Author's Note: I figured someone might want to see these, scenes I literally cut out in rewriting, replaced or removed entirely. As such, beware lower quality in some of these, at least in plot and effort put in. Also, Living Anonymously is up!

Deleted scene 1: That Thing Has Wings (chapter 21)

Toothless was starting to feel the strain of staying ahead of the deceptively quick Queen. 'Too well!' Hiccup's taunts were proving quite inaccurate.

Hiccup pointed at the clouds that were gathered above them. "Time to disappear, then. Stick to the plan!" He accessed Toothless's senses completely. He would need the enhanced vision to see anything in there. Hopefully the Queen wouldn't be able to see them.

Toothless and Svarturkló flew into the clouds, the Queen right behind them. They immediately swerved in opposite directions and put some distance between themselves and the now confused Queen. Toothless could see, and by extension, so could Hiccup. The Queen, however, apparently could not. She twisted around, trying to locate them.

Svarturkló flew out of the concealing clouds and blasted the Queen as she swept past. The Queen bellowed, smoke streaming from a new hole in one of her ponderously huge wings.

Toothless swung in from behind and put an identical hole in her other wing. He grimaced at the minimal damage, a small smoking hole slowly growing in the massive wing. 'Hiccup, this is going to take a lot of shots.'

"Just make sure you save one. We need it to end this." Hiccup was, apart from working the tailfin, stuck watching. There was nothing more he could do. This was all Toothless and Svarturkló.

The two Furies put more and more holes in the Queen's wings. The Queen was having a harder and harder time even hovering, as her wings became less effective. But it took a lot of plasma blasts to get to that point. The Furies were both almost out of shots.

Toothless had two shots left. He was going to use one more on the Queen's wings, but before he could, she changed tactics in frustration.

Rather than wait to try and catch a Fury blasting her, the Queen instead decided to just spew in as many directions as possible. She whipped her massive flames around in random directions, an attack that was fast and unpredictable.

Toothless barely dodged it. Hiccup looked back in fear that the tailfin had caught, but it had just barely avoided the flames. Still, that had been far too close. "Okay, time to see if this works."

Toothless flew into the Queen's vision, and the flew away. The Queen followed him, and he angled into a dive. She copied him. He was moving as fast as he could, but he was barely keeping ahead of her.

The Queen was done with these pests. This one at least would die right now. She couldn't figure out how he flew anymore anyway, although he clearly did. She inhaled, building up the massive cloud of gas used for her fire.

Hiccup could see their death approaching as the cloud of green gas built up in the Queen's throat. "Hold, hold…"

'I can't wait any longer!' Toothless objected, terrified.

"Not yet!" Hiccup responded, knowing this needed to be perfect. Another split second passed. "Now Toothless!" He yelled a moment before the gas reached its peak.

Toothless spun in midair, and fired a plasma blast directly into the Queen's throat, igniting the massive cloud of explosive gas prematurely.

Hiccup had gotten the idea from something Toothless had told him the day Astrid killed the Terror, and he got his friend to talk about the Terrors dead by his claws. He had been horrified at the variety of ways the Queen had killed Terrors using Toothless. This was one of her methods of execution. Having Toothless ignite their gas right before they fired at him. It wasn't lethal for Terrors, but it left the little dragons stunned, unable to escape whatever came next. Hiccup had remembered that, and was counting on the explosion to at least stun the Queen, long enough for her to not be able to pull out of the dive with her ripped wings. It would be fitting to kill her with the same trick she used on Terrors.

What Hiccup hadn't been counting on was the fireball engulfing the Queen, and her exploding into a quickly expanding cloud of flames as she hit the ground.

Toothless was just barely able to avoid the expanding cloud of fire, but he was clipped by a chunk of the Queen that had been propelled by the explosion. It hit him in the wing and made him lose control. They hit the ground hard.

Reason for removal/replacement: Too much like canon, by my own opinion.

Deleted Scene 2: Surprising Apology (Chapter 23)

'And I think no less of anyone for admitting weakness, especially when it is no fault of their own.' Her eyes glanced up to gauge Hiccup's reaction. She seemed sincerely ashamed.

