The Fire Lord's Left-hand Man
Chapter 2: "The Dark Forest"
There was a beaten-down dirt path in the direction Eijun was headed, which he knew was used by passing travelers.
The going was initially easier than he'd expected; he had gained a bit of lean muscle over the past month from his daily shoveling. But as he walked deeper into the forestland, going farther than he'd ever gone before in his eight years, the dirt path disappeared into untouched forest floor that grew increasingly difficult to navigate.
Leaves gave way to thick vines that hung down in his face, impeding his vision. With increasing frequency, he stumbled over hidden roots and scratched his face on thorns. In the distance and the not so far distance, he began to hear howls and yelps, and once, a deep rumbling that sounded like a large beast's growling stomach.
After some time, Eijun wasn't even sure whether he was heading north anymore. Several times, he panicked and thought about turning back—before realizing that there was nowhere to go back to. His grandfather, he tried reasoning with himself, had told him to head in that direction for a reason. And so, he took another step forward and moved on. Every now and then, when he heard something unsettling, Eijun tried to bend the earth again. But despite his efforts, he couldn't feel or hear anything from the earth, let alone bend it.
He wondered with a pang whether he'd somehow lost his earthbending ability.
By the time he stopped for the evening, Eijun was completely exhausted. He didn't know how much distance he had covered; while he couldn't have made much headway, the canopy had considerably thickened, blocking most of the sky. Even though it was late spring, it was cool, and the ground was soft and mossy. Eijun was tempted to fall asleep there on the spot—but just as he'd laid down his knapsack, he heard the sound of rustling branches and immediately snatched it back up. He looked around, his head turning this way and that. Nothing emerged. Nonetheless, not altogether eager to find the source of the sound, Eijun uneasily looked around one last time and then clambered up a knobby tree. As soon as he'd finished securing himself to the branch with a vine, he saw the last of the rays of sunlight disappear from the scattered cracks in the canopy.
The darkness was different from the night. The night had the moon and stars; the light of the fire from the Pit; the sounds of mooing bulls and clucking chickens. Darkness was different still from closing his eyes. Normally, when he closed his eyes, he knew that by opening them he would be able to see. But here, there was no difference between opening and closing his eyes; Eijun had to reach up with his fingers to make sure his eyes really were open.
And then, in the darkness, the voices appeared.
It started out as a whisper: It wasn't quite a human voice and they weren't words he understood, but first a single whisper, and then a murmuring of whispers broke out around him. Eijun looked around wildly, trying to place where it was coming from. He could only see blackness.
"Who are you?!"
Instantly, the sound broke off and stopped. It was silent, unnaturally so. Even the background sounds of the forest were missing, as though they'd been sucked away.
Eijun let out a rattling exhale. His heart thudded against his ribcage, sounding like a drum in the silence. He wondered if he'd scared it away somehow. Maybe it somehow knew that Eijun was an earthbender...even though he couldn't use his abilities at the moment. With another blind look around in the darkness, he lowered his head back down—when without any warning, waves crashing on the shore, the whispers exploded around him once more.
The source of the sound was clearer: It was coming from the earth below. And this time, he could understand what they were saying.
"Let us out..."
"Kill them all!"
"Let us out..."
"Get the earthbender boy!"
"I can't breathe!"
"Let us out of here!"
Increasing in volume, the voices of the strange men in the blue skins, the voices he had ignored before, howled around him. Their voices were accompanied by what sounded like fists banging against the dirt, and the screeching sounds of a pair of sickles sharpening each others' blades.
Trembling, Eijun covered his ears. But instead of blocking them out, he began to hear another set of voices ringing shrilly in his head—and to his horror, he recognized them individually.
"Eijun! Help!" cried Wakana.
"Where are you hiding, Eijun?" called Nobu's uncle.
"You left me," Nobu hissed.
"Eijun!" his mother shrieked.
"We wouldn't have died if it wasn't for you," his grandfather said in a terrible, accusing voice. "It was all your fault."
"I'm sorry," Eijun cried out. "I'm sorry, grandpa."
Even though he couldn't see anything, Eijun could feel his grandfather's gaze boring mercilessly into him.
"Prove it."
Eijun flinched. He tried to back away, but there was something—the vine he'd tied around himself—keeping him in place.
