With her little gloves, she batters away at the snow that plagues the doorway to her friend's house, fighting against the stiffness of her joints, chanting, always chanting – I'm not scared, no, not me,- and then she plunges her way inside.

'Nini!'

The young girl stares at the weak hisses of a fire that has been burning without any fuel to accompany its mournful atria. The grief clutches at her throat and she bows her head, even before the blue imprint of a nine year old girl materialises before her –Kya, I'm so cold, why am I so cold, tell me – and knows she is alone with her gift.

Kya has been special since the day she was born. Limp and bedraggled in her sleep, she screams as all infants do and drives her mother half-crazy as the nightmares increase. She does not have words to express what she sees, but she does not need to when she sees the shadows of plundered tribes and hear the roars of slaughtered dragons. Her eyes become wide and bulging and her mother panics. Later, much later, when she can walk with the fumbling pride of a toddler, she stares at the man who is not married to her mother and glares, seethes with the pulsating rhythm of knowledge. The only two people who should know why are puzzled.

Naturally, her mother's husband does not care. And Kya learns to grow up, not bothered by the fact that is impossible to see any man as her father, when the only two choices she ever had were already closed off for her.

'I like the sky at night. It is warm, almost orange, like the fire in our houses. Your house. Maybe that will make you feel warm Nini.'

Hakoda remembers her image against the aurora, pallid rainbows flittering across her skin. She arches her neck back, curved like the ivory tusks of the elephant-whale he will one day conquer and laughs, free and wild in a way that unnerves him. She is like a child, excited as her eyes roam the skies, hungrily scrapping out images only she can see. She tells every one of the relics of their past life, how the sun is the rapist bastard of Agni and why the moon flees his burning gaze and settles into the crooning lullaby of the ocean each dawn. Occasionally she confides in Hakoda that if she squints really hard, she sees strange colours that give way to the future. She says, almost confused, that she sees happiness and blood. He thinks she is crazy.

Years later, when she is not a girl but a teenager insecure in her own glowing skin, he listens to her breathe against her nightly sky-watching. The backdrop of the light spectrum is almost too much for him to bear, but then a waft of stray hair will catch his eye and tug his heart even further out of his chest. He is stupefied when he realises that it is being simultaneously charmed and brow-beaten into joining it's other half under her ribcage. And he can do nothing but gape when she marches up to him and demands to know when they are going to get married.

'I am sorry you will never have children, Nini.'

Kya knows her son does not believe in her abilities. He is too much of a realist in the way he shakes his head at her mutterings, turning away and closing his eyes when she rattles her pouch of bones and spreads them against the short, angry flicks of fire. Oh, he still indulges her in a story-telling session, but she is saddened at the way his comically large eyes have dimmed and sharpened with age when once they gleamed.

She likes to sneak up on him when he is sleeping and kiss his eyelids with the delicate platter of her southern-iced lips. She knows her lips are like rainfall compared to the harsher stomping of the earth-trained mouth that will take over this role of hers one day, and sees her kisses as compensation for the rougher reception he will receive from the snow-coloured wife who will strike thorns into his heart.

Kya pauses then, because she is a mother, as well as a seer, and smooths a hand over the family boomerang. She knows that this moment, much like the item she touches, will not be coming back.

'I'll get help. Stay there Nini!'

The one thing that has always surprised Kya is that most people believe her when she spins them her tales of faces in the fire and how her ancestors hug her bones jealously in her sleep.

For every now and then the people of her tribe can catch glimpses of the spirit world, but only the rare few are born with the ability to see into it. She is the new angakuq, their spiritual advisor and protector, born with the power to keep the evil spirits away from the children and they are relieved, for it has been a while since they last had a shaman among them.

Kya is not so sure. She can already see that no preparation in the world will be enough to stop her own children from being encased in their own personal demons and can't help but be puzzled when she sees cheerful grey eyes watching her from beneath the water. She can see her children's souls, blue and electric with promise, and she trembles when she sees warriors incarnated in their steps. She wishes she had more than her chants and dances to drive their warring natures away. In the end, she only has her words.

But strangely enough, words are all she needs in order to save the life of her daughter.

'It's me.'

It's always been her. Her to see the dead. Her to see what will happen to the living. Her to use words, words to save, words to heal, words to palpitate.

'Take me as your prisoner.'

Except she has always been a prisoner. And now she will finally take her place in the aurora she has always loved, the aurora that has always made her wild with joy and the aurora that helped Hakoda to fall in love with her.

'ME!'

Years later, the word will burst out of Katara, her warrior spirit raging in the blue her mother sought to defy, Zuko behind her and in awe of the perfect dome she builds, an igloo of execution for the one executer who fell from his post. But perhaps there is too much of Kya in her daughter after all, because the arms will drop, the water will fall and Katara will use words instead of action to drive home the finishing blow.

Hakoda does not listen to his mother when she warns him that she cannot bring herself to fully love Kya –'there's something inside of her, something that distances itself and makes her run away from others and be alone. She has somewhere to be, somewhere to go. I can't get attached; it feels like she'll be leaving soon.'

He laughs and thinks he understands. After all, his wife once scared him with her talk of how destruction and bliss go hand in hand. But he resolves to be the one to keep her close and entwine their gloves together and in pity, his mother hands over her necklace.

One night, it drops from his hand as he stares numbly at the aurora and away from where the rest of the village is setting out candles and driftwood. If he knew what flowers were, he would trade his armour for them. But he does not need to. For Katara will trade her childhood for a whole world of flowers in both the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation.

'Go find your Dad, sweetie.'

And she does. She finds him broken and hollowing at the rainbows in the sky. She picks up the necklace he has dropped and sets it round her throat like an extra heart.

'Mom, I'm scared.'

Her spirituality has been developed for water, not ghosts. But still, she talks. She heals. She helps. And she subdues her warrior spirit for just a little while longer. She has a feeling it's what her mother would have wanted.