Author's Note: It's been a while. Suffice to say that real life has been kicking in, summer or not, and having put this story on hold anyway, I found it easiest to just leave it on hold for a while longer than intended. But now that the semester is long since over with, Usurpation of the Darkness is finished, and everything else taking up my time is either done with or under control (looking at you, struggle to find somewhere to live next semester), it's time to resume this story. We're only about halfway through; by my calculations there are nineteen chapters left, counting this one. So on with the story!

(Also, we'll be returning to the bi-monthly posting schedule for the time being.)

Five Skrill. A nest full of dragons Toothless couldn't trust. An ice field and an ocean between enemy territory and anywhere else. No automatic tailfin, no manual tailfin to be operated by Maour… No Maour, though he might very well be out there. No reliable help from outside, and any help from inside would have to come from one of four Night Furies, all of which were grounded and only one of which he felt even remotely comfortable trusting with his safety in any way, shape or form.

It was a daunting challenge made impossible to approach by pure scope. To escape wasn't enough, he needed to escape and find his way to somewhere he could survive until rescue came and he needed to do it while grounded and while being hunted down by Skrill…

Given a day to work it out, he would have proclaimed the situation impossible. Given two days, he would have thought about it and come up with nothing useful.

He had been in this terrible place for much longer, and he had the bare outlines of a plan, one that at least tried to address all the problems inherent in such a complicated breakout. The plan wasn't fully developed, it wasn't foolproof by any means, and it wasn't safe. It ended in uncertainty; the final obstacle, their inability to fly coupled with the inhospitable ocean, still stymied him.

But he didn't have to solve that last problem. Not if he was willing to take a risk. He knew Maour, Von, and Ruffnut were out there, somewhere. He knew they would be coming for him. They weren't expecting Grey, but they were expecting a crippled Night Fury to maybe be with him. He wasn't taking Einn with him, but they would prepare for Einn, and Grey could use whatever clever solution Maour came up with just as easily.

Thus, there were three stages to the escape. To escape the enclosure, to escape the nest, and to escape the ice field. Maour would have the last one covered, if Toothless could get himself and Grey to the edge of the ice field and somehow hide there until Maour next came by.

That was by no means a certainty, it would be hard and difficult, but not life-threatening. The one saving grace of all of this was that none of it would end in death, so far as Toothless knew. If the Skrill caught him or Grey, they would just dump them back here, where he currently sat in an icy cell that stank of old urine and salt, awaiting dawn.

Going by Einn's example, there wouldn't be that much retribution if they were caught, either. It was by no means a desirable outcome, but he was well aware that he was not being forced to either escape or die trying. That meant some small risks and improvisation could be tolerated. The potential reward was well worth it.

He shifted his paws, the numb coldness of the bottom of his pit seeping into every part of his body. It was worse than usual on this particular night, but he resisted the temptation to warm himself with his fire. According to Grey, this was probably the night they could put their plan into action, and he would need every bit of fire he had.

He felt fairly confident in Grey's ability to predict the movements of the Skrill; she knew what was at stake, however effectively she hid her comprehension behind quips and jokes. He hadn't been able to get a straight answer from her about how she felt about coming along on his escape attempt, but she had never raised the slightest objection to his plans.

And it was not as if she was guessing without risking anything herself, either; she was awake and refraining from using her fire, just like him. If she was wrong, they would both be sleep-deprived and miserable in the morning. If she was right…

Well, if she was right, they were still going to be sleep-deprived and miserable come daybreak. He was just hoping to add 'free' to that list.

A shadow passed above his pit, and he watched as Sadistic, the Skrill on guard tonight, moved toward one particular pit. Just as he himself had witnessed only a few days ago, and as Grey had predicted.

'Every time he is on guard alone,' Grey said quietly, watching through his eyes as Sadistic leaped down into Star's pit. 'He will be gone for most of the night.'

