A time before war, a time when all four nations lived in harmony, the time of the Avatar. Katara remembered every word of her grandmother's stories, so well she could almost picture these idyllic days, but then the memory of the Fire Nation's ships came back and the images disappeared.
The Avatar was gone, they said, the cycle broken. The next Avatar would be Air, and the Air Nomads had been decimated by Fire Lord Sozin near the start of the war. Where are you, Avatar, when the world needs you most of all?
He'll come, Katara thought every night as she lay in bed, fingers tracing the pattern on her mother's necklace. He has to. Most of the world had given up hope of ever seeing an end to this war at all, much less their savior, but even when things seemed darkest she knew there would be a light at the end of the tunnel and with it would come the Avatar.
But until that day she would always look out over the horizon, waiting for that light.