Fenri sat on a carved bench on one side of the room, while Halvard leaned up against the door to Rook’s meeting room. The village of Shadow Ridge was oriented to point toward one end of the caldera, where the mountain reached a sort of local peak, before the range continued on the far side. The caves in the peak, where Rook made her home and her office were much bigger than the caves along the caldera, where the other villagers lived.
As such, there was an immense, warmly furnished room between Fenri and Halvard, and the space between them seemed even larger.
“Um, thank you… for the cloak… Again,” said Fenri.
“You’re welcome… again,” said Halvard.
There was shouting from beyond the door.
Fenri looked at his hands.
Halvard coughed and shuffled his feet.
***
“I told you if you let him out of your sight I would kill him!” Rook roared, hand on her sword.
“Halvard’s with him and Fenri’s the least of your problems right now,” Yaosen shot back, ready to summon fire and stop her if she should try to go after the boneshifter.
The woman didn’t know firebending, but something in his stance must have suggested that he was ready to fight for Fenri, because the wide, double-edge sword slid back into its place on her back.
“Why do you insist on being so difficult?” said Rook, “It's been nothing but trouble since you came here.”
Yaosen sighed and the warmth in his palms receded as he backed away from the source of his firebending. “I’m sorry for that. Truly I am sorry. But your village is in danger-”
“We’re over three hundred strong. Every man woman and child in Shadow Ridge knows how to handle themselves in a fight. We can take care of ourselves.”
“I don’t doubt that but what’s coming is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s warfare on a scale this continent has never seen. Where I come from this village would be one of the smallest villages in the Four Nations. The army that’s landed here is the product of one of the largest cities of the largest kingdom.”
“How big?” asked Rook. “A hundred fighters? Two hundred? Ten hundred?”
Yaosen did some quick calculations and then put it as he would explain it to Duu, “A hundred ten hundreds.”
Rook rolled her eyes, assuming the figure to be hyperbole.
“It's true. And that’s not the size of the city – of the village – that’s the size of the fighting force coming up from the south. They have steel that could cut through your iron sword. They have armor – metal hides that your arrows can’t pierce. Weapons that can shoot an arrow as big as a tree, further than you can see.”
“Numbers and flying trees do them no good if they don’t find us. The caves are an endless maze and the ridge hides us from view.”
“That’s the worst part,” said Yaosen, “They can move earth like I can move fire.”
He summoned a flame in the cup of his hands. Rook started but didn’t back away. Yaosen parted the flame then sent it up in a whoosh to demonstrate what would happen to their caves and their caldera if the Earthbreakers wanted to get through.
Rook’s eyes flattened. “So they have sorcerers. I have a few tricks of my own.”
“Tricks?” Yaosen laughed a bitter laugh, “Do you even know what you’re capable of? You’re a wild bender, so you might go about it in a different way, but you’ll also be incredibly powerful. Duu, the girl with me, can turn rivers, but she never even thought to try until she knew it was possible. You could incinerate an army, cut through a mountain, but you don’t know half of what you’d need to know to do it.”
Rook looked up at that, her eyes growing dark. That darkness bled to the edges of her black-feathered cloak and then continued spreading until a wall of darkness covered the wall behind her like a portal straight into the deepest depths of the mountain, or the space between stars. “You don’t know half of what I can do.”
That blot of pitch black reached out to Yaosen like the enfolding of wings. It closed in on him, threatening to consume him.
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There was no time for Yaosen to form the focus to draw light. But there was no need. This darkness was inky, dirty, raw.
Fire would suffice.
Yaosen let the flames burst forth, not just from his upturned palms, but from his arms, his shoulders, his back and the crown of his head. It roared like an aura around him, as if he himself were a living flame. But the heat never touched him. His battered white gi was unscorched. His topknot didn’t so much as singe.
He beat back the darkness in what was not only a display of overwhelming force, but one of overwhelming control. The fire turned from red to orange, then to a glowing gold that was almost white.
Rook was a wild bender, a shadowbender, perhaps even a prodigy. But Yaosen was a monk of the Light Temple, and the benders that were stronger than him could be counted on half of one hand.
