pulled the child out of the gully and he started to cry, grabbing the air after the dragon and reaching towards where it had been.
A warrior began to chastise him, repeating over and over that dragons are bad and he should not go near them until he was a warrior, big and strong and capable enough to kill one before it kills him. Once the search was called back and the village was calmed, his father scolded him, telling his son stories of people he knew who had been injured and killed by dragons. The boy had been too young to understand the danger the dragon had posed to him, but his father made sure that he understood that now.
The child was confused by his father's words, wondering why something so gentle and playful could possibly hurt him. But over time, he grew from babe to boy, learning with time and experience that dragons were vile creatures to be killed on sight, before they killed him. His first memory of dragons, the day spent playing in peace, was soon forgotten, replaced at a young age with images of bloody bandages and ships burning in the distance.
It resurfaced a few times over the years. Once, when he met a young woman who claimed that dragons were not what the Vikings thought they are, that they did not have to kill them. He pushed the memory down, years of fighting and experience reminding him that he had been extremely lucky to have survived his encounter with the Nadder. The memory came back again, once at the birth of his son and once at the death of his wife, and was forgotten again for many years afterwards.
Stoick the Vast remembered his day with the dragon one more time, when his own son defied his authority and dared to claim that dragons were not the monsters they were believed to be. It came back again and again, weaving itself into his thoughts while he wrestled a Night Fury to the ground and he disowned his son for voicing the very same thoughts Stoick had dismissed when he was a boy. The memory whispered in the back of his mind as he led his people into battle and moved mountains to end the war that had plagued his people for centuries.
It danced and mixed with younger memories, ones of we've killed thousands of them…they defend themselves…raid us because they have to! and one of a saddled dragon standing between approaching warriors and a defenseless boy to protect him. It shouted loudly in Stoick's head as he discovered there really was something else on their island, a dragon like nothing they had ever seen. And it finally broke through the walls Stoick had built over decades of fighting and killing and watching people he loved die in front of him as Hiccup lead the other trainees into battle while flying on dragon back, and when Stoick risked him life to save a dragon that only hours earlier had been prepared to kill him, he thought, not quite for the first time, that maybe Valka had been right, that Hiccup was right, that maybe his memory of that day was of the true nature of dragons, that maybe they were not the monsters everyone thought they were.