The Invasion of the Southern Water Tribe;
The South Pole, The Ocean, and Royal Caldera City.
Chapter One: Black Snow
Her hands are numb from rolling snowballs. She'd always found it easy, much easier than it should have been (according to Sokka – but then he was prone to exaggeration) as if the ice wanted to be shaped, and it made her quick. Much quicker than her brother, so he didn't really stand a chance, peeking out over the shabbily constructed wall of his snow fortress. His mouth drops as she pelts him in the face and he drops the overlarge snowball (that he would never have been able to throw successfully anyway) so that it cracks over his head and he is showered in crumbled snow.
Katara giggles into her mittens, and then there is black snow in front of her face, catching in her eyelashes so that every time she blinks long dark sweeps of it obstruct her vision. She lifts a hand to swipe it away, and her stomach coils. There is panic everywhere, blurs of legs zipping past her before she can even look up and put a face to them.
"I'm going to find mom," she says, and runs off before Sokka can stop her.
(And he would have, stupid, sensible Sokka.)
It's not easy, running the wrong way in a crowd, but she weaves in and out of various legs and only trips up once (over her own feet, and she grimaces and grits her teeth as she clambers upright) and home is in sight then. No matter how much her lungs burn or her calves ache from running through the snow, there is only one thing on her mind. Fuelled by the panic she'd picked up from the villagers, she snaps the hide covering back from the doorway and inside awaits two figures bathed in shadows.
Before she knows what is happening, there are rough hands on the lapels of her coat and she is being dragged into the centre of the room. She can hear her mother's voice, shrill in protest and desperation: "let her go, she's a child, this is nothing to do with her," and the child's heart is drumming so loud in her chest she's sure her mother must be able to hear it.
"Mommy," she whimpers, smothered in her fur collar as the hand yanks at the back of her hood, "I'm scared."
"I know, sweetie, I know. Everything will be fine. Just be calm. Be a big, brave girl for mommy, and everything will be fine."
(False promises are always coated with sugar.)
"Perhaps this will jog your memory," says the voice from behind her (dark and male and most decidedly cruel) and with a hiss she feels white-hot heat flickering by her ear. She tries to jerk away, but the hand is unrelenting in its grip and she only wriggles a little underneath the pressure, "keep still you little brat," and the heat moves closer and closer.
"Stop! Please, I'll tell you," her mother's breathing is ragged, and she unfolds her legs and stands from where she had been knocked down, tilts her chin into the air, "it's me. I'm the one you've been looking for."
Katara can almost hear the smirk cracking his face. The pressure on her throat is relinquished and she darts forwards to her mother's waiting arms; they are open wide and they fold around her, crushing her shoulder blades and forcing her to exhale so loudly, so unevenly that it sounds as though she is weeping.
"Mommy," she says, "mommy, mommy," over and over again because she is real underneath her fingertips, tangible, and this in itself is comfort enough for a frightened eight year old.
She doesn't want to be released. She wants to stay penned in her mother's embrace until the big metal ships leave and the snow is white again. But her mother pushes her away very gently, takes her by the shoulders and tells her to go and find her father.
And she almost complies, but the man behind her laughs so cruelly that she knows terrible things will happen when she leaves.
"Led us on a merry chase, you have," he says, and Kya pushes insistently at the small of her daughter's back until the girl slinks towards the door, "it almost seems a waste."
"A waste?" Kya is almost spitting, obstinate through fear and dread. But she has done the most important thing, she thinks, she has protected her daughter.
The man laughs again, a deep throaty chuckle that she can feel sending shivers down her spine.
"You've found me now, take me prisoner. There is no reason for you to return."
"Oh, we are not taking prisoners today," the man's lips are thin and chapped from sea air, his hands are large and white and crinkled, "it seems such a waste to kill the last waterbender," and his hands are red and yellow and burning.
"NO!" It is a thin, reedy voice that stops him; a thin, reedy voice that turns a mother's grave resolution in the face of death to something much, much worse; a thin, reedy voice that belongs to her daughter. "I'm the one who makes the water move. Not mommy. Me."
She can't possibly understand – she thinks that by doing this she will save the both of them. Perhaps things could continue on as normal, in the white snow. Perhaps they could forget that the black snow had never happened at all. Her hands hang loose at her sides and her eyes wobble in the dim light.
The man's chin hardens. His eyebrows furrow and he considers the two females before him. Well then, isn't this a curious turn of events? It is something of a dilemma – and one that he will answer readily.