With nowhere to go, as the voices continued to whisper in his head, he felt his strength draining from his body. His hands fell away from his ears—and the voices from the earth and in his head combined, tore away at him.
He didn't know how long he lay there on that tree. He curled up into a ball, but there was no escape: The voices of the dead clawed at his consciousness without rest. It was impossible to think. It felt as though he must have been there for years, but the darkness never lifted.
Just when Eijun had accepted that he was going to die there, he saw something.
In the distance, it looked like an indistinctive ball. It wasn't glowing, but the fact that he could see it at all in the pitch darkness set it apart. Groping to gather some of his scattered thoughts together, he observed its approach. As it grew closer, it began to take shape, and when it stepped just below him, he realized it was an animal. It was not one he'd ever seen before. It had the face of a tawny cat, but its body was much bigger than the one old lady Mao had kept. It had something that looked like white branches growing from its head.
He didn't know how, but it climbed the tree and licked his face. Its tongue was rough and warm. Next, he heard it chew through the vine, before nudging its head under his body and sliding him on top of its back. Eijun could feel its heart beating in rhythm below his and somehow, that helped ease him. The voices in the dark still raging around him, he closed his eyes and limply buried his face in its fur. The animal leaped back down to the ground in a single smooth movement, but the voices didn't grow louder. In fact, as they began to move swiftly across the earth, the voices faded, their shrieks growing weaker and farther away.
At last, it fell quiet. It was not the biding silence of before; Eijun could hear the wind whistling in his ears, and something else, rustling gently. The voices, however, were gone, and in their absence, Eijun realized that they could not possibly have truly belonged to the spirits of the dead. Something strange, something horrible in the forest had created the voices to whisper his doubts and fears into his ear. He shivered; he did not ever want to go back to that dark place.
Eventually, the animal came to a stop and bent down. He slid off, landing on the grass below, and opened his eyes.
It was still night. But to his unadjusted eyes, the ground at his feet appeared to be filled with what looked like twinkling lights. Eijun reached out with a wondering hand, and touched water. It was a river, Eijun realized. The lights were a reflection.
He looked up and saw that the forest was behind them. He was standing in a wide, open clearing. The suffocating canopy was gone. And high above, the night sky, filled with stars, stretched out over him. There must have been thousands of them, looking like particles of dust that'd been blown across the sky.
Follow the stars like I taught you.
Eijun turned to see the animal observing him in silence. Its eyes were intelligent. He reached out a tentative hand and placed it on its head. It nuzzled against his palm, and Eijun realized that somehow, he knew its name.
"Thank you, Mula."
It inclined its head, and then it galloped away back into the forest.
There were a set of constellations Eijun's grandfather had drilled into him when he was younger, but the most important was the parade of animals:
The cranefish's long beak curved into the goat dog's maw, which bit the tail of the ostrich horse, which jumped above the armadillo lion. The armadillo lion in turn bowed before the most important constellation of all: The badgermole, which's claw pointed north.
Looking up at the stars, Eijun quickly spotted the claw. It pointed toward a range of distant mountains, away from the forest, and ran parallel to a part of the river. It seemed that he really had been going in the wrong direction before.
Taking a long drink, he began to follow the river, but before long, his eyes grew heavy, and he fell asleep.
When Eijun woke again, his progress was much swifter than it had been in the forest. While he still didn't know exactly where he was headed, as his surroundings transformed from a grassy plain into sloping hills, he found a renewed sense of purpose in that he was at least going somewhere.
Ascertaining his direction at night with the stars, Eijun walked north for several days. On the evening of the fourth day, he reached the base of one of the mountains he had seen in the distance. Just a little ways up, he found an entrance to what appeared to be a shallow cave. It had started raining earlier that day, and relieved to have a roof over his head for the night, Eijun staggered inside.
He had lowered his knapsack and eaten half an egg before he realized that there was another person there.
The man was sitting very still in the shadows, near the back of the cave. He was dressed in tanned skins, and in his hurry, Eijun had taken him to be an oddly-shaped boulder.
As it was, Eijun saw something white and wondered what it was for an instant before realizing it was the white of an eye. He choked and leapt up to his feet.
"Who are you?!"
Without answering, the man rose up to his feet, and Eijun felt his eyes widen: The man was huge. He must've had at least half a head on the biggest man in Eijun's village, and his dark eyes held a gaze as hard as iron.
