Yang and Tyaga barreled through the close-pressed market place. Over the past three years they'd spent living in Ba Sing Se, the ebb and flow of the endless crowds had started to feel second-nature to them.
Angry merchants shook their fists and shouted obscenities when Tyaga's muscular tail whipped by too close for comfort. Yang spared them an apologetic glance from his perch straddling his Eel-dog brother's back but couldn't stop for more. They had a train to catch.
Parallel to their path, the 3 o' clock steam-engine train rushed uphill, only slightly outpacing them. Through flashes of green market-tarps Yang caught glimpses of its shining, copper hull and the people clinging outside the doors and squatting low on the roof.
"C'mon! We can make it!" Yang hollered, giving Tyaga's rear flank an enthusiastic slap.
"Easy... for you... to say!" Tyaga's mental tone growled back between puffs of breath. Over the past year or so Tyaga had gone through an amazing growth spurt. His legs and neck, once lanky, had grown thick and powerful, giving him a menacing stance that made people wary in his presence. However, Yang couldn't help but see him as the timid creature he had always been and still was.
At long last the hill evened out as they arrived on the upper tier of the city, a solid disc of elaborate townhouses and estates that ringed the palace at the mountain's apex. Ahead of them, the steam-engine rolled into its station in a cloud of vapour and squealing breaks.
"Hold on!" Yang cried. With an upward thrust, he pushed the Earth beneath them up and out of its bounds. Tyaga, having learned to put up with his brother's spontaneous bending, managed to keep from flipping end-over end as they flew through the air.
With a bit of subtle Airbending, Yang slowed their fall until they slammed into the tin roof of the station with only a very loud crash. Yang tucked and rolled off the lip of the now-dented awning and landed quietly on the platform below. The thick crowd moved away from him in unison, gawking nonchalantly in the way only city-folks do.
Yang's thick, jet-black hair, now tied in a neat tail between his broad shoulder blades and odd-coloured eyes could make people gawk on the best of days, and he'd almost come to expect it. With a flourish he produced a small package from the brown leather pack strapped across his side and straightened out his green tunic and dark trousers.
With a smirk on his lips he clicked the heels of his boots together and stood beside the port of the 1st class carriage.
"Sir Yamaedo." Yang stated as a man appeared in the doorway. Turning to greet the Fire-Nation dignitary, Yang had to fight to keep his pride out of his eyes when he saw Yamaedo's astonished and impressed expression. Cordially, Yang offered the silk-wrapped bundle. Eagerly, the older man accepted it and took a brief moment to check the contents of the parcel. Yang had no idea what his packages contained, seldom did, but that was the lot of a courier in Ba Sing Se.
"Thanks, son." Mr. Yamaedo smiled, flipping him a valuable coin before making off with his entourage into the billowing steam.
"We'll eat well tonight." Yang announced, grinning as he rejoined Tyaga a little ways off from the station, letting his eyeless brother sniff the valuable metal.
"Chen will be glad." Said Tyaga, flicking his long tongue over his fangs in anticipation. "There hasn't been much to go around lately."
A flicker of darkness crossed Yang's face then, and although Tyaga couldn't see it, he knew his adoptive brother as well as his own heart.
"Not that you can beat yourself up for that." Tyaga corrected, winding himself protectively around his human, thrumming softly in his throat. Yang's smile returned as he stroked Tyaga's leathery, black-grey hide.
"Maybe." Was all he would say.
True to his word, that night they ate like kings in their little tarp and corrugated-tin palace. Chen ate daintily, cross-legged while Tyaga and Yang tore into the rich chicken meat with wild abandon.
"You two eat like animals." She chided, smiling between bites. "And I thought I'd been raised a savage."
That was true enough, Yang thought, but at least she'd been raised among humans. Yang's own Mother and Father: The spirits One and The Other still slumbered within him, giving his eyes their odd purple-and-red coloration. His other mother, the eagle-wolf Bei Shiba he hadn't seen since they'd been ejected from his swampland birthplace in blood and fire.
"How wash yorr day, huh?" Yang asked Chen around a dangerously large bite of chicken. Chen tsk-tsked at him for being such a hog but couldn't help but smile as Yang burst into a fit of coughs and Tyaga had to slap him hard on the back with his tail until he could breathe again.
"Not bad," Chen replied, giggling, "Mr. Xiao's wife just had a son so he's too busy being happy for once to breathe down our necks. Though if I could find a way to keep my poor fingers from pruning up after a day working the tubs, I'd be happy as a fisher-clam." Chen sighed luxuriously and wiggled her fingers for emphasis. Yang gave her a smile, knowing that she was putting up a brave front. Mr. Xiao ran the bath-house on the middle-tier of Ba Sing Se. Word was he was about as bad of a tyrant as Fire Lord Ozai had been.
A loud crash in the alley outside interrupted their feast. Someone screamed but was cut off with a grunt and the thump of a body hitting the dirt. Chicken leg forgotten, Yang was up and peering out their grey fabric door-drape quick as thought.
"Hey!" He shouted, making out the silhouette of one man standing and one man hunched against another shack. The standing man's leering eyes rose to meet him and Yang swallowed dryly at what he saw there.
Where the man's eyes should have been was a creeping blackness, wet and thick. However, to Yang's spiritual senses there was a sort of dim glow within them, like spirit-light. Intensifying the horrific effect was a sort of sickening twisting of the man's features, as if the midline of his face had begun to bend clockwise.
Chen's sharp intake of breath beside him alerted Yang to her presence.
"R-run..." The man on the ground whimpered, reaching out towards them for help, contradicting his words.
