((AN: Happy Halloween, guys. :3 In the spirit of it all, I present a new story; may only end up being four or five chapters long, and won't likely be finished by the end of the holiday, but I'm festive enough to start it early in the morning on said day. xP

Enjoy! Maybe it won't be scary, but I hope at least it's entertaining. x3 It's rather fun to go into the folklore aspects of the Avatar world.

As always, I don't own anybody or anything in this story. It all belongs to Mike and Bryan and the good folks at Nickelodeon. But mostly Mike and Bryan.))

1

It was a cold autumn night in the Earth Kingdom. In many places, the tops of the mountains already saw a coating of snow; though it was sure not to last when the sun was due to arrive again. The wind howled outside of the lavish inn where the Avatar and his friends stayed, in an otherwise quiet little town nestled in a deep forest near the base of the mountains where Omashu was hidden within.

With the weather outside too cold and too windy even for the group to finish the flight to the city, they roomed together in the top floor and relaxed in a small circle of seven near the feet of the beds. Appa had been given a fairly steady, warm shelter in a nearby barn with Momo.

Pillows were gathered up so that the young heroes sat in comfort and told stories and shared laughter, reminiscing about the war days. Behind them a fireplace flickered and filled the space with needed warmth, but no other lights were lit…so eerie shadows were cast over the walls and along the floor along with the shifting orange glow.

Katara and Aang were sharing a blanket, the respectively sixteen- and fifteen-year-olds (Aang's birthday had passed on the Equinox) using the dark and foreboding atmosphere as a fair excuse to huddle close together. Sokka and Suki had the same idea, as well as Zuko and Mai. Toph lounged by herself, enjoying the space she had for herself between the Waterbender and her brother.

None of them were tired yet; but it wasn't like they could sleep anyway, with the wind still whipping relentlessly at the windows, slapping newly-fallen leaves against the panes and making the inn creak and settle in places.

"It's times like these that make me wonder why I decide to go traveling with you guys sometimes," Mai sighed dully, shifting comfortably with the Fire Lord's arm around her shoulder.

"Well, it's less boring than sitting alone in the palace, I bet," Aang chuckled.

"Yeah, and how about the adventure?" Katara grinned. "The thrill of finding new places? Expecting the unexpected?"

"Or having the unexpected expect us," Sokka interrupted, earning him a small jab in the shoulder from his girlfriend and a laugh from the others.

Zuko rolled his eyes and playfully nudged her. "At least you have good friends with you, Mai. Traveling isn't half as fun when you have to do it practically alone."

"She's just scared of the storm," Toph matter-of-factly stated with a yawn.

"I am not," the young noblewoman huffed. "I don't get scared."

It was easy for the others to believe her thanks to her stoic face (Toph excluded), but Zuko could feel her flinch a little when the wind picked up outside and made a piece of the building go bang…not that he would dare point that out. He never did figure out where she kept some of her knives.

"Well, if we're all looking to be scared, how about some ghost stories?" Suki suggested with a grin.

"Ooh, yeah!" Toph sat up, interested. "Something that we haven't heard already."

"I dunno; do we really wanna tell scary stories? Some of us might end up not sleeping," Zuko reasoned.

"Are you talking about yourself or the rest of us?" Katara laughed.

The Firebender grimaced. "Hey, I don't scare easily either."

"I think we've all been through things that are scarier than ghosts," Aang pointed out, watching everyone with his curious, tempestuous eyes. "So let's hear some stories; should be interesting."

Settling into an easy agreement, they all thought about the tales they wanted to tell. They didn't have to be particularly scary, but at the most, mystifying.

"So, who goes first?" Sokka shrugged. "I can't think of anything."

"No surprise there," Toph muttered.

Katara let out a long hum of thought, before her eyes widened with an idea. She shot her brother a small grin. "I could go with the story of Nokai."

His head whipped around. "Ohhh no! Not that one, Katara. Absolutely not."

"Nokai?" Aang echoed curiously.

Zuko's head tilted. "What's that one about?"

"It's an ancient Water Tribe tale. Dad told it to us once." She stared her brother down. "Sokka, come on, it's really good! It's an old and enduring part of our culture."

