Hey y'all! Ever seen The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010) with Jay Baruchel as David Stutler?
It's really a miracle [this story got updated] tonight. This [profile] might not matter, but thestory does.
My computer has been asking for an update for the past like, eight weeks, but I always refused it until last night... and once Max (my Mac... yeah, I'm not super imaginative when it comes to names) restarted, the wifi refused to work. It connected. I had the password right. It just didn't work. I wouldn't even be on here if I hadn't the inspiration from God to reboot the modem.
But, it's up now!
Many many thanks to those lovelies who reviewed and/or followed and/or favorited! You're all my favorite people ever.
DISCLAIMED.
CHAPTER FOUR
It wasn't until the sun had set that I got back to the village—after leaving the dragon, I'd spent the rest of the day running, trying to sort out my thoughts and failing pretty badly.
I didn't come out of my thinking until it started raining—then I glanced up at the sky, saw what time it was, and ran back to Berk. The trainees were supposed to have dinner together with Gobber in the Great Hall, in an effort to solidify friendships and let the passing of the axe of the old to the new generations go smoothly.
(The passing of the axe part made it a good idea; the 'friendships' part is to blame for the holes in the walls of the Hall that didn't already have my name on them.)
The great fires were already lit when I arrived, and I was soaked to the bone, freezing without my vest. My shoes were disgusting to put on wet, but, used to this, I grit my teeth and shoved both my feet into the soggy boots.
When I got inside, I saw the others had started without me. Of course, why would they wait for Hiccup?
"Where did Astrid go wrong in the Ring today?" I caught Gobber asking the group.
Nowhere, as usual, in my opinion. She was going to kill that dragon at the end of training, no question about it. Astrid, though, was a little harsher on herself. "I mistimed my somersault dive. It was sloppy, it threw off my reverse tumble."
"Yeah, we noticed," Ruffnut said maliciously.
"No, no!" Snotlout cut in, and to my ears, he sounded sleazy and desperate—typical Snotlout, then. (Yes, I did very much adore my cousin.) "You looked great, that was so Astrid."
"She's right!" Gobber claimed. "Ye have to be tough on yerselves."
I came up to the table they were sharing and picked up a plate with a leg of chicken and a cup of water. Snotlout turned and put his hand on the empty seat on the bench—no welcome there. Not that I was expecting one.
"Where did Hiccup go wrong?"
Oh gods Gobber must hate me. Why else would he do this?
The others took the bait like starved fish. "Uh, he showed up?" Ruffnut suggested.
"He didn't get eaten!" Tuffnut added.
"He's never where he should be," Astrid pointed out. That one, in that voice—never heard saying a word against me, even now this was probably her idea of helping—made me wince.
"Thank you, Astrid."
Ignoring them all, I walked past the trainee table and sat at an empty one beside it. Gobber walked between the tables, including me as he always tried. "You need to live an' breathe this stuff. Th' Dragon Manual!"
He swept some plates and cups off the table and tossed the book into their place. "Everything we know about every dragon we know of." I looked up—that sounded interesting. Maybe there was something in there about Night Furies?
Thunder rumbled outside and made the lanterns and torches shake. I wondered if good ol' Grandpa was finally getting fed up with Ruffnut and Tuffnut's constant threats to eviscerate his only descendant.
Gobber glanced to me and I shrugged helplessly. "No attacks tonight," he said, turning to leave. "Study up."
The smith wasn't even all the way out the door before Tuffnut protested. "Wait—you mean read?"
"While we're still alive?" Ruffnut added incredulously.
(I wasn't too surprised that they didn't want to do it; it went against everything they stood for, and if they knew how to read, I'm a three-legged Zippleback.)
Snotlout, though I was certain of his literacy (it wasn't much, but he was second-in-line for the chieftaincy—reports had to be read somehow), spoke up too, slamming his hand against the table. "Why read words when you can just go kill the stuff the words tell you stuff about?"
(The only heirs to Berk are scrawny old me and this guy. You can see why everyone, including my dad, is concerned.)
"Oh!" Fishlegs said eagerly, earning strange looks from the entire group. "I've read it like, seven times! There's this water dragon that sprays boiling water at your face! And there's this other one…!"
"Yeah! That sounds great," Tuffnut cut in, making a closing motion with his hands. "There was a chance I was going to read that…"
"But, now…" his twin finished.
