Hookfang's Tale (HTTYD)

7 - Still Alive

A/N:
Easter Egg time. My pop-culture reference last chapter is a bit dated: "Dragonheart". It was an awesome movie for its time that led to other significantly less awesome sequels. It also proves, once and for all, that Sean Connery is the most badass dragon in the universe.

"Dreams die hard and you hold them in your hands long after they've turned to dust."
"If a dragon falls in the forest and nobody gets to hear about it, does it make a thud?"
"Don't clutter up a clever scheme with morality!"
"You're the sad remains of dead systems and dead beliefs!"
I really, really wanted to include the quote, "I merely chewed in self-defense, but I never swallowed."

I tried so hard to find a way to hammer that square peg into a round hole, but, alas, no such fortune.

Still Alive

Electrocuted.

Shot.

Drowned.

Crushed.

Burned by acid.

Yes, there are many ways that I would enjoy watching that traitorous black dragon die. We placed our trust in him. He said Firefly could help us fight the queen better than our previous methods. It seemed too crazy to believe, but we believed him anyway.

Now, we're all going to die - and that's if we're lucky.

I can hear her. The queen. She's very faint, but still there. My mind remains my own, thanks to the distance and remaining land-striders on this island, but I can feel some sort of tug. As long as she stays on her volcanic island, we should be fine.

If she stays.

We're all keeping a constant watch on the intensity of the queen's pull on us. At the first sign that she is on the move and in a better position to take control of us, well, submerging my head in the pool of water and taking a deep breath is probably the fastest way to kill myself.

From what we could pick up off the land-striders' scattered projected thoughts, most of them have left the island. Probably every able body is now floating across the ocean... on nicely flammable wooden vessels... towards a dragon the size of a mountain... who controls over a thousand other fire-breathing dragons. Hopefully, all those land-striders will drown on the way over. If they manage to enrage the queen, life for us will become very unpleasant.

The four of us captive dragons have been contemplating our options. Rock suggested that maybe the land-striders, with their wooden, rock-hurling contraptions, can take down the queen and our lives will improve by a factor of infinity. Maybe such a quantity of land-striders can make up for the immeasurable difference in size. Maybe this was really Toothless' plan all along and everything's under control. Maybe Toothless didn't really betray us and he's actually off to save us.

Even she chortled at her own joke.

Greedy thinks it's worth trying again to tame some land-striders as mind snare scramblers. If we each tame our own, we would be set for a while. Spit and Sputter are leaning in favor of trying that out, but they keep fighting over who will carry their land-strider pet.

Nose cares for nothing more than to sink his claws into Toothless. That dragon beguiled us all. He made up some tale of a better way to use land-striders all so we would spare his rider. Now he's leading them all to rouse the queen. If Nose had any clue that these land-striders would use that dragon to find the nest, they would have found nothing but a bloody pile of black scales when they opened the cave to pull him out.

I can't blame the mink dragon. He's been here the longest by far and training land-striders is the only life he's ever known. Uncountable generations of dragons have figured out the best way to reliably use land-striders to strike back at the queen from our captivity. In a single day, everything has been ruined by Toothless and his pet. Everything Nose has ever worked to accomplish has been instantly burned to cinders.