How to Twist a Dragon's Tale (Hiccup) (14 page)

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the Stone slowed a little before colliding with a large rock and coming to an abrupt stop.

The Windwalker got to it first and looked nervously up at Hiccup, waiting for instructions.

"It's stopped!" called out Camicazi in relief to the others, as she struggled and slipped downward.
We can get it now ...
thought Camicazi.

We can get it now...

Three sets of fingers reached out for the Stone, and ...

"TOO LATE!"
crowed Alvin, swooping down on his Exterminator, and reaching down with his Fire-Suit-gloved hand, he picked up the Fire-Stone and bore it upward, up and up as fast as he could in triumph.

"You are
TOO LATE. Y
ou will never stop the Volcano now."

They
were
too late.

The Exterminator was swift of wing, even with a spear stuck in one of its hearts, and it soared up quicker than the White Dragon could follow.

The Volcano gave an angry hiss and a snarl, and then a furious warning belch, in a truly gigantic rumble that sent the ground trembling like waves beneath Hiccup's feet.

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Camicazi yelled,
"LET'S
GET OUT OF HERE! THIS VOLCANO'S GOING TO BLOW!"

But that wasn't what truly terrified Hiccup

It was the soft voice of the Windwalker, whispering his first words into Hiccup's ear.

"Desert," whispered the Windwalker. "Desert."

[Image: Fire stone.]

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17. JUST EXACTLY
WHEN IS
TOO LATE?

Hiccup had been in some tricky situations in his time.

But to be standing on a Volcano when the Volcano starts erupting has got to be the trickiest so far.

"Camicazi! Fishlegs! Get on the White Dragon's back!" yelled Humungous, swooping down toward them. He knew that the White Dragon couldn't carry any more, particularly wounded as she was.

"Will you be all right on the Windwalker, Hiccup?" asked Humungous anxiously.

"Of course," replied Hiccup, with a confidence he was far from feeling. "I was before, wasn't I?"

And then he remembered the Riddle of Lava-Lout Island, the piece of paper that Old Wrinkly had given to him at the bottom of the well, and that was now in his pocket.

He whispered to himself.

"It is
never
too late."

He turned to Toothless. "Toothless, I am trusting you with something now. It is not too Late. Get tie Fire-Stone from Alvin, I don't care how, and

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throw it into the Volcano anyway. EVEN IF THE VOLCANO HAS EXPLODED ALREADY, Toothless, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT."

And Hiccup climbed on to the Windwalker's back and the Windwalker began to run down the mountain.

The poor wounded White Dragon struggled to lift off carrying the three Vikings. But on the third attempt she achieved it, and fumbled into the air.

Fishlegs had his eyes absolutely tight shut. This was his first flying experience, and it had to be said it was one that wasn't likely to make him feel confident about flying. I think you would describe it as TURBULENT. The White Dragon would flap forward for a couple of moments and then drop like a stone for twenty meters, leaving Fishlegs's stomach some way behind.

"We're going to die ..." whimpered Fishlegs, as they plunged down toward the little sail of
The Peregrine Falcon
in the bay, which had now been joined by the sails of Stoick and Big-Boobied Bertha's boats.

"Oh, stop moaning," snapped Camicazi. "I'm much more worried about Hiccup." For at least the White Dragon was FLYING, in a fashion. The Windwalker's wings weren't strong enough yet to take

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[Image: The Volcano Exploded.]

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off with Hiccup aboard. Camicazi was peering at the tiny figure of the Windwalker running down the mountain.

Hiccup clung to the Windwalker's skinny neck.

"Run," he whispered. "Please, run, run, run."

"R-r-r-r-run!" squeaked Toothless, flapping furiously after Alvin. "Run, run, r-r-run!"

BOOOMMM!!!!!

The Volcano exploded.

[Image: Hiccup.]

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18. HERE'S AN INTERESTING QUESTION. CAN YOU OUTRUN AN EXPLODING VOLCANO?

Here's an interesting question.

Can you outrun an exploding Volcano?

The answer is, if you survive the initial explosion, you
can,
depending on the type of lava.

Some lava runs extremely slowly. Some lava runs horribly quickly.