'Right.' Toothless felt vaguely bad about basing his escape plan on this particular occurrence, as it amounted to him using Star as a distraction for Sadistic. But it was going to happen anyway, so it was not as if he was the one doing it. And the sooner he could get away, the sooner he could bring overwhelming firepower back to free Star and the other and melt this whole place back into the sea.

Somehow. The King might get in the way of that. But planning their counterattack was for later, when he was reunited with Maour and ideally Einfari and her family, too. Not now, while he was watching the sole Skrill responsible for guarding the pits fly away.

Sadistic was gone, and whatever he was doing with Star, it was something he didn't openly tell the other Skrill about, so he hadn't asked one of them to cover for him. That meant that there was absolutely nobody around to see or stop Toothless from doing what he did next.

One paw went to the icy wall of the pit in front of him, at eye level. He dug his claws in, feeling the unique sensation of ice both melting and cracking as he pressed in, and crouched.

His body was malnourished and he was out of practice when it came to anything physical, but it did not take practice or particularly clever moves to spring up, pushing with his paw, and scrabble out of the pit. Scales scraped on ice and he could have done it a lot more quietly had he taken his time and gone delicately, but he was out. It was a small thing, but every beginning was small.

He and Grey were escaping tonight. They were going to get out of the nest, flee on paw to the edge of the ice field, and hunker down until Maour and the others came around again.

There was a similar scrabbling sound from Grey's pit, only different in that the scraping of scales on ice was replaced with a smoother noise and a muffled yelp. She barely made it, her front paws trembling as she lifted herself out, but by the time he leaped over to help she had gotten over the ledge and was pulling herself the rest of the way.

'I have ice where ice should never be,' she hissed, hopping in place and shaking her tail. There was an excited, almost frenzied look in her eye, something to the way she moved…

He had bigger things to worry about than her enthusiasm for the escape. They had yet to so much as escape the larger enclosure.

It would not be as simple as going to the back of the icy pocket their cells rested in and flaming out, either. The timing wasn't right for that; the King had refrosted that part of the nest only two days ago, so it would be close to the thickest side. No, they were headed to the Western edge of the Nest, almost straight across the middle from where they were if they could fly.

He hopped over one of the other pits, skidding a bit as he landed on the ice, and made awkwardly for the place where their ice plateau steeply and suddenly dropped down to the half-circle stone outcrop they spent their days on. Grey followed along behind, her claws scraping and clicking in time with his own.

None of the other Furies woke, even though they had made quite a bit of noise. Toothless was ready to blame that on the cold environment and listless lethargy they all suffered from. He was almost thankful; one of the ways this escape could have gone wrong was Hefnd waking, noticing, and raising a fuss or tagging along and getting them caught. The plan was for two Furies, because two were what Maour was expecting… and because Toothless only trusted one of his fellow prisoners. Grey.

He reached the edge of the icy ledge and wasted no time in maneuvering himself around and dropping, sliding down the steep incline with his claws out, digging in to slow but not stop his descent. It was a fast, rough ride that ended with a tail-jarring impact onto solid stone, but it got him past what might otherwise have been a major obstacle to a flightless dragon trying to be sneaky.

Grey gamely tried to imitate him without any hesitation, stopping at the edge, looking down, and attempting to twist herself to slide down tail-first. Then her front paws slipped, her claws not catching, and she fell backwards.

Toothless had positioned himself under her, just in case, and he braced before she impacted his back upside-down, flailing wildly with all her limbs. He almost wished the impact had been worse; she was so light. So malnourished and lacking the proper weight. It was convenient here, but it wasn't healthy.

'I didn't make a sound,' Grey whispered as she shook herself. Her eyes were wide, and an amused, excited purr was resonating from her like distant thunder. 'That was easy!'

'Let's not celebrate yet,' Toothless admonished, neglecting to mention that however light she might be to him, had he not caught her she would probably have broken something in the fall. They'd already made one mistake in this escape attempt, and they were both lucky it hadn't ended up hurting anything.

