O-O-O
A horrid, outraged shriek split the air upon the defending King's last breath shuddering to an end, and what came next was not an end to the battle. Not even close. The fighting continued, unabated or perhaps even invigorated by the King's demise. Some dragons fled on either side, and some even switched sides, but the battle largely continued as before, if not more viciously.
Under other circumstances, the deaths of both Kings would have ended any war waged by their thralls. Dragons forced to fight would fight no longer, with no reason to continue killing each other. The dragons made to fight Berk had stopped with the death of their controlling Queen, dispersing to live their lives as they saw fit. Maour had seen it happen, and he understood the cause. Without a driving force, a reason, there was no fighting to be had.
But that outcome depended on the dragons who had been controlled having no other reasons to fight. Here, the attackers had come to destroy the enemy King, and that was it. They had won. The defenders, though… Their home had been destroyed. Their kin slain, in some cases by former friends or estranged family. It was personal for many, and their own personal enemies were still there to be fought.
Worst of all, the four most dangerous dragons on the battlefield had just lost all reason to ignore the presence of Night Furies. They would not be leaving the battle, far from it. They would be out for the blood they could finally freely shed .
Toothless dove like his life depended on it, back down to where Von and the two rescued females were hiding. Maour pulled the tailfin in and held on tight, feeling the mounting urgency. At least one Skrill knew where they all were, and while that one had fled for whatever reason, they could come back or spread the word.
Toothless had started his dive the moment he saw the defending King's wounds, but he still wasn't fast enough. Lightning flashed below them, a large, blindingly bright figure leaping into the narrow space between ice boulders to flood the entire area with lethal energy. Von and the others weren't directly in the Skrill's line of fire – Maour didn't see them, they had moved from the pile of smaller rubble – but the insanely large flood of lightning branched out through the crevices and jolted through ice, spreading like a plague.
Landing on the Skrill while they exploded with power wasn't an option, so Toothless did the next best thing and slammed down onto the ice lip of the canyon the Skrill stood in, shattering the lip of the ice and sending pieces tumbling down on the Skrill in his stead. The lightning sputtered to a stop, and then one final bolt flashed up in front of Maour, narrowly missing Toothless' head.
Further blasts of lightning failed to follow. The Skrill – not the one from before, smaller and with a more wild assortment of spines – shrieked at them and tensed, but nothing came of it. Not even a spark.
Any sane Skrill would have balked, then. Out of lightning, facing a Night Fury and possibly several more… The one from earlier had fled.
This one did not.
Toothless had to hop to the side to keep his skull in one piece, a heavy wing-arm jabbing up at his neck as the Skrill leaped up. He bit into the Skrill's wing as the limb came close, teeth digging through the wing membrane. Maour whipped his scythe around to jab at the leading edge. The point stuck in the wing, and then both he and Toothless were yanked forward and down, the Skrill pulling them into the narrow canyon.
If the Skrill were still capable of expelling lightning from anywhere on his body, the fight would have ended then and there. But he was not, and Maour took full advantage, throwing caution to the wind as he disconnected from the makeshift saddle and pulled his scythe free. He was off of Toothless and onto the Skrill's back as soon as the dragons hit the ground. Toothless scrabbled around to pull himself under the Skrill, using his flat body to his advantage, while Maour swung his scythe like a pickaxe, stabbing the point in between rugged scales.
Attacked from above and below, the Skrill thrashed like mad, screeching his agony and mindless rage into their ears. Toothless was momentarily slowed by the painfully disorienting noises, but Maour bore the auditory attack and kept digging. Two more swings broke a single scale loose, and a third sank the point of his scythe into raw flesh down to where the curved blade capped the wooden shaft.
That seemed to make up the Skrill's mind as to which of them was the greater threat. Maour went from driving his blade home to clinging on for life in a heartbeat as the Skrill slammed himself down, then awkwardly rolled to the side, driving his back against the icy surface of one of the two walls of the small canyon. The other end of Maour's scythe drove into the ice, then was ripped free of the Skrill in an ugly spray of blood and uprooted flesh. Maour was crushed for a moment, a dragon's bulk pinning him to the wall, a blade cutting through his armor right around his midsection, the air brutally smashed from his lungs–
It ended with another ear-splitting shriek and the Skrill shuddering violently. The entire dark grey and purple scaled body began thrashing wildly. Maour dropped down to the ground in the corner between gravel, ice, and scale, landing on his hands and knees.
