The final test that the river had in store for them made Yaosen realize that perhaps Duu was right to try the badland route first. He even thought that braving the horde of creepers might be the better option, now that he saw what they needed to face.
But he was alone in that, and they had spent too much time making it this far up the river besides.
There seemed to be only one last row of mountains in the range before the peaks turned to glacial ice and snow. But though they had come to the end of the river as they knew it, they had not yet reached its source.
The river before them rushed out of an immense cave bored into the rockface of a mountain.
The main cavern appeared wide and spacious for the part they could see, but Yaosen saw it getting tighter and more convoluted as it made its way under the mountain range for the last stretch.
“Actually, since we’re going upriver, this is the first stretch,” Duu corrected Yaosen when he mentioned this, “Or maybe the second. Either way we’re almost at the source. And Grandfather said the hidden village, or ‘sitee,’ as you guys call it, is on the other end of these caves.”
“But who is to say that there’s only one route?” asked Yaosen, “It could split off into a dozen dead ends.”
“If the water came from somewhere and it's going somewhere, there are no dead ends,” said Duu.
“Hmph,” Torun agreed.
“But that doesn’t mean it's all passable. What if a pathway is completely filled up with water? Or what if Headbutt can’t fit?”
Headbutt snorted and lumbered forward into the main cavern, seeming to head to a very specific sub-tunnel.
“What if Headbutt comes this way all the time?” asked Duu.
“He does seem to like salmonsturgeon,” added Torun, “Could be he follows them every year.”
The salmonsturgeon didn’t jump as much as they did in the rapids, since there were few waterfalls for them to ascend in this section, but he could still see the occasional flash of shimmering scales in the deeper flows.
“But they can breathe underwater!” said Yaosen.
***
The cavern grew dark, dank and cold almost immediately. But most of all, there was something instinctual within Yaosen that told him fast-moving water and underground tunnels just didn’t mix.
When they saw that Headbutt was only a snout and a single antler rising from the wide, slow-moving waters of the main cavern, they elected to paddle the canoe across the pool. As they reached the far side of the cave, the thousand pound bearmoose shook himself off and picked one of the many tunnels from which the water poured.
It was then that Duu decided to release the canoe bent from living roots, allowing it to follow the flow of the river and re-settle where it may.
“It's not right to leave a living tree in a cave with no other trees,” Duu had argued, and no one had refuted that, even if it did leave the young treebender with only her traditional waterbending skills in an emergency.
As soon as they entered the smaller tunnel in the back of the main cavern, and the darkness closed in, the voices started.
“Leeeeave.”
“Did you hear that?” Yaosen snapped as he turned to face nothing but shadows and rock.
Torun and Duu turned to look at him with puzzled expressions. Their faces flickered in the firelight of Yaosen’s handheld flame.
Yaosen increased the size of it.
There was nowhere to hide where the voice had come from, but the shadows around them only grew longer.
Now even Headbutt had turned to wonder at why they had stopped following him, and Grunt… well Grunt just looked nervous because they were packed in so tight with the bearmoose.
All these days spent with Headbutt as their ally, and Grunt still couldn’t bring himself to fully trust Headbutt. He was being silly.
And so was Yaosen.
“Nevermind,” said Yaosen, “the sooner we’re out of these caves the better. Let’s keep moving.”
Their tunnel was roughly circular, a weak trickle flowing down the middle of it.
“Duu what time of year is it right now?” asked Torun.
“Year?” asked Duu.
“You know, spring, summer, fall, winter, then spring again. That’s one year.”
“Let me tell you what I just heard,” said Duu, “Blip, blop, drip, drop, then blipblop and that’s one blurb.”
“Are the trees growing their fastest right now, or their slowest?” asked Yaosen distractedly. He had begun to enjoy the little puzzles of what Duu knew and what she didn’t, then how to put arbitrary human terms into strictly natural ones. Sometimes it was horribly difficult, like the long conversation they had once had regarding standardized distances.
“Oh, we’re three full moon’s after the big bloom. Sooo, the trees were growing their fastest, but they’re just starting to slow down a bit now.”
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Sometimes it was as easy as this, a civilized term like ‘spring’ only being one layer of logic away from a natural one like ‘the big bloom.’
“So there are twelve moons a year. Spring is the four moons when things bloom most, and summer is the four moons when the days are longest.” Torun explained.
“Oh, then it’s ‘sumner’ right now. But what happens when they overlap?”
“Well, the year is divided up into…”
“Falssse avatar.”
“What did you say?” Yaosen’s fire flared, driving back the shadows. He had rounded on Duu, who looked frightened. But Duu certainly wasn’t the one who had spoken. It hadn’t been Duu’s voice and Duu only looked frightened of Yaosen’s sudden outburst. “Sorry, Duu. I thought you said something… strange.”
“Um, it's ok.”
“What did you think she said?” Torun asked with a scowl.
“Something about the avatar. It doesn’t matter. I think it was an echo.”
That prompted a whole other line of questioning about what was an echo and what was sound, even though Torun hadn’t fully finished explaining the seasons. Torun began answering her most recent questions and Yaosen was happy to leave him to it. The monk was too busy darting his eyes from shadow to shadow.