Katara thinks that his fingers look unnaturally large, twisted through her mother's hair like that as he drags her back towards the ship. She follows behind, obedient if not willingly, with little desire to leave her mother's side even if it meant freedom and her father and the white snow.
"I will find out which one of you is lying," the man says, and out here she can see the silvery tracks of tears on her mother's cheeks, "and then you will feel how fire burns."
And then, to his soldiers: "raze it to the ground."
Katara reaches out for her mother then, tiny fingers searching for the fur of her hood, skin, anything, but the soldier at her back snaps his fingers across her shoulder blade and she is left to comfort the throb of it with half-hearted sniffles and disenchanted looks back at the city that was – had been – her home. If only she could stay, she thinks then, stay and fight with water. But she can't, and her father's swords are no match against a regiment of men wielding fire. The city falls, and the last she sees of it with harsh hands on her shoulder pushing her into the depths of this metal hulk that somehow floats on water is red and gold and she watches plumes of smoke curl and disappear into the sky, azure blue and aching overhead.
Then the sky is gone, replaced with endless corridors of grey metal. Lower and lower they go, along straight stretches of corrugated iron and the air gets hotter and wetter and she can feel her fingertips tingling. She tucks them into her parka, despite the heat, and remembers what her father had said to her when she had first moved the water: "you don't do this in front of anyone but me or your mom, ok? No one else."
Her mother is walking ahead of her with her head held aloft, and Katara copies her show of strength with pouted lips and an air of obstinacy that the guard watching her back cannot help but laugh at. The sound is tinny, rattling off the walls, and she pretends to herself that they are not humans underneath those masks (and it is not a difficult feat), but sea ravens, cruel and callous, picking on the weak and innocent.
"Welcome to the brig," the guard behind her says as his comrade opens the thick metal door (Yon Rha having stayed on deck to command his soldiers), "your new home," and there is a scathing tone in his voice that does not go unnoticed.
Left alone, Katara huddles into her mother's side with wet eyes and breathes in the familiar scent of salt water and cold.
"Why do they hate us so much?" she asks. "Are Sokka and dad going to be ok?"
Her mother's chest is heaving, and her breath is ragged. It's dark in the brig without candlelight, too dark to see, and Katara pulls back to scrutinize her mother's face, even though she can't make out the shape of it.
"How can you raise something to the ground?" her mother cries quietly, and Katara's questions go unanswered. She is petted and held and coddled but suddenly she is not so afraid anymore –there are so many things that she does not understand and her childish curiosity makes her fearless.
A guard brings them tea, later, and plain boiled rice. With the guard comes firelight, and standing with her palms pressed up against the door she repeats her question boldly: "how can you raise something to the ground?"
He laughs, and with his eyes hidden behind his helmet she cannot tell if it is friendly or menacing.
"It's not raised, not like that, kiddo, it's razed. As in destroy. Burn it to the ground."
And now she sees why her mother cried. She takes the tray he offers solemnly, and sits cross-legged in the middle of the room.
"Come and have some tea, mommy," she says sadly, "and then we should pray to the spirits for Sokka and daddy," and her mother wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. She has moped enough: look at her child, so darling and so wise, and then at her, sobbing grossly in the corner of a dark cell.
"Yes, sweetie, you're right. You're so brave," Kya sits down next to her daughter, and smooths her hair back off of her forehead, "and doesn't Gran Gran always say that tea fixes everything?"
If only, she thinks, if only it were that simple.
Katara grins, and turns her face up towards her mother.
"And she's lived for absolutely ages, so we have to trust what she says."
Kya laughs, and is glad that she is not alone. "Who told you that, huh?"
"Gran gran," Katara admits begrudgingly, and sips on her tea. She grimaces into the cup then, and says, "this isn't tea, it's spicy!"
Kya smiles, and pulls her daughter close into her side.
The air in the brig is hot and wet. In the humid atmosphere Katara can feel the power in it tingling at her fingertips, across her nerves, and it puts her on edge. She does not understand this power: not yet, and as she whispers her concerns to her mother in the dead of night when all is silent except the slight flutter of their heartbeats entwined and the dull thrum of the engine from below, she worries.
Her mother does her best to comfort her. She strokes her hair and tells her that no matter how hard her fingers tingle; she can't play with the water. Not in here.
Katara understands now, better than she had done before.
