A/N: Wow its been quite a long, long time since I updated this fic. The truth of it all is that I've been sitting in writer's block on this chapter for near 4 years now. I kept trying to come back to this, chip away at it and make it to my liking. I erased a lot of things, rewrote a lot of things, got stuck on a lot of things, and just wasn't happy with it for a long time, but I finally managed to bring it all together, little pieces at a time, and refine it to something I actually wanted it to be.
I think I'd have to say its probably because I've spent the last 4 years developing Alekt a lot more, and something finally clicked. In fact, I'm working on putting together a comic series with Alekt in it, though its still in its early stages. If you're curious about it though, you can find more about it on my deviantart (the-cawckiest-king), furaffinity (the-cawckiest-king), or tumblr (mordet-comic). Its much more of a modern setting involving magic and mystery but it undeniably takes heavy Norse inspiration in some areas. Tumblr is probably the best place to follow its progress since its where I post not only art and updates but other exclusive stuff like screenshots of settings for the story that I built in Cities Skylines that don't make it to DA or FA, but all of the actual important bits (the comic pages and art) will be on all three.
Anyway, enough of my shameless plug. I'm glad to finally have this out rather than leaving it sitting forever on a cliffhanger, and its been a joy writing this story and the perspective of Hiccup and Toothless every other chapter (with exception to this one of course). This is by far the longest chapter in this entire fic, so hopefully it was worth the wait.
On with the show!
Learning from the Masters
A How To Train Your Dragon Fanfiction
Based off Le'Letha's "Nightfall"
In the dark, Alekt had known many things.
When he was young, it was the sound of his mother's voice he knew before her face, and it had been the created light of fires and the glow of deep-earth fungi when he'd finally seen her.
He'd known many voices after then, some that were human, and some that were not. Those who had not grown in his world would not know the difference, and really the difference of people and birds speaking to him was very small in his peoples' tongue. There were the voices of his mother and his father and half-brother, and there were the croaks of crows, and the mimicking sounds of others within their clan who made up different families of humans, though it would not be for some years that he distinguished them as separate.
Beneath it all, almost unnoticed, but steady and low, had been the voice of the mountain.
In the darkest of shadows, when fires were blown out and the time to sleep came, he listened to it. The mountain rumbled at times just like the heartbeat of his mother, and just as he would nestle with his ear to her chest listening to it, sometimes he would rest his head to the warm stone and hear its pulse long into dreams.
Somewhere deep, deep below, ran the lifeblood of liquid fire.
It was a truth he would learn, years after he first became part of his dark world, but before then it would simply be a hum that set his mind at ease and lulled him to sleep in muted rumbles, just as his mother sang small songs to ease him into rest, and people and crows shuffled and squabbled in the darkness.
The heart of the mountain had a smell, too. The air thick with warmth, the occasional acrid waft of steam and brimstone, hints of small minerals locked away in hard granite and occasional branching veins of crystal. Where the stones split into deep fissures or small cracks, sometimes they would hiss with smoke and steam as the mountain burped. He would learn young that those, too, had differences. There were the steam and gases that were merely unpleasant, and there were some that were dangerous. Some which couldn't be breathed, and some for which fires could not be lit near, lest the gases combust.
Even when there were no fires beneath the earth, it wasn't without light. At times there were luminescent plants and lichens, glowing a bright blue and jade greens that could hurt the eyes if stared at too closely, and curtains of beaded string that he would find out were glowing bugs, weaving sticky webs to catch small prey as it fluttered through.
Sometimes the bright blue earth-lights would scatter over the walls, like very-close stars before he knew what stars were. Sometimes, they would glitter underneath the water of streams running through the mountain, fed by snow melt far above and springs deep below, seeming to come from nowhere through a small opening and leave just the same.
He had spent a lot of time pondering the places that the water might go, but in a world where most things are darkness, he had been left with little to base his imagination off of, at first.
Wondering led to wandering, tracing his way through the mountains often through memory alone, hearing the cues of the mountain where the sounds changed, feeling with his fingertips the places where his people carved unique symbols and shapes into the stone, drawing a map in his mind through nothing more than touch as he followed the edges of walls and listened to the way sound bounced off of them, to tell him where the walls were narrow and where the flat of pathways dropped into deep ravines of which there seemed to be no bottom.
Every movement was unusually careful, for a young child, never the boisterous charging forward with no heed towards what lay ahead. All of his people, even the youngest, were cautious. They were the only ones whose bloodlines survived all this time, traversing a darkness not even broken by slivers of moonlight on cloudless nights, or the flash of lightning during a storm. If they were to play recklessly, it was always close to home, where there were no steep drops or sharp stone-fangs to cut and gore, where the nests were long ago worn smooth by generations of habitation and filled with furs and sand and moss and feathers and other soft things to roll and curl up in.
Then one day, the world changed.
It grew, past the unending maze of darkness, broken only by bright glowing-things and the warm orange flickers of fire. The maze of darkness had an end, a way out that led into winter.
Winter was as deep of a contrast as it could get. A world of pure white, not just the fleeting speckles of glow worms and mushrooms.
Bright.
Startling.
Offensive.
Too bright and impossible to stare at, and cold. Whatever his world had been, outside and winter had been everything opposite.
He had shied away from the light and the frost which caked the entrance of the cave opening, the ice and rock sharpened downward into points that gave it teeth, white flakes splattering the edges as it threatened to creep in further, but the warmth coming from the throat of the mountain kept it at bay.
His mother, amused, had explained to him that the world was covered in snow and ice. Alekt knew of ice, which sometimes formed in the deeper places where the warmth didn't quite reach and fringed the edges of streams the mountain didn't warm. He didn't know snow, until then, and he found it to be soft. Soft almost like dust, or flour, or fur, but so very, very cold. It, too, was frozen water, but it fell from the sky one small speck at a time, drifting on the wind.
Explaining the sky to a young child who had always known ceilings of cave proved a lot more complicated. Explaining sharp, great spires of trees and flowing hills and jagged mountain peaks and dark dots of clustered buildings and the outline of the sea far beyond whose depths went deeper than anyone could know only slightly less so.
The sky was nothing like their caves, in the day. Almost as bright as the snow, but blue, lit by a great fire far away but so big that its light covered and warmed the world, sometimes. A world that, in summer, would be overtaken by flourishes of color he would have to wait a season or two to see.
When night fell, the sun went away far beyond the edge of the world, out of sight, and with it went the warmth. In its absence came the moon, a bright white ball against a more comfortingly-familiar veil of night, speckled with spots of light - not glow worms, but stars. While night cast the world into greater darkness, it was not complete darkness like inside their home. The light of the moon reflected off the snow, made it glitter beautifully, and then came the streams of color-
Alekt had never seen anything so beautiful, flitting slowly across the sky like the reflections of a gurgling stream, first streams of green, and then purples and reds, and then blues, always bleeding new colors and changing as they danced lazily across the sky, not so bright to turn night to day, but with presence enough to cast their colors across the snow.
The world outside... was wonderful.
Cold, strange, and dangerous even, but if this was what waited only just outside, a first step beyond the familiar, what else was there to learn? To see? To breathe and ponder over and explain? The dark of their world in the belly of the mountain seemed so small.
But the wider, brighter world was also intimidating. A place for which he had little reference, little foresight into what dangers might await. In dark caves, traveled often by his kin, he knew every nook, cranny, and corner. He knew the smells and the sounds that told him where he could go and where he could not, even though he could not see.
To see so much, too much, was a scary thing. While not blind, as his brother was, his world had never needed the use of much sight, save for the occasional marker of where other things grew or the glow of fires so they could see the food they cooked and the animated gesticulations of telling stories.
The outside world wasn't scary for no reason however.
Fear of novelty was fleeting on its own, until that novelty came with fangs and claws and weapons.
Outside was where a lot of food came from. Rabbits, deer, other species of bird - but it was also where other things hunted. Massive, lurching, drooling bears with rows of long dagger-claws. Wild wolves that keened in the night and snapped their fangs at anything that came too close, not like the tame ones raised by his people, that Alekt sometimes curled up in the flanks of. Great, slinking cats with demonic screeches and flashing eyes. Even worse were the screaming and howling of wild boars as they seemed to charge from nowhere at all and for no need of meat as predators sought after, and it was a quick lesson that, while food, huge deer with huge-er racks of antlers were anything but passive and helpless.
For all the wondrous dangers other animals posed, they were useful and important. Their flesh provided food, while their furs fashioned into clothes gave warmth and protection against the cold, or could be turned into blankets, and their bones could be carved into tools or weapons or inlaid with artistic patterns to decorate their home with.
In some rare cases, there were also dragons, with their thick hides and great wings and fire that often came from their throats.
But the strangest and most dangerous of all were the people.
Outside the mountain, far below at its feet, were villages. Nests where giants lived. Humans like them, but bigger, and bulkier, carrying massive weapons and cutting down Alekt's people viciously whenever they found them.
They were the worst of all, and to be avoided at all cost.
But their clan knew how to survive, and how to avoid the people at the bottom of the mountain. The giants didn't like to hunt in winter, hiding in their strange nests that stood out in the open, gathered around fires to stay warm as they waited for better seasons. And so Alekt and his people were more free to move about, and hunt, although it was no easy task.
In the trees - the odd, standing things full of endless webs of trunks and branches and twigs - they made pathways out of branches and rope to walk over, which were narrow, but made for good travel without leaving tracks in the snow. Climbing trees, Alekt found out quickly, was just as fun as climbing rocks, and often easier. There wasn't much else that could climb either, save for birds and squirrels. Wolves and big cats and bears and deer and boars, however, had a much harder time of it. The trees were also almost always free of traps, unlike the ground, which could hide many things beneath the snow, including things that bite and break bones.
He learned quickly the ways that trees and branch-paths could be used. To travel, to see, to hide and to escape and to leap down on things. The crows were always of great help, and flitted around him a few at a time as he went. They told him things. Where to step. Where not to step. What trees were safe, and which were impassable. They told him of hidden places in the trees, where sometimes there was food stashed away, or an animal's nest he could disrupt and hunt. They also warned of danger below, like wolves and big cats, or if there were any people from the bottom of the mountain nearby.
