a/n: Prompt is Nonbending!AU. There are great advancements in medicine and technology here. Enjoy!
Word count: 1,344
Five centuries after the Equalist revolution, a fifteen-year-old girl flopped in her bed and stared listlessly at the ceiling, listening to the hasty footsteps downstairs as her parents prepared to leave for the city. Today, this week, there was no school because of the Equality Festival. Today was the Five hundredth anniversary of the first purge of the bending epidemic. Posters of the mystical and greatly admired mask of Amon, humanity's purifier, was hung up all over Republic City on this fateful day in history.
The girl, Cewong, heard her family's Satocraft start up and pressed her face to the window. She watched her parents glide off, floating like a disc through the wind. She sighed indolently, starting to regret her choice of not joining her parents on their celebration in the city.
But, then, she remembered what they'd done.
They burned my dream journal.
One of her only possessions of importance, where she recorded night after night of vivid, beautiful visions. Visions of adventure, of nature, of love and fear and spirits...and strangest of all...bending. Cewong could almost feel the power of thousand sun and stars, visiting her in the night.
But it was all terrible. She was terrible and corrupted for dreaming about such things! And worst of all, she craved this perverseness, the dreams about the sensation of the elements in her bones. What was wrong with her?
Many, many things.
She couldn't tell her parents or her friends. They would think she was insane for sure. She would be given therapy, and acupunture to erase her memories, and surgury in order to eliminate any potential bending attacks in her body.
No...she couldn't tell anyone. It would've been best to keep it to herself, and her journal.
Slowly, she had let go of most of her friends and family. She even distanced herself from her parents in order to be able to go back to that wonderful dream-like world, where splendidly beautiful creatures and people would show her visions of their past.
The fantastical images started visiting her when she turned eleven, and have only been increasing in depth and importance since. But they never felt physical. She never could never touch them. She could move however she wanted, but whenever she tried to touch something, it would go right throught her hand.
Oh well. Simply being in that world was more than enough for her anyways.
There were forests of vibrant trees, expansive plains of fresh radiant grass, and a sky that lit up like the spirits used to at the poles, according to folklore. There was a lady with a painted face, and a man with an arrow on his head, and a wistful looking girl with three archaic Water Tribe-style warrior tails on her head. And even two normal people, like her, were there! Unfortunately, she could not hear them. Their mouths moved soundlessly as they showed visions of her doing things that her parents taught her to be wrong. They were vile, disgusting acts. Harmful to the rest of society.
Nobody deserves such a curse...right?
Besides, none of it was real anyways. Yet she still craved it. Especially now that she was ostracized by almost everyone she knew. She had no friends, no trustworthy confidants. No person to tell her amazing dreams to.
So she turned to pen and paper: chapters and chapters, thousands of inked pages, full of her stories and her dream-friends' stories. All in her precious journal.
Soon, she was spending most of her day in a trance, and her parents started to get worried. They questioned her constantly, never quite believing her excuses of 'being tired.' Suspicion made them read into her every action.
No matter what happens though, she cannot let them see her journal. She had kept it hidden in the inside of her mattress, where nobody would think to look.
It should've been safe! It was hers! Her real life now! How dare anyone take it from her!
How dare they burn her entire thousand page masterpiece before her eyes.
Remembering how the pages shriveled and blackened, how the fire reflected off of her flat grey eyes...it brought up such fury out of her. It still did...
Cewong squeezed her head between her hands, willing herself to empty her body of anger. She had to be calm and forgiving, just like the arrow headed monk had told–
No...stop thinking like this...he isn't real...none of it is real...you are abnormal, you need to stop thinking of this. It brings only pain and destruction to yourself.
She needed to get away, to go on a walk, or a swim.
Nodding once to herself, she changed into a pair of shorts, slipped a couple apples and a towel into her airtight backpack, and jogged over to the river near her house. Perhaps swimming to the mountains east of her house would do her some good. And she had plenty of time.
Her parents weren't likely to be back until very late at night. And even if they got home early, they wouldn't care if she was gone anyways. She was quite a disappointment
Whatever. I don't need anyone else's approval.
Not ten minutes after Cewong emerged from the creek, a few miles downstream from where she started, it started to pour. Initially, the rain had felt refreshing, but after a while, it was cold and dark like a whirlwind of black dewdrops. Flashes of lightning ripped through the sky, thunder rolled over the damp forest and she really didn't want to jog three or four mile home in the raging storm.
No matter. She was close to the mounainous caves now. She could stay in one until the rain stopped. Perhaps she would even sleep and visit her dreams again...
Nestled away in the depths of the cave, Cewong crossed her legs and laced her fingers right beneath her abdomen. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, rocking back into the the stone wall behind her.
But to her alarm, the entire wall rattled, and a pebble fell on her head.
Cewong immediately bounced onto her feet and leaned in closer to investigate. From the illumination of violent white bursts of lightning, she could just barely make out dozens of compartments, like a gigantic fossilized honeycomb. Each compartment had a large, perfectly cut stone to fit it, engraved with three curiously familiar looking swirls.
Warily, Cewong slid out the first hexagonal stone cap and peered inside. To her surprise, she found a ancient, fragile-looking bamboo scroll, glazed over with clear, hardened pine resin. The first inscription read:
Archives of Jinora, Daughter of Former Councilman Tenzin. Grandaughter of Avatar Aang and Master Katara of the Southern Water Tribe.
"The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can touch the poison of hatred without being harmed. Since beginningless time, darkness thrives in the void, but always yields to purifying light".
What? That line sounds awfully familiar... and was this "Jinora" person the daughter of a councilman? Then why were her archives sitting a dank cave instead of an actual study? And how did she get this wall to be coverend in such perfect, uniform stone cubbies? And how could she be related to an Avatar? According to her school textbook, the Avatar was just a legend.
Puzzled, Cewong opened the scroll and moved to the mouth of the cave, where she began to read by the flashes of lightning.
Little did she know that this tiny scroll would plant knowledge into her millenia old spirit; it would fill the emptiness and sow the seeds for a new revolution.
a/n: Cewong: (T'SEH-wahng) a tibetan name that means 'empowered life.'
Korra, as well as the next earth and fire avatar are gone now, so we're back to air. Ever since Korra lost her bending, the avatar spirit has been crippled in it's ability to bend, but it can still choose a person to continue the cycle. Spirituality still exists, but without bending. This is why Aang wasn't able to touch Cewong or give her bending back.
Also, there is new technology that allows doctors to alter people's memories and abilities through surgery and Qi points. Bending is now considered a "perversity" and people remove it from their children at birth.