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THE LAST THING YUN REMEMBERED WAS LAKE LAOGAI. She remembered the cool drip of the water from her matted hair, and the terrible migraines. She remembered a light, and then - She can't remember anything past those small snippets of her life.
Yun knew she was born poor. No matter how hard she tried to picture the faces of a family, not a single image appeared within her mind. She didn't have a family; That much was a given. Her stomach remembered the emptiness and the lack of food far more than her mind did, but it gnawed at her soul nonetheless.
She remembered the steady earth beneath her fingers, far below the freezing temperatures of the lake, where the only rocks she could bend were the ones stuck to her hair. The vivid scent of metal lingered long after it had been overtaken by the water clogging Yun's nostrils as she struggled against the lake's pull.
The last thing Yun recalled was the dull pounding of her head and the wave of relief at her successful escape from Ba Sing Se, the very testimony of peace of whose falsities she so yearned to run away from.
She awoke with nothing more than slush in her brain and a searing pain in her temples, feet sunken into the cool earth and face smushed flat against the floor.
There was sand clogging her ears and buried in the crevices of her dirty clothes, salty dryness coating the whole of her mouth. Along the lines of her lips was the faint taste of coppery blood, and she licked them in an attempt to get the acrid taste off her tongue.
With all the strength she could muster in her worn body, the young girl pulled herself out of the earthy floor, spitting and gagging at the number of non-edible things on her tongue.
"Disgusting." She murmured dryly, coughing. Yun should be used to the dirt that coated her body, but no matter how long she had lived among the muck, it still seemed too hard to digest.
Her eyesight blurred as she squinted, trying to scan the landscape.
The fresh memory of dragging herself out of Lake Laogai and walking till her legs gave out popped into her dehydrated head. Her body swayed, and she rooted her shoeless feet into the earth.
With the remaining memories Yun could force herself to remember, she tried to look back into where the Yun of the past was trying to get to. What she had been trying to achieve.
Within her prison, Yun dreamed of many things. Most of the time her fears manifested through her slumber, and it would cage Yun into her own self until she was gasping for air in the middle of the night. There was no one to comfort her there but the cold metal walls and the soft lull of the lake above her head.
The air smelled of humidity, a trait common in a land surrounded by a body of water. For a fleeting moment, bile rose up Yun's parched throat at the sight of so much liquid - The haunting images of kaleidoscopic lights shifting in and out of her vision and the stiffness of her underground prison filled Yun with a sense of instilled fear, and she shivered on impulse.
