The Origin of Roh-Shan

F: Avatar

Roh knew her mother and grandmother had been on the first boat, and she knew from the vision that Kota was also in the water, but she had no idea where. And she could hardly think straight over all the nagging voices in the water below.

"Shut up, all of you, for fuck's sake I can't think!" She grumbled to no one in particular.

She vaguely registered that something inland blew up.

If she saved everyone in the water, she would also save her family and Kota, because they're also in the water, right? Now Roh was running through every possible way to save everyone in the water.

She'd tried swooping low and blowing air across, trying to create a giant wave, but it had no effect. She'd thought of everything:

Drying up the water with fire wouldn't work, for many obvious reasons.

Sending a giant wave ashore would just drag more people back with it and probably be very violent, which would probably be funny but would also defeat the point.

Parting the water so people could walk to shore would only help those who could walk, and she'd seen Kota floating face-down.

She even considered bending the wind in a big circle, creating a funnel, and have the bottom of the funnel drain into an underwater air bubble along the ground. But that would only help mobile people too, and probably send a lot of debris flying at high speeds, potentially killing her mother, grandmother, or Kota.

Even if she could waterbend, she had no idea what to do.

She hovered on the dragon over the farthest-out people and debris, facing the shore.

It was impossible. There was nothing she could do. She just had to sit here and watch everyone drown, waiting for her family to die. She would sit here doing nothing, and get away with it.

She herself, was going to get away with it.

Suddenly the dragon seemed to have somewhere more important to be. It jerked to a start and Roh lost her balance, tumbling off its thin body and into the freezing dark water.

Now she was just another drowning body in the sea. The water filled her ears, nose, and mouth. She made no effort to swim back to the surface. Roh's mother, grandmother, Maita, and Kota. The four people who provided for her. Three of them about to drown. Without them, what would she possibly be? She's never had to exist without them before. If the world was about to rob her of her family, then she would rob the world of the Avatar.

She let the water fill her lungs. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

As she opened her eyes in the dark murky water, she caught a flash of Rya's angry face.

~

Something glowed beneath the water. Two beams of blue-white light that reached through the darkness of the water, illuminating thousands of bodies, before it burst through the surface.

The Avatar's eyes glowed as she rose in a swirl of water, her own body suspended within in the ghostly outline of Avatar Rya. Their eyes glowed as one, and their arms raised up, fists clenched, before their hands splayed wide, palms facing down at the sea.

Two white spiderweb-like splotches expanded over the water, shooting outward and stilling the waves. The spots spread quickly, branching off and catching each other like firing neurons. Soon, the entire stretch of ocean where people were spread out was encased in ice, less than two feet thick beneath the water. Every person, body, piece of debris, frozen in its last position within those two feet of ice.

Rya-Roh lifted their arms, and the entire section of ice raised itself from the sea. The gap that it left caused waves beneath them to crash together violently, but everyone was suspended above it in impossible stillness.

Rya-Roh's swirl of water carried them toward the shore, to the left of the city, levitating the ice sheet with them. Glowing eyes illuminating the shore, the Avatars brought the sheet of ice down on the expansive farming fields adjacent to the city, and released the freezing grip, turning everything back to water as it settled down onto the open fields.

Excess water rushed down the drainage slopes, the fields still soppy and damaged. But everyone was above water now.

The only thing their ice hadn't encompassed was a flaming battleship near the shore.

Rya disappeared, the glow left Roh's eyes, and she dropped into the raging sea, barely conscious and with no strength left.

~//~