O-O-O

The ice nest was in a quickly-departing turmoil. Horrible crashing echoed in the distance, ominous and louder with each echoing report. The King was gone, his subjects were rallying to repel the oncoming invasion, and the Skrill had left the Night Fury prisoners alone in the hope that they'd get themselves killed trying to capitalize on the situation. Whatever happened, it wasn't like grounded Night Furies could escape an ice field surrounded by an inhospitable sea.

'Time to go,' Toothless announced. 'We're getting out of here. Today.'

The Skrill had forgotten the Night Fury flying for their enemies. They had forgotten the human that Toothless had on his back when he was captured.

Or maybe they hadn't. He wasn't going to let his guard down on that front. He had all of his fire and his injuries were mostly healed. The time for cowering before the Skrill in the hopes of avoiding conflict was over. Rescue had come, and he was going to lead Grey and the other prisoners out to meet it.

'We still can't fly,' Hefnd growled. Star and Einn both looked to him. Grey was crawling out from under the rock pile; she had no doubts as to their plan. Even though it wasn't much different from the last one.

'Did I not just tell you about friendly humans?' Toothless asked dryly. 'Sure, I didn't get very far, but I would think the human invasion that apparently has a Night Fury with it might help you make the connection.'

'They're yours?' Star asked incredulously.

'Not sure by how much,' Toothless admitted, 'so don't go walking up to the first one you see, just follow my lead. They must be allies of some sort if my sister flies for them.' He didn't know the exact details, but Maour and Von would have worked that out beforehand. All he had to do was find them and bring the other Furies to them. They'd have the rest planned out.

'Or she's been taken and forced to obey by another King who would rather have a slave than a prisoner,' Hefnd pointed out. He rose to his paws, shaking himself vigorously. 'You might be going right into the same trap.'

'Maybe,' Toothless conceded. He didn't like it, and Maour couldn't possibly have been snared the way Von might have been, but he couldn't deny that it was possible. Maour might have pushed forward anyway, biding his time and planning to free Von once the other King had begun this invasion. It would be a risky plan, but if Maour was desperate or confident enough…

Still, it was better than nothing. 'But-' he began.

'Don't get me wrong,' Hefnd spoke over him, 'we're coming anyway. Better a slave who gets to do things than a prisoner left to waste away.'

'Maybe you think so,' Star huffed. Einn had stood, and Toothless could hear Grey padding up behind him, but Star remained stubbornly on her stomach, paws tucked neatly beneath her. 'I don't. Go get killed, I'm staying here.'

Toothless was sorely tempted to let her make that decision and leave her. He wasn't compelled to save everyone, if she didn't want to go he didn't have to waste time convincing her. But his plan got more and more feasible the more fire he had on paw, and he didn't want to leave anyone here if he could help it.

He'd try once. Only once. 'What do you risk by going with us that you don't by staying here?' he asked briskly. The nest was almost empty, and he could see some larger dragons with faded scales leading the boisterous fledglings into some recessed caves high in the ice nest's interior walls. In a few moments they'd be clear to try and leave.

'Death or disfigurement,' she huffed.

'Nobody out there can or will kill you,' Toothless countered. He didn't like trying to argue Star into listening to him while looming over her still-sitting form, so he took a few steps back and turned toward the ice wall. 'The Skrill cannot, the other dragons of this nest cannot,' or so he assumed as they'd never tried and it would be a poor order if the Skrill could bypass it simply by letting somebody else do the dirty work, 'and the invaders are on our side. Who would kill you? At worst, you will get snatched up by a Skrill and dumped back here, and that's not going to happen.'

'We might be leaving,' Grey chimed in, her voice low and her tone serious enough that Star glared at her. 'All of us… Except you? It is so much worse, being here alone. I know.'

'You're weak and stupid, I'd be fine,' Star growled. But a full-body shiver worked its way over her, and Toothless could imagine the thoughts running through her head. No Hefnd to share body heat, no Grey to mock, no companions to speak to at all, the undivided attention and rage of all the Skrill...

