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Katara had tried to convince her father that allowing an oil refinery to be built at the South Pole could have disastrous consequences. She had been unable to prevent it. How could she not try to prevent it, to halt progress, for she knew it was unstoppable, yet she also knew that it had been part of the identity of the Southern Water Tribe to live in harmony with their environment and nature, rather than forcibly intruding into its very core in order to exploit it. To set herself apart from nations that had genocide and the exploitation of the Earth to their name. This transformation of the world caused her pain. It felt as though she were witnessing a rape. As though something were beginning that would destroy life and the cycles of the world forever. The refinery had been built anyway.
The refinery stood out in the landscape like a tumour.
Its foundations had been driven deep into the frozen ground. Steel pylons punched through ancient ice. Concrete platforms covered what had once been untouched snow and it‘s towers rose higher than the surrounding cliffs, black against white ice, their metal surfaces stained with soot and oil. Pipes crawled everywhere. Thick, twisted lengths of steel disappearing beneath platforms and emerging again somewhere else, crossing overhead like the exposed veins of some enormous growth.
Katara was with the Southern Water Tribe and was helping Sokka with the chief’s duties, whilst her father, like Aang, was on a diplomatic mission to the Fire Nation. She still loved her homeland, and her brother and her father too, but her heart was broken. She was certain that the construction would not go unpunished.
The first warning was the silence.
Katara noticed it before anyone else did. The ocean was never this silent near the shore of Wolf Cove. Even in winter, when the ice pressed against the shoreline and the wind came down from the mountains like a blade, there were always sounds. Sea gulls crying over the water and the deep groan of ice shifting beneath the tide.
That morning, there was nothing. She went outside and stared toward the eastern shore. She felt something move beneath her feet. Not an earthquake, but water. Her head snapped toward the bay. The sea had gone unnaturally dark and Katara thought she saw something enormous moving underneath the surface.
Then the ocean rose.
Not like normal wave. Like a wall. It reared up menacingly in the distance, so much so that even the most powerful waterbender of her time was filled with fear. She heard a sound come from the deep water. It was almost too low to hear. The windows trembled and she heard someone scream.
The first wave struck Wolf Cove with brutal force. It swallowed the harbor. Boats were lifted from their moorings and thrown inland. Wooden hulls shattered against houses. Ice broke apart beneath the force of the water, turning into enormous slabs that slammed through docks and storage sheds.
Katara was already moving. She ran toward the shoreline. Water gathered around her feet. Then she launched herself forward. She rode a column of water through the village, landing on the roof of a storehouse as another wave came screaming toward them. She threw both arms outward.
The wave split.
For one moment, she held back an entire section of the ocean. It towered over her. Hundreds of tons of dark blue water curved around her body, suspended by nothing except her bending. Her feet slid backward. The muscles in her shoulders tightened. She screamed through clenched teeth. Then she redirected it. The water crashed sideways into an empty stretch of snow instead of the houses.
But the ocean kept coming.
A pale, luminous body moving through the water with the terrible grace of something that did not need to breathe. The ocean spirit rose. The water around him spiraled upward.
Katara understood then. This wasn't a storm. La had come for the refinery and the people that had allowed to spoilt the ocean and the people who gained power by his lover. He had come for the refinery and Wolf Cove was in the way.
Sokka was already organizing the evacuation.
The moment Katara found him, he was soaked to the skin, dragging two children out of a collapsing house. He shoved them toward another men and turned back.
A wave tore through the street. Katara caught it. She caught nearly all of it. The water wrapped around her like a living beast. She twisted, swept upward.
The wave rose with them, folding over itself before she drove it toward the empty tundra. It exploded against the snow.
Katara staggered. Her breath came hard. She could feel blood running from one nostril. She wiped it away. There were people trapped near the harbor. The village had become chaos. Water rushed through streets that had been frozen solid an hour earlier. Boats had become battering rams. Ice shards spun through the floodwater like knives.
