When faced with catastrophe, defeat or woe, men and women across all time have found a way to pick themselves up carry on. "Life goes on," the bards say, as does every widow and peasant and king. Life goes on, tick-tocks the unstoppable pendulum of time. Whittled away by war and halved by plague, life goes on and on and on. This sentiment is either hopeful or depressing depending on which end of the plague you are currently standing, but the unchanging nature of its absoluteness has given humankind comfort in times of strife for as long as strife has existed.
But some people have no need of such comfort. In eras of peace, a people's ability to even understand the word 'strife' is watered down by errant thoughts of cozy fires, beachside strolls and foaming mead had with good friends. The ancient chant of life's unstoppable march dies in their heads, replaced by other thoughts, none so concrete or desperate as those forgotten. This is not entirely their fault. However, when strife inevitably revisits them and evaporates the water from their diluted memories, there is no telling what it will uncover there.
So it was on the isle of Berk.
As far as modern civilizations go, Berk was modern by minimal standards and only civilized by a split decision made some years ago. Regardless, Berkians were extremely proud of their small spit of land, woven together by bridges and held up by barnacle-encrusted pylons. In the minds of the inferior outsiders who had somehow inherited the majority of the earth's landscape, Berk was a soggy backwater clumped in with a confederacy of islands known as the Barric Archipelago. But within the rivalry-based clique of the Archipelago itself, Berkians fiercely differentiated themselves from their smaller neighbors by measure of achievement. For instance, any Berkian worth their salt could have told you that Berk was home to the largest library in the region, and had the highest rate of missing teeth per capita. (A survey of the island would find that these two bragging points were mentioned equally as often, but never together.) In fact, before the Archipelago had earned its seat on the United Nations Secretary Council (in the corner, on the back row with an invisible dunce hat attached by silent vote) Berk had been he seat of power in the Archipelago. The other islands happily forgot about this. Berk talked loudly about it whenever it was convenient. Also when it wasn't. Sometimes both consecutively.
But even with all its bickersome neighbors and nonexistence on the global stage, Berk was an essentially happy, peaceful place. The fishermen loved to fish and the bakers loved to bake; even the younger generation who longed for the great wide world smiled on the weekends, truly, deeply satisfied with their freedom to knock out each others' teeth and roast marshmallows on the beach afterward. There was a college, and a doctor, the library (of course) and an adorable market on town square. There were big homes and small homes and row homes and one home that existed entirely underground. Life on Berk embodied a balance point between interesting and stability that kept families here for generations.
Although there was a general knowledge that old blood hung around their cliffy home, most Berkians had no idea who belonged to the oldest families on Berk. The only reason you needed to worry about that, they would say, is if you'd accidentally fallen in love with your cousin – there were laws against that. Other than that, it didn't much matter. You were on Berk, you were missing two of your teeth, your hair had seasalt in it no matter how you scrubbed, and you could hold your liquor for a bet. That made you family enough.
There were some who remembered, of course. However, more often than not the only way to ensure that your family is remembered for over a millennium is to have done something so worthy of ridicule that it haunts your entire progeny until the end of days. As it so happened, there was only one person left on Berk suffering such a fate, but he spent most of his days holed away from the rest of society - not to hide, not really, but in accordance with a long family tradition of being the local eccentric.
But more on the eccentric later. More pressing to our tale is the fact that in the past few decades, a remarkable number of new families (read as: three new families) had moved to Berk, bringing fresh blood and outsider's ideas with them. There was bachelorette reporter, who'd fallen in love with Berk after doing a story on their one and only athlete sent to the 2010 Winter Olympics. There was the elderly British couple who, for some unknowable reason, decided it would be nice to retire to an island even soggier and rainier than their own.
Finally, there was the family of Jon Mikkelson, former Barric Ambassador to the country of France. Jon was actually a native of Berk. He'd grown up here, tall thin like a weed, gone to school in the stone schoolhouse that still stood behind town square, eaten the local fish and helped his mother make mead bread on Sundays. He'd also been the first Berkian in thirty years to attempt to learn French, and the first Berkian in a hundred years to succeed at doing so. He was appointed as Ambassador with no competition in the running, and the Barric cabinet really ought to have appreciated their luck while it lasted. He moved to Paris for work and stayed there for love, married a fine young chef and raised two children with her. But as grey hairs snuck in unnoticed among ash blond and his children grew older, Jon felt tired. He wanted to go home. So, after taking a year or so to put their things in order, Jon and his family moved to Berk. His wife was nervous, but happy for a change of scenery, and his son (who'd been to Berk enough to like it, barnacles and all) was excited. But his daughter Jora had never been to Berk, and didn't particularly like what she'd heard about its bash-em-smash-em culture. But her father assured her there would be endless beaches, caves, mountains, and forests to explore, so she made herself be excited.
She was excited, she told herself. She was. She was excited to have a bedroom with a rotted floorboard that looked fit to give in, she was excited to have the whole population stare at her as though she were a fish walking about on shore, she was excited to have a rusty bicycle instead of a metro station beside her house. She was excited.
Force of will never seemed to work for Jora, so she cried sometimes. Her mother comforted her, and told her it would get better. It did, slowly. Even though Jora looked like her mother and her dark hair and eyes put her in a minority among Berk's extremely Nordic demographic, there was a part of her that whispered Berk. Her father belonged here, so she belonged here. Or at least she told herself that when she needed confidence, forcing her chin up higher as she made her way across the tiny grocery mart and a roomful of curious looks. And if she belonged to this island, then the island belonged to her – and she was going to explore every inch of it. She took full advantage of school being out of session and spent her days in the woods, and the cliffs, and the maze-like town.
Of all the places she explored, the beaches were her favorite. She possessed foggy childhood memories of her grandparent's coastal home in the south of France, but felt the sand beneath her toes now as if it was entirely new. Northern air was sharper and saltier than that of French coasts, but she didn't mind. She found various knick-knacks on her beach walks, and kept them on her windowsill: a shell, a heart-shaped scrap of kelp, a bottlecap with a Norwegian beer brand name on it, and a piece of oddly shaped metal she could not identify, but wanted to investigate. She went treasure hunting on the beach almost every day to let the sound of crashing waves clear her head. She had never found anything worth particular mention.
But today, that would change. Though she did not know it, today, Jora's treasure hunt would change not only her life, but the life of Berk, of the Archipelago, and the entire history of the oldest family on Berk.
As Jora and her family slept, the ocean dredged up an ancient prize and juggled it in unusual currents to Berk's shores. The waves drove it into the warm, wet sand like a sword into a stone. The waves watched. They waited. The people of Berk had forgotten long ago, but the sea was awakening, pulsating with the Long Forgotten Memory. Life goes on.