O-O-O
Grey was shrieking.
Toothless could hear her even over the high-pitched ringing in his ears. He could hear cracking in the distance, and a faint roar, but her irregular shrieks rolled right over those lesser noises and jabbed metaphorical shards of ice into his head, one of the few places that didn't already have real shards of ice jabbed between scales.
Something had exploded nearby, exploded so hugely that the entire mountain was still shaking. Their painstakingly melted tunnel was still mostly intact for the moment, but horrible cracks jutted out through the ground and the largest ones had exploded into the tunnel, shooting shards of ice everywhere as some unfathomable pressure below found the path of least resistance.
He was slumped against the side of the tunnel, his stomach and chest bleeding shallowly. Little nicks akin jabs from fledgling claws or particularly stubborn branches littered his underside, nothing to worry about in the long run.
He had scales, though. Hard surfaces to deflect and blunt the vast majority of the sharp shards that had exploded up from the floor. Grey did not.
Worse, he couldn't see her. He could see a short section of the tunnel, and Star sprawled out on her stomach right over one of the smaller cracks that had opened up, but Grey was gone. She had been between him and Star, and where she had been walking now hosted one of the largest gaps in the ice, a jagged line that stretched through the tunnel at an angle and was slowly climbing up through walls with spidery, jerking motions, wide enough to climb into at its widest.
The initial explosion, or impact, or whatever it had been was over, but the ice wasn't done shifting. Weights had moved, supports were gone, all of the sorts of things he had been taught to avoid while helping expand the cave system back home. And this wasn't rock, it was ice. Ice that melted without a King to reinforce it, and would thus be melting even now.
They were stuck in a shifting mound of broken and slowly melting ice, something massive or massively explosive had just taken an issue with said ice's continued existence as a coherent whole, and he couldn't see Grey, but he could hear that she was in agony somewhere close. One of those things was more immediately important than the others.
He clawed his way over to the largest crack – the ice shook beneath him, and something crashed in the distance – and leaned out to look into it.
Grey's wide, terrified purple eyes stared up at him from what had to be at least ten wingspans straight down. The narrow crack widened to a chasm below, and he could see Grey clinging with a death grip to a jagged spike of ice that protruded from the wall, blood slowly coloring the ice pressed up against her and immediately below her. If she slipped, she would fall a long, long way to the ice far below.
If she fell, if her wings weren't good enough to slow her fall, she would die. He had leaped off of smaller cliffs to free-fall back when he'd had two tailfins to rely on, and those had terminated in the ocean, not the bottom of a jagged hole smashed in ice.
'My head hurts enough without your squalling!' Star barked shakily from her place further up their melted tunnel.
'Help, shut up, or leave,' Toothless snarled. He was done with Star's stupid need to be rude and difficult. The situation had just become immediately life-threatening, and with it any semblance of an excuse for her behavior had disappeared.
'Do you think you can climb back up?' he called down to Grey. It wasn't far, but the crack was inclined inward, so she would be relying on her claws holding her entire body to the ice, and she was in no way a fit or active dragon.
'No!' she wailed.
'Can you glide!' he roared over the cacophony of cracking and crashing ice all around, tentatively clawing at the edge of the crack – ravine, now, and slowly growing wider with every passing moment. Something behind him crashed down. He suspected that the way back to where Hefnd and Einn were was no longer passable, though he'd not bothered to take the time to check.
'I can't fly!' she yelped.
'I said glide!' he clarified. 'Hold your wings out, just slow yourself down when–'
The wall Grey was clinging to cracked with a quick set of overlapping snapping sounds, and the crack ran straight through where her claws were gripping. She yelped, tried to detach one paw to get a new, less precarious grip, and then in a quick, helpless movement lost her grip entirely.
Toothless leaned forward and pushed off without thinking about it, leaping headfirst into the widening gap despite knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do to help her. She was flailing wildly at the air as she fell, her bent wings beating with absolutely no coordination, shrieking all the way. He was diving, then he was clear of the gap and out into the massive hole in the ice nest's wall, spreading his wings and immediately feeling the lack of balance stemming from his tail.
Gliding was not flying; flying involved gaining altitude, picking which direction to go, and having complete control over where one was going and how one got there. Toothless stuck his wings out as far as they would go, leaned into the wind, and did absolutely none of those things, folding his other tailfin in and letting the air take him where it would, so long as it kept him from hitting the ice too hard. He caught a glimpse of Grey doing something similar before she was out of view.
His heart thundered wildly in his chest and his entire underside stung as the chill air whipped across it. He was facing outward, looking out through the oblong hole gouged in the ice wall, out toward the ocean, the ice field, the shore.
All of which were dominated on the left by two massive dragons, one white and the other grey, facing off. On the right, dark ships pulled up, disgorging soldiers and traps and armored dragons.
He didn't notice he was getting close to the ground until a sudden gust of wind almost drove him right into it face-first. He fumbled his wings to try and counter it, splayed out his good tailfin on instinct alone, and accidentally ruined his momentarily peaceful glide by pulling to one side and smacking into the ground.
He lay sprawled out on the ice for a few heartbeats, stunned. He'd had harder crash-landings, most involving testing something new with Maour, but not many. Hitting anything at speed hurt, even when nothing ended up being broken. He'd be a bruised, hobbling wreck in a few days.
Grey limped across his field of vision. Her tail was dragging limply behind her, and she was heavily favoring her back right paw, avoiding putting any weight on it. Blood dripped sporadically from her belly and chest. Her back was to him, but the red splotches on the ice after she passed over it were telling. Not that she seemed to notice.
