Chapter 4: The Vision
Aang and Katara strolled lazily along the beach, surrounded by the beauty of the narrow sands, and framed by the jagged rocky cliffs that towered above them. They'd come here every day to this isolated spot for the past week, and left their clothes at the cabin, reveling in the freedom that gave them and thoroughly enjoying the unencumbered attractiveness of each other's older but still well-toned bodies. They were utterly alone on a much-needed vacation.
The ocean waves crashed just offshore, rolled up, and ran under their feet, tickling them, and scattering the sand crab-locusts looking for morsels of food washed up by the rhythmic surf. They smiled at each other, and tightened the grip on each other's hands. Water was an element they shared together from the very beginning of their relationship. As married couple, they'd been one with each other for some time now, but that unifying bond felt stronger every time they were near water, especially consummating their relationship against the backdrop of the enormity of the ocean.
They thought of the innumerable times that they'd been one with each other at the water's edge in the ultimate expression of unity with one another and with their shared element. Including just the other day.
And as a result of those years, now they had someone else to share water with.
Toddling beside them, hanging on to Katara's free hand, was a cute little curly brown-haired and mocha-skinned girl about nine months old, just as naked as they were. She was a little uncertain of herself stumbling in the wet sand, having just learned to walk. She squealed with the cool water swirling between her toes. She learned another skill long before she walked. She reached down and pointed at the foamy water and made it spin in a circle around her ankles and her mother's.
"Ma-ma! Wa!" she exclaimed, using her newly-discovered speaking skills.
Katara crouched down, smiled as she looked into her daughter's eyes, and said, "Yes, Kya. Water."
Katara pulled up a palm-sized ball of water and suspended it between them. It had a tiny fish in it.
Kya poked the glob of water and it jiggled, and the little fish startled. She giggled. Aang stood and watched the mother-daughter moment and grinned happily.
What he wasn't watching were multiple sets of eyes hidden in the rocks of the cliffs rising up from the narrow beach. It was the distracted moment those eyes needed.
Thrusting out with their arms, rock fists flew toward the innocent trio on the beach. Over the roar of the surf and the trade winds, Aang never heard those weapons, but Aang and Katara were bowled over into the sand with impact of the rock fists and they grasped and locked around their wrists and ankles. The couple was completely immobilized.
What was most disturbing was two rock fists had reached around Katara's and Aang's necks and were choking them almost to the point of not being able to breathe. Kya screamed and clutched her mother's leg, seeing these scary rock fists subdue them. Kya was untouched.
"Dai Li? I thought they were all gone or executed," whispered Aang.
Katara nodded and tried to calm their child as she rasped through the grip on her neck, "It's all right honey. Please just hold on to me."
Fifty seven men all emerged from the rocks and approached their completely hobbled targets. The leader made a casual move with his wrist and index finger and the pair were forced to kneel side by side, with their wrists bound in front of them, and their ankles handcuffed in stone too.
He flicked his wrist again and the rock fists gripping their necks loosened a bit.
"Well, well, well, if it isn't the Avatar and his woman. Sorry to interrupt your morning skinny dip. That's been most amusing the past couple of days. Especially the other day when you two thought no one was watching you –"
Katara flushed and interrupted the man in mid-sentence, "You've tracked us for days? Why?"
"To put and end to you."
"Why?" Aang asked carefully lest he trigger their demise. He had to keep them talking while he tried to get at least one limb free to bend. The pair's odds against nearly sixty deadly earth benders were poor.
The Dai Li leader scoffed, "You have to ask? Seriously, Avatar Aang, you belittle our efforts. Again."
The grip on Aang's neck tightened. He gasped.
"Before you kill us, please explain," rasped Aang. He was beginning to gray out a bit.
"It's simple. You are the last air bender. We want to eliminate you both so there won't be any more. Especially before you breed another air bender. We intend to complete the task that the ego-maniac Princess Azula couldn't do to you that day in the catacombs. To avenge Long Feng's death."
Aang shuddered at the thought of renegade Dai Li still loose and stalking him and his family.
"I did not kill Long Feng. He was executed by your King for abominations of your Order against the Earth Kingdom."
The leader was livid in his response, "Fabricated crimes. Hundreds died in our Order that day. Come on Avatar Aang. You know that Avatar Kyoshi herself started our Order of Dai Li to watch over the people and protect of the Earth Kingdom. There has been undeclared war between the air bending Avatars and the Earth Kingdom for centuries. It was your kind – the air bender Yangchen – that killed Emperor Zhen in his war on the Water Tribes' iunwarranted claim on the polar regions of the Earth Kingdom. After the hundred year war, it was you who caused the Dai Li to be wrongly branded as evil-doers and be all but exterminated. When you came looking for your precious sky bison, you meddled in our affairs too much. Everything would be as it was, had you not interfered and caused King Kuei to turn on his true protector Long Feng. It's time we end this air bender war on us by our terms this time – not yours."
Katara turned a fearful eye to Aang, and he tried to give her a reassuring glance.
"Oh don't try anything Avatar, especially your famous Avatar state, or we will kill your water bending child with no regret."
Katara nearly popped a vein as she struggled to find a way to get loose.
"What will be done about her when we are gone?" Aang demanded.
"One of my colleagues here is childless. We will take your orphan child and raise her as his own. We are not that cruel."
"NO!" screamed Katara as she tried to get up and rip her rock shackles off, but she was driven face down into the sand with a forceful movement of her rock fist cuffs on her wrists and neck by three of the Dai Li. She could scarcely take a breath.
