There was little sense of progress as they followed the endless maze, each tunnel looking much like the next. The endless loop of rock and shadow was almost meditative, and Yaosen could feel his guard slipping as the minutes – or perhaps hours – wore on. By the time Rook spoke again, Yaosen was nearly fully in a trance.
Rook turned, grabbing him forcibly by the arm and turning him to face her. She was tall for a woman, nearly meeting his eyes, and not for the first time, he wondered at how her hair had turned yellow.
He chastised himself for the dreamlike state he was in, and for allowing her to get so close.
Above, he had watched her every move, worried that she would stick a knife between his ribs. Now he barely even registered when she spoke to him, as if she were shouting at him from the end of a long tunnel.
She shook him by the arm, demanding some sort of response.
He accessed his firebending, passing energy through each of his chi points trying to clear his mind of whatever had fogged it.
Fire cleansing was a different type of healing than water. It was an advanced technique, known only to fire sages, Light Temple monks, and avatars. But even so, it sharpened his focus only enough to hear the words as they came from her lips. If there was some poison in the air, he had only partially burned away its effects.
“Sorry,” Yaosen said, physically shaking his head, too, to clear it, “What did you say?”
“I said, I’m about to trust you with something that I have never trusted anyone else with, not even Halvard. I want a promise under pain of death that you’ll share something in return. You said that you and the Earthbreakers were looking for the same person; a master of all the elements. Maybe I can help you find them. But first, you must promise to help me defend my people.”
“You want me to… teach you?”
Rook snorted and lifted her chin. “Teach? No. Call it an exchange of services.”
Yaosen closed his eyes and passed the energy through each of his chi points once again, feeling his mind clear a bit more of whatever toxin, whether it be physical or spiritual, permeated these lower caves. He was certain he had heard her right.
“A moment ago, you seemed so certain that the Earthbreakers wouldn’t find us. Now you want me to help you fight?” Yaosen asked. “You speak as if you know you can’t win, so why persist with this plan of standing your ground?”
“I’m a good leader. But I’m not infallible. Part of what makes me a good leader is that I have backup plans for when I’m wrong. My usual backup plan is iron and shadow.” Rook touched the haft of her sword over her shoulder for emphasis, “But if you know the enemy and you say that’s not enough, then you have to be my backup plan.”
Yaosen pressed a hand to his sinuses. It's like they were speaking different languages. Everything Yaosen had said so far, and she was still underestimating the Earthbreakers. She was still underestimating Lu Gun. “There is no plan that will work that doesn’t involved the avatar. The scales are tipped so far out of balance that only he can put them back. Our first and only plan should be to flee, not fight, so we can continue the search for the one person who can provide a lasting solution.”
Her eyes bored into his at close proximity. “I’m not negotiating with you. I’m convincing you. You want help finding this avatar, you help my people protect their home.”
“And if I say I don’t need your help? If it's not worth putting my people in danger?” Yaosen lifted his chin as he said it, capitalizing on what little height advantage he had. He was doing his best to be cold and calculating, to be as callous as Rook seemed to be. But he felt a pale imitation of the chief.
Rook stepped even closer and placed her hand above the fire in Yaosen’s own, and inversion of him. The fire between their two palms seemed to diminish. It didn’t get smaller or cooler, but the light it gave off seemed to be consumed by Rook’s shadows before it got very far, even as Yaosen inadvertently fed more of himself to the flame.
They were once again fighting over the energy between them, but unlike before in Rook’s meeting hall, it now seemed a smaller, more subtle struggle in the confines of the cave. It was almost intimate.
Yaosen knew he could overwhelm the wild bender when it came to control over simple fire, but for the moment he didn’t push it, and neither did Rook.
“When you first saw this, you were surprised,” she said. They both knew what she meant by ‘this,’ and it wasn’t a question.
Yaosen nodded his admission, “I didn’t know shadowbending was possible. It stood to reason, since I had spent my entire life trying to master its opposite, but mastery over shadow was only theoretical. Until you.”
Rook nodded, her suspicions confirmed, then the gesture morphed into a shaking of bemusement, “So you don’t have a clue what you’re looking for out here. You say your avatar is a master of the elements, but you’re not even sure what those elements are.”
Yaosen said nothing. Every fiber of his being wanted to refute that statement, and reassert his mastery over his knowledge of the elements. He was a high ranking monk in the Light Temple, after all, the most prestigious group of benders in the entire Fire Nation, if not all Four Nations.
But his lessons with Duu had taught him how little that meant. The elements as he knew them barely existed here. Or rather, the most common expressions of Earth, Water, Air and Fire were completely different in the Farwilds. The truth was that Yaosen had learned as much from Duu as she had from him, and now Yaosen stood in front of a firebender who could barely bend a flame, yet somehow could control its fundamental essence to such a degree that she could almost effortlessly bend shadows.
