The pressure from shockwave buckled the wooden beam Hiccup had been wary of, and with a yell and a massive shifting of stone, the boy and the Light Fury were trapped.

The storm still raged outside, but Toothless's cries had quieted. After Hiccup's shouts for his friend finally quieted, the Light Fury crooned quietly.

"Why did you bring us here?" Hiccup asked angrily, wheeling around on her. His voice breaking, he yelled, "We already knew the Night Furies were dead! You didn't have to show us! He's been through enough!"

The Light Fury's moonlight wings flared up and she snapped back at him, roaring her own anger. Her pupils thinned to shards. And you, who stole his tail! How are you any better? Dragon-hunter!

They held each other's eyes, standing tense and furious.

Something metal moaned loudly outside, and Hiccup glanced over, although he couldn't see out. The Light Fury relaxed a little. This boy was not an enemy, just a human.

He looked back at her.

"So how are we gonna get out of here?" he asked, defeated. "Any ideas?"

The Light Fury inhaled before he could stop her and the explosion rocked the stone barrier between them and Toothless.

"NO!" Hiccup yelled too late, and the Light Fury flinched in panic as the ceiling collapsed a few inches. Neither moved, waiting for it to crush them. It didn't. Hiccup spoke softly, "We have to do this carefully. Just—let me think."

She was right; the fastest and safest way out would be to get rid of the rubble that had fallen in between them and the Night Fury graveyard; beyond the collapsed wooden support was far more tunnel than he felt safe going through right now, even if Toothless had run out of shots.

He supposed that it was a relief to not be hearing any more explosions, but that led to another problem.

Why was Toothless suddenly silent?

The rocks shifted again, and he yelped. Some gravel sprayed down into their little room and then petered out. Some fragments of the raindrops from outside misted through the tiny gap. Hiccup recovered quickly and re-applied himself to a way out. The Light Fury inspected the small area they had to walk around in, poking into corners and inspecting nooks. They had about a twenty-foot by ten foot section of the tunnel; far enough that if she got too far away, Hiccup couldn't see very well. He struck up his fire-sword to light his way. Some rocks were blatantly balanced in a fragile equilibrium atop others, but others were loose, and he could pull them out with his hands without much danger.

"I really thought there would be other Night Furies," he said softly. He didn't look back at her, tapping against rocks with his sword, but the Light Fury turned as if listening to him. "I mean, when I was a kid, Night Furies were…I mean, I think there were more than one of them. They used to attack our village, and we kept hearing the noise, the, you know—" he tried to mimic Toothless's charge-up noise. "I thought for sure there was more than one. We had this book—we didn't think anyone had ever even seen a Night Fury, let alone killed…all of them. I guess that would have been fifteen, something years ago when I was a child. Even longer ago when the book was written. But—I don't know, I didn't know Grimmel had been anywhere near us until recently; we didn't know about him, we never heard about him. Maybe my dad did, at one of his Chieftain meetings, but he never mentioned a Night Fury killer. But he must have been, if he managed to kill off the other Night Furies on our Dragons' old nest."

The Light Fury crooned sympathetically. She could tell he was upset, if the words were unclear. You're upset. Is it because he's alone? At least you care, human. Not everyone does.

"Or—" A thought occurred to Hiccup. He had watched the Queen kill and eat a Gronckle the first time he'd seen her. He busied himself again digging out some some rocks he had found that didn't move anything else, but he couldn't help but wonder if she'd eaten one of the other Night Furies. More than one?

But no, most nests had a Queen. His mother had told him that; and that they were called Green Deaths. Surely they weren't so bad as that. Certainly never as horrible as Grimmel, but it was possible.

He stood and turned around, extinguishing his sword and coming over to the Light Fury. He knelt in front of her, to her great confusion, and used its point to draw in the dirt between them. The Green Death, to the best of his memory. She came around him to look over his shoulder, careful not to touch him, as the queen took shape.

Once he had finished, he looked at the Light Fury, who returned his glance, not understanding. What about her?

Okay, no fear response from the Queen like she had for the real Night Fury killer. Maybe she just doesn't know? "Did you ever have a Queen?" Hiccup asked. He pointed at the dirt drawing and then at the Light Fury. She wrinkled her nose, bared her teeth, and shook her head disdainfully.

