"-gas. 'Megas."
Omegas groaned and sat up.
"What do you want?" he said groggily to Alphas, rubbing his eyes.
"Your turn to keep watch, remember?" Alphas reminded him.
The memories of the past few days kicked in and he was immediately alert. "Right."
He got up, stretching. "After this it's your turn, isn't it?"
Alphas nodded. "Oh, and watch out for the animals. They keep showing up, and they're worse than before. I've killed three of them already."
"One for each hour, eh?"
"Not quite."
Omegas grabbed his axe and straightened. Stiffly, he walked to the point of their camp which opened up to a moonlit view of the lake. And frowned.
"Hey, we don't have any blood moons due yet, do we?"
"Don't know."
"Is it them?"
"Could be."
"Dammit. I wish we could go without situations every single day."
"We do. There's just stretches of time in between where all the situations we didn't have pile on."
"All I'm hearing is we were meant to have situations but put them off and now they all come at once."
"That's definitely what I said."
Omegas sat down, one leg outstretched and the other tucked against his chest.
"See you in three hours then."
"Night, 'Megas."
Omegas listened to his brother as he shuffled away behind him, and then lay down against Wreckage.
He paused, and turned back.
"Alphas."
"Mm?"
"You said you killed three animals, right?"
"Yes?"
"Where'd you put them?"
Without raising his head, Alphas pointed at a bush, where Omegas saw freshly disturbed dirt. He'd buried them, then.
"How'd you dig it?"
"Wreckage."
"Right."
"How long does it generally take?"
"You'd have to ask a plant expert. All I know is blood."
"Well, that's not completely true."
"I wouldn't want it to be, either."
"Right, but how long should it take? Really."
Alphas sighed. "Anywhere between one and three days for decomposition to set in, and another day or so for the plant to be affected."
"So in total, about two or four days."
"Yes."
"Right. You can go to sleep now."
"Finally," Alphas grumbled, and turned over.
And Omegas sat and watched the night pass by.
=0=
"Well, crap," Omegas muttered as he scrambled to his feet, "he'll definitely need to know about this."
He hurried over to Alphas. He leaned down. He punched him.
Alphas jumped to his feet, eyes blazing.
"Who?" he growled, and then recognized Omegas. "The hell did you do that for?"
"Sorry, sorry. But I needed you to wake up before it went away."
"What went away?"
"Night's quicker here for some reason. Moon's almost gone. I noticed it just now, so I thought you should wake up quick."
"What," Alphas said pointedly, "are you on about?"
Omegas grabbed him and shoved him forward. "Look at the moon," he whispered, pointing.
Alphas looked.
"What's there to see?"
"I know it's difficult, because the layer's really thick so you don't notice much, but look. Not just at it, look around it. Look at its light, look at the redness."
Alphas looked again. Alphas frowned. Alphas squinted, peering at the vile redness of the moon.
Alphas swore. It was a colourful one, too.
"Easy now. Don't want to wake them up."
Above them, a never ending cloud of red gas billowed across the sky, twisting and turning in a wind made of knives.
=0=
Hiccup yawned and stretched as he got up. Sleeping against his dragon was certainly a far cry from the comfort of his bed back on Berk, but the heat which radiated from that jet-black body kept him warm all night.
He looked around. Daylight streamed through the branches of the trees around them. The twins and Astrid were already up, eating fish a little way away. Their faces looked uncharacteristically grim. It seemed even the twins were taking the matter, whatever it was, seriously.
That wasn't right at all. What had happened?
"Ah, awake at last, I see."
Hiccup looked back at Alphas as he walked over to him. The man seemed even more pensive than he normally was. Hiccup blinked.
Was Alphas worried?
"There's something we found last night. I've already told your friends, the ones that are awake, at least. Now that you're up, you need to know as well."
Hiccup shook his head. "Nope."
Alphas looked surprised and confused. "Sorry?"
"Nope," Hiccup said again. "I'm not going to get involved in this, whatever it is. The past few days have really taught me something, and it's to stay out of your magic messes, whatever they are. I'm not having anything to do with this."
Alphas sighed, and squatted at his level.
"Normally, I'd say sure. This time, you don't exactly have a choice. We've all got to do something because me and 'Megas aren't going to be enough to handle it."
Hiccup was taken aback for a moment, but stood his ground. "Take the dragons with you then. Handle whatever it is with them by your side, not a bunch of random Vikings that got pulled into your messes," he said bitterly.
Alphas laughed hollowly. "You got pulled into our messes? Sorry, that's not how it happened, and you're not allowed to change the past to suit your views. You involved yourself. You could have ended your involvement at our meeting on that island, but no, you chose to stick your nose in it further, and now look where we are. Cut off at that point, you could be happily ruling your island and me and my brother might not even have been caught by Caird. Now look how it turned out."
