Chapter 11: A Long-Awaited Reunion
"Long, long ago, before I was born, the Barbaric Archipelago was home to more creatures than just Vikings," Nuffink told Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff as they sat around a table in Elsa's private library. "For nearly seven generations, the Viking tribes were at war. Not necessarily with each other, mind you, but the one thing they struggled to share space and resources with: dragons. The dragons ruled the air, the water, and even the land. Great, grim Sky Dragons that nested in the treetops like gigantic scary birds; monstrously huge Sea Dragons that were twenty times as big as the Big Blue Whale; even little, brown, scuttly dragons that hunted rats and mice in well-organized packs." Nuffink pulled out the Book of Dragons and placed it in the center of the table. "A warrior from my tribe, Bork the Bold, spent most of his life studying the dragons and compiling his findings in this journal. Bork's successors, my ancestors, used what they learned in the journal to gain any advantage they could over the dragons that raided the village on a regular basis. It was my father, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, who finally ended the war."
"How did he do that?" Anna asked with rapt attention. Nuffink smiled and opened the Book of Dragons to one particular entry.
"My father was younger than I, and frail as a twig. His name was one that was traditionally given to the runt of the litter, and that's what everyone saw him as. Hiccup the Useless, they called him, regardless of the fact that his father was the Chief. One day, determined to prove himself worthy of a place within the tribe, he participated in the ongoing raid and shot down his first dragon, which was this..." Nuffink tapped the page of the book with his finger, "...the Night Fury, said to be the unholy offspring of lightning and death. When he tracked it down later that day, he couldn't bring himself to finish it off. Instead, he befriended the beast and learned how to ride it. It took a while, but the rest of the tribe followed his example, becoming the world's first Dragon Riders."
"What happened next? Did they keep riding dragons when you were young?" inquired Elsa. Nuffink's proud smile at recollecting his parents' accomplishments faded.
"Not quite. You see, not everyone agreed with my tribe's views about cooperating with dragons. After battling a madman who enslaved enough dragons to form an army, my father's dragon became the Alpha Species, the king of all dragons. He was also believed to be the last of his kind, until a female of a similar species was discovered. That female turned out to be bait for a trap set by a ruthless dragon hunter. When the hunter was finally defeated, everyone unanimously agreed that dragons no longer had a place in the world of Men. Thus, the dragons retreated to the Hidden World from whence they came, never to be seen or heard again. But when I was a young boy, about six or seven years old, my parents took me and my sister in a ship to the entrance of the Hidden World to see his old friend one last time. That was the first and only time I'd ever ridden on a dragon's back, and the feeling was indescribable. You don't feel the cold or the wind; all you feel is freedom."
The others took a moment to let Nuffink's story sink in. As unbelievable as it seemed for dragons to actually exist, none of them could detect any falsehoods or inaccuracies within his words. Therefore, if Nuffink was confident enough to believe his own words and memories, then the only logical course of action was to assume he was telling the truth.
"So what do we do about this attack?" Kristoff finally asked, and Nuffink sighed.
"I wish I could properly identify which type of dragon it was," he replied. "Unfortunately, a single footprint and a vague eyewitness account aren't nearly enough. Though from the carnage it caused, I'm fairly certain it belongs to either Strike Class or Stoker Class, so that narrows it down a little. Either way, the beast isn't truly malicious, just hungry and scared." Nuffink turned to Elsa. "With your permission, Your Majesty, I will lead an expedition into the forest. If we follow my father's methods to the letter, I believe it can be persuaded to stay away from the farms."
Elsa took a few moments to think about it, then nodded in acceptance.
"You have my permission. I'll have my men ready their horses at once," she told him.
"No! No horses," the Viking interjected. "Horses make noise, and the last thing we want is to scare it even more. We have to pursue it on foot."
...
Nuffink, armed with two hatchets on his belt and his sword strapped to his back, led a small group of five men through the forest on foot. They were following blindly, for the trail left by the dragon could only be seen by an elite huntsman like the Viking. Each had reservations about tracking down a giant fire-breathing reptile, but the Queen had explicitly told them to obey Nuffink's every command.
Nuffink's keen ears picked up a nearly imperceptible sound, and he held up his fist as a signal to halt, his one good eye scanning the treetops around them. The other men stood in place, gazing around with hammering hearts.
After several seconds of tense silence, Nuffink said in a low voice, "All of you, stand in a circle. Now!"