The flailing subsided, and Maour hurriedly crawled out from under the Skrill. Toothless was there, his entire head bloody, and there was a matching hole in the Skrill's stomach, one Maour tried not to look too closely at.
The incensed cries of Skrill, several of them, rose above the hubbub of the not-so-distant battle beyond the ice boulders. Much closer, a Night Fury let out a muted battle cry and charged around the corner, while another peeked over from the top of one of the icebergs, fire illuminating her open mouth.
Both stuttered to a stop when they saw the obviously dead Skrill. 'Good, he's dead,' Von snarled, while Grey hurriedly maneuvered herself down to ground level, hopping over and sliding down with her claws digging into the ice. Star cautiously followed behind Grey, her gaze snapping to the Skrill for a moment, then turning to Maour and Toothless.
Maour shook his scythe, ridding it of a few small chunks of flesh and most of the fresh blood. He pulled at the newly gashed armor panel over his side, testing its strength. It didn't give, but he suspected it would if another dragon pulled, stabbed, or otherwise tested it.
'Skrill are loose, at least three of them,' Toothless hurriedly recounted. 'That wasn't Condescending we just killed, and Angry had to find out where we were from someone, to get here so fast. They know where we are. We need to move.'
There was no argument, not even from the green-eyed female Maour still didn't know the name of. Maour remounted, Von took up a place behind the two flightless females, and everyone made for the open shore. It was the only place they could go, dangerous though it might be. If the Skrill knew to check the ice boulders then they couldn't hide anywhere in there, and the only way off the island required that they connect with a ship of some sort. Further, though the grounded females probably didn't know it yet, the beached ships were being mostly ignored by the enemy dragons, and the ones stuck behind the beached front were entirely out of the fight. Safety, in friendly territory.
They just had to get there. Through the open, behind the human line of offense, and then back to the ships. One quick, dangerous run through a fight where at least three of the combatants would be looking for them.
"Would it be better to go out and hunt down the other three Skrill?" Maour asked. Once they were dead the grounded Night Furies could safely hide and wait for the fight to finish. Two on three – or three on three, if they left the grounded females without a flight-capable guard, and if he counted himself – wasn't great odds, but they would probably end up fighting anyway. At least going hunting was taking the initiative.
'I don't think it matters,' Toothless huffed as they passed between two final boulders and then out into the open. 'They're hunting us already.'
O-O-O
Grey ran along behind Star, out into the cold and wind and terror. The noises clawed at her ears, horrible sounds of rage and agony and gut-wrenching fear all at once. What had been an unnerving background sound was now assaulting her, blasting and shrieking and screaming right in front of her, around her, over her, everywhere!
She whimpered and hopped off a disgusting mass of something warm and squishy, then again as she landed on a sharp thing with her back paw, but she couldn't stand taking her eyes off the lethal mayhem going on everywhere but the ground under her paws.
Dragons clawed at dragons in the air, on the ground, everywhere. Humans stabbed and trapped and slashed and pounded at dragons in every direction, forming a very rudimentary line and attacking any unarmored dragon that approached the line, or any of their smaller pockets of defense. Cages littered the ground closest to the massive grey and brown structures lined up on the shore, many full and defended by humans from unarmored dragons. Some armored dragons carried humans, and one of the unarmored dragons was carrying a familiar human, even though the one doing the carrying wasn't the big four-winged one that always had that human–
'Keep moving!' the nice female who had flown in to save them barked urgently. Grey realized she had stopped running and tried to make her paws resume the blistering pace set by Kappi and followed by Star, who were getting ahead of them in the madness. The fighting was spread out over a large area so they weren't exactly having to dodge between claw strikes or blasts of fire yet, but there was violence everywhere and anyone could decide to strike at her as she passed them, she had to be close to Kappi. Fear made her run faster despite her aching and still sluggishly bleeding underside.