Hiccup was very pleasantly surprised. He supposed he really would need to get used to living around people other than Vikings. Admitting fault and apologizing was not something he expected when he was the one who had slowed them down, and no Viking would say what Svarturkló had said about weakness. He preferred this way of thinking immensely. It also felt like Svarturkló was starting to warm up to him, at least a little, though that might just be his imagination. He probably still had a ways to go. As Hiccup thought this, he realized he had a new goal. He wanted to get Svarturkló to fully accept him. Ideally, before they found other Night Furies if he had enough time for that. Her fully supporting him in that encounter would be really helpful.

Hiccup realized Svarturkló was still waiting for a reply. "It was my fault too. I should have said something. But I accept your apology. We can both try to learn from our mistakes. I'm just glad I didn't lose any fingers or toes.'

Reason for removal/replacement: It just didn't work very well. Honestly, I'm only including it here for the sake of completeness, as it's quite a short little fragment.

Deleted Scene 3: Catching Up (Chapter 26)

This needed to be explained carefully. 'I will first tell my part in the events leading up to our freedom. It isn't much. Fifteen years ago, I was out flying when I was ambushed by a Skrill. I won that fight, but it drove me far from our island in the process. I found myself right in the path of a raid being conducted by a swarm of dragons on a Viking village. The raid was an unprovoked attack, and the dragons stole all manner of food.'

Svarturskuggi and Svarturvon eyed her incredulously. Svarturvon spoke up. 'Why? Dragons don't need to steal food. We can just find our own in the ocean.'

Svarturkló shook her head sadly. 'I thought the same. And I made the mistake of being seen by one particular dragon. A Monstrous Nightmare, whose eyes were pure yellow. It saw me, and the entire swarm of dragons immediately attacked. I didn't stand a chance. They knocked me out and carried me far away, back to the Nest. There, they forced me to look into the eyes of a dragon so massive I could only see the head from where I stood. It enslaved me like the rest of them with the power of its mind.'

At that revelation, Svarturvon gasped. Svarturskuggi's eyes had narrowed, anger clearly written across his face for anyone to see.

'I couldn't leave.' She continued quietly, the darkness of those days weighing her down as she remembered. 'I laid Svarturkappi's egg there and raised him there because I couldn't go anywhere else. When he was old enough, the Queen enslaved him too. And that is how we spent most of the last fifteen years. Enslaved to the queen, unable to leave the island unless it was to raid some village to feed her.'

Here Svarturkló shuddered. 'And that wasn't the worst part. The Queen had command of all of her slaves. But she could force her will and perception into one at a time and control their body as if it was her own. That was what she had been doing to the Nightmare with yellow eyes. As the only Night Furies in the nest, Svarturkappi and I were her favorite subjects for this. Because we were strong, fast, stealthy, and because she could apparently teach us to do a very limited version of her tricks.' Svarturkló raised her head. 'And so we were taken on raids, the Queen randomly selecting between us. A month or two before the end, Svarturkappi was taken on a raid... and didn't come back. The raiding dragons who returned said he was dead, shot down by the village they were attacking.'

Svarturvon looked shocked. 'I have a brother?! Is he the Fury that was outside?' Svarturkló realized that Svarturvon hadn't been there when she said that.

Svarturkló nodded. 'Yes. And you should stay quiet and keep listening. In time all of the things you saw will be explained.' She had seen the rising pile of questions Svarturvon was going to ask and wanted to head them off.

'A month or so passed, maybe a bit more. The Queen had taken me on a raid to the same island, where she had her slaves lay waste to what they could in revenge. The next time she decided to raid that island, she used me as normal. But she made a mistake no real Fury would have made. She tried to use my fire nearby when a thunderstorm was about to break.'

Svarturkló saw Svarturskuggi and Svarturvon both wince. That was something most Furies knew. Never be close to a detonating plasma blast when lightning can strike. It has a nasty habit of drawing lightning for some reason. Svarturkló turned and bent, so they both could see the fractal scar that hadn't faded, the result of the strike. 'I paid the price.'

Svarturskuggi snarled angrily, looking ready to destroy something. 'I will kill this Queen myself.' There was true anger behind that promise.

