"It's okay to be afraid."
And she believes them, she truly does, because the only fear she has ever known has been minimal, inconsequential. Fear is tolerable and acceptable loss: it is the feeling in the pit of her stomach when she thinks that she might never master Airbending, that Mako will never look at her the way he looks at Asami. Fear is vague discomfort in a world that, more or less, is hers for the taking. What does Korra, the almighty Avatar, have to fear?
And then, one day, she learns.
She thinks of Amon as a dangerous shadow, a thug that merely needs a solid thrashing, and she is more than happy to oblige. It's not until the fight at Aang's monument (how poetic, how filling: the shrine of the world's greatest hero is the place of her failure) that Korra is proven so horribly, so terribly wrong. As Amon's eyes shine out in the dark, his figure twisting in the flickering light of the Equalists' weapons, Korra realizes what it means to be afraid.
Fear is a stranger with nothing but ice in his heart, reaching in and taking out the very essence of who she is, of what she can do. Fear is discovering just what she truly values in herself, and learning that it can be taken away, just like that.
In the days after she loses her bending, when Amon is a corpse and she is a shadow, she sits in corners and stares out windows and counts up her steps that have led her to where she is today. Thinks, this is what I believed about myself. This is what I liked about myself. This is who I thought I was.
This is who I am.
And as horrible as Amon was, with his masks and his voices in the dark, she thinks that her greatest fear is that she has only ever valued herself as the Avatar, and now
now she isn't.
Unalaq strikes a little closer to home – but then, what is family for? He comes for her, not so much a creeping shadow, but a villain who insists on calling himself the hero. He cuts her to the core: he shows her just how ineffectual an Avatar she is, because how can you call yourself the Avatar, when you can't even bring balance to your own life?
And everything falls apart around her in a cascade of broken hopes, falls to pieces until she's got war knocking loudly on her door, and she's afraid, hunched down, arms curled around her stomach, pressing in against herself, suddenly so alone and unsure of how she's gotten here.
Avatar? No, just a poor imitation.
Vatuu is fear incarnate, desperation and despair. He is living proof of her failure and her inability, but it isn't until he rips Ravaa from her, severs the past connections of Aang and Kyoshi and all the rest, that she realizes what she's lost. She's failed: the world, the Air Nation, herself. She is the Last Avatar, and she'll go down in history for it.
The time of the Avatar has ended.
She buries them: the voices and the fear, the voices that whisper poison in her ear at night, while she tries to sleep. Only later, when Zaheer's calm, emotionless voice repeats the prose, does she remember.
Let go, Korra.
Let go.