Chapter Two: The Southern Water Tribe
Everything was a scalding white and blue, swallowing her whole in its gaping maw. And it was so bitterly cold, as though she had been dropped suddenly into a cooler from the sweltering heat of a jungle. The last she remembered, she was looking into the pulsing light of the spirit above the pipes, carried forward by her feet and the pressing wind. She had— She had touched it. Had it blinded her in its brilliance? Had it gotten angry, and frozen her? Had it…eaten her?
"Hey!"
No, of course it hadn't eaten her, unless it had also swallowed the owner of that voice. Blinking resolved the world into literally frozen forms around her, with a pale blue expanse over her head that brushed itself with wispy clouds. The white forms were towers of snow and ice, and she felt herself bobbing slowly as if on a rowboat. The cold? The air around her, a tundra almost stark and barren.
"Hey, wake up!"
She blinked again, turning her head to look at the owner of the hand shaking her. It was a boy, somewhere around her age she figured, and he had blue eyes. His skin was dark, and his hair was mostly shorn away except in the middle row, which was tied back in a…wolf's tail, she thought it was called. His coat was similar to hers, being thick and warm, but it, too, was blue. Water Tribe? She was at one of the poles.
The boy jumped back when she moved and brandished a sharp boomerang at her. "Who are you, and where did you come from?"
Uhh… Help?
Xun brought her gloved hands up to rub at her eyes, ignoring the way the boy kind of yelped at the action. "Where am I?" she asked instead of answering.
That seemed to make him hesitate, because he shuffled his feet and suddenly dropped to a crouch in front of her. "You're at the South Pole," he told her.
Oh. In other words, the other side of the world.
She pushed the thought away. Her mother had always told her that the spirits worked in ways humans were unable to understand. That didn't mean they couldn't try to understand, but Mother had told her not to be disappointed if she couldn't ever figure it out. Case in point, this sudden transport.
"I'm Xun," she answered after a long, silent moment. "Mother took me to the Western Air Temple, said that— Well, and now I'm here."
He looked suspiciously at her, and probably didn't appreciate the forced cutoff there in her words. But he nodded, finally, and said, "I'm Sokka."
She shivered, violently, feeling the sweat built up from roasting in the chamber start to cool, and with a sigh he held out a hand to pull her up. "Come on, you look cold. I'll question you while you get warmed up, okay?"
"Um…okay…" She accepted his grip and felt the pack pulling her backwards as she rose, so was forced to shift her footing on the—ice floe? It shifted with her, but Sokka's hand kept her upright. "Is it always this cold here?"
"Well, yeah. It's the South Pole." Sokka looked at her as if she had lost her marbles, but she figured he already thought she had misplaced those. "Are you alone, or is your ship nearby?"
Xun shook her head. "There wasn't any ship, I swear," she answered. "There was this…spirit, I think, and I touched it and it sent me here. It kept shifting between looking like different types of birds and flying things, and it felt like I was in a windstorm. And it was blue, like the sky, and shone like the sun."
"If you say so." He was rolling his eyes as he helped her off the floe and started leading her away, and she figured she could give that cause up for lost. Instead of pursuing that angle, she switched to the other question he had asked.
"And it's just me. My mother was there, but she left so that whatever it was could take me here. I'm sorry, I know this sounds really really crazy—"
"Kinda, yeah."
"—but I swear on my life that I am telling the truth."
He stopped walking to turn and stare at her, almost resulting in her running into him. Briefly, she wondered what had caused that reaction, and then she realized. Her life; she had sworn on her life. Meeting his gaze fully, she put all her conviction and sincerity into her eyes—or as much as she could, in her weariness. It wasn't long before he dropped his stare and turned back to the frozen landscape. "Not many swear on that," he told her.
"I do," she stated firmly. "The spirits sent me here for a purpose, and if you don't believe that then I'm hosed anyway."