He didn't need to check her vision to know what so thoroughly had her attention. The vast expanse of open air in front of them, the ships, the hundreds of humans and dragons, the two massive Kings facing off… It had distracted him, and he was a worldly dragon compared to her. He had seen wars or at least battles; the clouds were a distant memory for her, let alone everything else.
'You stink at landing.'
He wondered if Grey had ever seen a mouthy, arrogant idiot get her tail stuffed so far down her throat she could lick her subfins. He wondered if she would like to see such a thing here and now. If Star said one more word about their frantic descent he would find out.
He groaned loudly and stood, shaking off the aching pain with some difficulty. There was a limit to how much of a beating he could take and keep going, and it was fast approaching. Especially in the cold; it already sapped his energy just to be walking and touching and crouching against freezing ice all the time. 'I'm sure your descent was flawless,' he snarled.
'Better than yours,' Star snapped.
'Why did you bother?' he asked, turning enough to confirm with his own eyes that yes, Star was on the ice behind him and no, she didn't look any worse for the jump and glide she had to have done right after him to get down here.
She glanced up, and he followed her gaze. The top of the hole in the ice wasn't that far away, it had looked like more of a drop from above.
Something shifted and an entire block of ice dropped from the ceiling, falling to smash against the bottom of the hole a ways behind them. There was a giant pile of stone rubble where the interior ledges of the ice nest had been, and beyond that presumably more ice and wreckage, all crumbling and falling further as the moments passed.
'That's why,' Star said succinctly.
They couldn't stay here, not when a chunk of ice could break loose at any time and crush them into a fine paste. The entire section where their optimistic tunnel to escape had been might fall on them at any moment; the crack was still growing.
The alternative to being squashed wasn't exactly welcoming, though. He walked up beside Grey – the smell of her blood made his nose itch – and looked out at the growing battle for a moment, just to get a sense of what they were about to walk into.
The two Kings were still facing off, waving their tusks menacingly at each other. He'd seen enough pride-fueled brawls between larger dragons in his time under the Queen that he knew the opening moves of a soon-to-be grudge match. Anyone stupid enough to walk or fly into that area would get crushed, likely without either King ever noticing them.
Off to the side of the battling titans, the ice nest's dragons swarmed over the ships. Armored dragons and their riders fought back, soldiers on the ships and shore set up fortifications on the ground, and it was all turning into a bloody mess on the shoreline. A few of the smaller beached ships were on fire, but more ships were grouped up behind them jockeying for a place to land. Traps were being set up behind the front lines, cages were being dragged away, and while the humans weren't all fighting with the same strategy in mind – some of the ones trapping dragons were getting in the way of the ones killing everything they could get their hands on, and slowing what would have been an even faster and more violent advance – they were effective enough that he didn't doubt they'd come out the victors, given time.
Given time, and assuming nothing changed about the grinding, bloody battle sprawling out across the rapidly reddening shoreline.
Grey whimpered quietly, and Toothless realized that he really didn't think she had any business watching a violent massacre, let alone being on the edge of one herself. A stretch of crumbled, mostly impassible ice boulders and a stretch of currently open shore was all that separated her from the violence, and while she was on the humans' side of things, they didn't know that.
'Yeah, come on, let's go,' he said quickly, stepping forward and sticking a wing out in front of her to block her view. 'Ceiling's crumbling and–' Lightning flashed, and he saw two Skrill flying about above the ships. 'And we don't want to be seen,' he belatedly concluded. If the Skrill noticed their prisoners escaping…
Well, they'd probably do nothing, because they were hoping the open battle would do what they weren't allowed to and finish a Fury or two off. Though nothing would stop them from inflicting a collection of serious but nonfatal wounds and leaving to hope for the best. Best to just pretend the Skrill were still capable of being homicidal and act accordingly.
Something crashed behind them, audible over the dull roar of battle, and Grey flinched. She hunched in on herself, her ears drooping. 'It's too much…' she whined.
'Yes, it is,' he hastily agreed, feeling the pressure of them needing to move before something fell on them. 'We're going away from all that.' He let his tail brush against her side as he turned and took a few prompting steps toward the far edge of the hole. Thankfully he felt her brushing against his tail as he walked, following close behind him. Star too was silent, a minor miracle in the making. He wasn't even sure why she was still tagging along with them.
Perhaps because he was the only one with any sort of plan for getting away from the ice nest. They couldn't fly and only he knew anything about humans, the only other way away from the ice field.
It was too bad, he reflected, looking down at the steep slopes and jumbled mess of ice boulders that separated them from the ground, that he hadn't yet seen any signs of the only humans he actually knew.
O-O-O
'It's a mess!' Von whined as they descended. She had to fly in careful, tight circles to stay under the small opening at the top of the ice mountain, but it was well worth the effort to do so; chunks of ice bigger than her were falling from the edges, the mountain slowly crumbling in on itself after one massive blow too damaging for it to handle. One strike had set off the destruction of the nest, and the King hadn't even been trying to do such a thing.
The ice nest might have once been impressive; she saw signs of sea stacks that could have been connected, and there was dirt and greenery strewn across some parts of the wreckage. The pool of seawater in the middle might have been a nice gathering place for dragons to fish, before it was crowded with fallen ice and stone. There could have been caves melted into the inside of the hollow mountain for the dragons who could be comfortable sleeping in such cold conditions, but only a third of the mountain's sloped walls still held any semblance of ordered structure, and she saw no caves there.
