The rain threatened to pour down on everything and the crickets were singing their chorus to the clouded sky. I rested on the windowsill and listened. The stillness of the night was a welcome change to the chaos of the day. This city had perhaps an hour of clarity before the old merchants and street vendors opened shop and the women came to buy the raw ingredients for their stews and dishes that would pollute the air for the rest of the sticky day and into the night. Now I could smell the hint of rain in the dust and the old wood of my floor and windowsill and all I could do was hope it would remain that way. I was thankful for the few courtyards the lots of Ba Sing Se provided. It was a reminder that there was more to be seen than haphazard arrangements of walls and roofs that appeared to me now more as one living breathing thing...with these decrepit sick people living between these folds as parasites...This was not the city of hope these people dreamt would be waiting for them at the end of their long journeys...It was hard to bare the loss of hope in this place.
The stagnancy was suddenly too much for me. I pulled away from the window to light a candle on my bedside. Ah. No firebending. Though the likelihood of someone being up at this hour was extremly slight I agreed with my uncle. We would be worse than dead men if we were discovered. I doubted we would have much of a chance to be arrested before the angry peasants got their hold of us...I hit the flint stones together, and with the first spark I had the candle lit. "They can't count THAT as firebending could they?"
'Who is they?' I suddenly thought to myself. The 'peasants'? They were not truly all peasants were they? There were old traders and sailors, scholars and librarians, craftsmen and artists, widows and orphans...my thoughts drifted further into what I had seen. The hungry, the starving...the dead. There were no peasants here. These people had had lives filled with aspiration. They were not the simple-minded sycophants doomed to routine and servitude to some lord or leader until their dying day!
I was awakened from my thoughts by the brightness of the room. The candle had entirely caught fire and was now leaking wax onto the floor. The flame immediately died down to a faint glow once again. I really needed to control myself. If I had been caught in that action...well there I went again. I knew the only thing that would allow me clarity would be to travel. I took my dagger from under my sad excuse for a makura and placed it in my sash. I had no desire to bother changing out of my clothes so the journey was to be taken simply as a commoner in the stead of a convicted criminal.
Rumors of "The Blue Spirit" had reached even here, with tales of "devouring children" and causing "permanent poverty and despair to all who look upon it" were common but I had to laugh when I chanced upon rumors of " a terrifying demon that demands that its leg be washed" or "a cat-like demon that descends from the sky and carries away corpses" I wondered to myself if that meant I had demanded my leg to be washed with the corpses I collected, or perhaps I just carried away the corpses of those I had slain who had refused to wash my leg. The thought made me smile as I left the house.
No tonight I was just Me. Here was no place for a prince or a spirit and I was completely fine with that. Titles had begun to become silly to me. The slow realization was sinking in that I was not among lower classes or enemies of my nation but among people, and I was nothing more than a person to them as well. My thoughts came clearer to me than they had in years...and finally, they weren't about who to capture and who to kill.
I glided down the stairs as the shadows whispered of the moonlight. I looked up. It was like a great liquid river, clouds turning and shredding like dancer's ribbons around and around again and I could think of nothing more beautiful. At that moment I did something I could never do before. I began to take in all that had happened to me in the past. I began to accept it.
"A passion felt so strongly even the moon needs to shy away."
The clash of blades broke the calm silence of the small courtyard. My eyes were ripped from the sky and placed on to the most unwelcome site imaginable: Jet.