Duu sprinkled the contents of several different pouches onto the sapling, then wiggled her feet into the marshy earth.

She twisted her arms in a pattern that was vaguely reminiscent of a bloodbending scroll Yaosen had studied, and shivers ran down his spine.

But Duu’s forms were not from any school of waterbending known in the east. They were a school unto themselves. A treebending school. A wild bender school.

As Duu continued – strain and a sort of meditative peace warring on her face – water from the wet earth began trickling toward the sapling of its own volition. It picked up the sprinkled contents of Duu’s pouches in its languid flow, and where it reached the sapling’s base, it sank and disappeared.

The earth beneath the tree began to bulge, and for a moment an alarm went off in Yaosen’s head. Duu was bending water and earth. What were the chances that the first person they had met on this continent would be the end of their search? What were the chances Duu was the avatar?

The sapling’s massive, miss-shapen root broke the surface of the earth, and Yaosen had to chastise himself for allowing him to believe such things without thinking.

Duu was a wunderkind waterbender, but that was the limit of her power. She wasn’t even the right age to have been born twenty years ago when Avatar Dandao of the Earth Kingdom died. Duu was merely using the water to carry nutrients – some from the surrounding marsh and some she had supplied from her various pouches – into the sapling, and cajoling the young tree to grow in a way it never would on its own, displacing earth in the process.

She was growing it to suit their purposes.

“Phew,” Duu slumped.

“Is it… done?” asked Torun.

“You’ll have to earthpaddle a little, but it's there.”

“Thank you, Duu,” said Yaosen, “I know that wasn’t easy for you.”

Yaosen meant it in more ways than one. It had taken the better part of a day to convince Duu that she was allowed to bend a tree to make a canoe for them, and then it had taken the rest of the day to convince her all over again when they had explained what a canoe was.

Bending a root was one thing, making a tree twist its roots into something unnatural was quite another. But digging up that tree afterward, and taking it far from the place it had seeded was absolutely unconscionable for Duu.

She had only agreed when Torun explained that the options were: bend a boat from a tree, or cut one down. Or, of course they could go back west and face the creepers again.

“No way!” Duu had said to that, “There wasn’t a single tree worth bending in that whole dusty place.”

Between Torun, Yaosen and Grunt, they had the entire root structure neatly exhumed within the hour.

It was astounding.

Duu had bent all of the tree’s roots in one direction, spreading outward from the base of the single small sapling, cupping around a hollow space that all of them could easily sit, then tapering back off and connecting again into a sort of prow.

Now that they had the strangely altered plant out of its hole and floating on the shallow swampy waters, the original sapling looked like a small masthead.

A few small alterations to fill gaps with bark, and their vessel awaited.

“A ship needs a name,” said Torun, turning to the little waterbender.

“I thought it was called ‘canoe.’” said Duu.

“That’s what it is,” said Torun, “Not who it is.”

“Hmm” said Duu, “Rootshoe!”

“‘Rootshoe?’” asked Yaosen.

“Yea, it looks like a shoe made of roots!”

“Rootshoe the canoe. I’m sure I’ve heard worse names,” said Torun.

Yaosen merely raised his eyebrows at that.

They had followed the river back down out of the badlands in the dead of night, and then retraced their steps to the fork in the river for the rest of the following day. They were all exhausted now, but they were happy to be out of harm's way and back into a happier, healthier stretch of the river. It didn’t matter that their last hour or so had been a trek through soupy marsh, as long as nothing was going to eat them.

As there was no raised dry land within a few hours walk, they dropped a root anchor and piled into Rootshoe to rest.

It was perhaps an hour before dawn, the first light showing up on the horizon, when they heard an enormous splashing plod nearby. Torun and Yaosen were on their feet in an instant, forgetting that they had slept aboard a canoe.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The whole thing tipped and tottered and probably would have flipped if it hadn’t been for their little anchor.

Yaosen didn’t think any of the creepers had followed them out of the badlands, but neither he, nor Torun wanted to risk another fight. Or worse, another sleepless night fleeing for their lives.

They settled back down beneath the tall marsh grasses and waited for the creature to move on.

***

By the time the sun shone overhead again, Duu was well rested, Torun was groggy at the interrupted sleep, and Yaosen was bleary-eyed, having not slept since hearing the movement in the grass.

“Get some sleep,” said Torun, “I’ll watch the kid for the next few hours.”

“But what if-”

“I’ll wake you, if anything happens. The best thing about a boat is that we don’t all have to be working at once.”

Yaosen nodded and settled into the prow.

“Alright Duu!” said Torun, “Waterbending practice starts now!”

“Yeah!”

Yaosen smiled as he closed his eyes and got comfortable. Such a willing learner.

“How about we practice the Foggy Bottom techniques I taught you and get this Rootshoe on the road!”

“YEAH!”