Svarturkló laughed. 'Too late.' She smugly noticed the twin looks of shock on her daughter and mate. 'I'm getting to that. So I crashed. Next thing I know, I'm alive, but in a cell. There's cheering, and then what sounds like the whole nest above me abruptly goes quiet. They opened a door, somehow, and I was staring into an arena, no way out, with hundreds of humans around it. But there was one human in there with me.'

Svarturskuggi interrupted. 'Humans. They might not be the main evil of your story, but they are still as bad as ever. He was likely meant to kill you in front of all of them, as entertainment.'

Svarturkló huffed. 'He was. You may be a bit surprised by what happens next. I didn't want to step into the arena. so I looked at the human in front of me. He was small, had almost no visible muscle, and didn't seem to have a weapon. He came forward and said one word that I understood clearly even though it was said with his lips instead of with the mind. Svarturkló.' Svarturskuggi's mouth dropped open at the sheer impossibility of that. Svarturkló noticed that Svarturvon was confused, but she seemed to be putting together what she had seen outside with Svarturkló's story. She would handle all of this better than her father because of what she had accidentally seen. Svarturkló continued. 'I was intrigued, of course, so I circled around him to catch his scent.'

'What did he smell like?' That was Svarturvon, seeming as if she wanted to verify something. Svarturkló caught her stare and stared back.

'A tiny bit of metal, and fire. But the most overwhelming scents were sadness, determination, and Svarturkappi's scent. The last was overpoweringly strong compared to the others. There was no scent of pain, or blood, or anger.' Svarturkló noticed that Svarturvon nodded to herself at that. 'And the human spoke more. He spoke of Svarturkappi by name and said that he was at the Nest. That we needed to save him. We. Then he took the horns that mark humans as Vikings off and cast them aside. He held out his hand and turned his head. Trusting me. And because of all of that, I trusted him in return. We broke out of the arena, and when a Viking ensnared me on the way out, he pulled a strange weapon off of his back and held them away until I recovered. Then we flew to the Nest.'

Svarturskuggi looked flabbergasted. 'This human must have been insane.'

Svarturkló shook her head. 'Two things convinced me he wasn't. First, he didn't smell insane. Second, he knew our names. There is no way that should have even been possible. But it was. There was clearly something going on that I didn't understand. We finished our journey to the Nest. The human distracted the Queen, who was using Svarturkappi at the moment, while I attacked her true body directly. That forced her to pull all of her consciousness and will back to her body, so she could defend herself. And that set all of the dragons free. After that, the three of us, two Night Furies and a human, fought the Queen. First, the human got her mad.' Svarturkló grinned. 'He and Svarturkappi landed on the Queen's head, and the human stabbed the Queen in the eye with his weapon. Although, he seemed to be unable to do it until he saw the Queen about to kill me. Then, we lured her into the clouds and shot the rest of her eyes out. Once she was blind I lured her into a dive, and let her kill herself against the hard ground.' She stopped. 'And that is how we were freed from the Queen. Or, my part of it. Svarturkappi has far, far more to tell. He and one other. One Svarturvon has already seen, and you should be able to guess.' She made eye contact with Svarturskuggi. 'Svarturkappi!' She called for him.

Svarturskuggi looked troubled as he thought about Svarturkló's last comment. He was distracted by the sight of the son he never knew existed. He saw a young adult Night Fury, with acid green eyes. But he also saw strange devices of leather and iron on his son's back. He didn't really care about that just yet. 'My son?'

Svarturkappi nodded seriously. 'Apparently. Well, most of me anyway.' He seemed uncomfortable. He looked over at Svarturvon. 'And you would be my sister?'

Svarturvon and Svarturskuggi approached him. He definitely smelled like a Svartur Fury. There was no doubt he was who he and Svarturkló said he was. They stared.

Svarturkappi misinterpreted their stares. 'Yeah, about that. A lot has happened.' He swung up the tail he thought they were staring at.

They hadn't been staring at anything in particular, but they were now. 'What is that?' Svarturvon was the first to speak.

