How to Twist a Dragon's Tale

by Cressida Cowell

And they hadn’t even saved the Archipelago after all.

  The Volcano had erupted, and nothing could now put the Exterminators back into their Eggs. The genie was out of the bottle, the plague was unleashed, and the Archipelago would be turned to sooty ruin in a matter of weeks.

  Great clouds of steam rose hissing up into the air as the pouring rain met the searing heat of the running lava.

  “Don’t fall over . . . don’t fall over,” prayed a soaking wet Hiccup, racing down the mountain on the back of the Windwalker.

  “D-d-don’t panic! D-d-don’t panic!” muttered Toothless, panicking like crazy, as he approached Alvin on the Exterminator from above. Alvin was helpfully holding the Fire-Stone high above his head, so that the fledgling Exterminators would have a good view of it.

  “H-H-Hiccup gave Toothless this j-j-job ’cos he t-t-trusts Toothless . . . Toothless NOT make mistake again,” said Toothless encouragingly to himself, praying that the Exterminator would not smell him through all this rain. “Toothless gotta G-G-GRIP this time . . . GRIP . . .” and he practiced gripping with his little talons, as he edged ever downward toward that tempting yellow Ball.

  Toothless pounced just exactly as if he were catching a nice fat rabbit.

  His claws closed around the Stone. They gripped . . . and held.

  Alvin gave a shriek of horror as his hand closed on nothing.

  He whirled around, but in the smoke, and rain, and thunder-and-lightning, he could not see what had attacked him.

  His Treasure was gone.

  Held firm, if Alvin could but have known it, in the gripping claws of Toothless, as he bravely swooped right into the heart of the exploding Volcano . . . and let it drop.

  Down, down the beautiful Stone dropped, like a golden fiery teardrop, right into the seething bed of magma.

  And Toothless flew up again, hiding in the smoke, too terrified to come out for fear of the Exterminators.

  Many pairs of unbelieving eyes were watching the apocalyptic events unfolding above them. It was like a scene from some great Cosmic Play. The great thunderclouds crackling above. The rain pouring down in drenching black drifts. The lightning spearing into the exploding Volcano.

  Camicazi, Fishlegs, and Humungous watched as they descended to the bay on the back of the White Dragon.

  Stoick watched, from the deck of The Blue Whale, sailing, a little too late, to the rescue through the driving downpour. He was close enough now to Lava-Lout Island to just be able to make out a small black figure fleeing from the lava streams on the back of a dragon with a horribly familiar kind of limping run . . .

  “That’s not . . . Hiccup, is it?” he said uncertainly, squinting up at the Mountain. “Please let that NOT be Hiccup . . .”

  “I think it may be,” said a dripping Snotlout at his side, with a secret smile.

  Hundreds and hundreds of Hooligans were watching from the Hooligan ships, and hundreds of Bog-Burglars too, for Big-Boobied Bertha had launched The Big Momma in search of her daughter.

  “The lava is going to catch them,” groaned Fishlegs.

  It was a dreadful sight, like being the audience at some primeval Hunt of the Gods, the tiny figures of Hiccup and the Windwalker fleeing like terrified foxes, and the lava streams and Alvin screaming behind them like some Dark Lord, and the shrieking Exterminators, getting closer and closer and closer.

  The first racing, burning lava stream finally caught up with the Windwalker.

  It did not hurt the Windwalker himself, for dragons’ skins, as we all know, are fireproof.

  But a tiny, scorching red-hot speck of it just touched Hiccup’s heel, and Hiccup let out a scream of pain that electrified the Windwalker, and it put on a turn of speed that it did not know it had, running as if its heart would burst.

  But there was still nearly a quarter of the mountain to run down.

  “That’s it, I can’t bear to look,” said Fishlegs, shutting his eyes.

  “I’m going to stand up on your back, Windwalker,” whispered Hiccup.

  And shakily, Hiccup got to his feet, upright on the back of the Windwalker.

  “OK,” said Hiccup, looking over his shoulder, “get ready for the impact . . .”

  The lava stream came up underneath the Windwalker, and he breasted it like he was breasting a wave, his wings spread wide to keep him above the lava.

