Author's Note:
This extension to the prologue was created during the rewrite.
Prologue 3: The New Prisoner
"Enjoy your stay here, child," the warden sneered in a cold voice that made the little girl shiver despite the stifling heat. "For you will never see the outside world again."
The cage door slammed shut, and her soul, already broken, finally shattered.
Everything had been taken from her.
Her mother. Her freedom. Her dignity.
And now, her life.
The heartbreak was too much now for the little girl to bear.
Her breathing became ragged and wild as she started to hyperventilate. The tears came as the remaining moisture in her body was used up.
Her shoulders shook as she buried her face in her hands. Her small body was wracked with desolate, broken sobs.
She cried for hours.
Her surroundings became all but forgotten. At one point, she eventually remembered that there were other people in the cages around her, but she never lifted her hands away from her face.
She knew where she was. She knew escape was impossible.
But if she looked at her surroundings for even a second longer, she would also lose her sanity.
This was where waterbenders were brought to die.
For a long, long while, she was only aware of the metal floor beneath her, the suffocating heat around her, and her muffled cries of anguish which echoed in the vast darkness of the prison.
But eventually, like her shattered spirit, her body grew weary as well.
Exhausted and utterly defeated, the little girl finally let the darkness claim her too.
She slept fitfully, uncomfortable in the heat, and her unconscious mind unable to dream.
She was still sleeping the next morning, when a loud clang startled her awake. Jolting upright, she caught sight of the Fire Nation soldier who had banged his sword against the bars of her cell.
"Get up, runt," he growled at her. Sheathing his sword, he tossed something inside her cage. Katara shrank away from his menacing silhouette, his masked and armoured form giving him a demonic appearance to the little girl's perspective. She slumped in relief when he had disappeared down the aisle.
The inside of the prison was too dark to allow normal visibility, so Katara had to crawl closer to the object to get a better look at it. Her muscles ached in protest. Sleeping while curled up on a hard metal floor had not done wonders for her body.
She ended up crawling on her hands and knees, as her bare feet were still sore from the long trek yesterday. She whimpered when she saw how bruised and battered her feet still were. Her wrists still ached and chafed from the shackles scraping her skin. However, most of the wounds and cuts on her feet had scabbed over, probably assisted by the dry heat.
At least that was one good thing to happen to her in a long while.
When she drew near, the object turned out to be a bread slice.
She made a face. She was getting rather sick of bread. Especially stale and mouldy ones at that.
Still though, there was nothing else to choose from, so she made herself eat her morning ration.
She had a little difficulty swallowing with a dry throat, and she wished she had some water to drink.
A short while later, that wish was granted — in an unpleasant and humiliating way.
Another armoured soldier came around, carrying a bunch of manacles which were slung over his shoulder. He approached her cage first.
"Move away from the door and go to the center of your cage," he ordered.
Katara obeyed silently and without question. Once she had done as instructed, the soldier took out a key and unlocked her cage door. He clambered inside, and Katara felt her stomach clench at the uncomfortably close proximity. She hugged her legs a little tighter.
"On your knees, and spread out your arms," he spoke again.
Katara did so, shifting positions and stretching out her arms to both sides.
The soldier took hold of her left arm, fastening the manacle on her wrist and attaching the other end to one of the latticed bars that formed the top of her cage.
He then did the same to her right arm.
After this, he left her cage and moved onto the next one.
Bound in her awkward position, Katara could only stare down miserably at the floor of her cage.
The coarse metal bit into her wrists, rubbing against skin which was still raw from yesterday.
It took a long while for the guard to shackle up the rest of the prisoners. By the time he was done, Katara's arms were already starting to get sore.
Two more guards entered, one of them carrying a long metal pole with a tin cup attached at the end. They weren't as heavily armoured as the other soldiers charged with providing security, as these pair of guards were meant for more menial tasks — distributing water rations to the prisoners.
Though their features weren't hidden behind helmets, these guards still looked intimidating — they still held the same cold and cruel look in their eyes.
The pair of guards passed by her cage, and started off in one of the rows behind her. She could hear the sounds of tortured slurping as one by one, the shackled prisoners drank their share of water.
