The Fire Lord's Left-hand Man
Chapter 1: "The Third Earthbender"
A/N: This is a fusion of Daiya no Ace and ATLA, namely using DnA characters in the ATLA universe. The story is crafted in such a way that readers do not need to have explicitly read either DnA or ATLA, as the rules of the universe are explained in-text.
Furthermore, while the names and characteristics of DnA characters will be used in the story, since they will not be Japanese high schoolers playing baseball, but rather have wildly varying circumstances surrounding their births, their personalities may divert from the canon.
In other words: You don't need to have read Daiya no Ace or ATLA. Characters from DnA may be OOC (but will still hopefully retain recognizable traits from canon).
Upturned chunks of scorched earth. Billowing black smoke and burning fires. Acrid air. Red streams of water.
A tired voice echoes across the battle-torn valley:
"I'm sorry…I failed to bring peace...There wasn't enough time."
His eyes flashed open.
The floor was trembling around him. Lying stock still on his pallet, he stared up at the hut ceiling. Dust scattered down onto his face. Was it an earthquake? But as soon as he'd thought that, the shaking stopped.
Getting up, he reached out and opened the door a crack. Just outside, he could see the bulls grazing on the grass. One of them turned a sleepy, uncaring gaze toward him before returning back to its meal. Considering the racket they raised if one so much as stepped a foot out of place around them, he must have imagined the earthquake.
So why was his heart beating so quickly? He'd been dreaming about something, he knew. Something he'd dreamed about many times before. But he could never recall exactly what it was. It faded away as soon as he woke up, and the only thing he could recall was a strange aching sense of familiarity.
Even as he thought about it however, the feeling had already begun to fade, and with a shake of his head, he got up. Folding up his pallet, he stretched and then slid the door open the rest of the way. The sky was bleached in red and purple from the rising sun. Taking in the vivid colors, once again, a lingering image of flowing red water flashed through his mind—when suddenly, he heard his mother call out his name:
"Eijun! Don't forget you're supposed to feed the ostrich horses today!"
With a clatter—he had forgotten—Eijun stumbled and rushed out to the coops.
"Put on your sandals, you foolish boy," his grandfather called out from the stable.
He was a boy like any other. Born into an innocuous family of farmers on the southwestern coast of the Earth Kingdom, the word 'kingdom' might as well have been a foreign word, for it meant nothing to the people where he lived. Compared to the other nations, the Earth Kingdom was diverse, and above all, scattered. Outside of great cities such as Ba Sing Se and Omashu, its citizens were only united in that they happened to live on the same sprawling land mass and spoke the same language.
Every now and then, traders and travelers passed through their village. They brought with them news of battles of unbelievable scale—of men and women who could bend the four elements to their will in the most destructive of ways. But to the people in the village, they were mere tales to be passed around the evening fire or to scare the little ones into not straying too far from their paddy fields. To them, the words 'unrest' and 'conflict' held about as much meaning as 'kingdom.'
At least, not until the foreign ships beached on the shore, their blue flags waving from masts that were just barely visible over the dense treetops.
It wasn't until they'd sat down for lunch that day that Eijun noticed a body was missing.
He looked around. "Where's dad?"
"Did you forget?" His mother set a bowl on the table. "They've been talking about it for all of last week. He and some of the other men are going hunting for hog today."
While the hogs around their area were too wild to tame, they made the perfect game for whenever they wanted some meat besides chicken and bull.
"Hog?" Looking down at the mixture of mushrooms and greens in his stew, at the thought of fresh red meat, Eijun could feel his mouth already begin to water. "For everybody?"
His mother smiled knowingly. "Akio's mother just had the baby, and I reckon her husband will want to get a larger share of the intestines for her…but yes, for everybody."
Eijun perked up. "Do you think they'll be back by tonight?"
His grandfather snorted into his tea. "Don't be silly. I reckon it'll probably take a few days,"
Pushing his food around on the plate, Eijun said, "I wish I could've gone with dad on the hunt."
