Korra: Time and the Avatar
It all started, as most things in myth and legend tend to do, with a flat, perfectly so, slab of rock, which bore a kind of roughly sketchy profile, of the kind that a child might draw. It is important to understand that the figure depicted was not overtly sketchy in its appearance; that is to say, the image was not frightening or grotesque in any way, but that it was simply sketchy. As though an amateurish artist had drawn it out hastily in a footnote while trying to capture the proper lighting in another body of work all together. This sketchy person's profile, which was at the same time not sketchy, was also adorned with immaculately precise and beautifully crafted characters, the kind one would find on a declaration of something significant.
In the eons that have passed since the blue moon's night upon which they were carved, both the profile and the characters have long since lost their powers. This phenomenon having taken the greatest toll on the character's chiseled faces. I don't mean to say that the characters have eroded or degraded in any fashion, quite the opposite in fact; but rather that the proper pronunciation of, and in several more serious cases, the existence of such a word in the Common Tongue has long been lost to the sands of time.
As best as most modern scholars can discern, the stone edifies reads as such:
In the beginning, there was the Dao, and the might that is the Lion Turtle.
Then, there was the Avatar, and their time.
Now, there is nothing but the end.
Scholars insist, as all scholars do, on debating the fine points. For example, some scholars from far off to the west claim that the form, following the function of "Might", should be hyphenated, or be plural; and others from an easterly bearing would insist that a number of remaining as-of-yet un-translated characters are in desperate need of identification; all of which would ultimately do little more than call into question the ancient equivalent of literacy, but would do little by way of altering the message, ultimately rendering it the same as at present.
Taken in the most common of ways, these few undeniably cryptic lines of prophetic pandering, chiseled into hard stone by one of the ten-thousand civilizations from all across the world, should be little more than a mockingly-philosophical question only asked of the youngest of our children.
It's the mind's job to make sense of the things that cannot be understood in a way that can. When it comes to things like this, these questions are best left to children.
Who would ever, reasonably that is, believe, for example, that, in any reasonable way, once upon a time, human beings could turn their breath into fire? Or create mountains from flat earth with their bare hands? And certainly not the notion of battering the skies with hurricane winds and waters?
Humans were once like Gods. But not any longer.
Impossible? Unthinkable?
The last of these Gods thought the same. Oh, not the shear absurdity of fire manipulation or earth conjuring, you understand; but the idea that her people could ever lose so much to both time and fate. Or, more especially, the fact that it was she that would set it all in motion.
Author's Note: This is something I wrote for fun and I'm interested to see what the feedback is on it (admittedly, if there is any). If anybody has any suggestions on where I could take the story, please review and leave your opinion. Thank you.