Svarturkló cleared her throat. All three looked at her. 'I haven't finished calling people in.' Now was time for the real shock. While they were still off balance. 'Hiccup!'

A lone human entered the cave cautiously, looking around nervously.

Reason for Removal/Replacement: Too much recap, not enough important information. Note that this conversation still did happen (in essence, if not word-for-word what we see here), we just went to Hiccup's POV and skipped most of it.

Deleted Scene 4: Meet the Myrkur Siblings (Chapter 26)

Myrkursprengja's brother did a double-take. 'Oh.' He considered Hiccup. 'We probably would have gotten you with him.' He indicated Toothless. 'You are on his back.'

His nonchalant attitude and the fact that he and his sister apparently pranked people for fun was giving Hiccup a slight headache. "You two wouldn't happen to be twins, would you?" Was that even possible for dragons? He wasn't sure.

The two incredibly similar looking dragons shook their heads in unison. The male Fury who had yet to introduce himself answered vocally as well as physically. "No. I'm a few years older."

Toothless decided to try and move this along. 'What is your name?'

The male Night Fury puffed himself up, trying to gain every inch of size he could. Myrkursprengja poked him with her paw, and he wheezed as she jabbed his stomach. Once he could breathe again, he introduced himself as Myrkursprenging.

Svarturkló was slowly coming to terms with the fact that she was really here. These two Furies were making the experience feel almost surreal. Being covered in fish guts was not helping with the surreal qualities of the encounter. She decided to cut right to the chase. She wasn't sure how much more weirdness she could take. 'Where do you all live? The island looks deserted.'

Myrkursprenging was the first to answer, by virtue of slapping his sister with his tail as she was about to speak, cutting her off. 'Caves at the base of the island. One cave branch per family and they all connect in the middle. The Svartur branch is on the far side of the mountain," he indicated with his tail working as a pointer, "pretty much the opposite side from here. Just fly all the way around. Svarturskuggi should still be in there. Svarturvon is probably out somewhere, but she never stays out for very long..." He stared intently at Svarturkló. "Because Svarturskuggi doesn't want to lose her like he lost you.' That was said with complete seriousness.

Myrkursprengja slapped her brother in retaliation for earlier. 'Yeah, she doesn't really get out much. I think it's kind of her choice though.'

Svarturkló had had enough of these two for now. 'Well, come on Svarturkappi. We know where to go!' She took off. Toothless stared at her, and then looked back at Hiccup.

"What are you waiting for? Follow her!"

Toothless took off after Svarturkló. The two Myrkur Furies watched them go. Myrkursprengja spoke. "Think we should tell anyone about this?'

Myrkursprenging considered the question. The real question was, which would be more fun? Letting the other Furies find out on their own, or telling them beforehand? 'Nah. Let them find out on their own. Funnier that way. We should get back to the caves to watch!' The two Myrkur Furies winged their way to the caves as well. They would wait in the Myrkur wing of the cave system. Wait for the mayhem to start. A long-lost dragon, an unknown family member of said dragon, and a weird human. This should be interesting.

Reason for Removal/Replacement: Things were just too easy this way around. As a side note, the Nótt family did not play a large part in this book at all, originally. Chapters 28-31 were blips in a single chapter, summaries of events that for some reason I didn't consider important. That was corrected, giving us those four extra chapters, and far more defined Nótts going into Living Anonymously.

Deleted Scene 5: Boy, Do We Feel Stupid (Chapter 35)

"So, let me see if I've got this. After holding the link open, you can hear all dragons now. And if a dragon spends time around humans, they grow to understand human speech. Right? So here's the first part of my question. Berg, do you know our language?"

Fishlegs seemed to be expecting the affirmative answer he received. "Okay, as I thought. You understand me, of course. And I'm assuming you met Maour when he first showed up wherever we are going, and that was probably a while ago, so you've had plenty of time to learn. But, did you understand him when you first met him?"

Berg nodded again. He and Maour had conversed a few times in those first few days.

Fishlegs seemed to be leading up to something. "Was he the first human you've spent time around?"

Berg nodded. Fishlegs frowned. "Wait, so you learned our language from Maour, but somehow were hearing and understanding him from the first day?"