"They have to be in here somewhere," Maour muttered. "You look, I'll watch our backs." The ice nest was empty at the moment, devoid of any signs of life whatsoever, but anyone could fly in from above, or, if they were daring enough, through the steadily-crumbling gorge created by the first tusks slammed through the ice from outside.
Von swooped lower, riding the quickly shifting air currents with absent-minded ease. She scoured the many cracks and crevices in the intact walls with a thoroughness carried by a burning need to find something, flying as close as she dared to check every likely cave, and flying wide of the crumbling sections of wall.
"Boulder!" Maour yelled, and she dove back into the center of the nest, under the cloudy sky and nothing else. A few tense moments later, a massive chunk of ice fell through where she had been flying.
"Saw that one before it broke away, but most of them aren't so obvious," Maour warned. "Be ready to do that again." It was taken for granted that they would keep looking, despite the danger. This was what they were here for, there was nowhere else Toothless could be…
A dark, worrying idea formed in Von's mind, spurred on by a challenging roar from one of the Kings outside, partially visible through the growing gaps in the ice as they knocked their tusks together. 'Unless he is being forced to fight,' she guessed. They knew nothing of what had happened to Toothless once he was taken here; maybe the Skrill were abducting Night Furies to form an unwilling strike force for their master. Grounded for even more control over them, treated badly and made to fight in defense of the one who was enslaving them…
"That…" Maour trailed off. Outside, dragons fought and died, killing humans and each other with equal ferocity. The Kings roared, and the ice cracked and shattered, and underneath it all a low, desperate roar echoed, nearly drowned out.
It was a familiar roar, bearing the same grating undertones that graced her own voice when she raised it loud enough, the peculiar tone and pitch unique to her kind. Von doubled back on herself in a swift, fluid motion, ears up as she strained to hear the roar. It repeated, even more desperate, and she saw a flash of black down in the rubble of ice and stone at the bottom of the nest. She dove.
He was wedged between two jagged chunks of ice, his tail up as he dug at the crevice, his back to her. Two tailfins waved distractedly at her as the unknown male – not Toothless, no matter how much she wished otherwise – roared again, blasting his frustration at the ice under him.
He wasn't Toothless, and he wasn't Einn either, but he was still a Night Fury and still in some sort of distress. Von landed on the flatter of the two ice chunks and barked to get his attention. 'What kind of help do you need?' she asked when his roar cut off.
He backed out of the crevice and whirled on them, his teeth bared in a dangerous snarl blunted by just how scrawny the rest of him was. 'He's trapped down there! I know it!'
"Who?" Maour demanded.
The orange-eyed Fury glanced at Maour, looked Von in the eye, then jerked his head up to stare at Maour again as what he had seen the first time made its way through his panic-addled mind. 'What… Kappi!'
"He's down there?" Maour asked.
'Yes,' the orange-eyed Fury confirmed. 'Help me dig!'
That was enough of an explanation to get Von into the crevice right beside the nameless male. Maour dismounted right before she dove bodily into it like she had seen the male doing, and presumably continued to keep watch over her defenseless backside. She envied him his composure; she had to stop herself from building up a big blast of fire and hurling it in the general direction of the ice between her and her brother. The only thing that was likely to accomplish was flinging her bodily out of the crevice with a burned face, but it was still tempting.
'Down this way,' the male corrected when she started flaming directly ahead of herself, pawing at her face and directing her closer to his front paws. 'He was over here when it hit, we were both in a pocket of air at the bottom, but a chunk of stone cut us off and I had to dig my way out.'
Von grunted in acknowledgement and continued to steadily melt at the ice. She could see now that the ice was darker below her than below the male, which indicated that she was above the rock and he was off to the side, and all the water she was melting had to be draining somewhere, since it wasn't puddling in the hole. The frigid chill of ice against her stomach and back only spurred her on, giving her a vivid glimpse of the demise that awaited her brother if she didn't get to him fast enough.
Her fire was running low when something gave underneath the male. He fell with a yelp and Von choked back the rest of her fire, shimmying to the side to look into the hole that had developed.
She saw the orange-eyed male, sprawled across a still bulk of black littered with scars. Scars… and two prominently displayed tailfins splayed bonelessly against the rock behind him.
'Come on, wake up, if I survived that disaster you should have too,' the younger male muttered, kicking at the dragon who Von suspected was Einn, the mute older male who had started this whole debacle.
Von craned her neck to get a good look at the rest of the air pocket, panic growing in her chest once again. There were no other Furies splayed out in the small open space, though half of a Monstrous Nightmare was jutting out from under the ice. She tried not to think about what the top half probably looked like… Or what might have happened to Toothless. But she didn't see him anywhere.
Einn groaned feebly, and the younger male let out a low cry of relief that he for some reason immediately stifled. Von dropped down into the hole and took that as her cue to redirect the male's attention to more immediately important matters. 'Tell me which direction to start flaming for Kappi!' she snapped.
The younger male crouched defensively. 'I don't have a clue,' he huffed. 'He and the others were flaming a tunnel… Either they were crushed or they made it out first.'
'You said he was down here,' Von objected.
'I lied,' the male barked. 'Got you to help, didn't it?'
Several different responses came to mind, all crowding each other out and rendering Von speechless. She settled for an extremely frustrated snarl that made him flinch, then turned to leap up into the crevice and away from the maddeningly callous dragon she couldn't quite find it within herself to hate.