“Not your place spirit walker.”
That had indeed come from the shadows behind Yaosen, but he made no move to turn or brighten his light. In fact, it took every ounce of willpower for him to dim his flame even further. His strength was rewarded when the shadows spoke again without hesitation.
“You talk to spirits and intercede on their behalf, but you know this is the duty of the avatar.” The voice was a low rasp, like a dark, torpid wind on the bare branches of winter.
Fear worse than drowning enveloped Yaosen, but he allowed himself to lag the others in the group. He let the flame die in his hand by increments, until there was no source of light other than the torch Torun carried far in the distance. Yaosen’s companions were a distant candle in a world of darkness, that bobbed and flickered, and then to Yaosen’s eyes, winked out.
The voice came from right beside Yaosen. “Hsss, you dare enter the spirit realm without the avatar. Have you no shame? Have you no respect?”
“What do you know of the avatar?” Yaosen asked. There was nothing around him except darkness, but he could see his ethereal self, and hear his body's footfalls, as it moved forward of its own accord and his soul lagged behind.
“We know you are not the avatar. We know you have no place in the spirit realm.”
“But you do know of him. You are a spirit of this place, yet you know a title that has belonged to the east for thousands of years.”
A dry rustling laugh as if from multiple sources and a different, equally strange voice spoke up, “The spirit realm has no borders, lightbender. But we know of your avatar.”
“Where is he?”
“Closer than you think. But not, I think, what you expect.”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the point in telling you, monk. You will die here.”
“The shadows lie. The shadows lie. The shadows lie.” This was another voice, very unlike that of the spirits that mocked him.
“Who are you?”
The voice stopped.
Yaosen came crashing back to the mortal realm as his body collided with something.
He summoned a flame for light and only just caught the glimmer of steel before it sliced the air above him.
He threw himself back and scrambled away, thoughts tumbling out like a pyroclastic flow.
Did the Earthbreakers beat them here? Did the creepers use weapons? Was this some new-
He couldn’t finish the thought as the flame in his hand was pierced by a blade from the darkness, narrowly missing his hand below.
Yaosen didn’t bother summoning another flame.
He kicked out with a purely physical attack and his foot made solid contact with a body.
There was a grunt that was not quite the snarl of a creeper nor the gruff voice of an Earthbreaker, but Yaosen didn’t take the time to consider.
He took off in the other direction.
Blindly, so as not to give his attacker a beacon to follow, he charged down the tunnel. Faintly he could hear Torun and Duu calling for him. He turned toward them, only to realize the calls were coming from a completely different direction. He turned again, and was again confused at the new trajectory of the voices.
Twice more he attempted to follow the sounds of his companions' voices, only to realize he was getting himself well and truly lost, sweating in the heat and panic of the moment.
Wait a minute, Yaosen thought, skidding to a halt, why was it hot down here?
He took a moment to soak in the warmth, then took a few steps back the direction he had come. It was hotter that way. It would have been imperceptible for anyone other than an advanced firebender, deeply attuned to temperature and energy flows. He took a few steps in the other direction.
Definitely cooler.
He took off in the cooler direction as fast as he could, remembering how cold and damp it had been in the tunnels when they had first set off into them.
Voices rebounded all around him. Echos, or lying shadows, Yaosen was unsure.
What he did know is that not all spirits were friendly.
Another turn in the tunnels and Yaosen’s feet began to splash through a persistent trickle of water.
Yaosen nearly laughed aloud. He had never been so happy to have cold, wet feet.
The tunnel turned and his footfalls fell on dry rock, so he halted and corrected himself, following the trickle of water as it increased. He was splashing through a knee-high underground creek at this point and he was just starting to get nervous that his fear of drowning would be well-founded when…
He slammed into a wall of fur and muscle.
It roared.
“It's me! Headbutt, it's me.” Yaosen summoned a small flame and held it to the side, so as not to startle the massive bearmoose any further.
Headbutt cut off his roar. And snuffed.
Getting a good whiff of Yaosen set him at ease, though he snorted his annoyance as he moved on up the tunnel.
“How did you get up there?” Torun asked. Torun’s tone didn’t seem rhetorical, but was genuinely concerned that Yaosen might have been able to bend himself through space and time.
“I… took a wrong turn.” How to explain? Had there been someone else in the tunnels with them? Or had it just been the dark spirits? Yaosen had no idea where the line was between spirit realm and physical in the past few moments.
“Well get behind me if you don’t want to start swimming,” said Duu. She was behind the bearmoose using what she had learned from her traditional waterbending to redirect the flow of the subterranean creek around her, Torun, and Grunt.
The deeper flow didn’t bother Headbutt, who was both taller and stronger. What was a knee-high trudge for the rest of them, was an ankle high wade for him.
Yaosen took a deep, calming breath and fell in line, reigniting his hand-held flame. He let it burn bright and wide, no longer trusting the shadows and the voices therein.
“You’re getting much better,” said Yaosen.
Duu smiled for a moment, but her concentration slipped and the water shot up instead of out to the side.
She regained the waterbending motion and grimaced, as Yaosen reignited his handheld torch and wiped the water from his face.