The first thing I remember is flashing lights and screams. Pressing my mud-covered body into the ground as hard as I could, I could only watch on in horror as my friends and family that I had known all my life shrieked as their skin melted off muscle and bone.
I had heard stories of the Fire Nation Army raids; How they surrounded defenseless villages before killing the villagers on sight whilst ransacking the homes of all valuables. To see it in person however, was another matter entirely.
My every instinct told me to go out and fight them, defend my friends and family, launch boulders through the scum’s head, or impale them upon spikes of earth, but I knew it to be a hopeless endeavor. The village of Bailong was outnumbered 3 to 1, with none of the town's residents having combat experience bar an 81 year old man whose torso could be seen with a large burn mark and lifeless eyes. Even if I managed to kill a few of the raiders, I would be slaughtered just like the rest. I could only pray to the spirits that the others would be able to flee and lose their pursuers.
After a half hour, the screaming stopped. Through the slit in the mud and earth I had bent to conceal myself, I saw the raiders start to congregate, piling their ill-gotten gains together and readying to move on. My rage surged when I saw my parents' locked box containing most of our valuables being added to the pile. I forcefully pushed it down as I prayed they weren’t killed like the rest.
The press of the earth around me helped distract me from my emotions as I watched them pile the loot into carriages pulled by what could only be Komodo Rhinos. Waiting another half hour after they left in case they were still watching the village after they left, I rushed back towards my house. Finding the front door to the family store ripped clean off its hinges, the sinking feeling in my gut that I had been suppressing earlier fully set in.
Slowly taking in the sight of a ransacked storefront I caught sight of a body behind the counter, I ran close to see the bodies of my parents. My father, Boshi Liedai, a slightly portly man with a kind face, was splayed out on the floor with a gaping wound in his chest. Behind him was my mother, Meili Liedai, a tall beauty that my father constantly bragged to the others in the village about marrying. She had large tears in her clothes and it looked like she struggled before she was killed after they went through my father.
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Tears soaked my face as I knelt before their corpses and I relived how utterly powerless I was to try to save them. I knew that in the back of my mind even if I made it to the store before the raiders came, I would have just been slain with my parents. It did nothing to help lessen my grief. I could do nothing but mourn the loss and wallow in my own misery.
I pushed aside my grief for now to try and make the best of what happened. It would disgrace me even more if I just curled up and died now that the tragedy had already passed. Walking away from Bailong I paused by the roadside and stomped down. A man-sized chunk of earth from the ground and I gently placed it to the right of the unmarked grave. I solemnly began to hoist the bodies of my neighbors onto my shoulder and move them into the empty graves.
After filling about 50 graves with bodies, my heart began to bleed with rage. What have we done to deserve this? How did the raiders even get to us, we were 20 miles out from the front lines. And most importantly, how monstrous do you have to be to so casually kill innocent and defenseless people? Spirits damn the bastards to face twice as cruel an end.
Carefully picking through the remains of the broken-down village, I tried to shove anything of value that remained inside a rucksack. Altogether I found a map of the local area and about 6 days worth of rations that my neighbors had stored for the winter season. I also found 1 gold, 21 silver, and 189 copper yuan among the various houses, a pittance compared to what he knew the village's coffers to be before, but beggars can’t be choosers after all.
Lastly, I went back to my parents' shop and carefully bent a tile out of the floor to reveal a hidden cache. Looking inside I saw a couple more gold, the deed for the store, and a gold locket that had a badgermole engraving on the outside and a photo of Boshi, Meili, and I smiling with Omashu’s three peaks in the background.
Putting the locket over my head to rest low on my chest, I shoved the rest in my rucksack and strapped it to my back. Looking sorrowfully back towards Bailong to say my last goodbyes, I vowed that the monsters that destroyed my home would pay for their atrocity.
Carefully unfolding the map, I plotted a course for the only major city participating in the war Omashu.