They came to her last, their harsh and merciless gazes still intact and unrelenting.
Katara looked down submissively and waited for the cup to be extended her way. It was done so, after several long uncomfortable seconds. She raised her head tiredly and parted her lips, lapping up the water and letting the pure liquid flow down her dry throat.
Water had never tasted so good to her before.
How preciously young and naïve she had been.
After the watering guards left, the same armoured soldier from before came to unchain them.
It took a long while.
Again, she was saved for last.
The routine in the prison made itself apparent.
They were all given pieces of bread once more a little after noon, then they were chained up again and were given water to drink.
Then they had to endure the long, hot afternoon.
In the stifling and suffocating heat, seconds became minutes, and minutes dragged on into hours.
Katara could only sit in her cage, completely drained of energy, and unable to do anything to relieve the pain.
Her mind was hazy and blurred, yet the agony of this torturous existence stabbed at her consciousness like a sharp knife.
Evening eventually came.
Bread slices were distributed.
Following that, they were chained up tightly once more.
And rationed water — far too little water — was held up in a cup in front of them, ready for them to slurp up.
And they did so, messily and desperately lapping up as much life-giving liquid as they could, even if the amount was far too small to truly let them live.
It was not enough.
It was never enough.
After that, there was nothing else to do except to try and find sleep.
Uncomfortable, aching and sore, it was hard for all of them to slip into the realm of unconsciousness.
But one by one, they each found their own way to enter into the empty void of sleep.
No one talked.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. The guards yelled at them, insulted them, cursed them, and ordered them about. But they didn't count.
No, the prisoners themselves remained silent and submissive. Oppressed and downcast and yielding.
The silence was painful. Katara longed for the friendly chatter and communal gossip that floated around in the wintery air back home, but that was never going to happen here.
Here, the only words spoken were curses and insults and orders and threats levelled at her and her brethren.
The only sounds to be heard were the rumbling of the air pumps, the creaking of gears, the clanking of machinery, and the occasional cough of a prisoner.
The silence was almost as suffocating as the heat was.
She sighed sadly and curled up on the warm floor of her cage to cry.
A few days later, she was jarred awake again by the sounds of clanging metal.
She looked around wearily, her eyes bleary and unfocused, before her vision cleared and she could see two soldiers regarding the cage across from hers. The old man inside it was no more. Instead, a lifeless body lay there on the floor, motionless and pale. Its eyes were closed, though the expression on its face was far from peaceful.
One of the soldiers banged his sword against the bars once more.
"No point in doing any more of that," his partner remarked, "It's dead."
Without warning, the elderly woman in the cage behind her spoke up.
"He had a name, you know," she croaked through a dry throat. Despite the tiredness in the elder's voice, Katara could detect the subtle undertones of bold defiance.
"Yeah. He had. Now be quiet, you old crone," the first soldier snapped.
The other soldier produced a key from his belt and unlocked the cage door.
The soldier with the sword now sheathed his weapon. He climbed into the cage and lugged the body of the old man towards the door. He let it drop through the opening, the corpse crashing onto the metal walkway with a sickening thwack.
Katara flinched at the noise and averted her gaze. But that was all she could do. The morbid sight was too surreal for her to react in any way other than catatonia.
But the old woman in the cage beside her wasn't affected. She had seen many of her brothers and sisters depart from this cruel world right before her eyes, all while she could do nothing.
Nothing, except bid them farewell on their journey to the Spirit World.
"Goodbye, Runik. May your ancestors welcome you, and help you find peace in the afterlife."
The woman spoke quietly and softly, so as not to draw the ire of the soldiers on duty. But the pair of troopers would never have heard it, for they were already out of earshot, dragging the body behind them by the legs.
The other prisoners nearby heard her words, however.
Katara heard them too, and was left dwelling gloomily on the solemn valediction for the rest of the day.
That night, she dreamed of the first time when she had been old enough to help out with the other children and their mothers in making clothes and preserving food out of the catch that the men had brought back from one of their long hunting trips.