"That's much too dangerous at your age," said his mother. "You'll have to wait longer for that, Eijun."
"How much longer?"
"Until you remember to wear your sandals for once," said his grandfather.
Eijun frowned and finished his stew in silence.
True, he didn't like to wear his sandals, but that was because he preferred to walk around barefoot; he'd always loved the feel of dirt against his skin. But of course his grandfather didn't understand that. In fact, he almost never had a kind word for him. He only ever told him to do this and that, and slapped Eijun on the head when he made a mistake.
Wakana's grandfather on the other hand was much nicer—he always gave Eijun a bit of sweetened rice cake when he came by their house. Not for the first time, Eijun wished Wakana's grandfather was his instead.
After helping his mother clean up, Eijun had just put on his sandals and walked outside, when he ran into two of his friends sneaking on tip toes past the coops.
"Wakana's 'it' right now," Akio explained in a hushed voice.
Eijun understood immediately: Hide-and-seek was one of those games that they often liked to play.
"Hurry up and find a spot," Nobu whispered, before scurrying past into the thicket.
Eijun knew just where he wanted to hide. Turning on his heel, he raced to find the tree with the curving trunk just by the shore. It was one of his favorite hiding spots, and he was rarely found there because none of the others liked climbing. But just like how Eijun liked the feel of dirt below his feet, he had never minded feeling the wind on his face.
As he passed by the paddies, he saw that some of the adults had come back from their breaks and resumed tilling the earth. Streams of water glistened from the fields which would soon be ready for rice planting.
His stomach grumbled, despite the fact that he'd just stuffed himself full at lunch. He couldn't wait for the harvest season to arrive: Rice tasted best when the grain was freshly picked.
"Excited for some sausages, Eijun?" Nobu's uncle called out as he bended a rock out of the earth.
"Shh!" Eijun hissed back, raising a finger to his lips.
Immediately, Nobu's uncle smiled in understanding and snapped a smart salute back, before returning to his work.
Nobu's uncle was one of three earthbenders in the village, the other being Wakana's grandfather. Earthbending, the ability to control matter related to the earth, was a highly treasured and invaluable skill, and the two benders did the vast majority of the village's farming. In fact, it was the main reason why Nobu's uncle, despite being a relatively young man, hadn't gone on the hunt with Eijun's father and the others.
It was also the reason why Eijun, the third earthbender in the village, hadn't told anyone that he was one. Whether it was his parents, his friends, even his grandfather—no one knew. It was his greatest secret. He'd only discovered it himself the previous summer, when he'd fallen off a tree he'd been climbing and bended a rock out of the way by accident. It was difficult to find privacy for long in their small village, and he had only been able to try bending a few more times since then.
Still, it was a small price to pay in exchange for his freedom. He didn't feel too guilty keeping his bending secret; he told himself he would reveal the secret later on, when he was a bit older, and then help the village with the farming.
With ease, Eijun soon found the tree he'd been searching for. It was tall, but the twisting trunk made it easier to climb than it looked. That didn't mean that it was an easy climb; just the last summer, old lady Mao had fallen from it while trying to get to her cat, and broken her hip. Unlike old lady Mao however, Eijun was young and limber, and after taking off his sandals, he clambered up its side quickly, his hands and feet easily finding footholds.
Before long, he was at the top of the tree. With a wide grin, Eijun looked around. The forest stretched to his left and right. Behind him were the fields and their village. And in front of him was the sea. It was blue and vast and stretched far into the horizon. As far as Eijun knew, that was the end of the world. There was hardly anything there.
But at that moment, he suddenly realized with a flash, there was something there.
He didn't know what they were at first—he'd seen some ships passing by in the distance before, but never one this up close. He hadn't realized how big they were. On a curious whim, Eijun slid back down the tree, and as he did so, he heard brusque unfamiliar voices coming from the shore. The moment his feet touched the ground, the earth rang warningly below him, surprising Eijun. He'd never heard it sound like that way before.
