Toph had always been a cheater.
She cheated at moving shells, she cheated at dice. She cheated at hide-and-seek and Sokka out of his last piece of seal-jerky.
But also more than that.
She cheated Despair out of the crushing pain felt when one realizes blindness. She cheated Helplessness out of its due toll. She cheated Captivity, Weakness, and Dependence, and she didn't look back. She had slipped cleverly away from their grasping claws and skipped away, blowing a metaphorical raspberry at their normally bone-crushing power.
Today, she intended to cheat Death.
They had slipped over the side of the war-balloon, Sokka catching her hand just in time to keep her from falling. She fell, then, their fingertips brushing briefly as she slipped from his grasp. She had heard him call her name, but the last digraph was snatched away by the wind rushing past her ears as she fell through the thin, hot air.
Panic clawed at her, slavering over the tender morsel his colleagues had been unable to capture, desperate for a bite before Death clamped down and closed the forum forever; but she cheated him too, intent to slip away from both Panic and Death.
She thought quickly but not franticly as her loosened hair whipped her shoulders. She realized, however, that she was screaming and had been since the beginning of the drop. Quickly, she shut her mouth; if she was going to die, she wasn't going to die like a twelve-year-old girl.
Almost as soon as she stopped screeching, the earth sang faintly back to her. Toph, in her surprise, flipped over several times before sticking her face into the wind again, desperate to hear the earth before it killed her. She shouted, and the earth hummed back, much closer now. Toph grinned, pleased with her new ability to echolocate in the air. True, the science was imprecise, but she could tell how close she was to the earth.
That would be enough to save her.
When she was close enough, she would bend the earth up to catch her and carry her deep into the earth, slowing her momentum to a crawl and then to a stop. No problem. She had done it plenty of times...well... from twenty feet or so. Well, what's a thousand? same idea.
She continued to yell periodically, gauging her distance as she spread her arms and legs, pretending to be a wolf-bat. Panic still clawed at her stomach, lending a high harmonic to her cries, but she wasn't going to let him know he was getting to her. She intended to escape both him and his cousin, Death, with style.
When she was about a hundred feet from the ground and knew exactly when to start bending, she threw a couple of flips to show the world she wasn't scared and blind and small; but she nearly made herself throw up, so she curled into a cannonball position and began to call up the earth...
CRACK
Something hard and unbendable smashed into her spine with unimaginable force, breaking it instantly. The wave of stone froze in midair before dropping limply to the ground. Broken, Toph hung from the branch of a large oak, her head and legs at an impossible angle; for the muscles over her stomach, stretched tight over the weight of her arms and legs, were the only things keeping her two halves together. She struggled briefly, not knowing what to think as her entire life rushed over her like the wave that should have caught her. The air had been smashed from her lungs, and before she could draw more, she was dead
Above her, a sobbing voice called her name again and again. It was hundreds of feet above the tops of the trees, going unheard by the startled sparrowkeets. There was nothing else that could have heard it.
Death hates cheating.