Yaosen dodged and blocked with weak ruddy flame, but for every fist of rock he avoided, he took two to the body. When one landed across his jaw, knocking him flat and nearly sending him careering off the edge of the cliff, Lu Gun gave him a respite. Yaosen hadn’t even remembered falling flat; he must have blacked out for a few seconds.
“Reconsidering my offer?” asked Lu Gun, “All you have to do is bow-. Well you’re already doing that. Call me master and I’ll let you live.”
Yaosen pushed himself to all fours. From their perch on the mountain ledge they both had a perfect view of Shadow Ridge’s last stand. Green and black lined the caldera on all sides except for the northern peak, where there was no lip except for the two combatants’ small vantage point. From where Yaosen now stood – or lay – there was nothing but a sheer drop a couple hundred paces to the main thoroughfare below.
The wind changed and whipped Yaosen’s hair loose from his topknot. The hide strap he had used to bind his hair flew out over the village, riding the breeze before plummeting.
He lost it somewhere over the village’s tavern.
Even as Yaosen watched, spherical boulders plowed through the city, leveling everything in their path to slam into that central building. Rook suddenly appeared in the doorway with Duu and the others behind. The walls shook and dust shot skyward as the building collapsed. All that was left were a few bedraggled villagers and a trio of beasts that could barely stand due to their wounds.
But Rook still gripped her sword. Every bow around the caldera creaked, every earthbender lifted a rock large enough to throw the distance, large enough to kill.
Yaosen looked at the body of Torun slung across Grunt’s back. He had fallen in honorable battle rather than give up on his duty to the Fire Lord and to Yaosen, or betray the spirit of his mission.
He looked to Duu, crying into Headbutt’s fur as the beast lowed mournfully. The little treebender had given up her grove and would die on solid volcanic stone where nothing grew, just so she could find her own grove of people.
Fenri, a man accused and shunned by his neighbors had stayed loyal to them until the last, crouching and snarling over the unconscious body of the very man who had condemned him.
Rook had flown into what would eventually be a mass grave, just so she could lead her doomed village until its dying breath. All of these people, Farwilders by birth and Farwilders at heart, stayed true to themselves no matter the cost. They faced their death with no illusions.
Yaosen looked up at Lu Gun, who still believed – despite the villagers below submitting themselves to die free rather than live beneath his heel – that he could dominate this land, that he could bend it to his will, that he could break it.
“You were right,” said Yaosen as he watched the smile grow on Lu Gun’s face, “This is all my fault. This all started because I tried to lightbend before my time, just because I needed to feel important. My nation sent me here as a punishment, so your nation sent you here to kill me. In a way, I handed you the Farwilds. General Fong never would have been able to take this caldera. It might have taken him ten years to even get here without you. Everyone that died here today is my fault.”
Lu Gun’s chin lifted a little higher, the picture of the conqueror, an indomitable figure.
“But I was right about two things,” said the monk, “I told you I’d see you in the Farwilds, and I told you I’d make you pay.”
Lu Gun’s smile dripped from his face a little at a time. He was left with a sour scowl, the monk having spoiled his fun. “Alright,” he said, “I think I’ve played with you long enough. You know what? You’re not a very good loser.” He unslung a bullet from the band across his chest.
“No,” said Yaosen, “I’m not.”
With that he rolled from the ledge and plummeted to the city below.
***
Lu Gun sighed, frustrated at having been denied the visceral act of completing the kill. Then he shrugged. Forcing an opponent to concede in pai sho was just as good playing them to the last piece.
***
“You are not ready,” said Aangatsu, seated in the center of the Light Temple Sages. These five people, wise and aged, all of them, were the only living creatures capable of performing the advanced firebending technique known as lightbending.
Yaosen bowed his head, his words proving the act of humility a false one. “I am ready, master. I have passed every test of the Light Temple, I have learned every lesson. I have been training and studying for this all of my life and I know I can produce the beam. My will to succeed is stronger than any bender in the Four Nations.”
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“But you lack the focus,” Aangatsu said simply.
“I am more focused than I’ve ever been!”
“But are you certain it is enough?”
“I am.”
“Would you stake your life on it?”
Aangatsu’s tone had become dark and Yaosen looked up.
“Master?”
“Every act of lightbending can kill the bender, especially when they wield as much willpower as you. But power is not enough. Only when you know with absolute certainty where to to direct it, can you master the technique. Everytime you lightbend, you must be willing to die if you cannot hit your mark. Are you willing to give your life to achieve your goal?”
Yaosen was silent.
“That is true focus.”
***
Red-hot fire shot from Yaosen’s heels, slowing his momentum. He forced his palms downward and that same violent power poured from his hands, singing his sleeves with dirty smoke.
