Chapter 3: Moon
When they drew near the ledge, Katara leaped off Appa's head and landed on the coarse mountain grass.
But there was one problem. The triangular wedge of land in the side of the mountain was almost completely covered with moon peach trees. Appa had no room to land, let alone hide.
"You need to go somewhere safe," she told the sky bison. "I'll call you when I find Aang."
Appa responded with a worried rumble.
"I'll find Aang. I promise."
Her words were really meant to reassure herself, but Appa seemed to understand. He dipped below the ledge and vanished into the low clouds surrounding the mountains.
Katara glanced at the sky. Even the cloud blocking the moon could not entirely blot out its light, which shone as a muffled glow through the thick layer of water vapor separating sky from earth. As the cloud's wispy edge drifted closer to the moon, the night grew a little less dark. In a few short moments, the cloud would uncover the moon completely.
There wasn't much time. She had to find Aang.
Katara crouched with her palm flat on the grass. The earth didn't give up its secrets to her like it did with Toph. But the earth still grounded her.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The air helped her focus, sharpened her senses. She held her position even as the darkness that concealed her steadily faded into light.
Thump-thump
Her breath caught. The sound—if the beat of Aang's blood could be called a sound—was faint, almost swallowed up in the rustling wind.
Thump-thump
Her head jerked up in the direction of the moon peach trees. She bolted for the shade of their leaves just as moonlight brightened the sky once more.
Katara ran. She dodged fallen branches, ducked under low-lying boughs. Her braid flapped against her back. The moon's white glow dappled the grove through gaps between the trees, lighting her way as a beacon and blinding her whenever she passed through the pools of light and back into darkness.
The pounding of her footsteps drowned out the thump of Aang's heart, but she knew where he was.
She entered another patch of moonlight, then plunged into the blindness of night. Her foot caught on something hard on the ground. She pitched forward—
And slammed into a wall of earth.
The next thing Katara knew, she was rolling on the ground in pain. She clutched her bruised shoulder, gasping for the air that was knocked out of her lungs.
When her breathing finally quieted, she heard it again.
Thump-thump
No, she didn't just hear it. She felt it. She felt Aang's heartbeat as clearly as her own.
He was on the other side of the rock wall.
Katara stumbled to her feet and groped along the rough surface of rock. Soon her hands found the opening of the crude shelter that Aang had created, a slab of earth bent at an angle into the side of the mountain.
And in the wedge of space between the rock and the mountainside, invisible to anyone but a bloodbender, lay Aang.
Katara dropped to her knees and pawed at the ground in the pitch-black dark of the shelter. Her fingers brushed against stiff fabric—the woolen upper of an Air Nomad boot. Her frantic hands moved up a pair of legs, over tattered robes, up the torso. One shoulder was bare when it shouldn't be—for such a historic pilgrimage, Aang would be dressed in his formal robes with a golden shawl around his shoulders.
Her hands shook as they traveled down the gash in his clothing. His skin was too cool, his breathing too shallow. His heartbeat too weak.
Then she found the edge of something sticky and ragged. Her fingers sank into a gap—a tear—a split in the flesh, where Aang should be whole. A scream rose in her chest before she remembered that the enemy had ears as well as eyes. But clamping down couldn't smother the strangled sob that burst from her throat.
Water, was her only thought in the haze of shock.
Aang needs water.
Bending water flew from her sealskin pouch to the gash in Aang's side. The glow of healing illuminated the tiny, dark space. Katara finally saw what had been hidden from her eyes—Aang with robes torn and burned, skin smeared with dirt and scrapes. Head tilted to the side, mouth slightly agape.
His wound, red and raw and angry. Blood mingled with the cool light of healing, dark tendrils twisting through the water like smoke curling from a flame.
Keeping one hand over the wound, Katara brought her other hand to Aang's chest. Beneath her palm, his heart skipped and stuttered.
She had felt rhythms like this before. Frantic and feeble, the final gasps of a body clinging to life.
The rhythm of a heart about to go out.
She moved her hand from his chest to join the one over the wound. The water was darker now, murky with blood. Aang's blood.
He's bleeding out, she realized.
Katara could heal the wound in his side—enough to stop the bleeding, at least. But even as the shredded blood vessels and tissue knit back together beneath her hands, she knew that she was healing something that could not be fixed.
Because nothing she did was going to make a difference.
Waterbending healing can work marvelous wonders, but even bending has its limits. Most wounds can be healed by harnessing the body's resources in the form of chi. But bending chi cannot replenish blood that had already drained out from the body.
Between the time it took for Aang to escape and send her that desperate message, and for her to fly over the waves to the temple, he had lost a lot of blood. Too much blood.
Katara sealed the last vein shut. Blood no longer oozed out from the wound. She laid one hand over his chest.
His heart barely fluttered now, on the verge of collapse.
Aang was dying.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
The healing water splashed to the ground, joining the blood that had soaked into the earth. Darkness returned. Katara felt for Aang's hands and took them in her own. Grief pressed down on her, so heavy and numb that she could hardly feel his hands, so limp and so cold, as she folded them between her fingers. She was only vaguely aware of her body shuddering, of the hot tears trailing down her cheeks and onto their joined hands.
But though she could barely feel anything, she knew that Aang couldn't feel her at all.
They were high up on a mountain, hidden in an earthbent shelter in the dead of night. No one knew where they were. No one could help them. Even if someone did come, no one could save Aang, not even the most talented healers in the world.
Katara was helpless to do anything but hold his hands as his life slipped away.
And after he died…
She would be alone.
The darkness of the shelter lifted as moonlight filtered in through a crevice between the rock wall and the mountainside at the far end of the shelter. Soon the round face of the moon filled the gap, cold and white, a silent witness to the death of the Avatar.
The death of Aang—her friend—the boy who held her heart.
Katara had never felt more alone in her life.
She clasped Aang's hands against her chest, which heaved with sobs and an anguish that split her to the core.
"You are not alone."
A flutter like the wings of a moth, a whisper on the edge of her grief.
Katara sobbed and sobbed, insensible to the world around her.
"You are not alone."
The words came again, moonlight dusting over skin.
This time, Katara looked up.
She wasn't alone.
Across from her, on the other side of Aang's body, was a woman in a flowing gown that shone like the moon. White hair was woven into two loops above her head and braided into long strands over her shoulders. But what made her so familiar was the sorrow in her pale eyes. Katara had seen that same sorrow before, in the face of the princess of the Northern Water Tribe.
"You are not alone, Katara," Yue said, with eternity echoing in the dulcet tones of her voice. "I am always with you."
Author's note: So...what was supposed to be chapter 3 is turning out to be chapter 3 and 4 😅 One more chapter to go!
As always, I'd love to hear what you think!