Avatar: The Last Airbender: Retelling

The Boy in the Iceberg

The water was an abyss. My breath clouds in front of my face as I peer over the side of the boat looking for any form of life. My reflection is jarred and distorted. I wonder if this is how the ocean spirit see me.

I find it incredible that things could live in such cold water. It's incredible anything could live at the south pole at all. I have been living here my whole life, and the cold still burns.

That's right. I have never left the south pole. Not once. My father and the other warriors of our tribe left two years ago. Sometimes I sit up thinking about how the rest of the world looks.

I picture the Earth Kingdom with lots of hills of green. I have never felt grass, but I bet it's soft. I bet it's warm.

Then I picture the Air Temples. The only thing I have learned from them were the few stories my gran gran told me as a kid- but she had never been there herself. Still, I picture that the Air Nomads lived in temples standing high into the mountains. The spires twisting up grabbing at the clouds with their stone fingers.

Our sister water tribe in the north, I suspect looked the same as ours here, but no one would know. We hadn't made contact with them in almost a century. I suppose none of the pictures in my imagination are quite right considering the Earth Kingdom is war-torn and the Air Nomads are extinct.

Yet still I dream.

Then the Fire Nation- I picture the Fire Nation on islands of magma. The ground crawling with heat, writhing under its own temperature. I bet the air taste like spices and dry sand. Fire grabs at people, screams stain the air... when I picture the Fire Nation, I picture the darkest, hottest depth of the spirit world.

My brother Sokka doesn't believe in the spirit world. He doesn't believe in the avatar, not anymore. They all seem like a children's fable to him. He believes that the spirit world and the avatar abandoned us. That they let the Fire Nation destroy the world.

Sokka is a child most of the time. Even if he is 15, he acts younger. He works tirelessly to fulfill this fantasy of being like our father, trying to comfort me in his place. He acts like he's strong, he acts like he's brave, he even tells bad jokes because he wants to be like dad so much but- it just makes our father's absence hurt more. I love him for it though, Sokka looks out for me, and I look out for him, even if he is a pain in the butt most of the time. We are all we have left. Our tribe is broken and sad, the kids are the only source of life, but even just keeping food on the table is difficult without water benders anymore.

In the southern water tribe, there is a total of one water bender left, the fire nation killed the rest. Just like Sokka and I's mother. The Fire Nation took her from us when we were just kids. I can still remember her smile. I can still remember the way she looked at Sokka and I when she knew we were up to something. I believe she's in the spirit world gazing up at us under the sea's surface. I bet it warm there though. I bet she's warm now.

I feel like I can still hear her voice sometimes when the wind whips by my ears-

The water.

I saw something move. I take off my glove, the cool air caressing the outside of my hand as I drink in a deep breath and shut my eyes. I think of my mother, I think of the feeling of the moon on my skin... water on my fingertips. The fluidity, the versatility, the life-

I don't hear what Sokka says on the other side of the boat. I connect with the water, feel the currents as if they were under my own skin. I feel the chill as if my skin was made of glaciers, my breath the roaring winds of a blizzard. In that moment I was the South Pole, I was ice and snow, I was frigid and brutal, I was balance-

My skin crackles, fissures of ice stiffening my bones but my muscles they feel shocked and alive. Like I've just dove straight into the ice water, and everything wakes up.