Yon Rha does not come down to the brig, although the days pass idly by (they can tell from the regularity of their meals what time of day it is, breakfast, dinner, lunch, and then like clockwork it begins the next day, breakfast, dinner, lunch…). Kya supposes that he is discussing their fate with his superiors, and the thought does not cease in making her uncomfortable.
To pass the time, she tells Katara stories from when she was a child. How she'd saved Hakoda from a polar bear dog that he'd been unsuccessfully 'hunting', falling out of her father's canoe and being saved by Hakoda in turn – the memories sting, and she can feel the tears pressing bitterly behind her eyes again.
On the sixth day, a grim-faced Yon Rha visits them. It is not a joyous occasion. Katara huddles into her as of yet unnecessary parka in the background (she has never been so terrified of anyone) while he questions her mother.
(Perhaps she has never been so terrified of anyone because never before has she met a man so cruel.)
"I've received orders to kill the both of you," he says, very pragmatically, "despite the fact that one of you is an innocent."
"It's the child," she says, wryly.
"So you say," Yon Rha rubs at his chin with one hand, before sighing almost as if in defeat. He removes his helmet, and places it between his feet. "I had hoped it wouldn't come to this," he says, and slaps the woman straight across the face. She gasps loudly and crumples, groping at her face (red and sore and stinging) with her hands. Katara whimpers somewhere in the back of the cell, but both adults ignore her. Yon Rha heaves Kya upright, his hands twisted through the collar of her tunic, he pulls so hard that she chokes and splutters. "Why don't you tell me that the child is the waterbender, and that you are protecting her? Save yourself. Save her. I have orders to bring her back alive if it turns out that way."
"Such blatant lies do not work so close up," Kya spits, defiant (and stupid, as always when her daughter was concerned) at his feet, and receives another backhanded slap for her efforts that sends her reeling backwards, splayed out on the floor.
"So be it—" he begins, but neither of them had noticed the child creeping slowly towards them. They had not noticed the grim determination on her face, or her hands curled into fists at her side.
"Katara…" Kya says, her tone a subtle warning, but things have gone too far now for the child to stop.
Her cheekbones have flushed a dark shade of puce, and the tray of tea that the guard had brought for them before Yon Rha appeared bubbles.
"Leave her alone!" she says, and as her mother struggles to her feet and reaches for Katara's skinny little arms (so deceiving, so powerful), the teacups explode. Delicate boned china shatters and scalding hot tea sprays the walls, the low ceiling… the commander's face. He roars in outrage, and bends down to rip a large splinter of cup from his shin.
"The child you are trying so hard to protect will be the death of you, then," he snarls, and raises the flats of his hands. Katara is knocked backwards by the force of the fire – the last thing she sees is her mother's face, torn with anguish and despair, her hands reaching out as if to hold onto her.
She is blown backwards against the metal frame of the cot that had been a comfort before, curled up with her mother in the endless night down here below deck. Her head cracks against a corner, and the room spins in front of her eyes. Smoke, she sees, and flame, red and menacing. Through the gloom she can see two figures, a raised hand, she can hear shouts and screams and pleas and she raises her hand to the back of her head. It comes away dark and sticky and she frowns down at it. She tries to raise her head again, but it is suddenly very heavy, and she is very sleepy, and there is no point trying to keep her eyelids from closing, she thinks, and there they go; as if they have a mind of their own.
She wakes up curled into her mother's parka, her nose nestled into the soft polar bear dog fur at the collar, and thinks that everything is as it should be. Her mother will come along shortly to wake her up for breakfast, and Sokka will crack some stupid joke that makes her snort milk out of her nostrils out of how utterly not funny and ridiculous it was, and then maybe her dad would take them out canoeing.
Her eyes crack open very slowly – it's too hard to open them, she thinks, but she doesn't worry about it, not yet – and her heart drops so quick in her chest that she almost gasps out loud.
Metal walls, metal ceiling, metal floor, metal bars covering the door; she is totally surrounded and it is not by something comfortable.
Not blankets of thick, white fresh snow that stretches on for miles and miles, so far and so bright that it wasn't unheard of for people to go blind from it. Katara never thought of it like that, though, she had never considered it as something that could drive a person mad. It was home, pure and simple and the white was even etched behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes to sleep at night.
A bright white that lingers, and taunts her now, as her lashes flutter once, twice before she screws her eyes shut and wishes (crosses her fingers, her toes) to see it again.
Instead she sees solid grey and criss-crossed black and her chin wobbles.
"Mommy?" she is uncertain even before she opens her eyes properly to have a look around the room – she is pretty sure that she's alone. She'd know if her mom was in here, surely? There'd be the sound of someone else breathing, a soothing hand on her forehead.