Sokka laughed. "Yeah! I guess you are. Come on, the village is this way. Gran-Gran puts more stock into this spirit stuff than I do, so maybe she'll believe you. I mean, as far as I know, you could be a Fire Nation spy or something, so don't think I won't be watching you."
Xun let the frown touch her lips as she followed after. A spy? Hardly. And why did he make that distinction, about the Fire Nation? The war was to spread— The war was a lie, she recalled suddenly, and lowered her ashamed gaze to fix on the back of his coat. A brilliant lie to a prideful people—a terrible lie, to a gullible nation. If Mother was to be believed—and she was—the war was not salvation but damnation, and she was about to be dunked headfirst into her first exposure of its consequences.
They crested a snowy bank, and she sucked in a breath that stung her lungs with the chill. "You said the village," she rasped. "Are there other villages?"
Sokka paused, looked at her askance. "No."
"It's just…it's so small. This is… This is all of you?"
He seemed to realize she was genuinely surprised by this, and nodded slowly. "My father and all the other men are off fighting in the war. The Fire Nation has killed or imprisoned all our Waterbenders, too, and what you see here is all that is left of us."
Xun swallowed hard and pressed her palms to her eyes. This wasn't any sort of enlightenment, spreading the glory of the Fire Nation in a grand empire; this was genocide, just as it had been for Hanuel's people.
Yes, she shouted in her heart. Yes, I will help the Avatar. But the spirits were silent, and Sokka beckoned her onward. Her moment of taking it all in would have to wait until later, because a feeling was building in her chest that was absolutely going to have to be dealt with in the near future. And there was no grand revelation for her, only the bitter wind freezing the tears on her cheeks.
... ... ...
Xun knelt on the fur pelt in front of Sokka's grandmother and bowed her forehead to the softened ground. "Thank you, madam, for accepting me into your home, however long you allow my presence." Old manners, taught long ago by her grandfather on her sire's orders, but they seemed fitting in this moment. Forget the posh nobles, forget the prideful military commanders, forget the frankly creepy royalty, this woman and her family deserved these words more than any of those. And she was the elder of the village, besides, the mother-in-law of the chief—Sokka's father, as it turned out. A girl sharing the same dark complexion and bright blue eyes knelt beside the old woman, and at Xun's best guess it was probably Sokka's sister. She had kind, soft features, and seemed younger than her by maybe a year or so.
The old woman, not nearly so frail as she looked, placed a warm hand on the top of Xun's head. "Don't bow to me, child. I'm not that special, and we aren't that formal. I am Kanna, but you may call me Gran-Gran. This is my granddaughter Katara, and you have met her older brother Sokka. He tells me your name is Xun, and that you claim to have been transported here by the spirits."
"Yes, m— Gran-Gran," she corrected herself, lifting herself back up so that she was merely kneeling, matching the pose of the woman across from her. "My mother took me to the Western Air Temple. She said she had been having visions of the spirits summoning me to a cold place, and before that to the Chamber of Songs. It was— I don't know if I'm allowed to say what it looked like, really, but it was so beautiful. And then, after she left, a spirit like a blue fire floated above the central sculpture and shifted among different forms. It's like I felt drawn to it, and when I touched it there was so much light and wind, and then I found myself here, where Sokka found me."
"Hmm. Your name is fitting, then, to have been dropped into our laps in such a way."
"You believe her, Gran-Gran?" Katara asked from beside the old woman.
"Katara, in your life you will find that the spirits do what they will, and there is no accounting for what they may do. If they wish to bring a young woman from across the world in a single breath, then of course they will do so. Normally, the body stays while the spirit travels, but in this case I think they chose to do it differently. Now, Xun, where are you from? For the Air Nomads are gone, and I highly doubt the spirits have brought you here out of the past."
"No, Sokka told me the date and it's the very same day as I left," Xun agreed.
"Indeed. Now, then… Are you from the Earth Kingdom? I do not think you are from the Northern Water Tribe, as you are obviously unused to the cold."