Having made it down into their only slightly larger, daylight prison, Toothless went straight for the waste pit over in the far corner. For reasons of basic sanity – and likely the Skrill not wanting to deal with anything more than the absolute minimum of cleanup – it was dug down into the ground, partially in rock and partially in ice. Off to the side, beyond the icy wall, a few rock ledges began, the far side of the actual nest beyond the little corner the Skrill controlled. Nobody slept there; they were high up, cold, and far from everything of interest to the average dragon. Not to mention anyone sleeping there had a clear view of the aforementioned waste pit.

However, said ledges were also physically connected to the rest of the nest, traversable on paw, and accessible if one could melt through a paw-thick pane of ice. Not possible in the day, not with Skrill watching their every move. Little more than another taunt leveled by the King, who had presumably shaped this place with the same ice breath that maintained it.

Now, though? With no watchful eyes ready to descend and stop them?

'Wings, like we talked about,' Toothless requested as he straddled the waste pit, ignoring the pungent scents assaulting his nostrils.

Grey came up beside him, perched on solid stone, and stuck a wing out to block the light he was about to emit. It wouldn't be seen from above, and to his other side an opaque ice wall would refract it and lose it among the many little things stuck in the ice.

He inhaled, feeling the fire he had been using regularly every night, and exhaled. A long, bright stream of heat carved into the ice in front of him. Unseen from above, from either side, or behind, visible only as a brief glint from the abandoned, chilly ledges on the other side of the ice wall, or as a dull glowing in the distance that nobody would care enough to investigate.

Risky, maybe, but necessary.

The ice melted and popped quietly, and Toothless was forced to crane his neck and twist himself around to cover a wide enough area to squeeze through without loudly breaking the edges of the hole. He used the equivalent of a single full-strength blast in a matter of moments to clear the way.

That wasn't promising at all. The plan hinged on them finding a way out on paw, and unless there were tunnels through the outer wall – extremely unlikely, as he'd never seen anyone using them in the days he spent watching the outside world – that meant melting a way through. He had to hope that his fire would be a lot more efficient when he was tasked with melting a hole into a wall, not through a thin one.

Water silently streamed down the ice wall as he finished with his fire, the hole still melting from the residual heat even after he closed his mouth, slowly growing wider still. He backed away from the waste pit and got a two-step runup before leaping through, landing carefully on the stone ledge outside.

He moved aside and carefully examined his surroundings, icy and rocky in equal parts. There were no Skrill descending on him like a pack of scavengers. No shrieked alarms from random ordinary dragons who had noticed and come to investigate. No earth-trembling movement from the King, who remained a stationary, silent island in the middle of the nest, hopefully oblivious.

'Out through the waste end,' Grey chirped, leaping through to land right by him. 'That makes us the indigestible bits.'

'Yes,' Toothless agreed, not really listening. From where they stood, they could circle around the inside wall of the ice mountain for the most part, sticking high and away from the desirable ledges and verdant greenery further down, but there was one spot two thirds of the way around that would force them to go much closer to sea level, and thus through more occupied areas.

The Skrill didn't sleep in any one place; as far as he knew, nobody did except the parents with their young. Cold, Condescending, Angry, Tolerable… They could be anywhere down there. Sleeping, unaware of what was creeping away from the captivity they maintained, but there all the same. He couldn't see any of them from where he stood, not for sure. Skrill and Monstrous Nightmares didn't look all that different when asleep, lacking any of the signature sparks or body-encompassing fire that usually differentiated them with ease.

'Are we stopping here?' Grey asked, padding around to stand in front of him and gawk at the nest laid out before them. 'It looks a lot more real without the ice in the way…' she said quietly. 'I forgot.'

He wanted to ask what, exactly, she had forgotten, but unless it was something about an easy secret passage out – which it obviously was not, she would be saying so if that were the case – they didn't have time to waste. 'Come on,' he rumbled for what felt like the third time since they had begun their escape. 'Walk behind me, walk quietly, and follow even if things get hectic.'

