[-Prologue-]
"Could you let go?" the voice demanded harshly. It was strange and alien and dark, but it kept ringing in my ears.
"Could you let go?"
"Could you let go?"
"Could you let go…"
The scene changed, showing Toph. I almost screamed with relief. My heart was thudding in my ears and my pulse was racing much too fast. The heat was overwhelming. It was suffocating, maddening, torturous heat. I wanted to cry and beg for mercy, but there was no one to ask to help me. Then came Toph—ever the strong one, ever the reliable one. Solid as the Earth.
Toph. Toph would help me.
I tried to figure out how to tell her without screeching and feeling hot tears pour down my face. The slightest of breezes ruffled Toph's hair, however, and my heart stopped cold. Her eyes were pure white.
Not the kind of white that usually plagued the blind of society, but the absolute white that only showed up around the edges of the eye. The white that should not have been visible on any human eyeball. Chills racked me from crown to toe before my mind screamed, Save her! I twitched, but it was too late. The ground opened up and swallowed Toph whole. It betrayed her, betrayed me.
I tried to fight back the panic. Toph was gone. There had to be someone else to help me. Someone, anyone… I dug my nails into my palms until I could feel that instead of the heat, but then the new pain just mingled with the heat and I was so desperate for release that I was ready to beg for it.
Please, I wanted to say, just please make it stop.
Then Sokka was screaming, right behind me. He tried to come for me, sword outstretched. I saw the beads of perspiration on his forehead. Knew that he was suffering from the heat. I wondered if he could feel the invisible flames licking up his arms, if fire could get so hot that you couldn't see it anymore. But the blackness swallowed Sokka whole, leaving behind nothing but his brilliant blue eyes. They were wide with fear and terror, and I was rooted to the floor. I couldn't make myself move; it was becoming impossible to breathe and everything was spinning.
A new cry, this time behind me, and my treacherous body spun around in an instant. Katara, dressed in the red of the Fire Nation, fear etched into every line of her beautiful face, was being sucked away from me. Sucked away into a dangerous inferno that would have loved to roar up and around her, swallow her and take her away from me forever. The pain that shot through my heart was unbearable, so intense that I felt as if I would never recover. Everyone had their limits—I couldn't lose her. I wouldn't survive it.
So I ran after her, into the inferno, towards the fire and my inevitable demise. But then something cool sprung up around me, hugging my every muscle fiber and hardening into a perfect shell. Katara moved further and further away, her unuttered screams pounding against my ears. My heart, held together like a patchwork quilt, fell apart. I opened my mouth to scream but found I couldn't. So I screamed in my head, again and again, begging for someone to spare her. Instead, one shrill scream, louder than the others, floated towards me. And then a man's sinister laughter shrouded everything.
The tears flowed down my face and along the surface of my icy prison. I had lost her. I had lost my only reason for living… I was fighting for the safety of the world, but the world didn't mean a thing without Katara in it…
I sat up in the pitch blackness, biting back a scream. My body was damp with sweat and the light humidity of the late evening was not helping the situation. I did a quick mental check: nothing hurt, nothing broken. I had just been having that dream again. It had haunted my nightmares every other day for the past month. I could only hope that the dream would vanish within the week, before I finally turned sixteen.
The most frustrating thing about this dream was the fact that I could not remember it in the morning. All I knew was that I didn't like what happened when I woke up. I felt a sense of dread that often accompanied me throughout the day and my heart wouldn't stop racing. And, of course, the aching sadness. The absolute pain of losing the one thing closest to the heart… I thought about what it could mean and shuddered: I had no desire to find out.
I knew there would be no sleeping for me after that nightmare, so I swung out of bed. I had only two mattresses and a closet in the room I shared with Aiko. She was still fast asleep. Moonlight poured in through the window, which my parents had forgotten to bar on the outside. I considered the window and the methods of escape it offered, including what incentives awaited me in the world. A small grin escaped my lips and I vaulted out the window, eagerly swallowed by the grasping shadows.
A/N: Hello all! I meant to post this a few days ago, but didn't realize that docx files cannot be posted as stories. Whoops! XD Anyways, here we are. If you are confused, that's quite all right. You're meant to be confused. However, I will do my best to answer any questions that are not related to the plot! See you in the first Chapter :)