Life with the Night Furies Chapter 16

Chief Night Fury was gliding lazily half a mile up, with his back to the morning sun, enjoying the view of the island. His island. He was in charge of the whole thing, and he was responsible for everything that happened there. He tried to make at least one of these overflights a day, and two or three overflights were better. It was important to him to be aware of all the goings-on among men and dragons. He could still hear his father's words – "Nothing happens on this island without me hearing about it." This was one area where he could, and should, follow in his father's footsteps. Of course, any reason to go flying was a good reason, to his way of thinking, so these overflights were good twice over.

The fishing boats were all tied up at the docks, and the fishermen were busily unloading the last of their night's catch. The young men of the tribe were helping out by carrying basket after basket of fresh fish up the ramps to the drying racks, where the fish would be prepared for storage, to get the tribe through the winter. Tradesmen and their apprentices were coming and going; a farmer was bringing in a wheelbarrow full of produce to sell; women were hanging laundry on clotheslines while their daughters fetched buckets of water from the town well. In the nearby pastures, shepherds kept an eye on their flocks, looking totally bored. It all looked normal and peaceful, once you got used to the Nadders and Gronckles resting on the roofs of most of the town's buildings, watching the goings-on if they weren't sound asleep. A few of the dragons were teaching their young how to breathe fire, using the sea stacks for targets. None of them were raiding the fish-drying racks or bothering the flocks of sheep. This was all normal for Berk now. The fact that it was normal was mostly his own doing. He didn't feel proud about that; he felt like he owed the village even more vigilance, to make sure that human nature and dragon nature didn't undo everything he'd worked so hard and risked so much to accomplish.

As he circled, he spotted two approaching black shapes. One descended toward the village; that would be Lady-night-fury, looking to spend some girl-talk time with Astrid. The other one closed in on him quickly. "Is this what Viking chiefs do?" Toothless grinned. "You do nothing but fly in circles all day? It sounds like a pretty soft job, you lazy lizard!"

"Lazy?!" Hiccup burst out. "Who are you calling lazy, you overgrown Terrible Terror? I'll show you who's the lazy one around here!" They spent the next half-hour playing tag-tail like a couple of month-old hatchlings. Toothless was still the better flyer by a small margin, and he probably always would be, but Hiccup certainly didn't make it easy for him. They didn't stop until they saw two more flying shapes headed their way. These were bigger than Night Furies, and as they descended, they each showed their second pair of wings.

"Mom! You're in the air!" Hiccup exclaimed. "Cloudjumper, it's great to see you, too!"

"I can fly now!" Stormcutter-was-human exclaimed. "See?" She tried to fly in a circle around him, as she'd promised the last time she saw him, but he playfully got on her tail and kept her from circling him.

"Oh, come on!" she fake-whined. "Go easy on your mother! I'm still new at this!"

"I told you, you can't outfly a Night Fury unless he lets you," Stormcutter-jumps-over-clouds admonished her.

"You can't blame me for trying," she answered tartly. She took a minute to look over her old home town, then joined the other three dragons as they glided together.

"What brings you all here?" Hiccup asked.

"This is just a social visit," his mother replied. "It was nothing more than good timing that we all wound up here together at the same time."

"Well, I brought some news that I think you'll appreciate," Toothless grinned. "It's about your unfriendly friend, Snorre the Vast."

"Have he and Dagur killed each other yet?" Chief Night Fury wondered.

"You're going to love this!" Toothless said. "The two of them sparred for a few days, throwing rocks at each other, but their hearts weren't really in it. Then Dagur suggested a truce so they could get off the island together. His plan was to tame one of my dragons, in the belief that they're stupid and gullible, and get a free ride back to human civilization. So, since they were both familiar with Night Furies, I sent Lady Night Fury to pretend to be friendly with them. The next thing she knew, they both jumped on her back and told her to get flying! So she did... for about a hundred feet. Then she did a quick spin and dumped them both in the ocean. They made it back to shore, they started blaming each other for the plan not working, and they've been throwing rocks at each other with a vengeance ever since. It's quite entertaining. Some of my dragons like to perch on the side of the mountain and watch them go at it."