She could, on the other paw, gripe incessantly as she squeezed herself upward through the narrow crevice. 'Rude, stupid, idiotic jerk with no concern for the feelings of others,' she muttered as she hauled herself up onto solid ice next to Maour.
"I heard," Maour said in a low voice. "At least now we found somebody. And we know Toothless was in the wall when the King working with Drago smashed it…"
Von didn't know what she would do if it turned out their own ally had killed Toothless in a freak coincidence. To have come so far, tried so hard, only to have made no difference or even doomed her brother by interfering…
'We should check outside the ice nest, if he made it out of the wall he would need to climb down,' she said quietly.
Maour reclaimed his spot in the saddle and they were off. She struggled to find the same urgency as she had felt before encountering the orange-eyed male; what before had been a rush of urgency was now a flood of dread. Toothless was either dead or out of the nest, and she didn't want to know which it was, not when not knowing meant he might still be alive. It was stupid and they did still need to find him, but her unreasonable dread persisted.
She went up and out the top of the nest, as there were no stable paths out through the walls, slowly crumbling as they were. Up there, high above the bulk of the battle, she could see the carnage being wrought below. The Kings were battling in earnest now, swinging their ponderous tusks back and forth and grappling chest to chest in a brutal struggle on a scale larger than anything she had ever witnessed. Every deflected blow shook the ground, and whenever one of them took a step back the rocky rubble beneath them was like sand to their weight.
Behind the defending King, the white one they had come to fight, the exterior of the ice nest was in shambles. The fighting along the shoreline had moved all the way up to the foot of the ice mountain, and there were dragons flaming and grappling all over the crumbling ice. Some soldiers were setting up small net-throwing devices with their backs to various chunks of ice, forcing dragons to come at them from the front, but most of the fighting in that area was happening in the air, because the ground was just too complicated and unstable to fight on paw.
The Skrill were nowhere to be seen; they weren't blasting the invading King with lightning anymore, but she didn't know what they had decided to do instead. Hopefully they had burned through their stored-up lightning and were stuck fighting like everyone else.
A massive flash of lightning down among the ice boulders killed that hope almost immediately.
O-O-O
Toothless picked his way under an oblong piece of ice with as much care as he could muster. It had tumbled down to land at an angle propped up against a boulder, leaving a Night-Fury-sized gap that could be crawled under, so long as one wasn't worried about upsetting the balance of the ice above one's head and being instantly crushed.
But that ever-present worry had long since dulled for him; this was the third precarious ice placement he had walked under since starting the trek down to the shore proper, and he had lost count of the ways they could die if something went wrong. They weren't being actively attacked, and that was the best he could hope for.
Grey and Star were still behind him; he was beginning to feel the strain of being the one relied upon to make all the decisions, but he couldn't fault them for trusting him given the situation. Grey had been imprisoned long enough that she had no experience with anything outside the ice nest, and Star… Maybe she had decided that he was her best chance of escaping for good and was just acting accordingly. She wasn't wrong.
The ice ceiling above was low enough that he had to squirm under it near the far edge, scraping his back with its cold, jagged surface. Beyond the low edge was open air for all of half a winglength, another less passable mound of smaller ice fragments blocking the way forward. He could easily climb over it, but that would make him visible from above, and there were enemy dragons in the air. To the left, there was a sheer wall of ice. To the right, a narrow vertical crevice that might be a dead end.
He was bruised and tired and mentally exhausted from the constant danger without any good physical solution, but he was still the most fit of their trio to make decisions like this one, so it was up to him. Which choice would get them safely closer to the shore, where the ships of dubious allegiance were beached?
They would have to go over the pile of smaller fragments, he decided. He could get a good look at how far they had gone, and how the battle had progressed while they slunk along, out of sight.
'Keep low, watch the sky, be ready to fire if someone comes down to attack,' he warned both females. They had both exhausted their fire flaming the tunnel, but by now they should have recovered a shot or two.
He crept up the unstable slope of the mound of ice. The individual pieces were all slick and wet from slowly melting, and he wondered what was different about this ice that it shattered so thoroughly while the massive pieces all around it had survived the fall intact. Whatever the cause, it was an annoying deviation in the terrain that offered a tolerably difficult ascent instead of a sheer climb.
He reached the top of the mound and found that even at its highest point he couldn't see over the boulders around it. Thankfully, there was a clear space down on the other side, so he didn't need to see over to see the battle. They were already at the edge of it.
A dozen heavily-armored humans were holed up in the passage ahead, three wielding rectangular shields and blocking the path, their backs to him. A solitary Monstrous Nightmare was on the other side of the shield wall, spewing heavy liquid flames all over it. He could have gone over the shields, they weren't any taller than the humans, but the nine behind the shields were all brandishing long spears, pointing them right at where his head would have to be to spew flames over the shields.
The shieldbearers were slowly backing up the passage, unable to push forward against the pressure and heat. The spearmen couldn't get past the shields. Something was going to have to give.
Toothless considered intervening on the behalf of the humans; they were nominally on the same side, after all, and maybe a good first impression would lead into them helping him get the females and himself clear of it all. But the more realistic outcome of such intervention would be taking a spear to the gut as the humans all turned on him. The middle of a battle against dragons was a bad time to introduce himself.
He hesitated, waiting to see what would happen.
Someone else did not.
Lightning flashed, sudden and bright. A second, larger figure came in behind the Monstrous Nightmare. 'I got this, big boy,' Condescending purred. A second flash of pure energy blasted the shields away, and she lunged forward. The soldiers didn't stand a chance, caught so off-guard.
