The walk from the arena back to the Great Hall was the strangest, longest journey of my life, and I have sailed through storms that would tear the world in two. Each step on the worn stone path felt heavy, as if I were wading through a thick, invisible mire of disbelief. Behind me, the arena gates were being barred, not with the grim finality of containing a monster for the next slaughter, but with the confused, hesitant motion of men trying to protect it. To protect the monstrous nightmare—and the Gronckle, and the Zippleback, and the Nadder—from a village that no longer knew what to think, what to believe, or who to fear.
After my order to lower weapons, a scene of such impossible domesticity had unfolded that I am certain many of my people still believe it was a shared hallucination, a mass bewitchment brought on by the shock of it all. My son, my Hiccup, had walked among the beasts we had feared and hated for seven generations, and they had flocked to him. They had vied for his attention. The Deadly Nadder, a creature whose spines I have personally seen strip a Viking to the bone in the blink of an eye, had nudged his hand like a seeking housecat, purring so loudly the stone under our feet vibrated. The Zippleback, a two-headed agent of chaos and explosion, had ceased its eternal bickering to allow Hiccup to scratch both of its chins at once, its two tails wagging in opposite directions. They bowed their great, horned heads. They purred, a sound like grinding boulders that was somehow, impossibly, gentle. They acted like puppies. Great, scaly, fire-breathing puppies that could melt a man's shield with a happy sneeze.
It was uncanny. It was unnatural. It was a profound violation of the natural order of things. And yet, it was undeniably real. My people had seen it. I had seen it. My son, the boy I once thought the gods had cursed as a joke, was some kind of dragon charmer.
"You know," Gobber had muttered, his hobbling gait beside me the only familiar rhythm in a world gone mad. His voice was raspy with a deep, bone-shaking awe. "Looking back on it all… the way he never quite fit in, the strange contraptions always clattering away in the forge, his way with… well, everything … I think I should have seen this coming." He shook his head, a wry, disbelieving grin stretching his mustache. "The boy's got his mother's touch, Stoick. He's got Valka's heart, but with a knack for making it stick. And then some."
He was right. This was Valka's dream made real, her stubborn, gentle faith given flesh and bone and proven true in the center of our bloody arena. And it had taken our son, our son, to show us the way.
Now, gathered in the Great Hall, the air was thicker than forge smoke, heavy with a tension unlike any I had ever known. It wasn't the grim resolve before a battle, or the boisterous cheer after a victory. It was the heavy, charged silence of a world turned upside down. My best warriors, men I had fought beside for decades, men who bore the scars of a hundred dragon raids, sat around the great table, their horned helmets resting before them like tombstones for a dead era. Their faces, usually so full of fire and certainty, were etched with confusion, doubt, and a reluctant, dawning hope that was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.
For a long time, the only sounds were the crackling of the central fire pit and the nervous clinking of mead horns against the wooden tables.
"So the raids… all of it… was just feeding time?" Spitelout finally asked, the words rough and raw in his throat, as if he were trying to swallow gravel. He looked at his own hands, hands that had thrown countless nets and swung countless axes, as if he no longer knew what they were for.
"For a beast bigger than the Great Hall itself?" Tuffnut Sr. added, his eyes wide and unfocused, staring into the flames. "Odin's beard. We've been stealing from a giant's pantry."
I looked at the weathered maps spread across the table, charts of an archipelago that now felt terrifyingly small and fragile. "We are lucky," I said, my voice echoing in the cavernous room, each word landing with the weight of a stone. "In all our years of searching for the Nest, we are lucky we never found it." A cold shudder, the icy touch of a fate narrowly avoided, ran down my spine. I pictured my fleet, my brave men, sailing proudly into that volcanic maw, axes raised, war cries on our lips, only to be met by that… Queen. We wouldn't have stood a chance. We would have been a light snack. "My foolish pride," I said, the admission tasting like ash in my mouth, "would have led us all to our deaths."
"So what's the plan, Stoick?" a burly, one-eyed Viking named Starkad asked, slamming a fist on the table with a resounding boom that made everyone jump. "We know where the beast is now! We know the source of our misery! We gather the fleet, we sail to this… Hell's Mouth, and we drive a sword through its heart!"
A few men grunted in agreement, the familiar call to battle a comforting reflex in a sea of confusion.
"And how do you propose we do that, Starkad?" I countered, my voice weary. "Did you not hear the boy? Our swords would be toothpicks. Our catapults would be pebbles. We'd be throwing ourselves against a living mountain of fire and death. I will not lead my people on a suicide mission."
"Then we use their own weapons against them!" another Viking, Erik the Quick, suggested, leaning forward, a cunning glint in his eye. "The boy can control them, can't he? We saw it! He makes them into lap dogs! We take the dragons from the arena, we put our best warriors on their backs, and we fly into that Nest as a force they'll never see coming! An army from the sky!"
