A Saga Of Ice And Fire

Chapter Thirty-Six - Terrible Tunnels And Terrors

Over the next few days , there was an ever growing and riveting energy that wove it's way through the houses , pubs, breweries, docks and every other place in the village of Berk, it's energy pulsating like a galloping heartbeat, growing faster evermore by the second , spreading like ravenous wildfire through the forest , unstoppable and ever growing. And every corner you turned , almost anything that had an actual pulse to it (except for maybe the sheep and the other livestock or the dogs, of course) had something to say or add to the tale. The entire village had been flipped on it's head and nothing made sense anymore . And it all had to do with one person. It all had to do with just one smallish Viking with a strange, longish name : Hiccup Horrendous Haddock, the son of the village Chief, the son of the King of the Vikings.

And it wasn't the usual talk about him that served as the main meal to the gossip mongers either ; it wasn't how he usually embarrassed his father , nor was it the usual talk of how unusual and unbefitting of a Viking the boy was . No. It wasn't even about how his hair was unusually shaped peculiarly like a bell.

To everyone's complete and utter shock, the recruit who topped Gobber's recent batch for the dragon fighting classes was not Astrid Hofferson , as everyone had expected. It wasn't even Snotlout Jorgenson, who'd boasted about his vow to slay the monstrous Nightmare to anyone who would hear him countless times. No, it was a reality that was as unbelievable and otherworldly as the knowledge of gnomes or unicorns existing. Hiccup, the scrawny , unimpressive son of the King of the Vikings who was timid and unbearably average in every manner imaginable; he was the recruit who topped the classes.

It had become such an event that now, whenever the batch had a practical class with Gobber where they actively engaged in combat with dragons from the pen, they even had a handful of spectators that clung to the rust speckled iron railings of the arena to watch Hiccup perform the unthinkable from down below on the stone training floor, as if they couldn't believe it until they'd actually seen it with their own eyes. A few even tried ocassionally to get pointers from Hiccup afterwards on how he dispatched off a dragon with such ease. But none of them ever really seemed to figure out that Hiccup was never actually doing what they thought he was doing to the dragons. And it wasn't like they ever really had the chance to deduce that something was off since he'd developed the innate talent of disappearing without a trace from the village after a class, spending most of his day with the Nightfury Toothless until nightfall, gaining the dragon's trust with each passing day whilst ocassionally stumbling across new stimuli from time to time that dragons would respond to, the very thing that he'd use on the dragons during the class sessions.

The days spent trying to help the Nightfury operate his prosthetic tailwing had taught them both that it was next to impossible for the dragon to manually operate the mechanism and the gears on his own and as a result, the dragon had (quite reluctantly at first) begun to let Hiccup strap on a saddle that the Viking had specifically put together using unused scraps of imported brown leather lying around Gobber's shop to help him sit on the dragon's back while he attempted to operate the prosthetic tail wing with his foot , something that was not as easy as initially theorized, Hiccup had found out through the many hours spent gliding around on dragonback in the secluded cove in the east forest.

It was strange. He'd yearned for the appreciation and the acceptance of the others that made up his village for as long as he could remember, especially in the past five years when any other alternative of a life ceased to exist and yet, now that he had what he'd always wanted, it felt mundane and incomplete. They all wanted to speak with him and spend time with him and he'd finally gotten the very thing he'd always dreamed about. To be one of them. To sit with them at the table and not feel like the outcast, the odd one out, the black sheep. But they loved the warped idea they'd formed about him in their heads. He had won their acceptance but it was not how he'd imagined it to happen the many times he'd mulled it over in the quiet hours in the dorm hut at night amongst the snores of the other boys filled the gaps of the sound of waves battering the rocky cliffside nearby.