The mothers were in charge of preparing the meat for storage. Among the bountiful catch, there were plenty of fish, walruses, and seals to go around. It was most fortunate for the tribe, as later that year the South Pole had been blitzed with some of the fiercest winter snowstorms that the tribe had ever experienced in decades.
The children, meanwhile, would help the elders in making clothing and tenting materials out of the leftover skin and intestines of the walruses and seals.
Katara, five years old at the time, had expressed some childish disdain and naivety upon handling the corpses of the hunted prey for the first time.
"Why do we have to kill them, Mom?" she had asked her mother, who was busy helping several other mothers strip the fur off a tiger seal.
"We hunt them because we need their meat as food to eat, and their fur and skin as materials and resources, sweetie," Kya had told her.
"Yeah, like you've never had a problem with eating fish before," Sokka had teased her from off to the side. A long strand of walrus intestine was looped around one of his arms like a coil of rope.
What Sokka had been forgetting, however, was that this was his sister's first time with helping out in the communal butchery. While she had lived on a diet of meat just like everyone else in the tribe, this was her first time in physically handling the fresh, raw, and blood-filled corpses of the animals.
"They're just animals," her brother continued bluntly.
Before Katara could protest, her mother intervened to correct them both.
"That's not exactly correct, son. Even though we're humans, and we have a higher status than animals because of our spirituality and sentience, that does not give us the right to disrespect nature and its animals. We do not and should not over-hunt them, lest they go extinct, or else what shall we have to eat then? And when we kill them, we do so quickly. A swift death with the least pain is our way of thanking them and honouring their sacrifice for our continued survival."
Katara and Sokka took this all in, captivated by their mother's wisdom.
Kya solemnly continued, "That's what the people of the Fire Nation have forgotten. They purge and take resources and living beings that are not their own, all in their attempts to win the war. They would be more than happy to step over the bodies of any creature on their way to victory."
Shortly after Kya had finished speaking, Bato, Hakoda, and several other men bustled into the butchery igloo, hoisting over their shoulders the prize of their catch. A single whale-walrus, its half-frozen blood still occasionally oozing out of the multiple stab wounds where the men's spears had brought it down.
"You dealt the blow that finally struck down this mighty beast, Rikihana, so you get the head," Bato said.
"Cheers to that, my friend," the fellow hunter grinned, before taking a large chopping knife and slamming it into the thick neck of the whale-walrus. Blood spurted and spilled over the ice in the immediate area.
Katara stood stock-still, staring wide-eyed at the bloody sight before her.
"Feeling a little arctic chicken, are we?" Sokka quipped, teasing his little sister as the men engaged in hearty laughter around them.
"N-no…" Katara had replied numbly, her voice quivering.
"Really, boys," Kya muttered under her breath, before taking her daughter by the hand. "Come on, sweetie. Gran-Gran would love your help in making pelts."
That was the first time Katara had seen a dead body. And it wouldn't be the last.
But the corpses of animals couldn't compare to that of a human's.
The way the soldiers had handled the body unsettled her greatly as well. Before she had been taken, she had seen the way that her father had lovingly held and caressed her mother's corpse, deep in mourning.
In contrast, the guards had just dumped the old man's body on the floor like a sack of frozen sea prunes.
That cold-hearted callousness had terrified her, leaving her badly shaken. But the worst was yet to come.
The next passing one week later brought out more of a reaction from her.
It was nearing the end of another long day in the cruel, confined world of the prison.
Despite the routine and schedule of the place, the living conditions had only worsened over time.
The guards brutally woke them up just after dawn, jolting them awake with loud yelling and bar-banging. They were given a morning meal, a morning drink, a lunch meal, a lunch drink, and now, Katara supposed, they were waiting to be given their evening meal and evening drink.
Though calling meagre rations a "meal" was stretching the very definition of the word.
And three small cups of water a day was never enough to quench their thirst. To say nothing of the agonizing and degrading way they were given water — with their arms chained up at inhuman angles, and having to wait in a kneeling position, unable to move until everyone had been given their drink and the soldier on duty came to unshackle them.