"Dragon rider up there!" Maour yelled, his voice reaching her despite the noise of the battle. An armored dragon landed right in front of Toothless and forced him to veer around, firing back up at something Grey didn't see. She passed within pawing distance of the dragon's sharp, armored tail.
'Guess that four-wing wasn't grounded after all!' the female behind Grey barked back.
A cloud of ominous green gas jetted out from between the clenched jaws of a Zippleback fighting three bulky humans. One of the humans caught it in the face and coughed, falling off and leaving the other two to struggle to make up the difference, but Toothless veered toward them long enough to make the Zippleback flinch back and give them the upper paw once more.
'Don't see the four-wing, just the rider!' Toothless retorted. Grey passed the Zippleback right as one of the humans knocked its heads together while roaring at the top of his relatively puny lungs.
Grey had no idea what they were talking about, but it didn't matter anyway. Not when she had just spotted a telltale flash of lightning behind the human line. Far behind, centered around one of the cage stacks, complete with a Skrill there in person, lashing out with wings and talons at the guards.
She couldn't watch the attack, not while keeping herself up and running – Toothless led them right over a pile of bodies, dragon and human, and she had to go around because she didn't think she could jump it like he did – but she saw the occasional flash of action. The Skrill throwing a human off their tail. The Skrill dragging one cage out of the group. A Monstrous Nightmare climbing out of the cage.
She saw the two of them flying off together, their tails to the island and by extension the entire battle.
Then she saw red and black and grey, and her paws left the ground as an explosion blasted her to the side. Her eyes reflexively closed just as she plowed into the rocky ground, her right side scraping and catching everywhere as she rolled over onto her back. She choked out a pained half-bark, the agony coursing through her fresh and unavoidable.
'Now you all die!' a dragon shrieked, his voice high and completely uncontrolled. Another blast shook the ground by Grey, spurring her to move despite the pain. Her muscles quivered and every touch of air on new wounds stung, but she forced her eyes open and forced herself up, shaking like an old invalid.
She didn't want to die here. Not in the middle of all this new terror and hope. If she was meant to die on this island, it would have happened years ago, back in the water that Sadistic used to take her scales.
The Skrill – Cold, she knew his voice – was snapping wildly at Kappi and his human rider, towering over them and driving his teeth through the air where limbs or heads had been a heartbeat prior. Von was rolling across the uneven ground with a second Skrill, right into a group of humans with long sticks topped with sharp stone. Star was watching, like Grey. Watching and doing nothing to help.
The humans all jabbed their sticks at Tolerable as he snarled and finally managed to throw Von off of himself, quickly redirecting his attention. Cold managed to draw blood in his frenzied strikes, dragging a gouge down Toothless' side. Grey moved, unable to fire even once but equally unwilling to be a helpless bystander.
'Hey, Cold!' she barked. She could serve as a distraction.
Cold didn't even look up, he was so busy pressing his advantage. There was an angled stick and claw sticking out of his back, out of reach of Kappi's human, and Kappi himself just didn't have the physical reach to strike back while Cold was using his wing arms so recklessly, continually backing away and dodging each individual strike.
Grey wasn't fast, or strong, or durable, or anything a Night Fury was supposed to be. Not even stealthy. But she didn't need to be any of those things to run up behind Cold, leap, and grab onto the dangling stick with her jaws just short of the sharp part capping the other end.
She wasn't strong, and she wasn't large, but bones and skin and the bare minimum needed to survive still weighed something and her grip on the wood held, though she had kept her teeth sheathed to avoid biting right through it, so her gums were taking all of the strain.
Cold was not prepared for a dragon-sized weight to suddenly yank a lightly embedded point down and to the side. Grey wasn't prepared for it either, and when her back paws touched the ground she let go.
Cold twisted to the right, his angry snarl cut off with an awkward shriek, and fell right on top of Grey. She kicked at his bulk, terrified that he would shock her to death at any moment, and squirmed out from under him–
Where she was immediately met with a stabbing pain in her tail and a spray of liquid across her back. She instinctively jerked her tail forward and around, which sent a bolt of acute agony up her spine from the very tip of her tail.
Behind her, Cold had a back talon stuck in the beach where her tail had been. Her tail sported a rip down the right fin, from right near the middle all the way out to the far end, dividing her poor tailfin into two limply hanging halves.
