If there was one thing Yaosen couldn’t face with any dignity, it was drowning.

Agni Kai would have been fine; at least it would have been quick. A meteor blade would have actually been a suitably significant way to die. A stake, like they used in the dark ages, would have even been preferable to this.

Instead, Yaosen was sealed in a metal box plummeting to the seafloor, waiting for the slow leaks at the seems to force out the last of his air.

Those leaks were slow, thought Yaosen. So at the very least he would have been killed by a very competent, and a very thorough metalbender. But that just meant he’d have more time to savor his injuries before he died.

As it were, his blood was filling up the coffin about as fast as the seawater was.

He attempted a form but there wasn’t even enough space within the coffin to try blasting his way out by sheer force of firebending.

His head thunked against the metal in front of him.

What had Aangatsu said at his trial? Focus was the key to lightbending, not force? Surely those weren’t his exact words but that was the gist of it.

It of course made sense in a practical way, like a magnifying lens held up to the sun, but bending was as much a spiritual art as it was a physical one.

He had done it, though, not once but twice. He had been able to lightbend, and with great effect and precision, cutting the valve from an engine about to blow, then cutting the match from a man’s hands. Well, not just the match. He had taken some fingers too. But that was in the heat of the moment, when everything was on the line and there was nothing to lose.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

So what did he have to lose now.

He positioned his hands before himself, making the exact minute movements he had seen in the lightbending scroll Noro had stolen for him.

He took the last of his ebbing energy and poured it into the gesture, willing the heat of his considerable firebending power through a mental focus, as clear and concave as a glass lens. Firebending was about breath, about the diaphragm, about force of will and passion. But airbending was about clarity and the absence of attachment. Lightbending was some combination of the two. It wasn’t airbending, per se. It was still firebending, but firebending influenced by contact with another discipline.

But that was what a scholar said, at a desk in a temple as he put ink to paper by candlelight. Passion and clarity were all well and good until you were trying to cut your way out of a metal box on the seafloor before you drowned.

Yet Yaosen found his mind drifting to the boy who had stolen that scroll on the theory of lightbending. Young Noro had wanted to see Yaosen succeed so badly that he had broken a temple rule for him. And then he had snuck into the training grounds in the middle of the night, just so he wouldn’t miss the result. Noro hadn’t only wanted Yaosen to succeed, he had believed in it enough to risk his life!

Light bloomed within the confines of the metal box. Distantly, Yaosen could hear the light humming in the small space, the metal sizzling, and the water on the far side bubbling and boiling where it touched the heating metal. Yaosen moved his hands, his physical focus, in a slow arc, and the beam of light followed.

But Noro’s faith had been misplaced. And the boy had paid the price for trusting Yaosen.

Yaosen felt the beam waver as he dragged his mind back to the present. Focus. FOCUS!

His mental lens grew clouded. Something between passion and clarity dropped out of alignment and Yaosen knew the beam would backfire even as the perfectly pure ray of firebending erupted into a gout of flame in all directions.

In a metal box, there were no other directions for the flames to go, and it was all Yaosen could do to try to vent the fire out the small fissure into the sea beyond.

Something within him buckled under the effort, and as the water rushed into the rent, Yaosen blacked out.