Yaosen sat on a rock in the midst of a cascading creek. He felt the rock solid beneath him, the air gusting above him, the water swirling around him in a pool before continuing on its way.

As a high level monk of the Light Temple, he was, of course, familiar with not only every known school of firebending, but also every surviving text from the lost air temples as well. Chief among them, at least as far as lightbending went, were the teachings of the Eastern Air Temple.

The Light Chakra was the chakra of illusion, and as such clarity was the path to lightbending as surely as willpower was the path to firebending.

To achieve the mental focus required for lightbending, the Light Temple monks taught, one must see not only see the surrounding world clearly, but also be able to look upon oneself with the utmost clarity.

So Yaosen spent hours looking at his own reflection in the swirling waters of that pool, and was startled by the man that looked back at him.

Gone was the pale, slender form of discipline so common among lightbending monks. Aside from those first few lean days upon the shores of the Farwilds, Yaosen had eaten for strength, not for mere sustenance. He had grown broader, where once he had been the picture of slender youth.

But he had not grown soft. His diet had consisted of game and wild forage, every scrap of energy put toward survival, not comfort. He had trekked up mountains, carved timbers from trees and lifted those beams into place. He had carried rocks from the riverbank to the top of the hill where he had laid their hearth, and stacked them higher where they had formed the chimney.

He had fought not only a metalbender and a boar, but a Meteor Knight in mock combat every few days. Those fights had been more ferocious than any training or dueling in the Light Temple. The fights with Torun especially had a way of testing his muscle far more than his mind.

The result was not only a powerful physique, but an efficient one. Veins crisscrossing the hands that had once been more used to brush and scroll than knife and hammer.

His skin too, once the ideal of Fire Nation paleness, had grown bronze in the many hours of sun each day. That dark skin would be covered in soot and sap even now had he not insisted on washing daily, no matter the temperature of the stream in their corner of the meadow.

It was strange to think, that for practitioners of fire, they very rarely tolerated ash. For practitioners of light, they very rarely basked in the presence of the greatest lightbender of all, the sun.

With that, Yaosen felt his light chakra inch open just a little more. He could not only feel the sunbeams beating down upon him, but slanting into the surface of the water. Half of them shattered to waver through its depths, while the other half glimmered on the surface.

His own reflection, too, was no more than the light from his body bouncing back from the surface of the water, wavering and reduced by the imperfect medium but reaching his eyes nonetheless.

The Light Chakra was the chakra of illusion, and with a focusing of his hands and then a distortion he shifted the lines of his own visage to be that slender youth he had seen often in the wells and looking glasses of the Light Temple. A shifting in a different direction, not a physical direction in space but a different direction of light, and the image of him paled, no longer appearing bronzed by the sun and hard labor, but pale as a result of long days of study and meditation in libraries and shaded gardens.

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In that moment, Yaosen thought he understood lightbending more than any of his masters ever had. With a different focus of his hands, be began to pass his considered reserves of willpower through that mental focus.

***

Just as Torun was about to hammer the last beam into its groove atop the post, the waters of the creek jumped and the earth trembled. Torun looked toward where the monk had gone and could see a rising puff of smoke and steam already being carried off by the wind.

“What in the comet’s name…”

He dropped the hammer and began running, taking up his sword.

It must have been one hell of an adversary for the monk to call on that much firepower all at once. The finer points of firebending were lost on him, but Torun knew that no bender was immune to his own element. He had heard of enough earthbenders crushed, waterbenders frozen, or firebenders burnt to a crisp.

One tale of the Hundre Year War even told of a great general immolating himself rather than be taken alive by the Earth Kingdom.

Torun ran faster.

When he got to the source of the explosion, he didn’t know what he was looking at.

The stones of the riverbank were red hot and cracked. The grass for twenty paces around was scorched black. What was left of the creek was no more than a cloud of steam.

Torun watched, sword bared, as the steam dissipated.

No one was there except for the monk, head bowed in abject defeat.

“What was that?” Torun asked.

“Failure,” said Yaosen, “I never even formed the beam, much less sustained it.”

“Is that… some sort of firebending technique then.”

Yaosen nodded without raising his head, “The one that got me – us – banished.”

“Hmph.” Torun understood the need to right past wrongs, and he did not judge.

“I don’t understand. When we left the Fire Nation I was so close. I even used it in battle with the metalbender, exactly as I intended. I thought that was it. If I could do it once properly then I’d have it for the rest of my life. But I’ve learned so much since then and somehow I’m further from mastering lightbending.”

The creek had come rushing back, refilling pools and following its new path past the melted rocks and shattered earth. Yaosen lashed out at his reflection in one of those pools.

“Have you ever considered you weren’t meant to lightbend?” said Torun.

The monk made no response, but his head seemed to hang lower at that. It seemed like the wrong thing to say, but Torun had some experience with failure and disappointment.

Torun tested one of the rocks and found that it had cooled. He folded his legs to sit upon it and placed his blade across his lap.

“The Fire Lord met with your Light Temple masters regularly, and I was usually in the room. I’m not a firebender, but I often heard the conversations between one of the greatest firebenders and one of the greatest lightbenders. I would go so far as to say I knew them… from a distance.”

The young monk lifted his head slightly at that, and Torun pressed on.

“The lightbending masters I knew all seemed like better versions of you back when I first met you. You were refined but they were more so. You were educated but they were wise. They were controlled while you were… restrained. Now, when I see you, I see something different. I see something that doesn’t exist in our nation, and perhaps won’t exist in any of the Four Nations as we know them. When I say that perhaps you weren’t meant to lightbend, I mean that perhaps you weren’t meant to be a better version of something that already exists. Perhaps the person you saw yourself as was always nothing more than an illusion.”

Yaosen’s head jerked up at that.

“Every sword is built for the same purpose at first. To cut, to stab, to defend. Not even the smith can know how that sword will distinguish itself. Only the wielder can say how that sword will cut, what that sword will stab, or who that sword will defend.”

“But how can a firebender defeat a metalbender without light.”

“What do you mean?”

Yaosen told Torun what the mountain spirit had told him.

The more Torun heard the more his knuckles grew white where he gripped his sword.