"What? Why?" the youngest member of their party asked, to which the Viking narrowed his mismatched eyes.
"There's more than one," he replied, hands hovering near his hatchets. Immediately, the other men gathered by his side and formed a circle. Arrows were nocked, blades were drawn, and breath was held.
Before long, three different dragons, completely invisible aside from faint, shimmering outlines, scaled down three different tree trunks and began crawling toward them. One by one, they revealed themselves, a process that started at their heads and ended at their tails. Each was the size and shape of an adult Night Fury, but with different colorations. The two male dragons were predominantly black with patches of white. The female between them was almost completely white, with small patches of black on the tips of her ears and tail fins. All three of them were growling angrily, their teeth bared and the pupils of their eyes reduced to vertical slits.
The men shivered with fear and clenched their weapons tighter, but Nuffink was unphased. He had seen these very dragons before as a small child, and they had scarcely been older than hatchlings then. His father called them Night Lights, as they were the hybrid offspring of a Night Fury and a Light Fury. Now was his chance to show them that they could trust him.
"Drop your weapons!" he ordered his companions, who looked at him like he was crazy.
"And get ourselves killed?!" one of them protested.
"If you value your lives, you will do as I say!" he snarled back, laying his hatchets at his feet and tossing his sword to one side. The female Night Light right in front of him was surprised by the action, and sniffed at the fallen weapons curiously. Then, following his father's instructions, Nuffink closed his eyes, turned his head, and stretched out his left hand. Several seconds lapsed, then Nuffink felt a puff of heated air against his hand. With a small crooning sound, the dragon's soft, warm snout pressed against his palm. Nuffink opened his eyes and looked back at the dragon, the determination on his face replaced by awe as he slowly ran his hand across the Night Light's leathery scales.
The moment was abruptly shattered by the sound of masculine screaming.
Nuffink and the female Night Light both turned to find the other members of Nuffink's party were fleeing in terror. The Night Light's two brothers made no effort to pursue; instead, they looked at each other in confusion, not knowing what they did to scare them away.
"Cowards!" the Viking grumbled, shaking his head in disappointment. The Night Light behind him then nudged him with her snout, looking at him in distress when he turned back to her. Nuffink furrowed his brows. "What is it? What's wrong?" he asked. Being incapable of a verbal reply, the Night Light inclined her head for him to follow her before unfurling her wings and taking off, followed closely by her brothers. The Viking quickly picked up his weapons and ran after them, trying not to let any of them escape his sight.
To their credit, all three dragons kept checking behind them to make sure Nuffink was still following. Before long, they led him to the site of an old stone quarry with a freshwater spring in the middle. Laying at the bottom of the quarry were two dragons. One was black as midnight. The other was pale as the moon. Nuffink saw them and gasped for two different reasons.
The first reason he gasped was that the Night Fury and his mate had evolved into their Titanwing forms. Each was nearly twice the size of their adult children, with distinct swirled markings on their wings. The markings on the Night Fury were a silvery color, like beams of moonlight. By contrast, the markings on the Light Fury were a pale blue, like the summer sky. In addition to being bigger and having markings, their faces were more angled and blockier where they had once been rounded and streamlined. Their two larger outer ear flaps had solidified into a pair of pointed horns, but their two smaller ears were still functional. They also had sharp bony growths on their leg joints, where the knees and elbows would be on a human, and their wings and tail fins also appeared sharper compared to those of their children.
The second reason Nuffink gasped was that the Light Fury was gravely injured, and seemingly had been for some time. A dark green fluid was oozing from the innumerable deep gashes that marred her pearly body, and one of her wings looked crooked, like it had been broken.
Nuffink wasted little time, making his way down the side of the quarry as quickly as he could. The Night Fury was occupied with preening his mate, and thus didn't notice Nuffink's presence until the Viking's feet reached the sandy bottom of the quarry. The moment his emerald-green gaze landed on Nuffink, the Night Fury bared his dagger-sharp teeth and gave a deep growl of warning, protectively shielding his mate with his body.
Not wanting to alarm the Night Fury even more, Nuffink once more disarmed himself as he slowly advanced. The Night Fury suddenly froze, and his eyes widened as his nose twitched.
That smell...
