And we're flying again. I swear that we spend more time in the air than anywhere else. Appa must love being in the sky, because if I were him, by this point, I would be staging a mutiny. And when we fly over a swamp, that's about when I draw the line. The scent coming up from it is funky, to say the least. And something about it is strange.

Appa starts going down towards the swamp, and Sokka notices. "Hey, you taking us down for a reason?" But Aang isn't paying attention to him. "Aang, why are we going down?"

"What, I didn't even notice." Aang sure is air-headed today.

Sokka gets impatient. "Are you noticing now?"

"Is something wrong?" Katara pokes her head over the side to check out the situation for herself.

"I know this is going to sound weird, but I think the swamp is calling to me." I roll my eyes at Aang, because yes, it does sound weird.

Sokka, as always, is thinking with his stomach. "Is it telling you where we can get something to eat?"

But Aang continues to be cryptic. "No, I…I think it wants us to land there." Maybe Bumi is rubbing off on him.

"No offense to the swamp, but I don't see any land there to land on." And this time, Sokka has a point. Sure, there are plenty of trees, but I don't actually see anything made of solid rock down there.

Aang shrugs. "I don't know. Bumi said to learn earthbending I would have to wait and listen, and now I'm actually hearing the earth. Do you want me to ignore it?"

"Yes." Sokka is very straightforward about not wanting to go down there. Katara, on the other hand, is a little more nervous. "I don't know. There's something ominous about that place."

Momo shivers and hides inside the saddle, and Appa groans loudly. Sokka uses that to support his argument. "See, even Appa and Momo don't like it here."

Aang figures that he's been outvoted, so he turns Appa away from the swamp. "Okay, since everyone feels so strongly about this, bye swamp. Yip yip!"

The swamp, on the other hand, doesn't seem to want to let us leave, and a tornado comes after us. I take one look at it and my hot blood runs cold. "We're in so much trouble…" And despite Aang's efforts to get us away from the tornado, it ends up sucking us up into the vortex and forcing us down into the forest. Aang uses airbending to keep us together, but then we get flung down by the tornado, and I end up split up from the rest of the group.

Alone in this creepy magic swamp, I'm completely lost. And I hate all the gooey water. So I get onto the large roots coming out of the water and start looking around for something, anything sentient, and preferably something that isn't going to try to kill me or eat me. But I can't, so I find a place to bunk down for the night. And then, after a night of restless sleep, the hallucinations start.

I know that they're hallucinations, because they're visions of people that are long since dead. And they're not like the nightmares I usually have. I see my parents, grandparents, and they look at me accusingly. "You abandoned us. Only you survived. Only you carry the curse of golden fire. Cursed child. Marked for death. You will die!"

Their angry taunts and curses on me scare me. I know that they're hallucinations, but they seem so real. "You will die! Just like us. Your life is over!" And I turn and bolt, I try to get as far away from them as possible. But they're everywhere, and only one direction is clear. So I run for my life, crying and screaming for help. I feel like a child, trapped in my own nightmare.

An image of my father appears in front of me, glaring at me coldly. "You should be dead. I died to protect you. You should be dead." A terrible leer crosses his face. "But you will be soon enough. You are marked for death. The more you fight, the sooner you die. You are going to die."

Frozen in fear, all I can do is look into his hard gold eyes, and tremble. I know that my father would never say something like that. He loved me too much to ever say something like that. But I would. I would say those things to myself. I was always wracked with guilt over being the only survivor of the massacre. I've told myself so many times that I'm the one who should have died, and that he should have been the one to survive. But I know that he would never have been able to live with himself if I'd died in his place. Despite knowing that, my guilt still tortures me. These hallucinations are a product of my own guilt and loneliness. But his eyes are so familiar, and the cold look in them forces tears from my eyes. And I turn away, running as if my life depended on it. Because my sanity certainly does.

I run so long that I can't even tell how long I've been running. And then suddenly, I smash right into Aang and we both go tumbling into the water. He pushes me off him and stares at me. "Ciara! Where have you been? What's wrong? We heard you screaming, and then you just appeared out of nowhere."

My trembling refuses to stop, and I just grab onto Aang's collar and sob into his shirt. "Don't leave me alone, I don't want to see it again. I never want to see any of it again!" More tears pour down my cheeks and soak Aang's clothes.

He starts patting my head gently. "It's okay; it's going to be okay. You're safe here with us."

And as if to contradict him, a huge monster covered in vines emerges from the water and scares the crap out of us. It attacks Sokka first, and then goes after Aang. And I just curl up in a ball and hide. It's too wet here for my firebending, and against something that size, martial arts will be useless, and my knives are too small to put a dent in it. So all I can do is watch as Aang, Katara and Sokka try and fail to fight the thing. Washing it away, hacking at it, and trying to blow it away.

So, when Sokka gets caught and taken inside the monster, Aang twists the thing up with an airbending tornado, and Katara frees Sokka by freezing him out of the vines and blasting a hole through the monster. Aang shoves its face into the water, then gets sent flying. So Katara sends sharp discs of water at it, cutting it to pieces, over and over, revealing a person inside. So she cuts the mask in half and Aang returns, blowing away most of the vine and revealing our attacker.

Aang confronts the attacker. "Why did you call me here if you just wanted to kill us?"

"Wait!" The man in the vines stops his bending and reveals himself to us. A pudgy, grey-haired old man in a leafy loincloth. "I didn't call you here."

Aang is now confused. "We were flying over and I heard something calling to me, telling me to land."

"He's the Avatar. Stuff like this happens to us, a lot." Sokka explains it to the confused water, plantbender? Ugh, it's some weird kind of waterbending if he's controlling plants.

"The Avatar? Come with me." The old man leads the way to the huge tree in the middle of the swamp. And the tree gives me the creeps.

So apparently, the big tree calls a lot of people here, not just us. And you can reach enlightenment here, because it's a sacred and mystical place. Great, and we get to have scary visions here as well. And, it turns out that this whole swamp is just one tree spread out over many miles, and all the smaller trees are just offshoots of the main one. Fantastic…I hate this place already. And I can't understand why anyone would want to live here.

And now comes the answer I've been hoping to hear, and the swampbender provides it. "In the swamp, we see visions of people we've lost, people we loved, folks we think are gone. But the swamp tells us they're not. We're still connected to em. Time is an illusion, and so is death."

Now, Aang is confused. "But what about my vision? It was someone I've never met."

The swampbender grins. "You're the Avatar, you tell me."

So Aang thinks about it for a minute. "Time is an illusion. So, it's someone I will meet."

Now, we just have to find Appa and Momo and get out of here. So Aang taps into the Tree's power and searches all over for them, through the entire swamp. And when he finds them, we hurry towards them and nearly kill a bunch of the swampbender's friends. And when they recognize each other, it all turns out to be one big misunderstanding and we end up being invited over for dinner.

And while Sokka and Aang debate how much natural and mystical shit was going down, I cuddle up with Appa and go to sleep. After the crazy and scary couple of days I've had, I need something a little more stable and comforting.