  “Oh, for Thor’s sake,” gasped Camicazi, “you can look, Fishlegs, look, I’ve never seen anything like it, that’s just INCREDIBLE . . .”

  “BY THE BEARD AND ARMPIT HAIR OF THE GREAT GOD WODEN!” cried Stoick the Vast in astonishment.

  “I don’t believe it . . .” groaned Snotlout. “How is he doing that?”

  Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, knees bent, arms spread wide, was SURFING the lava streams.

  DOWN he surfed the red-hot lava, with the Windwalker as his surfboard, just exactly as he had surfed the waves of the Long Beach on bits of old driftwood as a child (but rather more expertly actually — when the sea below you is boiling at seven hundred and fifty degrees Celsius, it does tend to concentrate a person’s mind on keeping his balance).

  That final, impossible surf carried them the last three hundred meters or so of mountain.

  And then, just as they reached the edge of the sea-cliff, the Windwalker gave a great push and a LEAP with its hind legs to carry them forward so they didn’t get caught up with the lava as it fell off the edge of the cliff.

  Hiccup had made leaps such as these all his life.

  Leaps of faith, leaps of hope, leaps out into the unknown. Hiccup had always trusted in his luck, in his faith that the universe was ultimately kindly, a Good Egg, as Stoick would put it, rather than a Bad Egg, and would reach out and save him.

  But this was more of a leap of despair.

  The Windwalker leaped off the edge of the cliff, and his leap carried them just far enough to get out of the way of the lava — and then they plunged immediately downward. The Windwalker spread out its wings to break their fall, but its wings were not strong enough, and in a matter of seconds they had blown inside out like an umbrella in a high wind.

  The Windwalker and Hiccup sank like stones to the sea below.

  That plunge into the ice-cold sea was a terrible reminder that perhaps, just perhaps, the universe was not a Good Egg after all. They hit the sea at such a speed that it was like crashing into an icy wall. Perhaps this is reality, thought Hiccup as he sank below the waves. This pitiless, uncaring, heart-stopping cold.

  And when he came spluttering up to the surface, gasping for breath, it was to the even colder reality of a great black cloud of Exterminators circling above them. A cloud that stretched right across the sky, blotting out the blue. A cloud that gave a shriek of evil joy when it saw their two little heads resurfacing above the water.

  “THERE HE IS!” shouted Alvin, his eyes lit up with savage joy, as he wheeled his Exterminator around for the final attack. “GET HI-I-I-I-I-I-I-IMMM!!!!!”

  The lava streams dripped off the edge of the cliff and dropped into the sea in an angry hiss of smoke. The black rain dropped steadily. The Exterminators pointed their beaklike heads downward and dived in a great storm down toward the sea, their sword-claws held outstretched in front of them, ready to destroy.

  So this is the end, thought Hiccup, as he watched them come down, the quenching cold turning his entire body numb. Nothing can possibly save us now.

  BOOOMMMM!!!!!

  The Volcano exploded for the second time.

  19. HERE’S ANOTHER INTERESTING QUESTION. IS THE UNIVERSE A GOOD EGG OR A BAD EGG?

  The Exterminators paused mid-dive, as the sea, and the sky, and the islands themselves, rocked crazily round them.

  This eruption was different from the first.

  This time, what had happened was that the heat of the Volcano had HATCHED the Fire-Stone.

  For one of the many secrets of the Fire-Stone, that Hiccup had worked out from Old Wrinkly’s riddle (and I am sure that you clever readers and l
isteners have guessed this too) is that it is not, in fact, a Stone at all.

  It is an Egg.

  The Egg of the exceptionally rare Fire-Dragon. And one of the reasons that Fire-Dragons are so exceptionally rare is that the conditions required for them to hatch are so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

  For the Fire-Egg can only hatch in the heat and turbulence of a Volcano that is exploding. But the Fire-Egg also gives out chemicals that PREVENT the Volcano from doing just that.

  First, you have to imagine the extraordinary, impossible hugeness of a Fire-Dragon.

  Then you have to imagine that hugeness all coiled up and packed inside an Egg no larger than a human head.

  That is the Fire-Egg.