Star flicked her tail against the ground, leaned forward, then forced herself up with a spryness that belied her obvious disdain for the idea. 'I will come along, but when the Skrill catch us you will claim you forced me to follow.'

'Deal,' Toothless agreed. He'd be tortured to the brink of death if they got caught regardless; Sadistic alone would be in a towering fury. He had no problem promising to try and protect Star. He'd do the same for the others, at that. But it wasn't going to happen, so Star's cooperation had been secured at no real cost.

'Keep the slug away from me,' Star huffed, tossing her head at Grey.

'As if I would ever want to be around you,' Grey all but barked. Hefnd's eyes widened as Star snarled viciously at her–

Toothless stepped between the two of them before Grey's unexpected display of her spine turned into a real squabble. 'No infighting while we're trying to escape,' he snarled. 'We need to go. Now. Time is slipping away.' The last few able-bodied dragons were slipping away, and those guarding the young were so deep in the ice caves they wouldn't see anything going on in the nest proper. Even if they did, they wouldn't risk intervening because that would mean leaving the young unprotected.

'Agreed,' Hefnd huffed. 'No clawing at each other.'

Toothless took Star's wordless huff as the closest thing to agreement he was likely to get out of her and considered the matter settled. He loped over to the far side of the half-circle of stone and dirt walled in by ice, his remaining bruises and cuts barely aching at all. The ice wall by the waste pit could be melted, a hole could be made, they'd done it before.

But a lack of fire had stymied them last time, and he was loath to waste any when there might be another way. Especially as the alternative was something he'd wanted to do ever since he first saw the clear, thin wall of ice that was meant to keep them in.

He pulled himself into a flat-out run for the last half-dozen paces, leaped over where they dropped their waste, and twisted at the last moment, ramming his shoulder and uninjured front paw through the ice. It shattered around him, scraping his scales in the heartbeat it took his body to travel through, and then he hit the rough stone ledge on the other side, rolling and hopping up immediately.

Behind him, the hole in the ice wall was rapidly expanding, cracks spreading and chunks falling with a staccato series of ear-piercing crashes perfectly audible over the background thumping that had yet to so much as pause. The expansion of the hole stopped at about half the wall's height, a jagged opening that threatened the integrity of the entire wall if anything weakened it any further.

'You don't get all the fun,' Hefnd barked from within the enclosure. He sidled to the side and hip-checked the wall a ways down from the original hole. Massive cracks jolted out from where he struck.

'Wait until we're out, idiot,' Star said waspishly, primly leaping out over the waste pit to land on all four paws by Toothless, moving with a practiced grace he was surprised she still had after so long flightless. Grey's following leap was not nearly as graceful, though it got her across just fine, and Einn almost tripped even though he'd been flying not that long ago.

Despite the urgency of the situation, they all stopped to watch as Hefnd struck the wall again. He smacked his shoulder against it, then lashed out with the hard edge of a crooked wing when that wasn't enough, sending opaque cracks spidering through the length of the wall.

The whole thing collapsed as a single unit with absolutely no warning, the bottom giving out between Toothless' hole and Hefnd's efforts, and taking the rest of it with it. Hefnd hopped back with a satisfied roar as the entire thing fell outward, most of it crashing into the rocks far below.

'Now let's do the same to this entire mountain,' he said as he came over to leap across to the stone ledge adjacent to the now open plateau they'd spent so long trapped on.

'It'll take a lot more strength than we have to knock the entire ice mountain over, but I would if I could,' Toothless huffed. The King could do it… Maybe they'd see it demolished, if everything went well today. He'd be satisfied with just never seeing it again, though. 'We can definitely make a hole, though.'

'That's a terrible idea,' Star objected. 'Climbing out is much easier.'

'You'd know,' Toothless muttered. That had been Sadistic's lie as to what Star had been caught doing when she allegedly tried to escape with him and Grey. He still didn't know what had really happened there, or if Star had been climbing anything at all. Maybe she had, but he doubted it.