It was a scent that the dragon hadn't caught wind of for many, many, many long years. The young man before him was barely a hatchling himself when last they met, and the dragon was flummoxed as to how the mere human had managed to survive for three whole centuries. The look on the human's face was not fear, but compassion.
"[Toothless? Is that really you?]" Nuffink asked in Norse, the language of his long-lost homeland. When the Night Fury crooned in the affirmative, the Viking once more stretched out his hand. "[I can help heal your mate. But first, I have to know why you're here. Touch my hand; show me what happened.]"
Viking and dragon both closed their eyes and concentrated before Toothless pressed his large forehead against Nuffink's palm. Immediately, the Viking's mind was flooded with images and sensations, experiences that were not his own...
...
The king of all dragons was perched alongside his mate on the crystal-studded rock spire that served as his throne. Dragons of all sizes and species milled around him, going about their own business.
All of a sudden, the other dragons fled, and the throne was approached by an adolescent Bewilderbeast, younger than Toothless by several decades but already twice his size.
To the surprise of both Furies, the young Bewilderbeast issued a challenge for control of the Hidden World. The Night Fury only laughed and sent him away, dismissing the Bewilderbeast as just an upstart brat trying to make a name for himself.
A decision he would come to deeply regret.
As young as the Bewilderbeast was, he had already figured out how to use the mind control powers possessed by his species. Dozens of dragons suddenly felt compelled to turn against their king and his mate.
The Furies and their children, having rendered themselves immune to a Bewilderbeast's powers, soon found themselves fighting for their very survival.
Even with the tremendous power that came with being a Titanwing, Toothless was hindered by the fact that his prosthetic tail fin had long since rotted away. Because he could no longer fly on his own, his mate and one of their sons picked him up in their talons and started carrying him to the entrance of the secret cavern while the other two Night Lights covered their escape from the rear. The horde of dragons hot on their tails soon became too large for the two Night Lights to fend off, so they took their mother's place in carrying their father. The Light Fury then used her far more powerful explosive plasma to collapse sections of the tunnel, so that only a Boulder Class dragon would be able to get through.
Her children and mate had just made it through the entrance to the world above when she was knocked out of the air. A Catastrophic Quaken had body-slammed her with all its might, the sharp spines on its body shredding her flesh and its sheer mass breaking her wing. They both plummeted to the water on the floor of the cavern, and the Quaken was about to finish her off when it was struck by a trio of bluish-purple plasma blasts.
The three Night Lights dodged the stunned Quaken, grabbed their barely conscious mother, and hauled her to the surface world, where their father was anxiously waiting. The Barbaric Archipelago having vanished into the depths of the sea, the family of Furies traveled nearly endlessly, the children continuing to carry their mother through the air while their father swam through the ocean below, until they finally came to the shores of Arendelle under the cover of night. They moved inland until they came across the quarry, where they remained ever since, the children dutifully gathering food for their parents.
...
Back in the present, Viking and dragon both opened their eyes and turned toward the fallen Light Fury, who crooned weakly as she shifted positions. Toothless crawled over to his mate and rubbed his nose against hers, crooning sadly.
Deeply moved by the plight of his father's former companion, Nuffink snatched up a nearby tree branch and snapped off the smaller branches to make a crude staff. He then approached the Light Fury, who opened her eyes, saw the Viking, and began to weakly thrash in a panic.
"[No, no. Stay still. I only want to help,]" Nuffink calmly told her in Norse, stretching out his free hand. The Light Fury sniffed his palm, then perked in a way that indicated she also recognized his scent. Relieved that he wasn't a threat, she laid back down and closed her eyes. Taking the makeshift staff in both hands, Nuffink drew two concentric circles in the sand around the prostrate dragon. Then, in the space between the two circles, he drew a series of runes that would help amplify the healing spell.
When the circle of runes was complete, Nuffink tossed the tree branch aside, knelt down, placed his hands on the circle, and began chanting in Norse. As he chanted, the runes in the sand began to glow with a soft white light. The white aura surrounded the fallen Light Fury and began to heal her. Her broken wing straightened out, and her green blood seeped back into the gashes across her body, which closed without even leaving scars.
Nuffink ceased his chanting, and the glowing runes faded. The Light Fury opened her eyes once more, then stood up and stretched. Her eyes widened, and she looked down at herself in amazement. Toothless made a joyful warbling sound and pranced happily around his newly healed mate.
The Viking broke into a grin at the display before falling unconscious, the spell having sapped all of his strength.