Mari: Scroll 1 (Being Reworked)

The Boy in the Iceberg / The Avatar Returns

     I  do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender, I only own my own OC's. 

  Mari

The cold had stopped hurting about an hour ago. That was probably a bad sign.

I pulled my cloak tighter anyway, more out of habit than hope. The fabric was damp from salt spray and frozen stiff in patches, and every time the wind cut through it I felt the chill settle a little deeper into my bones. My legs had gone from aching to numb to something beyond numb. A hollow, mechanical feeling, each step landing without sensation, like I was walking on someone else's feet.

Three weeks. That's how long it had taken me to get here. Three weeks of hitching rides on Earth Kingdom trade ships, sleeping in cargo holds that smelled of salted fish and mildew, walking through terrain that shifted from forest to tundra to this endless, blinding white that swallowed the horizon in every direction. I'd told the last ship captain I was visiting family. He hadn't believed me. Nobody with family waiting for them looked the way I did.

Why was I in the South Pole? Honest answer: I wasn't entirely sure anymore. The plan had been simple when I'd left the Earth Kingdom. Keep moving. Stay ahead of anyone who might be following. Find somewhere so remote, so empty, so far from anything that mattered that even the Fire Nation wouldn't bother looking.

So far, the only company I'd found were penguin-seals, and they weren't great conversationalists.

I crested a ridge of packed ice and stopped. Below, cutting through the dark water between two shelves of ice, was a small canoe. Two figures sat inside bundled in blue parkas, unmistakably Water Tribe. My chest tightened with something embarrassingly close to relief. People. Actual, living people who might have food and fire and a reason to let a stranger sit near both.

I opened my mouth to call out to them, but before I could, the girl stood. She was shouting. I couldn't make out the words from this distance, only the sharp edges of her voice carried on the wind. Then her arms moved, and the water behind the canoe moved with them.

A waterbender.

The ice shifted. Groaned. A crack split the air like a thunderclap and a massive chunk of glacier sheered away, crashing into the sea. The wave it sent rolling outward was enormous; a dark wall of freezing water surging toward the shoreline.

Toward me.

"Crap," I said, which was not the most eloquent assessment, but it was accurate. I turned to run but my body had been screaming at me to stop for the last mile and it chose now to stop listening to orders. My legs buckled. The wave hit.

Freezing water filled my mouth, my lungs, every gap in my clothing. The cold that had stopped hurting came roaring back with a vengeance, sinking its teeth into every nerve. The current dragged me sideways before slamming me against a shelf of ice. I clawed my way up, gasping, retching saltwater, and hauled myself onto higher ground on my hands and knees.

For a long moment I just lay there, shaking so hard my teeth cracked against each other. The sky above me was pale and enormous and completely indifferent to whether I lived or died.

Get up. The voice in my head sounded like my mother's. It always did, in the worst moments. Get up, Mari. You don't get to stop yet.

I got up.

My body protested every inch of it, but years of training had taught me something useful: pain is just information, and you can choose to file it away for later. I forced myself upright, locked my knees, and looked back toward the water.

That's when I saw the light.

It erupted from the water; a column of blue-white brilliance so intense I threw my arm over my eyes. It pulsed once, twice, three times, each beat resonating in my chest like a second heartbeat. When it faded and I lowered my arm, blinking after images from my vision, I saw a boy standing on the ice where the glacier had broken.