  The walls of this Fire-Egg are made of a material so terribly, terribly strong that only a temperature of seven hundred and fifty degrees Celsius can melt them or crack them. Normally, the Fire-Egg is laid on a nook on the upper levels of a volcano crater, where the temperature never reaches levels high enough to hatch it.

  But if it topples down (or in this case, is thrown) into the heart of the Volcano itself and sinks down deep into the molten lava, then that kind of heat is sufficient to crack the unbelievably hard shell.

  It takes about six or seven minutes, the same sort of time that it might take you to hard-boil a chicken’s egg.

  Then, when the shell is cracked, all that energy and hugeness packed down to such a pinprick smallness are suddenly released in an instant and the Fire-Dragon EXPLODES outward with an energy and a force impossible to describe, like a sort of mini Big Bang.

  So what the Exterminators, and the Vikings, and Hiccup and Toothless saw was SOMETHING erupting out of the Volcano crater, SOMETHING that shot up so high it seemed as if it could touch the very stars.

  Down on the deck of The Blue Whale, Stoick flung up an arm to shield himself from the brightness, for to look at it was a bit like looking at the sun itself, and pained the eyes.

  “What is that?” breathed Stoick in awe.

  Humungous and Camicazi and Fishlegs, who had landed safely on the deck of The Peregrine Falcon, forgot their fear as they gazed up in wonder at the extraordinary, terrible beauty of this sight.

  The SOMETHING that erupted out of the Volcano was a DRAGON that seemed to be made entirely out of fire.

  Of course, that is impossible, but this is what it looked like.

  Gleaming muscles and scales of flame. Burning talons and scorching fangs.

  It threw back its great fiery head and let out a great ROAR that echoed across the islands, and even reached the trembling ears of the fleeing Viking Tribes miles and miles to the south, watching all this unfold on the horizon, standing silent on the decks of their rocking ships, soaked to the skin by the wildness of the storm.

  The Fire-Dragon turned its great flaming red-gold eyes down toward the earth and they focused on the Exterminators, hanging below it in great black trembling clouds.

  And when the Fire-Dragon looked at the Exterminators, what it saw was PREY.

  The Exterminators knew it too.

  One minute they were the predators, leaping down toward Hiccup with greedy talons outstretched. The next, the world was shaking and vibrating around them, as if the gods had suddenly re-shaken the dice. And now that the world had stopped shaking again, they had suddenly become the victims.

  The Vikings were now in the extraordinarily privileged position of being the audience to a scene played out in the blue skies above that had not taken place for hundreds and hundreds of years. A scene that dramatically demonstrated the exquisite balance of nature that Hiccup had placed such trust in.

  The fight was played out against the background of the tempest at its peak, Thor’s thunder rolling out magnificently from the blue-black clouds, great flashes of white sheet-lightning lighting up the drama in intermittent bursts, and then dying away to darkness.

  Hiccup watched the combat lying floating on his back, in the grave coldness of the sea below, and the battle raging in the sky above him reminded Hiccup of a shoal of fish trapped in a tide-locked bay by a mighty shark.

  The Exterminators shot shrieking across the surface of the stormy sky in their panic.

  They scattered hither and thither, in great fleeing groups that sped across the firmament, splitting and re-forming as they dodged through the jaggedy lightning, right to the very edges and corners of the horizon.

  But however fast or far they flew, they couldn’t escape the Fire-Dragon.

  The Fire-Dragon never moved from its position on top of the Volcano.

  It reached out with its great arms, flaming gloriously upward like tall watery trees of fire, and scooped up the Exterminators in huge handfuls, thrusting them down its glowing gullet with noisy relish.

  It played with them like a cat does a mouse, letting them think they had gotten away, and then catching them up with its burning tongue.

  The Fire-Dragon swallowed the whole lot of them, tossing them into his blazing mouth in their struggling thousands, plucking them out of their hiding-places in the smoke, sucking them in in satisfied, crackling bursts . . .

  . . . until there was only one left, zigzagging across the sky like a demented bluebottle.

  This was the one with Alvin on its back.

  “You haven’t seen the last of me, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Thi-I-I-I-ird!” yelled Alvin the Treacherous (but he was far too far away for Hiccup to hear him properly).