"Too enduring if you ask me. That story gives me the heebie-jeebies! I couldn't sleep for a week after I heard it!" he hissed, pulling the whole blanket over himself like a hood.

"You were six back then," Katara's eyebrow rose. "How could you even remember it? C'mon, I bet if you hear it again it won't seem so scary."

"Yeah, I wanna hear it," Aang said, smiling with genuine interest.

"If it scares Sokka, should be worth hearing," Toph agreed.

Mai shrugged. "Bring it on."

There was a pause as Sokka considered it. Then, he relented and let Suki reclaim her half of the blanket with a huff. He sat up straight and pointed a finger toward the Waterbender. "Fine. But if I get nightmares tonight, you're so gonna get it."

"Whatever," she sighed, shaking her head before settling into a relaxed cross-legged pose to begin the story, the others quieting down in avid anticipation.

This tale takes place in the ancient times…back before there were Waterbenders, when Spirits walked the earth freely and the Water Tribes consisted of scattered villages and nomadic hunting families. The South Pole was a dangerous, wild place, and wasn't too far touched upon by people.

From one small family with their home on the water, the very place where our tribe stands now, there came a warrior-hunter named Nokai. He was strong and brave, but also very foolhardy. He always boasted that he was the strongest fighter and the most courageous of hunters. His skill was unmatched, for he managed to capture the most powerful game in the most blinding snowstorms with his whale-tooth-tipped spear. He had a long, jagged scar on the left side of his face that nearly touched behind his eye; a badge of honor, he called it, when he was said to have hunted and slain the last of the ferocious southern snow-wolves.

One day, the tribe was running low on food. It was the dead of the season of Endless Night—Summer, to all of you—when the sun is gone for much of the year, and the best fishing spots out among the icebergs had been covered over with ice too thick to break through. The hunters would have gone out into the wastes, but there was a thick storm covering much of the region with foggy, dusty ice and powered by wind so strong it felt like hammer blows. No smart warrior, no matter how strong or brave, would have dared to set foot out in that weather.

But Nokai didn't back down. He saw it not only as an opportunity to be the only help that the tribe had, but to truly test his strength against the South Pole's raw nature. His family begged him not to go; he could be trapped or lost forever, they cried. But he insisted that the Spirits would allow him to return, once they saw his courage.

He could not be swayed otherwise, and so with heavy reluctance from the others to let him, he readied himself to leave. But before he set foot out of the tribe, the elderly medicine woman looked upon him with stern eyes that seemed to glow, and warned him not to take the Spirits lightly. He was to respect their nature and the treacherous land that they watched over while traveling, if he was trying to seek their help in navigating the storm.

Otherwise, the consequences would be undeniably unexpected, and very possibly brutal.

But again, Nokai stubbornly persisted. "I will not back down. They will help me," he said.

So with those last words, he took his spear and vanished into the dark, enveloping wind.

He never returned.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. The storms ceased and the sun returned to the tribe's home. As soon as they could, the men formed search parties and fanned out into the wilderness to determine the fate of Nokai.

But his body was nowhere to be seen. No trace of him was found, and after a year of trying, they sadly gave the warrior up for dead.

Then, during the following Endless Night, a young man that had been out on a hunt on his own became lost in a sudden rush of a blizzard. It was an onslaught, nearly tearing into him before he could pull his hood over his face.

He trudged onward, just trying to find his way back home. The snow covered his footprints instantly, and he could barely even see his gloves in front of his face. He became disoriented, losing all sense of direction, and ending up moving in slow circles deeper and deeper into the wilderness…deeper into the darkness, farther into the deadly snow.

The young warrior became dizzier and dizzier by the minute. The freezing cold numbed him to the core. He cried out to his family for help, but his voice could never reach past the wind. He couldn't tell up from down, right from left, or see anything around but white. So, nearly out of energy, he fell into a drift and just tried numbly to dig a hole into it for shelter.

That's when he heard it. A deep, long, howl…so loud that it silenced the wind. The single note lasted a minute, echoing far out into the wastes even after it was finished. The blizzard halted in that one small spot, and the snow calmed down to a mere trickle of white flakes.