His body moving instinctively, Eijun fled the cave.
The rain had started pouring outside, and in a matter of seconds, he was soaked to the skin. Shivering, but mindless with panic, he splashed down to the base of the mountain before he realized he had forgotten his knapsack. Despite himself, Eijun looked back, his heart pounding in his ears. He was certain he would see the man right on his heels. To his surprise, there was no one there. He came to a wet stop.
Cold rain continued to fall in sheets around him. Something grumbled, and for a second, Eijun thought it was thunder, before realizing the sound had come from his hungry stomach. He swallowed. He didn't know anything about the terrain or fauna there and couldn't forage for food; without anything to eat, he would surely die. And yet, if he returned to the cave, the man would surely kill him.
With a pause, Eijun hesitantly dug his foot into the ground and tried to sense the other man's presence. But to his frustration, the earth remained resolutely unresponsive.
"Why won't you work anymore?!" he shouted, stamping his foot down.
"The earth won't obey anyone without the conviction to command it," said a gravelly voice that sent shivers running down his spine.
Eijun spun around to see the man looming before him. Eijun didn't think; he reacted. Letting out a yelp, he crouched down, and he felt the earth around him rumble and crack. When he looked back up, there was a barrier of rock jutting out around him, just as before.
Though the barrier blocked the rain, it was damp and dark inside. Eijun panted, catching his breath—when all of a sudden, a ham-like fist ripped through the rock as though it was nothing but paper. His mouth dropping open, Eijun fell back and watched in disbelief as the rocks cracked and fell apart. Rain started pouring inside.
His arms crossed, the man looked down at Eijun as one would an insect. "Did you think you were the only earthbender around?"
Eijun reached behind his back, his hands frantically searching for something.
"Did you think you could always be safe behind a rock barrier?"
His hands scrabbling across a pointed slab of stone, Eijun yelled and flung it. To his shock, the man effortlessly caught it with one hand. And then before his eyes, he crushed the rock, pulverizing it. Fine powder poured out from between his fingers.
That's it, Eijun thought. I'm dead.
But the man didn't kill him. Instead, he dropped something on the ground—his knapsack.
"Get out of here, you fool. Go back home. Or you'll be dead within a few days." Digging the heels of his feet into the ground, he jumped up impossibly high, landing on the ledge outside the cave in one go. He disappeared inside.
The rain was cold and unrelenting as it continued to pour around Eijun.
After a while, when some of the sensation had returned to his legs, he crawled over to his bag. He held it close to his chest. He wasn't hungry anymore, but he ate another egg. The egg was cold as well.
Tilting his head back, he looked up at the sky: The sun had set and the stars stretched out above him, twinkling. The badgermole's claw, without a care for Eijun, continued to point toward the mountain.
His hands clenched into fists by his side. Then he climbed back up the mountain and kneeled down in front of the maw of the cave.
"Please teach me," he said.
"Go home, boy," came the voice in the dark.
"I don't have a home anymore."
The man didn't answer.
Eijun remained there, kneeling, as the rain continued to pound down on his back. The hours passed, and the rain came to a stop. It was pitch dark outside, and the air was freezing cold on his wet skin. His body shook violently, his head ached, and his teeth chattered. Eventually, his vision grew hazy, until finally, everything turned black.
The next time Eijun woke up, his whole body felt like it was on fire, and he was so dizzy, he promptly passed out again.
He drifted in and out of consciousness several times after that, his mind a broiling fog. At first, his head split with aching pain and he dreamed of terrible things. But as the pain eased, his dreams changed into one of aching familiarity.
Wearily, an old man slumps against a battered earthen coin. His voice echoes out of an empty chest.
"I'm sorry…I failed to bring peace. Even with...locked away, darkness still surrounds humanity. There wasn't enough time."
When he finally opened his eyes again some time later, everything was clear once more. He was lying on a rough mat inside the cave. There was a crackling fire in the corner, and he could smell something warm brewing.
Eijun sat up, and saw the man looking down at him. Wordlessly, he handed him an earthen bowl filled with thick mushroom stew, and at the sight, Eijun felt a lump rise in the back of his throat.
He didn't have much strength left in his hands; they shook as he took a bite. The stew was hot, and he immediately burned his tongue on it. Taking a deep breath, he began to eat.
It'd been a long time, Eijun thought, since he had last eaten stew.