Toothless backed down, out of sight. He backed right into Star, who huffed quietly. 'We're going a different way, silently,' he hissed. If he had his fire, if he didn't have two noncombatants to protect… Getting into a fight with Condescending was a bad idea, but he was itching to hurt the Skrill nonetheless. Best to avoid her notice and the temptation to do something about it altogether.
'Okay,' Star said, a little too loudly for comfort. Grey glared at her.
Toothless, for his part, unsheathed his teeth and crouched. He knew his luck well enough to know what was about to happen next.
'What's that I hear?' Condescending crested the top of the ice pile, her talons sinking deep into the loose detritus. Little sparks were flickering sporadically around her jaws, but otherwise she was curiously devoid of lightning. 'You should be safely trapped,' she hummed menacingly at them. 'Can't risk you getting killed out here…' There was a dangerous, frustrated undertone to her words. 'That won't do at all.'
'We-' Grey began, her voice trembling.
Something large and black dropped onto Condescending's back, driving her into the ice pile. Teeth savaged the back of her neck and a purple blade stained black with dried blood bit into her side, jabbing deep. Lightning exploded outward, but it was weak and practically harmless in comparison to every demonstration of power Toothless had ever seen from a Skrill.
Condescending threw her attacker – attackers, for they had separated to better strike at her– off with a desperate roll, pitifully small flashes of lightning sparking off her body in every direction. Von made to leap right back on, and Maour swung his scythe, but Condescending leaped up to dig her talons into one of the taller ice boulders surrounding the pile and pulled herself out of easy eviscerating range.
Two bolts of blue fire hit her back, and she tumbled out of sight. Toothless saw Grey readying another shot, while Star shook her head angrily, presumably out once again. But when Condescending didn't immediately return, his eyes were drawn to their saviours.
To Von, as she leaped up to follow Condescending. Only to the top of the ice; whatever she saw there had her turning her back on where the Skrill had last been, dropping back down to the ice pile.
To Maour, who spun his scythe in a short, hurried movement to lock the blades in, then dropped it on the ground.
They were here. It was not wishful thinking, or hope, or hallucinations brought on by despair. They were here, he was here… They had found him.
Toothless closed the distance between himself and them as fast as his aching body would allow. Von met him halfway and they slammed into each other, chest to chest. She let out a relieved whine so shrill and vehement that it made his head spin, and he licked a wet patch of blood – not hers – off the back of her neck, all while whining back.
But she was only half of the siblings he had so missed and worried about. He heard and saw Maour coming up beside them and chose that moment to pull back from her embrace, twist around, and gently shove Maour to the ground. A fierce licking followed, which his brother did absolutely nothing to resist, instead grabbing his ears and pulling his head close.
"Hey," Maour said, his physical voice muffled by the oblong head resting his chest and face, but still unmistakably cracking with emotion. "Found you."
There was a weight behind those three simple words, one that spoke more than any amount of elaboration could have, at least to Toothless. Of the months they'd spent apart, the months his siblings had spent searching for him, probably unsure whether he was even still alive, only to finally find him here, in the midst of so much death and destruction. They found him, even though they had to chase his captors across frigid seas and find allies to fight right into the heart of their territory.
Von barked a near-hysterical laugh right in Toothless' ear. 'Finally,' she added. 'You are not dead!'
'Not dead, not badly hurt, and very glad you're here,' Toothless replied. Even with everything that was going on, with all the remaining danger and uncertainty…
One thing was right in the world. One big, important thing. The rest could get in line and wait until he was done savoring the feeling.
Well… Most of it could wait. Somebody was missing. 'Where's Ruffnut?'
O-O-O
Ruffnut was no expert in inter-dragon conflict – except when it came to Night Furies, and even then naysayers liked to claim otherwise – but she was pretty sure she knew what she was seeing in the distance.
"I'm telling you, one of them is female and they're going to get it on soon," she asserted to the nearest available set of ears. This happened to be the sailor currently trying to readjust their sail to tack them to the side, around the fat metal end of the ship directly in front of them.
"We can hope," the belabored sailor grunted. "Better than 'em turnin' on us and freezing the fleet before we can get clear."
"We're trying to get around, not clear," Ruffnut corrected him.
"No, we're turning around," Eret called out from behind her. "We've got a full hold, and glory is a poor substitute for pay. Nothing more that half a dozen able-bodied trappers can contribute to this mess. We're leaving."
"No, no, that's stupid," Ruffnut huffed, crossing her arms. "Drago's orders, remember? Fill the cages, then get down to the shore and pitch in." He'd said nothing of the sort – that would require talking to her, which he had at no point done – but Eret didn't know that, and what he didn't know wouldn't confuse him.
The ship was tacking to the side; Ruffnut could literally see her plans turning around and sailing away. They were pointed at the side of the channel through the ice, now, right at…
"Would you look at that," she said loudly, a big smile fighting its way onto her face despite her best efforts. "How much was the bounty for the rider and their four-winged dragon?"
Up on top of one of the icebergs the big dragon had shoved to the side, a familiarly tawny and broad dragon was limping along, a limp, human arm dangling from his back. He had made the tactical error of walking too close to the edge of a low-sitting iceberg, and thus being within eyeshot of any intrepid sailor looking to make a quick but hefty profit. And really, walking? He had wings to spare!
