1 The Greatest Day of your Life (not)

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PROLOGUE BY HICCUP HORRENDOUS HADDOCK III THE LAST OF THE GREAT VIKING HEROES Now that I am an old, old man, the past seems very far away. But once there were dragons in the Archipelago. And once I was a boy, a boy who in the thirteenth year of my life made a terrible mistake. I released the Dragon Furious from the prison of Berserk. The dragon promised to fly into exile in the icy wastes of the north for one year only. One year's grace, and then he vowed that he would bring down a Dragon Rebellion whose only aim was the absolute and utter extinction of the entire human race. Over the next year the boy-that-once-was-me grew like a weed, at least three inches taller. My arms were sticking right out of my shirtsleeves, but the year came and went, with no sign of the Dragon Furious, or of his Rebellion. I heaved a sigh of relief, and began to hope that

perhaps the terrible hurts of a hundred years of imprisonment had been soothed by the chill of those innocent snows, and diving free and joyous through the pin-sharp cold waters, chasing the fleeting seals in that endless chilly wilderness, the dragon had returned to the happy carefree life of his ancestors. Perhaps he had remembered himself up there in his element, and what if he had forgotten his promise, and maybe he might not return after all? Perhaps. What if? Maybe. But in the quiet watches of the night, the words of the Dragon Furious came hissing and burning back into my brain, and they were not words that melted like water into snow-drops. They were words of flame, and they hissed and leapt into burning, terrible life in my dreams. 'We shall scourge this world with fire, and leave no wretched human being alive, not a single one. For over the last hundred years I have been looking into the past and into the future, and I tell you this, Boy… humans and dragons cannot live together…'

The words spat through my brain like living, burning snakes: '…and so I will call the dragons from far and wide, from the depths of the ocean and the ends of the earth, and we shall fight the final battle before it is too late.' 'NO!' I shrieked in my dream. 'NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!' But time cannot tick backwards. The boy-that- once-was-me could not stop it. And the Dragon was coming.

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1. THE GREATEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE (NOT) One long-ago winter's midnight, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third awoke with a frightened start. Despite being the Hope and Heir to the Tribe of the Hairy Hooligans, Hiccup was a gangly, skinny, ordinary-looking boy, with the kind of face that was easy to overlook in a crowd. To tell the truth, he had not been sleeping very well. It is difficult to sleep well if one's bed is a hammock suspended three quarters of the way up the Hard Way of Angry Mountain. The Hard Way of Angry Mountain is a cliff so high that it takes two days and a night to climb it. It is so vertical that a climber has to hammer in a couple of nails and spend that night sleeping uneasily in a hammock hung precariously from the shiny rock. Hiccup's riding-dragon, the Windwalker, sleeping on a little shelf of rock a couple of feet away, was supposed to be looking out for danger. However it was still winter, the Windwalker's