Avatar 7
Given the 12-14 episode format taken by the Legend of Korra series, there is much less room for fluff stories like the ones I choose to write. I can only hope this can be considered canon, as it takes place between the first season and the upcoming second season of the show. I thank you for reading and hope you enjoy this tale.
The sun began to set, casting fading light into the cavern's small mouth. Tenzin pulled two torches from his backpack and passed one to Mako, who snapped his fingers above each to light them with his firebending.
"I thank you for coming with me, Mako. I did not want to make this journey alone." Tenzin carefully navigated the stairs poorly cut from the stone that steeply sloped down into the mountain. Griping the torch tightly as he went, he rubbed the sweat from his moustache.
"It's quite alright, sir." Mako tried to keep one hand on the wall to brace himself as he descended just behind the airbending master.
"You don't need to call me that, Tenzin is fine." He looked back up to the young man and smiled sincerely.
"Why didn't you bring Korra? You were in a foreboding mood when you came to me with this request earlier last month. Mako referred to the day when Tenzin came late at night into his abode in candlelight with a bunch of scrolls in his hand. Ink was smeared over his hands and stained on his orange night clothes. He had clearly been intensely working on research or writing of some sort, and he had the look on his face of an epiphany that he was eager to share with the world. However, Mako would later come to know of the gravity of Tenzin's discovery, and the need for utmost discretion.
"I don't think it would have been appropriate to bring Korra along. I imagine what is at the bottom of this cavern won't be a sight meant for her eyes. Not at her age."
"She's almost eighteen Tenzin. I think she would be able to handle it."
He sighed forlornly, "I hope you are right. Come, we should get started."
They began to delve into the long dark of the cavern. The walls were only as thin as the steps, and covered in centuries of dust, dirt, and cobwebs. The stone quickly turned from the pale grey of the mountain outside, to clay reds and browns. The path wound and wound into the rock, and quickly the light of the cavern mouth was long gone. A gust of wind blew past them and snuffed out the torches, leaving them in complete darkness, and eerie silence.
"Well, at least we have an unlimited source of fire." Mako snapped his fingers over his torch to try and reignite it. He flicked his fingers once, twice, three times. He could not get the torch to light. The wind wailed once more, chilling him to the bone. Mako took that brief moment of fright and channeled it into fury, and shot a fireball from his palm, engulfing the torch in flame. He passed his torch over Tenzin's, allowing the flame to rekindle. As light returned to the path before them, Mako almost screamed. His eyes went wide with terror.
The path became obscured by bones. Skeletons numbering in the countless thousands flooded the steps before them. They clutched weapons, swords and shields and axes. They wore body armor of iron and steel, long corroded by the passing of the ages, and bore none of the colors of any nation. "Where the hell are we?" Mako's voice shuddered with a mix of rage and unshakeable fear. He had been led all this way, deep into an island in the center of the ocean, and what seemed like a refreshing adventure was becoming a nightmare.
"When I was your age, my father's friend Sokka passed to me a scroll taken from the Forever Lost Library of Wan Shi Tong. 'Here you go, mah boy.' He said, 'You're good with this kind of stuff. Looks like good ol' gibberish to me.' It took me decades to translate the writings, and the mere coincidence of Sokka taking this particular scroll from the Library is such a marvel, it may yet be divine intervention that caused it to fall into his possession."
"Yeah, you showed it to me on the way here. He was right, looks like gibberish to me."
"It's a tale of our world history. The date is smeared, but the scroll is written in a dialect older than the four nations. It is extremely vague, but a recent rehashing of my translation has led me here."
"But why? Why come here at all?"
"Because my father came here once. He called it the birthplace of the Avatars. He told me if I were to ever explore this place, I should never bring the next Avatar, or any for that matter… I didn't know what to expect, and know we both expect it to only escalate from here. If you want to return to the surface, I will… understand."
"I'm not leaving you alone down here. Besides, what if your torch goes out again?" Mako chuckled.
They continued down the stone steps, now wadding through the bones. The sounds of their movements echoed through the winding path for what sounded like miles. No rats scurried about, no spiders or other insects crawled around or over the skeletons. It seemed as if life had long since left the cavern, and there was no end to the bones.
Almost an hour into their descent, the path began to level out. The bones of soldiers only multiplied, and the piles were now up to their knees. Mako noted cairns with pots of timbers and coals in them at the corners of the larger room they were now in, and tossed a fireball into each of the four pots. It was only then that he noticed in the center of the room, one of the skeletons clutched a long crystal that gave off a cool turquoise light, the same glow given off by Korra while in the Avatar State.
