Hiccups point of view:
My legs are burning. It's a hot, sharp feeling that starts in my toes and goes all the way up to my ears, which are already ringing. I'm running through the forest, and every time my foot hits the ground, a big "ouch" goes through my whole body. My side hurts where Ruffnut kicked me, and my arm feels heavy and thick where Snotlout punched it.
But I can't stop. If I stop, they'll find me. And if they find me, they win. I can't let them win. Not again.
Their words are still bouncing around inside my head, louder than my own breathing. Useless. Worthless. Fishbone. Even your own father doesn't want you. They said it over and over, like a mean song. Every time they said it, they'd push me or hit me. The pain is... familiar. It's like my morning oatmeal. It's just there. Today is Tuesday, but it hurts like Monday, and it'll hurt like Wednesday tomorrow. Getting hit, getting hurt, getting ignored. That's just what happens.
So I run to the only place left.
The woods are supposed to be scary. The twins say there are trolls and Wulvers and dragons that nest in the dark. Snotlout says he's not afraid of anything, but his feet always stop at the edge of the trees. My feet don't stop.
Because the woods... they don't hit. The trees don't look at me. They don't have faces that twist up into something called disdain or disappointment. I looked those words up in Gobber's old scrolls. Disdain is when someone looks at you like you're a bug they found in their stew. Disappointment is worse. It's a quiet face adults make, like all the air has gone out of them. Stoick makes that face a lot. At me.
He always talks loud in the Great Hall. "A Chief protects his own!" he booms, pounding the table so the plates jump.
So... why?
Why didn't he protect me? Was I not his own? If he hated how weak I was so much, why didn't he just... fix it? Show me how to be bigger? Or stronger? Or louder? I'd try. Even if I hated every second of being loud and smashy, I'd try. But he just... looked. His eyes would find me, and they wouldn't be angry like when the dragons came. They'd be... empty. And then they'd slide away, like I was a boring rock.
He hated me for being born wrong. I didn't ask to be born! I didn't ask to be me!
And what the heck was love, anyway? People were always saying it. "I love this yak stew!" "I love my new axe!" "Love you, son!" I'd heard other dads say it. Was it a feeling, like how sadness is a heavy blanket or anger is a hot stomach? Or was it a thing you did, like fixing a broken shield or bandaging a cut?
Whatever it was, I didn't get it. And I definitely didn't get it from him.
A new thought bubbled up, clear and cold like water from the well. It was a thought I'd never had before, and it made my running feet stutter for a second.
Stoick the Vast wasn't my father.
He was just... a man. A big, loud, frowning man who was supposed to look out for me because my mom was gone. And he wasn't doing it.
And for some weird reason... that thought didn't hurt. It didn't feel like a punch or a kick or an empty look. It just felt... true. Like saying the sky is up. It was just a fact.
Huh. At least something in this world didn't hurt me yet.
I tripped.
My foot caught on a sneaky root and I pitched forward with a yelp. My hands shot out and smacked into the cool, damp earth, scraping the palms. I wobbled, my arms shaking, but I didn't fall all the way down. I stayed there, like a four-legged stool, breathing hard.
I pushed myself up, brushing the dirt off my stinging hands. I was about to keep walking to my usual spot—a hollow log by the creek—when I looked up and saw something I have never seen before.
Between two giant, mossy boulders that looked like sleeping giant heads, there was a crack. It was almost hidden by a curtain of thick, green vines hanging down. It wasn't a path. It was just a... space. Dark and narrow.
But as I looked at it, a funny feeling started in my chest. Not a scared feeling. A... pull feeling. Like when you see a shiny pebble and you have to pick it up. Like the crack was whispering, but not with words.
The twins would never find me in there. No one would.
Without another thought, my small, sore body forgot its aches somewhat. I ducked my head, pushed the cool, leafy vines aside, and slipped into the dark.
The air inside the crack was cool and smelled like wet stone and old leaves. It was dark, but not scary-dark. Just... quiet-dark. My feet crunched on little pebbles as I walked. The crack wasn't very long, and soon I saw a bright light at the end.
