Disclaimer: How to Train Your Dragon and all related characters and events belong to Cressida Cowell and DreamWorks Animation.
From How to Train Your Dragon.
"Hey, Toothless, I brought breakfast. I hope...I hope you're hungry."
It's the small one again. He smells different today: no more salty fear-tang or acrid snout-taste of sharp blades. He smells of running streams, earth and grass, fresh kill, egg-breaking. He smells of life, and something else: smoke, the scent of burning, not the fire in the bellies of the great ones, but tree-burning, much smoke and little heat. He smells of death too: the death of little bright ones. He smells of the food he carries.
There is more of it than before, and he does not ask me to share. He is not like the Great One, always commanding, always hungry. He does not smell of threat, but nevertheless there is threat, the stench of a fever-bearer hidden among the little bright ones. To eat it means sickness, pain, uncontrollable burning, liquid agony in the belly. The small one lifts it with his foreleg, touching its foul scales to throw it aside. The small one must not know how the great ones fear and loathe such things. He makes soothing noises, like an egg-bearer tending young ones, but there is no need, for the fever-bearer is gone.
The small one moves behind me, still cooing and warbling; perhaps he has learned this from his egg-bearer. I have not forgotten him, but he smells of comfort now: he is not dangerous, and the smell of the little bright ones is overwhelming. I must eat.
The small one touches my tail, but no matter. His scales are soft, smooth, and his forelegs are thin and weak; he may do what he will. But when the little bright ones are gone, something else touches my tail, something hard and cold where my fin used to be. Something feels different: the small one is still there, and something he has made. Part of it is soft, like the skin of flightless ones, and it too smells of tree-burning. It is heavy and unwieldy, and it doesn't answer my command, but it feels like the fin that is gone.
I spread my wings, because the Great One is calling, and there will not be another chance to return to the nest.
A/N: Details concerning the effects of the fever-bearer are taken from Defenders of Berk, Episode 16: The Eel Effect.
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