Toothless almost fell out of the sky. 'How did we not notice that?! All the Furies in the pack could understand you from the start, even Nótthljóður, and she's only four! There is no way she had ever seen a human before, but she could understand you... So how?'

Maour was astounded. He had gotten so used to being understood by Toothless and Cloey in their three months of traveling, he had never stopped to realize that the Furies of the pack shouldn't be able to understand him unless they had spent time around humans. And for Furies, that was a very rare occurrence. He needed more information. "Eldurberg, what was it like to hear me talk the first day?"

Eldurberg responded confidently. 'Now that I think about it, it sounded like you were speaking gibberish, but I also heard what you were saying in my mind. I just assumed that that was how you talked, and after a while, I understood your spoken words, and they blended in with the words in my head.' He narrowed his eyes in concentration. 'Say something.'

Maour spoke. "Fishlegs, you nearly knocked Toothless out of the sky with that. Eldurberg has a theory, we'll explain in a second."

Eldurberg snorted. 'Yup, if I concentrate I can still distinguish the two parts. You are talking with your voice and mind, at the same time. Fishlegs doesn't do that, so it must be part of the link.'

Maour slapped his forehead. "You're telling me, all that time I spent trying to talk to Toothless in my head, and I eventually figure out how to do it with any dragon, and didn't realize it for over six months?!" He frowned, and then laughed. "But I still have to talk out loud to do it, apparently. Which was one of the reasons I wanted to figure out how to talk with my mind in the first place. Well, this might be more useful anyway."

Maour looked back at Fishlegs, his voice rueful. "Apparently, another advantage of the link is that I now talk with my voice and mind at the same time. They hear whatever they do or do not understand with their ears, but every dragon understands what I say with my mind. Apparently, I'm doing it subconsciously, and I have to use my voice to speak with my mind. They seem tied together; I tried for months to do the mental part on its own. I always failed at that. But I do this without even thinking about it." He remembered some odd looks Toothless had gotten that first day, always when Toothless translated for him. It was surprising no one had brought it up.

Fishlegs seemed satisfied with that explanation. "But the Furies you spend time around learn our language, so Berg, Blast, and Boom understand us all. That works out pretty well." He sighed. "But it would be nice to understand Berg without a translator. There's only so much that can be said with charades."

Reason for Removal: This is flat-out irrelevant now, as Maour and Toothless had their individual 'I'm an idiot' moments earlier on. Still, it was fun to think they didn't figure it out for a full half of a year. Unlikely in the extreme, but fun.

Deleted Scene 6: An Awkward Goodbye (Chapter 38)

Fishlegs knew he wouldn't escape the family house within the year if he talked to his mother. So, once he had snuck in, he was greatly relieved to find his father awake, carving a block of wood to pass the sleepless hours of the night. He knew that happened sometimes, but he hadn't hoped to get that lucky.

"Hey, dad." The conversation that passed was a lot less simple than the ones the twins were having. He manages to convince his father that he would be fine and that this was just like him moving to another island, which Vikings were prone to do during times of peace. His father understood there were things he wasn't being told, but he gave Fishlegs his permission anyway, on the condition that Fishlegs write regularly. More for his mother than anything.

Then Fishlegs left, and Fishlegs' father watched in amazement as his fearful son happily greeted the red-eyed Night Fury, showing no signs of apprehension as he got onto a saddle, and they silently flew into the darkness. The elder Ingerman didn't hold with dragons, but anything that his son wasn't afraid of had to be harmless. He would eventually write Fishlegs and ask for an explanation. He knew that Berk would stay the same. That didn't mean he and his wife had to be here as it did.

Reason for Removal: Simple. It's boring and short. I got called out on this one by my Beta, and honestly he was right. I could have rewritten this scene to be better, but in the end, Fishlegs parents aren't going to play a real role in future stories, so characterizing them here would just be adding yet another personality, so to speak, to an already large roster for no reason. That's also why we didn't see it from his perspective in the last chapter. No need.

One last thing. If anyone can come up with a summary for this story that doesn't spoil anything major and fits within the allowed character limit, I'd be interested in seeing it, given the current one is... mediocre at best.