'I'll hold on to your tail,' she said as he loped ahead, though he noticed that she did no such thing. Grey joked and generally said stupid things a lot, but when it came to actually doing something important, she knew where to pack it in and be serious.

He was grateful for that, because he hadn't been sure until this very moment whether she would know to hold herself in check. There wasn't really a way to find out; they might have planned this, but planning and doing were two very different things.

And his thoughts were flying in circles. He wished he were flying; it would make reaching the far side of the ice mountain a quick, easy trip instead of the nerve-wrenching run ahead of them.

Instead, his paws beat a near-silent rhythm against the rocks and occasional icy slick as he ran along the long, rocky ledge. It reminded him of the sea stacks he was familiar with back home, a flat stone surface at the top of a bulky pillar, but in this case stretched out in one direction, curved to fit the interior of what was now a mountain. It was stable, frozen together where a sea stack might eventually crumble, and the gaps between sea-stack-esque stone platforms were pure ice, filled in.

Below, Gronckles napped in piles, Nadders slept standing upright, Zipplebacks lay twitching, sometimes with one head moving while the other lay still, dreaming or maybe even keeping a watchful eye on their surroundings. Other dragons were there too, kinds he still didn't know except by description, but those he just had to guess about. The more familiar breeds he knew. He had shared a nest with their sorts before, he knew the quirks they tended to exhibit when sleeping.

The Gronckles would notice heavy vibrations in the stone under them, though he doubted he could do anything heavy enough to wake them. The Zipplebacks might keep two eyes open, though they seemed happy here, so they might not see the need. Nadders were always ready to wake in a heartbeat if anything woke them, flighty and prone to kicking or otherwise lashing out. Nightmares slept heavily, and Terrors tended to stick to small crevices where none could get them and thus none were likely to wake them.

All of which he had told Grey… and all of which he reminded himself as they reached the unleapable gap in their path and turned to work their way down. Into the populated ledges, where any false move might get them caught.

Icy-covered stone gave way to just normal stone, and then that to grass and a variety of ferns. They had to leap down from ledge to ledge to descend, landing with a soft crunch each time, the sound subtly different as the terrain changed, but no less nerve-wracking.

A duo of Zipplebacks, necks tangled together as they slept, posed the first challenge. Toothless crouched and looked down at the ledge they occupied, watching each head for as long as he dared. None of the four sets of eyes were open, and the way the necks were tangled meant they wouldn't be able to quickly move.

He dropped down, flattening himself against the grass. A tail twitched, but nothing moved beyond that. When Grey came down, that same tail twitched again; maybe a reflex, or maybe a groggy warning. They snuck around the two slumbering dragons and kept going, down another ledge. There were maybe a dozen individual levels on their descent to the shoreline.

The King rose above them as they carefully descended, a massive white bulk that could squash them like bugs if it chose. If it knew they were there to be squashed.

And so they went, creeping carefully, every movement a choice between expediency and risk. Grey followed perfectly, keeping behind him like a reluctant shadow, going so far as to step only where he did. She was not a problem; he couldn't have asked for a more cautious companion now that they were here and the reality of their escape seemed to be sinking in.

He did wonder whether her forceful cheeriness and humor would remain if – when – she was free. She could put it away if need be, this very journey was proving as much, but he didn't know if she had simply dropped the act of acting silly or if she was pushing herself to act serious; it would look the same to him.

They made it to the end of the ravine without incident, and began working their way up the other side as the night wore on. The only Skrill Toothless saw along the way was distant, a few ledges down and to the right of where he and Grey were, noticeable because they slept alone, with a wide empty space around them. His scales itched as he turned his back on their tormentor, but he did it anyway, and the Skrill did not leap up to attack him the moment he took his eyes off of them.

Sadistic had yet to return with Star; he had yet to see that three of the ice pits were empty, not one. The moment he did, everything would go wrong.