Katara dove beneath the surface. The cold punched through her clothing. She forced herself deeper. A family was trapped inside a half-submerged house. Katara punched both hands forward, then swirled her arms before her chest and upward to lift the water masses up.
Water surged through the doorway, wrapping around three people and carrying them toward her. She pulled them free. A beam collapsed above her. She turned. The timber struck her shoulder. Pain exploded down her arm. She sank and felt far away. Darkness. Cold. The roar of water.
Then her hand moved. She roared louder than the ocean and the ocean obeyed her command.
Black liquid from the barrels with oil inside them had spread across the water in enormous shimmering patches. Kataras stomach turned. The oil formed a black skin over the waves.
La's shape disappeared beneath the surface. Then the ocean exploded. A column of water dozens of meters high erupted beneath the shoreline and came down with an impact that
Katara knew immediately that they had lost. Not the fight. Wolf Cove. The Southern Watertribe. The sea that had fed generations of people was turning black. She ran toward it anyway. She couldn't stop La. But she could stop the oil. Katara planted her feet in the water. Both hands rose. The water around the cove began to move.
She pulled the polluted water away from the shoreline, forcing it into a gigantic rotating column. The black water rose around her. Oil coated her clothes, hair and face.
The strain became unbearable. Katara screamed. She dragged the contaminated water toward the direction of the refinery.
Behind her, Sokka and the others were still carrying survivors away from the collapsing buildings.
The ocean rose again. Katara barely had enough strength left. She raised one hand. The wave stopped. It hung in front of her. And Katara finally understood that she couldn't keep doing this. She wasn't strong enough. Not for this, her knees buckled and the water swallowed her.
Sokka found her minutes later. She was lying facedown on the frozen shore. He turned her over but she didn't move. For one horrible second, he thought she was dead. Then she coughed, water spilled from her mouth, she dragged in a breath so violently that it sounded like something breaking. Sokka pulled her upright and against his chest.
She stared past him. Wolf Cove was almost unrecognizable. Houses stood broken open. Boats lay upside down in the streets. And beyond it the sea was still black in some spots.
Katara's eyes filled with burning tears of rage and despair. She had spent so much time and energy trying to prevent this.
She had failed.
Some wounds could not be repaired once they had been made. Far out beyond the wreckage, the water moved. La surfaced one final time.
His enormous head rose above the waves. He looked toward the shore and then directly toward Katara. There was no triumph in him, only grief. She looked back at him, with an expression that resembled his. Great waterspirit sensed her and turned away from Wolf Cove for now. He disappeared beneath the water. The sea settled and the wind returned.
Wolf Cove began to mourn.
Three days after the attack, Wolf Cove still smelled of oil, salt, and burned wood.
Katara had stopped sleeping. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the same things. A house collapsing into the water. A child disappearing beneath the waves. A black sheen spreading across the ocean. And La.
Not as the monster everyone in the village now whispered about. As the spirit she had known since she was a child. The ocean was still angry. She could feel it and she was too.
She sat at the end of the table in Hakodas office with both hands wrapped around a cup she hadn't touched. Across from her, Hakoda stood with his arms crossed. Sokka was beside him. Neither looked rested. Neither looked particularly surprised that she had finally exploded.
"You knew." Her voice was quiet, she had not spoken over the course of the last three days. She had not even looked at them, not even at Aang. She mourned and her anger grew.
Hakoda's jaw tightened. "I knew the refinery had been approved." Katara laughed once. "You knew." "I didn't know what would happen." "You knew." The cup cracked between her hands and cold tea spilled across the table. She looked down at the broken ceramic. "You knew exactly what they were doing."
Hakoda's expression hardened. "We had no choice. Katara stood so quickly the chair struck the wall behind her. "No choice?" The words tore out of her. " You were blinded by the possibilities that lured you in and by the very same greed that poisons the whole world." Sokka stepped between them. "Katara…" She looked at her brother.