Hiccup flushed with anger. "You make it sound like it's all my fault, but it isn't. You can't just pile the blame on me and leave it there."
"He's right," Omegas said from behind him. Hiccup whirled to see him sitting in much the same way as Alphas.
"You're being too harsh. Turn it down a notch. Or maybe a whole swathe."
Alphas sighed. "Sure. But they're coming too, you agree on that."
"Oh, yeah, definitely."
"What is it, then?" Hiccup hissed, exasperated. "What is it that's so bad you can't deal with it by yourselves and with all these dragons?"
They sighed.
"You know what wyverns are?" Alphas asked him.
"Wyverns? They're smaller, dumber dragons, aren't they?"
"Wrong. The legend came from fact, but people mixed it up along the way. The general legends say that dragons are smarter, with the power of speech, and the ability to use magic, isn't that it?"
Hiccup nodded, the anger slowly dissipating. "Some of them also say they're bigger."
"Well, I don't know about that part, from my experience wyverns are about the same size. Of course, there's difference in size between the species, but that's true for dragons as well."
"The point is," Omegas continued, "that it's the other way 'round. Dragons are the ones who're less intelligent, and wyverns are the ones who can talk and, sometimes, use magic."
Hiccup gaped. "Wyverns have magic?"
"Some species. And of course, all of them can talk. It's kind of creepy, really. They hiss and snarl the entire time."
At this point Alphas took over. "Now, there's one species called Insidians. Physically, they look a bit like Windwalkers, if you know what those are."
"Windwalkers?"
"I'm guessing you don't then. Anyway, Insidians are vile," he spat. "The incarnation of evil in draconic beings. They breathe a gas, like the Zippleback, except it's red and it doesn't explode. If you breathe it in, you don't get sick, but you get… corrupted, I suppose."
"Corrupted?" Hiccup asked, bewildered.
"It's like this," Omegas told him. "Let's say you're a perfectly normal person who just happens to get in the way of an Insidian. Usually, you're just a normal person, with emotions and things you're happy about and all that. Breathe in the gas, and you turn bad."
"Everything you were before is gone," Alphas continued. "Now, you're pretty much slave to Insidians when they want control over you. When they don't, you feel the urge to kill. Your entire existence, just consumed by the want for violence. No one matters, not your brother or sister or father or mother, not your wife and kids, not your friends. No one means anything to you anymore. If the Insidians get to you and you walk in on them, you'd kill them, even beat them to death with your bare hands if you didn't have anything else to do it with, and you'd laugh while you did it."
"Insidians used to be a plague," Omegas said. "They were such a problem that everyone got together to beat them. Every society came together to get rid of them. Most of them were killed, and the rest were either banished to some weird realm or pushed back to some area in this world that they couldn't get out of. Now, the fact that we found free Insidians isn't the only thing that's worrying. The fact is that they haven't shown up above ground, which they would if they were enslaving the animals up here. As well as that, we've seen their gas at night. It's like blood red smoke."
"Now the question is, what are they using that smoke on? They don't have any reason to use it on each other, because they're immune, and if they're not coming above ground then there's nothing else to use it on. But then, the animals are too aggressive. So there has to be some source of influence."
"It's the plants," Omegas said. "The smoke leeches into the ground and contaminates the soil. That's why I told you not to eat the berries you'd gathered yet. But still, the problem is that there's no reason for the Insidians to use their smoke."
"There is, however, another source of it," Alphas cut in. "Instead of consciously breathing it out, their eggs produce it at night. Very, very large amounts. It's different from the normal kind of gas in that there's no mind control or anything, but the aggression remains. Until you can get it out of your system, the influence stays. Of course, since the animals are living off the plants and each other, they keep taking it in. It never ends."
"But the eggs are the important part," Omegas insisted. "Insidians were a menace back then. If they're laying eggs, that means their numbers are going up. If all of them decide to come out, well… it's going to be bad, for sure."
Hiccup sat back.
"There's no cure for Insidian smoke, either physical or mental. If you breathe it in, you're pretty much screwed. The only thing is to wait for it to wear off. Dragons, at least, aren't affected, so you can count on them to handle you until then."
Hiccup glanced at them both. Their faces were entirely earnest, and for once, there was a hint of haggardness to their expressions.
They were taking this extremely seriously, he realized. Which meant the situation was probably worse than he could recognize.
Inwardly, Hiccup groaned. The day had barely begun for him and here he was, having to deal with things like this. Did that seem selfish? Definitely, but Hiccup hated having to be selfless the entire time. He wished fervently that some day, that responsibility would fall to someone else.
He sighed. "Well, let's go beat your wyverns then."
=0=
"This is the entrance?"
"Yep."
