Nightmare Fuel / A Thing of Vikings

• This fic doesn’t shy away from showing just how brutal this time period was. Slavery is the norm, massive amounts of ethnic/religious intolerance, and Rape, Pillage, and Burn is less a war crime and more standard operating procedure.
  • Snotlout has a moment where he's sitting on the mountainside and watching the rebel city his Roman dragon-riders attacked go up in flames and having flashbacks to his childhood. He knows what the noncombatants are going through down below, and it horrifies him, made worse by the fact that they specifically attacked the food supplies and the people going for water to put out the fires.
  • Then the rebels do the only thing they can do: Forage—or in other words, pillage the countryside's farms to make up the difference in food.
• While undeniably awesome, the Battle of the Sound of Berk shows just how terrifying being on the receiving end of a dragon-enhanced army is when you are part of an army confined to the ground (or sea). Ships go up in flames or explode, men are crushed by rocks or drown in the sea, and worse, all from the POV of the men in the ships.
• The Byzantines have a disturbing obsession with torture and dismemberment (to the point that Wikipedia has a whole article on it!), made all the worse by the fact that they consider it to be merciful compared to just killing someone.
• The Berserker Clan and Savage live up to their names in Chapter 95. When they inflict punishment, they treat their prisoners like an animal to hunt, and when they catch them, if they're not already dead, they torture the prisoner first before killing them using an extremely brutal execution method.
• The Screaming Death that was Fearless's nest-lord. It was already terrifying in the series, but here the creature tears through basically every dragon and human defence that might try to stand against it, forcing Toothless's sister Fearless to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to take it down by triggering a volcanic eruption that engulfs her and the Screaming Death (and takes out Mildew and Toothless's Whispering Death nemesis as collateral damage).
• Book 3 ends with various dragon nest-lords, including Furious- a Green Death and the brother to Fire-Hunger- making plans to try and enslave walkers in revenge for the humans' recent efforts to enslave dragons, with Valka trapped in the middle as she lacks the support to argue for peace on any level, only able to imagine Stoick and Hiccup being killed as the 'dragon-killers' try to fight back...
• In Chapter 127, the dragons put their plan to enslave humans into action. They attack a village in Greenland and the attack is told from the point of view of a farmer who watches in horror as the dragons not only take the village's live stock, but people as well before taking him.
• The end of chapter 138 Deus Vult, Sir Henry the Sinister leads a religious mob of Christian Zealots into the Jewish quarter of the city of Caen and whips the mob into a blood thirsty frenzy, all from the POV of a pregnant Jewish woman, one of Esther’s in-laws. The way Henry is described sounds like something from a nightmare. The scene ends with a Synagogue being set alight, with several Jews trapped inside. And at the end of the chapter, Sir Henry takes her hostage.

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