When in Rome

of brewing chaos

Astrid had never been to war.

She quite liked that fact. She would even say she was proud of it.

That was the odd thing. That she was proud of it. Vikings as a whole were battle-centric, they glorified bloodshed almost as much as they glorified getting drunk after bloodshed, feasting after bloodshed and then lying in till late afternoon with a headache.

The many Viking tribes had spent so long being attacked by dragons, using every waking second to ward them off and keep on surviving, that they had fallen out of habit when it came to attacking other tribes. Dragons had become their common enemy and because of it Astrid, her parents, her grandparents and her grandparents parents had never stepped foot on a battle field where they were aiming to kill other Vikings. Things were now at a point that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on Berk who had killed someone. Maybe on other islands that had less dragon raids, tribes like the Berserkers, there would be a larger population of warriors with kill counts. But not Berk.

That realisation slammed into her like a cold winter wind when she received Hiccup's next letter. They'd been going back and forth about three weeks and Astrid had managed to get into a routine. Hiding the terror- which Hiccup informed her was called Swifty- was easy and she hadn't been asked any questions about why she was suddenly using more paper and charcoal. She knew eventually something had to go wrong. It was bound to happen. She guessed the twins would probably accidentally intercept Swifty or maybe her parents would find the letters, seeing as she was stowing them under her bed.

But these were all mundane problems. So simple. Hiccup was going to war.

Over dragons of all beasts.

The whole fourth and fifth legions were going to battle to protect from a power-hungry man looking to control every dragon with an iron fist. Willingly laying down their lives for these animals. The man was attacking Rome, too, albeit. But it was all over the dragons. All because of them.

It was so different to Berk. Such a crazy thought.

"Astrid, go to bed!" her mother called from downstairs. The neighbours candle-lights had been long-since put out. her father had been asleep for a few hours, her mother out on watch.

Astrid pressed her lips together as she finished reading the final paragraph of Hiccup's letter. She folded it up and slipped it under her bed, sitting down on the edge. She absentmindedly scratched behind Swifty's ears, realising what she was doing seconds after she had. She stared wide eyed at the green terror as it curled up further, stretching against her fingers. And it purred.

Her breath shook as she exhaled.

Every day Dragons became less and less monstrous to her. It was mind-shattering, the slow realisation that everything she had been taught about dragons was wrong. It was giving her a headache, this unhurried process of recreating her perspective on an entire class of animals. Every step closer she got to sharing Hiccup's view took an entire recalibration of her mind, only to be re-done when her thoughts changed her further.

If only she could get it over with, prove everything to herself now.

She wanted to immediately take everything Hiccup said to heart, whip her mind around and rethink everything she had ever been taught. But she needed proof. Needed it right in front of her. She needed more than one terrible terror and the word of a man who'd cast-out her entire clan. She wanted to trust Hiccup's word, but what if he was wrong? What if the romans had made a serious misjudgement? Of course, it is unlikely that an entire empire could get something so severely wrong.