'Climbing ice is like climbing a tree,' Star said to the group, pointedly not looking at Grey. She turned her tail on them to quickly lope over to the nearest ice wall. They were at the top of the stone ledges, quite close to where ice came up behind stone to form the inward-sloping cone of the nest. 'Dig your claws in and don't think about falling.'

With that less than encouraging advice given, she reared up and slapped her front paws against the ice, dragging down and scratching off a small shower of ice shards, digging her claws in deep. Toothless watched as she lifted herself up, sunk her back claws in, and proceeded to pull herself up another half a body length.

'Father and I tried this once, didn't get anywhere before we were spotted,' Hefnd said thoughtfully. 'It's worth a try, so long as you don't mind the fall being fatal once you get high enough. Get halfway, and you're either getting out or falling to your death when you get tired.'

Toothless had assumed as much, and was surprised Star was willing to risk such an all or nothing escape route after not even being sure about whether she wanted to try at all. He certainly liked the idea of melting a tunnel better than climbing…

But Hefnd was following Star's lead, and Einn was stretching his limbs out in preparation. Grey was looking at Toothless anxiously. 'We don't have to climb, do we?' she asked.

He would have said nobody was climbing, had he been asked a moment ago. But now Star was going and he doubted his ability to call her down, and Hefnd was following her lead. He suspected it wasn't his choice any longer whether some of them at least tried it. And he needed everybody's fire to prevent a repeat of his last escape attempt. He and Grey didn't have enough on their own.

'I didn't intend to,' he growled, feeling torn. He could try to exert his mostly nonexistent authority as the leader of this escape attempt and get the others down, but that might not do anything except make him feel stupid. He could follow, but then things really could go wrong, worse than just getting caught or failing to escape.

Einn hesitated from where he was pawing at the base of the ice wall, looking back at Toothless and Grey.

That might make three. Three sets of fire could maybe do it where two had failed.

He didn't feel confident in his own ability to get all the way up to the nest's circular opening in the ceiling. It was a long climb, one that would require the climber to hang almost upside down at several points, and never so easy as to be purely vertical, let alone sloped in any helpful manner. Grey certainly could not make it safely, and he'd say the same of Einn. Star and Hefnd might be confident, but he wouldn't have bet on their malnourished forms housing the raw strength needed to go all that way either.

He'd rather be embarrassed by Hefnd and Star making it than dead from a fall. 'No, we're sticking to the plan,' he decided. 'If they make it, good for them. Einn, are you with us? We need at least one more to melt all the way through the wall.'

EInn nodded resolutely, turning away from the wall.

'Good luck,' Grey called up to the climbers. 'We aren't doing that.'

'Worm,' Star snarled down to them.

'So much for us all getting out together,' Toothless muttered. 'Come on, let's go,' he said more loudly, and set off across the stone. They had a wall to dig into, and after the King wiped away their progress on the last attempt, he needed to figure out which section of the wall was the oldest, and thus the weakest. He thought he remembered the King going around to the Southwest section the day before, meaning today's reinforcement was supposed to be to the South, not that far from the prisoners' pit…

The crashing in the distance was still going, even as Toothless led Grey and Einn around the arced stone ledge, hugging the wall of the nest. It was eerily empty, the sort of emptiness that itched whenever he turned his back to it, and he tried to keep one eye on the open air at all times. The Skrill were nowhere to be found, they wanted him and the others to risk death trying to escape–

Ice shattered on ice behind him, and Hefnd yelped in the distance. Toothless stopped and turned to look, but Hefnd was fine. He had kicked a visible hole in the wall, apparently dislodging a chunk of ice with his weight, but he still had three pawfuls of claws stuck in the ice to keep him there. He and Star were making some progress, but they were still low enough that if they fell they'd probably survive with some serious bruises and maybe a broken limb.