Yaosen’s prolonged silence was as much of an admission as his previous response had been, and Rook was nodding again.
“If you agree to help my people,” she said, “I can show you exactly what you are looking for.”
“How?”
Rook cocked a small smile. “The shadows will tell you.” They both knew the shadow spirits would not tell them anything helpful. But clearly Rook had decided she had said enough on the matter.
Yaosen was left with only the two options Rook had granted him: face Lu Gun and his Earthbreakers, or go back to square one in his quest for the avatar.
If Yaosen chose to stay and fight, Torun would be honorbound to protect him. More than that, he would want to stand and fight. The Meteor Knight had already made that decision the first time Lu Gun drew close, and Torun was too stubborn to let one stalemate dissuade him from continuing the fight.
And Duu… There would be no sending Duu away. She would want to do whatever saved the most lives, even if those lives belonged to trees, not people.
She had wanted to stay with her forest, in the first place, even if it meant facing the Earthbreakers alone. They had coerced her to flee north with them to save her own life, but how far could they drag her from everything she held dear. There were no trees on the glacial tundra north of Shadow Ridge. Nor were the badlands to the west an option. No, Duu would not leave them now no matter what.
The simple fact was this: there was no extricating himself from his companions.
Rook must feel the same way, only on a larger scale, and suddenly Yaosen could empathize with the callous shadow chief.
Perhaps this was it, the place to make their stand. Perhaps these were the people they should stand with. Either way, Yaosen’s companions would understand and accept his decision.
Yaosen nodded solemnly.
“Say it,” Rook commanded, “Swear by the shadows.”
“I swear by the spirits of shadow, mountain, and forest, that I will help you defend the lives of your people. If they stand, I stand.”
Yaosen could hear unearthly snickering from the darkness, but he ignored it.
Rook removed her hand from the flame. Without her gentle resistance it flared to life between them.
In the sudden light, Yaosen could see that they had come to an end of the tunnel. But what lay before him was completely unexpected in the black volcanic tunnels of stone.It was a door of ivory, all of a piece, and so intricately carved it would have taken a master bender to accomplish the same effect with any other element. Rook barely glanced at it as she pulled it open.
An orange glow from beyond suffused the tunnel, making Yaosen’s flame redundant. He let the handheld torch slip without thinking and followed Rook within.
Heat blasted him immediately. Rivers, pools, and lakes of flowing magma stretched out before him in the most primal expression of fire the world had to offer. The cavern was almost as large as the fire nation capital, but it was obscured by the shifting subterranean topography of melting, cooling, and reforming stone.
Only one section was untouched by the glowing molten rock. A massive pillar of spiraling ivory appeared to be the cavern’s central column, reaching over a hundred paces to the dark ceiling above. Two flows of magma fell to either side of it like twin waterfalls, and on the pillar itself black tendrils of cooled volcanic stone twisted downward, as if the mountain itself sought to consume the unholy white obelisk, little by little.
Yaosen had stopped to observe the awesome display of nature’s ode to his element, but Rook strode a path of ash and fire without hesitation, as if she had seen it a hundred times before.
She kept to a winding path of cooled stone, but where the fireflows drew too near or cut across the path entirely, she fell into a strange distortion of a firebending stance, to direct the heat out of the stone and leaving it dark and passable.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
Yaosen knew a similar technique, one invented by the last firebending avatar, who died over two hundred years ago trying to stop an erupting volcano. Yaosen lent his aid once he caught up.
When at last they crossed the fields of fire and approached the great central column, Yaosen saw that the ivory of the pillar was carved as intricately as the door to the cavern, but where the obsidian reached down there was nothing, as if the bone told a story the magma had tried to wipe out.
“These caverns are very old,” said Rook, “Look. This is what I brought you here to see.”
The scale of the carving was staggering, rising from his feet to high above his head. And each of the figures depicted was no larger than his little finger. Even so, Yaosen could sense the difference in them. There was an order to it.
Four factions appeared to occupy the cardinal directions of the frieze, before obsidian spirals of cooled stone cut it off on either end. But the section that was visible was clear enough to Yaosen to note that these were once the Four Nations of the Farwilds.
In the east the dozens of tiny figures were all clad in bark and moss, dwelling amongst the trees. Yaosen paused in shock and then leaned toward the image as he thought he recognized the man at their head.
“That’s Duu’s grandfather! The first treebender!” Yaosen said.
“I’ve never heard of a treebender,” Rook said beside him.
