20 Epilogue by Hiccup

EPILOGUE BY HICCUP A few months afterwards, I had a dream. It was a dream about shipwrecks, perhaps because I had been doing a lot of that lately. The ship was called the Endless Journey, and just before it disappeared beneath the waves, the ferocious looking captain, who had a strange smile on his face, threw a sword up, up, into the air. It spun end to end over the waves, through the atmosphere and into space and stars and neverending time, where, to my surprise, my own left hand sprang out of its own accord and caught it. As soon as I awoke, I got up and brought out that uninspiring sword that Toothless had picked for me in the cavern of the Treasure, the one with which I had fought Alvin the Treacherous. I turned it over and over, and inspected the dull little object for quite half an hour. And eventually I found that by twisting and twisting it, the knob at the end fell off and there was a small piece of paper rolled up in a little hollowed-out compartment inside. A small fragment of paper on which was written the following words:

The Last Will and Testament ~of- Grimbeard the Chastly I leave to my True Heir, this my favourite sword. Because the Stormblade always lunged a little to the left. And the Best is not always the most Obvious. Yours, In the hope that you will make a better Leader than I was, G. G.

Now I am an old, old man, the same age as Grimbeard the Ghastly when he got his dragons to swim down to the cavern with the treasure. Toothless and Fishlegs and I have kept the secret of what really happened on that terrible day all those years ago... But because I am writing my memoirs I find I have to write it down, as it is such an important part of my journey to becoming a Hero. Even though I know I will never be able to show it to anyone of my own time. As soon as I have finished writing these papers, I shall lock them in a box. I shall throw that box into the sea. And I shall throw it hoping, like Grimbeard the Ghastly, that some day it may be found by someone who will be a better Leader than I have been. Someone living way, way, in the future, in times more civilised than those in which I have lived, where men can own beautiful and dangerous things and use them wisely.

Surely that would be the last Hiccup would see of that wicked villain, Alvin the Treacherous? His grim hook sank to the bottom of the ocean with the wreck of the Lucky Thirteen. He himself was last seen struggling in the throat of a monstrous Strangulator in an inaccessible cavern deep, deep underground. Nobody could get out of that situation alive. Or could they??? Look out for the next volume of Hiccup's memoirs, How to Speak Dragonese