So I heard the J.N. Howard suite for The Last Airbender and a scene involving these four people I once created popped into my head. It was so vivid that I thought to write it out. If you read and then listen to the piece, you'll get the full effect, though I think it stands alone well enough.
After the Youtube url paste in: watch?v=zjSctXi-0sg&annotation_id=annotation_695237&feature=iv
Or just search for "last airbender soundtrack james newton howard."
I couldn't find a way to shoehorn in any canon characters, so they're all OC's. As a result, there won't be any sort of readership for this, save for you, so thank you. Review if you feel so inclined.
EDIT: Changed title and upped the cliffhanger quality. My first chapters are always so closed at the end because I'm used to short stories. I'm getting better though.
I. Naraka
The empty horizon shivered with heat just outside of the static village. Nothing else moved until four dots - three faded green led by a deep blue - emerged in the distant panorama and grew as they approached the deadwood buildings hung with hushed pentatonic wind chimes. Soon the dots had grown into people, slouched as they slowly marched under the beating of the summer sun. They halted just outside the tiny settlement.
Qilaq, a young man with skin like lacquered leather and the threadbare, cerulean robes of a Waterbender from the Northern Tribe, led the other three: two young women and an adolescent boy. "Anana, can I borrow your helmet?" the swarthy northerner asked of his tawny female compatriot.
She looked over after she finished adjusting the loose braid that kept her long black locks mostly untangled. "Why're you asking me?" she smiled, glancing over at her similarly armored female comrade.
"Right," Qilaq said with a slow blink. He turned to his other, pale but slightly sun kissed, female compatriot. "Nuan, can I wear Anana's helmet?"
The young woman, about as old as Qilaq, with straight black hair down to her shoulders, adjusted two saucer like crowns stacked one atop the other. "Why?" she asked as though she really didn't want to give up her double-hat status. "Your skin doesn't burn."
Qilaq sighed and threw his head back. "It may not show, but my face is sizzling on my skull like an egg on a skillet. Please. Helmet." He reached out his hand without looking and lo, a blessed green helmet of solar protection was placed in it. "Thank you!" Instant shade was marvelous, even if it was only for his face.
"Baby," Nuan teased before surveying the peaceful settlement before them. She was done the moment she opened her eyes.
There was a flattened dust road and two rows of seven or so buildings facing each other on either side. The construction was of fissuring planks of knotted oak and cedar that had bled all their color long ago to leave behind a creaking gray mass. Some of the nearly dilapidated houses had plank awnings and porches with tilted chairs sitting on them. Ghostly silhouettes peeked and slide by the shaded windows of almost every house, but no other signs of life were present.
"Think we should even ask for anything?" she wondered aloud.
The other adolescent in the group, a former farm boy with a robust tan and pronounced features, looked down at his worn green fabric and steel-woven tunic and seemed to regard his gold trimmed shoulder plates as if seeking a higher justification from them. "Well, we are Earth Kingdom soldiers. I mean, it's kinda their duty to help us out."
The tiny traveling militia stepped lightly down the road, watching as shadows dodged their inquisitive glances at every obscured window.
Anana shook her head. "It doesn't look like they have the means to help themselves, much less us. Think the Fire Nation's been through here?" The question seemed to be directed at Qilaq, so he answered, sort of.
"Better question would be where the fire flingers haven't been, though I can't see them getting much out of here. Not anymore, anyway." A door opened and everyone that looked like a proper soldier jumped like a frightened puppy. Qilaq just turned to the man coming out of his home. "Excuse me, sir," he ventured, trying to be as non-threatening as possible. His cordiality was immediately quashed by the stern man who looked as though all water had dried from his russet skin weeks ago.
"We don't got nothin' for ya. No food. No nothin'."
Qilaq was still slightly defensive from being spooked. "You seem to have plenty of 'nothin','" the sun-touched northerner remarked. He immediately regretted the attack, owing it to the heat and thirst and heat and his smarmy nature and the heat.
"Heh. Ya can just take that attitude 'a yours an' walk."
"It doesn't mean anything that we're soldiers?" Lim asked with all his sincere naivety laid to bear.