Hiccup stared down the vast darkness of the cave. "Wow. Who would've thought."
"How did you know, by the way?" Fishlegs wondered.
"Easy. Even the rocks around here are red. The plants are entirely red. If we're talking red smoke that infects other things, then it's really quite obvious," Alphas replied.
"But smoke isn't all there…" Fishlegs faltered.
Alphas glanced back at him as he stepped forward into the mouth of the cave. "Of course it's all there. Where else would it be? Smoke's just a little less solid than anything else but you can still touch it. You can't tell me you've never waved your hand through smoke and it hasn't come out a little bla-"
It was there that the speech ended, as Alphas was yanked deeper in. Omegas yelled and raced in, extracting his axe from his back and flicking his shield out as he came. The dragons immediately followed, though those bonded with the Berkians faltered as they wondered why their riders weren't coming too.
Hiccup breathed in. "Ah, screw it."
And he ran in too.
Something wrapped around his leg and dragged him away. It felt like a tail with a dagger at the end. He heard the gasps as the rest of the Vikings were picked up as well. The tail thing swayed for a moment, then he came face to face with a face from hell.
Evil yellow eyes glared at him, a hint of playfulness and power bright within the slitted pupils. A snout as long as his arm, tipped with something like an arrowhead, was all that separated him from those eyes.
"What do we have here?" the Insidian said, and even the voice slithered, like a snake's scales rasping across stone, brushing through grass. That voice was the core of every final strike, the hiss and the fangs and the whispering of air, cut to the bone.
It opened its mouth, and red smoke pooled within.
A hissing scream interrupted the moment, which Hiccup was thankful for. The Insidian turned those glaring eyes onto whatever had stopped it from having its fun, and its eyes came to rest on a head.
Red scales, elongated snout, and a long, long neck that curled behind it like an entire serpent on its own.
"Nah," Alphas said, stepping into view. "You'll put him down."
"Or what, human?" the wyvern hissed.
"Or you get the same treatment."
"You cannot kill one of-"
The sword flashed.
Hiccup fell.
"You good?" Alphas asked him. Hiccup nodded, and sat up, looking at the Insidian. It was the one time he was actually thankful to see a corpse.
"I think," came a serpentine voice from the dark recesses of the cave, "that we should have our fun, don't you?"
Hiccup was yanked away once again by a tail with a dagger at the end, dragged along the ground.
He hit his head on a rock on the way and the world blurred, although it didn't really make a difference. Everything was just blackness anyway.
His senses sharpened after a few seconds, right as they dropped down from the blackness into a luminous, foggy redness. Hiccup screamed as they kept on dropping. There was a rustle of scaly wings, and a rush of air as the Insidian carrying him finally took flight.
They flew through the red mist. Hiccup could only barely see a dark shape to his left, indicating that there was an Insidian there as well, maybe carrying someone. If it was, it was probably Alphas, since he'd been right beside him.
The tail let go of him, and he dropped face first into the ground. Moaning, he got up, and reached for Inferno. He drew it, but didn't light it yet. There was no need to show the Insidians what he had up his sleeve.
There was a sound of beating wings, and the fog shifted, whirling and swirling around him as it was blown away to reveal lines of Insidians in a huge cavern. It was like the entire island was hollow on the inside. Rock formations tinted with red were visible, crimson stalagmites and stalactites reaching up and hanging down respectively. Steps of stone and small pools of water had formed, and at the very edges of sight, at the far ends of the cavern, were large, rounded objects that he immediately knew to be the eggs.
The Insidians smiled at him and the rest of the group as the fog began to come back.
"We will enjoy the entertainment," one of them said, and it rasped. Hiccup realized that was supposed to be its laugh.
Alphas' voice cut through that horrible sound. "Wreckage," he said, pointing with his sword. The fog descended, and Hiccup prepared to hold his breath for as long as possible. Alphas was momentarily shrouded in crimson before the next order came.
"Wave."
A blast of power hit the Insidians and they flew back, screeching. Hiccup was knocked to the ground, and the fog was blasted back and away to somewhere that all those suddenly visible tunnels and other caves led to.
"Entertainment?" Alphas said, swinging his sword in the direction of the Insidians. "Who said we were here to put on a show?"
Wreckage growled in that thundering way of his, and settled into a stance behind his rider. Omegas sauntered up behind Alphas, axe over his shoulder, shield by his side. Spiral emerged, craning his long neck over his rider's head and growling too.
One by one, the others stepped up as well, each handling their own individual weapons, their dragons right behind them. Toothless stepped up to Hiccup as well, snarling at the Insidians, his mouth and spines and nostrils all glowing blue. Hiccup finally lit Inferno, slowly swinging it in circles.
"Nah," Alphas continued. "The show ends here."