Cold also had a raging Night Fury clamped down on his neck, so aside from the pain she didn't feel so bad about that outcome. She was already grounded.
Kappi braced himself against Cold's chest, then ripped his head free of Cold's neck by force, taking a large portion of said neck with him as he leaped off and twisted to land on all four paws. His back was empty, Grey noticed.
Cold stopped dead mid-flail, a sharp motion of his head splattering blood across the ground in front of him. His eyes dulled, and Grey resisted the urge to look away. Instead, she curled her tail around and gingerly licked at the tear. Maybe not the smartest thing to do in the middle of a chaotic battle, but–
'Lick your wounds later,' Kappi said sternly, rushing past her as his human jumped right back onto him. 'Once you're behind the human line, at the very least!'
Grey flinched at his stern tone, even as she gave up attending to her tail. He was almost never cross with her… She didn't like it. Even if he definitely had a point. Turning around to watch him go, she saw that potentially lethal danger had been much closer than she assumed.
Tolerable had thrown Von off, crashed through the attacking humans, and snapped most of their stabbing things and most of their bodies, and was now disemboweling an armored Gronckle who had flown in to help. Two more unarmored dragons had come down to defend him in turn, and humans had congregated to throw their false claws into the mix, along with big things that spread and tangled wings, and smaller thrown claws that took an unlucky Nadder's eye. Any one of those things could have missed the larger fight and hit her from behind.
She had used up all of her courage and pain tolerance attacking Cold, and didn't think she could contribute anything to the larger-scale fight happening around Tolerable and Von. She limped away from the fight, making her way to a pile of empty cages – she knew what a cage was, Kappi had explained in detail – and hid behind it, only peeking out far enough to see the fight and keep track of the others.
Tolerable was much more dangerous than Cold. Grey had believed this for years, based solely on their attitudes, but she had never seen either of them fighting. Now Cold was dead and Tolerable was holding his own, without lightning, against two mildly injured Night Furies and a collection of humans, while others from the ice nest fended off the armored dragons working with the humans.
Von struck, Kappi struck, but Tolerable turned both tooth-filled lunges aside with deft deflections of his wings. The humans put their smaller, faster flying claws through his wings as he did so, but he ignored the new injuries without letting out so much as a pained grunt. Star, on the outskirts of the battle, looking in, fired a quick shot into the ground in front of him, spraying debris in his face, but he closed his eyes just in time to avoid being blinded for more than a moment. Kappi tried to take advantage of even that momentary lapse, but Tolerable was already backing away.
He backed right into another group of humans with even longer sharp sticks. They jabbed him from behind. He lashed out with his tail, knocking two over, but the others spread out and avoided the unaimed lashes. Von dragged her claws down his wing arm while he was distracted, drawing so much blood Grey could see it from her hiding place, and Kappi followed up with a whip-like tail lash right at the midsection wing when he faltered, striking it so hard that it snapped.
Tolerable fell to the side, and lightning lit up his body, but it was a short-lived burst that the humans ducked away from and the dragons weathered. The armored dragons in the air above him were the worst affected, the closest dropping out of the sky and the rest quickly flying away from him, but it made little difference. There were too many humans and too many armored dragons. Many of the unarmored dragons Grey could see were flying away from the fighting now, giving up as the battle turned further and further in favor of the humans.
Those who remained might have been trying to rally around Tolerable, the last truly fearsome dragon on their side, but it was doomed from the start. His last emergency blast of lightning exhausted, Tolerable fought like a mad-dragon backed into a corner. A corner made of long, unfeeling sharp things and tangling vines and lethal teeth and claws seeking any vulnerability, along with a single human unafraid of getting close and jabbing with his own sharp stick… He fought silently, eerily so, but that did not make his situation any better. It just gave him an air of violent resignation. He was not angry, he was not raging, he was just doing his best to kill everyone around him and finding that his best wasn't good enough.
Grey did not feel sorry for him. Not even as he finally made a mistake and lost his other wing to it. He might have been the least terrible of her captors, but he was also the last of them, save for Condescending, who had fled with the Monstrous Nightmare she went to the trouble to rescue.