The bearded man's throat rattled with something resembling laughter. "Oh, no, it means somethin'. Soldiers been through here: Kingdom and Red. And they sucked us dry. Worse than the drought." His accusing eyes seemed to identify what it was that was worse than the drought.
"We're here to help, though."
"You standin' there ain't helpin' nobody." This time, Qilaq restrained himself from making another smart remark about the double negative. "Just get gone," said the scraggly villager, throwing his finger out toward the empty plains that stretched to the distant horizon. They all glanced down the road, save for the stone faced Qilaq who was more than a little irked by the treatment he was getting. They noticed a small stone well jutting out of the middle of the road, as if to mark the border between civilization and miles of unforgiving expanse.
Anana decided to lend her tender tone to the situation. "Sir, could we at least dip into your town well? Just to fill our canteens and waterskins."
"Sure." The man rattled again. "Dip in and take whatev'r ya kin get." With that, the dried up figure slid like a paper cut out back into his derelict home.
"Don't you just love that rustic charm, Nuan?" smirked Qilaq.
"Oh, just ever so," his bubbly friend concurred, digging deep to uproot her most delightfully spiteful earthen charm.
The four of them stepped over to the well and leaned their heads over the mouth of the dark cavity. It was just big enough for all of them to get a look at once if their crowns all touched. A wall of stagnant air, as dry as sun bleached sand, hovered just below their noses. The two Earthbenders couldn't see anything past the impenetrable darkness that started a few feet down, where even light was too afraid to continue on. The Waterbenders, however, could sense the sere soiled bottom or, rather, the complete absence of moisture.
Anana's heart fell, though Qilaq's started to thump with frustration. He trained one of his darker glares on the door of the man who had dismissed them and the village by proxy, but something poked its head out that relaxed his furrowed countenance.
A girl nuzzled through the door. She could barely reach up past Qilaq's waist. Her tiny lips and hands looked so dry and withered that they didn't even look a part of her anymore, just useless ornaments. More people started coming out, as dry and lifeless as the bottom of their well. A daughter tugged on her mother's fraying shirt and asked in a whisper, "Is the water man here to bring the water back?"
Desperate men and woman and their children all locked their hopeless, sunken eyes on the four soldiers. They all turned from the desperate gazes. They were helpless. All but Qilaq.
Qilaq was never helpless. So long as life surrounded him, he had something to use, something to bend.
He placed his dark, parched hand on the arid clay dust beneath him and let the fingers of his essence branch out like cracks across a sheet of ice. The tips of his Qi, the tendrils of his soul, passed through the hash corporeal: earth and stone and clay and glass. After an eternal instant of stretching his senses beyond his physics, something beneath him, and within him, churned and he opened his cobalt eyes, an artful look drawing over his rough features.
He stood to looks of concern and confusion from his comrades. The swarthy Waterbender then dropped to the ground, right knee bent and left leg outstretched with his toe pointed toward the empty blue sky. His hands stroked the dust, the fluid motions drawing and whipping away flowing and impermanent designs.
As if struck by realization, Anana and Nuan locked eyes, while Lim scratched his short black shock of hair. The aware female soldiers hung their heads over the well and deep in the darkness there was stillness and then…
Water began to flow. The parched soil cracked and let miniscule rivulets snake out. As the streams flowed up the arid stone walls of the cavern, the soil cracked more then bulged and became damp.
An instant after breaking the ground, a cool breeze, as though from a thousand beating butterfly wings, rushed up through the tunnel and stretched itself out, filling the stagnant air with fragrance like baby-soft lightning. Anana greedily inhaled the scent and looked to Nuan, who felt something, but couldn't quite identify it.
"Don't you smell it?" Anana asked, breathless. "It's water."
The whole of the village seemed to hear those two soft words as though they were the singular knells of the very Rapture, but they couldn't believe them. They remained frozen with anticipation for cool confirmation of the promise of those two dulcet tones.
"Anana," Qilaq said as he slowly rose. "Let's make waves." Anana giddily obliged and joined her fellow Waterbender, matching his precise and gradual form exactly.
