The visions had been torture. Seeing Kelsang laugh and throw his arm over the shoulder of the man who would one day slice his throat open and leave him to bleed out on a mountain. Watching Hei-Ran in her prime, knowing she would be robbed of her strength and her honor.
They had all started out as such good friends, and yet Kuruk had let the people who loved him most drift away like chaff in the wind, down the paths to ruination. He should have done more for them. He should have fought harder to keep them together.
“I didn’t learn anything,” Kyoshi choked out. “Only how much easier his life was than mine.”
Nyahitha looked at Kyoshi sadly. Then he snorted, clearing the contents of his nose into his throat. “All right. Pack it up. We’re done here.”
Fine by her. “Is there another technique we can try? Maybe a different location?”
“We could, but I don’t think you’ll do any better than you did just now. This is your limit.”
Nyahitha rose to his feet and dusted himself off. “You might be good at meditation, but you will never talk to Kuruk or any of your other predecessors in the Avatar cycle if you cling to your resentments this hard. Kuruk’s flaws aren’t keeping you from what you want. Yours are. You’ll have to find another way to rescue your boy from Father Glowworm’s clutches.”
In a fury, Kyoshi crossed the distance and grabbed Nyahitha by the front of his robes. He stared up at her calmly, as if he completely expected the threatening gesture. He had seen into her thoughts and found her wanting.
She let go as sharply as she could.
“Let me share with you some advice, the wisdom of my years,” Nyahitha said, straightening the rumples she’d given him. “You can have your past, or you can have your future. Not both. We can try again once you understand this.” Deciding his future lay back in town, he began the trek down the mountain.
Kyoshi watched her erstwhile guide walk away, feeling as powerless as she ever had. Coming here had been a mistake. She should never have believed Kuruk could give her answers. There was nothing else she could do right now but follow in Nyahitha’s wake, bitterness welling in her throat.
They hadn’t gone far when the sage, perhaps sensing she was on the verge of tears, spoke up. “I wasn’t lying when I said you had the potential for great spiritual discipline,” he said as he continued picking his way through the narrow path. “You must have had a good teacher showing you the fundamentals.”
His pity was worse than his antagonism. “You’re not the first old man I’ve meditated with, if that’s what you mean.” She’d learned at the feet of a supposed immortal. It would have reflected poorly on her if she hadn’t picked up a trick or two about the inner mind.
Nyahitha shrugged. “Whoever it was has my regards. I could feel the veil between worlds thinning around your shoulders, Avatar. The spirits of the islands came through and spoke to you tonight. It’s just a matter if you can decipher their hidden messages.”
Dawn breaking further put the rugged handsomeness of the Fire Islands on full display. The sun gilded the fields below them, and from this high up, the disk of North Chung-Ling looked like an artist’s gentle stamp on a nature painting. But as the glare in her eyes lessened, restoring the farmed land to its natural colors, a jarring discrepancy arose.
Kyoshi stopped where she was and pointed at the hillside melonyam field. “Did the spirits do that?” she asked. “Because if they did, I think their message is pretty clear.”
The melonyam leaves created a dense blanket of vegetation over the soil. But many of the plants had, in a single night, dried and turned sickly yellow in swathes that stood out clearly against their green surroundings. From this distance, the dying crops formed patterns that looked like giant brushstrokes.
And the perfectly legible characters they spelled out were Hail Fire Lord Chaejin.
INTERLUDE: SURVIVAL
Yun threw up his hands as Father Glowworm bore down on him. This is it, he thought. This is where it ends. The boy who’d turned out to be nothing would fittingly vanish without a trace.
But his body was stronger than his will. Out of sheer memory and practice, the forms carved into his muscles and bones, his gesture of surrender turned into a Sky Piercing Fist, an uppercut.
The earth. The earth that loved him when nothing else would. He should have known that even in his lowest moment, he would never be abandoned by his element. A focused blast of mud and loosened rocks lashed Father Glowworm across the iris. The spirit shrieked and halted its charge.
Yun stared at his own hand in shock, as if this were the very first act of moving earth he’d ever performed. Tears welled in his eyes, blurring his vision.
“Oh look.” He wiped his face with his arm and sniffed. “I can bend here.”
The duel raged for three days and three nights is how his fable would have gone, if told by another.
In truth, he didn’t know how long he battled Father Glowworm. Time seemed to work differently here. At one point he remembered crawling on his hands and knees for the edge of the swamp, willing to put his lips to the bottom of a puddle, needing to drink more than he wanted to defend himself. But tendrils of slime had blocked his path, forcing him to turn and continue to fight. It was no longer about predator and prey, but whose hatred and stubbornness would see them through.
Yun had to strategize which parts of his body he could sacrifice, like he was one of the wound dummies he and Master Amak used to practice on. A twisted elbow was better than a broken rib. Bleeding from the head was fine but he had to protect his arteries. Above all, he could not lose consciousness, whether to exhaustion or a knockout blow.
And he gave as good as he got. He battered the spirit with columns of solid stone, sprayed it with clouds of pebbles, nearly caught it in a giant hand of mud. An observation throughout the fight gave him slivers of hope, peeking through like rays of sunshine. Every time he struck home and truly wounded the spirit, it shrunk in size. A marker of progress.
“So,” Yun wheezed during a lull while bent at the waist and heaving for breath. “How do I stack up against Kuruk?” His blood and sweat dripped off the tip of his nose, pattering and mingling on the ground. “I have it on good authority I’m his equal when it comes to earthbending.”
His enemy continued to flit through the trees, but at a slower, ragged pace. The spirit h