Hi there! This is late, isn't it? If there's anyone out there still interested in this story - I had yet another bout of writer's block but I've overcome it, I think, and here's chapter 4. I'm proud of it, I think it moves the story on well, and it's a lot longer than previous chapters, so there's more to get your teeth into! I hope you enjoy it, and again, sorry it's so late!

Chapter 4

Thunk.

The sound of splintering wood echoed again around the forest. A couple of birds, spooked by the sudden noise, fluttered away from the upper branches of a nearby tree, but nothing else moved. A mist hung in the air, cloying, damp and cold. The ground was damp, wet leaf mulch coating the soil, and the light was diffuse and grey.

A hand reached out, grabbed the axe firmly by the shaft and gave a single tug. The weapon came away easily, tearing pieces of the lichen-covered bark away with it. If there had been anyone else there, they would have heard footsteps moving away from the tree for a moment before they stopped, and a slight rustle followed before...

Thunk.

In again went the axe, wedged firmly into the exact same cut it had already made in its first pass. Again footsteps made their way towards it, again the axe was pulled free, again those self same footsteps retreated to a distance, and so it went on, for hour after lonely hour.

It was nearly noon, but the light had scarcely changed at all, it seemed, since she'd come out here at six in the morning. It was diffuse and grey, scattering listlessly through the enveloping mist that clung to the forest like a cold, wet blanket, smothering what little noise there was and, it seemed, pervading the air with a sense of stillness, of inertia - of intransigence. This far north, the sky hardly darkened at all during high summer, and though it was now well past the solstice, she refused to shorten her hours. She was out here every day, doing the same thing over and over again.

It has to be perfect.

Astrid threw her axe again and again, almost unthinkingly, deliberately aiming for the point where she could throw the thing and be confident without having even to give it any thought that it would end up where she wanted it to. The single notch in the tree grew deeper and wider, but there was still only the one of them to testify to her efforts, and she liked what she saw - a sort of dry, detached sense of satisfaction that the destruction she had trained herself to be able to cause was so clinical, so perversely flawless.

Finally, Astrid hefted the axe over her shoulder one more time and prowled over to a nearby tree stump. She dropped the weapon unceremoniously, following it down as she slumped to sit on the stump, and her fingers picked at the edge of the bindings on her hands, uncoiling them after a moment as she leaned in to check what damage she'd done this time.

She could feel her hands hardening with each and every passing day now, and fewer blisters showed up with each new training session. Calluses had sprung up in all the right places, and the skin grew rough and coarse in other places, testifying to the constant rubbing and wear that rather went with the territory.

Those hands seemed rather a good metaphor for her mind, she thought. Abraded, battered and worn, their automatic response had been to toughen up, to construct a barrier between themselves and the harsh realities of the world they had to deal with.

Three months had passed already - in the blink of an eye, it seemed. The raids kept coming, the casualties kept mounting, and Hiccup was already thought of in the village as just another casualty of war - that is, if he was thought of at all. Mourned, to be sure, but it did no good to dwell on such things - they all knew that. It wasn't callous or cruel - it was a necessity. People were dying all the time, and none of them were so disconnected from the realities of their situation that they could have fooled themselves into thinking Hiccup was any less vulnerable just by virtue of being the son of the chief. Even Stoick had kept up the necessary pretences, although his facade had cracked by some not insignificant degree in the days following his son's disappearance, and Spitelout had needed to cover for him in a couple of important council meetings. It hadn't lasted though - it was not as if anyone's default emotional state was joy or happiness at this stage. They were all far too weary.

Throughout all of this, she'd held her peace over what she knew to really be the case, and it was eating away at her. She lied to herself about it, but really, this was the reason she spent so long out here. One slip, one mention of what knowledge she had of the boy who was still, technically, heir to the throne, listed as he was merely as missing, and all hell would break loose. The less time she spent around the rest of them, the smaller the chance of that happening, and it suited her to no small degree to spend her time in such splendid isolation.

After a moment of staring at - and through - her hands, she re-wrapped her bindings, stood, and hefted the axe again, taking aim this time at a different tree, drawing her arm back and hurling the weapon just as she had the preceding thousand times.