"Hold on, what is this?" Mako reached for the long crystal.
"Don't touch that!" Tenzin hastily slapped Mako's hand away, "This world is filled with forces far older and far more powerful than mortal comprehension. We have no idea what will happen should we disturb the resting place of that crystal stone." Tenzin then reached for the stone himself.
Mako gripped Tenzin's wrist, "And what makes you invulnerable to these unknown powers?"
"I will not allow myself to put you in harm's way."
"If we are to pick it up, we'll do it together." Tenzin was hesitant, but he knew there was no better option if they were to pick up the crystal at all. Tenzin readied his right hand, and Mako lowered his left, "On three, we grab the crystal. One… two… three!"
Both grabbed the stone in unison, and immediately the room around them shifted and jerked violently. A soft glow of purest turquoise enveloped the two men, who felt a shrieking wind almost sweep them off their feet. The bones before them rose up, and the glow gave them new life. Incorporeal images of rotting skin, frayed muscle, and corroded armor appeared all around the skeletons, imbibing the bodies with their lost lives and a shadow of their former appearances, if only for a time. Mako and Tenzin struggled to hold on to the crystal, for it haphazardly sent bolts of energy through their bodies, but they possessed a constitution that could endure the onslaught of such assaults.
What they witnessed was unlike anything they had ever seen before. The ghostly soldiers battled each other, completely ignoring the two guests in the center of the chamber. Sword and spear met iron shield. Axes cleaved into bone. Men died in droves, with no side dominating the other in victory. For the briefest moment, Mako could see beyond the walls of the room. He saw a vast and beautiful city, covered in vines and flowers. Perfectly carved basalt structures and towers merged with massive trees and moss covered roots. Beyond the city limits was the sparkling ocean, and the same islands dotted the horizon in every direction as they did when he arrived earlier in the day. The images vanished just as quickly as they had come into view, and darkness overtook the room, save for the light of their torches.
The crystal dimmed, and the energy surges ceased. The two men lowered the crystal, but it still sat between their two palms. A small black rune was now savagely carved into one side of the stone, near the far edge towards Tenzin. They took a moment to process what had just happened. The bones were still resting in their places around them, lifeless as ever, but Mako could not remove the images of the horrifying undead soldiers, wailing and cleaving into each other. He exhaled, and a skull tumbled from its perch atop a warrior's head, falling but a few inches from his body onto the armor of another man below. Startled by the sound, Mako jerked about. He waved his torch in the general direction of the sound, only to find nothing. He felt as if the skulls were starting to stare at him. He turned around to Tenzin, who was almost as scared as he was.
"The barriers between our world and the spirit world are blurred and corrupted by the extreme amounts of violence that took place here. I did not expect such a level of macabre distortion."
"You certainly found a way to scare me half to death. Should we expect more of this?"
"If these visions are triggered by the crystal, then perhaps we may."
"Then lead on, Tenzin. I'm not turning back now because of a few disturbing moments of corpse on corpse violence."
"It was more than that. What we saw was the crystal perhaps awakening the damned spirits of the soldiers, who saw their former enemies and began attacking each other once again."
"What if it was just a recreation of the previous battle, just the soldiers were appropriately aged given the time that has passed? Like a looking glass through time."
"I have not ruled that out either. But I doubt we will get anything solved by dwelling on it. We should continue onward."
They walked a few more minutes down the path, and at its end was an immensely vast cavern, with a rounded ceiling and buildings not unlike the ones in the vision. However, time and warfare had battered the structures into ruin. Rotted and dead tree vines draped over the crumbling architecture, but it was still a sight to see. Bones of warriors lay in clusters near the buildings, but the path before them was clear. At the center of the chamber, perhaps a half a mile from where they stood, a chrysalis glowed faintly, as if awoken by the intrusion of the two men.
Walking toward it, Tenzin pulled out the scroll, reading from it to jog his memory. Mako was perplexed at how such a city could end up so far underground, he remembered specific landmark buildings in the vision, and they matched what he looked upon now. He felt it they had to both been the same thing, and this only made him more curious.
"At time of strife and world-eating war, when we were ready to consume ourselves and our homes, did the spirits, our eternal foes, give us the Avatar." Tenzin read aloud as they approached the cocoon. It was a grey stone coffin, roughly hewn from rock different from that of the red earth of the city chamber. Energy coursed through microscopic runes along its surface.
