Kiara (a last airbender story)

~Prologue~

Secrets. You find them everywhere, in families, in friendships, even in ourselves. There can be secrets that hold us together, or secrets that can shatter us apart. Those dangerous secrets, are most of mine.

My name is Kiara (pronounced Ky-are-a), my mother wanted my name to be unique, so she came up with that, even though it sounds like any other name in our tribe. And when I say tribe, if you haven't guessed it already, I live in the Northern water tribe. I'm also a Waterbender. But I'll get into the details of that later, so I'm going to start from the beginning, and I mean the beginning, what I once was.

The Northern water Tribe is where I was born, and where I grew up. My father, a man named Dioah, had left to fight in the war against the fire nation when I was too young, too young to even remember him. When he didn't return, my mother kept herself from breaking down, she always seemed to be brave and strong when the hardest moments came and went. Although, sometimes I could hear her sobbing at night, I remember how i had wanted to help her and felt so helpless when i didn't know how...but she would have been furious if she knew that I had heard her, I didn't want to make her more upset than she already was. She was all that I knew about my father, she would tell me stories about his bravery. And she told me about the day they meet, which always brought a smile to both our faces. I remember everything about that time she told me...

We where sitting on the front steps of our home, which was just a block of ice in the shape of a house. It was nighttime and we where staring up at the stars that lite the sky, replacing that single glance worthy black sky, with an amazing dark blue I could stare into for ages. I was only six years old, not old enough to fully understand the terrors of this world, but after this night, I new more than I should have.

My mother stroked my long dark brown hair that came down passed the small of my back. For a moment I looked at her, still beautiful with her own hair knotted into a long dark braid, and her skin just a small shade darker than my own. Her eyes where the light blue she and I both shared, well, part of my eyes anyway.

"Do think he's up there somewhere?" I ask my mother.

My mother hugged her arm over my shoulder. "Who Kiara?" She asked.

"Dad. Do you think that his spirit is somewhere up there, in the stars?"

She smiled and looked back up to the tiny lights in the sky, I followed. "Yes," my mother said. "I believe he is, watching over us every second..."she turned back to me "so don't try to steal any extra possum-chicken, or he'll get ya!" She started to tickle me, and I couldn't catch a single breath because of my laughter.

"Stop!" I tried to say a few times but each time my voice was drowned with laughter.

When she stopped, she was smiling and so was I. "I love you Kiara." She whispered, started to stroke my hair again. "And your father loved you so much, don't forget that, no matter what. He loved you."

My six-year-old self promised her I would never forget. No matter what.

"He loved you too, mom, you forgot go say that, he loved you too."

"Yes, he did, from the moment we met."

"How did you meet?" I asked.

She smiled and held me closer to her. "We where both nineteen. It was a very sad day for me, I had gotten word that my mother had died, your grandmother. She was kind, you would have liked her, Kiara, you two would have been good friends. Anyway, when I heard a fire nation solider had killed her because she was a Waterbender..."

"She was a Waterbender?" I said

"Yes, like you and me. But because she was living in the southern tribe, she was caught. Now, I was very angry, it is not a feeling I ever wanted to feel ever again, and I didn't, not after what had happened. You see I had gone to the southern tribe with revenge, I wanted the fire nation solider to pay for what he had done, when I got there, I tried to get to the solider, but they arrested me as soon as I made a splash on him, it wasn't enough, but they already had me in restraints. They took me away, far away. I had spent a week in the awful fire nation prison..."

"What did it smell like?" I asked, how curious my younger mind was.

My mother seemed to consider the question, focusing hard to remember. "Hm, it was kind of like dust? Maybe charcoal...I wasn't pleasant, Kiara."

"When do you meet dad?"

"Hold on there, sweety, I'm getting to that part." She said.

I nodded.

"Alright, no more questions. So, I was in the prison, so hungry I couldn't bare it, there was no water, so I couldn't bend my way to freedom. But there was this man, the most gorgeous man, your father, he was dressed as a prison guard so he could secretly help the prisoners escape. One day, when he was delivering my food, he started to talk to me, he told me his real identity of Dioah, and that he too was from the northern water tribe, so together we formed an escape plan that lead to our freedom. After we left the prison it wasn't until then that we realized how we felt about each other, so we returned to the northern water tribe and got married. Then we had you. Our little Kiara, we where such a happy family, all three of us, then of course there was the war. He refused to sit back and do nothing, he wanted to fight. So he and a few others from our tribe left...." i watched as she bit her lip and looked down, "...only to never return again."

She traced her fingers on something in her hand. For a moment, I couldn't see what it was, but when she opened her fingers up wider I saw that it was her betrothal necklace my dad had given her when she got engaged, I had never seen her take it off before. When she saw me looking at it, she sighed and stuffed it into her coat pocket.

The story took more meaning each time I replayed it inside my mind. The thought that my grandmother was killed and my mother thrown in prison just because they Waterbended was terrifying. Waterbending was a apart of who we are, just like Firebending is apart of the Fire lord. They wouldn't call him the fire lord if he couldn't bend fire, without fire he'd be nothing, just some messed up guy with no more than several thousand mental problems.

I was five when I discovered I was a Waterbender. My mother was so proud of me, a Waterbender just like her, just like her mother, and her mother's mother. I was also happy of course, I always thought that bending was one of the most coolest things in the world. But against my mother's protests, they wouldn't teach me to fight using Waterbending, instead the Waterbending master of our city, master Pakku, forced me to learn healing with the other girls of our tribe. I hated every minute of it. There was a war going on, against the fire nation, I needed to know how to fight. So, my mother taught me to fight, secretly, of course. And now I'm basically a pro, you won't believe how many times I wanted to get Into Pakku's face and splash some water on him, to show him that I'm a Waterbender whether he likes it or not. And of course I never did that, I had to keep my skill a secret, for now anyway.

Well, you now know more about my past, and these stories are going to come in handy, trust me, I do not have a voice of a liar, but a mind of secrets. Now, I will tell you the true story, the story of secrets and lies, and stories twisted on the truth. And pay attention because things are going to get complicated.