The two raised their arms and let them fall. There was a splash.
Rise, fall, splash.
Rise, fall, splash, spray.
The two benders exhaled and slowly lifted their arms. A swirling crescendo roared. Every breath held. And then…
A wave broke on the high well wall like the sea against a cliff face. Droplets soared holding full-circle rainbows within them before splashing back down into the churning cauldron of crisp liquid from the untapped veins of Mother Earth.
The world slowed with joy and all the villagers ran to gather up their jugs and buckets. A boy still innocent to the touch of the world toddled into his kitchen to retrieve the dry water jug. As he waddled out, his bedridden father lifted his head and asked where the little boy was headed. "What's all the commotion?" he asked.
The boy rewrapped his tiny hands around the jug and answered: "The water people are making water in the well. I'm going to get you some water daddy."
With that, the boy continued out the door, leaving his single parent to lay back and wonder: "Making water?"
The whole village crowded around the well, smiling and cheering, the water still sloshing back and forth at the rim of the well, spilling over with all the hands and ladles and buckets dipping into it. The four soldiers smiled, until voices began to raise. People began to shove their neighbors. Fists started flying. Some used the lengths of chained rope segments tied to their well buckets to whip or choke the nearest aggressor. The mob began to grapple with itself to reach into the well.
Nuan and Anana were immediately trying to break people up and calm them down. Lim and Qilaq followed, getting more physical and even throwing some of the rowdier rioters. One of the women brained Anana with a terracotta jug and she fell away from the mob. Lim was at her side in a blink, offering concerned comfort, but the bronze Waterbender didn't want any.
She was disgusted, almost crestfallen. It was almost worse than the vapid waterless shells they were not a minute ago.
Anana had had enough. She stood and twisted in a taught stance, wound herself up, and then threw out her arms, summoning the well water to explode and throw the fighting citizens apart. Everyone fell to the ground stunned - save for Qilaq and the stalwart Nuan - and the hundreds of gallons of frothing white-water rushed into a single scintillating blob above the well like a living mass of godly glass.
Every eye went wide with fright and awe and gazed at ferocious power of Anana, the Waterbender of the Earth Kingdom. Qilaq was quick to react after the initial shock and began to pull tiny streams from the central mass. The streams went and found their way into the mouths of the town's people's containers. Some raised their vessels, while others still stared in awe at the sight and the might woman who commanded the tremendous power of the moon and the sea.
With the violence quenched by wonderment, Anana and Qilaq succeeded in distributing the water plumbed from the depths beneath the parched well. Thanks and grateful smiles were lavished on the outsiders, though the four of them got the sense that behind every gratified pair of eyes hid unease. The soldiers made the villagers anxious and that was nothing new.
Qilaq was used to it. His dark visage and foreign blue garb was about as off-putting as his sardonic slips, though it wasn't nearly as odd as seeing Anana: a member of the Water Tribe dressed like a Kingdom soldier. All four of them felt the repellant tidal forces exerted by the people. Nuan quipped that it felt almost tectonic in its passivity, like being squeezed a hairs breadth more every day between two boulders. They did their best to ignore it.
As noon faded into evening and the fringes of the sky began to blush, the four of them chatted, encircling the well, each soldier with his or her back against the curve of the rough earthen wall, legs outstretched and helmets off.
While Qilaq stabbed tiny pits into the hard terra-firma with his calloused finger tips, Nuan busied herself with rubbing the caked-on grim of soil and dead skin from her forearm. "You know," she said, "I was inches away from stripping down and jumping in that water, before all the rioting and floating lake action."
"I would have liked to see that," quipped Qilaq with an erect eyebrow.
"I bet you would have, iceman."
"Actually," Qilaq segued, "I was inches away from melting the ice plug and sinking all that groundwater back into the aquifer." Anana was leaning against the opposite wall, facing the empty plains and hunchbacked horizon stretching westward away from the tiny village. Were it not for the chasm between them, the two Waterbenders would be back to back. He rested his head on the rim of the recently tapped watering hole. "But your way worked, too. Dramatic, but effective."