That should have warned him then. If he'd listened to the earth's warning, maybe things would have turned out just a little differently. But Eijun had always been curious. He was always the first among the children to lead an expedition to find out which critter had been making that sound while they slept.
He was so small that they didn't notice him at first. 'Them' being the fifteen or so number of men dressed in blue skins and white pelts of animals he didn't recognize. They were nothing like the people he'd ever seen before: They were dark-skinned, bulky, scarred—some more than others—and without exception, they were all carrying what looked to Eijun like long sickles on their backs.
Something about the sickles made the pit of his stomach twist. While he'd come out to look at the ships, now, he couldn't look away from the blades, gleaming sickly in the sun. He began to back away, hoping the men wouldn't see him—but as though listening to his thoughts, one of the younger men suddenly pointed a finger straight at him. In response, the others immediately spun to look at him, their hands leaping for their sickles. Eijun felt his stomach flip-flop.
"Where'd you come from?" the young man asked, his voice smooth and silky in a way that sent a shiver down Eijun's spine.
Instead of responding, Eijun turned around to try and run. But before he could, he felt someone grab the neck of his shirt and roughly pull him up off his feet. More than a little frightened now, he kicked out. The grasp didn't budge.
"Let me g – !" He broke off as the man holding him suddenly slapped his face. Winded and stunned from the sharp blow—even his grandfather had never hit him that hard before—Eijun stopped struggling and fell still.
"He must be one of the brats in that village nearby," he heard the man holding him say gruffly.
"What should we do?" said another man. "He's seen us."
The gruff man shook Eijun, who stayed mute. "I doubt he knows anything... Neither do we have the time, if we want to make the shipment."
"Even brats can talk," said the young man, a dangerous glint to his eye.
"An isolated village like this won't know anything, nor will they care."
The young man paused, clearly contemplating something. It was strange, Eijun thought despite the pounding of his heart, how the other men were paying him rapt attention despite how young he looked.
"No... I'll deal with him here."
It all happened in an instant. In a curious motion, the young man sliced the air in front of Eijun with a hand. He was wondering whether the man had somehow missed, when he saw something glinting swooping toward him. Letting out a yell, he twisted in the air and kicked out. The gruff man dropped him with a bark, and looking unsurprised, the young man raised another hand. Moving instinctively, Eijun dropped low to the ground, and made a pushing motion with his hands.
In response, a block of earth burst out of the ground and knocked the young man off of his feet. Eijun heard a sharp intake of breath from the other watching men.
"Well, well..." The young man got up to his feet looking only slightly winded. Wearing a strange, gleeful look on his face, he wiped a thin trickle of blood from the side of his mouth. At a gesture, two other men jumped out and grabbed Eijun by his arms and legs, preventing him from moving. "I'd thought they were just a bunch of barbarians not worth our time, but the boy's an earthbender. This changes things."
"I told you, Taiyou," said the gruff man. "The patrol's grown stricter lately around the coastline. Not to mention, we're already behind schedule as it is - "
The man called Taiyou waved an impatient hand. "Old man Ippachi can wait. And I doubt he'll mind, not when we've got earthbenders in our shipment."
"You fool," said the gruff man. "We don't know how many men are in their village. Nor do we know whether there are any more earthbenders. Is it worth the risk of our own men to capture free men?"
There was a sudden lull as the men began to murmur, looking at each other. It seemed to Eijun that for the moment, he'd been largely forgotten.
Taking advantage of the moment, he took in a deep breath, and then hollered out at the top of his lungs, "Help! He - " He broke off as another man clamped a beefy hand over his mouth.
But it was too late. There was a rustling in the nearby trees. The men raised their sickles in alarm.
A moment later, someone stepped out. Immediately, Eijun felt his heart begin to sink as he spotted a familiar pair of widened brown eyes: Wakana. Before he could try to shout out a warning from behind the hand, something suddenly burst out from the seaside and struck her by the side, flinging her body several feet to the side. Her short brown hair splayed around her head. She didn't move.
