The ice went on forever, fading from the white visible in the torchlight to meld with the dark horizon. There was no sun - it was winter, and twelve year old Sokka knew it would be months at least before sunshine beamed down on their village once again. He sighed as his stomach grumbled.
"Katara!" He shouted, turning to aim his voice back into the tent he and his sister shared. She poked her head out.
"What?"
"Do we have any meat?"
"Sokka, you ate all of your rations yesterday. You can't have mine, because they're mine. So, it's not that we don't have meat - it's just you."
Sokka grumbled, turning to look back over the ice.
"I'm going to go catch something to eat."
"OK, well, don't die." Katara said, kindly, and her head disappeared.
"Yeah, thanks." Sokka whispered back. He picked up a torch from the fire burning in the middle of the village and walked out across the ice, alone. It was times like these he wished his father hadn't left to fight the Fire Nation. Times like these he wished his mother hadn't been killed by the Fire Nation, thereby catalyzing his father's departure.
But most of all, it was times like these that he envied his sister. She didn't have a handle on what she could do yet, but he remembered Mom being alive more than she did - he had two years more in that category. He had seen Mom pull a whole bearseal out of the water, and slice it's head off with a razor thin whip of water. He could also remember when he broke his ankle slipping on the ice, and how she had healed it - the way the water chilled, numbed, and repaired while guided by her hands.
He reached the water. It was a black pool of nothing - just small ripples of water as the waves splashed against the shore of ice. He kneeled and held a hand out to the water, willing it to do something - anything - to prove that he was a bender, too. In reply a large tentacle exploded out of the water and wrapped around him, too tight to let him pull air into his lungs to scream for help. Then, it yanked him off the ice, and into the water.
Down, down, down he went. The frigid water soaked into him, chilling him to his bones and organs. He could not see anything. All he could do was hold his breath - there! In the distance, he saw a light. The tentacle became illuminated by it as he was pulled closer and closer, and then the massive beast of which the tentacle was a part of was revealed. It's eyes were darker than black, and it simply stared back at him as they neared closer and closer to the light.
Worry not. A voice whispered into his mind. By morning, you will return to the surface.