But it was looking like he would not make it in time to ruin the escape. Toothless and Grey made it back up to the highest stone ledges, unseen by all. There was no obvious border between old ice and new, but when they stood opposite the opaque wall, he was able to look behind himself and see their prison, meaning they were there.

It looked so small from here, across the nest. Just a walled-off bit of bare stone and ice, nothing of interest. Barely enough space to be worth wanting, with nothing there to make it desirable. Easily ignorable, if one didn't know what lay beyond the translucent sheet of ice. And if one did know, then one probably didn't have a choice in ignoring it.

He turned back to the ice wall and to his unusually solemn companion. 'Block the light, like before,' he reminded her. 'Here is as good as anywhere.'

'Won't we come out high above the water, though?' Grey asked in a small voice, hunching in on herself. Her earlier confidence was gone, and he suspected the seriousness of what they were doing had truly set in.

'I…' He hadn't thought of that. He should have thought of that. Maybe it was more obvious now, standing on a ledge high above the waterline, but still. 'I'll angle the tunnel downward, and we can slide the rest of the way on our claws, like we did before,' he answered, giving the first potential solution that came to mind.

'Okay.' Her wing went up, bent but still capable of hiding some of the light from what he was going to do, and he got to work.

It was a steady pattern, a rhythm he knew by heart. A heavy inhale, three beats of the heart, and then a slow exhale, as slow and measured as he could manage. To cough or spit or just let go would fire a blast, the heat was welling in his throat and chest, but that wasn't needed. A slow, small release of heat over time was what he wanted, and what he got.

This ice was not like the thin, fragile wall he had melted before; it had depth and was dark, seemingly endless. His fire carved into it, reducing solid ice into a heavy drizzle of water and some steam, creating a dent, and then a hole that he widened as quickly as he could.

His shot, his breath, ran out. He let it go, panting as he examined one blast's worth of tunneling.

It was pitiful, barely half the length of his body in depth, and with a paw-deep puddle of water at the end that would only grow deeper as he went. He had six shots left, and Grey had eight, but that would only get them seven more body lengths into the wall. He very much doubted it was as thin as that.

He continued to flame anyway, occasionally retreating to stir the air and fuel his fire before diving back in again. Doubts were well and good, but he wouldn't know this was a failure until he actually proved as much. There was no point in turning back, to giving up. He and Grey didn't have any other way out, they couldn't fly and there were no exits reachable on paw. It was through the wall or not at all.

He worked his way into the wall, expending his fire one long exhale at a time. It was cold, surrounded on all sides by ice so close it rubbed against him every time he twitched. The light from his flames reflected and refracted through the ice around him, revealing many small particles of dirt, sand, or other contaminants frozen in the ice. And presumably shining a light for any looking to see, but nobody was looking. Yet.

He spent the last of his fire trying to reduce the growing pool of water at the bottom of the tunnel to vapor, then backed out into the open with a cold chest and a growing headache of indeterminate origin.

'My turn,' Grey said, descending into the hole. 'Is this water supposed to be here?'

'Try to ignore it,' Toothless advised as he awkwardly held a wing out over the entrance to the tunnel. He was grateful for all of the particles and contaminants in the ice; from here he could see that while some light was reflecting out from Grey's fire, it wasn't as bright and obvious as he had thought it would be. Like a flame in a snowstorm, there but dimmed if seen from a distance.

The nest was quiet and still. The King had not moved, still a slumbering mountain. Toothless let out a sigh of relief; he had worried, if only for a moment, that he would look at that giant mountain of scale and malice and see those large eyes staring back at him.

But no, the irresistible ruler of this hollow mountain was asleep. For now.

He didn't like thinking about his time under the Queen, the six-eyed monstrosity that had ruled her dormant volcano with suffocating intensity, but his current situation was far too similar for him to not think about her. Where she ruled with an iron will and many, many commands designed to keep total control, this King was far more… relaxed. But both used their power for control, just in different ways.