"A lot," Eret announced. "Set course for the iceberg in front of it! If we can scale that cliff, we can get in front of it! If it's walking then it can't fly, and if it can't fly it's easy pickings."
"That's more like it," Ruffnut whispered as the remaining crewmembers sprang into greed-fueled action. They weren't all that far from the iceberg, and the intermittent roars from the big dragons smacking it out on the shore made it hard to hear their ship coming… She didn't expect them to actually corner the four-winged dragon, but it was something to tempt them away from leaving the scene of the battle before she could get some stowaways on board.
They quietly broke away from the body of the armada and sailed off perpendicular to the other ships, towards the edge of the channel. The four-winged dragon plodded along, unaware of their intentions. The other enemy dragons gave their little ship no trouble at all; the real fight was going on at the shoreline and on the beach, not in the back of the reinforcements. The dragons were all going for the easy targets in the bloody melee.
In what felt like no time at all, Eret's crew was digging anchor picks into the side of an iceberg twice as high as their mast, and Ruffnut was handed a pair of picks for herself. Nobody questioned her right to go up with the rest of the crew; nobody was stupid enough to deny her, and they were short-handed besides.
She still didn't think it would work, even as she hauled herself up onto the iceberg's mostly flat top, but she had to admit that their barebones plan had gone flawlessly so far. She, Eret, and three less interesting trappers were now directly between the presumably grounded dragon and the ice nest. No reinforcements, nowhere to run on the flat plane of the iceberg, and he was burdened with…
With a not-so-unconscious dragon rider. Ruffnut gripped her ice pick in one hand and pat the alcoholic dragon-blaster secured in a pouch at her side with the other. One for the human, one for the dragon.
The dragon saw them, of course. He stopped his plodding trek a good several hundred paces from them, out of reliable arrow range. His rider was standing up on his back – Ruffnut envied the rider their sheer stubbornness, to want to stand when sitting would work just as well – and he was turning around.
"Who feels like running for the prize?" Eret asked the group. "It can't be very fast on the ground with those big wings."
"We're gonna get roasted," one of the trappers complained. Ruffnut noticed that he wasn't turning back, though. The lure of copious amounts of gold truly did embolden even the most cowardly.
All was not well with the distant duo, either. The rider had gotten off the four-winged dragon and was prodding at his wings. Then they were pointing their staff at Ruffnut and the dragon trappers – no, actually it looked like the staff was pointed at the big dragon brawl going on at the ice nest. Close enough.
All the while, Ruffnut and the others were steadily closing in… She would feel immensely cheated if they managed this brag-worthy feat because their prey was too distracted to put up a fight. And she wasn't even invested in being a dragon trapper; helping out was just her cover to commandeer their ship later!
"Don't throw the net until I say so," Eret warned.
Ruffnut glanced back long enough to confirm that yes, one of the lackeys was lugging a net with him. And here she had assumed they would be taking down the four-winged dragon with wits and normal weaponry. Now she definitely felt cheated.
She and the trappers continued to stalk toward the arguing dragon and rider. They were definitely arguing; those increasingly frustrated gestures with the staff did not speak of somebody calmly conversing. The rider kept pointing at the nest, and the four-winged dragon angrily flung a wing in their face. The rider examined the wing for a moment, then pushed the wing back into line with the other one on that side and made an exaggerated flapping motion.
Ruffnut was unimpressed by their mediocre charade skills. Their lack of situational awareness was even worse. She and the trappers were closing in, spreading out as they approached to come from different angles.
The four-winged dragon let out a short roar of frustration, turned, and tried to grab the rider with his teeth. The rider dodged, smacked his head with the staff, then jabbed it at him in a far less friendly fashion. He backed off, glaring at the rider and then turned to give Ruffnut and the trappers an evil eye, too.
"Which one's worth more, the rider or the dragon?" one of the lackeys called out to Eret.
"Definitely the rider, but the dragon can fly away and the rider can't," Eret responded. Ruffnut doubted that the dragon could fly – he had to have some reasons for not postponing his disagreement with his rider long enough to take them somewhere safer – but she didn't disagree with his reasoning.
The rider turned and finally seemed to realize that they were an imminent threat. That ugly staff was pointed right at Eret, and the four-winged dragon moved to stand beside the rider, their quarrel momentarily forgotten.
Ruffnut hoisted her weapon. She could take out the alcohol and smash it on the ground right now, and completely disable the dragon, but that was far too simple a use for such a hard-won prize. They'd be doing this the old-fashioned way.
The lackey with the net charged first, holding it ready to throw as he closed the distance. Eret and the others followed suit, brandishing short swords, an ax, and what looked like throwing knives. Ruffnut ran in behind them, looking for an appropriate opening.
Eret met the rider sword for staff and immediately took a jab to the gut. The four-winged dragon opened his mouth to flame them all, was distracted by the partially-tangled net that smacked into his head, and then Ruffnut was upon him. She tried to punch him in his fat throat as he reared back to shake the net off, but the slick coating of snow under her boots gave way at the worst possible moment and she skidded right into him, her fist and arm crumpling against his big chest.
He tried to drop and crush her, so she slid to the side, grabbed a convenient bit of dragon-whisker and then horn, and hauled herself onto his neck.
He was not a Night Fury, but he was a dragon. A fist and knee to the soft spot behind his jaw drew out a pained grunt. A big wing tried to scrape her off, and she slid down his face to avoid it. She dropped her knife in her scramble to stay away from his maw and inadvertently kneed his eye.
