“Achh!”

Yaosen awoke to a frustrated hiss from Torun, and could just barely make out the knight stomping out the coals of their fire in the pre-dawn gloom.

“What are you-”

“Shh! Put it out.”

With a stifling motion from his palm, Yaosen quelled the heat in the heart of the coals and their little campsite went dark.

Torun quickly began collecting his armor and stuffing it into a salvaged pack.

“We need to leave,” he said, “Now.”

“Wh-”

Torun silenced him with a look, then looked pointedly toward the sea.

A dozen looming shadows blocked the glow of the rising sun.

Yaosen squinted and could make out… faces. Stone faces on the prow of each ship.

“Earthbreaker warships? But how?”

“Doesn’t matter,” hissed Torun “With any luck they think we’re dead, and I aim to keep it that way. Now move!”

Yaosen looked at the little camp they had carved out on the beach.

“Should we hide the camp?”

“No time.”

They had a pair of pine-bough huts leaned up against the base of the felled tree, a fire with a healthy stack of split wood, and Yaosen had even started practicing lightbending to cut the trunk into timbers when Torun was away. Inch-long singes in the wood marked the limits of his lightbending.

It all told a clear story to anyone who found it: the Earthbreaker sabotage had failed, the lightbender sent by the Fire Lord to find the avatar was alive, and there was still some tiny spark of opposition to the Earth King’s imperial ambitions.

But unfortunately Torun was right. There was no way to hide it in time, not if Yaosen didn’t want to create a flaming beacon to lead the warships right to them.

Stolen novel; please report.

Their camp was crude and uncomfortable, but even so, as Torun finished packing and led them into the tall pine forest, Yaosen couldn’t help looking back with some longing.

Yaosen’s old life had ended in the Fire Lord’s temple, maybe even before that when his lightbending had exploded and injured an innocent boy.

But this camp… it had been the start of a new life.

Now, just as they had begun to make progress, they had to start all over again?

Yet Yaosen couldn’t help feeling like a fresh start, a new campsite, far out of reach of his old life, might be exactly what he needed.

***

The owlynx sniffed the pile of dry wood, then the ashes, then finally found the source of the scent: a pile of discarded bones.

It picked at them, tearing at the grizzle.

The wind changed and the owlynx no longer smelled fatty meat, but something acrid, oily, and strange.

Man.

The owlynx spun to face its stalker, puffing up the furfeathers on its shoulders and hissing low.

The man reached for something, small and shiny like the weapons of man, but much too small, and not glimmering with the same sharpness.

The owlynx circled, and the man kept his distance.

The man was still several paces away, not attacking, not running. Perhaps this was one of the-

***

The owlynx was dead before it hit the ground, a hole in its forehead, barely bleeding.

Lu Gun reversed the slingshot metalbending technique and the small shaft ripped from the owlynx’s skull, trailing blood and clear fluid. Lu Gun caught it and polished it on his mantel before returning it to the bandolier across his chest.

Hunting like this was hardly sporting; muffling footsteps with subtle earthbending, attacking before the owlynx knew it was in a fight, never closing with the beast to give it a chance to defend itself. But Lu Gun didn’t care. He didn’t want sporting. He didn’t want fair or honorable. He wanted to live. And to do that, other things had to die.

The owlynx would make a good addition to his mantel once he had skinned and dried it.

Lu Gun pulled out the crude knife he had metalbent from the ship’s wreckage. And he froze.

Those bones hadn’t been piled there by the beast. There were ashes nearby from a cookfire, split wood for fuel. Then he noticed the scorch marks in the stripped and processed tree. Only one discipline could make those marks. Only one man in this hemisphere could have done that.

“Lightbender,” growled Lu Gun.

Voices rode the wind as the Earthbreaker scouts drew nearer.

Sloppy, thought Lu Gun, if they were my men…

But no, that life was closed to Lu Gun now.

Unless…

Lu Gun snapped off a form he had learned from a central Earth Kingdom trader. Sand from the beach cascaded over the lightbender’s campsite like a crashing wave.

When it settled, the campsite was gone and so was Lu Gun.

If he was to live, other things had to die.