Snotlout stood, pushing his bench back. "You guys read, I'll go kill stuff." Gods help any poor animal stupid enough to be out in this rain then—and gods help them for not realizing everything would be taking cover in a thunderstorm like this. Ruffnut and Tuffnut followed him quickly, alongside Fishlegs, who was still reciting different dragon species. Had I not wanted to risk a beat down courtesy of his friends, and had there not been a better source right in front of me, I would've asked him about Night Furies.
I got up and walked over to the table—only Astrid was left. "So, I guess we'll… share?" I offered.
Astrid used a finger to push the book towards me. "Read it," she said.
"O-oh. All mine then. Wow." And because I was, for some reason, feeling bold: "Unless you, uh—wanna go over it together?"
Her eyebrow rose like a thin drawbridge. "We're not friends."
My face turned bright red, I could feel it. "Uh—of course not! No, not at all, why would we be friends, you know? In fact, we, we are like, anti-friends!"
The eyebrow cranked higher as I died inside. She sighed, shook her head, and left me to my humiliation.
Though I knew that it wouldn't look too odd—for a dragon-killing trainee to be reading the Manual, or for the just weird, un-physical son of the Chief to be reading, of all the terrible hobbies—I waited until the Great Hall was empty until going to the book. I'm not sure why; I could've wanted to put it off for some reason, dreading the information I'd get, or maybe I didn't want to be seen looking up Night Furies so soon after "downing" one.
I spent the few hours between dinner and the compete abandonment of the Hall sitting away from the main fire and inspecting the bruises and little wounds training had left me this morning. Over the years, I'd scraped together a good collection of remedies from one of the brusque and ironically violent village Healers, mixed with what I could get out of Grandmother Gothi's wordlessness. But the ingredients and everything were all back at the house and no good to me unless I went back home—but if I left the Manual alone, I had a feeling it would walk off with a pair of legs named after Fish.
It hadn't been as bad as I expected; especially considering, if I'd been anyone else, I'd've been dead from that last Gronkle blast to the face. Only most of my back felt bruised, and the hair was burnt off my forearms—both things I was very accustomed to as, A, a blacksmith apprentice, and B, a blacksmith apprentice to Gobber.
When the Hall was empty, I stood up and walked to the central firepit, the flames growing higher and hotter as I got closer. A pair of candles on plates I'd gotten from one of the back tables lit a few inches from the actual fire, and it was hard work for me to actually put the entire pit out.
Once it was, my candles were the only light in the entire hall, bright and warm with my proximity. I carried it back to the trainee table and sat down in front of the book.
It was red leather—second most difficult to produce after white leather, showing how important it was to the tribe—and embossed with a circular, spiraled dragon curled up on the front. The book was longer than my forearm and not easy to open.
The first page had dragon classifications—Stoker, Strike, Fear, Boulder, Sharp, Tidal, Mystery classes. Not a table of contents; organization wasn't a Viking's strongpoint. We were more likely to just toss every newly discovered dragon in at the back. I turned to the next page.
"Thunderdrum," I read out loud. The pictures with its mouth closed had it squat and wide, with an overlapping lower jaw whose long fangs stuck out almost to the eye. When its mouth, which seemed to take up most of the front part of its body, was open, it would suddenly become twice as wide as it had been before, shaped like a cylinder, and you could see the multiple rings of teeth. "This reclusive dragon inhabits sea caves and dark tide pools. When startled, the Thunderdrum produces a concussive sound that can kill a man at close range."
(I figured that the picture was an exaggeration. The victim's head wouldn't really be blown off its body… or at least, I sincerely prayed so.)
"Extremely dangerous, kill on sight," was the last thing the two pages on the species said. If it did blow people's heads off, I could understand why.
I flipped a few pages and stopped randomly—"Timberjack." This guy had a long neck and head, like a Nightmare's, but that's where the similarities ended. Its body was more worm-shaped, and its wings were huge and had hooks on the tips. "This gigantic creature has razor-sharp wings that can slice through full-grown trees. Extremely dangerous, kill on sight."
(I had to wonder why they threatened Vikings, if they were just happy cutting a bunch of trees down.)
"Scauldron," was the next random pick. It had a super long, thin neck that ended, on one side, in a thin head and a huge baggy pouch under it. On the other, there was an almost grotesquely bloated body. The tail fin was nothing like the Night Fury's, more a fan or a fish's fin—the top said it was a Tidal class. "Sprays scaulding water at its victim. Extremely dangerous, kill on sight."