Xun looked away, down into the fur at her knees. "I am not."
"Oh, so you are Earth Kingdom?" Katara pushed, tilting her head to the side. Shoulders slumping, Xun could already feel herself shrinking down.
"No," she answered quietly. "I am all that you hate and fear, and for that I hate and fear myself."
From beside them all, in the shadows at the edge of the tent, Sokka hissed. "Fire Nation!"
"Yes." She bowed again, the built up tension causing her shoulders and arms to tremble. "Please, listen to my words and judge me only after them. I grew up on my mother's stories, and she on hers, and through our mothers we remember what used to be between the nations. Through them, we whisper the truth where we are surrounded by lies. In the schools, we are told that it is a grand war, a great war, and the navy's duty is to spread our greatness to the rest of the world. My mother, in secret, told me differently—and it is to my mother's teachings I cling, not my nation's. I have abandoned that nation, have sworn not to call myself its citizen until it becomes in any part something to be proud of." She pressed her forehead to the fur, resisting the urge to bang it against the hard ground. "There are no wondrous battles," she said in a voice full of tears, "I see that truth for myself, now. The soldiers of the Fire Navy have decimated your people, and there is no glory or vaunted honor in that. I pledge myself to your service, if you will have me, and I renounce any loyalty to the Fire Lord."
The tent was silent, a stillness that stretched on for several minutes, it seemed, before Gran-Gran shifted in her place. "Sokka, your opinion? As son of the chief, what you say has weight. With me, you lead in his absence."
"I—" The boy stopped, hesitating. "Well, you're not a soldier, right?"
"No," Xun promised. "I am not."
"And you seemed pretty sincere when you pledged yourself to us. And if word ever got back to the Fire Nation that you'd renounced loyalty, you'd be labeled a traitor."
Xun winced. "I know, and I pray that my mother does not have to face that same fate, that her role in events is never discovered."
"Oh. Okay, then." By the sound of it, Sokka had just stood up. "We'll say you're from the Earth Kingdom, then, to anyone who comes knocking. That will allow lots of room for interpretation, and your name sounds like it could be from there, too. As son of the chief, I will allow you to stay—on probation. You can't go anywhere alone yet, and for now you are not allowed to know any village secrets."
"Sokka," his sister protested.
"This is for everyone's protection, Katara, including yours. Gran-Gran?"
The hand returned to Xun's head, and she sat up again to look Gran-Gran in the eyes. "I give my blessing," the old woman said. "The Fire Nation has done much harm to our people, but if there are more individuals like you then perhaps I can feel hope again. I do not hold the navy's actions against you."
Xun felt the tension release, and bit back a relieved sob. "Thank you," she told the family earnestly. "Thank you."
... ... ...
That night, the tent dark only by benefit of the heavy walls, Xun stared up at the ceiling and did her best to keep her breaking heart from shattering. She wanted her mother, wanted to run to her room and feel her arms around her, and to wrap her with her own. Instead she got warm furs and hugged the bedding Mother had packed for her, burying her nose in the scent of home. She wanted— She wasn't sure what else she wanted, because Mother was foremost on her mind and she just wanted to be home.
But she couldn't go home, not for a long time, yet. She was on the other side of the world, where that morning she had been on a ship approaching the Western Air Temple. She was hiding from her own nation, and had the goal of aiding the Fire Lord's greatest enemy. She was laying in a tent with the Southern Water Tribe, a people devastated and ruined by her nation's armies. If her father ever found out, he really would kill her. And hopefully she had dodged the arrow of the arranged marriage he had been plotting for her next birthday, as she had just turned fifteen. Now she'd be forever ineligible among her people, at least until the war ended at the Avatar's hand.
And how long would that take, she wondered. How long until she found him, how long until the end of the world?
How long until the world crumbled, and the only one left to catch her was herself?
[posted 2-26-15]