The griffins of the Western air temple
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to their owners.
The sky bison flew effortlessly through the sky, despite the various people who were currently sitting upon its back. "So, Aang, you want to explain again what you've done to Ozai?" Sokka of the South Pole's water tribe asked good-humorously.
"Sokka!" one could almost hear the wail in Aang's voice, "cut it out! I have even drawn all of you a picture back at the palace, remember?"
"Yes, you did," Toph agreed, "and the colours were really pretty, too!"
"Thanks – Toph!" now Aang almost wailed for real. "Cut it out!"
"Sorry," Toph didn't sound very sorry at all, "but you guys are so easy! And on a totally unrelated note," she continued, without missing a beat, "Momo is sounding somewhat more agitated than usual, nervier too."
"Nah, that's just you," Sokka said dismissively. "He's just upset because Hawky has come along."
Despite being blind, Toph looked sceptically in the direction of Sokka's voice. "What?" asked the young man.
"Why did Hawky come along? Shouldn't you have left it with Katara and Suki at the Kyoshi Island?" Toph asked.
"Nah, it was just too Fire Nation for the lack of them – not that Hawky should listen," Sokka said, dismissively. "The girls promised to send us a message to give us an update by their own means."
"Yeah, ah-ha, their own means," Toph agreed, somewhat morosely. "I guess, anyways back to Momo-"
"We're here!" Aang proclaimed proudly as Appa landed on the landing pad of the still abandoned air temple. "Sokka, help Toph off-"
"I'm blind, Twinkletoes, not helpless," Toph snapped as she slid off Appa's saddle and onto solid ground – and froze. "Guys – we have a problem."
"What sort of a problem?" Sokka inquired as he and Aang slid after the diminutive earthbender. "Someone's crashing at Aang's temple?"
"Yes! I mean no!" Toph cut-off before Aang protested that it wasn't really his temple, per se, "I mean I think there are animals in there, not people!"
"Animals? That means meat! I eat meat! Tasty animals, here I come!" Sokka yelled excitedly and fled into the temple, waving his machete.
"Twinkletoes?" Toph frowned, "prepare to act as back-up – I think Snoozles is going to need it-"
Before Aang could ask why – surely Sokka could handle an animal on his own, Sokka emerged from the temple, still waving his machete and still yelling, but now with fear rather than excitement. The cause of that shift in attitude and direction became obvious too, following Sokka closely and nipping at his heels with its beak – a fully adult and very angry female griffin, half-eagle, half-lioness, and all lethal.
"Twinkletoes, wait!" before Aang could airbend (well, try to, at any rate) the griffin back into the temple, Toph struck first, earthbending in such a way that Sokka lost his footing and slid down to Appa and the others on his belly. "I sense something higher up!"
Since Aang could see, he looked up – and instantly regretted that he did. Another griffin was emerging onto the temple's inverted balconies, and now even Aang could hear that it wasn't alone either.
"Sokka," he muttered to the taller boy, "I think we're outnumbered – we've got to flee! Strategically, I mean."
"We can take them on," Sokka protested as he got back on his feet, wiping dust off himself and giving Toph an evil eye that she couldn't see. "I was just luring them out-"
"Not if they take to the air," Aang shook his head. "These are griffins – Gyatso and Kuzon have mentioned them some times before the war, I just don't remember what-"
"But they can take us if they take to the air," Toph interrupted. "I can't fight them in the air so well, and neither can you, Snoozles."
"Yes I can-" but Sokka didn't finish: Aang and Toph grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back onto Appa, before flying off. And once in the air, Sokka fell silent of his own volition: he could see that there were a lot of griffins – more than all of them, including Appa, Hawky and Momo combined...
"This must've been our most frantic strategic retreat," Sokka muttered some time later when the three of them made camp at the site of Zuko's old campsite. "The only time we've retreated so quickly was when Azula was chasing us with Mai and Ty Lee, you know?"
"Yes, well, there were a lot more than just three griffins in there," Aang said, sounding unusually terse for him. "I'm not sure, I don't know for sure, but I think they may've been nesting there."
"So, what? That's it? We're just going to leave and let them keep your temple for a nesting ground?" Toph asked.
"No! Yes. Maybe," Aang confessed. "I need to remember what I've been told about griffins, I'm going to meditate." With these words he sat down in a lotus position, stuck his staff into the ground, and froze.
"Uh-" Sokka was never a big fan of meditation, nor did he understand it all that well either. However, seeing how Aang's arrow tattoos began to glow, even he knew better than to intervene. "So, now what?" he asked Toph instead.
