The Rise of Kyoshi (Avatar, The Last Airbender)

Kelsang had grabbed her arm and was staring at her, eyes wild and white. His grip squeezed tighter and tighter, crushing her flesh, his nails drawing blood from both her skin and his.

“You’re hurting me!” she cried out.

The room was silent. Disbelieving. Kelsang let go, and she caught herself on the edge of the table. A map of purple was stamped on her wrist.

“Kyoshi,” Kelsang said, his voice constricted and airless. “Kyoshi, where did you learn THAT SONG?”

REVELATIONS

After Kelsang took her aside into an empty study and spent half an hour tearfully apologizing for hurting her, he told her why he’d lost control.

“Oh,” Kyoshi said in response to the worst news she’d ever heard in her life.

She ran her fingers through her hair and threw her head back. The library where they were hiding was taller than it was long, a mineshaft cramped with scrolls, yanked off the shelves and put back without care. Beams of sunlight revealed how much dust was floating around the room. She needed to clean this place up.

“You’re mistaken,” she said to Kelsang. “Yun is the Avatar. Jianzhu identified him nearly two years ago. Everyone knows this.”

Kelsang didn’t look any happier than she did. “You don’t understand. After Kuruk died, the Earthen traditions around locating the Avatar fell apart. Imagine if the seasons suddenly refused to turn. It was chaos. After so many failures, the sages, Earthbenders especially, felt abandoned by the spirits and their ancestors alike.”

Kyoshi leaned back against a ladder and gripped the rungs tightly.

“There was talk of Kuruk being the last of the cycle, that the world was destined for an age of strife, to be torn apart by outlaws and warlords. Until Jianzhu labeled Yun as the next Avatar. But the way it happened had no precedent. Tell me this—with the two of you as close as you are, has Yun ever once told you the details?”

She shook her head. It was strange, now that Kelsang mentioned it.

“That’s because Jianzhu probably forbade him. The full story would cast the shadow of illegitimacy on him.” The monk rubbed his eyes; it was abhorrently dusty in here. “We were in Makapu, surveying the volcano. We’d honestly given up on finding the Avatar, like so many others. On the last day of our trip, we noticed a crowd growing in a corner of the town square.

“They were gathered around a child with a Pai Sho board. Yun. He was hustling tourists like us, and he’d made quite a bit of money at it too. To give his opponents confidence, he was running the blind bag gambit. It’s when your opponent plays normally, picking their tiles, but you dump yours into a sack and mix them up randomly. Whatever you draw each turn is what you have to play. An insurmountable disadvantage.”

Kyoshi could see it too easily. Yun’s silver tongue coaxing money out of people’s wallets. A stream of banter and flashing smiles. He could probably bankrupt someone and still leave them happy to have met him.

“What most people don’t know, and what Yun didn’t know, was that the blind bag is supposed to be a scam,” Kelsang said. “You’re meant to rig the tiles or the bag itself so you have a way to find the exact combinations you need. But Yun wasn’t cheating. He was actually drawing randomly and winning.”

“We might have passed it off as a kid enjoying a string of luck, but Jianzhu noticed he was drawing and playing Kuruk’s favorite strategies, turn by turn, down to the exact placement of the exact tile. Game after game he was doing this. He displayed tricks and traps that Kuruk explicitly kept secret from anyone but us.”

“It sounds like Kuruk took Pai Sho pretty seriously,” Kyoshi said.

Kelsang snorted and then sneezed, sending a little tornado spiraling toward the skylight. “It was one of the few things he did. And he was unequivocally one of the greatest players in history. Depending on what rules you’re using, you have as many as sixty tiles. There are over two hundred spots on the board where you can put them. To randomly draw and then brilliantly execute a precise line of play that only Kuruk was mad enough to win with in the annals of the game—the odds of it are unfathomable.”

Kyoshi didn’t have a taste for Pai Sho, but she knew that masters often talked about play styles being as individualistic and recognizable as a signature. An identity contained within the board.

“After what Jianzhu went through with Xu Ping An and the Yellow Necks, it was as if a mountain range had been lifted off his shoulders,” Kelsang said. “Any doubts he might have had completely vanished when we saw Yun earthbend. Granted, the kid can move rocks like no one else. If we identified the Avatar solely through a precision-bending contest, he’d be Kuruk’s reincarnation hands down.”

Kyoshi thought back to this morning and Yun’s incredible manipulation of the earth. In her mind only the Avatar could have done that.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “All of this is proof. Yun is the Avatar. Why would you tell me that I’m—that I’m—why would you do that to me!?”

Her anguish was absorbed, without an echo, by the masses of faded, crumbling paper that surrounded them.

“Can we get out of here?” Kelsang said, his eyes red.

They walked in silence down the corridors of the mansion. Kelsang’s presence justified taking the shortest route, where the visiting dignitaries might see them. They passed works of calligraphy mounted on the walls that were more precious than bricks of gold. Vases of translucent delicacy held the day’s flowers cut from the garden.

Kyoshi felt like a thief as they passed the casually displayed treasures, no better than an intruder who might slip past the guards and stuff each priceless item into a gunnysack. Even the servants’ dormitory, plain and poorly lit, seemed to whisper ingrate at her from its dark corners. Not all of the staff were able to live on-site. And she knew that a bed lifted off the floor and a wooden door that shut tight were better than what many other servants around the Earth Kingdom got.

She and Kelsang squeezed inside her room. It was cramped, the two of them being the same height, but as sizable people they had practice at minimizing themselves. Her quarters were small but still technically more space than she needed. Besides a few knickknacks from her street life, her only two possessions upon moving into Jianzhu’s house were a heavy locked trunk that she’d stowed in the corner, and on top, the leather-bound journal that explained what was in it. Her inheritance from the days before Yokoya.

“You still have those,” Kelsang said. “I know how valuable they are to you. I remember tracking you down to the little nest you made around the trunk underneath the blacksmith’s house. You hugged the book so tight to your chest and wouldn’t let me read it. You looked ready to defend it to the death.”