The Shadow of Kyoshi (Avatar, The Last Airbender)

The year of his birth—the same as hers, the year Kuruk died. Family name—like her, Yun didn’t have one. The ease with which he’d assimilated into high society had many visitors convinced he came from a noble family of prominent standing, but the truth was he was a commoner, the same as Kyoshi. The date of his death—

Sometimes people used the Avatar calendar to precisely mark when their loved ones had passed. Doing so in this case would have meant Kyoshi writing her own name on Yun’s gravestone. She had to leave the space blank.

So it came to be that his marker was unusually sparse. Yun. From Makapu. The rest of the stone was empty, as if it could still be filled with an unwritten destiny. She’d buried him on a hill, where he could see the village by the waves below and watch the clouds drift overhead in the skies above.

Everyone had left except for Rangi, who lingered by Kyoshi’s side. It was the three of them together, like it had been in the very beginning.

“Was I right?” she asked Rangi and any spirits listening nearby. The muscles in her chest were tired and aching from grief. “Was I right about anything at all? What will they say about me? Avatar Kyoshi, who killed her friend because she couldn’t save him?”

“I don’t know,” Rangi said. “I can’t tell you anything for certain about the future. Only that I’ll be there with you.” She leaned over, supporting herself on the crutch she’d taken from the infirmary, and kissed Kyoshi on the top of her hair. Then she limped down the hill, leaving Kyoshi alone with her memories.

Kyoshi waited and waited until finally she thought of the right farewell to give.

“I wish it could have been you, Yun. If it couldn’t have been me.” Neither part of it was a lie.

A gust of wind swept her hair. She heard a chirping sound, perhaps a bird disturbed in its nest. She looked behind her.

From a nearby bush, a snout poked out. Its owner emerged into the clearing. A four-legged animal resembling a falconfox, only without the beak and feathers, furry all over.

The beast stared at Kyoshi with glowing green eyes. It padded over to her, sniffing along the way, until it was close enough to nuzzle at her.

She didn’t know what to do except offer her hand. The fox . . . fox licked her palm, the roughness of its tongue tickling her skin. She risked scratching it behind its ears. Creatures like this didn’t live in Yokoya.

The strange animal leaned into her touch, enjoying the contact, until it suddenly and arbitrarily decided it’d had enough. It chirruped at her again, throwing wide jaws set with small, pointy teeth, and then dashed back into the bush.

A few seconds later it came back. Somehow it looked annoyed with her. The fox padded around in a circle. “You . . . want me to follow you?” she said.

It scratched impatiently at the grass until she got up.

Kyoshi followed the fox through the woods, over the edges of the hills, down and up ravines. There was no trail and she nearly fell several times, off slippery stones and bridges of rotting logs. She didn’t know where they were going, and though she had spent nearly a decade in the village, she couldn’t boast knowledge of every inch of the mountain. Wandering was dangerous and expended energy. The younger version of her liked to stay put.

Speaking of which, getting lost as an adult wasn’t a good idea either. “We’ve gone too far,” she said to the fox. Then she realized she was talking to an animal. She’d gone too far indeed, in the head.

The fox jumped between two thick trees. Kyoshi sighed and wedged herself through the space. She stumbled into a clearing.

In the middle was a spring, a little pool with clear, fresh water bubbling up from the earth. It was hemmed in with mossy stones, and the lip jutted out over the slope of the mountain. It was beautiful.

Kyoshi understood once she saw the water. Kuruk had sent the fox to guide her to a spiritual site so they could commune. Her connection to the Water Avatar, as it had been made obvious, was strongest near his native element.

She saw a flat table of a stone, perfect for sitting on to meditate. The fox watched her climb onto it and take a cross-legged position. She arranged her hands with her thumbs touching to make a circle, preferring it over the knuckle-to-knuckle contact master Airbenders used to align their tattoos.

As Nyahitha had observed, it didn’t take her long to detach from her body and the physical world once she closed her eyes. Perhaps because the realm of humans hadn’t cared for her much, it was easy to separate from it. Or she’d simply gotten more skilled with practice. It was difficult for her to admit, but at the cost of sufficient effort, sometimes heroic, inhuman effort, things could get better over time.

She smiled once she felt a presence across from her. “I don’t want to relive memories of you swimming in this pool,” she said to Kuruk.

“Sure?” a woman’s voice replied in confusion.

Kyoshi’s eyes snapped open. It wasn’t Kuruk sitting in front of her.

“No,” Kyoshi whispered. Her heart pounded between her ears. Bile surged over her tongue. “No no no no NO!”

She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready to see her mother’s ghost. What kind of cruel trick of death was being played on her? How had Jesa of the Eastern Air Temple come back to haunt her?

Kyoshi scrambled back over the rough stone. She flailed her arms to ward off the tall, beautiful Air Nomad woman, the one who’d abandoned her in Yokoya, never to return. “You’re not here! You’re supposed to be dead!”

The spirit parted her lips and raised her dark brown eyebrows. The act scrunched the blue arrow tattoo lying over her shaved forehead. “I . . . know? Kyoshi, who do you think I am?”

Kyoshi caught her ragged breath. She squeezed her hands under her arms to still their shaking. She forced herself to think rationally about it, instead of panicking over the same slight laugh wrinkles about the eyes that Jesa had, and the deep gray eyes the statues at the Air Temples couldn’t capture. People could resemble each other. No one’s face was as unique as they thought it was.