Something big swooped overhead, and she heard Eret cursing up a storm, but she was too busy not being squashed or barbecued to care about anything beyond the disoriented dragon leaning down to paw at her. She kneed his other eye – intentionally, this time – and then pushed herself right off his head, landing on her back on the ice in front of him.
He was squinting out of both eyes, raising a paw to squash her head far more slowly than he probably would have liked…
She fumbled at the pouch on her hip, pulling it off her belt by mistake, popped the loosened cork, and stuck her fingers in. The potent alcohol tingled on her skin – one more reason to hope she had enough to try once this was all over – and the four-winged dragon came down. She rolled to the side, leaving the pouch where it was, and the head-crushing paw crushed nothing more than a bit of snow.
Before he could try again, she rolled forward and sprang up, smacking his face with an open-handed slap.
With her alcohol-wetted fingers right across his nostrils.
His eyes rolled back as he swayed once, twice, then unceremoniously fell to his side, eyelids fluttering closed.
Ruffnut stood, dusted the snow off her backside, and mentally counted her bruises. She stopped after the tenth one, bending over to pick up her now sodden pouch. Half the alcohol had spilled out, but there was enough left in the bottle that she went to the effort of recorking it.
Then she remembered that Eret and the others had gone into the fight with her and thought to look around.
Eret and his three lackeys were all staring slack-jawed at her.
"So…" She made a show of looking around again. "Where's the rider."
"You should be dead ten times over," the trapper who had messed up the net throw said gormlessly.
"You should have better aim," she shot back. "I practically had to do it all myself!"
"You're insane," the disgruntled trapper shot back.
"Wrestle one dragon and you've wrestled them all," she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. This four-winged dragon and Boom weren't all that different; he was just bigger and had more wings. And talons on the ends of his paws instead of nimble claws. And tornado flame-breath instead of projectiles… Totally the same. "Seriously, where's the rider?"
"Got picked up by a Snafflefang," Eret remarked. "Left the four-wing behind."
"Wow, cowards everywhere today," Ruffnut remarked. The net-throwing trapper reddened and opened his mouth. "Lucky for you I feel like sharing my catch," she continued. He paused and then deliberately closed his mouth again.
"Planning on dragging your catch back to the ship by yourself?" Eret asked.
"Nah, you guys need to feel like you contributed," she dismissed. "I'm… going for a walk." She'd have an amble around while she waited. She recalled a third dragon involved in the crash that had stranded the four-winged dragon here…
The Skrill had probably flown away, but she might as well check. The four-winged dragon had left a trail of limping prints in the snow, so she knew where to look.
O-O-O
"Ruffnut?" It took Maour a moment to think about anything other than the overwhelming relief of knowing Toothless was safe and sound, right there in front of him. And crushing him to the ground with his heavy head, but that was less important. "She's out on the ships somewhere, I think."
'You've got a plan?' Toothless asked. He lifted his head and backed up from both Maour and Von, giving them space and a good look at him for the first time since their hurried arrival. He didn't look so good, all in all, though infinitely better than Maour had feared. A few new scars, bruises, and a general sense of frailness could be overlooked, simply by remembering that he wasn't dead and his wings weren't broken.
The two Furies behind him, though...
They were a study in opposites, in some ways; one was pure black with only a handful of scars and green eyes, whereas the other was a sickly grey in color, completely scaleless, and staring at the ground with vibrant purple eyes. But both were painfully emaciated, and both sported wings with visibly crooked crimps in the middle. Neither looked at all healthy, and he wanted to throw them both at Eldurhjarta and a pile of fish, in that order.
'Is your human trying to look like one of us, or does it just admire our scales to the point of obsession?' the female with a normal coloration asked snidely.
"More the former than the latter, but I'm not denying I like the look," Maour answered as he stood and retrieved his scythe. Both females jolted at his unexpected mental voice, and the grey one anxiously checked over both shoulders before seeming to believe who was speaking.
'This is Maour, and he is going to get you off this island, so keep a civil tongue in your head,' Toothless growled.
'What am I, the brainless muscle carrying him around?' Von snorted. 'I'll be helping too. I'm Svarturvon, not so pleased to meet you, ugly cousin.' The green-eyed female bristled.
'No relation,' Toothless corrected. 'The green eyes are a coincidence.'
'Oh, good,' Von huffed. 'And you?' she nodded toward the grey-skinned Fury. If she was even a Fury at all… Maour had never seen a Night Fury without their midnight black skin and scales. He would have to ask… Later, when they weren't on the edge of a warzone. Quite a lot had to wait until they were truly safe.
'Grey,' the female offered timidly. 'Nice to meet… both of you?'
"And you," Maour replied. "But we should save our proper introductions for when we're well clear of this mess. Ruffnut has been doing something with a smaller ship and its crew, so I think we can count on her to get you two off the island if we can find her and get you there." He pulled the saddlebag off of Von's saddle.
"Just us?" Star huffed.
'Just you,' Toothless confirmed, spinning around to present his tail to Maour. 'Which kind?' he asked, peering back.
"Manual, I didn't want to mess with the fancy new stuff in an unfamiliar forge, let alone in an unknown, probably dangerous situation." Toothless' tail was no worse for his ordeal, so fitting the actual tailfin to the bare edge was the work of a moment, an easy habit to fall back on. Strap the bare edge to the tail, spread the false fin, check the length of the pins…
'What can you tell us about the Skrill and this place?' Von asked. 'What do you think we're going to need to know?'