I stepped out, and my mouth fell open.
I was standing on a big, flat rock at the edge of a... a cliff. A huge, curving wall of gray stone went all the way around in a big circle, like a giant's cup. And way, way down at the bottom, I could see a patch of the greenest grass I'd ever seen, and in the middle of it, a lake. It was so still it looked like a piece of the sky had fallen down and got stuck. I could see tiny little dots moving in the water—fish, probably. Or maybe they were normal fish and I was just really, really high up.
My heart did a little jump. There was no path. No stairs. No way down.
A smile, a real one, tugged at my sore mouth. No way down for them.
I walked to the edge and looked over. It wasn't a straight drop. The cliff face was bumpy and jagged, with cracks and little ledges and bunches of tough, spiky grass growing out of it. It was a climbing wall. My favorite kind of puzzle.
I sat down, swung my legs over the edge, and felt with my toes until I found a good lump of rock to stand on. Then I started to climb down. My side throbbed where Ruffnut had kicked me, and my scraped hands stung against the stone, but I didn't mind. This was a different kind of hurt. This was the hurt of doing something. My brain got quiet, thinking only about next handhold, next foothold, don't look down.
After a bunch of careful moves, my feet touched something soft. I let go and dropped the last little bit, landing in a patch of grass.
It was... so soft. Softer than my old wool blanket. Softer than anything on Berk. It sighed underneath me, and the smell of it—green and sweet—filled my nose. My legs just... gave up. They folded like wet rope, and I collapsed onto my back in the grass with a little "oof."
For a second, I just lay there. Then, all the aches and pains I'd been running from caught up to me at once. A hot, sharp gasp tore out of my throat, followed by a low moan. It felt like my whole body was one big bruise.
I slapped a hand over my own mouth. Shhh! I scolded myself inside my head. You can't be loud! They'll hear! They'll find you and hurt you again!
I panted hard, my chest going up and down fast. My shirt felt awful. It was stuck to my skin, all stiff and itchy and... sticky.
With clumsy, hurting fingers, I pulled at the hem of my tunic. It didn't want to come off. It was sticking. I yanked harder, wincing, and finally pulled it over my head.
The air felt cool on my skin. I looked down.
My sigh sounded more like a sob. My whole front was a mess of colors. Purples and blues and ugly red scratches, all swirling together like a bad painting. There was a big, dark blotch on my side that hurt the most when I breathed. In the middle of all the bruises, little cuts were beading up with fresh red blood. That's what was sticky.
"Okay," I whispered to myself, my voice shaky. "Okay. Have to... have to clean them. Or they'll get... they'll get..." I frowned, digging for the word. Gothi had taught me. She showed me her plants and her clean bandages. "...Infected!" I said, proud I remembered. "They'll get infected."
A sad, little laugh hiccupped out of me. "I'm an expert at it. After so much practice."
But then, looking at the map of hurt on my skin, my brain started to drift. It's been doing that a lot lately. The memories come without me asking them to.
I saw Snotlout's big, mean face laughing. I saw the twins pushing me back and forth between them until I fell down and they kicked dirt on me. I saw the other kids, just... watching. Their faces blank, like I was a strange bug.
Then I saw her. Astrid.
My chest got a different kind of hurt, a squeeze-y one. For a little bit, she was different. She didn't push. She'd sit next to me at the edge of the training yard. She didn't talk much, but she listened. I thought... I thought maybe she was a friend. A quiet friend who smelled like pine needles.
Then I heard her. I was hiding behind the fish-smoking shed, and she was talking to her dad. Her voice wasn't quiet. It was loud and annoyed.
"I hate it, Dad! I have to be nice to the little runt because Mom said a Chief's son is important! But it's stupid. He just mumbles and trips. And it doesn't even work! Stoick doesn't even look at him. So why should I? It's a waste of time!"
Her words were worse than kicks. They were like cold water poured inside my tunic. She didn't like me. She was just pretending. Because of him. And when she found out he didn't care... I wasn't worth pretending for anymore.