They were also not too bad at helping to keep warm, finding perches all over him when he found a place he didn't want to move from. The crows were small enough, not unlike him, but quite warm for their size. Feathers were good for the cold, and his own clothing was often adorned or stuffed with feathers just as much as fur.
The cold air would often try to nip at any exposed skin, like a hungry, angry fox. He often found himself rubbing warmth back into his fingers, times when he stopped and lingered to draw things he saw. While he always had gloves on him to keep warm and climb with, outfitted on the ends with hook-like claws that helped him find purchase on the smallest of seams, he enjoyed feeling the texture of things beneath his fingers.
Of course, even without the crows that often accompanied him, he was rarely alone.
While it was often that others of his clan accompanied and oversaw him out in the world, none such were so persistent as Spyttebrann. The uplifted roundness of her cheeks and impish eyes weren't enough to detract from her scrappy roughness. In the light of winter days, her face was often well-flushed from the cold, her black hair dusted white from the snow, and she was ever as persistent - maybe more so - outside of their clan's home than in it. After all, without the darkness of the caves, there was nowhere to hide.
More often than not, Alekt found her in his company, much to his mother's and others' amusement. If he were to climb a tree and settle there, then Spy wouldn't be far behind, although less often with intent to sit and enjoy the sights and sounds. More likely, she usually wanted to play, or roughhouse. All things that Alekt was less inclined to do, which ended in his face shoved into a snow pile more often than he would ever like to admit.
Unfortunately, offering little reaction and walking away didn't seem to help much with dissuading her childish bullying and prodding.
Of course, even Spy knew better than to draw attention from dangerous sources, so times when the giants came around, they made a point to retreat deeper up the cliffs and trees and away. It told him some things, at least. Like that Spy was in fact capable of shutting up, until they were safe again. And then it was back to her constant chatter, and occasionally getting more snow in his face.
Seasons would pass, and Alekt would learn a lot as each one cycled through.
He'd learn that trees were not always bare and skeletal, sometimes covered in leaves. At least those who didn't retain their needles through the winter. Tall grass and ferns would cover much of the landscape, making it only barely more visible than when snow covered the ground.
The days were often longer, and hotter, but the nights were also darker. With no snow on the ground acting as a mirror, the light of the moon often never penetrated the trees, especially on the nights when the moon was in shadow.
Alekt couldn't say he had many complaints of that. While it was more difficult to see, he was used to the dark.
Just as spring meant the crows had nests, eggs, and chicks, other animals also had offspring in the spring and summer. Many younger animals were good for hunting, when they could be caught without getting attacked by the mothers. This was often more important when it came to big animals, like deer, but smaller animals could be quite aggressive as well. He definitely couldn't say he enjoyed being on the receiving end of attacking birds that weren't crows, but the eggs of other bird types were undeniably good to eat.
Many of the trees sprouted nuts that could be eaten, and berry thickets were often a treasure trove of sweet fruits to scavenge, if they could get to them before the animals and the giants.
While his people didn't like the giants, they were undeniably an asset more than they tended to be a hindrance, for the clever thief. Fish and animal traps were often a good source of food if he could get to them while the hunters were away, and unlike most of the wild animals, he could do so without it being so obvious that food was stolen, often resetting traps as he found them once emptied.
Sometimes he would even take live fish back in a pouch of water, to drop into their own secluded waters inside the mountain caves and replenish the fish populations they tended to there ahead of winter, since the cave waters did not freeze solid.
On his most daring of days, sometimes he would go so far as to sneak into the village of the giants.
Usually, he would only come in the dark of night, when his black furs and feather-skins made him the hardest to see, flitting along the shadows wherever possible and avoiding the firelight that lit the paths of the wood-nests. Even as a child, the giants would give no mercy to cutting one like him down. They did not like his clan that lived in the belly of the mountain.
The brush that surrounded their nests was more than enough to crouch in and observe, and the wood-nests in their odd, tall shapes had plenty of small crevices for his metal claws to find purchase and haul himself up, onto rooftops and across beams.
Most of the wood-nests were of similar size, a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller than the others, but one stood out above the rest. It was both tall and long, many times the size of any other nest in the village, where many of the giants gathered and made lots of noise, feasting and drinking and singing and speaking. It was easy enough to slip inside unseen, digging his talons into the wood scales that topped the nest, to an opening that billowed of smoke, expertly slipping down onto a light platform of crisscrossing lattices and square-cut tree trunks that supported the structure.
From below, he could hear the rhythm of drums, a melody of flutes, and strummed, buzzing strings. Laughter echoed all around, unawares to him even as he stretched out across the highest beams like a cat settling for a nap. The place was not just made of natural woods, but carved, alike yet unlike those of his own people. Some of the tree-beams were made into the shapes of animal heads and knot-work, intricate, and dangling from them were holding wheels of horns where small candle lights flickered.
All around, pieces of meat, legs and ribs and other things were set upon tables or passed around, ripped at ravenously by the giants' teeth while they drank generously from upright horns or wooden tankards. The smell of spiced roast hung heavy on the air and wafted up with the hearth smoke, snaking its way up towards the way he had climbed in.
Shields and animal pelts hung along the walls between him and them, as well as fluttering cloths in colorful patterns like he had never seen. Woven images of animals or weapons set against broad squares of color.
He had heard plenty about the giants, and he had seen some of them out in the forests and the fields before, but he found himself intrigued by their elaborate works of art. No greater than the wood, stone, and bone carvings of his own people, but different.
He spent more than one night watching the activities from the rafters of the longhouse, picking up chatter, learning their words and their patterns, the ways that they rejoiced in loud cheers and hearty gesticulations, how they lowered themselves on their knees for their chicks, how they would squabble and fight, only to be broken up by all the rest around them, and how they mingled alongside small cats and dogs alike.
At times, he would find himself with a piece of charcoal and paper, sketching out the scenes of the people below, the artistry of the wall and the banners, or the figures they had made in statues of wood or stone. At rare times, he would indulge to climb down into the upper rooms, if no one occupied them, and take small trinkets of interest. Sometimes he would hear the giants bemoan or accuse others of the missing items later. Sometimes he would put them back, sometimes he wouldn't.
One time was a mistake that would rob him of future spying, when he was distracted inspecting a bauble between his claws and didn't hear the soft foot-pads of a giant child come up into the upper rooms. It was silent at first when they saw each other, until the child screamed, and many of the giants came running.
He was much quicker than them, skittering up the wood lattice and scroll-work as fast and practiced as a squirrel, controlling his slide down the scaled back of the longhouse outside, rolling head-over-heel as he hit the ground and breaking immediately into a run from there. He didn't look back when the doors of the longhouse slammed open behind him, already well on his way up a retaining wall of cobblestones, and then up a wall of snowy clefts beyond that.
No amount of shouting or activity at his tail was worth stopping to see, making quick work up the trunk of a tree, through the branches and the hanging paths that his people set up between there, so that there were no foot-trails for the giants to track him back home.
He was scolded when he came back to the nest in the mountain, and the next he returned to the giants' village, the hole in the longhouse was closed to him, and the giants had been shooting at any of his avian wing-kin who tried to fly into and watch the village below to bring back news, as they had been doing unbothered for some time before he got caught inside the giants' long-nest.
He didn't revisit the giants' village again for some years, spending his time instead with mentors and other young wingless like himself, perfecting many of his skills. His ability to track, to hunt, to hide, and to fight. Often times he found himself in the company of Spyttebrann, ever the energetic pest, and Gyr.
While most in his flock were small of stature, Gyr was very easily the size of any of the giants below. He towered above most adults, even though he was only a couple years older than Alekt and Spytte, and just as Alekt had a destiny to one day inherit the title of Head from his father, and his half-brother would become the flock's Seer, Gyr would become his second-in-command and his bodyguard, the Beak.
He also made for a good opponent in fighting, given his greater size. Even among his flock, Alekt fell on the smaller side, and most who would ever dare to fight him for real would be those among the giant-folk. As he learned training to fight against Gyr, overcoming the barriers of size was no small task. It often took both Alekt and Spytte or someone else of considerable skill to ever win against him, and often only barely, if at all.
While Gyr may have dominated in the fights - as he well should have, if he expected to guard Alekt's life one day - he paled in comparison to some of Alekt's own skills, and none among their age in the wingless of their flock could climb quite like Alekt was able to, especially as he started to mature into his fledgling seasons.
Leaving his thirteenth winter towards his fourteenth summer, Alekt took the Fledging, the rite of passage for all growing chicks like him. A journey towards the highest peak, Sun's Perch, far on the horizon and many days away.
The village of the giants still slumbered at the bottom of the mountain nearest the sea, as snow continued to cling greedily to the land, and the wind bit bitterly even with furs and feathers.
Even with the sun above the horizon, there was little warmth to be enjoyed, save that of each other - all of the Fledglings soon to prove themselves - and the wing-kin of their crows huddled together, gathering heat and strength for the long journey ahead. Longer still for those without wings.
In order to go across, they first had to go down, clattering down the rocks as metal talons scraped stone, moving just as quickly downward as they would've upward. To most, with the ice and snow, it would be harder to scale, but with their claws and their boot-talons, all of them made quick work descending, no ropes or ties as insurance against slips.
When it wasn't jagged rocks and crags above sheer drops, it was snow-laden hills steep enough that they did more sliding than walking, some more controlled than others, but no one getting themselves into anything one could deem a danger.
Some of the others whooped and hollered, fussed around or played silly pranks of thrown snow or light shoves, much as their guide would allow, but Alekt remained one of the quiet and focused few, off of the cliffs at least.
On the cliffs was a different story. None were dumb enough to get too playful, but there was undeniably contest, unspoken challenge and competition as each of them swung over the edges and began nimble movements downward, bruises on the way down when someone slipped a little or dropped and caught themselves on a jag nothing more than temporary badges of honor to be shrugged away in their race to reach the bottom ahead of the rest.
Their exit down the cliffs was done with a grace none of those large, clumsy giants could ever hope to try and match, done with an ease that Alekt would later hear spoken of as if it were mythical, but in the moment there and then, it was nothing spectacular. This was just how they lived and moved. Those who could not, didn't survive, and those who survived had been doing this for generations.