No. No, my kind does not live under Queens.

"No Queen. So then you don't live in Nests." Hiccup tried something else, and drew a Bewilderbeast. The Light Fury rumbled respectfully as she recognized the figure. "Maybe a King, then?"

The Light Fury nodded, but he wasn't sure she really understood the question. She stared at the drawing and then around the room, smacking her lips speculatively. Then she bounded to the opposite corner and started digging furiously, spraying dirt behind her into Hiccup's face.

"Wha—aw, why?"

He shielded himself as best he could until she had a hole as deep as she wanted it to be, getting to his feet as the Light Fury's frenzy slowed. She looked back at Hiccup's drawing and then kept digging.

"What are you doing?"

Night Furies were not built to dig, and neither were Light Furies. Dirt escaped through her claws as she scooped at it to the best of her ability.

Eventually, the Light Fury backed out of a sizable hole and looked at him expectantly. Trying to be polite, he said, "Iiiiit's a…hole. A hole in the ground."

Stupid. The Light Fury wrinkled her nose again and leapt back over to the Bewilderbeast drawing, slamming her claws down around it in an attempt to pick it up, and collecting only dirt. Then, with a flap of her wings, she was back at the hole, and she put the dirt that the Bewilderbeast had once been drawn on firmly into the bottom of it.

"A Bewilderbeast is in a hole in the ground," Hiccup tried again. The Light Fury nodded, and tapped the ground beside her, a little outside the hole. Once he was beside her on the ground she'd indicated, she swiped at his sword, guiding it to the ground. Again. Again; draw him again.

So Hiccup complied, scratching a rough approximation of the Bewilderbeast into the dirt. Before he could complete it again, though, the Light Fury stamped her foot on one of its tusks, swiping it away, and their eyes met meaningfully now.

"You know where he is?" Hiccup asked. "You know where he is! How—where? He got to you somehow, after he left, after we won against Drago, you know where he went—but you're not scared of him, so he's not hurting you, he's in a—a hole! In the ground!" He paused excitedly, not really knowing what to do with this, just glad to understand the Light Fury's meaning. Her head bobbed along to the rhythm of his infectious Hiccup enthusiasm. "I don't know what to do with that!"

The Light Fury hummed something and then jumped over to the Night Fury paintings on the wall, tapping them and then setting herself in place, looking at Hiccup. She spun in a circle, flapping her wings and set herself again.

"Night Furies," Hiccup said. "Night Furies are over there."

The Light Fury came back over to the hole and fit herself inside it, craning her head around to see Hiccup realize what she was talking about.

"He's where you were while the Night Furies were being killed. You were in this—this hole, somewhere. And now Drago's Bewilderbeast is there, too. Are there other Light Furies?"

The Light Fury's head bobbed in a way that Stormfly's sometimes did when she was playing with other Nadders and she came back out of the hole.

"Will you take us there?"

Her head bobbed again and she mumbled something. I was planning to take you there. I forgot I was more used to their deaths than he is.

"If we can get out of here, I guess," Hiccup said.

Do you think he will forgive me? The Light Fury paced behind him as he reapplied himself to the careful destruction of the avalanche barrier, her blue wing light flaring as bright as she could get it to help him.

"You know, if we're going to work together," Hiccup said, grunting as he transferred a heavy rock away from its place, "I should have something to call you. I'd been thinking about Escape Artist." Her head tilted doubtfully. "And then I thought, maybe Dancer?" He glanced over his shoulder at her and she lay down, unenthused, watching him. "What? You taught him how to dance."

She babbled back at him mockingly in the same rhythm his sentence had taken.

"Okay. Glowy, then." She rolled her eyes so hard that her head went with it. "Are names just a human thing? Do you guys call each other by names? I only called him Toothless because when I saw his retractable teeth—well. I'd never seen a Night Fury. Anyway. How about just a regular, average Viking name?" She growled. "What? Oh, you're too pretty to be named like a Viking?" He was met with a serious and confident nod. "Fine. What do you want to be called?"