Yaosen shook himself. He hadn’t realized he had spoken aloud. In fact, he had forgotten that he wasn’t alone down here.
“How old did you say this was?” Yaosen asked.
“At least a hundred years. My clan wintered in these caves for generations and even the oldest among us didn’t know about the bone door.”
Yaosen now suspected that the spirit that had raised Duu was not, in fact, her grandfather, but might have been a distant ancestor of hers if he was related to her at all. The spirit of the old man had suggested that he was the first treebender, and that he had come back to raise Duu. But he had not specified how much time had passed between those two events.
This carving suggested that there were many more treebenders, once. Figures made exalted poses and trees seemed to rise before them, or curl their branches around their summoners in protective embraces.
Duu’s grandfather seemed to be their leader, and he faced west toward a host of equal size.
There was no mistaking what the opposing faction was.
“Boneshifters,” Rook hissed, tracking Yaosen’s gaze.
The figures in the left-hand quadrant of the frieze held the forms of humanoid wolves, bears, boar, or mountain cats, but they also had shapes of less carnivorous beasts. There were deer, elk and bison-like figures among them. Others had ram’s horns or quills like hedgehogs. A few even had feathered or insectile wings.
It seemed there were few limitations, if any, on the boneshifters of old, save for the fact that they were all depicted as humanoid at their base, and none was significantly larger than the others.
Their apparent leader stood at their head, facing east, as if in direct opposition of the treebending leader.
Standing above both of them was a regal looking woman who had a line down her center, as if she were split somehow. The people at her back appeared normal, though where the boneshifters wore little clothes, and the treebenders wore garments of living wood, this northernmost faction wore more dignified attire.
But aside from that, there was nothing distinctive about these figures. There was no sign that they identified with one element or another.
“A faction of nonbenders?” asked Yaosen, slightly disappointed that one of the Four Nations of the Farwilds would be dedicated entirely toward the mundane.
Rook pointed to one figure.
Yoasen noticed nothing special about the man.
Rook must have sensed his confusion, because she stepped closer, and pointed specifically to the man’s shadow.
Indeed, the shadow was vaguely depicted, nearly invisible within the mass of the people around it. But it was clearly twisted. It appeared not to belong to the person it was attached to.
“Shadowbenders?”
Rook raised her eyebrows like a teacher asking for him to try harder, and pointed to the man next to the shadowbender.
While the first figure Rook had pointed to had a twisted shadow, the second man had no shadow whatsoever, despite seemingly belonging to the same faction.
Yaosen’s eyes went wide and Rook knew he had figured it out.
“I was at a loss until I met you,” she said with a small arrogant smile, “There’s only one way a man has no shadow.”
“But that’s impossible! Surely he's just a nonbender among the shadowbenders. There couldn’t possibly be a faction… an entire nation… of lightbenders.”
Rook cocked her head to refute him, pointing to the shadows all around that shadowless man. The shadows all pointed away from him, as if he were the dominant lightsource. As Yaosen looked from figure to figure among the shadowbender faction, he saw that some shadowbenders had multiple shadows, and they all pointed away from the nearest figure with no shadow.
Yaosen stepped back as his head swam. Though the frieze was all carved of the same ivory, suddenly he could almost see the splotches of light and dark among the mass of northerners.
There were so many of them! Lightbenders and shadowbenders both, living side by side.
“Your people may have stumbled upon lightbending,” Rook explained, “But the bending of light has existed for at least as long as this pillar. Whoever carved this makes no distinction between those that manipulate shadows or do away with them, just as they make no distinction between the different expressions of boneshifters, or for that matter, benders of bark, root, or leaf.”
Yaosen couldn’t believe it. Light was the purest refinement of the firebending art. It required the most precise manipulation of energy, the greatest focus of a volatile and sometimes destructive element. Yet in this image, it appeared as common as, well as common as any other form of bending.
And what was worse, was that the choice between light and darkness was… irrelevant. It was beyond disrespectful, not just of the Light Temple and Yaosen’s life’s work, but to the entire institution of the avatar and the spiritual understanding of everyone in the Four Nations.
Despite all this, Yaosen was consumed by only one question, when looking upon a multitude of lightbenders and shadowbenders.
“What…. what happened to them all?” asked Yaosen.
Rook strode to the far side of the ivory pillar. A massive slash of black stone covered what might have been several panes of the frieze’s story. But after several strides, Rook paused where the ivory remained exposed.
It took a moment for Yaosen to realize what he was looking at.
It was chaos. Pure and utter destruction. Tiny ivory figures were locked in one massive melee that spanned several paces worth of mural. They were of a strange style, but every single figure within that melee wielded a mundane weapon, a few of them wearing simple armor. The one constant within the entire expanse of the deadly brawl, was that not one single figure within this panel was bending. The four elements were completely absent, down to a complete lack of shifted or bark-clad wild benders.
