The sky was blue above their heads, like a pristine canvas of the purest cerulean hue stretched all the way from north to south and east to west. The sun was shining brightly, its light catching on the floes and drifts and bergs of ice below in a breathtaking display of radiant color, refracting and reflecting in countless hues, dancing across the surface of the cold, dark, antarctic waters in a dazzling show of countless, flickering sparks swaying and flitting amidst the low, curling waves.
The world was quiet. The only sounds to be heard were those of the sea itself: the steady, predictable sssh-thp sssh-thp of waves lapping against the fragmented shards of what was once a single whole: a vast, primeval glacier from a long forgotten era, a time so far in the past that even the ageless, immortal spirits reckoned it as long ago.
It was peaceful, serene, a truly picturesque setting.
"You won't get away from me this time!" a voice broke the silence, the pitch and timbre somewhere between that of a boy and a man, the tone a mixture of self-assured confidence and slight exasperation as its owner leaned his torso over the edge of his canoe, a mitten-clad hand tightly clenching a long, slender spear of bone and ivory, an elegant example of Southern Water Tribe craftsmanship. His deep blue eyes glinted as they caught a small, dark shape flitting near the surface, and he thrust his weapon into the water.
The spear's razor sharp tip cut through the surface tension with sublime ease as it lanced down in the direction of its mark. But the young fisherman's aim was off by an inch, or perhaps the timing miscalculated by a second, and his tool spitted nothing but formless, dark water.
His companion in the rear of the canoe, a girl of faintly similar appearance to the dark-skinned youth, could not help but giggle at the sight.
"You miss again, Sokka?" she said, gentle amusement in her tone. She was not teasing him, exactly, and her eyes sparkled with affection as she gazed at him. Sokka could tell the former in her voice, and he knew the latter from secret, forbidden moments together over the past few days -- kisses stolen in the dark, the gentle caresses of hands gently wandering over one another's bodies, whispered promises of love and devotion -- but he still winced, disappointed with himself for failing again and angry at the fish for getting away -- again.
"Not helping, Katara," he replied, though his words were less a complaint than they might have been a week ago, and if one looked closely one might have seen the faint ghost of a smile tugging at his lips.
"Oh, really?" said his sister -- lover -- teasingly. "Are you so sure of that?"
And Sokka, turning to look at her, saw a good sized flounder smelt suspended in mid air, flapping around helplessly inside a floating orb of water. A ghost of a smile gained new life as a wide, beaming grin as the hunter and warrior eyed Katara, pride and affection swelling in his chest, a tangible sensation of gently tingling warmth that spread all the way to his finger and toes.
"Impressive," he said, meaning every bit of the word even as he casually brandishing his spear and thrust it through the swirling, fluid globe, impaling the fish moments before Katara let the water fall with a splash, a pink flush spreading from her ears to her cheeks at her brother's compliment.
"Thanks," she said, shyly brushing a hand against one of her hair-loopies. "I've been practicing..." she murmured, unconsciously lowering her head by a fraction of an angle as her face and chest continued to heat up under Sokka's loving gaze.
"I can tell!" said he, beaming proudly at her. "It's really--"
Whatever he was about to say next, it was cut off when the pair felt the canoe suddenly lurch forward beneath them. They dropped low, clinging to the small vessel's sides as it rushed forward, carried through the drifting, grinding ice floes on some unseen current. For a few harrowing minutes, their canoe bounced against massive shards of ice as the waters dragged it onward to some unguessable destination, before finally the craft's luck ran out and it was smashed between two drifting floes that crashed into it from either side like the great, frozen molars of some enormous ice giant.
Fortunately, the force of the collision threw Sokka and Katara from the splintering craft before they two could be crushed, and they landed in relative safety on the flat, snowy shelf of a nearby iceberg.
Sokka was the first to recover from the shock of their accident, briefly glancing sadly back at the few floating fragments that remained of their canoe. Then, seeing that there was nothing to be done for the loss of the vessel, he turned his attention to Katara, who was sprawled out on the ice, staring fixedly ahead in an almost trance-like state at the rising, jagged spire of the iceberg on which they had landed.
"You okay, sis?" Sokka asked, concern obvious in the tone of his voice and the way he wrapped his strong arms around her form. "Did you hit your head? Does anything hurt?"
"N-no..." Katara stammered in response, shaking herself out of her reverie at the sound of his voice. "I'm fine..." she murmured, curiously finding her gaze once more drawn to the great, white-blueish bulk of thick, solid frost before them. She stared silently at it for a moment, her breath feeling strange in her lungs.
"Sokka..." she said slowly, after several long moments of silence. "...Does something about that iceberg look strange to you...?"
The teen quirked an eyebrow curiously at his sister, before he shook his head. "No, why?"
"I don't know, but..." Katara bit her lip, uncertain how to say it without making a fool of herself. "It almost feels... like there's something alive about it."
A second eyebrow joined the first, before Sokka furrowed his brow worriedly. "...Katara, sis, are you absolutely sure you didn't hit your head when we landed?" he asked, half-joking and half-serious. There was genuine concern in his eyes, but the hint of sarcasm was also there -- it was part coping mechanism, part habit for him.
Katara, picking herself up, nodded her head, the movement causing the heavy hood of her parka to rustle against her hair. "Yes," she said, "I'm sure."
And she stepped forward, curiously placing the palm of her bemittened hand against the iceberg's peak, curiously tracing an unseen fault in its formation, then gasping when she felt it crack beneath her fingers. She stepped back with a yelp as the crack spread out and split into a vast, splintered cobweb as the ice formation abruptly began to collapse.
There was a mighty cacophony of sound and snow and splashing water as the tip of the iceberg fell to pieces, and when the mess cleared the two Water Tribe siblings beheld a massive, eerily glowing sphere of ice, within which they could see the silhouette of a person, and something else.
Katara, seeing this, felt an instinctive urge to forward and free whoever was trapped inside the ice. Even if what she was seeing seemed impossible to believe, the girl had a powerful desire to help others wherever she could, and this was no exception. But her brother put a hand on her shoulder, holding her back.
"We don't know who's in there," he told her reasonably, cautiously, logically. "What if it's a Fire Nation trap?"
She couldn't imagine how the Fire Nation could possibly set such a trap as this -- firebenders couldn't make ice, and certainly not ice like THIS -- but she did not argue with him on that. Instead, she simply said:
"There's somebody trapped in there! We have to help them."
And, swiping a club from her brother and running forward, Katara began hammering away frantically, determinedly at the ice. At first she only managed to chip away a few small slivers of ice with her swings, but then there was another mighty crash, and a great pillar of light, and for a few moments after that everything was a senseless, unintelligible jumble of sounds and sensations and emotions.
By the time the world stopped spinning around her, Katara saw her brother kneeling over a young, slender girl in strange, light clothes, a blue arrow mark visible on her forehead. She heard the girl giggle, saw her smile up at Sokka, who was holding the stranger so protectively, and Katara had to almost bite back a jealous remark, instead asking if the girl was alright.
The lass -- she actually didn't look more than a year or two younger than Katara herself -- blinked big, round, gray eyes at Katara. How did the girl react to the presence of the two siblings?
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