He caught Einn looking too, but that was no surprise. Einn would surely be up there with his son if he thought himself physically capable of following. It wasn't like he was following Toothless for any reason other than a lack of options.

'There's a crack here,' Grey called out. She was walking closest to the wall, looking intently at the ice. Now he knew why. 'We could follow it?'

'Good idea.' They weren't quite at the Southern part of the wall yet, but he was guessing as to exactly which parts had been frozen over anyway. He could feel the phantom claws of Skrill and other enemies at his tail, and his heart was beating too fast to ignore, an insistent pounding in his ears like that of the shattering noises coming from outside the nest. Not directly outside, not yet, but closer than before. The nest might be empty, their escape might seem uncontested, but they were still trapped and the enemy could return at any time. The King could come up and destroy them with ice or with mental dominion, the Skrill could return and strike them with lightning… The latter could be fought, but the former would be irresistible and it could happen at any time.

He realized that he'd stopped walking, and that Grey was clawing at the chest-high crack in the ice she had found. Einn stood behind him, waiting for a cue.

There would be time to have a paranoid freak-out later. If the King showed up he'd figure something out. If the Skrill showed up, he'd do his best to fight and bring them down. He had his fire, he knew how to fight… Being grounded was a massive disadvantage, but he could work around it.

'Start flaming, remember to aim slightly upward so the water drains this way instead of puddling in the tunnel,' he told Grey. The rocky part of the ledge was angled to one side enough that he wasn't worried about water building up there, and it wasn't quite cold enough to freeze so long as it was moving. 'Einn… Watch the top of the nest, tell me if the Skrill show up.'

Einn shot him a truly unimpressed look.

'Growl or something,' Toothless amended. A bright, sustained light in the corner of his eye indicated that Grey had begun to flame. Einn would watch, then switch out with her when she ran out of fire. He would do… something.

Something other than staring at the empty pool of water that could at any time disgorge a monstrous mass of scale and power.

O-O-O

Einn watched from afar as his son painstakingly clawed his way up a sheer ice wall, headed for the ever-elusive illusion of freedom. Hefnd was a ways up, still behind Star but slowly gaining on her as they both ascended. A fall from that height… It would probably be fatal. Their wings might not be crippled enough to be totally worthless – gliding only really required a flat surface, though he'd never seen any of his fellow prisoners do anything with their wings – but they would inevitably either crash into hard stone or the deep, icy water in the middle of the ice nest. Neither would be good for their health.

Behind Einn, Grey was using up the last of her flames in the tunnel. Around them all, the ice shuddered. Kappi was in the tunnel with her, watching or maybe just waiting for his turn. The nest was deathly still, reverberating thumping aside. Whatever was happening outside was coming toward them.

Escapes were supposed to be quick, frantic things. Not this lingering, heart-pounding waiting game. The Skrill were gone, the other dragons were gone, a fight was going on at length outside. They had time to slowly climb or painstakingly melt tunnels, but none of them knew how much.

If he were a less patient dragon, it would be driving him mad. Seeing his son risk his life like this should have been worrying him. But it didn't, not really. Hefnd had made it clear he would do his own thing and go his own way whenever he liked a long time ago, and only them being stuck in this horrible place had kept him around for so long.

If they escaped, this might be the last time he saw his son. He hadn't thought about that, not when escape had always seemed so far away. Now it gnawed at him, but not in a way he could do anything about. Escape came first, everything else was a secondary afterthought.

The ice-shattering crashing noises outside stopped. Their absence rang through his head like a new noise, the silence truly deafening. Star slipped, futilely flapped her barely-crimped wings a few times as she got her grip back, and kept climbing. His son had never stopped.

A King roared nearby. Just outside the nest. Smaller crashing noises echoed faintly in the distance, and other dragons screeched and roared in a growing cacophony, far softer than the previous noise but no less distracting.

'The fight's reached the ice nest itself,' Kappi said, stepping out of the growing tunnel to look around. Nothing inside the nest had changed. Not yet. 'Grey's out, I'm switching with her now. Einn, be ready to use your flame once I'm done.' Sure enough, Grey stepped out behind him, panting heavily.