Once they had reached the bottom of one mountain, it was back up another with the same acrobatic grace and power, moving just as fast up the rocks as they did running across the small valley between them, if not faster. Underneath fur and feathers buffeted by the arctic winds, lean but defined muscle rippled along their arms and shoulders, heaving them upward one well-placed claw-hold at a time. Their winged kin flew ahead of the wingless, alerting to the best cliffs for climbing, and the best ledges for resting when they needed a moment to breathe and relax their arms.
Then, it was upward and upward, no matter that the cliffs were entirely vertical and sometimes so steep as to turn upside-down.
It was a full day's climb before they reached the top of the first peak, and still more laid ahead of them before they would find Sun's Perch. Dried meat filled their bellies when they huddled together underneath an overhang, piling snow to the sides to make it a cave with a fire for heat. When the sun rose again the morning after, they would begin again for their destination.
In heights easily deadly, there was room for caution, but not fear. Whether they scaled upward, or across flat-tops of stone, or leapt great gaps trusting that their claws would catch them from falling, the only way was forward, and they knew that their guide would not ask of them anything they could not handle, and if they could not handle it, they did not deserve to Fledg.
By day three, all childish antics within the group had ceased. Even Spyttebrann in her boundless chaos was more focused on the task at hand and what it would take to reach the end of their journey. Days were spent traversing harsh terrain, and nights were spent tangled together around a fire while the sky-lights danced in the night and colored the snow.
The bitter cold of a winter not yet ready to break wore at their flesh and bones hungrily, and none had energy to spare beyond making the journey itself, or hunting game as they found it and breaking apart wood for fire along their path.
They would sometimes see the yellow glow of flames in the distance, small clusters of nests for the giants, but they dared not get near any of them and held little interest in stealing or raiding yet, even when some lone giants traveling the roads crossed their line-of-sight.
Their travel was slower than the first day, no more unnecessary movements or contests of speed. Now it was about endurance, making it a little bit closer, a bit over the next rise towards Sun's Perch, and what had once been everyone finding their own way was now a coordinated line, following in each other's path as they found their way upward on the best claw-holds. When one would stop for rest, all of their traveling flock would stop also, curling up together to share body heat until they were ready to move once more together.
When tall jags were at their tails, it was forward through deep snow, which was a harder obstacle than the rocks were, but once again, moving in single file seemed to help as one cleared the path first and the rest found easier walking as a result, trading off when the one in the lead tired.
After eight days of all this, up and down different cliffs and hills and mountains, they finally found rest at a camp within view of the last and highest mountain, just over the next valley. Their reward ahead of it was to rest a day, to eat properly warm food and drink and chatter among themselves, some excitement, some relaxation.
A small lake on top of their resting-mountain provided plenty of water, a place where animals they could trap or hunt were sure to come to, and marked their way forward as it snaked through the rocks and cascaded down the cliffs on the other side.
Better rested and fed, and with their last horizon within easy view, some energy returned, clicking and chattering at each other in their crow-tongue as they clamored down the cliffs with renewed vigor, not even caring for the sting of the wind any longer.
Old, ice-caked wooden platforms and narrow catwalks of stone along the cliff edge made for an easier descent than the other places, the area below them marked in ancient standing stones and totems of bone, feather, and twine that signaled this stretch of mountain as a part of their territory.
Their path was not like that of the giant's though, where footsteps had trodden the ground flat and hard through valleys and coast. Instead they were narrow ledges and scraggly trees, lengths of rope and tunnels between clusters of stalactite icicles beneath the stone lip of a gushing waterfall.
The final peak was the most difficult of all the climbs, even with the day of rest beforehand. The sides of it were steeper, with less places to hold onto, and more upside-down places that took all their strength and concentration to defeat. For the first time, some almost slipped, with nothing but open air waiting to crack them on the stones below, and they looked out for each other's holds more than before to ensure no one did, even as they knew that the moment someone did, there would be nothing they could do to stop their fall.
Their lungs were used to the thin, cold air of the high elevations, but even for them, the heights left them winded as they drew near the summit. Though they were born of a people who spent all their lives clawing their way up and down something or other, reaching the top felt like an accomplishment only talked about in legends, but victoriously, all of them made it to the peak.
Some simply lay panting clouds of white, basking in a much-earned rest. Others hollered in triumph. Standing at the point of the highest mountain, it felt as though all the world was laid before them. Every other mountain surrounding them, the villages peppered off at every direction, even the edge of the ocean far outside their lands' borders.
And yet, for as far as Alekt could see, to where the sea and land and sky all melted together in the haze of impossible distance, still he would not see even a fraction of the world from Sun's Perch.
But for now, at least - once they had caught their breath, and each had left a painted hand-print on a stone wall decorated by generations of others who had made their climb here - he could know the taste of flight.
Once they had rested and taken in their victory, it was time for the last step in their journey down the fly-lines that took them over the cliffs, apprehension and excitement every step towards the rope-frame before they each took their turn downward.
The roar of the wind in Alekt's ears, the feel of adrenaline like fire itself in his veins and the breath caught in his throat as air itself pushed back on his very being all the way down. It made every hair on his body tingle and shiver from more than just cold, an exhilaration indescribable, and he fell right into it instinctively. The feeling of a controlled fall unlike any other, even though he had held on to fly-lines before. None were like this. None were so high and ran so long and the wind never pulled him so hard.
And the disappointment after he hit the end, momentum carrying him into a thick pile of snow that cushioned his fall at the bottom, was immeasurable.
An addictive taste to his whole body, gone the moment it was over and wanting for more.
It followed him into sleep more often than not, dreaming of freedom. Of being one of the wing-kin, of a bird himself with feathers of soot black, unbothered by the cold and the wind, higher and higher towards the sun so that the whole frozen world lay bare underneath his wings. Sometimes he would only fly alone, others he would be joined by many of his flock, and on the rarest occasion, sometimes the god of the sky would descend low alongside him, body aflame yet painless. Moreso even, that her sparks would catch his feathers, igniting over his wings and tail, and fill him with new strength rather than burn.
As a spark of Frith, he'd follow her across the northern sky, until not only her feathers underneath but her flames burned black and then dissipated entirely, leaving remaining streams of fire in all different colors across the night sky when she disappeared beyond the horizon.
When he awoke, it was always with a yearning. To soar among the clouds, above the cliffs and the forests, untethered from the earth whenever he chose yet still a part of it.
With his Fledging, there were new opportunities allowed to him, and new responsibilities. He was allowed to go on hunts and patrols of their territories, on raids of their enemies when they tried to push too deep into crow-lands.
The giants wanted their stones and metals, he was told, often trying to push their way up the mountain, each time building wooden outposts from felled trees and filling them with weapons to kill.
Each time, his flock thwarted their efforts.
Sometimes the giants tried to be sneakier, trying to climb and camp on parts of the mountain while leaving less signs, but if the wingless like him didn't find them first, their wing-kin and wolves would tattle.
The giants were never so graceful on the rocks as them, big and lumbering rather than small and agile, bad at falling when they slipped, often left limping off towards their wood-nests when they fell or were pushed, if crashing against the ground didn't kill them.
Often his flock, wingless and winged alike, would scold and mock, chattering and cawing in disdain when they had victoriously beaten back the giants from their high and perilous domain. Sometimes when they lost or were pushed away from the giant's village, it was their tails that were mocked instead, as his flock retreated into the shadows defeated.
The giants would try to set traps for beasts and for them alike, sometimes on the forest ground beneath the brush or soil or snow, sometimes in the trees. Most times his people were alert enough to avoid them, every so often, someone was careless or unlucky, their leg snapped inside metal jaws or caught in a tree snare. Sometimes they would be found later, bled out or hung dead, alone and unable to free themselves. Sometimes the giants got to them first. Sometimes they didn't even recover a body to lay to rest with the others of their flock.
The crow-folk would hunt and ambush, slipping through the trees and over rocks like a whisper, stalking the giants like wolves after hares. Sometimes they would have wolves with them, of many different shades, white and black and grey and brown. When they liked the place of ambush, they would pounce, from the cliffs or the trees, tackling the giants from their blind-spots, ripping through their throats with metal claws or with sickle blades if they timed their attack right, rolling and juking and coordinating their attacks as a group if their opponents turned out to be better fighters than they'd hoped. Sometimes they managed to overwhelm the giants, sometimes they were sent skittering back into the trees and cliffs, but always they left scars to be remembered by when they did.
Sometimes, there was no going for the throat or making anyone dead. Sometimes it was just harassment, the giants waving their axes and clubs and roaring, the crow-folk cackling and clicking in crow-tongue, goading each other and trying to pelt each other with rocks and sticks but not fighting.
On both sides, no one really claimed much in the way of new land. The crow-folk kept their mountains and their caves, and they built and rebuilt tree-paths on the fringes of the giant's territory. The giants kept the forests and the fields and the sea. Blood spilled often where the two domains met and members of each clashed. Sometimes one or the other kept a brief dominion over a desirable spot on each other's border, but those spots traded ownership over battles waged too many times for anyone to keep track. In summer the giants would swarm a good stream or a cluster of standing stones and in winter it would belong to the crows again.
The worst of the fighting would almost always be when the giants tried to build new nests closer to the mountain, trying to establish themselves behind circles of tall, spiked tree walls and stone, with tall towers so they could see far. Sometimes the crows found them before they could get very far in building, but sometimes the giants managed to make their wood-nests with spikes and traps before they could be halted.
When those times came, so did the crow-folk, skulking around the far fringes in the brush and the trees, poking and prodding and examining the walls for any weaknesses. Sometimes they had to make weaknesses, sometimes they found them in the natural landscape.
Often the giants would set strings of bone-chimes in the brush and in the trees that would alert to the smallest movement, and they would have to be cautious not to trigger the noise-traps and bring the giants to alert. Sometimes they would alert them on purpose and set their own trap.
There was always a quiet, before the raids. A planning. A tension in the air like before a storm broke. They would wait, and watch, and meticulate how to breach the offending giants' nests, knowing all the while the giants were expecting them. Sometimes they had to attack more times than once. Sometimes they waited until the giants left their nest circles and wandered into the woods, picking them off when they could, warning them away with wounds and angry clacking when they could not. Sometimes it went on for days. Other times, it went on for seasons.
