XXXVII.
He stood there in the dark for a long while, unmoving. He felt the wind bite up against his cheeks and the alpine atmosphere howl into his ears. Above him a moon rose, near-full, waxing into a glowing blue coin which washed the world in soft blues and silvers. Somehow, the colors created an eerie tomb-like ambience rather than one of peace and calm.
And still the night wore on.
Only when Hiccup began to quite shudder from the night's accumulating cold did he turn aside, moving away from his position facing the ocean, and turning instead toward the ascending mountain peak behind him. Slabs of rock and crystalline ice spears rose hazardously up and upward, but a gaping hole into the Vigilante's lair provided a nearby cave-side entrance. It is to this black maw he stepped; and because his first steps were half-frozen from cold and grief, it was more of a hobble into the fortress than a steady stride.
The wide, expansive clarity of the mountaintop outdoors collapsed into cramped passageways. Inside, a perverted contortion of nature-carved hallways twisted and turned in jagged corners, sharp cuts jerking left and right, or half-collapsed rock formations spilling out over suddenly-narrowed passages. It was a distorted realm through which he traveled. Everything appeared broken, fragmented, splits of reality snapped one from another, as the passage suddenly veered in right angles to the left, then sudden right, then right again.
Even light appeared distorted in the caves – what passed as light, at least – spindly forms which squeaked around crags of granite or splintered through many rhomboidal layers of ice. When filtered through the floes and broken ceilings of stone, the light appeared more like an afterthought to darkness, a reverse shadow, flickering uneasily along the floors and walls. At times Hiccup felt as though he stepped underwater; the bluish ambience of ice reflected everywhere, and when he looked upward, he could see a distant, whitish, sparkling surface, which above it must have lived the moon. Yet instead he crept in gloom… in depths… in darkness. Vaulted bluish ceilings gave way to cramped corridors, the latter fully black and altogether hazardous to navigate.
He kept his hands forward, feeling and groping at air in the dark. He tripped on rubble blocking footpaths, stumbled over sudden inclines or drops, hobbled around what his straining fingers felt must be stalagmites, or columns, or other large stones. Hiccup could only hope he staggered in approximately the right way.
In the absence of clear light, the world of sound amplified to booming levels. Tiny shuffles from his prosthetic scraped painfully against his ears. Haggard gasps escaping from his mouth echoed like shouts. Sometimes he cringed – only to realize that that deafening boom was nothing more than his boot setting down on stone. Any noise louder than that, and Hiccup whirled, yanking out Inferno and extending its blade, even though the Monstrous Nightmare saliva coating it had run dry and Hiccup would have been unable to light the sword aflame. But he would hold it before him nonetheless. Then wait. Wait. Wait. Listen. Strain for light. Strain for sound. Strain for something. Keep waiting. And only after many, many unbearable lapses of time passed him by in the uneasy dark, did he decide all he heard was a small animal or himself or his imagination. In this groggy state of mind, head blurring, mind graying, it might have been morseo delusion than anything else.
Then the entire world screamed in a bone-shattering snap.
Backwards he staggered, then stumbled, knees briefly hitting down on stone before he picked himself up again and continued retreating. Yet nothing afterwards stirred… he again crept forward… knees bent, ready to dart once more… breathing stilled… lips pursed… and as he sneaked toward the source of sound, his eyes fumbled through a small patchwork of dim light, and after squinting and frowning and staring into the murk did he realize that the bone-shattering snap had indeed been the sound of a snapping bone. There, the shards of a skeletal hand laboriously pointed Hiccup into a larger chamber. A familiar chamber.
The room filled with bodies and skeletons seemed even grimmer than when he had last visited. Perhaps that reflected his thoughts regarding death's inevitability, or elsewise reminded Hiccup of his mother's ability to kill. It also pointed backward to that death rattling in the back of his mind, that death about which he tried not think. Recollections of his father's splayed organs unbidden entered his mind as he looked about the other bodies in the room.
He tried to keep his thoughts to the present. At least these bodies were older, less gruesome, and did not belong to anyone he knew.
Hiccup stepped forward reverently, knowing at least now he was heading in the right direction. Though he gingerly avoided trodding on the flesh or bone of any victim resting here, once his peg leg knocked up against a shield, while another time it rang against a sword lying on the ground.
When his prosthetic tapped the sword Hiccup paused. Again he remembered that Inferno was useless as a weapon now; and though the war had passed and every army retreated from the battlegrounds, Hiccup still felt the need to hold something solid, something to protect him, protect him outwardly even if it could not remove the macabre images still dancing in his head. He might as well take this sword lying at his feet.
It was not an impressive weapon by any account. It was plain, a little battered, and a little proportionately short for Hiccup's arm, but when he tested the blade against his fingers, he noticed it still was rather sharp. A small pinprick of blood leaked out of a tiny crack the blade just cut. The sword would be able to protect Hiccup, and that was all that mattered.
Though it was a simple piece of sharpened metal, hardly worthy of attention much less love, Hiccup's mind conjured a grand name for it nonetheless. Endeavor, he thought – since I will need to endeavor to make it through alive. It seemed appropriate. Indubitably he needed the reassurance to continue groping forward, and the feel of cold steel in his hand helped provide that support in its own simple manner.
The journey hence forward felt securer – less warped, in a sense. The atmosphere certainly seemed less ambient and more concrete. Solid. And the coldness of ice gave way to warmer air currents, until suddenly the confined walls of rocky corridors burst outward into a cliff side overlooking a waterfall, an expansive ceiling rising upward so high above it might as well have been the true night sky.
He had returned to the center of the Vigilante's fortress.
Worry washed over him. It was time to find out if his mother were here. If Toothless were here. And consequently discover whether or not his best friend had turned – or henceforth would be his enemy.
He felt his heart pounding heavily, heavily, heavily inside his chest.
Was it such a good idea to come back here after all?
But as his ears strained for a sound, he realized all at once there were no sounds. No draconic noises, anyhow. The rush of the waterfall, yes. The trickle of quieter streams dancing downward, yes. Yet the wild, distinctive cacophony which he remembered had accompanied every aural moment in this fortress no more resonated beyond the cliff sides, just as no wing flashes or swinging tails came in sight. Instead, Hiccup encountered a vast, vast emptiness.
The Vigilante must have left, and upon leaving, taken all the dragons.
Toothless was gone.