He couldn't honestly say which was better, either. At least under the Queen everyone was equally trapped, aware of who the enemy was. Here, the majority of the King's subjects lived idyllic lives, but they did so at the expense of others. Maybe he was biased, but he didn't think that was any more tolerable or less terrible. Subjugation with a light paw was still subjugation so long as that light paw was only light because it did not need to be heavy.

A figure stirred in the distance, down on a lower ledge. Little sparks of bright light flashed on and off over the length of their body as they stood and stretched, and Toothless knew that their time to enact a sneaky escape was about to be up.

'Can you see the other side yet?' he hissed to Grey, watching closely as the Skrill flew up and around a bit before heading leisurely over to the false wall and the ice pits.

'No, just more ice, and I only have three shots left,' Grey reported. 'But maybe that will be enough.'

An enraged shriek split the cold, still night air, long and grating. Lightning flashed on the other side of the mountain's interior, bright but distant. For the moment.

'Time's up,' Toothless growled, backing into the tunnel tail-first. 'Keep flaming, I will tell you if they get close.' In an ideal world, Grey would break through to the outside with the last of her fire. It could still happen.

He really wanted it to happen. He didn't want to go back to being a prisoner, to whatever nonlethal punishment Sadistic and the others would devise. They were so close…

Dragons all over the mountain's interior were waking, dragged from their slumber by the shrieking cry of alarm. Toothless could see many of them even with the majority of his body in the tunnel, so long as he kept his eyes above the level of the ledge they had started on. He could see that most of the dragons who had woken weren't doing much other than milling about or rolling over and going back to sleep, which was… not the worst-case scenario, at least.

But the other Skrill, all three of them, rose to the air webbed in lightning. They met the first, the one who had sounded the alarm, in the air over the King. Sadistic was still nowhere to be seen, but that left four angry Skrill…

And one titanic white dragon, whose massive tusks moved once, twice, and then fell still again.

'I am out of fire, I am going to try ramming through,' Grey reported. A moment later, there was a dull thump and a splash from the bottom of the tunnel. 'I didn't get through,' she added. 'I can't tell if we are even close to the other side…'

The Skrill were splitting up now, and if the King had given them any orders, he hadn't bothered telling anyone other than them to do anything. Two went down to the lowermost ledges and began prowling around, one flew straight up and began circling inside the exit, and the fourth…

The fourth flew up to the highest set of ledges by the prison side of the mountain's interior and began prowling around on paw, lightning intermittently leaping out to strike everything around them as they walked. That was the one Toothless was worried about, because he – or she, if it was Condescending, he couldn't tell them apart at this distance – was going to walk right up to the tunnel entrance once they got over to this side of the cave.

'We need to leave here,' he said, making a snap decision. The tunnel was a dead end, literally and figuratively. 'Find some other way out.'

'There isn't another way,' Grey whined, coming up the tunnel to him. 'Maybe we should sneak back to the pits? Pretend we were there the whole time?'

'No–' he began, only to stop himself mid-denial. If such a blatant denial worked, it would spare them both a lot of potential pain. Who was he to force Grey to keep following him, when he didn't even know what else he would do?

If it worked. Which it wouldn't. The Skrill wouldn't believe them over one of their own, and there was a Fury-sized hole in the wall that wouldn't go unnoticed once someone looked more closely. 'We'd just be questioned until we admitted what we did,' he said gruffly. 'We're out, they know it, that's all there is to it. We might as well drag this out as long as possible and try to figure out another escape plan while we hide.'

'Why not hide here?' Grey asked.

The Skrill at the bottom of the ledges were moving up to the next level, picking through the sleeping and no longer sleeping dragons and checking every possible hiding spot in a systematic fashion. Lightning cracked behind bushes, little ledges had a probing talon stuck in them, and piles of sleeping dragons were rudely scattered, as if the Skrill thought a Night Fury could hide under a half-dozen Gronckles without them noticing or crushing him to death. The one checking the top ledges was almost at the dip they had needed to circumnavigate.