Einn nodded. However this escape attempt was fated to end, he was along for the journey and would do as he was asked.

Kappi disappeared into the tunnel, leaving Grey with him. She looked up at the wall where Hefnd and Star could be seen, flicking her tail nervously. 'They are pretty far up, now…'

Far, but not far enough. And when they reached the top they'd have to come back down. Kappi's potential human "friends" were the only way anyone was getting away from the ice field, lacking flight, and Einn doubted they'd be able to retrieve a Night Fury from the top of a mountain in the middle of a battle.

But she was right, they were making progress. More than he'd ever seen in any of his own escape attempts.

A little flicker of color right at the top of the nest caught his eye, and he squinted as it descended, trying to make out the little dragon. Whoever they were and whatever their purpose might be, they flew right down past the two climbing Night Furies without even acknowledging their existence. They swooped around the nest's open air for a bit, then flew right back out again.

His chest clenched painfully, and he tried to breathe calmly. The pain would go away, it always did. It struck randomly and disappeared shortly afterward, that was how it worked…

The clenching ache faded, and he was able to breathe easily once more. He missed Eldurhjarta; she had made his aches and pains feel less severe, even when she could do nothing for them. It was comforting just knowing that somebody understood what was happening to him, why things hurt and what to do about them.

Three large dragons dropped in through the top of the nest, two flaming the third even as they fell in a tangle of wings and scales and hard stone plates he had never seen on a dragon before. The two without such strange scales pulled out of the tangled mess just above the water, one narrowly missing the plunge into the icy depths and the other skimming the water before smacking into the shore head-first. The oddly-scaled dragon sank like a stone and didn't come up again.

'Don't see them, don't see them,' Grey chanted quietly as the two surviving dragons shook themselves off and took to the air. Both were Monstrous Nightmares, neither flaming at the moment, and both flew swiftly up towards the exit, back to the fight.

For a moment it seemed like they wouldn't notice the two dark shapes clinging to the wall. Or that they would notice but dismiss it; the Skrill weren't bothering to keep their prisoners in the midst of everything else going on, surely dragons not even tasked with keeping them specifically wouldn't care enough to be diverted from the battle.

Then one doubled back, smoke trailing from his nostrils. He roared something to the other, and they plucked Hefnd and Star off the wall as easily as snagging a dead fish. Both Nightmares flew over to the ice pits and dropped Hefnd and Star in…

But they didn't fly away. They stayed right on top of the pits. Grey muttered something low and likely rude to herself.

'I think they realize that Star and Hefnd could just climb out again if they left,' she said after a moment. 'What do we do?'

O-O-O

Toothless was deep in the ice wall. Sound echoed strangely around him, and his fire refracted through the ice, the light glaring in his eyes until he was forced to partially close them as he worked. He flamed up and down, angling his head to clear out a sloped path upward large enough for his body, but no larger. Chilly water ran like a small stream around and over his paws.

The noises of war were a distant, nearly unintelligible murmur totally overshadowed by the low vibrations running through the wall all around him. The noise was so low it wasn't heard so much as felt in his bones. Something was going on outside, probably multiple things, and none of them were anything short of ominous.

Ominous, but also tempting. He was a third of the way through his fire, and he knew from experience that all of his fire wouldn't be enough to get all the way through, but they had Einn this time. He had to believe that would be enough.

He took a short breather between the end of one shot's worth of flame – a long, measured exhale limited by how long he could go without air – and the beginning of the next, his chest throbbing with the strain of rationing out the explosive power as slowly and steadily as he could.

His next shot's worth of fire got him a ways further into the ice, but other than a lengthening tunnel behind him, there was nothing–

Nothing but an anomaly in the ice in front of him, just to the left of where he was aiming. Everywhere else, the light reflected and refracted at random, but to his left there was a place where it was different. A pattern, not a lack of reflection but a gap, surfaces he could barely see.