"What happened here?"
"I believe I can answer that." Before them, the spirit of Avatar Roku, the Avatar before Aang, appeared. Both men knew of the greatness and the legacy of such a man to think him a god, and were taken off balance by his entrance. They kneeled before him, and he bid them to rise before continuing.
His voice was ancient and rasped, "Thousands of years ago, when mankind bent the energy within themselves instead of the elements, we waged war against each other for centuries, each war being larger than the last. One day, a civilization rose from the carnage and created this city as a haven of peace for all who would wish to escape the war. Koh the Face Stealer was not pleased to see any part of the human world seek an end to the violence and corrupted five barbarian kings, each raising an army to burn the city to the ground. It was then the Lion Turtles intervened, granting one the power to stem the tide of violence with not the tools of his kind, but the sorcery of the spirits."
As Roku spoke, tens of thousands of ghost soldiers fought the same war that led to the city's demise. Massive, six-armed elephant creatures trampled across the battlefield, garbed in massive suits of plate armor and carrying ornate clubs in each hand. They could almost hear the roaring charges, the clashing of armies, and the cries of the vanquished. Not even the atrocities of the Fire Nation in the last century could compare to the carnage that took place here.
"Thus the first avatar was created…" Mako looked to the stone sarcophagus and was overcome with awe.
"He was born and killed on this battlefield. Even though he stopped the five armies against the city, it was still lost, and thus he used all four elements to submerge the city, and encase it within this mountain, dying in the process."
"What is this crystal?" Tenzin asked.
"In the time before the Avatars, people used crystals like that one to power stone machines, the crystal channeled raw energy from the spirit world and imbued any manner of constructs with alien power. Its very existence causes a disruption between this world and the spirit world. Perhaps that is why Koh wanted to destroy this city, even if it was a beacon of peace."
"My father told me to never bring an Avatar here, and yet you come before me instead of him?" Tenzin did not want to delve too deeply into the subject, fearing to drudge up the loss of his father.
"I cannot speak to his intentions now, but this place is a haven for the spirits of the damned. They remain here to keep the last crystal from leaving this place. I will guide you out of here, but you must promise me, and Aang, that you are to never let an Avatar hold the crystal. Our two worlds could collide with catastrophic results."
"Can't we just destroy the crystal?"
"Not after so much time has passed, it is imbued with too much power to be destroyed by mortal means. You must keep constant vigil over it."
"I will… We will. Tell my father that I miss him, that the world misses him," Tenzin wiped a small tear from his eye, "Is it safe to go back the way we came?"
"I am afraid not." Roku lifted the two men and the patch of earth beneath them high into the air with the wave of his hand. The crystal glowed and shook, and another rune carved itself into the opposite end of the crystal. The spirits shrieked, and shot upward toward the retreating duo. Suddenly, beside Roku awoke the spirit of the first Avatar, a robed individual whose face and gender were hidden to the world, worked in tandem with Roku to repel the armies of the damned.
The top of the cavern opened before them, and an endless dark tunnel awaited them as they rapidly ascended. Suddenly, they could see a light at the top, and they braced themselves as they shot through.
Looking around, it was the middle of the night, but the starlight still stung in their eyes, which were so accustomed to the darkness of the cave. Looking below, Mako could make out their boat, still tethered to a rock, peacefully floating in the water. He looked to Tenzin, and helped him up. They climbed down the mountain and began their journey home.
Several weeks later…
"No Rohan! Don't go in there, that's Tenzin's study!" Korra chased after Tenzin's youngest son as he crawled about the house. She was coming to regret offering to babysit the four rambunctious children of her airbending tutor.
It was a round room, with a homely green carpet, and tall bookshelves with tomes from across the four nations. The baby Rohan crawled with remarkable speed, and soon found himself under Tenzin's desk, carved from finest mahogany and oak wood. He began to play around under the desk, before bumping his head on one of the drawers.
Korra reached for him as he began to cry, just as Jinora walked in after them. "He's a feisty one for sure," She said as she dashed over. "Sorry about that in the kitchen, didn't think he'd get away."
"He bumped his head on the desk." Korra worried.
"I'll put him to bed, thanks for finding him Korra." Jinora took Rohan from her and moved out of the room, just as the drawer caught her eye. It had been locked, but Rohan's little accident forced it open. Inside was an ominous crystal, with a rune carved in either end of it, and it glowed a radiant blue. Korra reached for the crystal, a third rune at the center appearing as her hand came closer to it.
End of Part 1…