'They're coming this way,' Toothless summarized. If he and Grey wanted to hide, they needed to somehow get down to the areas the Skrill had already checked. That would only work until daybreak came and all the other dragons woke up, but it was something.

He saw the Skrill leaning down to check the ravine, their head dipping out of sight, and made his move. 'Now!' he hissed, leaping out into the open and bounding to the edge of the ledge. Slipping down to the next one was the work of one heart-pounding moment, and Grey came right after him. They huddled together in the shadow of the overhang, which was barely deep enough to hide them both.

Grey's skin – not scales, she didn't have those – was cold, wet, and far too smooth. Toothless huddled protectively over her, raising his wings so that his darker complexion would better fade into the shadows.

They held their position there, waiting for what Toothless suspected was going to happen next. If he were a Skrill and he found a suspicious tunnel he wasn't big enough to fit into that definitely shouldn't be there...

The Skrill shrieked loudly above them, frighteningly close. 'Here!' he – it was Tolerable, Toothless knew his voice well enough to distinguish him from the others – roared.

The Skrill on the ground took to the air, and the one watching the exit up top came streaking down, an eye-catching blur of excess lightning crackling out in a trail.

Toothless growled to himself, taking his wings off Grey and leading her down further. This, at least, he could do. They were going to be distracted with the tunnel, and in that time he and Grey could sneak down and hide in one of the hiding places the Skrill had already investigated. If they 'cleared' the entire mountain, they would go to checking the ice outside, and it was possible he and Grey could hide through the entire day.

It was a wild plan, but a plan nonetheless. He leaped down again, leading Grey through the more occupied ledges with careful speed. The disinterest of the average dragon worked in their favor here; most were trying their hardest to ignore the intermittent shrieks of the Skrill and get back to sleep. Those who were up and looking around, relatively few though they were, he gave a wide berth.

First, they'd get down to the first places the Skrill checked. Then, they would find somewhere to hide out. If they could keep their heads down long enough, the Skrill would assume they had gotten away and go searching, and he and Grey could go back to the tunnel and complete it, or find another way out. It would be–

'Oh!' Grey said behind him, speaking quietly but urgently. 'I know what to do!'

He didn't know why, but a part of him wanted to pretend she hadn't said anything. His hackles would have risen if he wasn't already on full alert; something about that didn't sound right at all. Not here, not now–

'I know her, we can trust her,' Grey continued, pushing past him and taking the lead as they descended another ledge to the rocky surface below. She made for one of the piles of Gronckles that littered the rockier areas, her tail swaying eagerly, and to Toothless' horror began poking one with her paw!

Her words sunk in a heartbeat later, just as he was about to pounce and drag her away from the danger, and he hesitated. It didn't make sense that Grey would know someone here, or that she would trust them, but it was not as if he knew everything about her or her past, so it didn't necessarily have to make sense to him…

The Gronckle, a bulky blue and grey female, stirred and twisted around to look at the one prodding her. Large yellow eyes met Grey's purple gaze.

'Nærandi,' Grey hissed, 'help us hide!'

The Gronckle – Nærandi, Grey had called her, but that didn't sound like a name a Gronckle would take – blinked blearily at her.

'Please?' Grey added. 'You–'

'Escaped usurpers!' the Gronckle called out, opening her mouth to roar loudly. She began struggling and kicking those laying beside and on top of her, roaring all the while.

Toothless was already moving, darting past Grey, away from the sudden alarm, but he knew it was too late, that running wasn't going to be enough. Most of the dragons around them weren't reacting quickly enough to stop him, but they didn't have to, not when there were–

Lightning smashed into the dirt in front of him, spraying grit into his eyes and knocking him back with sheer force. He scrambled to his paws, but another blast to his side knocked him down again immediately, and then talons were cruelly seizing around his body, yanking him off the ground with such force that his neck snapped forward painfully. Smaller shocks surged through him, torturously forcing his muscles to spasm and clench as he was carried away from even a small chance at freedom.