With Tolerable dead, the battlefield was cleared of Skrill. Grey breathed a heavy sigh of relief when Von dealt out the killing blow.
The humans all piled on, presumably to make sure in their own violent way, and the armored dragons continued to harry the unarmored dragons in the sky above. Kappi and the others pulled away from the continuing battle, ducking behind human fortifications and back into the stretch of shoreline that had been conquered and was too dangerous to the defenders to strike at.
Grey stepped out of hiding and quickly rejoined them, holding her tail gingerly up as she walked to avoid dragging her dangling pieces of tailfin on the ground.
"That needs to be sewn back together right now," Kappi's human announced as she tried to unobtrusively walk beside Kappi. She didn't know what he meant, or who he was talking to–
'The tail?' Kappi asked. 'I didn't think it was–'
"You might not mind a rider, but the sooner I do it the more likely she won't need one when all is said and done," Maour interrupted. "Seriously, I've got a needle and thread tucked away in the interior of Von's saddle, let's stop here. I'm not sure which ship we should approach yet anyway."
O-O-O
Toothless kept a wary eye on the battle while Maour painstakingly sewed Grey's tailfin back together. He hoped she would be okay… Or at least no more crippled than she had been at the start of this exhausting day. She had so many minor injuries, cuts and bruises mostly, all over her body. Some of them only looked worse than they really were because of her lack of scales, but others were worse than they would have been on a scaled dragon, and she was flagging badly.
He had some gashes and a whole collection of bruises to tend to later, and suspected that at least one of the bones in his right front paw was broken, but he could keep going. Von was even less injured, sporting no major wounds and few minor ones. Star had kept out of the battle aside from contributing her slowly returning fire whenever she could. Maour was fine, though his armor would need repairs. It was really only Grey who looked like a walking corpse, as morbid as that comparison was.
He was impressed by her resilience and pain tolerance, but she had limits and she must have already far surpassed them. The moment Maour was done with the most necessary treatments, they needed to go find Ruffnut, find a ship, and get moving. He wanted to see Grey sleeping in a warm nest of soft things to recover, not laying around on the cold ground like she was now.
'You're growling like you always do when you want to knock someone out and force them to sleep for their own good,' Von grumbled, turning to glare at him. 'It better not be me, I am not in the mood to be patronized.'
'You're in better shape than I am, and since when do I growl so specifically you can assign a motivation to it?' he asked, mildly offended. He wasn't that predictable. 'I'm worried for Grey, she lost a lot of blood and she was in bad shape to start with.'
He expected Star to chime in about Grey, but the emaciated female to his left kept her mouth shut. Maybe seeing him kill multiple Skrill had forced her to reassess whether she really wanted him angry at her.
'Agreed, she needs to be waited on paw and tail for the foreseeable future,' Von rumbled. 'But… Oh, you must be kidding.'
'What?' He tried to figure out what she was looking at, but there was a lot going on in the direction she was looking. Most of the dragon-on-dragon fighting had ended, but there were roving groups of dragons moving too quickly for the armored dragons to follow, striking at any vulnerable-looking humans. The humans were all still pushing forward, unwilling or unable to hunker down and let the dragons turn the attack into a minor siege. There weren't many unarmored dragons left in the air, but the environment was still inherently hostile to the humans. To stop might be to die right on the brink of victory.
All of which Toothless understood, and he didn't think Von was referring to the battle as a whole. Four of the five Skrill were down and he had no idea where Condescending had gotten to. He only saw a lot of humans fighting fire-breathing dragons, and up on a lone boulder–
'Who is that?' he barked. The dragon rider, mask and staff and all, was up there, fighting a big man with a dark cloak, a hooked staff of his own, and tangled black hair.
'Drago himself,' Von explained. 'The one in charge of all this. Didn't think he would fight, though, he's old for a human.'
Toothless didn't think the supposedly old human was doing too badly; he was swinging his bullhook in wide arcs, taking up the majority of the space atop the rock and forcing the rider to duck and dodge perilously close to the edge. Any short, quick blows the rider got in against his cloaked bulk simply bounced off, especially when they struck his cloaked arm. He probably had a shield in there, though why he would keep it covered and limit its movement…
"What's going on? Do we need to move now?" Maour asked. Toothless could hear Grey's pained, muffled yelps in the background as he worked.
