How to Be a Dragon Star 1

Chapter Eleven - Leaps and Bounds

Hiccup spent the next couple of days avoiding his dad. He spent his mornings at the ring and his afternoons with Toothless and Estrella. Every day, he learned something new that had never occurred to him before.

"Did you know," Estrella absently said one day, lying on the grass and staring lazily up at the sky, "that endangered dragon species often have more offspring than unendangered ones?"

"No, but I guess it makes sense," Hiccup said, leaning against Toothless. "So they can keep reproducing."

"Yeah," Estrella agreed.

"Wait," Hiccup said, and turned around to look at her. "So Toothless is really endangered, right?"

"He could very well be the last of his kind," Estrella told him.

"Yeah. So if he finds a mate and they have offspring, will those offspring be the last Night Furies ever known?"

"Well, dragons can hypothetically mate with their siblings," Estrella said. "It isn't the best option, but when push comes to shove..."

"I wonder what a young Night Fury looks like," Hiccup mused.

"Hard to know," Estrella joked. "It's not like you can just go looking and immediately find one."

"I wish," Hiccup mumbled, fingering one of Toothless's ear plates. "So Toothless's birth name is Starcross?"

"Yeah," Estrella said. "Dragon names are really dramatic like that. I knew a Timberjack named Cloudsoar. A lot of names are two words strung together— a noun and an adjective. Mine isn't, but well, I'm not exactly a normal dragon."

"Or human," Hiccup added. "Which one do you think of yourself as?"

"I don't really think of myself as one or the other," she replied. "I was born a human, into a human family, but I only used my dragon form when I was living in the Hidden World."

"Yeah, tell me more about that," Hiccup said.

Her eyes lit up. "Oh, it's amazing. It's all glittery and crystal-y and shiny and colorful and there are dragons everywhere. Some of them I'm almost positive you don't know about. Like, the— the— Oh, I don't know the human word."

"That sounds very ominous," Hiccup muttered.

"It is," she said. "Humans haven't discovered them yet. They're really vibrant, with neon colors like orange and purple and yellow. And it shoots..." She paused, her brow wrinkling. "I have no idea what the human word for it is. But it shoots this substance that hardens almost instantly. And it has this call that draws dragons in from every direction." Her eyes glazed over, no doubt imagining one of these dragons in her mind's eye.

Hiccup tried to picture one of these dragons as well and was miserably failing when Estrella continued. "How many dragons do humans know about?"

"I don't know the exact number," Hiccup admitted. "Probably around thirty or forty."

Estrella's green eyes sparkled, and a smile grew on her face. "Oh, you have no idea," she said. "There are probably a hundred breeds out there, not including those that I don't know about."

Hiccup's eyes widened at the idea of fifteen, twenty, fifty or more new breeds of dragons just waiting to be discovered. He had an incessant thirst for knowledge and always had since he was a small child.

"Wow," was all he could say, faintly.

Estrella was pleased at his reaction. "If you come to the Hidden World, I'll show you all that and more," she promised him.