There was something there, so he turned to the left and used up the last of that shot uncovering it. A blast of fetid air whooshed out of the cavity as he broke into it, and he coughed out a small bolt of fire by accident, blasting the ice just above the opening to smithereens.

'Waste pit,' he huffed to himself. That smell was distinctive, though he didn't see any waste. The ice was speckled different colors around the air cavity, and he suspected that he didn't want to melt any of the darker ice.

Disgusting evidence of forgotten waste pits aside, it was not a simple hollow in the ice, leading nowhere and providing nothing except a reason to breathe through his mouth alone. It was a jagged crack in the ice, leading left and outward. Toward the outside of the wall.

Better yet, he was pretty sure most of the dragons of the ice nest dropped their waste outside. He didn't know if they did it wherever they pleased or had designated areas, but this seemed to indicate the latter… meaning it might lead quite close to the outside, if not all the way there. It had been sealed up and iced over, but even a single step closer to the outside meant less fire was needed to melt the rest of the way there.

He stepped forward, into the jagged, uneven crack in the ice, and kicked at some of the sharper lumps in his way until he could keep pushing forward. Without his fire it was dark in the wall, and the darker shades of ice around him blocked what little light filtered through from the outside. The stench continued to be unbearable in the way that all foul smells in the otherwise clean chill of Winter tended to be.

The crack, winding and obscured, proved to go quite a ways away from where he had first found it. Most of that distance was travelling along the wall's length, but he estimated that for every three paces he moved to the left, he moved at least a pace toward the outside world, so he followed it to the end.

It proved to be as much of a dead end as he assumed, terminating in a wall of clean ice. An old waste pit, extended and then abandoned and iced over… Useful for him, but not something the King or any other dragon would ever even think about.

It was too bad he didn't need a hiding place; this would have done in a pinch. Anyone who came down the tunnel far enough to reach the waste pit would assume there was nothing worth investigating further. The Skrill wouldn't even be able to fit inside the tunnel's narrow confines.

'Toothless,' Grey murmured in his ear. 'Trouble, Hefnd and Star just got… look for yourself.'

He took the time to back out of the waste pit section of the tunnel, then checked what she was seeing. Star and Hefnd… being bodily carried back to their pits. And trapped there. 'Well… That's bad.'

Bad for Hefnd and Star – though now they weren't risking their lives climbing, at least – and bad for the rest of them, too. Those Nightmares had to know that there were supposed to be five prisoners, not two. All it would take was one of them making the smart decision and sticking Hefnd and Star in the same pit, freeing up the other to go round up reinforcements, and there'd be a hunt for them.

'I think they realize that Star and Hefnd could just climb out again if they left,' Grey said to him. 'What do we do?'

On the one paw, two Monstrous Nightmares. From the brief glance he'd gotten through Grey's eyes before returning to his own vision to make his way back, neither was particularly injured, but both seemed to have been fighting. The fight was still a dull roar in the background, so he knew it was still going. It was just the two of them.

He emerged from the tunnel and saw the forces he had to work with. One scaleless grey Night Fury with little to no combat experience – for that matter, little to no life experience in general – and one scarred male he knew had at the very least outflown two Skrill for a while.

'Einn, with me, we're going to get Hefnd and Star and make sure those two don't go looking for help to put us back where we're supposed to be,' he decided. 'Grey…' She was out of fire, meaning she wouldn't be any use left at the tunnel. But she was so ridiculously defenseless in a real fight, even the Nightmares setting themselves on fire might prove fatal to her if she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. 'Stay here.'

'I could help,' she protested, but her heart obviously wasn't in it. 'I could… claw at the tunnel? Make it a little longer?'

'You do that,' he agreed. 'Come on, Einn.' It had been a while since he was able to actually feel confident about a fight. He still wasn't, not about this one; they weren't fresh, but neither were he or Einn.