This time though, the axe struck the tree with the tip of the point of one of its horns, cutting by chance into a knot in the wood. Met with the unequal resistance, the axe was forced to jump to the side as it entered the tree, warping the blade along its span, and Astrid heard a distinct metallic ringing accompanying the usual, metronomic, thunk as the weapon's momentum was dissipated and splinters of bark and wood flew in the usual fan-shaped pattern outwards from the source.

The blade remained lodged in the wood but she could tell immediately that the angle it was resting at was odd. Striding up to the weapon, she gripped the base of the handle as normal and found that she could not lever it free. Bracing herself even further, with one foot planted against the trunk of the tree itself, she pulled with all her not inconsiderable strength and finally felt the wood either side of the blade itself begin to loosen and the axe slowly pulling out of the deep cut it had made. Finally prising it away, still with considerably more effort than was normally needed, she peered down at the blade itself, and sure enough, she could see a hairline crack running inwards from the leading, sharpened metal edge. She brought the axe up to her eye level and looked lengthways down the span, and could immediately see clear as day that the normally dead-flat profile of the blade had developed an ugly diagonal twist in it, and she knew the whole thing was compromised, probably fatally. Astrid cursed under her breath. That was the end of her throwing for today - two more attempts at most and the whole thing would shatter, and that would if nothing else render beyond doubt the status of her axe as 'irreparable'.

Shaking her head in annoyance, she clambered up the soil bank to where her pack was sitting, hefted that over her shoulder as well, and trudged away to the east, back towards the village and its unwanted, petty complexities. The path was rutted, broken up and overgrown to the extent that it was barely distinguishable from the forest floor either side of it, and the moss and heather underfoot were sodden with a deep moisture and dampness, of the sort that comes only from the particular kind of persistent, cloying, drizzly rain that had set in over Berk in recent weeks, accompanied by the thick mist that still sat pregnant over the woods. Astrid's fur-boot-clad feet squelched repeatedly as they fell, her gait uneven as she stepped over, around and between stones and potholes in the path. Her gaze was solely on her feet as she walked, but her ears were as alert as they always were. The forest was exactly the sort of place you could get caught out by some kind of small dragon or other wildlife if you let your mind wander.

It had been harder than normal for her of late to stop her mind from doing just that. She'd had a couple of close scrapes in subsequent raids where she had simply not been paying as much attention as she needed to, and she was kicking herself for it. It was not something you could confide in people about, at any rate - it was not exactly the done thing to explain your battle weaknesses to all and sundry around you, those things were best kept to oneself. Even more than that, the particular topic that had been occupying her mind during these lapses of concentration was not something she felt she'd ever be able to share with anyone.

Hiccup. It could have been little else, really - a lot could happen in a war in three months, but the fact remained that it was not a great deal of time, and the memories of his departure were still fresh in her head. It did not help that she spent a great deal of time out in the forests in solitude. Every single pine tree she walked past - every single one of the hundreds, thousands of trees that comprised these dense woodlands - could very well have been the one she'd been dropped onto the top of by that dragon.

Astrid shook her head forcefully again, trying to clear it. She stopped for a moment and looked around, the trees immediately next to the path appearing as massive, branched, foreboding obelisks fading upwards to a diffuse grey somewhere in the sky above her, such was the denseness of the fog that had settled over the island. A deep breath condensed in front of her face as she exhaled and she could feel the warmth of it on the tip of her nose. Once more she trudged forwards, eyes up this time, a feeling of unease settling in the pit of her stomach for reasons she wasn't quite sure of.

A rush of warm air hit her in the face as she swung open the door to the forge. Its glow had been obvious from quite some distance even through the gloom, as she'd walked through the almost-deserted center of the village and up the hill towards the chief's house. Straight ahead of her stood the main workbench, piled high with a multitude of obscure tools and other unidentifiable clutter, and just for a moment the ghost of a wry smile fluttered over her lips as she recognised the barely organised chaos that could only have been created by their indomitable blacksmith, peg-leg and all.