Alekt still remembered one of their raids clearly, after having harassed the giants for many moons, picking away at their defenses in small ways that they wouldn't notice easily. A loosened rope in the wall binds here, a hole dug beneath the rock walls there, grooves cut into wood structures that were hardly noticeable but just deep enough to dig their claws in and climb.
When they struck, it was as if they were a part of the shadows themselves, not a sound between any of the wingless as they moved inward. The winged crows had flown over many times and watched where the giants moved, where they slept and where they watched from, and when. They told them of the places where the brush was thick enough to hide, where the land dipped just below sight, and they told them when the giants had the fewest numbers.
They slipped in between gaps they had made between the standing logs of the outer walls, or pounced inside from overhangs of tree branches the giants had failed to cut away from their walls, or slipped easily down rock faces that met with the edges of their palisades, all under the cover of night when their black feather-skins would blend best. Some would heave themselves up the watchtowers first and dispose of the one or two giants who surveyed from above without raising any alarm.
They moved out from the cover of the brush or from behind small structures and piles of supplies, and with the efficiency of mountain cats, dragged them to the floor and spilled their life-blood, then vanished into cover with their corpses just as quickly. One after another, the giants on the outskirts or patrolling with little or no company met their end, until only a few of them remained and realized the danger they were in.
Too late.
Too late, they realized, and with little resistance, all the giants in the smaller wood-nests away from their main holdings fed the earth with their blood so that his own people could set the nests aflame and reduce them to ruins.
In the thick of it all though, as his people moved about, clicked and chattered, moving oils and timber and setting fires with an air of casual routine, he couldn't help but pause over one of the bodies, staring into its lifeless eyes that had already frosted over.
He recognized the face of the giant that lay dead before him, years ago within the longhouse where the giants sang and feasted and danced. Alekt remembered him throwing his hands up in cheer, roaring louder than all the rest with a grin and a light in his eyes, drink splashing from his mug as he did, and the rest of the giants cheered and raised their arms with him, their voices too, and some time afterwards he lowered to his knees before a child with a tenderness familiar in the motions of his own clan.
His eyes scanned further, and while some were faces he had no particular recollections of, there were some that did.
A woman, once a fledgling like him now, shy and giggling, twirling her hair as she courted a fledgling male, now more grown, yet still with a softness to her features even in death.
Another man, quite old, who moved stiffly before and with a set jaw, movements those of age and pain, but a stubbornness to push through it all anyway.
A cocky young man who boasted and flexed, trying to impress others only a few seasons older than he, and often flushing his face red as he made a fool of himself more often than not.
Another man who had sat quiet in the feasts, scribing with a feather and ink, only occasionally glancing up from his writings before he was back to it.
More and more, he saw a familiarity there, lives wasted that had probably had their own quirks, dreams, loves, and hauntings. Bigger than most of his people, perhaps, but people still the same, whose individuality could never be seen or entertained when they and his people clashed over land and resource, tried to kill each other for what they believed to be solely theirs to possess.
He found himself wondering what commonalities they might share. What stories they might tell over the fire. What scars they would brag about, or what hunt they would most want to boast. What songs they would enjoy singing and what dances they would do.
When he thought of it in most serious terms, he knew that many of the things they would tell each other would be insults to the other, intended or otherwise. Their battles would be of humiliations over the other. Their songs would be in tongues they did not commonly share. Their scars would be from each other, and the wild game they had taken would be that which they stole from each others' lands.
But was that something that could be overcome? He wasn't sure. He knew enough of the giant's tongue to understand many of their more common words, even if he did not actively use them himself, but that did not mean they could understand one another. Not in a way that would matter.
Still... he was sure there had to be a better way than this. Forever killing and burning away all sign of each other that they could, endless in their conflict.
Today was not that day, as fire charred the wood-nests and bodies of the giants, leaving a blackened graveyard for the other giants to find in the morning.
When Alekt didn't wage bloody war with his people against the giants, he dreamed still of flying.
But dreams became a little bit more. They become wonderings. Plans. Drawings of frames and furs and cloth, wings that could take him above the ground, perhaps. A task that was easier said than done, and attempts that more often left him with bruises, sprains, and unquenched frustrations.
Their birds could fly, but they were small and light, and many of the winds around their mountain were strong. Sometimes his attempts to get off the ground were successful, in a way. He could take a big sheet of canvas and bunch the corners together, let the wind lift him up. He was also small and light, even compared to most of his wingless kin, but there was not much to be done for controlling it or holding on for long.
When he tried to actually make wings he could tie to his arms, they were not very good at all. At most, he could be pushed back, but not up.
It was strange to him, though. In their lands, besides the deer and wolves and bears and cats, there were also dragons. Some were ground-dragons, that lumbered along the earth, but others flew too. Some even bigger than horses. If they could fly, why couldn't he?
And perhaps that was the start of things, really. A simple curiosity.
Dragons had thicker bones and horns and spikes. Their scales and leathers were much heavier and denser than boar's hide. Many of them even had shapes that did not seem well-suited to flying, like the arrow-points of beaks on birds. Their sheer size also seemed almost impossible to get off the ground, yet they did so all the same.
They found dragons, sometimes, in traps laid by the giants or curled up in caves or rarely at times frozen in snow and ice. Sometimes the dragons would be alive and sometimes dead, sometimes his clan would kill them if they drew too close into their territory, and some of their skins and fangs and horns could be found scattered around their cave-nests just as there were skeletons and pelts of deer and boar and bear and wolf and other animals.
On one rare instance where they found a dead dragon in a giant's trap, he found himself poking around its corpse, living up its legs or its head or its wings, finding they were indeed very heavy and its hide super thick. The dragon skins in the mountain's belly were much the same, yet somehow they flew.
Was there something different about dragon-skin that they could fly, then? Something that humans and giants and crow-kin lacked? He could not be sure, but he found himself inspecting different skins often, and when he could get away with it without making someone mad, picking it apart and inspecting it for clues, but the answers simply wouldn't come.
Perhaps if he could study the dragons more closely... alive and in their element, but he was not sure how he would do such a thing, and with the giants, it was far too dangerous than it would already be. There was no room for such risky endeavors between their already-strained survival, and he was only one small crow.
Unknowingly to him, that would change rather soon though.
Some of the crows came to him one day, flying with alert-calls on the air, twitching and flicking their wings in agitation as they landed on the branches near him.
Danger! Alert! Enemy! Angry-alert! Flock-kin! That way! Danger-threat! Hunting! they cried, looking from him towards the direction of their distress. Alekt was quick to move through the branches and tree-paths, the birds leading him the whole way, continuing to call Here here! Danger! Threat! Flock-kin! Help!
What they led him to was a small brown bear that was tearing apart an old log with its claws, dipping its head into a hollow in its wood-flank before coming out with nothing. Its nose and ears and mannerisms were all greatly interested, however, in whatever it was trying to dig out, and he heard the muffled sounds of another crow from within the hollow trunk, screaming Away! Threat-danger! Bad-bad-bad-bad! Angry! Fury! Away-threat-bad! No!
The bear was not large for a bear, just old enough to be driven away from its mother, and it seemed to be alone, but it was large compared to him, and he was careful about his movements up in the trees, sneaking to not be seen and heard even as the bear pulled an injured bird from the wood, which keened and aggressively flapped for freedom, ignoring other crows who scolded it loudly and even occasionally dove and attacked its back end.
While it paid no attention to the flock of angry crows trying to distract it, an arrow from the woods found its shoulder and was much harder to ignore, the bear dropping the crow and giving a pained roar, snapping at the arrow length. A couple more arrows lodged in its pelt, and without much more thought, the small bear took off running, soon with several giants bursting out of the woods onto its heels.
Alekt stayed still and unseen, watching most of the small hunting party crash on by completely unawares. One young giant trailing at the end of their pack stopped however and crouched down, picking up the wounded crow even as it tried to flap away from them across the ground, unable to fly. The giant held it up with wings held to its body, inspecting it, and shoved it into a satchel at their side before following the rest into the woods.
Alekt tracked them for a while, even as they made to return to their giant nests closer to the coast, having lost the bear they were hunting with nothing to show for it.
Most of the giants dispersed to their own separate nests on their return, but the one who had taken the injured crow into their bag and another went to the same nest and disappeared inside. Like most of the giant nests, it was made mostly of wood and thatch and occasional bits of metal, and it was the same size as most except for the longhouse where all the giants liked to gather. Unlike the longhouse though, the place for fire-smoke to escape was too small to climb down into, and it had few openings or windows, nor was it tall enough to sneak in entirely unnoticed from the shadows of the rafters.
His only real choice was to try and sneak into the front, peeking his head towards the few gaps in the structure where he could see between cracks in woven wicker coverings. Luckily with the dark of night and the firelight inside, it was easier to see inside than it was for any to see him out. The giants remained totally unaware of him, tending to a pot of cooking liquid.
He could likely guess at what they planned, and made a plan of his own, taking a stick of wood from the ground and tapping and scratching away at the outside back of the giant nest in rhythm. It didn't take much tapping to get the giants to look up and around, the bigger of the two calling out to see if anyone would answer. He remained silent, save for the tap-scratching, and saw them start to head out the door to look.
He slipped easily into the shadows and waited as they peered about the back, and for extra measure, he threw a stone into the brush further away to give them something to investigate.
He was quick to dart inside when they did, faced only with the young giant who was small like him but, judging by the look of them, not as physically strong.
She startled at the sight of him, in her hands the injured bird, and quickly backed away into the corner. He stayed low, but his talon gloves were visible, firelight glinting off the metal, and he moved towards her silently. He could have been more aggressive, pounced at her, but he tried something different, extending a hand and motioning to give-it-here. She barely dared to breathe, daring to look from him to the bird and back again, and started to move forward with it to give to him.
If she had moved just a few moments faster or luck had been on his side a few moments longer, he may have taken the bird and disappeared as silent as a whisper back into the night, but the larger giant returned faster than he expected and snarled at his back.