"I don't know," Toph confessed. "Want to play at dice?"
"No, you tend to cheat," Sokka replied. "I think I'll go to the swamp indicated on Zuko's map and see if I can't hunt us some meat!"
"You do that, Snoozles – I think I'll keep Twinkletoes company instead," Toph replied after some thinking. "I don't like swamps very much – they got centipede-leeches and I know what else!"
"You could wear shoes," Sokka suggested before remembering that Toph hated shoes since she was blind for real in them. Of course, Toph's glare at the suggestion might've something to do with that. "Okay, okay, I'm going," Sokka said quickly and... strategically retreated before Toph could do something about it, presumably with earthbending.
"Sucker," Toph muttered to herself (Aang, meditating, didn't fully count) and turned to the animals. "So, you guys have any ideas as how to pass the time?"
Perhaps unsurprisingly, no answer was coming.
Sokka was not having a good day. First that rather ignoble retreat from the air temple – the damn animal-birds have achieved what only Azula (and maybe Ozai, and possibly Zuko too, when he was evil) had done – driven them out of the temple. That was just wrong – Sokka was a hunter of the water tribes, he didn't retreat from tasty meaty animals-
Okay, odds were that these griffins weren't very tasty or meaty – just as the polar bears weren't; only they were, if you could kill and skin one...
"Hmm," Sokka said thoughtfully, "meat... Boomerang," he pulled out his trusty weapon and looked at its shiny reflection, "where do you think we can find meat?"
The metal weapon, of course, didn't answer, but Sokka did see something in its highly polished, reflective surface and turned around. A tawny tail with a brush on its tip was hanging down from a tangle of tree branches.
"Bingo," Sokka muttered delightfully, adjusted the angle of his boomerang and let it fly.
Toph was bored. Bored, bored, bored. "I probably should have gone with Snoozles instead, and kept him out of trouble. This is boring!" she confessed to Momo. "You guys are really scared of these giant cat-eagle things, aren't you? Now Sokka, on the other hand-"
It was at that moment that Sokka landed in the clearing, looking absolutely terrified, followed by something big and familiar. "Toph! Earthbend! Now!" he gasped, grasping his precious boomerang. "Like, five minutes ago!"
Something in Sokka's voice persuaded Toph to comply. Hastily, she erected a crude but solid earth-and-stone shelter – and just in time, as something powerful just slammed into it; so hard, that the whole structure shook.
"Snoozles?" Toph's voice didn't sound particularly gentle, "Just what you have done?"
"Pissed off the leader of the griffins?" Sokka half-asked, half-stated in reply.
And though she was blind, Toph just stared.
While this was going on in the world of the mortals, Aang the avatar was submerging himself into the world of the spirits, seeking some sort of wisdom regarding the griffins. Sadly, partly because Aang had little knowledge of the spirit world, and partly because he wasn't sure how the griffins were figuring into this, he didn't end up with particularly great results: the patch of the spirit world he ended-up at mostly resembled its' counterpart in the material world, and that was... ambiguous.
"Hello? Is there anybody here? An Avatar is in search of advice here!" Aang called-out, fully aware that he was sounding desperate and desperately hoping that he wouldn't attract the likes of someone like Koh the face-stealer.
"So I see," answered a voice that was definitely unlike Koh's, "but an advice about what?"
Aang slowly turned around. A spirit was peering down on him from the boughs of a nearest tree – half fair maiden (by Earth Kingdom's standards, at any rate), half badger-frog.
"Uh, advice about griffins," Aang finally admitted. "Why are they in the air temple, by the way?"
"Hmm," the spirit made a show of thinking so convincing, that even Aang became sure that she knew the answer all along. "I think the answer to that lies with the old nushi-onna that has decided to take over it after the Fire Nation's impromptu desecration of it."
"I knew it!" Aang muttered sharply. "When Azula had attacked us, she had messed-up on the spiritual level as well. Guess now I'll have to chastise the nushi-onna, right?"
"Don't see why not," the initial spirit yawned, revealing briefly a rather wide mouthful of rather sharp teeth. "Good luck on your plan, Avatar."
"Wait!" Aang called out, belatedly, "tell me, who are you to express my gratitude?"
"I am Dolabra, the spirit of the Cloudberry swamp," the spirit replied with a smile and vanished, jumping away into the woods – of the spirit world...