***
There was a creaking yawn from behind the door like a giant had settled his foot down within. Fenri’s ears popped, as if he had suddenly climbed a mountain. A roaring whoosh answered it and the pressure returned to normal.
The room was cold and then stifling all in the span of a heartbeat.
“What is going on in there?” Halvard said, one hand to his brow the other on the haft of a battle axe at his belt.
“I don’t know,” said Fenri, “But I don’t really want to find out.”
Halvard looked at the fledgling boneshifter, then to the crack beneath the door. Darkness warred with golden light.
Halvard slid the ax back into its loop.
***
Yaosen watched Rook’s eyes. They darted from the flames to Yaosen’s face, then to the door as he let them sputter out. He hadn’t wanted to scare her, only prove a point. But it seemed the people of the Farwilds, even cold-hard leaders like Rook, could flip from fight to flight in the span of a few heartbeats.
She had tried to summon the shadows twice more, to push back the flames that had roared from Yaosen, but she had found her trump card strangely absent, and had looked on the verge of panic as a result.
They had been battling for control over the energy in the room, Rook trying to absorb it leaving nothing but cold and shadow. Yaosen in turn had amplified it, igniting it into roaring golden flames.
Rook, of course, knew none of this. To her, she had tried to cast magic, some innate force she had been able to control her entire life, and she had found that this stranger was able to counter her spell. She knew none of the art, none of the philosophy, and she didn’t even know why she had lost.
Yaosen had to work quickly to shift the arena. He needed to work with Rook, not against her. They shared a common enemy after all.
“Believe me when I say that there are those among the Earthbreakers – the invaders – that can do tricks. And then there are those with real power. Even the weakest benders are more than a match for a Farwilds fighter. And even the nonbenders among them can hold their own against you or Halvard.”
“What do these Earthbreakers want with me? My quarrel is with the boneshifters at my doorstep, not these foreigners.” Rook’s composure was quickly returning, but Yaosen didn’t like the way she circled the furniture as if to get closer to him.
Yaosen circled the opposite direction. “The boneshifters have never attacked your village before, right? Maybe not any village? And their tactics are new, too? That’s because they’re just animals to the Earthbreakers, and the Earthbreaker leader knows how to bend a beast to his will. He drove them into your village to soften you, get your people scared, maybe even weaken your defenses.”
“But why? Are they searching for you?” Rook’s hands were hidden in her feathered cloak and something instinctual in Yaosen told him not to let her get close.
“They search for the one I’m searching for. The Four Nations that we come from have been thrown out of balance. The one I search for, the avatar, can restore that balance but they were supposed to be born into the Fire Nation more than twenty years ago. The cycle has never failed in such a way, nor have the sages ever failed to find the avatar, at least not in the Fire Nation.”
“And if you simply… went away? Would these Earthbreakers still harry my people with boneshifters?”
Yaosen realized the purpose of their slow dance around the room. He realized why he instinctively wanted to keep his distance from this woman.
He had overplayed his hand and now she saw him as a threat.
Torun was Yaosen’s sword, but Rook was her own sword. If she got close, her superior martial skills might outweigh his superior bending skills. She hadn’t beaten him with shadow, so she was defaulting to iron. If she wanted to keep him talking, that was fine. All he had to do was get her to listen before she decided to kill him.
“If I never came here, they would still be pressing out in every direction. Earthbreakers are conquerors. They seek an empire, ostensibly for the Four Nations, but really they seek to place one king above the others. They care nothing for the people in their way and they care nothing for the balance that the avatar would seek to maintain.”
Yaosen circled toward the fireplace, carved into the black volcanic walls of the dwelling. He couldn’t run from her forever, but if she closed, an existing fire would be quicker to hand than generating his own.
“The next avatar was meant to be born a firebender. And since the avatar wasn’t found among the Four Nations proper, the avatar must have been born here, on this continent.”
Rook stepped in front of him, cutting him off from the rest of the room and the fireplace. Yaosen saw the flash of a knife in her hands but he pointedly ignored it, staring straight into her depthless eyes. It was now or never. His next sentence would convince her or it would be his last.
“They will kill anyone with even a passing affinity to fire: lightbenders, shadowbenders, even nonbenders unlucky enough to live in the caves of a dormant volcano.”
The knife flashed as it came free of her cloak.