Yaosen didn’t move for a while. He spent the better part of the afternoon feeling sorry for himself and being angry at Torun.

“Make yourself useful, and do something with that,” Yaosen mimicked under his breath.

Do something with the dagger? Or the tree?

Both were equally preposterous, but by the time Yaosen’s anger reached a boiling point, he had decided on both, if for no other reason than to throw it in Torun’s face when he got back.

Yaosen started by hacking off the branches with the thickest needles and setting them to one side. By the time the branches were halfway gone, Yaosen was sweating through his shirt. He hung it on a nearby branch to preserve it.

However strenuous or even pointless it was, the motion felt good. And for just a moment, Yaosen considered that when Torun had said “do something with that,” the “that” was Yaosen himself. But Yaosen discarded the thought as the kind of thing a lightbending master would say, not a graying old nonbender, cursed to carry around hunks of metal to defend himself.

Once he had stripped the tree bare of branches and was left with nothing more than the massive column of wood that was the trunk, Yaosen had to start getting creative with what to do with his time and his anger.

He had no idea how to build shelter, but he knew that the timbers of the Light Temple didn’t have any bark on them, so he started stripping the trunk.

By now, Yaosen’s hands were bloody and oozing with blisters. The knife’s handle kept clinging to the worst of them.

The blade, though not made of meteorite ore, was of excellent quality. Its leather grip was well worn and supple. Its blade was sharp and it faced little resistance as it peeled away the tree’s outer layer.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Even so, Yaosen began stopping often to rest his hands. He would allow himself a few moments of rest before returning to it, so close now to having the visible progress he sought to prove Torun wrong about him.

Finally, at one point, as he was switching the dagger to his off hand, his hands were so raw that the leather grip stuck to them and came away from the hilt.

Yaosen was surprised to find that beneath the red Fire Nation leather of the dagger was the jade green of the Earth Kingdom.

Perhaps, sometime in the past, the fire and earth nations had been such mortal enemies that such a discovery could mean only one thing: that Torun was a secret agent of the Earth King, tasked with getting close to the Fire Lord. And who was closer than his personal guard, the Meteor Knights?

But since the unification of the Four Nations into one Republic, there were many Earth Kingdom children who had grown up in the Fire Nation “colonies” or Fire Nation citizens who had put down roots in one of the once-occupied Earth Kingdom cities. Since the end of the Hundred Year War, dual citizens were common, especially among nonbenders, where their bending wouldn’t set them apart.

Still, it wasn’t always easy for an Earth Kingdom immigrant to live in the Fire Nation, or vice versa.

Yaosen jumped as he heard Torun return to their little camp.

“Hmph,” said the Meteor Knight looking over the stripped tree. But Yaosen got the sense that it was an entirely different type of grunt than he had been getting in the past.

“Look,” said Yaosen, “Everything you said is true. Just because it cut close to the bone doesn’t mean I should have-”

Torun held up a hand. “The true sword cuts deepest. But it cuts both ways.”

Yaosen looked at him for a moment, his face a mask. “Does anyone ever know what you’re saying?”

Torun shrugged.

“Well luckily I was trained by monks. I’m sure with a few days of meditation I can forge some meaning from that statement.”

Torun made a noise. Did Yaosen dare think that it wasn’t a grunt, but a chuckle?