The boy looked up in front of him. There, out of the icy dust, stood a beast—a snow wolf—far larger than he was…far larger than he'd ever seen a creature; standing up straight, he could just come up to the bend of one front leg. Its stark white fur was broken up by black, rose-like spots all over the coat. Its ears pricked straight up, and its eyes glowed yellow like nothing he'd ever seen. One long line of gray cut down across its face on its left side. Its outline was blurry; perhaps due to the haze of his damaged vision and mind. But yet it looked so real. Its presence stopped the snow, and the storm fell into dead silence. Its thick fur was still, even from the short breezes.

Looking at the ghostly creature, the warrior thought that he had died in the storm, and that a Spirit had come for him.

The snow-wolf only stared for a minute before moving forward and brushing past him, slowly walking calmly into the distance.

Entranced, the boy followed the creature. It was like he was hypnotized. He saw nothing else but the beast and its graceful, purposeful stride, and the way that it didn't even look back.

And as it went, the storm all around went quiet, and he could only hear his boots crunching into the ice. He didn't hear the snow-wolf's steps, but he did see its paw print trail as he followed the pattern onward. Perhaps it IS real, he thought.

The boy just followed the beast and its prints blindly until he grew tired and weary again. When finally he could take no more, he fell again into the drifts. Before his eyes closed, he saw the beast vanish into the storm, and heard frantic shouting from the people of the tribe he'd collapsed near.

When he awoke again, he was in his own bed in his hut, being watched over by his family and the medicine woman. "The snow-wolf!" he shouted, remembering everything, and leaped out of bed to run outside and search for the creature that had led him back home.

But there was nothing to be seen in the snowy wastes before him. The storm had cleared for the night, and yet the line of paw prints he had followed was gone, too.

"I do not understand," the boy said. "The snow-wolf found me and saved me. Where has he gone?"

His father looked at him in confusion. "You were just seeing things," he insisted. "There are no snow-wolves in this region. They have all moved on or have been hunted down."

The medicine woman then came up to them, and her eyes glittered. "Ah, but look."

She went a few paces into the drifts and bent down to retrieve something from the snow. In her hand, she held a long spear with a whale-tooth tip; which hadn't been there before.

"Nokai," she murmured, looking outward.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, even now. There are many stories. Some say that Nokai had died and that his soul was lost forever in the wastes, transformed into a snow-wolf as punishment by the Spirits for killing off the creatures. Others say he was perhaps eaten by that very Spirit. Perhaps that Spirit is the protector of the South Pole's wastes, watching over the creatures and waiting to destroy any unfortunate, boastful hunters that wander in, with Nokai's very scar as a way to make an example of him.

And still others say it is but a simple guide creature, appearing to the lucky and the innocent who become lost in the blizzards, ready to bring them home again. Perhaps Nokai himself had become a sad and lonely creature, unable to let go of this world, and so finds solace in helping the lost people of his tribe.

Who knows?

But to this very day, if you look outside at night, there's a chance that he'll be out there looking back with nothing to see but those eyes. Maybe you'll follow him and be lost…and maybe you will be found again. Maybe you will just hear one, long, low howl that sends a chill into your bones colder than the ice itself.

And maybe…just maybe…you'll see Nokai, waiting to come home, but always out of reach…forever lost.

"…The end," Katara finished.

The group let out the breaths that they had all been holding, staring toward the Waterbender with awe in their eyes.

"Wow," Zuko marveled. "That's quite a story."

"Kinda sad, in a way," Mai added, admittedly impressed herself.

Toph hummed. "Well, I'll probably never say that the Water Tribe has the most boring stories again."

"Still a little creepy," Suki admitted. "Could you imagine running into a snow ghost in the middle of a blizzard?"

"It's not that creepy," Sokka said, earning him a few small grins. "Not as much as I thought it'd be. I kinda feel for the warrior. He got a little too bold and paid the price."

"The Spirits do have ways of punishing those who doubt them," Aang nodded and turned to Katara with a warm smile. "It was an amazing story."

"We have a lot of good fables," she smiled back and nestled into his embrace to be warm again. "I'll have to tell you all of them."

"Well, before we get all mushy again," Toph interrupted, "Who's next?"

As they settled into silence to think again, the wind howled louder than ever outside.