“I don’t know how,” Rook continued, “but somehow, it was all lost. Not just bending, but any knowledge of that time, save for this carving. A few more years and the fire flows will shift and consume this too. Then no one but us will remember that there were once great nations of the Farwilds. No one but us will know that there were once benders in the Farwilds.”
Yaosen considered this for a moment. A world without benders was like an ideological gut punch to Yaosen. It was like a continent where people didn’t speak, or told no stories, or forgot how to breathe!
Yaosen also realized that his expectation had been for the Farwilds to be much like the Four Nations; full of traditional benders. His hope had been that all the continents of the world would fit neatly within the four elements.
He was shocked to realize how misguided that hope was, how wrong it was.
What's more, was that in a few years, that may be the reality. The last of the wild benders might be wiped out by the Earthbreakers, before they could even rekindle their knowledge of their bending arts. All the incredible things that Yaosen had found in the last few months would be replaced by earth. And then what? How long before the Earth Kingdom stamped out everything that didn’t fit within their world order?
But there was one person who could prevent this, and everything depended on Yaosen finding them before the Earthbreakers did.
Yaosen nodded gravely.
“So the avatar may not bend water, fire, earth and air… but wood, shadow, bone and…”
Yaosen returned to the carving of the four factions tracing the gaze of the lightbending leader – or shadowbending leader depending upon how you looked at it – southward toward where the fourth faction stood in opposition to her.
But Yaosen didn’t know what he was looking at. There was no southern leader. There was no southern faction. There was only scorched, blasted bone.
Whatever the carver had been trying to depict had been erased, not by the slow changing of pyroclastic flow, but violently and deliberately.
Yaosen looked to Rook who just shrugged. “As far as I can tell, someone smashed that section to bits before the lava even had a chance to claim it.”
Yasen traced a hand over the jagged mass. The heart of the image had certainly been violently defaced, leaving a crater in what was otherwise a perfectly preserved section of the carving. What was left of that section was barely more than a border; swirling and slashing lines, sometimes with jagged angles.
All in all, it was not much to go on.
So if Yaosen was going to figure out what the fourth manifestation of Wild Bending was, his only hope was through the process of elimination.
He traced a hand over the other three factions.
Duu’s ability to bend the river had proven that treebending was just a specialized form of waterbending, promoting growth by sending specific nutrients to different parts of a tree. It had to be more than that, but for the purpose of this carving, Yaosen contented himself with the fact that water was the element of change, and if you could change the flow within a tree, you could convince a tree to change for you.
Fire at its root was energy. And while a flame was both heat and light, lightbending was the practice of putting out purely the latter. Or, in Rook’s case, it was about redirecting that energy away from a place, obscuring it in shadow.
Boneshifting was more difficult. But with only two of the four elements to choose from, Yaosen suspected that Boneshifting was more akin to earthbending than airbending. After all, earth was the element of substance and diversity. Shifting the shape and substance of one's own bones was not terribly different than changing the shape of a rock or stretching a mound of clay. If the old rumors were true, and elite bloodbender deathsquads could bend the water in a target’s blood, then why would bending the minerals in one’s own bones be any more difficult.
Yaosen shuddered to think of his own body as no more than a rock or a flame for bending.
That left only air for the jagged crater bordered by chaotic lines.
If the southern faction was a group of smokebenders, they would have required fire as much as air, and manipulating mist was actually waterbending more than it was airbending. Yaosen supposed either was possible. And a mixed group was not out of the question. But it didn’t feel right for the nations to have organized themselves so cleanly into three of the four traditional elements and then double up on fire or water, or skip air entirely.
So Yaosen maintained the assumption that the southern faction was a nation of wild airbenders. He lept down that line of logic. But every path he traveled grew tangled and muddy, and by the end of it, he was left frustrated with his own lack of knowledge.
Here he was one of the most learned men of his civilization, but time and time again he had learned that his position of prominence in the Four Nations meant nothing when it came to the laws of the wilds.
So for now, if Yaosen hoped to find the Wild Bending avatar he had to content himself with looking for someone who could manipulate wood, shadow, and bone. And then be ready for whatever else that avatar might throw at him.
Based on everything he had learned – in exchange for a terribly binding oath, he had to remind himself – if this avatar of the Wilds really did exist, then they were a fearsome creature indeed.
Only one other question remained unanswered, and at this point, Yaosen was absolutely certain that it had to do with the fundamental essences of shadow and light.
He turned away from the pillar of bone and regarded the woman beside him. “So how did your hair turn yellow?”