Once again, we are grateful to the Waterford University Archives for allowing us to quote from an undated draft of The Wing and the Ax, in which Queen Marshal Astrid Haddock I Wrote:One of the great advantages of dragon-mounted warfare is the freedom of movement it grants.  Control of the air grants incredible supremacy over those below; a simple rock dropped from above becomes a deadly weapon, and the armory available to a dragon-rider is vaster than mere sticks and stones.  But the weapons alone are only part of that supremacy.  Ground-level enemy forces cannot stand in your way unless you choose to fight them.  Enemy leaders become targets or traps, huddled under half of their army for fear of being plucked like ripe fruit. 
For all of the peaceful uses of dragons and their abilities, in war, they make it so that the only thing that can fight or defend against a dragon-armed force on anything resembling equal footing is another dragon-armed force.  And while exceptions abounded in those early years—at the First Battle of the Seine River, for example, or the New Year Fire-Rout—part of that was due to a lack of understanding in how to properly use dragons on the battlefield.  But it swiftly became apparent to everyone in those early days that there were two options: Either one has dragons, or one is beholden to one who has dragons. 
There was, and is, really no middle ground.

To Label The Stars: The Cultural Impact Of Names, Kyoto University Press, Ltd. Wrote:One of the great paradoxes that comes from the study of history is that historians are forced to simultaneously speak in both concrete and abstract terms.  We say 'the society decided to change' at the same time as we speak of the leaders making specific decisions.  But the society did not decide to change.  The Hooligans of Berk, for example, did not, as some abstract whole, decide to adopt dragons and grow to become the core of a new sovereign nation over the next five years.  Nor did then-Chief Stoick's decision to allow for the adoption of dragons force this decision.  No.  Individuals within that society decided to change, in how they acted or how they viewed the world, while others did not.  And yet we are forced to speak in the aggregate, the cumulative, taking the broad trend of the social unit and applying it to all members inside.  We can recognize the individual dissenters when their dissent from the mean is sufficient to stand out, and yet this very recognition paints a degree of uniformity on the rest that is both unrealistic and unearned. 
Furthermore, referring to the aggregate of the society in the abstract creates a false impression of their numbers, simply due to the common fallacies of equivocation and false equivalence (i.e. we call them the same thing, ergo we see them as being roughly the same).  We project ourselves and our own modern expectations and experiences with current political entities onto the past, despite those historical units being vastly smaller, simpler, and less developed).  We speak of the Byzantine Empire and the North Sea Empire as two simple units.  Due to the difficulties that many have with comprehending large numbers and larger scales, the typical comprehension of the concept of "Empire" lends itself to a false equivalence, that one Empire is much like another Empire in size, population, economy, culture and so forth, but that mental abstraction again does a disservice in scale.  To illustrate, consider that, in AD 1040, there were more people occupying Constantinople and the Thracian farmland immediately outside the city's famous walls than there were in all of the island of Eire in that same year.  Meanwhile, Sweden, Norway and Denmark together had less than a million people combined, while the city of Baghdad alone had over a million people sheltering behind its walls.  And again, in making such comparisons, we fall prey to the lure of the abstract, of referencing the masses of otherwise anonymous people as conglomerate wholes. 
But at the same time, such abstraction is necessary; we do not have the data to be able to conclusively say that, out of the approximately 300,000 Albans who lived under King Mac Bethad's rule, 68,821 agreed with his stated desire for continued independence from Berk's influence, while another 121,749 would have been happier if he had made overtures of integration prior to his fatal duel with Astrid clan Haddock.  Such precision is not available to us and we are thus forced to speak in the abstract and the aggregate, erasing the heterogeneous beliefs and attitudes of entire generations—save those individuals who had the foresight to record their thoughts, or the impact that inspired others to record them.

In the final fit of the Secondary Phase, in a quote I wanted to use last time, the late great Douglas Adams Wrote:And since this is of course an immensely frustrating and nervewracking moment for the narrative suddenly to switch tracks again, that is precisely what the narrative will now do.