Epilogue by the Author, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the Last of the great Viking Heroes

The story doesn't end there, of course.

The nineteen boys who entered Initiation with me those many years ago were all allowed into the Hooligan and Meathead Tribes as a result of their Heroic Actions in defeating two Seadragonus Giganticus Maximus in one day. The Battle at Death's Head Headland has passed into Viking legend and will be sung about by the bards while there are still bards to sing.

Of course, there are very few bards left nowadays. What is more, nobody has seen a Seadragonus Giganticus Maximus since, and people are already starting to disbelieve that such a creature could have lived.

Learned articles have been written, suggesting that something that large simply could not have sustained its own weight. The dragons that would be my evidence have crawled back into the sea where men cannot follow and, what with Heroism being so unfashionable nowadays, nobody is going to believe the mere word of a Hero like myself.

But the thing about dragons -- and I am a person who knows about dragons -- is that it could very well be that they are merely sleeping down there in the black, black depths. There could be numberless numbers of them, all frozen in a Sleep Coma, with the unknowing fishes swimming in and out of their tentacles and hiding in their talons and laying eggs in their ears.

There may yet come a time when Heroes are needed once more.

There may yet come a time when the dragons will come back.

When that time comes, men will need to know something about how to train them and how to fight them, and I hope that this book will be more helpful to the Heroes of the ?uture than a certain book of the same name was to M? all those many years ago.

It is easy to forget that there were such things as these Monsters.

I forget myself sometimes, but then I look up, as I am looking up now, and I see in my mind's eye a shield, strangely changed by a rich encrusting of jewel-like barnacles and cold-water coral, with an eight-foot tooth sticking right out of the middle of it. I reach out and the edge of that tooth is still so bitingly sharp after all these years that just a gentle brush with the fingers might send a rain of blood down on these pages.

And I bend my head, not too close, and I am sure I can just hear very, very faintly:

Once I set the sea alight with a single fiery breath---Once I was so mighty that I thought my name was Death---Sing out loud until fou re eaten, song of melancholy bliss, ?or the mighty and the middling all shall come to THIS....

The Supper is still singing.