The idea was both brilliant and horrifying. A wave of murmurs swept through the hall, a mixture of excitement and revulsion. To ride the very beasts we had fought our entire lives? To put our trust in a scaly hide and a pair of wings instead of the solid deck of a longship? It was a leap of faith that felt more like a plunge into madness.
Before the debate could escalate into a full-blown argument, the great wooden doors of the hall, 60-foot tall of solid oak, creaked open with a groan that silenced everyone.
Every head turned. A collective gasp sucked the air from the room. Standing silhouetted in the doorway, framed by the gray afternoon light, was Hiccup. And beside him, a shadow given form, a piece of the night sky come to earth, was the beast of legend. The Night Fury.
It moved with a liquid grace that was both beautiful and utterly terrifying to behold, a predator of supreme, unshakeable confidence. It was smaller than the Nightmare, sleeker, but its presence was a hundred times more potent. Its scales were the color of a starless midnight sky, seeming to drink the very light from the room. Its eyes were the green of balefire, intelligent and ancient. A low, nervous growl rumbled through the hall as Vikings instinctively reached for axes that were no longer at their belts. The dragon, in turn, let out a low hiss, its pupils narrowing to predatory slits. It wrapped a wing around Hiccup's back, a clear, possessive gesture of protection.
My son was walking with the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself. And the dragon was protecting him . From us.
"Easy now," Hiccup said, his voice calm and steady, though I could see the tension in his shoulders. He spoke to the dragon in a low, soothing tone, a language of soft clicks and murmurs that was not meant for our ears. It was an intimate conversation between two beings from different worlds. Slowly, the great beast relaxed, its hiss subsiding into a low rumble, though its wing remained firmly around my son.
They walked down the center of the hall, between the long tables filled with my stunned and silent warriors. Men who had faced down charging boars and rival chieftains without flinching now seemed to shrink into their seats. They were a force of nature, my boy and his monster, a vision of a new and frightening age. I saw it then, up close. The intricate leather saddle strapped to its back, a testament to my son's impossible ingenuity. The clever, articulated tail fin, a marvel of leather and metalwork that replaced the one it had lost.
"By Thor's hammer," Gobber breathed from beside me, his blacksmith's eye gleaming with a mixture of professional admiration and fatherly pride. "Look at that metalwork. The articulation on the joints… the forging is clean. I taught him well, I did. That's my boy!"
My son and the Night Fury stopped before the head table, before me. Hiccup gave me a small, nervous smile. "Dad," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "This is Toothless."
Toothless. He had named the nightmare that had haunted our nights for years, the phantom striker we had never been able to see. He had named it Toothless . I almost laughed, the sound catching in my throat like a fishbone.
I rose from my seat, my legs feeling unsteady, my authority as Chief feeling like a borrowed cloak. All my instincts, honed by thirty years of war, screamed at me to draw my axe, to sound the alarm, to put myself between this monster and my people. But the memory of the arena, the image of Valka in my son's eyes, held me fast.
Hiccup kept the dragon calm. He told me it was alright. He told me to slowly extend my hand, to allow his dragon to accept me, to show I was not a danger.
My hand trembled as I lifted it. Every muscle in my arm screamed in protest, wanting to ball into a fist or grab for a weapon. I forced my fingers to stay open, my palm upturned. I was Stoick the Vast, Chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe, slayer of thousands of dragons, and I had never felt so small, so utterly, terrifyingly vulnerable.
Hiccup murmured something to the dragon. A soft, reassuring sound.
The Night Fury, Toothless, looked at my outstretched hand. Then he looked at Hiccup, a long, searching look. Then back at my hand. He took a hesitant step forward, his great, reptilian head slowly approaching. I could feel the heat radiating from his scales. I could smell the faint, clean scent of sea salt and thunderstorms. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the silent hall. I held my breath.
He lowered his snout and sniffed my hand, a soft puff of warm air against my skin.
And then, a flicker of something passed through those intelligent, green eyes. It wasn't fear, or aggression. It was something I could not name. It looked, for all the world, like… surprise. A flash of unexpected recognition, as if he smelled something familiar, something he hadn't expected to find on me. His gaze darted to Hiccup for a fraction of a second, a silent, lightning-fast question passing between them, before returning to me.
And then, he closed the final inch. The dragon rested his snout in my palm. His scales were smooth, like polished obsidian, and surprisingly warm. The gesture was one of profound, unbelievable trust. In that moment, he was not the terror of the night sky, and I was not the great dragon slayer. We were just two old warriors, brought together by the impossible boy who stood between us. The boy who was my son. And for the first time in a long, long time, I felt the ice of a three hundred year war begin to thaw.