Even in the distance, Eijun could see the red liquid seeping from her side. He knew what that was; he'd seen it before on his knees and palms when he'd tripped on the stacked boulders just outside the coops after Nobu had dared him to. He'd seen even more of it a few months ago when his father last went out with the other men and brought back two hogs. They'd slaughtered it in the center of the village, at the Pit, and everyone had feasted that evening. It'd been delicious and the mood had been festive for several days following that.
Half-paralyzed, Eijun thought that the red pooling around Wakana was more like the latter.
All of a sudden, he realized that the men must have somehow reached a mutual decision, for they had all begun to move. He'd thought that with their heavy-looking clothes, their movements would be slow and clunky, but they slinked across the rocks on the beach as gracefully as any cat he'd ever seen. The gruff man who'd opposed Taiyou, with a shake of his head, joined them. The men who'd been holding Eijun let him go and joined them as well, leaving just Taiyou to pull Eijun roughly by the arm.
Eijun could have tried to earthbend again then and there, but somehow, he couldn't. He could only think about the red liquid coiling around Wakana's still body. As he did so, somehow, his feet automatically moved and he stumbled along with them.
The first person to see them was Wakana's grandfather. He'd been bending the earth to till the field, when the first men burst through the clearing. He had just enough time to widen his wrinkled eyes, before one of the men smashed the flat side of his sickle across his head. His expression stunned, his eyes rolled back and he fell to the ground, knees first. The impact of his body crumpling to the earth—Eijun felt the vibration of every pebble and particle of dirt run through his body and clench around his heart.
The next to see them was Nobu's uncle, and he fell in an instant too. Seeing that, his head felt so dizzy and heavy, Eijun dropped it, turning his aching eyes toward the ground instead. But he could still feel the tremors of the earth below, running straight through his body, painting an image so clear and vivid, he might as well have been watching without blinking the entire time. The earth had never before felt so alive to him. But at the same time, he'd never felt so distant from it in his entire life.
The men in the blue skins quickly took the two bodies, binding them in ropes of twine. Then, the gruff man slung each over his shoulders, and headed alone them back to the ship. The rest continued onward to the village, where, as they drew closer, Eijun could hear the usual bustling of the mid-afternoon activities. It didn't take long, however, before they noticed the strange men approaching with their sickles.
"Who are yo...?"
There was a whistling sound, like something sharp cutting through the air. Something dropped to the ground and shattered. A single fragment of a clay pot rolled toward the ground where Eijun's eyes were fixated on, and spun a few times before coming to a stop.
And then the screaming began. It was a horrible, pained keening sound that made Eijun desperately wish he could cover his ears, but he didn't. For as long as he lived, Eijun would never forget the sound.
Not so long afterwards, he heard the most terrible voice call out his name: "Eijun!" It belonged to his mother.
The sound finally galvanized Eijun into action. He raised his head just in time to see one of the strange men striking her with their sickle. She collapsed.
"Mom!" He tried to run towards her, and was forcibly stopped by the hand that'd been holding him, which yanked him back.
"Oh no you don't," said Taiyou.
Wide-eyed, Eijun watched as the strange men dragged the body of his unconscious mother away.
The entire village was thrown into chaos. The men in skins and pelts had charged into the houses with their sickles. There were furniture and bodies thrown indiscriminately onto the ground. The chickens were squawking riotously in their cages. Somewhere in the distance, a bull mooed mournfully.
There was a great shout; somehow, a small group of the village people had managed to assemble, led by the remaining men. Armed with pitchforks and shovels, they began charging towards the invaders. Eijun felt a light of hope flicker in his chest. But even as he watched, Taiyou let out a silky laugh and raised his arms. In response, with a crashing sound, what looked like whips of water broke out from the rice paddies and rose into the air. Eijun felt his eyes widen. A waterbender? He had never seen one before. That, he realized belatedly, must have been what had struck Wakana. So you could do that with bending. He'd never realized...