(That one was a bit more understandable; Vikings are sea-faring folk, and running into sea dragons was an occupational hazard. A lot of ships searching for the Nest had come limping back, never even having reached Helheim's Gate because of things like this.)
"Changewing—" a strangely shaped head with vines growing off of its neck—"Even newly hatched dragons can spray acid. Extremely dangerous, kill on sight."
There was the Gronkle from this morning, and the Zippleback; the Skrill and the Bone Knapper; Deadly Nadder and the Nightmare; Terrible Terrors and the Flightmare.
Gods, there were so many, and they all had different ways of killing people—burning, eating, boiling, burying, choking, ripping, driving them mad, turning them inside out—good Oðin let me never meet that thing, and it was ugly too.
Across the entire book, from Tidal to Stoker class, there was only one thing kept the same: the images of Vikings taking axes and swords and spears and everything on hand to the dragons, blood spurting in colorless waves across the pages.
Extremely dangerous, kill on sight. Extremely dangerous, kill on sight. Extremely dangerous, kill on sight. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS KILL ON SIGHT.
A BOOM of thunder scared me out of my reading, and I glanced back at the half-open Hall doors in time to see the lightning fade.
I swallowed, still feeling my stomach twist with the images of dragon and Vikingly gore. What could that mean?
When I turned back to the book, I saw that jumping at the sound had thrown me onto the last page—one almost completely empty.
"Night Fury," I read, my voice soft and a little awed. There was so much blank space. "Speed, unknown. Size, unknown. The unholy offspring of lightning and death itself. Never engage this dragon. Your only chance: hide and pray it does not find you."
There was… nothing here. We didn't know anything about it, could only hide from it. And because of that, it came off as the most terrifying creature in Midgard, and I remembered thinking the same of it not too long ago.
But none of that matched the dragon I'd seen this afternoon after training. It was down, but the look it gave me hours ago hadn't been vicious, or ferocious, or wild, or bringing down the wrath of the gods of lightning and death—it had been curious, maybe somewhat annoyed. Definitely annoyed, after I hit it with my vest.
(After fifteen years of it coming from every direction, I was able to read annoyance off any face, no matter the species and no matter how much they tried to hide it. It's a gift.)
The Manual obviously knew nothing about the thing—the enormous spread of blank said as much as bolded letters did—but what it lacked was so much worse than the fact that it did lack.
The dragon trapped in the cove had seemed… aware. Not like the aggressive, raiding dragons were. I remembered how long it had taken me to realize it had only gone after the catapults, never going after food; now knowing about it's relatively small size and vulnerable, large-target wings, it made a lot of sense for it to stay away from the main fight, but going after the catapults especially?
That was strategy. That was a thought process, protecting its companions and not making itself a target, maybe so that it could keep protecting them. That was intelligence. The Manual had nothing about that. Nobody had anything about that.
(I had to wonder how much of that intelligence was in other dragons; the raids said not much.)
I fished my notebook out of my jacket and flipped it open to my drawing of the Night Fury, dropping it on the Manual. None of the other dragons I'd flipped through had matched; this was the Night Fury, all right.
I pulled out my charcoal and put it onto the empty Manual page, transferring my sketch of the dragon onto the space before moving down to add notes.
This dragon's wingspan has to be almost 50 feet, I wrote, tongue between my teeth and trying to bring up every memory of the dragon I had. Small and sleek, its pitch-black color lets it blend smoothly in with the night sky—hence the name. The scales also seem to be vulnerable to sunlight, which is probably why no one has seen the thing during the day before.
It only goes after catapults during raids. I licked my lips, thoughtful. Intelligent. Self-aware and forward-thinking—wingspan ignored, it's one of the smallest dragons out there so it would be easy to take down, and it knows that, so it relies on stealth and carefully chosen, strategic targets.
Needs both tailfins to fly.
The next morning, for dragon training, Gobber had set up the wall constructs he usually kept housed under a small roof behind the forge—saved especially for two purposes: a, dragon training, and b, emergency.
("Emergency" usually meant "Hiccup blew something up and we need something to patch up the hole until we can get to fixing it.")
I actually wasn't even aware of their primary purpose, so when I walked into the Ring with my axe and shield and saw them standing everywhere, my first and automatic reaction was to wave my arms and say, "But it wasn't even me this time!"
