Daughter of the Moon - Book Three: Fire

Epilogue

- Elara -

Five years. That's how long it took me to find my way to the Fire Nation.

I spent most of that time working with Guru Pathik at the Eastern Air Temple, needing almost three years to fully recover from my extreme mental and physical trauma. The process was harrowing, and I surfed a chaotic wave of progressive and regressive recovery as the Guru tried to help me to open my chakras and look towards my future instead of drowning my past (not to mention that I was forced to live off of onion-banana juice as my only form of subsistence while I was there). It was slow and exhausting, but even though I knew I may never be the same person I was before I was ripped away from my tribe, I somehow learned how to take my life experiences to become a better person.

I opened the last chakra—the thought chakra—early in the spring of the year 103 AG, and that very same day, Guru Pathik had me pack up my things and set off to go back to the real world. I didn't have much—I had been instructed to abandon all my worldly belongings in order to achieve total enlightenment—so I left the temple with only the clothes on my back and a couple charms hanging from my wrist.

The mountains surrounding the Eastern Air Temple were exceedingly perilous, so my journey through the rugged terrain nearly claimed my life on more than one occasion (it was much harder to travel without the assistance of an Air Bison). However, I was able to use my newly acquired skills as well as my bending to make it out safely, finding a port at the bottom of the mountain range and hopping onto a small transport ship to make my way towards the Earth Kingdom.

My plan was to sail from the Eastern Air Temple to Crowanlai City—a large port on a nearby island—so that I could get onto another ship heading for Ba Sing Se, but things were quickly disrupted as my ship was intercepted by a band of sea-faring robbers. The captain and her crew raided the storage cabins of my ship for all the materials being traded, and she captured myself along with the small crew abord with the intent of executing us the proper pirate way so as to prevent us from squealing to the authorities. Fortunately, I was just under a pace away from toppling over the edge of the plank when a huge storm rolled in, and the captain somehow found it in her heart to spare my life after I had saved her ship from utter destruction. I made several friends there as I helped with the chores for a time, but a few choice encounters eventually led the captain to deliver me to Crownlai City to continue on my own journey.

The port was rather overwhelming after the pirates had left me to fend for myself, and I nearly became helplessly lost as I tried to traverse the winding system of dirt roads to find a ship to take me to Ba Sing Se. However, my course was quickly altered once I stumbled upon an old friend—my brother, Mayar—and my plans were changed once again as I decided to join him on his travels.

A small voice in the back of my screeched at me as I boarded a ship with Mayar setting off for Chin City, reminding me that I had made a promise to return to a certain someone once I had completed my recovery program with Guru Pathik, but I simply ignored it. I wasn't entirely sure why I felt the need to explore before finding my way back to him, but I was suspicious that it had something to do with the anxiety I felt knowing that he had probably already moved on with his life. So, I tried to do the same with mine.

Once we had landed in Chin City, Mayar and I set off the explore the large swamp in the southernmost part of the Earth Kingdom mainland. There, we were able to converse and study with a strange tribe of waterbenders living within the marsh, and they taught us many important lessons about the capabilities of a waterbender as we learned to control the plants around us by manipulating the water hiding within.

Once Mayar and I had learned all that we could from the Swamp People, we made our way to the Si Wang desert to begin the treacherous journey up to Ba Sing Se. We had employed a small group of sandbenders to be our guides in an attempt to make our journey as safe as possible, but that didn't stop our company from getting caught in the middle of a massive sandstorm. Fortunately, our guides were not caught by surprise as the storm rolled in, and they effortlessly created a bunker beneath the waves of sand where we wouldn't be blown away by the harsh winds of the desert. We spent several days living underground as the storm raged on above us, surviving off the rations the sandbenders had prepared in advance, and all the free time allotted to me in the dim caverns of sand allowed me to grow extremely well acquainted with one of the sandbenders in our group. However, I quickly recognized that my interactions with the boy were simply reminiscent of a relationship I had once known, so I broke things off the moment we had made our way out of the desert a few days later.