Peering in through the doorway, her gaze sweeping from left to right, she had almost got to the point of satisfying herself that Gobber wasn't there before a door clattered open on the opposite side of the low-ceilinged, dimly-lit room, and in he staggered, his arms full of yet more bizarre and incomprehensible shards and gnarls of metal which all, apparently, did something useful. It took him a moment to notice her, but when he did, a broad grin cracked over his features as he waddled ignominiously over to the self same workbench and dropped his cargo haphazardly on top of the pile of pure anarchy that already resided there.

"Come in, Astrid, don' just stand in tha' doorway, ye'll catch ye' death o' the cold, and then wha' will I do wi' ye?!" He chuckled amicably as he swept his prosthetic arm over the top of the pile of junk on the workbench, sweeping some of it away onto the floor. "Wha' can I do fer ye this time?"

This time, she did smile - she couldn't really help it. The blacksmith was nothing if not jovial, and it regularly reduced her to quiet, admiring befuddlement that he'd kept his spirits up so formidably in the face of everything that was happening. She'd been seeing quite a lot of him of late, bringing him no end of requests for small repairs and other adjustments to her not-insubstantial arsenal of bladed weaponry, and there was something about the warmth of the forge, his domain and his alone, that seemed to shut out the outside world for just a little while.

"Big one this time, I'm afraid, Gobber. I've completely screwed the blade" she replied, walking over to a nearby, smaller bench that was mercifully free of detritus, and placing her axe down on it. The unmistakeable, syncopated plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk of someone walking with one real and one artificial foot told her of Gobber's approach from the other side of the room without her needing to look behind her, and before long he appeared at her side and bent over the bench, peering closely at the axe head for a long moment.

Looking askance at him, she saw his eyebrows shoot up to where his hairline would have been if he hadn't lost it all those years ago.

"Hooh boy, I'll say ye have" he half-whistled, hefting the axe up by its shaft and revolving it in his hands, taking in the misshapen twist on the blade from a number of angles and running his careworn fingertips over the hairline cracks in the metal itself as he peered closely down at the axe, his face a picture of knowing concentration.

"How in Midgard did ye do this?" he asked after a long moment of silence during which Astrid had strolled across to the other side of the forge, where hung on the wall a few small throwing hatchets that had caught her eye.

"Knot in the tree, went in at an odd angle" she replied cursorily, the majority of her attention still taken up by the multitudinous small hatchets - made in batches, simple, rugged weapons that belied their cheapness many times over in how effective they were at dealing with smaller dragons - Terrors in particular.

"Ah" she heard Gobber say behind her. "Ye were out again today, were ye?"

"Yeah, it's good practice when the visibility's so bad."

"Yeh're spending a lot o' time out there these days."

Gobber paused for a moment, and this time the silence hung awkwardly in the space between them. When he spoke again, his voice was soft, raw - resigned, almost.

"Hiccup was doin' exactly tha'… every day, before he… before he went missin'"

Astrid's breath caught in her throat for a moment. She recognised this feeling most acutely when she was at the forge - the urge to blurt it out, to tell the blacksmith just what had really happened in the woods - why he'd been spending so much time out there.

Gobber was the only one who Hiccup had really got on with to any degree at all in the time she'd known him. She knew from the few dragon training lessons they'd had together, before things had got really bad, that Hiccup had been Gobber's apprentice for a considerable length of time in his earlier childhood, and had remained so right up until his… disappearance.

The blacksmith had taken Hiccup's apparent death harder than most, and as she turned slowly to face him, it struck her just how much older he looked when that big jovial smile he so often wore had fallen away. He suddenly looked just as tired, just as drained, as the rest of them.

Gobber was still looking down at her axe, but she could tell from the way his eyes had glazed over that his mind was elsewhere. He sighed, his figure seeming to slump and his stature collapsing, and he replaced her axe gently on the bench and ran his hands slowly, forlornly, over the wooden worktop. Astrid watched from across the room, and the words were still on the tip of her tongue - but she had to hold her counsel, had to. She couldn't let on.

"What do you think he was doing when he was away?" she asked instead, her tone deliberately off-hand, trying to drag the conversation in another direction, if only slightly.

"I don' know… he kept mentioning somethin' about some… archive or somethin'… never could figure out wha' exactly he was goin' on about…"

Astrid would later come to thank her lucky stars that she had still been on the other side of the room at this point, because she knew her expression would have betrayed her alarm had Gobber been looking at her.