“Ok. Now remember, arms straight, elbow’s locked…”

Yaosen was out before Torun finished explaining the exercise.

***

In Yaosen’s dream, a black koi circled a white one, but this wasn’t the Spirit Oasis in the Northern Water Tribe capital. They were swirling through a tidepool surrounded by marsh grasses.

Suddenly they weren’t koi anymore but a pair of much larger, more primordial fish. One was red striped and the other was a silver-blue. They had spiny armored plates along their backs, like an earth kingdom tank, and battering rams for noses.

They didn’t so much as circle one another, peacefully in balance as the Spirit Oasis koi had, but they veered off in wide loops to gain momentum and ram into one another, then spun off in stalemate to loop around again.

***

“Salmonsturgeon!”

Yaosen lurched awake at Duu’s exclamation.

They were plodding upriver, the young waterbender standing at the stern, waving her arms like a windmill and propelling them forward with her waterbending. They didn’t move nearly as fast as a Foggy Bottom tribesman could move them, but it was better than paddling by hand.

Torun was manning a branch that he might have been using as a paddle when the girl flagged, but now he was brandishing it as if ready to fend off attack.

“Watch your head!” shouted Duu.

Even as Yaosen sat up, a Salmonsturgeon lept over their boat to splash back into the water.

“I… was just dreaming of these,” said Yaosen, eyeing the dozens, if not hundreds of large leaping fish that were making the journey upriver alongside their canoe. These were all silver gray, or a dark-spotted murky green. “Only, the ones in my dream were blue and red, opposing forces like Yin and Yang.”

“Whatever color,” said Duu, “You don’t want to get hit by one of these. They’re hard as rocks!”

“But where are they all going?”

Duu shrugged, “I don’t know, but they do it every year.”

One launched over the boat and Grunt caught it in his tusks, making a merry snack of it.

Yaosen looked shocked and Torun chuckled. “He’s a wolfboar remember? Can’t just eat mushrooms all the time. Not on the river anyway.”

At what Yaosen considered an act of unbridled savagery from something they slept beside, Duu merely shrugged again, “They go up the river but they don’t come back down. I think it's part of their life cycle.”

“Must spawn up there, and eggs wash out to sea,” Torun said.

A cycle. A balance. Yaosen pondered this, in light of his dream. The first spirit he had encountered was a wolfboar, so it made sense that the spirits of the river – at perhaps the heart of all waterbending in the Farwilds – would take the form of a common beast in their domain.

The only problem was, while the mountainous boar had communicated clearly with Yaosen, the divisions of language having no bearing on understanding in the spirit realm, the spirits of the river had been too locked in combat to pay Yaosen any heed, other than to appear to him.

“This some sort of Light Temple meditation?” asked Torun. He had given up on trying to fend off the leaping fish and settled for hunkering down behind the safety of Rootshoe’s gunwhale.

“No,” said Yaosen, shaking himself, “Just lost in thought. ‘Spiritual crap,’ as you’d call it.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have. It saved our lives. What are you thinking?”

“Well, it did save our lives by warning us of Lu Gun, even though we could have managed that a little better. But the spirit of Duu’s grandfather also probably saved her life by getting her to come with us. And I don’t know where we’d be without her…”

They both looked up to see Duu propelling them forward with far more ease than they could have managed against such a current, in a boat of her own making besides.

“...I think the spirit of the badlands, or whatever remained of it, warned me of the creepers in our camp, too, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.”

“And you’ve had another dream,” said Torun. It wasn’t a question. He knew where this was going.

Yaosen nodded, “I’ve been categorizing them based on the natural environment they seem to represent. The spirit of the mountain was a razorback wolfboar, then Duu’s grandfather seemed to be a spirit of the forest, the remnant of the spirit of the badlands was both vague and undecipherable, probably because her land was so weak and corrupted. Now I think I’ve been visited by the spirits of the river… only they didn’t tell me anything. They just seemed to be fundamentally opposing forces, a wilder version of our water spirits in the east.”

“Maybe that’s all you’re supposed to learn from them,” said Torun after a moment, “Maybe all you need to know is that things are similar here, but different in ways you might not expect. Kind of like Duu’s waterbending.”

Yaosen nodded, “Yin and Yang exist, but they’re not in balance, they’re at war.”

“War is a kind of balance, just as a sword can create a kind of peace. There’s something to be said for a longstanding stalemate.”

“The more I see these things, the more I realize that we need to find the avatar. He’s not just the bridge between nations, he’s the bridge between the spirit realm and the physical. And it seems I’m a poor substitute.”

“But they did show themselves to you.”

Yaosen nodded reluctantly. Perhaps his years studying the spiritual realm within the Light Temple had attuned him to such things. Perhaps in him, the spirits had recognized someone who might be able to decipher their messages. But for now, Yaosen was not convinced that it was anything more than an accident.

Accident or not, it would be the spirits that saved his life, once again.