City of Marrow
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Author's Notes: Feral airbenders are explained in one of my other stories, "Secrets of the Wind". If you're not familiar with the concept, you should probably read that one first.
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There was a city.
It's original name was lost long ago, when it disappeared into fairytale and legend. The Air Nomads called it Marrow, the City of Hunger. For it had been cursed, and it fed and fed and fed on itself, until it was nothing but wind and the semblance of a city.
It blew with the winds, and when the winds were trapped against cliffs or in valleys, sometimes the city would appear. Hungry, always hungry, and those who went into Marrow rarely came out again.
Legends said that an airbender who passed through, who came out of Marrow again, would possess the winds of wasting, winds which could be used in the Spirit World.
Fairy tales cautioned that Marrow killed far more than people won through. Many seventh sons and golden-ball daughters, the heroes of fairy tales, passed into Marrow. Few, very few, came out again.
Then the Fire Nation came, and the legends and fairy tales of the Air Nomads disappeared forever.
Marrow, the City of Hunger, did not.
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There was not a city here yesterday, Nima thinks. She has lived in these hills all her life, and there has never, ever been a city here. Even her mother's town is more than an hour's walk away, and her mother's shop farther still.
The city is golden and bright, though the brightness jangles and much of it seems to be in ruins. But there is a market she can see with people trading in it, and she can use a good drink before she hikes back to town.
She just wishes the wind would stop howling. But, oh, how it howls like a tempest, and the leaves of the trees are so still, and the banners of the city hang limp.
This isn't right, she thinks. But she is thirsty, and while she hears the winds, she doesn't feel them.
She scrounges in her pouch for a few coppers and enters the city to find a tavern.
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The trees are wrong, Nima thinks, but they are trees and they are not Marrow, so she weeps with joy. They are trees with long heavy needles instead of leaves, but they are trees.
She wanders through the woods and knows they are not the woods she entered so long ago. But they are woods, and this is real, and if it weren't for the winds howling inside her head, she would be so overjoyed she might die.
Her hair is long and tangled, but her work in Marrow wore her nails to slivers. Her dark skin is chapped from the winds, the ever-roaring winds, but she knows it will fade now that she is out of them.
She tilts her head back and begins to sing, a traveling song of wild spirits and dancing, for she may not know where she is now but she will find out soon enough.
It's not until hours later, when the two Fire Nation soldiers ambush her that she realizes how bad her life really has become.
She is singing a different song now, a sea chantey her father taught her when she was old enough to cry over him going to sea. And when they step out to grab her, she cannot stop singing, not until the end.
They ask her questions. She understands the questions, and she is thankful she has grey eyes, because grey eyes would not betray her like her mother's green or her father's blue. They ask her where she's from, what she's doing out here in the woods looking so wild.
She wants to answer them. She comes up with pretty lies, but somewhere between her head and her lips, the winds inside her steal them.
She cannot speak at all, and she weeps and she sings, and they have no idea what to do with her but to bring her to the nearest colony town.
Jee, the one who is kindest to her, finds her something she can do and a place she can stay, and she finds herself new clothes and a hairbrush. It frustrates her so much, this pointing and gesturing to communicate, and she cries often.
But she has gold from Marrow, and Jee is warm, and if the winds in her head steal her spoken words, they don't steal her songs. So she sings, and the colonists smile and give her money because she can sing like nothing else.
She sings so beautifully, they say the spirits sing with her, but she knows it's only her twisting of the air that gives her additional voices.
-End-