Hiccup chuckled. "If Snorre had thrown a rock at me instead of a spear, he'd still be the chief of his tribe. I suppose he's making progress."

"Vikings," Valka nodded. "Stubbornness issues. They'll never change."

"So... what happens next, Chief Night Fury?" Toothless asked him. "You fought the Red Death and won, you fought the Berserker tribe and won, and now you've taken on the whole Barbaric Archipelago and, of course, you won. When you go to next year's Thing, I'll bet that the other chiefs will actually listen to you for a change. But what will you do for an encore?"

"He did what?" Valka exclaimed. Toothless gave her a quick summary of the recent war and its outcome. She shook her head in amazement.

"Short-term, I need to start mending fences with the neutral Viking tribes so they'll stay neutral," Hiccup began. "Bribing them with special swords was good for one special occasion, but they're Vikings and they're liable to forget who their friends are, unless we keep reminding them. That's going to take up a lot of my time, and it will keep me away from Berk a lot."

"I'm sure your mate can hold the fort while you're away," Cloudjumper suggested.

"If it was just dragons, then yes," the chief answered, "but Mother-of-twins isn't long on patience when it comes to dealing with Vikings. She'd rather knock their heads together than talk until they see reason... and it works, short-term, but it doesn't solve any problems, long-term. I'm going to entrust that half of my duties to Night-fury-full-of-surprises."

"Your third-hatched?" Valka was quite surprised.

Chief Night Fury nodded. "Bang is great at thinking, but not so action-oriented. Six is a lot like her mother, all action and no patience. Full-of-surprises is surprisingly good at both."

"Just like her father," Toothless noted.

"Well, I wasn't going to say that, but that's the idea. I think she's the best choice to fill in for me with the humans... and I also think she'll be the best choice to take my place as Chief and Alpha someday. Seeing how Bang is probably going to lead a nest on the Meatheads' island, and Six is an easy choice to lead a nest with the Bog-Burglars, it makes sense for me to groom Full-of-surprises to be my successor."

"She's come a long way from the baby dragon who sat in Agnarr's lap and charmed him by batting her eyes at him," Valka said.

"She sure has," Hiccup agreed. "She's still charming Agnarr; she's just doing it differently now. Anyway, my long-term goal is to change all the Viking tribes' attitudes about dragons, so we will be safe wherever we go. Some of the tribes, like the Bog-Burglars and the Meatheads, are a sure thing. Others, like the Thunderheads and the Uglithugs... they won't change so easily. But they'll come around eventually. We dragons just have to be patient. And, because we outlive the humans by centuries, we can afford to be patient."

"But how can you be so sure they'll all change?" Valka wondered. "After all, these are Vikings! Their stubbornness issues are legendary."

"Here's how I see the game playing out," Hiccup answered. "For a few more years, we'll have to be vigilant against another tribe turning hostile against us. Once the sons of the current chiefs... and the daughter of one current chief... begin to take their parents' places, that's when the change will happen. Most of those future chiefs are getting curious about dragons already, thanks to a little prodding from me and my children. After a few of those future chiefs turn their curiosity into reality, there will be two kinds of tribes: the ones with dragons and the ones without them. The ones who welcome the dragons will have big advantages over the ones who don't. They'll be almost immune to Viking raids, they will find more fish at sea for their fishing boats, and their leaders can get from one island to another in hours instead of days.

"The young chiefs in the non-dragon tribes will look at the others and ask themselves, 'Why don't we have dragons like they do?' They'll have no bad memories of the wars because they'll be too young. Their fathers will no longer be around to influence them against us. The only answer anyone can give them will be, 'We've always done things this way.' That won't be good enough, once they consider all the benefits they're missing. They'll want what we've got. They might even be willing to pay us for the privilege of bringing dragons into their tribes!" Valka chuckled at the irony of that thought.