In a moment, he was on the ground under the other's weight, but not for very long as he braced and bucked, rolling them over and twisting in their hold. The giant was probably close to his age, maybe a bit older, but definitely larger.
Still, he had fought many times with Gyr training just for such situations, knowing that his size was a disadvantage. His beaked mask pecked the giant in the eye and made them screw their eyes shut and reel back, and he was quick to kick with his boots, which also had talons for climbing, cutting through shirt-cloth and shallowly into belly-flesh alike as they tumbled into a wall.
The giant howled out in pain and to alert other giants, and he knew then he had to get out or he would assuredly be killed. Injured crow left but not forgotten, he darted outside and bolted into the shadows in a not unfamiliar scene of flight from the giants' village, with shouts and arrows at his back that bit into tree trunks and spiked wooden walls.
A little more than moon-span later, to his surprise, the injured crow would return to his flock, chattering of being held captive and how the giants had wanted to kill it, but the small giant with the bag had screamed and cried and wailed and fought the other giants to protect it and tend it, feeding it each day and binding its wounded wing and petting its feathers softly then letting it learn to fly again so that it could return.
It was an occurrence almost unheard of. The giants did not like the crow-folk, and would often shoot down the winged-kin that flew overhead with arrows or caught them in traps. They would eat them as they did other animals and then use their feathers to make arrows to shoot down more crow-folk. An insult if ever there was one.
But this giant had shielded the crow from harm from the other giants and returned it to its flock, and that became something worth talking about.
Still, most of his clan decided that it was nothing worth paying too much attention to. The giant that did it was young and probably foolish and that it had to defend their winged kin from the other giants meant that nothing had changed, except that one of the giant younglings just happened to be kind. In time, that would change as the giants taught their chicks to be vicious towards them.
Alekt, however, wondered if there was more weight to it than they gave credit towards.
The crow that had been injured and rehabilitated hovered more on the edge of the giant village, and when the youngling would leave its confines away from the usual watching and arrow-firing of the other giants, the crow would greet the youngling and take food scraps given in offering. Alekt often watched from enough of a distance not to be seen, perching himself in the cover of the trees as giant and wing-kin made friends with each other.
After nearly a full season of this, he decided to try his luck approaching them one day as they sat at the creek-side watching the water run down the rocks. At first, he merely moved onto a rock not far off, many bounding leaps away for sure, but within easy view. The giant youngling was not long in noticing him, going very still and moving slow when she dared to start to get up.
He swiveled his head to regard her, otherwise as unmoving as a statue, before looking ahead again at the water in dismissal. After a time of standing and staring, she lowered herself back down to sit, tense, but tolerating his presence. The crow-friend came to visit her while they sat in silence, and she offered it food and stroked its feathers, but always she seemed to have one eye on him as though waiting for a strike that would never come.
No words passed between them, before he eventually stood and slipped into the trees. A few days later, he found her again, and sat afar, and this pattern repeated several times until she was comfortable enough with his passive presence to speak to him, though he didn't return her words. He learned of her name though.
She was called Eir, daughter of Bothi and Randalin, sister to Dyre, her brother who Alekt had fought the night the crow was taken. Her brother was still very mad about her taking in the crow and luring him into their home, she said, but showed off his scars proudly that Alekt had left on his stomach all the same. Most of the other giants had scorned her for saving the crow, but she did not regret it, and her curiosities about him were as endless as her frustration when he said nothing to her in return, until she accused him of not understanding her tongue.
He understood well, but found that the more he remained quiet, the more she spoke, rambling away the hours.
Sometimes, they would be interrupted as other giants came to find her, but he always slipped away before they spotted him, despite her panic the first few times that he would be found with her and attacked. After the first few times though, she seemed to pick up that he was clever enough not to be caught, and with his crows keeping watch and alerting him as needed, there was no way they would be snuck up on.
At the very least, not by the giants.
His own people knew long before they did, some of them scolding him, some teasing him. At best there was confusion from his fellow flock-kin and at worst there was scorn and hate for the giant-folk.
When he did finally speak to her, she acted as though he sprouted a second head, flushing red and wondering how much he had understood that she had so carelessly said thinking he didn't know her words. The simple answer was 'all of it', but he didn't press her embarrassment about it.
When he removed his mask, she seemed a little surprised that he looked the way he did - more smooth-faced than the giants, lacking much of their long hair and large beards - but no less human than she was. She dared to say, even perhaps a little bit pretty. Prettier than most men she was used to, in a way, but perhaps not very manly.
He simply shrugged. He had no idea what standard she used to judge what made a male or a female, but he knew it was rare to find a clean-shaven giant among her own people. It was not terribly unusual among his own, but she would not know that.
Naturally, she wanted to know more about him, about his people, his home, but he was less forthcoming and could tell her nothing of it. Secrecy had always been the way of his clan. They guarded everything of theirs jealously from the giants who would want to take it for themselves, and he would not tell of it now even if she wanted to take nothing from them.
He could not tell her. Not until there was peace. A peace which may never come to pass, but that he brought up as though perhaps it might, in time. It was a topic they visited often, and that she seemed eager to explore and, when she left, pushed onto her fellow giants, though Alekt was assured that she omitted anything about him. More often than not, it sounded as though the very idea of truce was ridiculed and scoffed at. The giants didn't believe such a thing to be possible, and if he were honest, his own didn't either. There was too much blood spilled to believe in it.
At least not until the wind shifted in their favor.
In the deep of winter, Eir came looking for him near the bottom of the mountain, even at the risk of raising the ire of his flock, demanding to speak with him. He came, when he was told of her wanting to speak and that it was urgent, perching himself in the trees among his wingless and winged kin, leaning into the trunk and branches while she looked up from below. Eir pleaded about how her brother Dyre and several others had meant to travel another village over many days ago and should have returned already, but when a rider was sent to find them, they had never arrived at their destination, and no one was able or overly willing to search all that distance for them.
Some of his flock clicked and scoffed good-riddance to the giants. To at least some of them, the only good giant was a dead one.
While he wasn't so cruel as to celebrate their deaths, the impression he left with Eir was that it simply wasn't their problem, indifference to her plight.
It wasn't something that the giants would do for the crow-folk, not even if she begged and pleaded them to do so. They wouldn't even search for their own. Why should they do what the giant-folk weren't even willing to do for each other?
He left her to her frustration and helplessness in the wake of his answer, but her pleas still settled contently in the back of his mind like a nested bird refusing to leave, watching him from his blind spots when he failed to acknowledge it until he gave in.
He sent several of his crows out to search for any sign of them that a bird would have an easier time picking out through the deep snow following the giant roads, taking some of their horses along the paths since they could travel farther and faster on open ground where there were few trees and fewer tree-paths made by his clan.
Eventually word came back to him of some of the giants huddled away in a rocky crevice, the only hint of them a faint fire-glow and smoke rising out from the fissure, not far off-course from the road but far enough they would not be noticed by other giants. At least one of them, they knew, was dead above the fissure, blood soaked into the snow and half-eaten by something, and some wide, weaving trails cut through the snow.
Although his birds had seen nothing but the giants, he knew already to be cautious before they ever came upon the scene.
In their mountainous land, snow could get deep enough to completely smother giant nests beneath it in the coldest winters. In regular winters, it could still bury them halfway, taller than any man's height. That was part of the advantage of their tree-paths suspended far above the ground. They did not need to bother with digging their way through to move about the forest as the giants did, especially when they were smaller and lighter and trudging the deep snow strained their limbs.
Most creatures adapted to either travel the snow or hide within the coldest months. Most dragons tended to hibernate this time of year, except for one that was most commonly called the Snow Piercer. It wasn't a dragon that could fly nor breathe fire, but it was no less deadly than other species. What it lacked in anything resembling wings and agility, it made up for in sheer bulk, thicker than any oxen and armor-plated, not terribly fast compared to other land-creatures, until it built up momentum, but you didn't want to be in its way when it got moving, or, inside walls of snow that made it impossible to go anywhere.
It was a dragon that basically ate anything. The uninitiated might have considered it harmless since it would graze plants and brush just like a deer or cow, and when it did eat meat, it often scavenged, bullying other animals away from a carcass, but it wasn't above charging something down and killing it either when given the chance.
Winter was the most dangerous time to encounter one, since it often couldn't be seen beneath the snow, but that didn't mean it wasn't there, and it was guaranteed to outpace anyone it found in its path with its pointed horn-head that could plow easily through any snow mounds like a knife through butter.
His clan-mates who chose to accompany him on his fools errand knew it too, chattering their caution and unease as they perched in trees and along rocks wide around the open snow fields, leaving their horses well out-of-sight. Those of no experience or foresight about a Snow Piercer would have seen the fields empty and assumed it to be safe, but they knew better. Parts of the giant corpse remained, so the dragon was close even if it was unseen, and it became a game of patience and waiting.
Even into a full night, where the glow of a dim fire became more obvious, no one dared to approach, and into the next day, the dragon finally showed itself, heaving out of the mounds caked in snow to finish its meal, chomping down on frozen flesh and bone alike with no prejudice. Then, a second one, just as big, pushed its way through to share in the meal. Not one Snow Piercer, but two of them, thick as boulders and single, huge forward-facing horns that tapered into a ridged back, lines of long, sharp spikes that made finding purchase on their backs near impossible even with claws.
It would mean that they would have to be careful, but they had dealt with Snow Piercers before. Winter was the domain of the crow-folk when all the giants hid until spring-melt. There were none better equipped to handle them.
Communication passes through them seamlessly like a ripple that travels back and forth, chatters and croaks and lilts and other sounds, coordinating where to be and what to do. They take small branches and rocks and throw them at the hide of the dragons, bringing them to attention with one loud, bellowing snort as their heads snap up, or at least as far as such low-slung creatures can.
The deep snow is to their disadvantage here. The dragons can push through it, but they can't see above it, and their black feather-skins blend just as well into the black winter trees as to be parts of the trunk and branches themselves. Only in movement can they sometimes be spotted through the tangles of wood, and only then from something that can lift its eyes that far.
Some of his clan-mates whoop and call from the trees and the rocks to draw the dragons away from the fissure, the lumbering behemoths tossing away snow to either side of them as they go and trying to root them out, as confident as they are slow that they will find whatever new prey harasses them.