Their state of dehydration got more and more dire.
Now her body was always complaining, but there was nothing she could do about the perpetual torture.
Her head was hurting constantly, futilely protesting about the lack of water in her body. The hot, dry air stifled her breathing, making her chest hurt. What little moisture she had left was gradually sapped from her eyes and mouth and throat, causing her more agony and pain.
But perhaps the worst part of it all was the fact that she was still young, and still full of life.
The other prisoners around her were much older — they had endured this pathetic and torturous existence for far longer than she had.
Despite her anguished distress, she was better off compared to the adults. The majority of them seemed half-alive, at most. The elders, however, seemed to be clinging to their last few threads of mortality.
And they were all losing their will to live, with each passing day.
In one of the cages in the fifth row, another elder had finally stopped breathing. She lay still and unmoving, slumped against the bars of her cage, her eyes closed.
She had nestled in the corner of her cage after their noon drink, and had stayed there for the rest of the day.
Katara had naively believed she was sleeping. She herself had slept for a couple of hours in a pathetic attempt to ease her own pain. It didn't quite work out as well as she had hoped. She had woken up, more aching and sore than before.
She had also missed out on an important detail because of her sleep.
None of them had been given water for the night.
Katara looked over at the sleeping elder, and wondered if the older waterbender had the right idea. Maybe the guards would come a little bit later with their water rations, and it would be best to sleep again now.
The old woman looked peaceful in her repose. But the young waterbender was about to find out just why she looked so placid and still.
When twilight's last gleaming came and a pair of guards did their routine sweep, once they checked on the old woman in her cage, it had become clear that she had died in her sleep at some point during the afternoon.
The little girl heard a quiet murmur from the cage beside hers. Resigned words of goodbye from one old friend to another dearly departed one.
"Farewell, Dimika. Thank you for being our friend, and may you find peace in the Spirit World."
The guards unlocked the cage, dumped the body outside on the walkway, and hauled it away for disposal.
The sight and sounds of another stiff corpse being dragged along the metal floor pushed Katara over the edge.
This was it.
The harrowing truth finally pierced her heart.
There would be no escape for any of them.
They would all die here.
She would never see her family again.
Gasping painfully, she burst into tears, ragged sobs wracking her little body.
She curled into herself on the cage floor, crying inconsolably, sprawled on her side. She had no strength to prop herself up. Her resolve had left her, along with her hope.
As the horrible feeling of helplessness descended upon her with the coming night, a voice in the cage beside her rose gently in tone. A quiet whisper of a tender song. A lullaby that all parents and children back home knew.
"Gentle pool, the wind blows by,
Gently sigh.
See the snow and ice,
All the clouds up high.
What a sight.
Feel the soft chill on your skin,
And let your face smile.
Let's play outside for a while,
For a while."
Katara's mother had often sang this to her, usually after a big fight with Sokka, or a scolding from Gran-Gran at the end of the day.
Right now, Katara was silent and still, her spirit holding on to every word. She blinked away her tears.
"Gentle stream, the current flows,
Let it snow.
Gently twist and twirl,
See the waves unfurl.
This is our world.
Feel the snowflakes on your nose,
Feel the cold down to your toes.
This is the place that we call home.
This is home."
The little girl let her sprawled body relax on the cage floor, trying to get as comfortable as she could. She clasped her hands together and laid her head to rest on top of them.
Her eyes slowly started to droop, her body weary from shedding tears, and tired from the dry heat.
The old woman began to sing the final verse.
"Gentle sea, the waves roll by,
Gently sigh.
The water beckons us.
It calls and summons us.
Let us reply.
Let us journey far and wide.
Raise the sails and catch the tide.
We'll let the ocean be our guide.
Guide us home…
Guide us home…"
Katara closed her eyes and fell into the comforting embrace of sleep as the song reached its end.
"Guide us home…"
There's a few more chapters to the extended prologue that I have yet to upload, so please bear with me.
I just figured that I ought to upload at least some chapters that I've been working on over the past two years, lest I lose my sanity.
PUBLISHED ON = 15 / 10 / 2021