Kyoshi was watching a memory of her past life. She stared at a young Kuruk from every angle at once, recognizing what was going through his mind with each twitch of his handsome face.
“Kuruk!” she tried shouting, to no effect. Her voice left her body, but there was no round trip, no echo. These were images, not people who could hear her and talk back. She was imprisoned, an audience in someone else’s performance, forced to watch a play she had no chance of altering.
Earthbending came so easy for him. Too easy. The rocks danced at his command, but his form was improper, his wizened master from Ba Sing Se grunted. Too loose and wiggly, not enough stamping around. He wasn’t adopting the attitude of an Earthbender. Kuruk struggled with why the influence of his waterbending style was considered a detriment to the other forms of bending. The elements—they were all connected. One flowed into the next, sharing the same energy. He wished his older teachers could see that. To be of one mind instead of four, wasn’t that the strength of the Avatar? To constantly switch your identity back and forth, Waterbender-Earthbender-Waterbender-Firebender-Airbender, the strain would tear you apart.
Surprisingly, the only person who agreed with him was a younger member of the Earth Kingdom delegation, some prissy kid from the Gan Jin tribe. Despite the difference in their personalities, Kuruk began to hang out with Jianzhu more and more. It was clear the uptight boy needed a friend. And the Avatar needed one too. He had plenty of people who liked him, but that wasn’t the same thing as true friendship.
It took a surprisingly long time for the two of them to sit down at a Pai Sho table together. By the time the first game concluded, Kuruk’s bond with Jianzhu was absolute.
The two of them put on their masks and suffered through the lecturing of their elders all the way through his mastery of fire and air. Best to simply comply than fight tradition along every single front. He pretended to be a model student in front of his teachers, held his tongue on corrections he could have made to their forms. He even invented a technique that could have earned him arrows, a way to create a cushion of air under a heavy object so it could be slid and moved over a floor with ease. A perfect way to arrange all those statues they had lying around the Air Temples.
The people who knew Kuruk as a child would have been surprised at his good behavior. There was a reason for it though, a reward that lay at the end of the elemental cycle. A sky bison. You could have all sorts of adventures once you had a flying mount at your disposal. The world opened up, unconstrained by distance.
That was how one of the junior monks of the Southern Air Temple caught him and Jianzhu sneaking into the pen, hoping to experiment with a joyride, and pinned them to the wall with a blast of air that rippled their cheeks for minutes on end.
Jianzhu’s hair stuck up like cactus thorns as the two of them knelt in front of the abbot of the temple and Kuruk’s elders, trembling at what punishments they might receive. Idiots, they were told. Every Avatar normally did a bit of independent traveling; they could have simply waited for their chance. Now, on their first trip, they were going to get chaperoned into oblivion.
The monk who had roughed them up so badly was assigned as a companion to the Avatar, despite his protests that he wanted nothing to do with two bison thieves. They were shocked to learn he was the same age as them, his hulking size and enviable beard making him seem older. It was a good punishment. The Avatar had this Kelsang fellow pegged for a no-fun grump.
“No!” Kyoshi thrashed back and forth, unable to break free. “NO!”
She had weathered the nausea of having to look at a younger version of Jianzhu smile and enjoy himself. She’d swallowed her hate by reminding herself the man was dead. But seeing Kelsang again was too much.
She couldn’t warn him of the monster sliding into his life in the disguise of a friend. She couldn’t change his fate. She was watching a wave crash inexorably against the shore, where it would break up and dissipate, irrecoverable.
The last member of their group would be an adult. The three of them would be accompanied by one of the strictest, harshest senior teachers at the Royal Academy. A Sei’naka man. The most powerful clan heads in the Fire Nation thought twice about trifling with a Sei’naka. But as fate would have it, the man got sick. He sent a younger relative in his stead, assuring them the arrangement would be only temporary. Kuruk knew he had to pull every string he could to make it permanent once he saw Hei-Ran.
He was convinced the spirits had given him a vision that day in First Lord’s Harbor. The girl who arrived was a walking dream of night-black hair and fierce lips and eyes that cut like knives. He had to ask quickly. He had to make her feelings clear, while his heart pounded in his chest like a battle drum giving him the courage to approach someone so beautiful. He turned on his charm, a weapon that had never failed him in the past.
It took less than a minute for Hei-Ran to coldly proclaim she wasn’t interested in a relatio
nship with the Avatar. Jianzhu and Kelsang bonded for the first time over their mutual friend’s misery, slapping each other’s backs and laughing at how brutally he’d been shot down. But while the two of them had their fun, they’d missed Hei-Ran giving Kuruk a slow blink, a smirk, and a little comment that romance was forbidden . . . while on duty.
Finally, world travel on a bison. As the breeze ruffled their hair, the sun warm on their skin, Kuruk surprised his companions by asking for more bending training. Why? they asked. They were young, not the established experts in their disciplines. And Kuruk was a bending prodigy, already a master of all four elements. What need did he have for further practice?
He explained that the distinction between the best Pai Sho grandmasters and those journeymen who were only mediocre was that the true geniuses simply played more games than their lower-ranked counterparts did. They never stopped learning. Jianzhu, Kelsang, Hei-Ran—they could make the Avatar better. They could make each other better. Constant challenge was the key to growth.
And so they practiced along the stops of their journeys. They practiced with each other, identifying and correcting and destroying each other’s habits, until it felt like the four of them could speak without speaking, their spirits merging into a single pool. Kuruk knew his companions had the potential for greatness, unorthodoxy, far beyond what their elders expected or even wanted of them.
Kelsang confirmed it one night when he admitted he’d visited the Spirit World unintentionally. His descriptions of colorful, translucent creatures, talking plants, shifting landscapes, had confused and upset the older monks who thought of the realm outside the physical as an austere place of blankness mirroring the detachment of the visitor.
That was exactly it, Kuruk said. The instant the facts disagreed with their preconceived notions, people lost their minds. That settled it. Kelsang was going to guide the Avatar to the Spirit World.
The monk agreed readily, eager for someone to share in the wonders he’d seen rather than ridicule him for it. They picked a meadow in the Earth Kingdom near Yaoping where it was said Yangchen liked to practice using the Avatar State to power her airbending. Kelsang and Kuruk sat on the grass, facing each other.
Though the exercise had been his idea, Kuruk didn’t still himself into meditation right away. He took a moment to watch Kelsang’s breathing rustle the coarse hairs of his mustache. He felt Jianzhu and Hei-Ran’s eyes on his back, their gazes filled with warmth.
His friends. He loved them so much. Life was good. It was simply good, and the world was a wonderful place.
Kyoshi’s nails were wet. She’d broken the skin of her palm. Blood trickled down her fingers.
She could still see Kelsang’s face. She’d seen the man who’d saved her life, who’d raised her. She’d seen her father’s face. Kuruk had gotten to spend time so much time with him.
Her eyes suddenly hurt. They stung from the light of dawn. Nyahitha was sitting with his back to the east, so the rising sun streamed over his shoulders. He looked at her with awe and confusion.
“Your spirit left your body,” he said. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn there was admiration in his voice. “I let the flame go after the first ten minutes once it was clear you didn’t need it. I’ve never seen anyone get the hang of journeying so quickly. Was Kuruk there? Did he tell you about Father Glowworm?”
“I didn’t find Kuruk.” Kyoshi sounded like she’d been strangled. Her words didn’t belong to her. “Only his memories. And they . . . they weren’t the ones I was looking for.”