Disclaimer: Don't anything in this story, not making any money. Those rights belong to Michael di Martino, Bryan Konietzco, and Nickelodeon. This is essentially an exercise in futility, mostly to avoid doing something important, like studying for exams.
This is way more fun, anyhow.
Her grandfather had stories.
A thousand stories that he told a thousand times over, seated next to the fire as her grandmother embroidered during those balmy summer evenings. And she would fall asleep listening to her grandfather's deep, steady voice, her mind drifting away to distant lands of flying men and tiger-seals.
They were her grandfather's past, just as her grandfather was now her past. And so she held those stories close to her heart as she grew up into a world far less vivid yet far more real. What had happened to the sky bison? The men who shifted with the sands? The vast walls of an impenetrable city that housed an ancient king?
One of her grandfather's many stories – one memory of his long past – was a library. A Great Library, which he said contained every story ever known to man. She supposed such a place couldn't really exist, but she knew her grandfather had also been a librarian in the days before the War. And she wondered if maybe the story of the Great Library had actually been his own.
What had been his repository of knowledge was also now past, destroyed in a blaze that had then spread over the lands, devouring tiger-seals and sand-men alike. After that, all her grandfather had were stories. Every scroll was then a memory in an old man's heart.
And now they were her memories, which she tucked away in her mind for fear that a fire might try to find them there. For years, she had refused to write them down. Even when she became Master Librarian to the Imperial House, she obediently destroyed the stories they asked to be destroyed and silently kept the ones that they never knew about.
Then, one day, the stories came to life. Sky bison. Waterbenders. A little boy, awesome and terrible, yet not much older than she when her grandfather gave her his memories. They filled the air and covered the ground, and though she cowered with her family in terror of these actualized myths, she also felt relieved that the stories had somehow survived.
She now sits next to the hearth, her grandchildren huddled on bamboo mats just outside its light. And as her husband brings in coals to feed the fire, she no longer hides from the flames. She whispers the stories that she had never been allowed to share, tells the tales that she had nearly lost to the past.
These stories are hers. And like her grandfather before her, she has thousands.
A/N: Finally, an up-beat chapter! Took me long enough to think one up. So as I'm getting closer to the end, I thought I'd mention what I've been going for with these one-shots. I've been trying really hard to give each story a distinctive voice (and feel like I've only achieved it once, with "The Ships"). Unfortunately, my writing style is too pervasive, and everything sounds the exact same to me. Still, I've tried to put in some variation. For instance, chapter 4 is told by a guy who lives his entire life by analogies and platitudes, because it's easier than actually having to face things. And in this chapter, the narrator hides in a dream-world, so she can barely recount anything except in terms of metaphor and hyperbole.
I know – if I'm a good enough writer, that should come across on its own. And if it doesn't, I need to go back to the drawing (or writing) board. But I'm getting so close to the end, I at least want to point out that I was trying for something in all this, even if I failed.