Katara struggles upward – her limbs feel thick and heavy and don't cooperate – and is promptly forced back down again by what she now realised had been a dull ache in her head turning into this sharp pain like a hundred knives pressing into her skull.
She holds her head in her hands and feels the thick bandage wound around it. Her hair feels different, she thinks, and finds that she worries about that more than the things she should – like, the most pressing issue to hand, her mother.
Valiantly ignoring the piercing trills any movement sends through her head, she climbs to her feet and stalks precariously towards the door of her cell. Her hands twine around the bars and she peers out, her voice a tentative tremor: "mom, mommy, where are you?" A soldier sitting perched on a crate outside snaps to attention, and slams the visor of his helmet down.
Katara thinks he might be the soldier from before – the one who had first dropped them off at the brig, but she can't be sure. The helmet means anonymity over all things, and besides, she can't quite bring herself to care.
"Do you know where my mom is?" she asks, and realises that she is crying. Sad, pathetic hiccoughs wrack her tiny chest, and she presses her face into the bars like some wretched little animal yearning for its freedom.
She remembers fire and smoke and yelling, and she is scared. She remembers, and she wishes she hadn't.
"Welcome back to the world of the living, kiddo," Katara's breath catches in her throat, answer the question, she wants to say (there is nothing worse than being ignored) but she chokes on the words and splutters at him instead. "Doc thought you were a goner for a while," the soldier tilts his head to the side and considers her, "tougher than you look, huh? Anyway, your mom is… well; the Commander wasn't too pleased with what happened in the brig. You're in the medical bay right now, a specialised part of it. I'm not authorised to answer any other questions right now. Probably shouldn't be talking to you at all, come to think of it." Katara is silent, her eyebrows furrowing thickly on her forehead. "You hungry? Thirsty?"
She shakes her head and retreats back to the bunk she'd woken up on, and pulls her mother's parka down, presses it into the corner of the room. She huddles down into it, and pulls her knees up into her chest. She sits there like that for hours, until a guard (she's not sure which one) leaves a tray with a cup of tea and a bowl of boiled rice with some kind of white meat and vegetable dumplings.
The next day she waits at the bars again, until she can be sure that the guard outside is hers (she's not sure when she'd come to think of him as that – as something belonging to her, when he doesn't even care, he's as cruel and callous as ever).
"Mornin', kiddo," he says, and sits down unceremoniously on the crate outside her cell.
"How long have I been away from mommy for?" she asks, folding up against the bars like wet rice paper.
"Uh," he hesitates, fiddles with the visor of his helmet, and then lifts it up. He has eyes like little flecks of sunlight, though they look dangerous, narrow and sharp like a predator's, "pretty much a week, give or take a day."
"Please will you take me to her, please, I just want to see if she's okay," Katara is pleading, desperate, her eyes wide and wet with tears and for a minute the guards stony expression falters and then with a heavy sigh he turns his face away from her and pulls his visor down. She rests her forehead on the bars, and pretends that the tears on her cheeks are flakes of white snow.
The air in here is much drier than it had been in the brig, she notices. The lack of moisture is draining her energy quicker than it should have, and it takes her longer every day to open her eyes, it makes it harder to stand up and press the guards outside for information (so astute, so wily for an eight year old, but all she wants is her mother and she wants her now and she'll do anything to be reunited with her).
On the fourth day (she asked the guard who brought her lunch in for her: "what day is it? Where's my mom? I want my mommy,") she is frustrated. She slaps her palms against the bars as she talks to her guard and her face gets redder and redder and redder. The big ship had stilled underneath her hours before, and she misses the comforting way it almost rocked her to sleep.
"Better be on your best behaviour kiddo," her guard remarks, scanning a dog-eared book he'd pulled from a pocket somewhere in his uniform, "got big fish coming to see you today."
"Who?" she'd demanded of him, and when these demands were not met, she retreated into her cell to scream under her breath and kick at the walls.
The 'big fish' turned out to be a very tall man with lots of black hair that he had up in kind of a girly style, held into place with a gold flame thing that Katara eyed nervously. It was all sharp edges and dangerous looking, the same colour as his mean, slanted eyes. Straight away she knows that she doesn't trust him. He comes with her evening tea and she makes the same demands as usual – so used to the ritual by now that she almost sounds bored with all of it.