It depends, in short, on the Volcano in question.

And you can't really tell what kind of Volcano it
is
until the Volcano actually explodes.

When this particular Volcano exploded, the whole of the top half of the mountain blew right off. A great mushroom of cloud ballooned up into the air and rolled out across the clear blue sky. The entire island vibrated, churning up the seas roundabout and sending
The Peregrine Falcon, The Blue Whale,
and
The Mighty Momma
rocketing up and down the gigantic waves, and sending the hearts of the two parents aboard those ships plunging up and down with it.

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Great chunks of burning mountain were blasted up into the air and rained down to the ground and into the sea. The Windwalker screeched to a halt as a truly gigantic flaming boulder that could have squashed them flatter than two pieces of paper crashed to earth right in front of them, close enough to graze the Windwalker's quivering nostrils.

The Windwalker leaped on, dodging the flaming rocks falling out of the sky, and now running over the Exterminator Eggs that stretched before him in a great carpet all the way down to the sea.

Hiccup looked over his shoulder.

Burning rivers of hot molten lava were shooting out of the top of the crater and racing down the sides of the mountain.

It really wasn't Hiccup's lucky day. Depending, of course, on the way you look at these things, whether you are a "glass half full, or glass half empty" kind of person. You COULD, for instance, say that Hiccup had been really rather lucky to survive the day so far.

It turned out, as bad luck would have it, that the lava on Lava-Lout Island was the extremely fast-running kind that races in a red-hot river of death at speeds of over seventy miles per hour, much, much

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faster than a man can run -- but was it faster than a Windwalker? It already seemed to be catching up with them.

"R-R-R-R-R-R-RUNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!" screeched Hiccup again, as if the poor Windwalker needed telling, already running as fast as he possibly could, ears back, smoke steaming from his nostrils, taking great gasping breaths as he rocked forward in his extraordinary, limping run.

The lava streams shot down the mountain, horrible, steaming bright-red rivers.

And it wasn't just the lava that was chasing them.

You'd have thought that things couldn't get any worse -- but things can always always get worse.

The Exterminator Eggs were HATCHING the instant the lava touched them.

So that out of the red-hot streams came bursting thousands and thousands and thousands of Exterminator fledglings.

You might have thought that these newborn creatures would be still sleepy, still shaky, after lying curled up in those Eggs for nearly two hundred years, but no, it was as if their long gestation had been driving them MAD, so eager were these animals

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to be off and killing, even in their first few seconds of life.

They burst out of the lava streams still curled up like fiery Catherine wheels, and unfurled themselves midair in a shower of sparks, shaking the lava from their unfolding wings.

[Image: A dragon.]

And the first thing they saw as their carnivore

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eyelids snapped open was ALVIN, hovering at the top of the exploding Volcano, holding the terrifying flame-gold Fire-Stone in his hand.

For the previous three months, they had been trapped in their Eggs, looking up at the great statues of Alvin scattered all over the island.

Now here was this familiar face in the flesh, aboard one of their own, screaming at the top of his voice "AFTER THEM!!!!!" and pointing with his terrible copper-red sword at the shaking, terrified little figures of Hiccup and the Windwalker, fleeing from the lava streams like a fox from the Hunt.

The Exterminators didn't need much encouragement to obey. An ancient memory stirred in their tiny brains. They knew what THIS was.

This was PREY.

Ten sword-claws leaped from the ends of their fingers like switchblades, and the Exterminator fledglings took off in hot pursuit of the fleeing Viking and his dragon, shrieking as loudly as the Furies having their hair pulled.

Down shot the lava streams, rushing closer and closer, nearer and nearer, catching up with Hiccup.

Down, too, flew Alvin and the Exterminators, in

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their hundreds of thousands, like a gigantic cloud of homicidal bats.

Hiccup remembered what Humungous had said about Exterminators. They would attack
everything,
anything that moved, set fire to every blade of grass, every bush, every tree. There wouldn't be a single living thing for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Even if
they
survived (and at this particular moment, this seemed unlikely), the Quest itself had failed.

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

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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

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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 ...

[Image: Hiccup.]

"That's not... Hiccup, is it?" he said uncertainly,

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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.