If the blacksmith didn't know of the existence of any kind of archive, Astrid's instinct would normally have been that such a thing couldn't possibly exist. Gobber knew everything that happened in the village - he often seemed like Stoick's de facto right hand man, particularly of late, what with the chief's reclusiveness and the tenseness that seemed to reside almost permanently on his brow. Hiccup had been adamant though - and as she thought about it, his face swam into view in her mind's eye - the quiet, refined, focused anger that she'd seen behind his eyes on the day she'd found that dragon.

Something must have convinced him of the truth of what he'd told her about his father and his descendants.

It didn't make sense. As always with him, it didn't make sense.

Taking a deep breath and schooling her features into the practiced, amicable-but-distant indifference she so often resorted to, she crossed back over to where Gobber was still standing and kept going, making for the door. She swung it open before turning back to face him.

"I've got to be going, I'm afraid… when do you reckon you can fix that by?" she asked, gesturing to her axe.

Gobber started, snapped out of his contemplative stupor, and the grin returned to his face, albeit slightly thinner than it had been.

" I think tha's goin' to need a completely new blade, Astrid" he replied. "Probably not fer a good while… mebbe a week?" He scratched his substantial chin for a moment. "I'll let ye know."

She cursed inwardly - that axe was somewhat vital these days, with the frequency that the raids had been coming in, and she couldn't simply make do with one of the spares that was lying around in the training ring - the quality of those was, on the whole, diabolical, and she barely trusted them not to disintegrate mid-throw, let alone put up with the punishment of a genuine fight.

"Alright, thanks Gobber," she replied nonetheless, and she left it until she was outside of the forge, and out of sight of anyone who might have put two and two together and worked out why she was angry, before she let her expression slip into a weary, browbeaten scowl.

Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, her heart pounding in her ears and her breathing laboured as she sprinted across the uneven, dusty ground. Leaping forward, she rolled away behind the cover of a stone wall, and she felt the heat of dragon's fire pass just behind her as she did.

She pressed her back into the wall, her brow laden with sweat. The armour she wore on her shoulders, relatively minimal though it was in comparison to what the heavy-set men of the village typically wore, still weighed her down considerably and made it hard to stay as light on her feet as she normally was. It was the main thing she had going for her in any sort of fight though, and she was damned if fatigue was going to stop her. Curling her fingers tighter around the shaft of the rudimentary practice axe she held, she braced herself, taking a single breath and holding it for a moment before leaping up and vaulting out from cover, over the wall, and sprinting forwards again.

Her opponent was not the most imposing of dragons, to be sure, but there was no such thing as an easy dragon to deal with - they all breathed fire after all. Right ahead of her, distracted by Ruffnut who was herself sprinting for cover opposite, crouched a Terrible Terror, its hackles well and truly up and steam rising from its overlarge nostrils as its head twitched from side to side, searching for its next quarry.

Terrors, although dangerous, were particularly stupid, Astrid thought. Certainly, for all the frenetic attention this one was paying to the area directly in front of it, it had totally failed to register her hurtling towards it from behind. She drew back her throwing arm, transferring the whole weight of the axe into that hand and raising the opposite arm out ahead of her, splaying her fingers. The weight of the weapon felt off to her as she had known it would, so used was she to her own axe, and she waited longer than she otherwise would have to compensate, closing the distance between her and the dragon more than normal. She slowed her run, timing her breathing to match her steps, and once again her vision narrowed so that her only focus was on the wretched, wretched creature in front of her. The sound flashing around her seemed to dull and quieten, falling off into insignificant background noise, and finally she planted her foot in the dirt, swinging the arm holding the axe forwards as she did and letting her momentum carry through into the throw as well. She watched the weapon leave her grasp, almost detached from events as it span away ahead of her, and she knew already that she'd timed it to perfection.

Her predictions to herself on the negligible quality of the practice axes were ringing true however. The odd, misbalanced weight in her hand was one thing, but as she watched, her mind seeing the axe's flight almost in slow motion as the adrenaline of the fight accelerated her senses, the rotation of the weapon in the air developed the slightest lateral wobble, and the axe's previously nailed-on trajectory began to deteriorate mid-air.

