Daughter of the Moon - Book 1: Water

Chapter 16: Elara's Hope

- Elara -

Several days after we had left the great city of Omashu, my friends and I were faced with quite the predicament. We were completely out of food (you can thank Sokka's bottomless pit he calls a stomach for that one), and we were almost out of money. Not that it mattered much. We hadn't seen another village in days, so we couldn't buy food even if we wanted to. Sokka and I had gone around the forest scavenging for something to eat, but our efforts had brought forth little reward.

"Great, you're back! What's for dinner?" Aang jumped off a boulder excitedly when we returned to the camp.

Sokka opened his near empty sack and pulled out its contents. "We've got a few options. First, round nuts, and some kind of oval shaped nuts, and some rock shaped nuts that...might just be rocks..." Sokka trailed off as he tossed the small stones over his shoulder. "Dig in!"

Katara exchanged a look with Aang before speaking. "Seriously, what else ya got?"

"That's it, that's all we got," I said with a shrug. "I guess it's just a bad time of year for forest harvestables."

"Oh," Katara sighed in disappointment as she looked at our mediocre pile of nuts that we had to call dinner.

However, before we even had the chance to lament over our scarce findings, we heard a loud crash coming from somewhere within the forest, drawing our attention away from our meal.

"What was that!?" Sokka asked defensively as he grabbed his boomerang, preparing himself for some kind of attack.

Another boom shook our camp, but this time we were able to discern where it was coming from.

"It's coming from over there!" Aang shouted as he started running towards the source of the commotion (followed by Katara and myself, of course).

"Shouldn't we run away from huge booms—not toward them?" Sokka complained as we ran off.

I looked over my shoulder and smirked. "Come on, Sokka. It's like you don't even know us."

"Fair point," he noted as he turned to follow.

We ran through the forest until we arrived at a dry riverbed, hiding ourselves behind a fallen tree in case the noise was coming from an enemy of some sort. As we peeked over the trunk, however, we just saw a boy about our age earthbending rocks into the sides of the riverbed, producing the same crash that we had heard earlier.

"An earthbender!" Katara shouted excitedly as she watched the boy earthbend (Katara always was one to State the obvious, I suppose).

"Let's go meet him!" Aang suggested.

Sokka shook his head, his eyes glued to the stranger in front of us. "He looks dangerous, so we better approach cautiously."

"Hello there, I'm Katara! What's your name?"

Without any of us noticing, Katara had somehow slipped away from our hiding place to greet the boy. And for good reason, he was obviously startled by her introduction and he ran away almost immediately, throwing up a wall of boulders to prevent us from following him.

"Nice to meet you!" Aang called after the boy, but he was already out of sight.

The rest of us emerged from behind the tree, and I flung my arm over Katara's shoulder. "Jeez Katara. Stranger Danger much?"

"I just wanted to say hi," she slumped in disappointment.

Before I could comfort the waterbender, Aang pointed in the direction that the boy had run in. "Hey, that guy's gotta be running somewhere. Maybe we're near a village, and I bet that village has a market!"