"Where's my mommy?" she asks first, and with the flicker of amusement on his face she grows bolder. Her face is puce red and her hands are clenched fists at her side. "Go get my mommy, ok, I need to see her now! Who are you? Where is my mom? What have you done to her?"
"Me?" he asks, incredulous, "how could I have done anything to her? Your ship just docked in my city, child, I am innocent of the crimes you would have had me commit."
"Crimes?" Katara is suspicious, squinting up at him as she sits cross-legged on her bunk with a small cup of tea balanced on one of her knees, "so something bad has happened to her?"
She can sense the pleasure coming off of him in waves – but she doesn't know why. What has she done, to make him so very happy? His gratification makes her angry, and she scowls viciously and turns her face away as he speaks: "you are very clever for one so young," he says quietly, then, "how old are you, child?"
"I'm eight years old," she is spitting and hissing almost in her unruly irritation, "I'm not a child so you can stop calling me that, okay? My name's Katara."
"Very well, Katara. You may call me Ozai, for now," she wonders what that means, for now, but she doesn't have time to ponder for long, "your mother is dead, Katara."
Some people talk about these great moments of despair, of bleeding hearts ripped from chests and bitter salty tears, but Katara is just… numb. From head to toe she is numb, and she swallows again and again with a throat so dry that it catches and clacks and Ozai stares down at her with quirked eyebrows as though he disapproves.
"Take a sip of tea," he says plainly.
She waits for some great rush of terror to hit, some great flood of tears to be unleashed from her eyes. Instead, she wants to curl up in her mother's parka (the smell of salt water and fresh air and that inexplicable smell that was just mommy) and go to sleep.
"I don't believe you," she intones stonily, even though she does.
"Oh," Ozai does not seem surprised, whatever kind of impression of it he might attempt, "I believe that the body has not been disposed of yet: Would you like to take a look at it?"
Katara's fury is quick to rise; she splutters and her cheeks turn a heady shade of red. "No," she manages to spit, but then there is nothing else, though a hundred different words press hard at her lips. And then it is finished – the girl gives up. With one long exhalation she puts her teacup on the floor and goes to sit on top of her mother's coat. She buries her face into it, and she sobs so hard that her body convulses, she sobs so hard that she can feel the neat, careful stitches in the back of her head unthreading, she sobs so hard that she chokes on her own phlegm and has to cough and sputter for a few minutes to get her breath back.
(What is the point, now, she thinks, when all she has left in the world is her mother's coat and her childish defiance against immeasurable powers?)
She can hear the man leaving. His feet are heavy on the metal floor and the bars scrape as he drags the door closed. She doesn't care. She lies curled on the floor until her eyes are dry, but the sobs still come. They are uncontrollable.
Eventually the numbness returns, and she lies spread-eagled on the cold, hard floor, staring up into grey nothingness.
Her mother is dead.
Her father is dead.
Her brother as dead.
Even her grandmother will be dead, by red fire and black smoke.
She might as well be dead herself, she thinks.
What is there to live for, now?
Breakfast comes with the big fish, Ozai, instead of with her guard. She eyes him from the corner, until he sits down on her bunk, and he is too close to ignore. She has to crane her neck back to see him from her vantage point on the floor, and he looks appropriately solemn. She supposes that she will speak with him today, if that is what he wants.
"I'm here to talk to you about your mother," and Katara drops her eyes to her feet, "about how she died. About who killed her."
The pit of Katara's stomach coils and churns and aches for justice.
"Who do you think killed her?" he asks, and when she replies she is so certain that her chin juts out at a right angle.
"The commander."
"Why do you think that?"
"Before I hit my head, he was – there was fire. He was making the fire."
"Do you remember why he was making the fire?" Ozai is looking at her with such sincerity that she starts to trust him. Just the tiniest bit though, because he still looks like the messenger hawk her guard had brought to show her – and those things were not pretty.
"I think – I'm not sure. He was hitting my mommy!"
"And was that what made the fire?" he asks, very gently.
"Yes. No. No – the teacups," she is thinking hard now, her bottom lip pouting with the effort to remember what happened that day in the brig, "they exploded. He must have got burned. Maybe it made him angry."
That – that is what Ozai was looking for. He bridges his long, pale fingers, and stares down at the little water tribe girl.
"How ever did the tea cups explode?" he asks, surprise tingeing the very edges of his tone.
Katara's face blanches in realisation. She grips the bottom of her tunic with her fingers, and wrings it round and round until all the blood seeps away from them. White-knuckled and white-cheeked, she whispers: "it was me."