"I know what to do now!" Aang proclaimed loudly, standing up back in the material world – and hitting his head on an earthen roof that wasn't there when he went to visit the spirits. "Where did this come from?"
"Sorry," Toph replied wryly from one of the corners of the impromptu cavern, "but the great tribal hunter here has had another run-in with the griffins and led them to us. So, I had to improvise, you know?"
"Thanks, Toph, I think," Aang said slowly, "but now, I also think, I have an idea as to what to do about them. Think we should come up to the temple from high or low?"
"That depends," Toph confessed thoughtfully, "are we against just the griffins or something else? No holding back, Twinkletoes!"
Aang exhaled, but realized that it was useless to lie to Toph right now. "Ever heard of the nushi-onna?" he admitted, not very happily.
"The demon spiders?" Toph's blind eyes narrowed in her own thought. "Only an occasional scary tale or two heard on the sly. Generally, I think, that you should hit from the high, because they don't like attacks from above much – they're that sort of a spider."
"All right," Aang nodded, and then noticed something else. "What do you mean, 'I should'?"
"You're the airbender here, hello!" Toph rapped her knuckles against Aang's head and not too gently. "You're the only one who can mount a proper attack from above, as you've told me and Snoozles earlier, remember?"
"Oh, yes, I forgot," Aang admitted, sheepishly. "Thanks for reminding me!" With a simple earthbending move and a determined "yip-yip", Aang and Appa were gone into the sky.
"Wha-? What has happened?" Sokka muttered, still half-asleep from his corner into the oversized earth tent.
"Nothing much, Snoozles, prepare to move. Twinkletoes might be going from above, but we'll be helping him out from below!"
The temple once more loomed before Aang, dark and empty, save for the griffins, of course. Again, Aang was able to land on the inverted plaza, and look into the temple's darkened depths. "Nushi-onna!" he called out, as loudly as he could, "come out! I know you're in there!"
"Clever Avatar, you've learned – of me," came a dry, insectoid chuckle from within the temple and the nushi-onna emerged into the light of day.
Aang stared. The nushi-onna was huge, huge and spider-like, save that it was coloured with colours that no spider could be expected to have. "So, Avatar, why are you here?" the demon spider chuckled dryly.
"No," Aang stiffened his grip on the staff, "why are you here? Your kind was never welcome in the temples of the air nomads, so why are you here?"
"The air nomads are gone," the nushi-onna chuckled back, "this is an empty, abandoned place now – a home for my kind. Leave now, or else!"
"Or else what?" Aang stood his ground. "What can you do?"
"See my power!" the nushi-onna began to swell like a hot air balloon, swell so much, that the temple began to creak and seemed to begin to topple.
"Oh no you won't!" Aang snapped back, and bent. Not air, but earth, shoving the temple back into the mountainside – and the temple seemed to respond.
"Oh no you won't!" the nushi-onna seemed to implode slightly and leaped at the Avatar, its jaws ajar. Aang struck back with his staff; there was a flash of white, and suddenly the nushi-onna was in two – pieces, that is. Aang took a deep breath and exhaled... with a breath of fire.
"...And that was when Toph and Sokka came from the inside the temple," Aang finished telling the tale to Katara. "Once they told me that the griffins had hatchlings – well, a nest with eggs in there – we decided to give it to them for a nesting season and left."
"Just left?" Katara asked, slightly incredulous.
"Yes," Aang blushed slightly, for no reason. "Sokka, of course, wanted to have some eggs, if he couldn't have meat, but we've outnumbered him, so – no eggs."
"And the griffins?"
"They can have the temple. The nushi-onna had a point – there aren't too many air nomads left in the world, and there won't be, for a while. It's a bad idea for our temples to remain abandoned and alone for too long, so Toph and I decided that it would be better for the griffins to have the temple, rather than another spirit of empty places should come and settle there."
"Well, that makes sense," Katara said, slightly grudgingly. "I'm sure that it'll work-out for the best."
The night was moonless, neither full moon, nor a crescent young or old hang in the sky. The griffins were asleep, gathered around their collective clutch, but though they were sleeping a very light sleep, not even their keen ears heard the silent approach of Dolabra of the Cloudberry swamp.
"And so, another one bites the dust," the swamp's spirit chuckled as she looked at the freshly re-consecrated air nomad temple. "Another one tried to challenge me for the dominion of this land and lost! I'm still the queen!" and she chuckled long and hard from the forest's darkness, echoed by her chorus of badger-frogs.
Back inside the air temple, the griffin pride slept, free, and safe, and sound – for now.
End.