Borra Week, Day 4: Masquerade
He knew Korra wasn't the best at the spiritual side of bending, but she'd heard the old tales enough times that she made a captivating storyteller. From earliest childhood she'd been exposed to the mystical stories of all the world's bending cultures and could recite nearly all of them from memory. She could tell the tales older than memory, like how a kidnapped bride's frozen shattered fingers became the creatures of the sea. She knew the ritual sky burials the Air Nomads used to practice, which were so alien to him that he could barely imagine what they would have been like. But his favorite was when she told stories from the recent past, accounts from the lives of the heroes of the hundred year war.
When she spoke of these, her eyes lit up and he could hear the excitement in her voice. She told him that Katara used to tell her these stories at night when she couldn't sleep and she had them memorized before she turned ten. She had Aang's stories of the terrifying meeting with Koh, the Face Stealer. She heard about seeing the Avatar's body taken over by the spirit of the ocean and used to wipe out a massive armada. There were stories of the strange owl-like librarian they'd met in the Si Wong Desert. Katara told her how Fire Lord Zuko and the Avatar discovered the remains of a lost civilization and learned to firebend from dragons. And there was unmistakable awe in Korra's voice when she described Aang's experience of coming face to face with all his previous incarnations. The wistful look she in her eyes during that story told Bolin how much she really longed to fully come into her own as a spiritual leader of the world. Without a word he pressed his hand against hers, silently reassuring her that he trusted in her strength to conquer anything.