Sometimes one of their own pounces down from the trees onto the back of one of the dragons, their finger-talons and boot-talons harmless against its thick hide, but by the time it has built itself into a buck, they have already sprung from its shoulders and into another tree, braced and ready for when it runs into the trunk and tries to shake them loose from its canopy.
No one forgets what a danger the Snow Piercers are, but so long as no one makes a mistake, it is a fun game all the same, luring the dragons deeper into the trees with cackles and howls, well clear of the fissure so that Alekt and others can move towards it and look over the edge.
At a quick glance, he can tell some of the giants are injured, all of them huddled together around a quickly fading fire to try and keep warm. The sides of the small ravine are steep, at an angle narrower at the the top and wider at the bottom and slicked with ice. Even his own people would have difficulty getting themselves out, but they could do it. The giants? They stood no chance at all of climbing their own way to freedom.
With the remains of the dead giant up top and the few trapped down below, he can make a solid guess of the events that probably led to this scene, but it doesn't matter for now. What matters is getting them out, despite any protests to the contrary. He's the son of the clan's Head. His brother will be its Seer. He can make people move to do what he says whether they want to do it or not.
The first order of business is to find a quick way the giants can get out. While Snow Piercers aren't smart, they also aren't patient and don't have a long attention span, and they'll bore of being harassed before long and return when they can't catch his crow-folk when there is a perfectly good corpse here to chew on.
The technicalities of a way up are not the biggest obstacle though. That will be the giants themselves, and getting them to cooperate long enough to save their own skins rather than get into it with his people.
His clan, he's not so worried about. None of them particularly like an open confrontation anyway. Their smaller size and discreet movements lend better to surprise attacks and terrain that gives them an advantage, especially against bigger opponents. In the dark too, whenever possible. They do not fight with their strength. They fight best with their smarts. They are crows; they are clever, not brutish.
They have ropes, but he does not think all of the giant-folk would be able to climb them straight up, especially the injured, and he does not think that they will have enough time to weave a proper ladder out of them. The giants are too big to tie onto and pull up. They will need them to be able to get up with their own strength.
Some of the rocks along the walls are more jagged than others or caked in ice though. Places where the rope can be woven around at different points at diagonal angles. In a way, they could make a sort of awkward ladder of crisscrossing lines. He decides that on short notice, that is their best bet, and sets to work climbing his way down, securing parts of a long-line as he goes.
When he leaps down to the bottom, some of the giants startle their heads up. The one Alekt knows now as Dyre was the first to stand and brandish a weapon, curling his lips back in a snarl, but he's startled twice when he hears Alekt speak.
"Up, quick." He looks up at the crossings of rope lines spider-webbing a path for them to climb. "Eir is worried for you."
He gapes a moment, dumbstruck. "Eir...? How do you know my-hey!"
Alekt doesn't leave him time to figure out the details before he scratches his way back up the rocks and ice, with no need for ropes, looking back down at them expectantly once he reaches the top. There is only some hesitation from Dyre and his fellow giants, but they are soon to follow after, realizing their situation and knowing this is their only chance to live, carrying up their couple of injured on their backs.
Once they were out of the fissure, it was back towards the road before the dragons could return for them, the giants cold, hungry, and tired, but alive, if confused.
"Why did you help us?" Dyre demanded, grateful, yet suspicious.
"Because she asked me to help you." There was still a physical distance between him and them, but he preferred that anyway. "Your sister saved a crow once. I'm returning the favor - although I've returned it greater, with all of your lives compared to our one. That means you're in our debt."
The flash of anger in the giant's eyes is immediate. "Blackmail, is that it? Favors owed that you can take advantage of. What do you want? Land? Our food?"
"Peace." Its a simple declaration, that Dyre doesn't seem to know whether it is his answer or simply trying to tell him to calm himself. He clarifies; "I want peace between our peoples. No more pointless fighting over imaginary lines and grudges long lost track of, and you're never going to be rid of us doing the same as we've always done." After all, part of negotiating was establishing what the other side would lose, or at the very least, never win, if they refused.
"And why would you want peace with us?" Dyre growled out. "You sneak into our homes to steal, you burn our outposts, you kill us in the forests and throw us to our deaths off the mountain to guard all its treasures for yourselves. Before now I didn't even think you could speak like us."
"There's a lot you don't know about us. You're as much to blame in all this as we are, and you kill us just the same, but really, there's no point to any of it. Neither of us gains anything from it, but we would gain a lot from a truce."
"We have no reason to believe you would keep peace or that yours would be the same as ours," Dyre declares stubbornly, lifting his head up haughtily. "You are thieves with no shame. Murderers who strike at our backs when they're turned and try to cut our throats when we sleep, instead of head-on in open and honorable battle. Peace with you sounds like nothing more than a trick."
Alekt shrugs, and Dyre seems to be becoming more aware that they are largely outnumbered as they see movement in the trees and hear the chattering of the crow-folk, who watch passively, unimpressed with them. "Its really not up to you. I'm not asking you to give me an answer. Rather, take back my proposal to whoever heads your people. Discuss it among the many. Whether you want to continue these foolish blood-games or call an end to them once and for all, you can meet us at the stone rings when the snow melts, and we will decide it there." He and his kin whistle for their horses to come, who trot out of the woods for them to mount and ride away again.
"Oh, and you can tell your leaders that the one who proposed as much will be the one to lead the crows next. If I bid no more bloodshed, then there will be no more bloodshed. Whether you believe that or not, is not my concern past telling you."
He leaves that last bit of advice before following after the rest of his crow clan, and let it simmer in the minds of the giant-folk until spring eventually melted away the snow and brought new growth.
And when spring came, so too did the giants to the stone circle that had been changing hands between both groups since time immemorial. Leaving winter just at their tail, the stone circle was currently in the claws of the crows, decorated with their marks and decorations of twine and wood and bones and feathers, though by their own standards it was a modest display, since it would only be torn away and destroyed again in the summer when the giants fought them away from it.
Ideally, there would be no fighting this time, but one could never be sure.
Ideally, if there WAS fighting, the crows would win this round, and the giants seemed to realize the possibility as they looked around at all the crow-folk who had perched in and above and around the circle and even beyond it.
Alekt's father stood at its center, not as large as the giants, but bigger than many of the flock. Most of his size was in height - a trait that Alekt's older half-brother had inherited, while Alekt was one of the smallest in the clan so far, though some said perhaps he would still grow to a proper size. He was not particularly wide, as the giants were, but he was still muscular.
Dwarfing both his father and the giants was Gyr's father, who had quite clearly passed on his size to Gyr as well. While most in the clan were considered to be crows, the family who held the title rank of Beak - of the clan's strongest spearhead fighter and defender - were more often attributed to eagles. Gyr himself was named after a falcon, but ironically far exceeded any size that would seem appropriate to the name, given that his stature and demeanor even intimidated the giants.
While most of the clan had no such great girth to impose with, they had numbers, and his father had been sure to bring out the full force of the clan's fighters and defenders. Their Talons. Most of them sit poised up on the top of stone spires and columns worn smooth by rain and wind, waiting relaxed and yet at a perfect vantage to leap from above. From the trees and rocks further out, the Wings watched on alert to call out information as they saw things those who may have to fight in the thick of it would not see coming, while the Feathers waited well-hidden for any injured they would have to drag away from bloodshed and treat their wounds if things went south.
To the giants, he is sure they all look more or less the same, but Alekt can tell at a glance who each and every one of them are, and if he cannot tell by sight, then he can tell by sound. His ears are the best of all, and can pick up even the tiny differences in their voices even if he cannot see their faces or their scale-skins or their gestures.
It was a show of strength rarely done. Most times they would hide in the shadows, never too many of them out together at a time, as smaller flocks tended to go more unnoticed, but now the giants seemed to be getting an idea for just how many of them there were living inside the mountain, naturally protected by thick stone and warm caves and supplied with fresh melt-water and fish they had cultivated inside its small, isolated ponds and lakes held within pockets of stone when they were not out scavenging and hunting and stealing.
The giants were formidable, that was true, and the crow-folk would lose many of their own lives in all-out war, but they had never waged a full raid with their true strength on the giants below. If they had, they probably could have killed them all or driven them out. At the very least, that was the vision that they wanted planted in the giants' minds as they spoke of peace.
The chief of the giants was a man named Hrollief, whose daughter and next to take over was Svana. Alekt couldn't say he was a fan of the old chief, but Svana had a good head on her shoulders, and whenever her father began to disparage any ideas of partnership, she would belatedly jump in and try to encourage that he change his mind, much to his chagrin.
With both Eir and Svana's testimonies, and Alekt's own father having agreed to see the discussion through honestly, the gamble paid off. It was tentative, but an agreement of, at the very least, a cease-fire was made.
Its a start, but far from an end and farther still from perfection.
There are squabbles, of course. There are always squabbles. Even among his flock-kin, there are hurt feelings and misunderstandings and tugged tails and differing opinions. In their greater flock-nest, things are solved sooner or later without collapsing all that they have built, but the peace between crow-folk and giant-folk is a much more fragile thing that must be carefully strung back together on both sides whenever tempers flare.
Svana proves to be quite good for that task, much moreso than her father. There's undeniably a chirpiness and charm to her that manages to earn good will and cooperation from her fellows, popular among her own tribe, and she proves to have enough of it to share with his crow-folk when they interact, whereas Hrollief seems to wish he could simply act as though they don't exist at all. Many of the crow-folk are still skeptical, but unsurprisingly, it takes no time at all for some like Spytte to become the best of friends with Svana straight away, and the fact that she will inherit her father's kingdom after gives more weight to her good will.
Peace at first is little more than staying out of each others' way. The giants no longer tear down their tree paths up in the branches through the forest, and the crow-folk no longer make a game of sending the giants bouncing down the rocks whenever they are found, though to accept either side into their wooden village or cave networks takes time and there are misunderstandings and almost-fights that happen even so.
Sometimes there is a theft that the giants blame the crow-folk for, sometimes it is their fault and sometimes it is another giant.
