Time is an illusion.
This is something many people- humans- know. Time is a falling star that curves into the nothingness of space- time is the blanket that warms a chilled spirit more than freezing flesh.
But it can also be numbing, a wash of staccato grey on grey on grey, until the world's emotions are but raindrops filling an already-full bucket. And I am the being that must go out and empty it when the time comes. Time is a concept like death is a concept, to most.
I know it intimately.
It's the crags in the back of my shell, the mountains worn to dust, the rivers shifted and the people gone. It is sleeping for a blink of an eye in an ocean and waking in a desert. It is a thousand-thousand things that people can never understand and never hope to understand.
Do you understand?
No?
I hoped- but hope is nothing more than the bird that rests on my trees, barely felt, and gone before I even knew it. I trusted- but trust is nothing more than laughter in the face of failure. I wept- but tears are nothing more than the marks of a job undone as it is done.
I gave the Avatar his powers.
I gave it again and again and again, and I will give it again and again and again, until the mountains these people believe unending and unchanging are deserts under my palms.
I watch, and wait, for the moment the Avatar steps outside his bounds. The moment she does- he will die. She will die. They will all die.
Because I am the Lion Turtle of Spirits, and the Avatar lives and dies by my hand.
(You think Raava told Wan everything?)
(All spirits have their secrets.)
This was written in response to the challenge over at AtLA Fanfic Challenges- and was finished in less than ten minutes.
I'm not completely happy with the formatting of this; but as soon as I saw the prompt "Lion-Turtle" I knew I had to do something. Especially after my physics teacher spent a complete hour lecturing on the philosophical aspects of time-space, and a variety of other topics I'm soooooo freaking out about for tomorrow's midterm!
But, anyways- this is in the POV of the fictionalized Lion-Turtle; it uses some aspects of Korra but is set right after Aang receives his awesome (so very not) spirit-bending mojo.
How does it sound?
Read and review!
-Dialux