After that, I ran away whenever I saw her. Once, she tried to stop me, her eyebrows all bunched up. "Hiccup, wait—" But I just ran faster. My ears were too hot and my eyes were too blurry to listen.
The memory made a growly sound start in my throat. It got louder.
Everyone. Everyone hated me. For no reason! I never hurt anyone! I never took anyone's toy or called them names. I just... was. I was just me. And that was enough. Enough for them to push me, to ignore me, to look at me with those empty or mean faces.
Even Gobber. He helps me. He puts a big hand on my shoulder sometimes and gives me an extra piece of bread. But I heard Gothi talking to him in her hut, her staff tapping the floor. "You will watch the boy. You will see he is not left in the cold." So he only does it because she told him to. He has to. Not because he wants to.
The growl in my throat got so loud it vibrated in my chest. I HATED IT. I hated that just because I was small and my brain thought of weird things and my legs didn't work right, I was nothing. It didn't matter that I was nice. It didn't matter that I tried to be kind. In their eyes, I was NOTHING.
A picture flashed in my head, bright and hot. A dragon raid. But different.
In my head, the dragons weren't just burning houses. They were everywhere. The sky was black with them. I saw Snotlout running, his mean laugh turning into a scream as a Monstrous Nightmare swooped down. I saw the twins, for once not smirking, but crying, holding onto each other as a Zippleback cornered them. They were begging. "Please! Please, no!" But the fire came anyway.
I saw Berk burn. Not just a little. Everything. The Great Hall, the docks, the houses—all turning black and crumbling into ash. And I saw Stoick. I saw him standing in the middle of it all, watching his precious village disappear. I saw his big, strong shoulders crumple. I saw his mighty beard catch the light of the fires as everything he loved turned to nothing.
A dark, fizzy feeling bubbled up from my toes to my hair. I wanted it. I wanted them to all go away. My lips pulled back from my teeth. I was smiling, but it didn't feel like my smile. It felt sharp and fierce, like the snarl of a trapped wolf-pup.
Yes. Let it burn. Let them all—
Then I saw her in the fire.
Astrid. Not running or fighting. Just... lying still in the street. Her bright blue eyes were open, staring right at me through the smoke. They weren't mean. They were just... empty. Like Stoick's.
Snap.
The dark picture shattered like ice.
"No!" The word ripped out of me, loud in the quiet cove. "No, no, no, I can't think like that!"
I scrambled to my feet, the bruises screaming. I hugged my arms around my shaking body.
"I'm not bad," I whispered fiercely to the grass, to the sky, to myself. "I'm not a monster. I don't want that. I don't."
The fizzy, dark feeling drained away, leaving me cold and tired and small again. My scary smile was gone. I don't want to think like that again.
I just felt... hollow. And my body was starting to shout at me.
I took a step towards the glittering lake. A hot, sharp crunch jabbed my side, right under the big purple blotch. I gasped and froze, my breath stuck in my throat. It felt like one of my bones was a piece of kindling that Gobber had stepped on. I tried to breathe in slow, but it hurt. It really, really hurt.
A whimper escaped my lips. "Okay," I whispered, talking to my rib like it was a separate, naughty thing. "Okay, you're hurt. We have to be careful."
Moving like Gothi when her knees were bad, I shuffled step by step to the water's edge. The grass was so soft it was like the island was trying to be nice to my feet. I knelt down, which made my side crunch again, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a second.
The water was clear. I could see little stones at the bottom, all different colors. I reached a hand in. It was so cold it bit my scraped palm, but in a clean, good way. Not like the hot, dirty hurt from the bruises.
I hated being sticky. I hated the dried blood making my skin all tight and itchy, and the dirt ground into the cuts. It felt like I was wearing a second, awful skin.
"Clean first," I said, using my Gobber-voice. He always had steps for things. "Step one: assess the damage."
I looked at my reflection in the still water. A small, pale face with too-big eyes and messy hair looked back. There was a smudge of dirt on his nose. He looked tired.