Sometimes the giants intrude on caves where the crow-folk do not want them, and a resolution needs to be decided before someone is shoved off a cliffside.
It is not perfect peace, filled with misunderstandings and hot tempers, but it is not bloodshed, which is progress, and deals are worked out over time, boundaries drawn of places that even a truce will not allow one or the other to tread on each others' territory, but compromises made that it is no longer such a hardship, such as trading metals from the mountain so that the giants will not intrude deeper into their home-caves, and in return getting baubles and novelties the giants get from far-away trade ships or raids across the sea.
It is of little surprise to him, but he learns from the giants about other people in lands far away. Some of them are vikings, like the giants themselves are. Others go by different names. Saxons and Franks and Welsh and Mercians and Celts and many other things, many of which were at war with one another to varying degrees just as the crow-folk and giant-folk were, but often on an even bigger and more active scale.
They had different kinds of ships and weapons and languages and foods and on and on and on.
He found he had endless curiosities about them and there were always more answers than questions, although Eir liked to confront him often that he learned too much of others and never told enough of himself. Naturally, he deflected her criticisms with indifference and rarely entertained her or others with many answers beyond the unhelpfully generic.
The peace also allows another unplanned benefit, that being that Alekt is able to better focus on and explore his idea of making wings to fly, something he never really gave up on but often found itself set aside to deal with more important matters. The only real problem that remained being finding dragons he could study, and being able to capture them alive, something not many of either the crow-folk or the giant-folk were willing to do for an idea as silly as making wings so that people can fly.
If humans were meant to fly, they would be born with wings, but they weren't, and if he were meant to change that, he would not crash and fail so often in his attempts. Most were unsympathetic, but not all.
His mother, of course, supported all that he did and wanted to achieve unconditionally, even at the discouragement of his father who insisted she not fill his head with impossible ventures, when he could use his talents elsewhere to greater benefit. If he wanted to fly though, who was she or anyone to stop him?
Svana and Eir were likewise much the same. To fly sounded like an impossible thing, but an amazing one if he were to pull it off. He had made more impossible things happen, in their own eyes, bringing two people together who had hated each other for generations, never even speaking to each other on neutral ground before now. What was to say flying would really be so hard?
Spytte, of course... was Spytte. She lived for any challenge, so her own encouragement and excitement at the idea was only natural, and Gyr offered his own support even if he still had a reasonable level of skepticism about it.
Dragons, however, were not so common in Norge anymore. Many of the flying dragons preferred places far out across the sea, taking refuge on scattered islands and archipelagos.
Somewhere, he was told - though it was the first he'd heard of it - there was even a land of dragons at the edge of the world where the ocean spilled over into the void, but no one had yet found it and returned to tell where it was. One had to wonder then how anyone knew of such a place. Presumably, the current of the oceans was too strong and swallowed ships whole who came too close, and only those who could already fly could reach it safely.
He wasn't sure if he believed in those tales, but he had not traveled enough of the world to declare it true or false.
Before the peace, he had never even been out on the ocean, an experience he found he didn't greatly enjoy and neither did his legs or stomach at first, and he was told the edge of the world he saw from atop the highest mountains was either not the edge of the world or much further away than he thought it looked.
It took many nights and a few seasons of proposing his ideas and speaking about them to his father before he was able to earn enough approval to leave across the ocean on his endeavors, and a while yet more before he could find a crew willing to go out on such a venture, but slowly, little by little, as his people and the people at the bottom of the mountain learned to live with each other, his plans to figure out a way to fly were set into motion.
Even he had to admit - as limited in expression as he was - that the thought of traveling abroad to study dragons and to learn to reach heights no person before had was a little bit exhilarating, and he found he had a difficult time finding sleep the night before they set sail.
Slowly but surely though, his eyelids began to sag, and a deeper darkness than that of the mountain-nest took him in as he nestled comfortably into his furs with the familiar scent of granite and brimstone beneath his nose, and the deep rumbles of the mountain's fiery heart thrumming far beneath solid stone.
When the world first came back into focus, it was slowly, and only through the smallest crack of eyelashes that obscured things in blotches of half-shadow.
Flat on his back, he could hear the sounds of activity nearby. Of horses softly huffing and moving around their pen. Of a fire pit crackling. Of voices casually conversing with each other over drinks and roasted meat. Of soft chirps and trills and rumbles of dragon-speak nearby.
He was warm, at least. Perhaps even uncomfortably so under several layers of fur and wool, but he found himself feeling too weak to throw them off just yet, consciousness drifting in and out for a time.
He couldn't remember ever feeling so tired in a long time, coming back around at a sluggish pace and debating uncharacteristically if he should just slip back into sleep. Perhaps he did. Its hard to tell the passage of time in the moment of and whether seconds had gone by or hours.
When he finally gathers enough energy to sit up, his movements are likewise heavy and difficult, shifting his elbows beneath him to push himself up, but he doesn't make it very far before a dull pain makes itself known in his side and he softly grunts, tracing a hand under his ribs and feeling bandage wrappings there tight around his torso as he sinks onto his back again.
Ah... that might explain a few things.
He didn't immediately notice the hush of dragon-chatter going silent behind him as he tried again to get his arms under him and sit up, taking deep, panting breaths with the strain. Before he realized, a large, rough, warm something pressed up under his back and pushed him up, enough to take away the effort but not so fast as to pain his wounds more than they already were.
For a moment, he felt a soft rumble, a vibration against his back like a purr, but he couldn't be sure that was what it was. He blinked once his surprise before angling his head over his shoulder, Toothless snorting once at him and briefly shaking his head, staring him down from where the Fury had once again retreated to sit a few paces away.
For a moment, he wondered where (click)-phuh had gotten off to, but soon caught motion of him in his peripheral vision on the other side, vocalizing a mix of happy trills and chirps and grumbling-growling scolding noises, for a moment raising one gloveless hand up as if to cuff him without actually doing so. What he was being scolded for, he couldn't be exactly sure, but he'd dealt with enough different species to be sure that was what he was doing.
He decided to give it minimal acknowledgement, crossing his legs since it was easier for him to sit forward that way and noting as he did that his leg ached as well, pain radiating from just above his knee.
Briefly, he lifted a hand up to drag down his face and rub over his jaw, noting the feel of short hairs beginning to form along his normally clean-shaven face, so he must've been out for a number of days.
It didn't take long for a lot of it to come rushing back. The fires setting the island ablaze. Ships in the distance. A plan. A flight over the dark ocean, before he and the Fury pair launched their assault. A whirlwind of fighting and spilled blood and clashing steel. The crack of one ship into another, before he and (click)-phuh slipped below deck to save the dragons... and then a confrontation with one of the trappers who had the cage keys.
Right... he had gotten stabbed there.
His eyes flicked to (click)-phuh as the dragon-feral continued to hover nearby, but still not nearby enough for him to reach before the other would be able to spring away from him if he tried to reach out touch him.
He tried to whistle a questioning noise at first, but his throat was dry and the sound wouldn't come, clearing his throat and trying a few more times, watching as the dragon-man tilted his head with wonder and confusion at the off sounds.
When he finally managed the correct pitch, he gently tapped his own bandaged side and then pointed to (click)-phuh's, who followed his gaze and then lifted some of his leathers and scales away to show unmarred pink skin underneath.
"Nuh," he shook his head, devolving into a series of other sounds that Alekt found he was still too groggy to interpret in that moment. He chose to take it as something to the tune of I'm not injured.
"That's good," Alekt murmured, throat dry and words still hoarse, swallowing and clearing it again.
Hartvig was already approaching and (click)-phuh's head snapped around to look at him, before he started to scuttle away back to Toothless on all fours and tuck himself comfortably under the Fury's chest, while a finned tail curled around him protectively and the dragon crooned reassurances that were equally returned by its rider.
"You're awake again," Hartvig greeted jovially, already toting along a cup of water without needing to be asked, kneeling alongside Alekt's sleeping furs to hand them to him. Alekt took a moment to sip some of it down before attempting to speak again, closing his eyes. Water had never felt so good on his throat before now.
"How long was I out?"
Hartvig gave a contemplating sniff, eyes wandering subtly in thought. "Close to a week I'd say. Really gave dying your best shot, but I guess the fates decided you aren't bound for Valhalla just yet." He rested a hand on top of Alekt's head, ruffling his hair affectionately. "Better that you're not, I think. Gonna need your smarts a while longer and I did promise to bring you back in one piece."
Alekt tolerated the gesture, humming as he rested the cup on top of his lap. "Suppose so."
"While you're already up, I'll change your bandages. Get you something to eat after so you can get your strength back."
Alekt gave another hum, breathing out tiredly. "I don't much care for mead, but I think I'd like to have some just this once." For the pain.
Hartvig gave a chuckle as he braced hands on his knees and stood. "Aye. Water and food first though. Then you can have your mead."
He wasn't long in returning, working to re-wrap the arrow-wound to his thigh first, then the wrappings around his torso after. Alekt managed to get a brief look at the wound while he did so, and it seemed likely that it had been cauterized shut. It would leave a long-lasting scar, but it was a small price to pay for living.
He found himself swaying a bit when Hartvig left a second time to get food and drink, finding it hard to stay upright without feeling the strain, and it seemed as though it was noticed by more than just him when he caught (click)-phuh moving behind him and sat pressing his back against Alekt's, chirruping soft noises.
It was a little bit of a surprise, but he supposed half-dead and with only fur blankets and bandages to protect him, he didn't pose much of a threat to the dragon-rider right now, and a quick glance at Toothless made it obvious the dragon was not overly concerned by it, settling itself down onto his belly and relaxing one paw over the other.
He couldn't really say he was someone who liked close proximity or physical touch all that much himself. As a matter of fact, most days it would make him outright squeamish, if it wasn't the kind of contact that happened in a sparring ring dodging and juking and trading blows, or unless the touch came from his family or Spytte or Gyr, but for the moment at least - and not unwise that this was a rare moment he'd probably never get again once he was better recovered, and what that probably meant in the world-view of a dragon-man who hated humans - he found some appreciation in the support and let himself sink more of his weight against (click)-phuh's back, breathing out a sigh.