He loped out into the open, running across the curved stone ledges at a steady pace, Einn behind him. They made it maybe a third of the way around before the Nightmares spotted them. A short, inaudible but visibly heated debate later, the smaller of the two Nightmares flew out to them.

'Surrender, this is no time for games,' the Nightmare roared.

'Come here and make us,' Toothless challenged. From a Skrill, the demand might have at least made him think about what was happening. Not so from a Nightmare; he wasn't intimidated at all.

The Nightmare stooped into a shallow dive and picked up a respectable amount of speed by the time he made it to them. He tried to land with his talons on Toothless, but Toothless saw the move coming a good while in advance and simply ducked to the side at the last moment. Talons scraped horribly on stone, and the Nightmare nearly embedded himself in the ice wall, he hit it so hard.

Einn ran up to the visibly stunned Nightmare and raised his claws menacingly at the nearest wing–

'No, don't do that,' Toothless objected, the spark of an idea hitting him just in time. He darted over and jumped on the downed dragon, grabbing ahold of one of the Nightmare's ridiculously oversized horns and putting his full body weight into yanking the head to the side.

The side with the ice wall. The disoriented dragon's skull crashed into the ice for a second time in as many moments, and his eyelids fluttered. A third, less violent yank and he was out, crumpling to the ground in a bundle of wings and long limbs and spikes.

'We might have an ally when he wakes,' Toothless explained to Einn. Knocking a dragon out removed any control the King might have had. So long as the dragons here were, at their core, unwilling followers…

A Nightmare's lava-like fire would be a great help in melting the tunnel. Or just flying them out of the nest altogether; Toothless had seen this very Nightmare carrying Star, though he had struggled with her weight over that short distance.

Yes, this would be a good thing.

A bolt of blue fire shot up from the ice pits, drawing Toothless' attention away from his conquest. He looked up just in time to see the other Nightmare disappearing out of the nest's open top.

That… might not be quite as much of a good thing.

O-O-O

'I bet you're pleased we didn't make it,' Hefnd snarled as he passed Einn. Einn, of course, said nothing. Not that he would have said something if he could; Hefnd's anger was most easily blunted by an unwavering acceptance. He only stayed angry if someone was denying his anger as valid… Or if he had no power to make them sorry.

'More fire for the tunnel, unless you want to try again,' Kappi offered far more nicely than he had to. 'I don't think we have long, though, and you might not want to be out in the open.'

'The Skrill want us to escape and run into the deadly battle going on outside, they won't intervene,' Star huffed. 'Where is this tunnel?'

'Here!' Grey barked, poking her head out of the entrance. 'Come on, we already did most of the work. Somebody with fire needs to be here.' Einn thought that she was getting more energetic the closer they were to escaping. He wondered what she'd be like without the crushing weight of this place burdening her body and mind.

It seemed like they might just find out. If all the lesser dragons were as easily dispatched as that Nightmare had been, Kappi really could lead them out. It would take a Skrill to stop him, or maybe several.

'I'll do better than you,' Star grumbled pettily, stalking over and smacking Grey with her tail as she entered the tunnel. Grey turned to follow after her, apparently too enthusiastic about the tunnel's progress to leave the aggressively rude female alone.

'That's not going to cause any trouble at all,' Kappi huffed, quickly following them in.

'Why do they leave you to keep watch?' Hefnd grumbled, taking up a place next to Einn. 'You can't tell them if someone is coming.'

Einn had wondered much the same thing, but he didn't question it. He had a job and he'd do it. There–

The world shattered in two right behind his head, and the last thing he heard was a truly ear-splitting explosion of obliterated ice.

O-O-O

Author's Note: Why does it end here on such a terrible cliffhanger? Because it was entirely necessary! Suffice to say that next chapter will provide all the much-needed context we're missing here. At least you didn't have to wait an extra week for this one; I might have been late with last chapter, but I'm not going to let that throw me off the schedule. We've only got five chapters and an epilogue to go; this is no time to delay posting! Nothing kills the buildup to a finale quite like it coming out slowly and irregularly.