Heads or Tails: Book 1 ~ Arin's Tale

Home at Last

Heads or Tails

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Book 1 – Arin's Tale

I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender or Legend of Korra or any of the characters. Only the OC's.

In this chapter, Italics = Arin speaking in her present time (199 A.G.), so she would be 17 years old.

Chapter 4: Home at Last

Arin's POV 

Time: 188 A.G.

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There are not many memories left from the dark before the Beifong's came into my life. Well, more like I came into theirs. Most of what was left, nothing but a blur. Still there, but almost long forgotten. The memories I have now are mostly of the time I spent with my newfound family. But the one I will never forget is the day when I first saw the place, I call home.

The wind blew kisses into my face and through my hair nonstop. Unlike the breezes in Zaofu, it was constant atop the striped-arrowed beast they call Juicy as we make our way toward the temple. That's what they've been calling it at least; I've never seen a temple before. Not in person. Only heard from the many tales that they or the passerby's would tell. Of tall structures built in and on the side of mountains, taller than any tower in the city, one that could bear against the cold winters and tame the chilly springs, and one that housed the 'airwalkers'.

There wasn't one in sight, not yet, but the others keep telling me to be on the lookout. Their faces shines bright with eagerness as they waited for me to see their true home for the first time. All that was in sight and around us were gigantic snowy mountains that touched the clouds hanging just meters above us. White mystical clouds everywhere you look, up and down, fading out the distant backgrounds. Clouds, clouds everywhere! Only a few trees dared to grow, roots breaking through the sides of the bare earth.

Another thing different about this place. The mountains. They went on for miles and miles, from what you could see through the cloudy puffs and small rocky valleys below from what I could tell. Zaofu was surrounded by smaller ones covered with forest green trees, built in a large valley beneath them, but that's it. No clouds to cover them.

Behind those mountains were beautiful landscapes, some that were natural and for wildlife, and some for farming.

Farming.

I've heard the guards discuss it. About the ruins of a farm found in a nearby village, nothing left, nothing survived. Whatever caused it, long gone. Whatever was there, disappeared. My heart beats faster and felt colder the more they described it as I overheard their conversation. It wasn't my intentions; they were walking by my hiding spot while playing hide-n-seek with Nera and Noren. But the way they talked about it, of the destruction that was brought onto that place, of the devastation it left behind to whoever may have owned it, of what all that was lost; it scared me.

However, I was more afraid to tell them what it was like living it.

After all, the farm they were describing was my home.

Was. It's long gone now as they had said, there was no point in going back. It had mountains similar to the ones in Zaofu.

But the thing is, even I don't know what happened. I don't know what or who caused it or why they did it. I don't know where or what happened to my family, and every time I tried, every time I thought about what happened, painful, aching flashes would sting its way through my head. As if memories were trying to resurface from that night but couldn't.