Ahead of her, the dragon had finally realised its vulnerability and in the blink of an eye had turned to face her, leaping upwards and forwards and unfurling its sinewy, miniature wings. Before it could even think about shooting any fire in her direction, however, the axe reached its target, its mid-air wobble offsetting the angle at which it struck, instantaneously cleanly severing one of the dragon's forelegs and mangling the wing root on the same side as it passed through. A spurt of blood leapt immediately out from the wound, scraps of flesh spinning away in a number of directions, and the dragon screamed and slumped straight to the ground again, landing on its ruined wing and scrabbling mindlessly at the ground, yelping and whimpering, trying and failing to flee.

Astrid's expression was a perverse cross between grim and triumphant as she stepped around the Terror, careful to avoid its line of fire as she advanced and planted a single, booted foot harshly down on the infernal thing's stomach, watching as it yelped and frantically tried to run with both its rear legs and single remaining foreleg, its panic so complete that it did not seem to realise it was now fully lying on its side.

Keeping her foot firmly pressed down, she reached down to her other boot and unclipped the small hunting knife that almost permanently resided there. She dropped to her knees, now replacing the foot that held the Terror in place with the knee of her other leg, and she leant over the dragon, tossing the knife a couple of times in the palm of her hand before bringing it down to rest the blade's leading edge against the dragon's leathery, scaly neck.

She'd been in this position a number of times before. Terrors were, of course, the easiest of dragons to take one-on-one, particularly for someone of her light and lithe build, and she'd killed a few over the years.

She'd never hesitated before.

She did now, though. The dragon beneath her had stopped its wriggling and struggling, and it startled her somewhat to find that her own stare was now met, steadily, by the dragon's single upward-facing eye. It bored into her as the rest of the Terror's body relaxed and went completely still, blood still flowing freely from its wounds and soaking into her leggings and arm bindings. The rest of the world disappeared again, and her grip on the knife relaxed as well, for a moment.

Visions - scenes, snapshots - were flitting through her mind, one after another, faster than she could really compute them - visions of Hiccup in the forest, of the great jet-black dragon behind him, staring her down. Of the lack of hostility in its face, of its relaxed stance, how it had looked almost noble. And of course, the simple fact that the two of them were standing there, both of them looking unflinchingly at her, not even remotely concerned that either might harbour an ounce of hostility for the other.

For all that she'd tried to bury it over the last few months, it had unnerved her. She wasn't stupid, and it had not passed her by that the very fact of meeting a dragon in such a manner flew in the face of everything she'd ever been taught, regardless of whether or not it was right.

What was the saying Gobber favoured? A dragon always goes for the kill.

Well obviously they didn't, although quite what Hiccup had done, she suspected, would always remain a mystery to her. Now though, she was stooping over on the floor, one knee planted firmly on the midriff of a dragon that she'd just dismembered, and all it was doing was staring at her. The damn thing was only inches away from her, and her knife just a minuscule fraction of that from ending the thing's life in an instant, and she couldn't tear her gaze from its own.

She shut her eyes, shook her head and steeled herself, exhaling forcefully and reminding herself where she was. She was in the middle of a village of people who thought nothing of what she was now having to force herself to do.

She heard the dragon whimper, once, and perversely, it was the twang of regret and pity she felt, followed almost immediately by the disgust that she could have ever felt such a thing at all, that finally forced her to press the knife into the dragon's throat and slice upwards.

A wet squelch met her ears and the dragon's body, which suddenly felt very small indeed, went utterly limp beneath her knee. She drew herself to her feet, nudging the Terror perfunctorily with her toe, and staring down at it.

"Good job, Astrid!"

Ruffnut's voice snapped her back to reality and she looked up to see the girl jogging towards her, the urgency gone from her stance. Gobber too was walking over from the far side of the ring.

Astrid shrugged noncommittally. "Eh, easy session really."