"Pardon?" he asks – he needs to hear it louder.
"It was me. I made the teacups explode. I – I was scared."
"Ah, I see. The commander didn't kill your mother, then? She would still be here if it hadn't be for the tea scalding him, I think." Ozai is almost bristling with his victory – manipulating water tribe peasants was much easier than he had first thought, and he wonders why he hadn't thought of this ingenious plan years ago. Again, he asks: "Who killed your mother?"
"… it was me… I – I killed my mother."
The turning point in their conversation is marked with a child's sour realisation and a man's sick glee – her face whitens and her shoulders slump, he grins and he sits up straighter. The numbness is back, pin pricks all over her body, except this time she accepts it: she thinks that maybe this is better than any of the other options, the heartbreak, the despair.
"This could have been prevented, Katara, if only your parents weren't traitors to the Fire Nation. If your father hadn't fought against our missionaries then children like you would have had a chance to understand your control over the elements – your people were too stubborn to accept our help, and because of this your mother died. Many innocent people are killed because they do not accept our help when we offer it – can you understand why?"
"No! Why wasn't I allowed to learn?"
"I don't know, Katara. That is something that your traitor parents kept to themselves."
"My dad told me not to bend in front of anyone except him and mommy, once."
"Perhaps they didn't want you to be the best that you can be – the best waterbender ever in the history of the world. You have that potential, Katara; I can see it in you. If you stay here with me, I will teach you everything you need to know. Nothing you need to know will be denied." Her insatiable curiosity is piqued; she peers at him over her tiny nose. "Will you come with me?"
Ozai extends one of his hands towards her, and she stares at it. If he didn't know better he would say that she was weighing up her options. (Not that he was an expert on what water peasants thought.) She turns away from him, and his heart thumps in his chest. In that instant he floods with anger, and whips back his hand. He is fighting for control when she turns back with her mother's coat held pathetically in her hands.
"Yes, please. I would like that very much," she says, and slides up next to him to search for his hand beneath the majestic folds of his crimson robes.
They emerge from the belly of the metal beast, towards sea and salt and despite the familiarity of that the heat hits her before she appreciate and she wilts visibly. She blinks in the sunlight like a newborn, but the pressure on her hand is insistent so there is no turning back – not now. Her spare hand is buried in her mother's coat, so she cannot shield her eyes from the glare of the sun (she can feel it, high in the sky, before she sees it, her enemy, she thinks, somehow jovially) and it takes a while before she can crack her eyelids far enough open to see the harbour.
The ships is anchored far enough out that Katara can see a huge lump of something (brown and green and yellow, what on earth, where's the white,) rising towards the sky, and when Ozai points towards it she hangs off his every word.
"That is a volcano," he tells her, "and that is where the Royal City of Caldera is located. Your new home."
She remembers: big fish.
"Are you important?" she asks, purely genuine, the way only a child can be, and Ozai is so starkly reminded of his son that his breath nearly catches in his throat. Nearly.
"I am," he says, and amusement tickles at his tone, "I am the Fire Lord, leader of the almighty Fire Nation and all it's colonies."
Katara doesn't understand all the words, exactly, but his tone and the straightness of his back is enough. She stares up at him wide-eyed, and he let's go her hand as they descend a ladder strewn across the side of the ship to a smaller vessel that will take them closer to shore.
As the Fire Lord and his young protégée with the bright blue eyes walk engrossed in conversation along the winding path towards the Capital city, the Southern Raiders begin to disband; they lower their black and red Sea Ravens that had once whipped so proudly in the wind, for there is no Southern Water Tribe left to raid.
A/N: Ok so I probably should have made it clearer that the prologue was set quite far along in the narrative of this story, and that we would be jumping back in time to see how Katara got so skewed and horrifically out of character! I'm not sure if the next few chapters will be easy or particularly pleasant reading, considering we'll be discovering what turned such a sweet little girl into the monster we saw in the prologue; but stick with it if you can and wonderful things will happen eventually. Maybe even a bit of fluff. If we're lucky, ahahaha.
I've changed my update day to Wednesday, though I have a feeling next week's might be a bit delayed as the next chapter is going to be quite draining… it'll feature Hama the Bloodbender (eeee I'm ridiculously excited ;D) and semi-assassin Katara.
A big thank you to everyone who reviewed/faved/story alerted; feedback is much appreciated (I basically live off of concrit). Also thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to read my humble scribblings! A big epic thank you to my beta read goes here because her annotations literally make my life! I LOVE YOU.