'Drago is facing the dragon rider and looks like he's winning,' Von reported.
"You did probably break a few of their ribs with that last headbutt," Maour remarked. "They have to be feeling that."
'Who do we want to win this?' Star asked, sidling up on Toothless' other side. 'I always hated that human, so I want it to lose.'
Toothless wasn't sure he had an opinion either way. He would probably like it best if they just kept fighting until he and everyone he cared about was long gone. That rider had fought Maour and Von in the past, while Drago had a big force of humans and a lot of captured dragons. Neither would necessarily come after him or the Furies next, but either could and he was tired.
Drago continued to hem the rider in on all sides with his considerable size advantage. He took several staff blows to the head, only one warded off by his own polearm, but he had control of the boulder's oblong top and he knew it. It was only a matter of time–
The rider misplaced a foot, slipped, and fell back to the ground. Drago took two steps forward and jumped off the rock himself, feet first. He landed on the rider's legs with all of his considerable weight.
Toothless imagined he could hear the sharp crack from where he stood; it had to have been loud. Drago stumbled a bit, but compared to completely crippling his enemy, that was nothing. He planted his bullhook blade-first in the ground by the rider's head and reached down.
Toothless felt Grey looking through his eyes to watch. "What is…" Grey trailed off.
Drago held the dragon rider by the collar of their odd tunic. Their staff lay discarded on the ground, and then when they tried to scratch at his face he shook them like a cat with a mouse until they stopped, completely unaffected by the bloody scratches inflicted on his face.
Toothless could see Drago's expression; the way he was standing, the dragon rider's back was toward them, and off to the side a pair of steely grey eyes and hooked nose could be seen.
The mask slipped off, falling to the ground. Shaken loose by the fight, or by his rough handling afterward. The rider had short brown hair.
Drago stared at the rider. They stared back, or perhaps their eyes were closed. All Toothless could see was the warlord's face, not what looked back at him.
Said face was curious, in the reserved way most Vikings tended to be. At least at first. But as the tense seconds passed, his face twisted into a scowl.
Drago threw the rider to the ground, seized his bullhook – kicking the rider's hand as it reached for the discarded staff – and jabbed his weapon down. Right into the rider's back.
O-O-O
Thus ended the last true resistance to Drago's assault, and with it Maour's hopes for a continued positive alliance with the man. He couldn't put his finger on it, but something about Drago executing his human opposition when he could have spared them or at least captured them…
Maour didn't know if he would be treated the same way now that he and Von had outlived their usefulness, but he did know that he didn't want to find out. "Okay, I think that's as clear a sign as we're going to get that we shouldn't stick around," he said to his brother.
'Ruffnut?' Toothless asked.
"She should have a ship… somewhere." He had yet to see any sign of her or the dinky trapper ship she had wormed her way into having authority over. They weren't among the first line of ships to beach themselves in the assault, which made sense. She would have to take hers around, to an unoccupied section of shoreline. "Von, can you go look for her? We're going to go wait somewhere a ship can get to." It would be so much easier to get away if all of the Furies could fly, but that wasn't the case.
'On it,' Von barked. She took to the sky, leaving two grounded Night Furies and one Night Fury who needed Maour to fly. He was pretty sure he had heard a logic puzzle that started like this once… Thankfully there was no river to cross here. Just a stretch of mostly empty beach.
'Let's get out of here while our friends are still our friends,' Grey said weakly. Her entire body shuddered every so often, and she was swaying from side to side, not dramatically but enough that Maour had noticed it. She was going to crash soon, either metaphorically or literally if they didn't reach safety in time.
'Walk like you aren't worried we are going to be ambushed and slaughtered,' Star hissed as they started off toward an empty section of shore, their backs to Drago and his final victory. 'Don't look weak!'
'You chose a terrible time to start trying to be helpful,' Toothless grumbled as he leaned over to let Maour on. Maour thought it was fairly good advice, all things considered. Maybe not feasible when at least one member of their group was so obviously weak and vulnerable, but still. Either his brother was holding a grudge – unlikely, but possible if it was over something serious – or there was some hidden barb to her words that Maour didn't have the context needed to understand.