Of course, she thought, it was just her luck that a routine training session, when the rest of her group was watching, had produced that sort of uncertainty in her for the first time. She glanced up, and could see the three boys looking down from the other side of the elevated metal fence that ran the full circumference of the ring. Snotlout and Tuffnut were looking thoroughly disinterested, but even from this distance she could see the confusion on Fishlegs' face, and she cursed under her breath as she realised that her hesitation had not gone unnoticed.

Composing herself, she strode over to the wall and leant the axe against it, picking absent-mindedly at the end of the bindings on her arm that were now soaked in drying blood, unwinding them as they came loose and tossing them aside. Behind her the thick-set metal gate of the training ring rumbled and rattled its way upwards and she turned and strolled towards it. The light was low, the day nearing its end, the ever-present fog still casting its pall over the island. Ducking beneath the partially-opened gate, she clambered up the entrance ramp and out into the open.

She didn't even look - she knew Fishlegs would be jogging after her. Sure enough, his yell of "Astrid!" reached her ears only moments later and she glanced back over her shoulder.

"Hey Fish."

"What happened there?" he asked, his tone more inquisitive than anything, as it so often was.

"When?"

"When you had the dragon pinned, you waited at least three seconds longer than you normally do"

"Oh, that," she replied nonchalantly, feigning indifference. "It did something weird, just stopped moving. Threw me for a moment. Sloppy, I know."

Half-truths were so much easier than outright lies, she mused.

"Oh, okay. I did wonder, you're normally pretty… clinical…"

"Yeah, I know. No harm done though."

"Anyway, why were you using one of the practice axes?"

She laughed humourlessly. "Trust me, I wouldn't use one if I didn't have to. They're absolutely screwed". She swiped a hand across her forehead and flicked her fingers to clear the sweat she'd taken away. "I broke my axe yesterday when I was out training in the forest. Warped the blade. Gobber told me the whole thing needed switching out and making a new axe blade for me is harder than for most people".

"Oh, that's a shame. Yeah, your axe always was much lighter than everyone else's".

A comfortable pause fell in the conversation as the two of them continued their trudge back towards the center of the village.

"He seemed distracted," Astrid piped up after a while.

"Who?"

"Gobber."

"Hm, that's odd, he was the same with me a couple of days ago. I think Hiccup's still bothering him."

"Yeah, he is. He was talking about him yesterday."

Astrid's mind was whirring and she looked away, out to sea - what little could be seen of it with the fog. Fishlegs was, for all intents and purposes, the guy they all went to with obscure questions - on the rare occasions they had reason to concern themselves with them - and she couldn't help but wonder whether he might know of this 'archive' Hiccup had claimed to have gotten into.

Before she could really debate the merits of broaching the subject with him, though, the words had tumbled from her mouth anyway.

"He told me Hiccup was preoccupied with some archive before he disappeared, but he said he didn't know what Hiccup might have meant…"

She kept walking, and was puzzled after a while not to have received a reply from Fishlegs. Looking back, away from the sea, she stopped abruptly as she found he was no longer walking alongside her. Turning fully, and catching sight of him standing stock-still a few paces behind her, she was almost paralysed by the look on his face.

His eyes were as wide as they'd ever seen them and his expression was a mask of complete, unmitigated shock. His whole frame had tensed, his arms hanging by his sides, and it took her a moment to assign a word to what she saw. Only a moment, though - he looked scared. Genuinely fearful. It was unfamiliar on him.

"Fish?"

The look on his face didn't change, but he suddenly paced forwards to her, his gait purposeful, urgent - tense, still. His voice, when he got near enough to her, was scarcely more than a whisper and she could hear the sudden strain.

"Hiccup was looking for an archive?"

"Apparently, yes," she replied, more than a little taken aback.

"It exists."

If she was worried before, she was unashamedly alarmed now. Fishlegs was never this direct.

"I don't know where it is. I found an oblique reference to it in a book years ago and I asked the chief about it… I've never seen someone get so angry so quickly. He made me swear not to tell anyone and he ordered me to hand over the book I'd found out about it from."

He reached out and grabbed her upper arm in a vice-like grip.

"I assumed for ages that it had something to do with sensitive secrets, but if Hiccup was asking after it then it can't be that… he'd have access to stuff like that anyway, since he's -" he caught himself, and regret flashed across his features for a moment - "since he was the heir to the chieftainship. And… and he asked me as well, about a week before he disappeared. I thought it was odd then… and if he was asking Gobber as well then he must have got his hands on the same book I found, and that means his father was keeping it from him on purpose. Why would he do that?!"

