...
It was late and the largest city in the world was asleep. Scattered oil-lanterns gleamed up like stars across the dark and jumbled expanse of tiled roofs. The night air was still but this ancient metropolis of stone and brick was never truly quiet. Even in these early hours, before the farmers outside the encircling city wall awoke to hitch up their beasts, the streets and alleys still echoed. Ten thousand subtle nighttime sounds merged together into the silent roar of life temporarily interrupted.
The man who glared out from his high tower window did not appreciate these nightly noises. Of course, he was also the sort of man who disapproved of playful children and refused to trust sunny meadows, so his attitude was not exactly unusual. However, tonight at least he had good reason to stand here in his thick silk robe and glower at the night. His plan for this city had just been dealt a setback.
A second man stood behind him at the top of a steep lacquered staircase. He carefully stood several paces away from the walls, still not accustomed to the uneasy feeling brought on by their decorations.
"I apologize," he said. "Tonight's attack on the secret society was swift and in the confusion it seems the assailant was able to escape."
The man by the window growled out at the dark. "Those fools let it be taken? After all the power I gave them? Imbeciles. All they had to do was find a hiding spot! I might almost think this city's guardian spirits had ironically roused themselves just to spite me." He exhaled slowly to calm his breathing. "But it is still within the city?" Within the cuffs of his robe, hands clenched and unclenched in an anxious rhythm.
The subordinate paused delicately as he considered his next statement. "Yes, as far as I can tell. Forgive me, but though this is unfortunate, is it a disaster? The ambassador's death was the ignition, but I was under the impression that what will happen next is now merely a matter of time. The radius of effect is quite large, is it not?"
His master continued to stare out into the dark and declined to answer. Each of those gleaming lights below his window represented a prize in this coming clash of powers. He couldn't feel the spiritual change yet but that would come soon.
"This city has been rotting for centuries. They have forgotten the spirits of the land. Now heaven has given us an opportunity to remake this entire country. In all the population only a bare handful fit to even recognize what is awakening, let alone to stop it." He gestured vaguely behind his back. "I have recorded all their names on that sheet."
The servant held the indicated paper forward in both hands as he bowed. "They will be monitored and dealt with accordingly. I will relay it to the organization." He moved towards a small brazier that quietly glowed in the corner of the room. "Shall I destroy the list?"
A twitch jerked across the man by the window and he quickly walked over to snatch the list in his own hands. "No, no burning for now. Given the plan it hardly seems appropriate."
He glanced around the room as if suddenly aware of many watching eyes. This near the dim light of the brazier's coals, dark shadows sprang up over his face turning him to an eyeless echo of the rows of silent masks that hung across the walls. The painted wooden faces were carved with horn and fang in endless colored variety. Then a coal split and in the changing light both the master and his masks bore flickering smiles.
"We have other means of destruction at our disposal."
...
Ayika stood balanced on the peak of a dusty tile roof, looking out across the tangled streets and canals in the dying shreds of night. From there she slowly moved over to lean against a stub of soot-blackened chimneys and felt the cold seep out of the bricks through her dress. Her breath came a bit heavily after the climb but this precarious perch was the perfect viewing spot for the coming performance. She liked to call it the second sunrise.
In the dimming dark, Ayika could just make out the jagged rooftop landscape of the sprawling harbor town around her. Bestriding a wide river clogged with anchored steamships and sailing junks, this mini-metropolis would in any other place be a large and important city. However, here it was a limpet clinging to the looming mountain-like wall of Ba Sing Se, capital jewel of all the Earth Kingdoms. Somewhere out beyond sight in each direction there were twenty other such towns clutching to that same immeasurable stone barrier. Come dawn, Ayika would be able to see endless prayers chiseled high on the wall above the harbor gate, at least for a few minutes until the smoke of ten thousand cook-fires reformed the urban haze that drifted up over the wall like steam from a bowl of soup.
Grandma Aka had never really liked prayer. Aka had said that teaching people to respect the spirits was fine, but encouraging ordinary folk to go around calling out to the other world was just asking for trouble. She'd often growled, "Spirits need us as much we need them and you can never let them forget. Everything has a cost."
Sayings like that were why the town had called her Aka the River Witch, though never to her face. Aka had used a different word: shaman. To Aka, the spirit world was a powerful and unpredictable thing, most often valued in its distance despite her own familiarity with it. To her, the local spirit gods like Blind Dog Lord, Golden Toad, and the Builder King all shared the same rank as the butcher and the tobacco seller and deserved the same sharp tongue.
Grandma Aka had been of a different, wilder place. The North was a land of storms, seas, and mountains where nothing was given that you did not take yourself. She hadn't understood this land of temples, bureaucrats, and walls. Now, in the early morning half-light, Ayika waited dreamed of far off places. Places where you could see anything, even a single thing that was not shaped or changed or clouded by human industry. A place where a teenage girl could stretch out and not hit carved and fitted stone on all sides. A place where she wouldn't have to get up before the sun and flee a tiny apartment to find somewhere not occupied by a mother cooking or a father stacking his work equipment or a little brother screeching like an injured gull.
