Blood of the North (Avatar: TLA Fanfic)

Chapter 1c: Cracked Ice

A huge, black, metal shape splits the iceberg that shaded me a moment before, plowing the ice. My dad hollers for me to get back to the canoe as chunks of ice turn the still pool to a choppy whorl. My mother clings to my sisters and screams for me. I am paralyzed by the height and darkness of this shape, that it inspires such fear in my sturdy, unbreakable father. It is a ship like I have never seen, larger than any boat in the Northern Water Tribe.

Now it looms over me, filling the boiling pool, drowning the voice of my father and mother who are maneuvering the canoe against the current. I break the ice in my veins, scrambling after my family, bending a firm path through the powder snow, falling once, twice, not caring as my boots fill with snow. Fifteen paces from the canoe again, it suddenly feels a league distant. The ship groans, thrusting its prow straight for us smashing wide the natural current we had navigated so carefully. My father shouts for me to run away, unable to stop bending. Away! Hide! He raises our canoe on a swell, washing them in a slushy tide out of the current. We will be faster on foot, I think as my mother leaps out. Unable to beach our canoe, it slips into the current. My mother and sisters run toward me as the steaming ship roars behind me, crushing my family's boat to debris that is sucked under its hull. With a deafening rumble, the ship has come to a stop, wedged in the ice.

I think it is stuck as a twist of metal and the whisper of steel cord opens the front of the and from its open hull a proud gangplank lowers. It is an image straight out of a campfire story. Dark figures appear in silhouette beyond the smoky haze. Laughter of a group of soldiers fills the silence like too many birds of prey screeching on a bluff. My father stands not ten paces from the foot of the gangplank.

I begin to run toward my father, who is calm as several soldiers descend from the gangplank in a clumsy formation. Their shoulders are brutal spikes, each helmet like the skull of a dark spirit. With an air of fresh authority, one soldier addresses my father. As I draw closer, one guard steps forward to command my father to his knees. I wonder why he doesn't leap into action, strike, and fight. He is not telling them what they want and they are angry. I stop, sensing a decision. The men turn to me. My father rises in a flash, raising a barrier of ice as he takes steps backward, putting space between us. He yells to me, eyes animal: "Run!" I shouldn't have come so close.

Three soldiers run toward me, including their leader. I thaw the ice at the men's feet so they sink calves deep before bending it heavy and dense. The leader burns his ice shackles, launching from a slushy puddle on torches of flame. He rain fire down around me, so I step closer. I realize too late. The man snatches my arm and pulls me to his armored chest. He traps my arm behind my back, and touches a lethal set of fingers to my temple.

Appearing like magic out of the white drifts, my father thrusts a sheer blade of ice at the man. Spinning deftly, the leader tosses me to his men. As the leader turns, he produces an arc of fire. My father is singed, tumbling over the drifts of snow.

In a burst of heat, the man crosses ten paces and catches my father on his back. Pulling him up, he twists my father's arms behind his back, binding him with steel cuffs in a practiced motion. My seven year old sister runs up on the guard, sending a torrent of hard ice down.

Maybe it wouldn't be a nightmare, maybe it would be a story we told, if she had been faster. Or if she had only held back, maybe my five year old sister would not have followed her. One broad-chested soldier, taking a firm-booted stance in the snow, blasts fire at the seven year old. She dodges easily. She's a prodigy, the smile that touched my father's lips during a day of fierce training. But the bolt of fire, abandoned and spreading, engulfs the eager face of my youngest sister, just steps behind.

The flames consume her tiny, bundled body as my mother screams from depths of her lungs, gloves grasping for her daughter. My father hears his wife, anguish shatters his stone features, and spotting an instant's hesitation, one skull-faced soldier kicks him hard in the gut. The blow doubles my father over and a second soldier leans into a jaunty dropkick to the head. The fire torches for seconds after the steel heel breaks my father's jaw... My father's face sloughs off, blood frying and bubbling on the bone. I cannot not look away as he becomes a smouldering hyde in the snow and the soldiers exchange heated words over his body. It's someone's fault that the game went awry.

I am led up the gangplank alongside my living, thrashing sister. She struggles and screams. I am dragged, a limp, empty sack. I feel acid and bile in my throat and the bright day seems to come and go without my eyes blinking. I am slightly aware as my sister breaks away.

In one sharp kick, my sister bashes the soldier with a block of ice. She leaps from the gangplank. I hear the general's order: "Leave them. Another minute and we'll have the whole northern fleet washing us away." The gangplank rises, cutting me off from my snow white world.

Led into the bowls of the ship I am locked away for the first time between four straight, solid walls. I am hardly aware of the days that pass, sinking softly and swiftly into the dark of my mind as if it were a tree well—head first, no way back.