Astrid's jaw flapped uselessly for a moment, before she got her senses together enough to reply. "I don't know, Fish."

His expression darkened further. "There's something going on here that we're not being told."

And of course, Astrid knew it was true. She knew now that Hiccup had been telling her the truth - he must have been. And of course it showed on her face - there was no way it could have failed to, really - and she was standing opposite one of the most perceptive people she'd ever met, so it really shouldn't have surprised her what came next.

"You know what happened to him don't you?"

And yet it still was a shock, and the urge to deny it furiously welled up in her for a long moment before she realised how obvious it would be that she was lying. So in the end, she opted for simplicity.

"Yes, I do."

"What?"

"Fish, I can't tell you." Her voice dropped to a low, urgent whisper. "I can't tell anyone."

"Why?"

"It's too dangerous. Too dangerous for me, too dangerous for everyone. I… I can't tell you."

And then she was running, running towards the Mead Hall, running from everything that would force her to face up to what she now knew. Everything he'd told her had to be true, now - had to be. If his father had been hiding the existence of this archive from him then that fitted horribly perfectly with everything Hiccup had said about the illegitimacy of his entire bloodline, and his ancestors' sole responsibility for centuries of warfare with dragons. No wonder he'd felt like leaving, like running, like leaving it all behind.

She had to see for herself, she had to know.

And as his words tumbled through her head, and the whimpers of the dying Terrible Terror that she'd maimed and killed only minutes earlier rang in her ears, she knew that first, she had to get this blood off her hands.

The water sluiced over her forearms and ran red back into the water bucket.

It was the only place that had popped into her mind in the state of semi-panic she'd found herself in, and right at that moment, she couldn't have waited any longer to cleanse the extant evidence of her cruelty that the dragon's blood represented. The firefighting equipment she was so intimately familiar with had provided for her once more, stashed in a dark corner of the hall, and she crouched over it, trying not to tremble.

She'd been there for what seemed like hours to her, just trying not to think, and failing.

The thunderous, cacophonous creaking of the great oak doors jolted her back to full awareness, though, and she turned, expecting to see Fishlegs. She wouldn't have blamed him for chasing her, for insisting on knowing what it was she knew.

The perfunctory greeting she had been ready to deliver died on her lips, though, as she caught sight of the huge frame of the man walking through the door. It certainly wasn't Fishlegs.

It was Stoick, and his eyes looked haunted.

Instantaneously she shrank back against the wall, the shadows her saving grace as she tried desperately to regulate and shallow her breathing. Thankfully for her, the chief seemed about as distracted as she'd ever seen him. He stumbled - almost staggered - over to the opposite corner of the hall from the one she had hidden away in, and as the door swung shut again and the light in the hall fell back to only that provided by the few dim, flickering torches that were still lit, she saw him bend down over a seemingly nondescript piece of the flagstone floor, his fingers reaching out and fiddling with something she couldn't make out in the gloom.

Then, an almighty, dull thump echoed through the cavernous room, followed closely by the unmistakeable sound of stone grinding against stone, and she could just make out a doorway, previously hidden, opening in the stone wall at the back of the hall, the room beyond - whatever it was - entirely black and revealing nothing at the narrow angle she was viewing it from.

She watched as Stoick raised himself up from the floor, and with the irregular, erratic gait of a man almost broken, he made his way slowly over to that doorway, squeezing himself through the relatively small opening, ducking his head and disappearing from her view altogether.

And she knew, of course, what she'd just witnessed. This was the archive, it had to be, and the last of her doubts fell away as she watched. That room contained something absolutely explosive, something revelatory, something that could either save them or doom them, depending upon who knew about it.

And she knew what she had to do. As the sound of stone grinding on stone started up once more, and the doorway began to close once again, she took one deep breath, sprinted towards it, and lunged inside.

Well, there you go. It's a lot longer than previous chapters, and I will do my best to keep this up. I'd really, really appreciate you leaving a review - I want to hear how I did, basically!