"Run!"
-
Korra slapped the endless stack of papers off her desk with a suppressed shriek. Nobody was around to hear at this late hour but still... With her back to the wall she slid down until she sat with her legs sprawled and he hands laying dejectedly in her lap. It was only with an incredible effort of will she suppressed a racking sob. She was the Avatar, for crying out loud, not some toddler throwing a tantrum!
Unbidden, the thought of little-now-big Tophie, the daughter she'd been able to see only sporadically for the past three bloody years slipped between the cracks in her mental armour. The papers now littering the floor and even those still stacked neatly on her desk flew into a frenzy as Air responded to Korra's unbounded emotions.
Unsteadily, Korra regained her feet and tottered out the door of her stifling office and clicked shut behind her. Before she knew it, she was closing the front door of the Ba Sing Se base of operations behind her too. Swiftly, one foot in front of the other, Korra set off into the night, her mind anywhere except for where she was.
Three. Bloody. Years. Tenzin had been so sure of his theory of a Dark Avatar. So sure that when Unalaq had died with the spirit of Vaatu within him at the end of Harmonic Convergence those 15 years ago, he had begun a new, Dark Cycle of reincarnation. Korra tried to sense the pure essence of Raava within her that marked her as the true Avatar, but it was buried deep under her thrashing emotions. They had searched the Earth Kingdom high and low, far and wide for three years. Absolutely fruitless. For all their consorting with so-called spirit mediums, spirit-tamers and even a few obviously nutty back-alley shamans Korra and her small team had come no closer to finding the source of the gradually worsening dark spirit problem.
Now, it wasn't that there weren't any Good spirits about. In fact, Korra pondered, there were probably a lot more. It's just that they don't wander about stealing children in the night and causing shipwrecks. And now... now there were these new rumours coming in. Terrible Ghouls with ink for eyes and a dark spirit where their soul used to be. Nobody knew where they were coming from and, thank the elements, there had only been a few very isolated cases of the phenomena. Still, however, the fact that any of these abominations existed at all was proof enough that Korra had to hurry.
Korra's feet seemed to have gained a life of their own, restless from countless hours idling at her desk, they took the twists and turns of the labyrinth of slums as if they knew exactly where they were going. As if they were guided. Meanwhile, Korra's overstressed mind turned to imagining what a Dark Avatar would look like if she met him or her. She couldn't help but imagine some tall, dark-clad figure with glowing yellow eyes slanting down an imperious nose. Perhaps, she thought, she was projecting a little too much Unalaq in there. The natural order of elements an Avatar would go through would be Fire, Air, Water and then Earth but that was only because that was the order in which Avatar Wan had first mastered the four elements. Because Unalaq had been a Waterbender, it made sense that his successor could be an Earthbender which was why they were scouring the Earth Kingdom in the first place. But what if a dark cycle ran backwards? What if Korra had been searching the wrong continent in vain while some devious Firebender schemed and laughed behind her back? Air whipped through her hair in fury and a few black rats which had been gnawing at trash in the gutter sprang for cover.
No. No, she argued with herself. The abominations had all been appearing in the Earth Kingdom. In fact, the areas directly outside Ba Sing Se were the epicenter of the occurrences. But what if there were more, just unreported? There were just too many factors.
-!
Suddenly, a man's wavering scream split the night, ending abruptly. Korra's feet stopped immediately and she stood stock still in the suddenly silent air waiting for another sound to track by. Korra was terrible at sitting around doing nothing but this, this was her element.
No sound came at first, only a creeping odor of pungent decay. Much, much worse than the smell of whatever those rats had been eating. Fighting the urge to plug her nose, Korra silently followed the putrid scent, all senses on alert.
"Chen! Get back inside!" Came another shout, just a little ahead of where Korra was now. It was not a man's voice, only a boy's judging from the way it cracked. Footsteps muffled by the thick moccasins she wore, Korra slunk through and between the eclectic lean-tos and came out in a poorly lighted alley.
Up ahead, a crash, a bang and the rattling-crashing noise of a metal house collapsing. Korra felt she should run ahead to face whatever trouble had arisen but something was holding her back. A sort of dread in the pit of her stomach, planted by that awful smell.
By now Korra could make out two - no -three silhouettes brawling in the alley. Two were human, one was nearly as large as Naga had been but much thinner. Korra suppressed a sudden longing for her elderly polarbear-dog and squinted into the darkness. The smaller shadow was Earthbending, hurling rocks at a larger, shambling shadow while the quadruped shadow danced around them both, snarling and snapping its jaws.
That was odd, Korra thought. Something that big should have been able to bite the man in half.
Enough. Korra decided and waded into the fray. The boy, a gangly thing with dark hair and bizarre eyes seemed surprised by her sudden appearance and left off his assault. The man, however, continued clawing and frothing.
"Stop this right now!" Korra commanded, putting a strong hand on the man's shoulder to make him face her. She immediately regretted it.
It was an abomination. Exactly like those in the blurry black-and-white pictures she'd been sent at HQ. The notes hadn't mentioned the stench.
"EEEEEEeeyyyaaaaaagh!" Korra screamed, Fire reacting unconsciously. Before the boy, the animal or even Korra herself knew what was happening the creature was up in flames, shrieking in an unnaturally thin voice. It waddled towards Korra a few steps, extending a flaming hand whose black flesh was curdling from its bones.
"Yoouuuu..." The creature mouthed with the last of its breath. In the next instant it collapsed into a pile of char, bones and half-cooked maggots crawling out of breaks in the skin.
Nobody had anything to say.