At the sight of the water, the charging villagers had started to falter. In a terribly graceful manner, Taiyou swung his hands forward, sending the whips lashing out toward the group.
Standing at their center, he realized with a jolt, was his grandfather. But while the others began to yelp and scatter, instead of moving to escape, his grandfather looked straight at Eijun. "Get out of here!"
His heart thudded loudly in his ears. He looked down—indeed, his arm, though red and bruised, was now free. He stumbled forward, his legs still not feeling quite like his own. As the feeling began to return, he started to run—but towards his grandfather, not away. In the corner of his eye, he saw the whip of water cut cleanly through poor old lady Maya's head, and something red and grey spurted out in globules. His grandfather's eyes, darkening with despair, were focused on something behind Eijun, and he knew a whip must be coming in their direction.
Reaching his grandfather, Eijun wrapped his arms tightly around him. He screwed his eyes shut and buried the heels of his feet into the ground. Without his sandals on, he could feel everything touching the ground in his vicinity at that moment. The number of bodies being dragged, the number that'd already fallen. He couldn't sense his mother's body.
He felt something deep within his chest crack. Suddenly, the ground shook and something erupted out from behind him and cast shade over his back. After a moment, Eijun opened his eyes to see a wall of rock circling around them, separating them from the attacking men. He blinked. Had he just done that?
"You did," said his grandfather, and Eijun realized he must have spoken aloud.
"How?" His voice came out, cracked and worn. He'd barely been able to bend a rock or two before.
Bang! Angry voices were shouting around them. He could hear something slamming against the barrier. Pebbles and dust began to roll down.
"When I tell you to, I want you to push out at these rocks and send them flying," said his grandfather in a low voice. "That should throw them off. Then I want you to run."
"But – but I don't know how. And what about you?"
Bang!
"Listen to the earth and you'll know how," his grandfather said gruffly. In one swift motion, he took something off of his arm and pushed it into Eijun's hands. "Look for your father. If you can't find him, head north. In that case, just follow the stars like I taught you, Ei – "
BANG!
It was too late. Water burst through the rock, and all at once, the walls around them crumbled. Before Eijun could react, his grandfather shoved him out of the way. Where he had landed, he trembled, feeling like a leaf in the wind.
When the dust cleared, he found his grandfather's body crushed under a boulder. There was a red pool seeping out from below his head. What Eijun could see of his eyes and mouth were open.
And Eijun knew he was gone. Just like Wakana, Wakana's grandfather. Nobu's uncle. Old lady Mao. And countless others... They were all gone.
"Get the earthbender boy!" he heard Taiyou shout from a distance away, his smooth voice cracking.
Slowly, Eijun stood up. The chaos around him seemed to have faded into the background. All he could think about was how there was no longer anyone to tell him to do his chores anymore. There was no one to slap him on the head and call him an idiot. Even though just that morning, he had wished his grandfather wasn't there.
If only, he thought with a sick lurch, he hadn't ignored the earth's warning. If only he hadn't gone out to the shore...
The ground around him began to rumble. He could feel the crack that had split inside him growing larger and larger, deepening into a ravine. He didn't know where it was coming from, but he could feel a great river of unimaginable force and vigor, both strange and familiar, suddenly streaming through his body. His senses had been completely opened. If the earth had whispered to him before, it sang to him now. Despite the fact that he could count the number of times he had bended on one hand, Eijun suddenly knew just how to direct and caress the earth so that it obeyed his every will. Anchoring his feet in the ground, with the mere movements of his arms, he was sweeping the earth back and forth like the waves in the ocean.
He could feel the remaining invaders' bodies being swallowed up by the ground, the earth muffling their screams. He could hear the terror and pain in their voices, but it didn't reach him. He felt oddly cold and distant, as though watching from up high as he stepped on ants.