The other trainees snickered or glared at me, but when Gobber's laughs echoed through the Ring, it came from above. We all turned our heads upwards and saw him leaning against the bars of the cage—before the chain roof began, and immediately above the chiseled-out stone walls, there were horizontal iron bars running around the place to keep spectators safe. They were spread far apart, so people had been known to get wounded just from watching a Kill, and kids were banned from the Ring at all after one had fallen in and nearly gotten swallowed.
I gulped—Gobber was staying out of this one? That wasn't good.
"Uh… is that bad?"
When no one answered Fishlegs, I realized he was talking to me. The others were looking at him oddly, but I met his gaze and sighed. "If he's not down here with us," I said, weary already, "then whatever today's lesson is? It's only half for our education. The other half is for his… own entertainment. He used to sit back and watch as I struggled to make nails when I was a kid."
Fishlegs seemed to take my warning to heart and looked worried, but Snotlout snorted. "Wow, you were just as Useless as a kid as you are now! How hard could nails be?"
"Not as hard as your head," I muttered, insulted, and thank Oðin I wasn't heard.
"You're Gobber's apprentice," Astrid seemed to suddenly realize. I wasn't too surprised that she didn't know before now—as conspicuous as my… explosive escapades could be, something as scrawny as I am among a tribe full of such enormous people, was bound to get overlooked. "You know how he tea—"
"Good morning!" Apparently Gobber was ready to get his amusement for the day. "Aaan'… good nigh'!"
He pulled a lever next to him, and our heads snapped to the maze of walls as something clanged on the other side. A quick rattling and heavy stepping suddenly filled our ears, and we almost subconsciously huddled closer.
I wasn't the only one to pale this time—Fishlegs was white too. The others, predictably, looked excited.
"'Oo wants to guess which dragon I just released?"
Doubtful that it was the Gronkle—Gobber wouldn't want to repeat yesterday's close call to my secret. I frowned, trying to guess with the sound, and Fishlegs spoke up. "It's the Nadder!" he squeaked.
"Good!" The rattling and footsteps stopped, then started again—faster and getting louder! "Ye migh' want ta run now that it's 'eard where ya are!"
We scattered, screaming. I could hear Gobber laughing above us.
I cut through part of the maze—losing my sense of direction almost immediately—and stopped when I saw that I was underneath Gobber. Well, there might not be a better time…
"Hey Gobber?" I asked, stopping. "I noticed that there was nothing in the book about Night Furies. Is there another book, maybe a Night Fury pamphlet?"
It had been bugging me all day; that couldn't be all that anyone really knew about the thing! There was nothing there!
He didn't even answer before a blast of impossibly hot fire burned past my left arm, melting the head of my axe away into nothing, and leaving an enormous hole in the wall. The thing was right in front of me—blue and birdlike and decorated with yellow spines. I didn't care about anything right now, though, except the fact that its fire burned hotter than any other.
(Twice as hot with me around. They really should've thought through having me in dragon training.)
I yelped and ran, nearly tripping in both directions before picking one and taking it. "Focus, Hiccup!" Gobber shouted as I tried to decide if it was worth my life to run at full speed and reveal my lineage. (I decided it wasn't worth my shoes.) "Ye're no' even tryin'!"
That's kind of the point, I thought as I struggled to resist the urge to flat out sprint with a two-ton raptor after me.
There was a heavy thump somewhere high above me, and I look up in time to see a smooth, rustic blue jaw open to release a squawking caw—it had jumped on top of the wall!
I held in a yelp—obviously quiet was better with this dragon, if it could hear me move—and dove around another turn. "Today," Gobber called, "is all about ATTACK! Nadders are quick, ligh' on their feet—yer job is to be quicker, an' lighter."
My eyes turned to the sky and I sighed. This would've been my day if my Gifts weren't a secret.
There were thumps somewhere to my left—didn't the Manual say something about throwing spines? Nervous, I turned to my right, and heard Fishlegs yell out—I was almost worried for a moment before I heard the big boy say, "I'm really beginning to question your teaching methods!"
(I had to give him credit; it took him two days to get to that point. At the forge, it had taken me four.)
Gobber, just as he'd been with me, seemed not to care much. "Look fer it's blind spot." I couldn't see him, being on the other side of the Ring, but he sounded bored—guess us running for our lives wasn't entertaining enough for him after all. "Ev'ry dragon 'as one. Find it, 'ide in it, an' strike!"