  And then the Fire-Dragon picked up the Exterminator Alvin was riding by the spear in its breast, between two delicate flaming fingers, for all the world as if it were a wriggling worm on a cocktail stick . . . and down it went too.

  The Vikings held their breath.

  Were they to be the next to go?

  But no, the Fire-Dragon has particularly evolved to only feed on Exterminators.

  The Fire-Dragon let out one final ROAR of triumph, the contented song of a meal caught and ready for digestion.

  And then it leaped up into the sky, and dived back down into the Volcano crater, its great tail sending fresh waves of lava spilling over the top and down the sides of the mountain.

  Swimming down, down, who knows where?

  To the earth’s core?

  I can imagine it there in my mind’s eye, swimming as free and joyous as a dolphin in those fiery waters.

  There were two final flashes of thunder and lightning, louder than all the rest, whose rumbles echoed dramatically before growing gradually fainter and fainter . . .

  And then all was majestically silent.

  The peril was over.

  The Volcano still spewed out its lava, but it was moving more slowly now.

  The rain thinned down from deluge, to downpour, to drizzle, before petering out completely, to mere drips on the wind.

  And even ALVIN, surely, surely, would find it difficult to swim his way up to safety through the burning waters of the earth’s core?

  The thunderstorm drifted away toward the Mainland, and the sun was coming out through the clouds. But the strange, boiling-hot weather had broken at last, and this was a very different sort of sun from the sun that had been beating down unrelentingly on the Archipelago for the past three months. This was a kindly benevolent sun, with a gently blowing cool breeze.

  A great sigh of satisfaction went murmuring along the lines and lines of Vikings, watching from their boats to the south. One began to clap, and soon they were all applauding, as if what they had been watching had been some great Play.

  “Bravo!” shouted out Mogadon the Meathead, stamping his feet on the deck of the ship, “BRAVO!!” And the other Vikings followed his lead, cheering and clapping, and making ready to sail back to their homes again, their safe, quiet little homes in the bogs, that had been saved by this miracle.

  “He’s ALIVE!” cried Stoick the Vast, embracing the nearest thing to him, which happened to be his repellent nephew, Snotface Snotlout. “He’s ALIVE!”

  “YES, I have this feeling that he probably is
,” snarled Snotface Snotlout through gritted teeth. “What excellent news.”

  20. WHEN THE PLAY IS OVER

  Camicazi, Humungously Hotshot, and Fishlegs had to sail The Peregrine Falcon across the Bay to pick up Hiccup. By this time they had been joined by Stoick in The Blue Whale, and Big-Boobied Bertha in The Big Momma. The Windwalker flew across to them in order to show them the way, because of course they couldn’t pick out one small lopsided helmet across those choppy seas, that had been so stirred up by the explosions and vibrations of the Volcano.

  They were all extremely worried, because the seas around Berk are very cold, and it is perfectly possible to freeze to death if you spend too much time in those icy waters.

  But in fact Hiccup was all right. The red-hot lava now pouring down from the cliffs had swiftly heated the shallow waters of the bay to what was really almost a very pleasant swimming temperature.

  So he lay calmly on his back, waiting to be rescued, letting himself float up and down supported on the swell of the warm water, looking up into the blue sky and thinking what a great joy it was to be alive.

  Toothless had been hiding up in the great billows of mustard-colored Volcano smoke, peeking out from his hiding place in the drifts of cloud, absolutely terrified.

  But when he had satisfied himself that all the Exterminators had been Exterminated, and the Fire-Dragon meant him no harm and had disappeared, he sped like a whirring green butterfly down to the bay where he was the first to find Hiccup, turning gentle circles as he floated peacefully in the water.

  “Toothless d-d-drop the Stone in the Volcano!” stammered Toothless, giving Hiccup a lovely surprise by landing on his chin. “All on HIS OWN.”

  When Hiccup had recovered from the shock of the sudden arrival, and coughed out some of the seawater, he stroked the little dragon’s back, as Toothless licked his face with his little forked tongue.

  “You,” said Hiccup, as the two of them revolved gently around, looking up at the sky, “are a Great Hero, Toothless.”

  Toothless lifted up his head and did his Victory Cock-a-doodle-doo.