Taking a deep breath that made my side whine, I leaned forward and started to splash water on my chest and arms. The cold was a shock, making me gasp, but then it started to numb the throbbing. I used my fingers, gentle as I could, to rub away the dried blood. The red swirled in the water like skinny little clouds before disappearing.
Some of the cuts stung fresh when the water touched them. I had to bite my lip. "It's just water," I told myself. "Water is good. It washes the bad stuff away."
Next was my tunic. It was lying in the grass like a sad, crumpled creature. I picked it up and dunked it in the lake, swishing it around. The water turned a faint, rusty brown. I scrubbed at the worst stains with a flat rock, but they were stubborn. They were part of the fabric now, big brownish-red shadows that wouldn't leave. Like the memories. You couldn't scrub those away either.
After a while, my fingers were numb and wrinkled like old raisins. The cold water had made the sharpest pains fade to a dull ache, which was better. But my teeth started to chatter. Clack-clack-clack.
Gothi's voice was in my head, strict and sure. Cold after injury invites sickness. A sick warrior is a dead warrior.
I didn't want to be a dead warrior. I didn't want to be a sick one, either. Sick meant the empty hut. Sick meant no one coming to check.
"Out," I commanded my shaky body.
I stood up, water dripping off me, and squeezed the cold lake out of my tunic. It was damp and heavy. I didn't want to put the wet, stained thing back on. It felt like putting the hurt right back on my skin.
So I carried it to a sunny patch of the soft, sighing grass and spread it out like a little blanket. Then I lay down beside it, on my back, careful of my crunchy side. The sun was warm on my skin. It felt like a dry towel, a lot nicer than my wet, scratchy one at home.
The grass cradled me. The sky above was a huge, quiet blue bowl with little white clouds that moved slower than anything. No one was here. No one was going to shout, or hit, or look at me with empty eyes.
The hollow feeling in my chest was still there. But the hot, snarling want for everything to burn was gone. In its place was a quieter, older ache. It wasn't in my side. It was in the middle of me, right behind my ribs where my heart beat.
I didn't want Berk to burn. I didn't want Snotlout to get swooped.
I just wanted... someone to see me lying here. Someone to see the bruises and the scratches and get that worried wrinkle between their eyes, like Gothi did when a sheep was hurt. Someone to say, "Oh, Hiccup," in a soft voice, not a loud one. Someone to put a blanket over me that wasn't just sun-warmed grass. Someone to sit beside me until I wasn't alone.
I wanted to matter. Just a little bit. To one person.
But the only person who was supposed to do that... was just a big, loud man in a big, loud hall. And he wasn't coming.
A tear escaped. It rolled from the corner of my eye, down my temple, and into the soft green hair of the earth. Then another. I didn't sob. My body was too tired for big noises. The tears just came, quiet as the clouds, washing some of the salt and dirt from my face that the lake hadn't reached.
The sun kept warming me. The grass kept holding me. The cove kept its secret.
My eyelids got heavy. The blue sky blurred. The ache in my side and the bigger, quieter ache in my chest all mixed together into one big tired feeling. The kind of tired that pulls you down into the dark, whether you want to go or not.
Maybe here, in this hidden cup of stone and sky, I didn't matter to anyone. But the island wasn't hurting me. The sky wasn't ignoring me. For now, that had to be enough. It was shelter.
As the world faded into a warm, blue-black nothing, my last thought was a simple wish, sent out into the quiet air of this place.
Please.... I just want someone to care for me.
Unknowns point of view:
Something stirred where nothing ever stirred in my domain.
I was not in the garden when it happened.
The disturbance brushed against my awareness like a misstep on stone—small, wrong, sharp enough to irritate. That section of the forest had been silent for generations. I had made sure of that. Humans learned quickly. The few who wandered too close did not wander again, and the stories passed down through blood and fear did the rest of the work for me.
Isolation was efficient.
So when the wards shifted instead of striking, my first thought was not curiosity.
It was anger.
I moved without hesitation. Distance folded away, shadows drawing me through as easily as breath. By the time I arrived, the garden had already accepted something it should not have.
A human child.
