The pack of razorback wolfboar didn’t bother them again, but Yaosen and Torun kept their pace slow nonetheless.

The once-alpha razorback was still learning to walk with only the three legs, and in a brutal world such as this, neither Torun nor Yoasen would leave the fallen leader behind.

“He needs a name,” said Yaosen.

“Why?”

“Because ‘razorback wolfboar’ is too long. If you wanted to name a dog ‘dog’ that’s fine but if you don’t come up with something shorter for him, I will.”

“I imagine he’s already got a name in his language.”

“But you don’t speak razorback wolfboar do you?”

“Hmph.”

“‘Grunt’ it is then.”

Torun shrugged and seemed satisfied with that.

“What do you think, Grunt? Do you like your new name?”

Yoasen reached a hand out to the Grunt’s mane and the wolfboar snapped, hand-length tusks coming dangerously close to goring Yaosen.

“Guess you’re still warming to me.”

“He fears you,” said Torun.

“You do speak boar, then?”

Torun shook his head and perhaps Yoasen saw the shadow of a smile on the Meteor Knight’s face, before he ducked his head and leaned into the climb, heavy armor returned to the pack.

“Why would he fear me?” asked Yaosen, when they had crested the rise and stopped panting, “You’re the one who defeated him in battle.”

“But he knows battle. He doesn’t know what to make of you and your fire, so he’s wary until he figures out where you stand within the pack.”

“Hm,” said Yaosen. He supposed that made sense. He had lived his whole life within one hierarchy or another, and there was an odd sense of comfort in knowing exactly where you stood. It dictated how you should act so as not to give inadvertent offense.

But it also locked you in place, whether you deserved that place or not. Born to the wrong family in the Fire Nation and your entire life was limited. Born at the wrong time and the effect was the same.

Bending was the only means of advancement that Fire Nation hierarchy allowed, but even that had its checks and balances. Yaosen had poured his life into his firebending, seeking to master a technique that might finally prove that he was worth more than the station afforded him. And that had gotten him… what?

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Was he knocked back in station to the lowest possible point: an exile? Or was he now removed from that hierarchy, off to the side somehow in a way that no longer fit?

Yaosen didn’t know. The problem with losing your place in the great order of the Fire Nation, was that you no longer had a teacher or master above you, telling you what to make of things.

Now he had to let a giant pigdog make up its own mind about him.

Yaosen sighed.

They were alive anyway; Torun, Yaosen, and Grunt. The three of them had been plucked from their neat little lives and strewn into the chaos, but they were alive. That had to count for something.

Yaosen thumped into Torun’s pack.

He was about to ask Torun why they had stopped, when he stepped around the Meteor Knight to see the incredible panorama that lay before them.

They had ascended the highest mountain in what appeared to be an eastern range, running parallel to the sea. They were so high above the rest of the Farwilds that it might as well have been a mystically detailed map laid out before them.

Yaosen was filled with a sense of wonder at the land that lay out before them, so different from anything he had seen in the Fire Nation or in his studies of the Four Nations.

But at the same time his heart sank. It was all interminably green, untamed forests for as far as the eye could see. Rocky gray peaks broke up the sea of pines, where they reached above where the trees could survive, but there were no towns or cities, no homesteads or plowed fields.

In one instance, far to the north, snow covered everything. But from that high plateau of white, a ribbon of blue meandered toward them.

It was this river that Torun pointed out.

“If we’re to find people on this continent, we should start there, and work our way outwards.” He gestured to a series of wide bends in the river as it cut between mountain ranges. There, the dark green of forest and pine seemed to give way to clear verdant meadow.

Yaosen had to agree, if he were to pick anywhere to settle on this continent, that place seemed idyllic, at least compared to the rest of what he could make out from here.

It seemed somehow the heart of everything they now looked upon, and Yaosen could only hope that it was his training and his study that called him to this place, attuning him to some spiritual force that most people – aside from an avatar – lived their entire lives without acknowledging, but following nonetheless.

He tried to attune himself to this spiritual energy, as an avatar might, and found that in his mind’s eye he felt caught between two opposing forces, one far to the north nestled within that veil of white snow and one behind them. They were like chi points in the body of the world, or perhaps spiritual chakras depending upon which ideologies you studied.

He turned to survey the land south of them, part of which they had spent the better part of the week trekking through.

His mouth hung open at what he saw: a great gash where the forest met the sea. The Earthbreakers had been there for less time than Torun and Yaosen had, but already they were tearing down the forest, flattening the earth, and putting up a great walled city of stone at the river’s delta. Atop that wall at intervals were the monolithic faces that had once adorned the Earthbreakers’ ships.

Those stone giants had borne the Earthbreakers across the sea, and now they stood sentinel around the imperialists’ foothold.

It was only a matter of time before all of the Farwilds they could now see – from sandy beach to green forest to gray peak – became part of the new Earth Kingdom.

“Hmph,” said Torun with disapproval as he too looked upon the first city of the Farwilds, as far as they knew. Then, after a moment, “Let’s move.”

With a sad shake of his head, Yaosen turned his back on the new city and fell into step.