"Blanket?" Tanya asked.
"The one 'yer were wrapped in when we found 'ya at the doorstep. Odd looking thing it were. Hold on a 'mo, I'm sure we stored it away somewhere in the cupboards."
...
Vula disappeared out the door for a moment, and reappeared clutching a pale yellow blanket. As she handed it over to her, Tanya immediately registered the familiar texture of ramie: a textile almost exclusively produced in the Fire Nation. Yet the style was far from what she had seen in the Fire Nation before.
If she had to draw equivalents, the art style in the Fire Nation was similar to that of feudal japan in her original world. This however looked more like something she'd seen in museum exhibits on Aztecs: a pattern of bold lines that formed geometric shapes just as much with the empty space between them as with the ink itself.
The blanket displayed two dragons in zigzagging serpentine shapes; one in red ink, the other in blue, spiralling like a yin and yang.
"I've never seen anything like it." She murmured, honestly quite astounded by what she was seeing. Since the war began, the Fire Nation had been very strict on pruning anything they considered to not be a part of their "proper culture" from the homeland.
As far as she knew, from the capital city to the smallest islands, everywhere produced the same style of art. Either this was made pre-war and had been remarkably well cared for, or had been made somewhere that had been able to keep its culture hidden from the rest of the nation. "I wonder where it's from?"
"'Fraid I've no clue either, petal." Vula replied. "But if you'd like, you're welcome to keep it. Maybe it'll help you track down where your parents were from."
Tanya considered it for a second, then shook her head and handed the blanket back. "Thank you, but no. I've never needed parents, so knowing who abandoned me isn't going to change much anyway. I think I'd rather focus on the future than the past."
Vula nodded. "Suppose that's the pragmatic thing to do. Alright then petal, I understand." She whisked away Tanya's now empty soup bowl, bringing the jolly smile back to her face. "Now then, why don't you share some stories with me about all the adventures you've had."
...
Aang was running as fast as the wind could carry him, but the maze of ice he was trapped in seemed to stretch on eternally into the distance.
Crimson moonlight bathed the icy labyrinth, dying the walls and floor so red they looked like they were coated in blood. No, when he looked closer, Aang realised that they actually were bleeding.
Frozen within the ice, he could just about make out the faces of warriors from the northern tribes, their expressions trapped forever in a rictus of pain. Their bodies were still and unmoving, but their eyes turned to follow him as he ran past, silently judging him for their failure to save them.
"HAHAHA!"
And inhuman laugh, like the roar of a gigantic beast, echoed out across the maze behind him, and Aang whimpered in terror as he looked back over his shoulder.
A towering giant of fire, its skin roiling like molten lava and its hair a wild web of beams of sunlight, stomped after him: incinerating the prisoners trapped within the maze's walls as it passed. Aang raced around a corner, only to stop in his tracks as he came face to face with a dead end.
"Aang! Wake up!"
Aang looked to the side, only to find Katara trapped in the walls of the maze next to him. He was pounding on the walls with his fist, trying to break through, but the ice would not budge.
"Aang! Help us!"
More pounding sounded out from behind him, and he turned around to see Yue and Sokka frozen in the walls on the other side. The temperature began to rapidly grow hotter as the fire giant loomed closer, their footsteps echoing louder and louder from back around the corner.
"Don't leave us to die Aang!"
"Wake up!"
"Save us, Avatar!"
Bullets of sweat broke out across Aang's skin as the heat grew unbearably hot. A fierce hiss of steam caught his ears as a huge, fiery hand came around the corner and gripped the wall.
"It was your duty to protect them!"
"Wake up!"
"Don't fail us again!"
A great, grinning face peered around the corner, molten lips peeled back into an amused snarl. Now that he was close enough to make out the feminine shape of its face, Aang recognised the giant.
"FOUND YOU, AVATAR!" The fire giant bellowed in Tanya's voice. Aang backed away, but with the walls of ice surrounding him there was nowhere to run! He was trapped, powerless, helpless before the giant as it reached out a hand towards him.
"Wake up Aang! Wake up!"
Aang's eyes shot open as he bolted up with a gasp, heaving in greedy, gulping gasps of the cool night's air. Katara was at his side, the cloth in her hand drenched with his sweat, and Sokka a few feet away with a waterskin at the ready.
"It's okay Aang, you're safe. Breathe." She said gently, carefully laying a hand on his back and soothingly massaging the space between his shoulders.
Her touch helped to calm him, and as Aang continued to breathe deeply he felt his nerve slowly begin to relax. After about a minute his heart stopped pounding in his ears, and Aang exhaled deeply and took a deep swig from Sokka's offered waterskin.
"Thanks guys." He whispered meekly, shifting from his sitting position into the cross-legged pose he usually used for meditation. Sokka and Katara shuffled their sleeping bags over, sitting on either side of him. They didn't say a word, nor did they look at him with any sort of judgement or pity. They simply let him take his time.
It had been ten days since they'd left the survivors of the battle in a friendly village and travelled on to the Earth Kingdom in search of a new master for Aang.
Yet although time and a change of scenery had helped a little, it was still rare for a night to go by without at least one of them waking up screaming in the night. Nightmares had plagued the party ever since the siege of the north.
Sokka's nightmares always featured Yue. They would be together in some sort of tense situation; chased by a mass of dark smoke, a wave of inky water, or some other elemental force of evil, and Yue would turn to him for help.
Yet Sokka would always betray her: tripping her if they were running, pushing her if they were climbing, or even literally stabbing her in the back on one occasion.
Then he would run, turning his back on her screams of betrayal as the darkness swallowed her up.
Katara's nightmares featured Master Pakku, their mother, Yagoda, and other people that she looked up to as symbols of wisdom and teaching. She would be fighting by their sides against hordes of enemies, trusted with protecting their backs, when all of a sudden her control over the water would suddenly just snap.
No matter how much she fought and flailed her bending would not work, just like it had when the moon had turned red, and she would watch in horror as the enemies bypassed her and surrounded her mentors from behind.
Sometimes they would just capture them, other times they would attack them, but always her mentors would look at her with blame and disappointment before they were taken away.
Aang's nightmares were of prisons, cages and traps: all filled with either the warriors of the northern tribes or the airbenders he'd grown up with. There was a huge monster of some kind that prowled about devouring them, and no matter what Aang did he could never defeat it.
The monster, which often bore a disturbing likeness to a certain golden haired firebender, would shrug off his efforts as it devoured the people he wanted to protect. Then it would set his eyes on him, and no matter how hard he ran it would always catch him eventually.
It was Katara who'd finally pulled them together after a week of sleepless nights and declared that something needed to be done.
Yagoda the healer had taught her a little about the northern tribe's techniques for healing the mind, and so she had decided that, when one of them had a nightmare, the others would sit and listen to them without interrupting with their own thoughts or opinions.
It had been a little awkward at first, but after that initial hurdle they'd all begun to find it quite nice to get things off their chest.
...
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