"So do you love birds want to go together or does one want watch the other die first?" the renegade Dai Li leader asked snidely.
"At least do us the honor of killing us together, but let us say goodbye," Aang conceded.
The ruthless Dai Li leader granted the Avatar's request, but was wary for a trick. Aang leaned over to kiss Katara as her eyes got more panicked, but he whispered, "Keep Kya close to you behind me and cover her eyes."
Aang turned to the leader of his would-be assassins, and made it look like he was bowing to the attackers, in submission of his fate at their hands. He held out his arms, but formed an odd flat circle with them as he finally managed to interlace his fingers, and extend all of his fingers outwardly as far as he could. Katara noticed the difference, and held her breath.
He said, "It's a good day to die."
"That it is, Avatar Aang," said the leader with great relish, as he started to motion the rock fists to close enough to snap their necks.
But he and the huge ring of Dai Li were knocked over from behind by a large donut-shaped blast of air that materialized and coalesced from nowhere to engulf them in its winds. The gusts seethed with a howl far above the pitch of the ocean breezes and the Dai Li were spun about in place trapped in the concentrated hurricane force winds contained within the toroid that trapped them.
The rock fists dropped from Katara and Aang, she scooped up Kya, covered her with her arms, and hid, crouched behind Aang's legs.
Thus released from his rock shackles, Aang stood erect, and his eyes flashed into the Avatar state. Katara looked up from her huddled position to see more fury in him than she had ever seen, but she did not stop him this time. They were all protected within the swirling shell of his Avatar State. She wondered if any Avatar before Aang had used that shell to ever protect his or her family like this.
Aang reached up to the skies and spread his arms wide, with his fingers splayed outward. Purplish electrical charges formed on his finger tips, and he spun in place, the sparks flowing outward in a sheet of glowing energy from his fingertips and into the toroidal maelstrom that trapped the Dai Li. The air smelled sickly sweet from the ozone-laced air. The donut-shaped wind storm sparked and crackled with electrical energy as it spun like a power plant dynamo. The Dai Li writhed and screamed in pain from the electrical shocks and poisonous, unbreatheable air
Katara could feel a terrible heat coming from the torus that trapped the Dai Li as it started to glow blue then white hot. Even more unsettling was the feeling of that prickly electric charge all about them emanating from the deadly toroidal airstorm, causing her hair to stand on end. The Avatar State sphere that surrounded Aang and his family maintained a protective cocoon of cool air, laced with water vapor, spinning and protecting his family to protect them from the deadly maelstrom only yards in front of them.
The super-heated air immolated the the Dai Li until only their ashes were churned by the tornadic winds within the alien wind storm he had created. The sand fused into molten glass underneath the donut of lethal air.
Aang dropped his arms, bowed his head, and his eyes returned to normal. The toroidal air storm dissipated and human ash fell like black rain on the white sand and still-glowing silica glass that had been the beach.
He let out a very deep sigh, "Never, ever threaten my family."
There was not one Dai Li left alive to say that to.
"Aang?" Katara carefully stood up with a whimpering Kya deeply cradled on her bosom.
Aang looked away, "Katara. I'm…I'm sorry you had to see that. There were too many. We're safe now. They won't bother us ever again."
Katara looked about at the carnage left of the assassins. She reached out to Aang and turned his chin toward her so their eyes met.
"There is bending in this world worse than blood bending, isn't there, Aang?"
"I regret that is true, Katara," confessed Aang.
…
Korra's head swirled in and out of the real and spirit world and between life and vision, shaken by the reliving of Aang's reluctant destruction of the renegade Dai Li, and though she felt like she was coming out of the vivid vision of Aang's Dark Arts air bending, she fell deeper, and longer, and further away through her past lives. Images of Avatars of the past flew past her as her mind and soul touched every one of them ever so briefly. It was a vast multitude of Avatars, and it was nearly overwhelming, until she realized that she had been all of these people. More importantly, she felt the Avatar Spirit inside of her, and her feelings turned to awe.
Unlike the hard clarity of her vision with Aang and the Dai Li, she drifted in and out of the lives of several Avatars spanning several hundred years – men and women of all four bending disciplines. Through them she re-experienced the horror of the era of the Dark Times. She relived the screams and cries of a world in anguish on a scale not known in her world. Some of the pain was her own - at losing spouses and children and parents in the cruelty of those times. She felt the shock of losing her own life, struck down from behind with a broadsword, while protecting citizens with Dark Arts bending.
She experienced everything that Tenzin described that he learned from his father – all the abominations and atrocities of race against race and tribe against tribe within races. Bending forms she had never seen and wished she would never ever see again flashed before her – even some that those ancient Avatars before her performed both in defense and retribution.
She paused for a moment in communion with the Lion Turtles. In her mind, the agreements between the Turtles, the air bending Avatar of the time, with the very first of the White Lotus, stood in solemn agreement to make the terrible times disappear, as well as any memory of it and the Dark Arts that so characterized the barbarism of that era.
She drifted back through the lives and years, and opened her eyes, safely in the bed she shared with Mako. It would always be 'their bed' now. It was late afternoon – with the sun pouring in from the window. Mako was holding her hand, and circles of fatigue ringed his eyes.
"Korra? Are you OK? I thought you'd never come out of that spirit journey."
She sat up and hugged him, "Oh, Mako, I don't deserve the way you take care of me."
They kissed long and deep, further grounding her back into the present.
She said very seriously, "Mako. The Dark Times. The Dark Arts. It's still in every one of us. It was in Aang. He had to use it himself to save his family. And he taught Tenzin to protect his,too. I understand everything now."
