C-C-C-C-C-CRASHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
A great crack of lightning skewered through the black sky above.
A tremendous rumble of something, it could have been thunder, it could have been the Volcano ...
"GUYS!!" shouted down Humungous, swooping down on a cringing Alvin, and performing the Grimbeard's Grapple, the Piercing Point, the Half-turn Demi-Plunge, and the Deadly Double-Act, four entirely different and immensely difficult sword-plays in quick succession.
[Image: Toothless and fire stone.]
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN THERE? YOU REALLY, REALLY
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NEED TO GET A MOVE ON!"
Toothless unwrapped the Fire-Stone from the waistcoat and took a good hold of it.
He looked over his shoulder.
Hiccup, Fishlegs, and Camicazi were running down the mountainside toward him through the driving rain, Hiccup still calling out: "BO! TOOTHLESS! I'LL DO IT! IT'LL BE~"
Toothless gave a defiant little snort and a toss of his head.
"Toothless d-d-do it on his OWN," he said, and lifted the Fire-Stone up in his claws.
But the smooth, golden surface of the Fire-Stone had become slick and slimy in the driving rain. And Toothless's sharp, pointy little claws didn't have the grip on it that they might have done when it was dry.
"~ SLIPPERY," groaned Hiccup.
[Image: Toothless and fire stone.]
Hiccup, Camicazi, and Fishlegs reached the
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waistcoat just in time to get an excellent view of the Fire-Stone sliding from Toothless's clutching talons and beginning to roll down the mountainside that they had so painfully, so slowly, so bravely come up.
"Whoops!" squeaked Toothless guiltily. "S-s-sorry?... what a butter-claws I am... Don't worry... don't panic... m - m-me get it..."
And he made another dive for it, getting in the way of Camicazi, who was just trying to tackle it from the other direction.
"Got it!" cried Camicazi, in a split second of triumph, before Toothless crashed into her face, and knocked the muddy golden Stone out of her fingers.
"Whose side are you on, Toothless?" howled Hiccup, as he passed Camicazi and Toothless sprawled in the mud, and pelted after the rolling Stone, now gathering speed and bouncing merrily down the steep slope through the soaking, drenching, drowning rain, lightning crashing all around it.
On and on it rolled, and with every foot that it bounced, the success of their Quest was rolling further and further away from them.
Up in the air, despite being mounted on a far superior dragon, Alvin the Treacherous was being
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[Image: Toothless and fire stone.]
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THOROUGHLY beaten in the sword-fight by Humungously Hotshot the Hero.
Humungous had already thrust his spear into one of the Exterminator's hearts, and although the Creature could still fly because it still had the other heart to keep it going, some of the fight had gone out of it. Can you blame it?
Alvin was preparing to desert, for if ever a person knew how to run away when things looked bleak, it was Alvin the Treacherous.
But Alvin looked down, and he saw the golden globe rolling down the mountain, with the three little figures and their dragon scrambling, sliding, and falling after it.
Alvin saw a chance to snatch Victory from the jaws of Defeat.
To Humungous's surprise Alvin stopped the Exterminator mid-charge (this was most certainly NOT considered good Barbarian Behavior, running out on a fight) and wheeled his dragon around, and swooped after the rolling, fleeing figures and the Stone.
The ground was flattening out a bit, and
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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.
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But there was still nearly a quarter of the mountain to run down.
"That's it, I can't bear to look," said Fishlegs, shutting his eyes.
"I'm going to stand , up on your back, Windwalker," whispered Hiccup.
And shakily, Hiccup got to his feet, upright on the back of the Windwalker.
"OK," said Hiccup, looking over his shoulder, "get ready for the impact..."
The lava stream came up underneath the Windwalker, and he breasted it like he was breasting a wave, his wings spread wide to keep him above the lava.
"Oh, for Thor's sake," gasped Camicazi, "you can look, Fishlegs, look, I've never seen anything like it, that's just INCREDIBLE..."
"BY THE BEARD AND ARMPIT HAIR OF THE GREAT GOD WODEN!" cried Stoick the Vast in astonishment.
"I don't believe it..." groaned Snotlout. "How is he doing that?"
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, knees bent, arms spread wide, was SURFING the lava streams.
DOWN he surfed the red-hot lava, with the
How to Twist a Dragon's Tale (Hiccup) Page 10