Avatar: The Last Dragon Prince

Chapter Four: Branches of the Same Tree

This story has not been edited at all. This is quite literally my first and last draft. So I apologize in advance for spelling and grammatical errors.

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Ezran wasn't totally helpless on his own; he was pretty adaptable. But even in these circumstances, he definitely wouldn't mind finding Callum and Rayla again. All they wanted was to give Zym back to his mom and end the human/Xadia war. Was that too much to aspire for?

"Callum! Rayla!" No answer, no surprise.

The splashing of water behind him caught his attention and he whipped round, not entirely sure what he was going to do but knowing he had to do something. Luckily (or unluckily depending on your perspective), there was nothing but the same old marsh and mangrove around him.

Until there wasn't.

Until standing on a ledge in the short distance was a man in royal finery with thick, dark dreadlocks. Ezran's legs decided it was a good time to freeze. He wanted to move, he wanted to run to his father and have him tell him everything would be okay. But his legs would not move.

"Dad!" he yelled.

Whether this was a figment of his imagination, he didn't know. He didn't particularly care either. With all the strength he could muster, he pulled his legs out of the imaginary roots that were holding him down and ran. The tears rolled into the wind behind him as he charged for King Harrow.

Instead of crashing into his father's warm embrace, he stumbled right through him and over the ledge.

And bumped right into Aang, who also conveniently happened to be airbending right in the direction of his fall. Together, they fell into the thick muddy water below them.

Ezran didn't even care that he was wet. He had finally seen a familiar face – one that was actually real and not a hallucination.

"Aang!"

"Ezran!" Aang beamed. "You're okay!"

"Ezran?" Callum's voice rang clear in the air as he appeared from behind a tree.

"Thank the moon you're okay!" Rayla rushed over to hug the little boy she'd quickly grown fond of. She didn't even care that she was publicly showing vulnerability for once.

Callum couldn't help but make it a group hug. In this foreign universe, they couldn't possibly know how relieved he was that they were okay. Especially Ezran. He knew Rayla could handle herself when it came down to it.

Just then, Katara and Sokka emerged from a horde of hanging vines. Safe to say they were both sufficiently surprised to find everyone they had been looking for in one place. To Katara, it felt... scripted almost.

Here I go, thinking like Sokka, she thought to herself.

"We're all here, which is great," she started, "but where exactly is here?"

"Looks like the middle of the swamp." Aang pointed to the gigantic tree behind them that was hard to miss and yet all of them missed it completely. Clearly they had had enough of the mangrove around them to even care.

"Why did we all get here at the same time?" Sokka asked suspiciously. "There's definitely something weird going on in this swamp and I don't like it. We should just find Appa, find the others and get out of here."

"I second that," Rayla agreed. "This place keeps playing tricks on me. I keep seeing things." Not to mention I absolutely despise water.

"You saw something too?" Sokka gasped.