He slipped through the narrow break in the stone as if it had been waiting for him, vines brushing his shoulders without tightening. He did not hesitate. Did not marvel. Did not look around as though he had stumbled into something forbidden.
That alone should have killed him.
I waited for the garden to correct the error.
It did not.
The wards bent. Not broke—bent. As though something older than intention had decided to allow this.
I watched him reach the cliff's edge and peer down into the cove. The drop had ended full-grown men before. The rock face was etched with dangers layered carefully over time—stone meant to crumble, grasses meant to cut and poison, ledges designed to betray weight.
I willed it to act.
Nothing answered.
He began to climb down.
My irritation sharpened into disbelief as the cliff held for him. His movements were careful, practiced. He tested each grip as though he had learned long ago what it meant to fall wrong. When he dropped the last distance and landed in the grass, I expected screaming.
Instead, the grass softened.
It sighed beneath him.
That sound stopped me cold.
The garden had never done that. It existed to punish intrusion, not cradle it. Yet the blades curled beneath his legs, cushioning the impact, surrounding him as though he belonged. The scent of green rose thick and warm, and the child folded into it with a broken sound pulled from somewhere deep in his chest.
Only then did I see how badly he was hurt.
He moved like pain was familiar, like it lived in his body and no longer startled him. When he tugged the cloth from his torso, I froze in place.
Bruises layered his skin in overlapping colors, some fresh, some fading. Cuts crossed his chest and arms without care or pattern. Scars interrupted scars. One dark mark along his ribs drew my attention immediately—the way he guarded it, the way his breath hitched around it.
Broken.
He did not cry.
That unsettled me more than the wounds themselves.
He spoke to himself quietly, counting steps, naming dangers, reminding his body how to keep going. When he stumbled over a word and then smiled—small, shaky, proud of remembering—it pulled my focus tighter.
His voice sounded... worn.
As he stared at his injuries, his expression changed. His eyes unfocused, jaw tightening. A low sound crept out of his throat—not loud, but raw. The air around him thickened with something sharp and bitter. I could feel it even without touching him.
Hatred.
Not directed. Not controlled. It radiated off him unevenly, like heat from a cracked stone. My wards reacted before I did, humming faintly, drawn toward that emotion in a way I did not expect.
Then he smiled.
It was not a child's smile.
It was sharp, feral, all teeth and tension—the expression of something cornered imagining how to bite back. The sight caught me off guard, and an absurd thought crossed my mind before I could stop it.
...Cute.
The realization stunned me more than the thought itself.
Since when did I think anything about humans was cute?
The moment shattered almost immediately. His expression collapsed. He stiffened, breath hitching, and whatever darkness had risen in him broke apart. He whispered frantic denials to the air, hugging himself as though afraid of what he might become.
Something hot and unfamiliar flared in my chest.
Anger.
Not at him.
At whatever had done this to him.
He moved again despite the pain, limping toward the lake. The water should have ended him the moment he touched it. Instead, it numbed him, easing the sharpest edges of his hurt without healing the damage beneath.
Another surprise.
He cleaned himself with meticulous care, hating the blood on his skin more than the wounds themselves. When he laid his clothes out to dry and then lowered himself into the grass beside them, it was with the careful precision of someone used to sleeping hurt.
The garden quieted around him.
The wards settled, uneasy but no longer resisting, as if they, too, had decided to wait. I watched his breathing slow, watched tension bleed from his small frame until sleep claimed him despite the pain. Daylight still lingered over the cove, thin and watchful, and the flowers remained closed, their petals dark and patient.
This was not the time to act.
Whatever had allowed him entry—whatever had made my magic bend instead of strike—would reveal itself more clearly when night fell. The garden would wake then. So would I.
I withdrew deeper into the shadows, letting the distance grow again, not abandoning the cove but leaving it to its silence. The child slept, unaware of how closely he was being watched, unaware of how many rules he had already broken without trying.
Intruder or not, accident or not, one thing was certain:
I would return when the sun was gone.
And then, in the dark, I would learn exactly what kind of child the forest and my magic had chosen to shelter instead of killing.