Behind her, the sky finally blushed from purple to red and then Ayika caught sight of what she had come up here to watch. It was opposite the slowly birthing sun, over on the other side of the River Reformed's ship-clogged banks. There, across the dark expanse of the slums, the gloom of night suddenly blazed with an errant sunrise as one by one the huge furnaces of fifteen foreign-sponsored factories came to life.
From her rooftop Ayika could see the factories' doors and windows belch forth an angry light: red, writhing, and alive. Dark and soot stained, those buildings breathed in and out with fire. That entire burning quarter was reflected in the web of canals around them, setting them on fire with blazing light. It was like the Fire Nation was forging a new god on the far side of the river.
Ayika loved something about those factories. Despite all the anger and suspicion directed towards the Westerners there was an intangible power here that Ayika imagined she felt inside her chest; the force of new ideas. It was spiritual in its own way. In her imagination the foreigners were pulling light towards those mysterious furnaces, feeding a fire that promised to burst forth across the city, burning away all the chains of paper and stamp ink in the blinding fury of its creation. It would leave something new and bright. Then, as she watched, that distant blazing display slowly quieted down to the tame illumination of pacified fire.
One by one, the great smokestacks began to put forth clouds of black smoke. From her perch Ayika could just hear the low keen of the horns across the bridges and canals. That sound carried local workers to the factories, performing jobs on assembly lines that didn't require understanding of the foreign machines they served. Those horns were also the curtain call. The time of secret sorcery was over.
Ayika didn't know exactly why she loved watching this so much that she would trudge through the early morning and climb an apartment building once a month. Perhaps it felt like Grandma Aka's witchcraft. Maybe it was like being part of a story larger than her own. The Fire Nation and their foreign industrialism was the promise of danger, but it was also the promise of change. Change into what, Ayika struggled to imagine but it had to be better than what she had.
The sky was slowly turning blue-grey above her and the sun now promised to show itself above the low hills of the farmland to the east. Ayika stood up on the roof-tiles and stretched her arms behind her as she arched her back. On a nearby rooftop, her motions mirrored those of a small feral gargoyle that sat at the end of a projecting wooden eve languidly grooming its fur and wings.
The early light bounced off Ayika's long dark hair and a distant thought regretted that it had more wave than the sleek black hair of true locals. Then a second thought rebelled against the first, silencing it once again in a very familiar pattern. Those same first rays of sunlight played on her cheeks whose dark complexion marked her as an immigrant even though she'd been born a ten minute walk from here. Her parents might have been from the far off Water Tribe but Ayika had been born here in the City. This was her true home and she'd never known any other.
For a moment, Ayika looked out wistfully at the panoramic vista of apartments, fields, slums, and factories. Then she took a final deep breath of cleansing morning air and her reward was a lungful of smoke from the chimney beside her. Someone below had started their breakfast cooking. Her violent hacking shattered the dawn calm and startled the poor fuzzy gargoyle near out of its skin. The little creature launched into the air in a hissing flurry of fur and feathers, glaring back at her as it glided off. Ayika laughed, however, since Ayika was still standing in the lee of the chimney, laughing just filled her mouth with more soot.
A moment later, still coughing, she made her way down off the tiles through a maze of roof gardens, rain spouts, and balconies with the swift ease of an exceptionally sure-footed goat or of a city girl, born and raised. With a thud, Ayika landed down in an alley and took a moment to roll down her faded blue dress from above her hips. She'd bunched the poor simple thing up over her the trousers she wore underneath in part for better movement, but also because she couldn't afford to risk one of her four outfits getting ripped any more than she could risk tripping on it while climbing. Then Ayika took a final breath to steel herself for returning to civilization.
She stepped out onto the streets that were already filling with the daily chaos of the working quarter of the harbor town outside the south-eastern section of the capital city of the Earth Kingdoms. These streets meandered in their courses and were paved with flat stones beside trickling recessed gutters. Above them, the buildings sat squished together into exaggerated shapes under pointed tile hats, waving their pennants of hanging laundry.
Ayika ducked around mothers laying out low tables in the street, barrow-porters pushing passengers in front of them, and knife-grinders setting up their spinning stones. She made her way down the small hill of her factory viewing post; around corners, over canals, through doorways and alleys. As she went along, her pace became faster and faster. Thought became sheer instinct: race over a bridge, slide sideways through a gap between wagons, and jump down a thin flight of steps, water splashing off her boots.
Smooth as flowing wine she spun around the curses of a man carrying a stack of poultry cages, deflected herself past a cart and then stood at the top of short flight of stone steps under a dirty grey stone archway. Before her was a muddy slope leading down to the tangled slum of the Bed, below where the rest of the city thought the ground's surface ended. She was panting slightly as she surveyed the rickety wooden stairs that led to that dingy teeming domain, and grinned. Grandma Aka may have had her forests and her wilds, but before Ayika was a jungle, and it was hers.
...
(Author's Note: I welcome and encourage all comments, criticism, and discussion.)