His next step took him laterally out into open air, the force of his firebending allowing him to step on nothing but pure heat, the streams from his feet turning from red to yellow to white, and then finally to a blue that burned so pure it was violet to his eyes. He ran, jet-stepping his way out over the village, higher and higher, his purpose purer and purer with each step while his fire burned hotter.
Bows, ballistas, and hovering rocks all turned in his direction now. But his life meant nothing if the people beneath him were crushed into the earth. He wanted those missiles aimed at him. He wanted all of the Earthbreaker eyes fixed firmly on the monk walking a path of purple fire.
He summoned his willpower but didn’t bother with the focus.
***
Rook followed the eyes of all the Earthbreakers lined up along the caldera. Yaosen ran in mid air, bursts of color flashing beneath him as if he were walking a rainbow bridge that only became visible where he touched it.
Finally he twisted to a stop driving higher into the air by the stream of heat beneath him. The fire cut off and he hung there for only a moment longer before he began to fall.
He erupted into sunlight.
Rook cried out and reflexively sucked away the energy, covering herself in shadow that she quickly extended to her remaining villagers. The beams of light from Yaosen’s falling orb still cut her veil of shadow like the edges of a solar eclipse, dangerous and powerful, but partially blocked.
Screams came from the Earthbreakers, too, all along the caldera.
“Go!” Rook yelled to Gama, to Rune, to Duu and her beasts and to the rest of the villagers, even as she herself ran to that falling star that was Yaosen. She didn’t know what she could do. He was so high up and she was so far away, but this wasn’t something you thought about. Sometimes, when a friend was falling you ran to them. It was as simple as that. It was always as simple as that.
Voices filled her head and her shadows flickered and blinked out. She reached out her hand, and just as Yaosen smashed into the rock a vortex formed below him.
It was gone as quickly as it had come, but Yaosen’s body now lay in the center of the shattered, abandoned village, one leg at an odd angle, blood dripping from one hand. She slid on the stone and wrapped her arms around him, cradling his head. Her hand came away bloody, and Yaosen’s face was still.
Rivulets of rage streamed down her face, down her neck, to fall onto the body crushed to her chest. The world through her tears turned crystalline as light poured from her eyes and she screamed with a thousand voices. She and the man she held began rising over the village in a dark tornado.
Stones flew at her from one direction, but a furrow of her brow shattered them to dust that blew away on the rising wind. She turned toward their source to find Lu Gun standing on the mountainside, shielding his injured eyes and roaring in frustration as he sent everything he had at her.
A flick of her head halted a trio of metal projectiles mid-air and sent them dropping uselessly to the earth, robbed of their impetus by the avatar.
“YOU!” It was Rook’s voice, but it also held the voices of the many others that she had been, the many lives that had come before her and were within her now. A dropping of her chin crushed the peak of the mountain, creating a landslide that consumed Lu Gun and cut short his final screams of anger and pain.
“ALL OF YOU!” She spun slowly in the air to survey the Earthbreaker troops lined up along the high reaches of her village. “YOU COULDN’T JUST LEAVE US IN PEACE!”
The Earthbreakers cowered before her. Some clutched at their injured eyes, blinded by Yaosen’s ultimate display of light and sacrifice, but others still held their bows or missiles that had moments ago been aimed at her innocent people. They dared not fight back now. Many cried out for her mercy.
“Forgive us avatar!” “Spare us!” “We’re sorry!”
Many of the voices within her even cried out for mercy.
Mercy was for her past lives; Rook found none within herself. She inclined her head and heat welled up from beneath her. As magma rose through the tunnels of Shadow Ridge it poured forth from the doors and windows that had once been her people’s homes, it washed along their streets in rivers of molten rock. Within heartbeats, the village was consumed, replaced by a lake of fire that filled the caldera and continued to rise.
Rook’s eyes narrowed on the Earthbreakers who thought to scurry from the ridgelines before the lava overflowed. The scree beneath their feet trembled and shook, surging around their ankles and knees before sliding downward into the city-sized lavapit.
The Earthbreakers screamed as their very element carried them helplessly to their doom.
“Rook,” Yoasen’s voice was a gasp, “No.”
She looked down to find his face dotted with her glowing tears and a sob of relief nearly threatened to break her connection with the power that flowed within her and held them aloft.
She didn’t realize that the slow descent of the caldera into its fiery destruction had halted, many soldiers frozen up to their waists or necks in gravel or even solid rock. She didn’t know what element she called upon next. Before she knew it, she was hurtling into the air, piercing the clouds, a crack of thunder in her wake, leaving nothing but pain and destruction below.