Strike—yeah, that wasn't something I'd be doing with my axe melted into the wall. Looks like I was aiming for another nice fail for this lesson. I heard Ruffnut and Tuffnut run into the Nadder and turned away from the area, still thinking.
Maybe I'd still be able to ask Gobber about the Fury, scrape some use out of the day…
"Blind spot yes. Deaf spot, mmm, not so much." I hit his side of the Ring—alongside Astrid and Snotlout—as he was chuckling at the twins' predicament. I slid to a stop in front of him.
Even if there wasn't any extra information, maybe he could help with my problem. "So—how would one sneak up on a Night Fury?" I asked.
Gobber scrubbed at his face. "No one's ever found one and lived to tell the tale NOW GET IN THERE."
Like I didn't know that already. "Well okay, but hypothetically—"
"Hiccup!"
The quiet, urgent hiss snapped my attention away—Astrid and Snotlout were crouched by one of the walls. She was waving, for me to get down and be quiet; my cousin was just glaring at me.
It must've been close. I went over to the wall and crouched low. Astrid glanced around the edge of the wall before ducking back.
Her hands flew quickly, pointing to us and doing some weird motion in the air. Before I could even make a confused "Huh?", she nodded like she'd been understood perfectly, turned, and silently rolled over her shield to the other side of the gap I assumed had the Nadder inside of it.
I glanced at Snotlout. "Er…What was that?" I hissed, hoping he'd understood.
"Hot," he said, before following her exactly.
Well, at least what he did gave me something of a hint, even if he was too thick-headed to manage anything verbal. I ducked forward, landing heavily on my shield first like the others had—the problem was, the others had maybe thirty pounds of muscle on me, so while they lifted their shields and finished their rolls, I got yanked back and flat onto my back.
Uuak?
My head snapped to the side. $hit it was right there!
It took my full speed to get away from the snapping teeth, and I zoomed around a corner, slowing almost immediately to keep from getting seen moving that fast. Loki must've been smiling on me for once, because no one was in the corridor I stopped in.
"HICCUP!"
I winced. Gobber always saw anyway. At least I was away from the thing—it was back up on the walls, but had lost track of me.
It was a short trip back to Gobber's side, even moving slowly and quietly. I could hear the Nadder shifting around in the background. When I made it to the Ring wall, Gobber was glaring down at me.
Wincing again, I started with, "Sorry." And continued with, "They probably… they probably take the day off? Y-you know, like a cat." I was nearly shoved to the side as the twins ran by, but I ignored them—probably chasing one another for some kind of imagined slight again. "Has anyone ever seen one napping?"
"HICCUP!" Gobber yelled.
"What, I didn't even—"
"HIC-CUUUUP!"
I turned at the name from behind me, and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of falling walls and falling dragon and falling Astrid with a very big axe!
The impact was hard and sudden, and had her on top of me—not entirely my idea of a bad situation… in every other scenario except this one. Angry dragon and her axe in my shield? Kinda killing the mood.
"Oooh, love on the battlefield!" Tuffnut apparently didn't agree.
"She could do better," Ruffnut pointed out, and ouch.
Astrid, after some forceful pulling, got untangled. When she looked up, I saw fear enter her eyes.
Suddenly, she was yanking at the handle of the axe stuck in my shield, nearly pulling my arm off! "Hey—ow—here, let me—"
She ignored me, stepped on my face, and tore the shield off. I curled into my normal position—arms and legs protected by sturdier chest and back—and only looked up when the sound of splintering wood and warbling, injured dragon met my ears.
"Well done Astrid," Gobber commented, sounding satisfied of his entertainment. His tone was decidedly harsher when he said my name. "Hiccup—"
I uncurled and glanced at him. "Yeah, yeah, I know," I muttered, sighing heavily. "Nails."
Astrid had turned around and was glaring at me. "Is this some kind of a joke to you?" she demanded.
I flinched at the all-too common words from a very uncommon source and felt the blood leave my face. Thankfully, she didn't continue that line of thought. "Our parents' war is about to become ours." She thrust the axe into my face. "Figure out which side you're on."
With that, the only person my age in the village who'd never said a word against me turned and marched out of the destroyed arena, the rest of the group following her, and leaving me on the floor in the ruins.
Hope you liked it! See you tomorrow!
PEACE,
~Tibki