Even when Hartvig returned again, (click)-phuh didn't move, though he did feel his back go more rigid against him, head turned to watch the older viking out of the corner of his eye pensively, and Toothless uncrossed his paws to watch with a certain intensity that was impossible to miss, yet not outright hostile.
Hartvig didn't linger close long, moving some distance away and sitting down cross-legged, into a less threatening position that was obvious he couldn't pounce from as Alekt ate his food in small nibbles, pacing himself so he doesn't make himself sick. (click)-phuh relaxed a little, but not completely, softly chattering uneasy noises but also not moving away.
"So what happened after I passed out?" It pained him to say that he didn't even know exactly when he had lost consciousness. At some point between getting stabbed and Toothless showing up, and blacking out, most things were a blur. He's almost certain he's remembering less than what he was technically awake for, but blood loss could do that sometimes.
"Well..." Hartvig drawls, giving it a moment of thought. "Inevitably we did manage to win. Sunk two of their ships, caught another. Figured at best we get a free ship, at worst we lose one and use its parts to repair the other. Most of the trappers are either fled or dead."
"And the dragons?"
"Drakkkn fuh-ree," (click)-phuh interrupts to trill happily, following it with other noises that seem like happy good pride accomplished proud and are echoed by Toothless who has relaxed again now that there is some distance between them and Hartvig and the man acted as though he had forgotten about them there.
"They all managed to fly off before we sunk the ships. Helped us with our victory too. Caused some confusion. A few of them lit the other ships on fire. Couldn't have asked for better chaos for us if I tried," he laughed in a soft baritone. Softer than usual, Alekt noted, and he wondered if it was to set the dragon-pair's nerves at ease. For a moment, Hartvig jerked his head towards them, while his eyes were down on his hands, fake-distractedly picking at one of his nails. "Those two brought you to safety after you collapsed. Don't know what happened exactly but seems you have a bit to thank them for."
"Is that so?" Alekt mused, glancing to the side at them without moving his head, and then back at his food, continuing to piece-meal it slowly and sip at some of the stew broth that went along with it. "We got into a fight with a trapper below deck. He was a much better fighter than anticipated." Come to think of it, he didn't know what had happened there either, but he could be sure Toothless made him regret attacking them.
"Lucky to be alive then," Hartvig noticed.
"Wasn't luck," Alekt argued neutrally. "For me, that was quite a lot of bad luck. Choosing the right allies is what saved me."
Hartvig let out a hearty laugh that seemed to startle (click)-phuh and Toothless with its suddenness, but not enough to send them running. "So it'd seem. I'd think you could befriend anyone. Or at least," he motioned at Alekt's bandages. "Almost anyone."
"If given the motivation to do so," Alekt hummed, falling quiet to continue eating even as (click)-phuh fidgeted at his back, whether out of unease or impatience or something else, he wasn't sure, but it wasn't long before he went still again.
Inevitably, even with the small amount of food brought to him, he couldn't finish it all. He thought better than to return the uneaten food to Hartvig and instead slid some of it back along the floor towards (click)-phuh and Toothless if they wanted it, the former crooning curiosity and gratitude both as he sniffed at and tentatively tasted some of it, and Alekt was finally able to enjoy (much as he could with a drink he didn't like) a mug of mead to take away some of the pain and help him sleep.
He dared to let his head rest back on the dragon-rider's shoulder while he and Toothless warbled a myriad of different sounds at each other that Alekt paid no attention to in the moment, receiving only a dual glance that he barely noticed as he let his eyes shut, fatigue still greedily clinging to him.
He might have dozed off like that for a moment or two - he couldn't really be sure in his current state - but decided it was probably better to give (click)-phuh back his freedom sooner rather than later, since he was sure the dragon-man remained only because moving out from against him would send him falling to the floor and pulling his wounds.
He gave him a nudge with one elbow as he sat himself forward, signaling for him to move, and it was easy enough for (click)-phuh to catch the hint. Of the many things he was and wasn't, he didn't lack in cleverness.
Sliding down onto his back again, he blew out a gusty sigh as he settled back into the blankets and tried to get comfortably, cracking his eyes open when a whuff of air ghosted over his bangs, a twin pair of green eyes peering down at him with concern.
He slow-blinked at them, hopefully reassuringly, letting the curled knuckles of one hand briefly brush over the Night Fury's nose, but he didn't dare go any further than that, figuring that any more contact would not be welcome and letting his hand rest back down on stone, but even a small and light gesture like that had much larger implications of trust than most other vikings would see it as.
"I'm alright," he breathed out, wiggling the smallest degree to settle in and closing his eyes, resting his head to the side as comfortably as he could. He found himself already drifting, breathing and words both softening as he let sleep come. "I just need some rest."
The salty wind blew back his hair, even as the smell of char and smoke remained heavy off the skeletons of black-burnt forest, lingering at the edges where land and sea met.
It was good to be back on his feet, even if his steps were slow and lumbering, outpaced by even the older vikings among them with ease, but there was nothing to be done for it except endure with patience. Vulnerability is not a feeling he enjoys, but acting tougher than his mortality will get him nowhere except an early grave.
The last of the horses were being loaded onto the ship, as were the last of their supplies they planned to take with them. Normally he would be among those loading up for the journey, but not a soul would let him lift so much as a small sack while he was still healing. It was odd to him, uncomfortable in a way - being doted on - but sort of touching and surprising in another, given that none here were a part of his birth-clan. A few years ago, they would have hacked and slashed him to bits if they met on low ground, and now they would sternly advise him to take it easy and let them do the heavy lifting.
They had gotten what they came for, to capture live dragons and study them and make something that could fly and be used in raids. That, coupled with the fact that this island was both no longer safe from the eyes and ears of competitors, and that most of the game and vegetation on the small island would not support them for much longer with how it had been scorched, and that Alekt was fairly seriously injured and would need time to recover before he could work on his experiments any longer anyway, meant that it had been fairly unanimously decided that it was better to travel east again to where they'd first come from.
Besides that, they could find better healers within their own territory, which would be wise given the state of Alekt's wounds.
While they may have been able to stop him from doing anything deemed laborious, there was one thing left to do that no one could argue he was unfit for, and probably that no one else was equipped to do anyway, using the surface of a crate to lay out a longer strip of papers secured together into one, beginning to draw as the others bustled around him, securing cargo and animals alike, and Arvaken sat perched comfortably on his shoulder idly preening his hair.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the swoop of black wings over the water, banking wide around the moored ships before landing in amongst the burnt rubble that had once been trees and underbrush, dragon and rider alike looking over the scene with chirps and croons of wonder and confusion, slinking low around the vikings towards Alekt and his most recent drawing project.
There was still a wariness about them, but by now they had mostly relaxed to the presence of Alekt and his crew, though Alekt was still the only one they seemed comfortable closing the distance with, while the latter they were simply content to ignore or watch from afar so long as the men also ignored the dragon-rider pair.
(click)-phuh whistled a question and both he and Toothless directed with their eyes at the ships being loaded, (click)-phuh wondering aloud "bad pfikingr?"
Alekt shook his head no, sitting back a bit slowly. "No. No more bad vikings. Dragons free." He directed at himself and the others, and then around at the burnt forest. "We go." Between (click)-phuh's croons and hums - that he's not sure whether to read as understanding or disappointment or both or neither - he motions for him to come closer as he draws, the pair soon almost right over his shoulder as he does, with (click)-phuh interestedly drumming his fingers along the top of Toothless's head with whistles of curiosity.
What Alekt draws is somewhat of a map, the island they reside on currently being farthest to the left of the paper, which he indicates with a small, rough drawing of Toothless just above the island, and fallen trees and small fire-lines on the island itself, that the two seem to understand means where we are now.
Then there are many other small islands that he draws eastward (and notices, absently, that (click)-phuh seems to perhaps recognize some more than others with how he lights up and gestures and chirps), and he tries to mark some of them with small, unique landmarks that he knows about them, which are few, but still helpful, until eventually he draws the much larger area of Norge, marking it with viking houses below the mountain and forests and crows and nests up inside the mountains themselves.
Admittedly, the distance is a very long way from where they are now, and he is not sure how far the two are from their nest now or how far they go otherwise, but he would be lying to say that he would never want to see them again.
He indicated to himself and then tapped his finger over the crude representation of his home, to show them where they were going, and drew faint lines between different islands where they would be passing or stopping on their way there to mark a last thing he drew for them were ships at an angle not-quite-head-on but not the side either, drawing the different symbols on the sails and shields that represented their tribes.
Once he was done drawing and showing, he carefully folded the paper up and then held it out for (click)-phuh, who took it in his hands almost delicately and held it close to his chest, murmuring a bunch of quiet, thoughtful sounds to Toothless and that Toothless answers with his own rumbles and chirrs.
Alekt pushed himself to his feet, still struggling with it a bit, and what few steps he took to face them were still pained and limping, even if not heavily.
"You are always welcome to my nest." He's not sure that they understand all of the words, but he offers them anyway, and figures he'll let some of his tone and body signals help his message since they tend to understand it better. "And thank you, for saving my life."
He briefly bows his head a little bit in gratitude, and notices the two exchange a glance before chirping noises he takes as being gratitude of their own.
"However far your wings take you, I do hope we meet again."
A/N: I may or may not write one more chapter for this. I definitely have one in my head and a good idea of how I want it to flow, but its a matter of whether or not I can find the will to write it all to completion and not just go AWOL for 4 more years. If you've read the Nightfall series, you can probably take a guess at what themes the epilogue would entail! If I never get around to writing it for whatever reason (even though I want to), I'm still happy leaving things off here.
As a last note, this is a spin-off and not really canon to the Nightfall series, but if I had to pick timelines, I'd have to say that this definitely happens after Nightfall, and definitely before Freefall. Stormfall is a little bit of a big grey area question mark, I'm not really sure exactly where to place this where that's concerned. However, if I manage to write out the last Hiccup/Toothless POV before putting the big old Finished stamp on this story, the epilogue will definitely be after the events of Freefall.
Of course, that also means I'm going to have to refresh myself on it and re-read all three installations, since they're all (especially Stormfall and Freefall) going to inform how Hiccup and Toothless are ultimately written by that point.
Hope you all enjoyed!