'I want out the way you're going,' Star huffed. 'It would be a brutal flight away from here even if I could make it, which I cannot.'
'Remember that,' Toothless shot back. 'Because if you come with us you had better be on your best behavior.'
They reached the tideline, turning to walk parallel to the line of beached ships. There were more cages and other miscellaneous supplies in their path now, some already being loaded back onto the ships and others being set out despite the battle drawing to a close. The fight was over, but Drago's fleet wouldn't be able to leave immediately. Many of the ships had run aground at considerable speed, incapable of slowing lest they start a chain reaction of wrecks throughout the entire fleet. They would not be easy to fix.
Toothless chanced a furtive look over his shoulder, and Maour felt the subsequent growl. 'He's coming this way, and a dozen armored dragons are shadowing him from the air. Everyone walk faster, but don't run!'
'Maour, I can't find Ruffnut's ship,' Von reported. 'The only one doing something different from the rest of the fleet is out loading up more cages from where we took down Sadistic, that wouldn't be her.'
"Definitely not." Ruffnut wouldn't have led her crew off on a wild dragon hunt, and even if she did she wouldn't have let them capture more dragons along the way. "Look through the middle of the fleet, at all the ships that are stuck with nowhere to sail." If Ruffnut was trapped there, a new plan would be needed. They would have to find somewhere to lay low for a while.
He would have happily jumped on that tentative secondary plan right now, if they weren't being actively followed. Grey limped out past the last ship, clearing the occupied section of shoreline, and the rest of the group was right behind her, but Drago was still behind them. They could keep retreating down the shore until it terminated in a massive ice slide from the ruined nest, but that wouldn't keep Drago at bay for long.
Drago hadn't gathered any soldiers to him; Maour looked back to confirm that for himself. The dragons following him were doing so at a remove, likely ready to intervene should he order it or obviously need aid, but otherwise unobtrusive.
The attacking King was dead, both Kings were dead, so such behavior had to come from genuine loyalty or maybe a sense of obligation. Not something Maour was confident he could talk his way out of, should the need arise. But Drago… He could maybe talk Drago out of whatever he intended.
"Okay, we need to hold here," he said to the others. "There's nowhere else to go. Let's see what he wants."
'What could he possibly want with the only dragons on the battlefield who aren't directly loyal to him, caged, or dead?' Star muttered. 'If he had an alpha I would never let him get close to me.'
'He doesn't have one now, and not all of his dragons stayed,' Toothless observed. 'I can see some flying over the ice mountain, but not many are still right here on the battlefield. He can't be feeling too certain of their allegiance now?' It was a question, but not one Maour knew the answer to.
Drago slowed as he approached, walking deliberately. He waved off a few approaching soldiers who made to intercept him. His eyes were fixed on Maour, or perhaps on the Night Furies around him.
"Dragon rider," Drago called out as he walked.
'Maour, I still can't find her,' Von reported at nearly the same time.
"Look harder, we might come running across the fleet soon, at least figure out where in the fleet she isn't," Maour muttered. "Be safe, but hurry."
"The only dragon rider, now," Drago continued, projecting his voice across the empty beach between them. He was still slowly approaching, the dragons above him continued their detached vigil… There was still nowhere to go, save for onto the fleet or out toward a dead end along the shoreline.
"I'd rather not be called that, if it's all the same to you!" Maour yelled, struggling much more than Drago probably was to project his voice across the distance. He noticed several of the dragons waiting on Drago recoiling in shock. One even flew away there and then, and none of the others made any move to stop him.
"Collector of Night Furies, then," Drago thundered. He was using his bullhook like a staff at the moment, but the dark stain on the bladed tip was an unavoidable reminder of what had happened to the last dragon rider to meet him face to face. "What of your brother?"
The brother Maour had said he wanted to find. The one Drago didn't know was a dragon. "I found him," Maour replied.
"You found more than that," Drago said darkly. "I have walked your path. It does not end well."
"Nobody has ever walked my path before me," Maour shot back, crossing his arms. Drago was too close for comfort now, a bare dozen paces away. More worryingly, most of the dragons watching him were closer now, too. They would be the immediate danger, if he commanded them and they obeyed even now.