"Anyway, as each tribe becomes dragon-friendly, the pressure on the remaining hold-outs to join them will get stronger. If they decide to go to war against us again, they'll fail even worse than they failed this time, because they'll have fewer allies. The four of us will probably live to see the day when we can fly to any island in the Archipelago in broad daylight, and be welcomed by dragons and humans alike. It won't happen tomorrow, but it'll happen."

"And that will be your grand victory," Cloudjumper nodded.

"No, that will be our grand victory. A win for dragons and humans alike! Cooperation instead of conflict; friendship instead of hostility; long lives instead of early deaths. Everyone will benefit. And, as a fringe benefit, all those islands with new dragons' nests will need Night Furies to keep an eye on things, so all of my children and Toothless' children will have nests to lead. We'll have peace, we'll have human friends, we'll have useful work to do... it'll be a dragon's paradise. It will be pretty good for the humans, too.

"And it's all happening now because, a few years ago, Toothless turned me and Astrid into Night Furies. I'm sure you had no idea what the consequences of your actions would be... but look at what's happened among us, my friend! Think about what's going to happen! Maybe you didn't plan it all, but you definitely deserve some of the credit."

"You're right; I definitely didn't know what was going to happen," Toothless admitted. "I had no idea I was changing the universe for myself and everyone around me. I certainly didn't know I was creating the ultimate dragon who was going to rule over humans and change every Viking tribe within a hundred miles of here! I was just doing my duty for the species. It was no big deal at the time; I thought it was nothing."

"Well, in that case," Hiccup grinned as he surveyed his island, "thank you for nothing, you useless reptile!"

"Useless? Who are you calling useless?" Toothless grinned back, swerved in the air, and swatted Hiccup's tail. Valka and Cloudjumper watched as the two old friends resumed their game of tag-tail, as though they didn't have a care in the world.

"He's my son," Valka said to her partner. "I still remember him as a human baby. Now he's an adult dragon... and look at him! He's playing like a child! Don't boys ever grow up?"

"If you mean, 'will he ever change?' then the answer is 'probably not,' " Cloudjumper said sagely. "He used to be a Viking, and you know about Vikings and change. What's more, I don't think he should ever change. And somehow, I have a feeling that those two never will."

She watched her son, who was now the Night Fury chief over the tribe that rejected him as a human, and shook her head. "I can't agree. My son has changed, more than anyone else in history. Others have changed from humans into dragons, but how many have also changed from losers into winners? How many have changed from failures into successes? How many have changed from despised to beloved, from the bottom of the heap to the top, from a social reject to the chief of two tribes at once? Only one. Oh, yes, that ex-Viking has changed. And it's all for the better!"

Hiccup could have overheard this discussion easily. But he didn't try. He was immersed in flight with his ultimate friend, and nothing else in the world mattered.

The End

o

A/N
...and another expansion to the story comes to an end. What happens next? Your guess is as good as mine. Every time I finish an expansion, I figure that's the end of the tale, and then, after a few weeks or a few months, I get another idea and it starts again. I meant for this chapter to be the very last one, but I just got an idea for one more chapter, so we're not done yet. Even if I said this was really the end, I know a lot of you wouldn't believe me.

Shortly before I posted this chapter, "Lightning and Death Itself" passed another milestone. It received its 1000th "Favorite." Thank you to phieillydinyia, who is Favorite-clicker #1000, and also to the other 999 of you, and to the ones who have come after.

Here's a quick, heart-felt "thank you" to all my readers. If you sort the HTTYD fanfics by reviews, favorites, or follows, "Lightning and Death Itself" will be either on the first page, or very high on the second page. It's not just because this story has so many chapters; other authors have written longer stories. It's clear that a lot of people think this tale is something special. I appreciate that, more than I could ever say. When I was younger, it was easy and fun to create things that my friends liked, but my greatest dream was to create things that total strangers would like and enjoy. Thanks to the Internet and to fanfiction dot net, that dream became possible, and thanks to you, it came true. Again, thank you. I hope this story has made you as happy as its success has made me.

But the bottom line, as with all my stories, is that it didn't matter whether it was a huge hit or not. It was a story that I wanted to tell, and the joys of telling it and sharing it are my greatest rewards.