When the last scream faded into silence, Eijun lowered his arms. And then as though a dam had been put in place, he felt the river cease into a trickle of what it'd used to be. In its place, instead, was weariness. He staggered to the ground, and fell into pitch blackness.
When Eijun opened his eyes again, he woke to his home in ruins. Where there had been huts, there were only scraps of wood and rocks. There was no longer a village center to call the Pit. The fields and their carefully hoed rows were gone, replaced by upturned chunks of earth.
Most of the invaders had been buried alive, but Eijun found that one of their ships was missing, and he knew that the waterbender, Taiyou, had escaped. Eijun realized that he must have taken some of the villagers that'd been dragged off early on. He couldn't find his mother's body anywhere no matter where he searched, and wondered, his chest tightening with a feeling he couldn't recognize, whether she was one of them.
There was hardly anyone left in the village. The few left that Eijun found had been severely injured, and despite his best efforts, they soon stopped moving afterwards. Still, he wasn't the only one left. Not at first. He found Nobu, shaken but unharmed, under a hut. Furthermore, somehow through it all, the chickens had also managed to survive. For a while, Eijun and Nobu survived on raw eggs as they waited for their fathers to return from the hog hunt.
In the meantime, they busied themselves with burying the village folks, using rocks as markers for their graves. The first body Eijun tried to bury was his grandfather's. When he'd first regained consciousness, Eijun had found himself tightly gripping something in his hand: It was his grandfather's armband, the one that all the men in the village wore once they'd reached adulthood. It was too big for him, so he had to wrap it twice around his arm. Having done that, he attempted to try and bury the body by earthbending.
However, not only had the power that'd flooded him completely disappeared, the earth itself had stopped responding to him. He couldn't bend even a single speckle of dust. And so, he had to do it the manual way, with a shovel. It was hard, grueling work, for a pair of eight-year-olds, and it took them a long time at first to bury even a single body. Still, as time passed, they grew used to the work. The bodies had started to stink, and they threw up more than once, but they quickly got to the point where they were able to get through several bodies in a day.
They didn't talk much. Eijun knew Nobu had seen everything; he could tell from the way his friend had flinched when Eijun first raised his arms, and how he no longer looked him in the eye on the few occasions they did talk. He wasn't sure himself what'd happened. While he'd known he was an earthbender, he was quite certain that Wakana's grandfather and Nobu's uncle could never have done what he'd done. Nonetheless, putting that all aside, Eijun numbly clung to the thought that once their fathers returned, they would fix everything as they always had. Everything would somehow return to normal.
But days turned into weeks, and then a month had passed, and there was no sign of anybody coming for them. They were lucky the days were warm, for if it'd been in the winter, they would probably have died in the cold. As it was, they'd managed to build a temporary hut and had also finished burying all the bodies they could reach. Having grown sick of eggs, they spent their days chasing wild weasels away from the chickens.
Despite the possibility of there being supplies on the remaining beached ships, Eijun made a point of staying away from them. He'd wondered whether Taiyou and the other men who had managed to escape wouldn't come back for revenge, but the shores remained undisturbed.
"My grandpa…said to go north," said Eijun one evening. His voice croaked from lack of use.
"Dad's coming back," Nobu replied, his face unmoving.
Eijun hesitated. "I don't think…they're coming back."
"Your dad might not be. But mine is."
That night, Eijun heard Nobu get up. He didn't react, pretending to be asleep, and the next morning, Nobu was still gone. Eijun looked for his friend for two days and two nights. He tried to feel for his footsteps through the earth, but couldn't sense anything. He climbed up the tree he'd once hid in, and looked for him. But he was gone.
Up in the tree, away from the ground, the wind rattled around him. He couldn't see anything around but an unmoving forest and sea for miles in all directions, and he felt like he was the only person left in the world. And yet, he couldn't cry. He could only feel a terrible emptiness in his chest that he didn't think could ever be filled again.
On the dawn of the third morning, Eijun packed a knapsack with what he had managed to scavenge, and left the ruined village. He set out north.