You up there,' Toothless called out to the ominous flock, 'what are you doing?'
There was no response. They had definitely heard him, but they continued to swarm above Drago without saying anything at all.
'That's not concerning at all,' Toothless grumbled to Maour.
"There is only one end, no matter the exact steps taken to it," Drago growled, unaware of the byplay between the dragons. "But it will be yours. Not mine. Your part in my fleet has concluded. I…" The focus of his sharp grey eyes switched from Maour to something behind him.
Sails creaked behind Maour. The sound of water sloshing against wood had been growing louder, but he hadn't properly noticed with the other things going on. Toothless turned, keeping one eye on Drago.
"Oy!" A familiar figure leaped off a small wooden ship that had pulled up just beyond the sudden dropoff from shallows to deep water, within walking distance of the shore. She splashed down, a bottle of all things clutched in one hand, and swept a hat off her signature hair, the blond 'nubs' falling to either side. "We're kidnapping your Night Furies!"
Grey and Star were already in the water, making a beeline for the only other human they had ever met that they could understand. It didn't take a genius to put two and two together.
"What is this?" Drago yelled. "You, what are you doing?"
"I think it's either theft, piracy, insubordination, or kidnapping, depending on what happens next!" Ruffnut yelled back. "Somebody catch!" She hiked her arm back and threw the bottle – and it really was just a bottle so far as Maour could tell – up at an angle.
"Go, go, go," Maour urged his brother. He even flicked the tailfin a few times to snap his brother out of whatever dumbfounded trance Ruffnut's sudden appearance had placed him in.
'I am no longer used to Myrkurs,' his brother groaned as he took to the air. He had to immediately duck, the armored dragons were right above them and flying menacingly, right toward the trapper ship Drago was so obviously displeased with–
One caught the bottle as it arced down toward the shore. It shattered all over the unlucky Nadder's talons. Maour twisted in his saddle to watch as Toothless took them to the ship, and as a result had a perfect view of a spray of liquid bursting out along with the broken glass, and the Nadder immediately passing out. All of the dragons behind them swerved, dived, or just plain dropped out of the sky.
Toothless landed on the deck of Ruffnut's ship, startling several sailors and interrupting an incoherent rant from one in particular. Grey and Star awkwardly clawed their way up the side.
The armored dragons doubled back, some abandoning Drago entirely and the rest seemingly dazed, even the ones that had missed the effects of whatever Ruffnut had dropped in their midst.
'There you are!' Maour heard Von bark, and shortly after Ruffnut was unceremoniously dropped on the deck by an irate Night Fury. 'I am linking with you next time we need to rely on you for anything important. That was terrifying!'
The ship was tacking away from the shallows, the sailors following the orders of an increasingly frantic captain who apparently didn't know any more of Ruffnut's plans than Drago had a moment ago, but who was now entirely certain he was about to die at the hands of his own boss. Or so he said loudly and repeatedly every time it looked like Ruffnut might be able to hear him.
It was chaos, but they had made it out. Drago stood on the shore, watching as their ship departed. Armored dragons flew uncertainly overhead, and more could be seen in the distance, above the ruined remains of a mountain of ice. The corpse of the formerly reigning King slumped against the rubble, and that of the would-be King rested in the shallows.
Snow was falling, and the meagre, diffused light coming through the clouds was steadily decreasing. The day of reckoning had come to an end.
Toothless was safe. If nothing else, they had accomplished that.
Author's Note: To answer a question from a guest: Of everything story-length I've written to date, I'm most proud of Usurpation of the Darkness and Taking Up the Mantle. Both were much more technically challenging to write than my usual fare, and both came out quite well. As for my favorite series? That's an easy one. The IHTR series wins, hands down. I like the Living series, but it's dragged down quite a bit by being the first things I ever really wrote, whereas the IHTR series has the benefits of experience going in and a much broader world to work with.
That said, I like everything I've published to some extent. If I didn't, it wouldn't be published. My standards for my own work have risen over time, so some of my oldest stuff may now be in desperate need of reworking to bring up to the same level, but there's still an appeal to them as they are.