The following morning, Grimmel and his dragons touched down again at the meadow in which they'd left their airship, with the broken Light Fury trap in the center.

"Ah, hello again, my old friend" Grimmel said as he saw it.

The Deathgripper carrying Toothless touched down first. Darling and the other four circled around so that they could be strapped into their positions to carry it.

Dismounting Darling as soon as her claws touched earth, Grimmel strode back up the ramp as if it had been mere moments since their departure. Toothless grumbled as he was dragged towards the airship. Grimmel retrieved a chain from inside and hummed as he brought it out to hook onto Toothless's restraints.

"Alright," he said, kneeling to speak to Toothless. "Soon, we'll go show Berk that their Alpha is dead, shall we? Show the Vikings that I was right? The only reason Berk and dragons get along is you, Night Fury. You and your power over them, and your Hiccup's power over you. And once that is taken away, with no more control and no more protection, I wonder how they will fall apart. It's a shame Chief Hiccup, son of Stoick, isn't here to see the flock of Berk flee into the Warlords' traps."

Toothless growled angrily and stretched against his bonds, half-lunging for Grimmel as best he could, with teeth bared. Grimmel merely laughed and stood again.

"Be that way, then."

He whistled and threw his hand around his head in a gesture for his Deathgrippers to take off, and just stepped onto the platform as they threw themselves into the air against the airship's weight. Toothless was pulled backwards off the ground, and hung upside down as they took off towards Berk.

—

The mass exodus of Berk had begun hours ago in full. Technically the moment they'd discovered Hiccup had been captured, the day before, they'd begun to prepare.

Astrid's reasons were these:

The Warlords, now that they had Hiccup, would use him as leverage to get the firepower that they wanted from Berk.

They no longer had any reason to wait patiently for a peaceful answer, so they would arrive fast.

If they came to Berk and found no one to blackmail, it was unlikely that they would kill him, anyway. At least not right away. If what they wanted was dragons, then they might be more likely to strong-arm Hiccup into catching them.

They would probably keep trying to find Berk's flock, with Grimmel's help.

This assumption relied on Hiccup not saying something stupid like "I'd rather die first."

He would want her to protect the flock. He would want her to protect Berk. If Toothless was gone, he would still want the rest of his dream to be preserved, no matter what.

So dragons streamed from the island in mini-packs every minute, guided by their Vikings towards the Dragon's Nest. Very few were left by the time it was midday.

Astrid and Valka were the last two to leave. Stormfly and Cloudjumper pushed off together and soared after the last disappearing tails of Berkian dragons.

They flew in silence until Valka pointed with her staff at the horizon, where she thought she could see the first ships' masts poking above. Still far enough away that they wouldn't be able to see the dragons before they were in the fog.

It was less than half-an-hour flight before they ducked into the fog and Stormfly's crown of bristles began to tremble, guiding her this way and that through the jagged black rocks, under and around generations of destroyed Viking ships. They would have to remove those, Astrid thought. All they served now was to memorialize a painful past that Berk was committed to moving on from.

"Lovely place," Valka muttered, Cloudjumper's big wings just barely dodging around the rocks.

"Yeah," Astrid said. "Just wait."

When they burst through the fog again and found the gigantic volcanic mountain, Astrid gasped. It looked so alive, suddenly, so full of color.

The last time she had seen so many people here had been when they fought the Green Death. Now, they had set up buildings and shacks instead of catapults, erected beams of colorful painted wood for dragons to roost on, dug away some of the smooth round stones to plant seeds in the soil beneath.

They soared around. Dragons perched on the mountainside and roared cheerfully to them. Vikings and their heavy dragons working to set up their homes and shelters waved from the ground.

House frames were being built up against the rocks of the mountain, dug into its side. The mountain clearly had potential for carvings. And it wasn't like Berk wasn't built on half a mountainside.

"Hey," Valka exclaimed, looking proudly at Astrid. "It doesn't look bad at all!" She glanced up at the clouds blanketing them. "Weather could be better."

Astrid held herself back from being too praised. "Sure, but we can't all stay here forever if we've all abandoned Berk. We'll have to ration food."

"Oh, sure," Valka said. "We have dragons, they have ships. We can fly anywhere to fish before they can catch us."

And for now, at least, the camps were set up, the boats held food, the dragons were scampering around the mountain, up its sides and into its caves.

Five years ago, the Viking army had burst a hole into the wall of the cave, and the Green Death had come bursting through the rest of the mountain itself to claim their fleet, throwing heaps of solid rock aside as if they were nothing. Stormfly and Cloudjumper swooped over one such heap.

"You should see the inside," Astrid said. "It's growing green at twice the rate as out here."

"Show me!"

The two riders urged their dragons further down again to seek out the cavernous gash the Green Death had carved in the mountain, and Stormfly and Cloudjumper folded their wings as they flew into it. Valka and Astrid ducked and weaved them around outcroppings of uneven rock until the greenery opened up before them, lit as before with light from the sky above them that was filtered through the perpetual gray clouds.

"Oh, my!" Tears filled Valka's eyes, remembering what Drago's tortured Bewilderbeast had taken from her. "It's just like our sanctuary."

Astrid looked back at her, pitying that she had only gotten to see the place when it was abandoned. The Alpha had been killed by Drago's Bewilderbeast, and their crew of humans had only crept back in after Stoick's death to find the babies who had stayed behind. And now, seeing Hiccup's mother's face, she remembered the words she'd said that had made Drago go on the move before he'd planned to. She'd taunted him. And he had changed his mind and gone after Valka's sanctuary earlier than he would have otherwise. If she had kept her mouth shut... if she had...

The losses still haunted her.

She wheeled Stormfly away from Cloudjumper and circled around to land on one of the outcroppings. She remembered this place from when she and Hiccup had gotten in the night before the Viking ships had attacked the nest. And this was the place where Hiccup had proposed to her. She dismounted and kept a hand on Stormfly to steady herself. The dragon turned her big head to check on Astrid with one yellow eye.

"Astrid?" Valka had Cloudjumper land nearby, and she slipped off his back easily to approach her cautiously.

"I don't want to be chief," Astrid said. "I'm sick of playing like I'm any good at this. We need Hiccup back. I miss him."

"Oh, I do, too," Valka said sympathetically, coming forward and stroking Astrid's hair out of her face. "Look at me, Astrid. You are good at this."

"He must be so scared," Astrid continued. "And if he doesn't have Toothless, I..." She steeled herself. "I believe in him. I was the first to believe in him. But this... He's never been this on his own, not in six years. And I just had us all run away."

"You are good at this, Astrid. Hiccup told me he believed in you before he believed in himself. And I know that sometimes every choice you make seems to fail you, but you, and Hiccup, both just do what good chiefs are supposed to do: Protect their own."