'Five Skrill,' Toothless reported as Maour worked. 'All incapable of killing Night Furies so long as their King's orders constrain them. Vicious, capable of injuring and torturing, but no killing. Not sure how that applies to enemies instead of prisoners, though, so maybe assume they can kill just to be safe.'
"Four Skrill, we left one dead on an iceberg," Maour corrected. "The one who came back from the last raid injured?"
'You killed Sadistic?' the green-eyed female demanded, sounding curiously offended.
'If you could fly I'd offer to show you his body, but you'll have to take our word for it,' Von replied.
'Good,' Grey barked. Maour looked up just in time to see her cringing at her own loudness, then continuing at a lower volume. 'He was the worst of them.'
'That leaves four,' Toothless continued. Maour worked his way up his brother's side, laying out the minimalistic riding harness he would need to stay on his brother's back. It was no saddle, sporting no cushioning or any features at all, but it held up the foot pedal and would secure him to Toothless' back through a simple leather double-loop around his shoulders, and that was enough. 'They're not using as much lightning as I would expect, and you drove Condescending off… But it's weird that she retreated at all.'
'They've been wasting their lightning on the King, they probably don't have much left,' Von offered. 'There are clouds above, but it's not a thunderstorm.'
"So they're conserving it," Maour guessed. He vaulted up onto Toothless' back and slid his foot into the pedal. Toothless flicked his tail out straight and Maour ran the false fin through its full range of motion, twice to be sure. "Saving it for the shots that count, or to get out of sticky situations."
'Try not to give them worthwhile targets,' Von advised. 'We can sneak around the bulk of the fighting… probably. Or we could just hide you two here until the fight is over.'
'That assumes our side wins,' Toothless huffed. 'I'm not so sure I want to rely on that.'
Maour flicked the false tailfin out. "Let's go see how the fight is going. Von, stay and protect them?"
'You got it.' He could feel her presence at the back of his mind still. For now, it might be better to leave their link as it was. He had just gotten his brother back; now was not the time to lose track of his sister.
Toothless took off, and long-ingrained muscle memory had Maour effortlessly adjusting his side of the tail to complement his brother's every move. After so long working together, he didn't need an inside view of Toothless' muscles to know exactly how things should work and what was going to happen next.
The human and normal dragon front of the battle continued much as it had before, albeit with a lessening of numbers on both sides. The humans had seized control of most of the beach and a long stretch of shoreline, forcing the dragons out and making the ground hazardous to approach. There were markedly fewer armored dragons flying about, but Maour could see quite a few on the ground, lending their fire and mostly fireproof exteriors to countering the braver enemy dragons who managed to land.
The Kings, meanwhile, were going at it full force. At the moment, both were backing up, mutually deciding to make some space so their tusks could be used to full effect. The invading King stood with his back paws – if such massive things could truly be called paws – in the water, his tusks angled slightly up to point at the defending King's chest.
Both let out bone-rattling roars and stabbed forward with their tusks. They clashed, deflecting each other off to the side, then backed up. Again, the short, violent jabbing motion, their legs dug in for any purchase they could find in the terrain, knocking together so hard the ground shook.
Twice more they clashed and mutually deflected each other. Twice more the ground shook and the air vibrated. Then, on the fifth pass, the deadlock ended.
The invading King, discernable from the other by his darker scales and slightly smaller size, jabbed forward with a twist of his head.
The defending King did something very similar at the same time, also angling himself differently to avoid being so easily deflected.
If one or the other had made such a move, it would have drawn blood, a shallow or perhaps serious wound inflicted before deflection.
But they both did it, in opposite directions. Spears of ivory shot forward, passing right by each other and piercing unfathomably durable hide on both sides, stabbing straight into the bulk of both Kings in a mutually harmful embrace.
Maour's breath caught in his throat. Toothless fell into a stunned glide. Most of the battle paused, if only for a heartbeat.
The older, larger King had two tusks jabbed into his chest, deep and right of center, one just below his stout neck. The younger, invading King, having stood slightly lower, was not so lucky. One tusk went to the intersection of neck and chest. The other jabbed right into his face, the tusk scraping against bone and scale and deflecting to the path of least resistance. Right through the left eye.
A cry of despair rose among the armored dragons as the invading King sagged limply, pulling the older forward and down with his ponderous weight.
The older King pulled his tusks back, hauling himself off the tusks of his fallen enemy. The horrible, gaping holes left in his chest started expelling waterfalls of blood when the tusks left them, and a horrible realization came upon Maour, and doubtless upon the majority of those on the battlefield.
The older King let out one long, rattling roar of victory, and then a wet cough. The blood pouring from his chest didn't abate in the slightest.
Then he fell, his body falling deceptively slowly against the ruined ice nest as he staggered to the side. He slumped there, pushing inward the last bits of standing wall on that side of the ice nest. His blood pumped feverishly out of his body in steady spurts.
Toothless was descending, making for their sister and the two females he had brought out of the ice nest, but it was too late. The entire battlefield knew when the other King died. The now free dragons still living shrieked loud enough to shake the sky.
Author's Note: No backlog plus an extra-long and important chapter plus lots of real-life time sinks (Hello, 14+ hour school/senior project days, how are you this time of year? Especially annoying? You don't say.) equals a delayed chapter. That said, it's Thanksgiving week here in the USA, so I've got a whole week off. Guess what my no. 1 priority is during that week? Finishing the last three (or four, but that's a thing best discussed later) chapters of this story, of course! Hopefully that news makes up for the two-day delay on this chapter.