Anana pulled one of her knees up toward her chest and afforded herself a self-satisfied grin. "Sometimes drama works."
"What's an aquifer?" Lim asked of his swarthy friend from the frozen north. "Is that like a furry leopard seal?"
Qilaq smiled. "Yes, it resides deep in the hollows of the driest plains and survives by eating runoff and general unawareness." The sarcasm of the cerulean robed man was well received by his giggling female comrades. Lim just narrowed his gaze. "You don't know much about water, do you?"
"Don't need to," Lim snorted. "I ain't a Waterbender. I know dirt and rock and plants, though. Anyway, I know water wells. They dry up and that's it. You're saying there was still water down there?"
"You saw that there was. Not much more than a puddle left, now that the town's finished hording."
"Stocking up." Nuan corrected.
Qilaq barked a single resounding laugh. "You can still feel them watching us. They don't even want us touching the dregs." He swung an illustrative thumb over his shoulder into the damp, cavernous chamber between the four of them.
Nuan didn't look up when she said: "Well, who's to stop us taking a drink?"
Lim turned and looked at the lithe young woman wide-eyed, but then concluded that she must have been joking or had emphasized wrong. They wouldn't just 'take' without asking.
Qilaq cracked a smile. He knew Nuan better than that.
Anana cleared her throat deliberately. "We could stay here for a while. Maybe help them dig another well."
"There isn't any more water around here," Qilaq chuckled, amused by the hopelessness of the entire scenario. "And this drought is going to continue. I can feel that much. No, they need to take what they can and head for greener fields."
"Wetter fields," Lim corrected.
"That's the implication with the whole 'greener' thing. Anyway, we've got a war to fight. We've gotta get to General Fong's fortress before summer's end."
Anana tilted her head back against the well's rim, just like Qilaq, and contemplated the low hanging country sky. "You know, I've heard Fong is…" She hesitated to tersely encapsulate the rumors about their future commanding officer. Lim felt no such reluctance.
"A few lines short of a field?" quipped the former farm boy, leaning his head back, too.
"What's with the farming analogies?" Nuan asked, joining her friends in the laid-back club.
Lim just shrugged. "They're easy."
Nuan resisted the urge to say: "You're easy." Instead, she said, "I've heard Fong's as smart as two hammers knockin' heads."
"Now that's crazy," Lim concurred.
"I've heard both of those things," Qilaq said, "but stupid-crazy can be good, especially in a fight. We can all attest to that. Well… the crazy part anyway."
"No, we've done some 'stupid-crazy' before," Nuan laughed. "Remember burying ourselves and waiting for that platoon to march over us so we could spring out and 'surprise' them?"
"Surprise is a very powerful element in combat."
"Yeah, so is fire," Anana added darkly.
"We were surrounded before the fight even started!" Lim exclaimed with an emphatic wave of his hardened boyish hands.
"Hey," Qilaq yelped in defense of his scheme. "It worked during The Siege."
The undisturbed silt of Nuan's memories kicked up and mired her normally pristine stream of consciousness. She leaned her head forward and hugged her knees to her chest. "Always gotta bring up Ba Sing Se."
"Sorry, Nuan," Qilaq said, regretting what strain his thought-out, yet thoughtless words often caused the people around him. He gathered a sunnier demeanor and looked to Lim, slapping him on the shoulder pad. "Anyway, here we are: stupid, crazy, and still alive."
"Hey! Why'd ya look at me when ya said 'stupid'?"
"I said crazy and alive, too."
"And that's supposed to make me feel better?"
"What, you aren't alive?"
"Well, yeah, but…"
Anana lowered her sapphire gaze from the cloudless sky to the far horizon and the tawny color in her cheeks emptied. "Guys. About that 'war to fight.'"
The other three soldiers recognized the signature dread resounding in her tone like a thousand distant drums pounding in unison. A couple villagers stepped out of their homes to take part in the foreboding observation. There, above the blinding curve of the horizon rose a putrid column of bulging, jet smoke. They all knew what was coming.
It was Lim who finally voiced everyone's feelings with succinct and practiced precision. "Damn."