Katara's breathing became ragged, her eyes burned.
"Wolf Cove is destroyed." Her voice cracked. "People are dead."
Hakoda's face changed. She saw the pain in his expression. But she couldn't stop.
"The water is contaminated. The hunting grounds are ruined. Children are sleeping in the healer's tents because their homes are gone." She pointed toward the window.
Hakoda's voice finally rose. "I was trying to secure a future for this tribe!" "So was I!" The room shook. Water erupted from the basin in the corner. It spiraled around Katara like a storm. She looked at her father. "I thought you understood that."
Katara lowered her hands. The water fell. She suddenly felt exhausted and started to cry. "I thought you understood."
She pushed Sokka to the side and left the building.
Aang was coming after her. She knew that before she even heard his footsteps.
She stopped since he would catch up to her one way or another.
She just looked at him, arms crossed in front of her chest and laughed bitterly.
"You allowed all this." Aang went silent. Katara stepped closer. Her voice dropped.
"You're the Avatar. You were supposed to bring balance between the nations and the spirit world. You were supposed to prevent thus events from occurring in the first place. You should have stopped them, when they agreed to build a refinery right here."
The words landed harder than she intended. But she didn't take them back.
"The nations are tearing pieces out of the world because they can." She gestured toward the ruined village. "They dig into mountains. Cut down forests. Dam rivers. Pollute the ocean. They call it progress."
Aang's eyes turned dark. He looked at her.
"You were supposed to protect the world." "I am trying." "No." Katara shook her head and then looked toward the sea. Once she had believed that if the two of them stood together, there was nothing they couldn't fix.
Now she wasn't sure. Her voice broke "I'm disappointed in you. I thought you would be the one person who wouldn't let this happen."
Aang lowered his head. "I’m not fit to deal with this kind of progress. I feel as though I’m in a completely different world. Defeating the Fire Lord was a piece of cake compared to facing this unstoppable march of progress without allowing nations to interfere destructively with nature. This time, you give me hope. Hope that people like you realise it’s wrong and that progress doesn’t only bring good things. But all we can do is try to limit the damage. A great deal of damage has already been done, and I can only hope that future generations will better understand that we only have this one world."
She began to weep bitterly. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She knew that, in a way, he was right, but what could she hope for, if not the Avatar?
She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that there had to be a way to undo what had been done. But she knew better now. The refinery would not simply disappear. The oil would not vanish from the water because she wished it to. The lives lost at Wolf Cove would never be returned to their families.
Some wounds, once inflicted upon the world, could not be completely healed.
Katara finally looked at him through her tears. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that there had to be a way to undo what had been done. But she knew better now. The refinery would not simply disappear. The oil would not vanish from the water because she wished it to. The lives lost at Wolf Cove would never be returned to their families. Some wounds, once inflicted upon the world, could not be completely healed.
She knew the damage that had been done to the world could not be completely reversed. But she would not accept that the pople who were dragged into this would have to suffer.She wiped the tears from her face and looked once more toward the dark ocean."Then we'll learn," she whispered. "We'll learn how to advocate for the importance of living in this world without destroying it."Aang looked at her."I still believe in you," she said, her voice unsteady but certain. "But I think you need to understand that you don't have to carry all of this alone."She stepped closer to him."I can't stop the world from changing, Aang. Neither can you. But I can stand beside the people who are hurt by that change. I can fight for them. I can make sure their voices are heard when everyone else is too busy calling destruction progress. I couldn't save Wolf Cove. I couldn't stop the refinery. And I couldn't save everyone.", she paused and her voice grew stronger, her eyes were no longer full of despair, "But I can help rebuild. I can protect what is still here. I can fight for the places that haven't been destroyed yet. And when you don't know where this new world is taking you..." She finally looked directly at him. I'll be there."
For the sake of her cultural heritage and the innocent she now made it her purpose to heal the world and revive the belief of the Water Tribes that man should live with nature and not against it.