Chapter Seven: The Southern Air Temple, part 2

The door to the sanctuary wasn't grand and massive like the doors to the Chamber, and was in fact much smaller than those bronze creations. It was still big, but only half or a third as tall as those she had seen at the Western Air Temple. The difference was intriguing, as was the intricate lock built into the door here. Perhaps one like this existed in the other doors, but here it was much more visible on the wooden construct and much more obvious in design.

Katara frowned up at the doors, her brow furrowed as she contemplated what Aang had said back in the courtyard. "But Aang," she warned, "no one could have survived in there for a hundred years."

"It's not impossible," Aang told her. "I survived in the iceberg for that long."

"Good point," Katara realized, but Xun shook her head.

"Aang, you're also the Avatar, and as such you have forces on your side that no one else would have. The Avatar State preserved you where nothing else could have."

Aang shook his head. "Maybe the spirits could have helped them, if they can take you bodily all the way across the world. Whoever's in there might help me figure out this Avatar thing."

"And whoever's in there might have a medley of delicious cured meats," Sokka drooled, rubbing his hands together. He approached the door, but it was solid and walking into it did nothing. He pushed and strained, but gave up quickly. "I don't suppose you have a key?"

"The key, Sokka, is airbending." He took his stance, Sokka scrambling to get out of the way, and breathed deep. A step forward, a push, and wind poured from his hands into the trumpets waiting for breath. A tone started, first with one note and then two others in escalating scale. The coils flipped over from blue to a blush pink, and the center scroll twisted vertical. The doors creaked open, and despite herself Xun leaned forward in anticipation. It was as dark as the Chamber had been, but the open doors let in enough light to begin to make out shapes as they entered, Aang calling out for whoever he thought might be there.

They were, Xun realized, statues, placed on a spiral in the floor that moved around the floor and the walls. There were men and women of all ages and nations, each as different from one another as the next. Sokka voiced his protest, asking, "That's it?"

"What did you expect, a feast?" she asked him. "Besides, if you haven't noticed by now, Airbenders are vegetarians. That cured meat you were hoping for wouldn't be a reality, anyway."

He groaned in disappointment, and she turned with a humored smile back to Katara and Aang as they stopped at one of the rows. "Who are all these people?" Katara asked.

"I'm not sure. But it feels like I know them somehow. Look! That one's an Airbender!" Aang pointed to the statue before him that stood larger than life and had an arrow carved in relief on his head, and Katara indicated the next one in the row.

"And this one's a Waterbender. They're lined up in a pattern. Air, water, earth, and fire."

"That's the Avatar cycle," Aang realized.

"Of course. They're Avatars! All these people are your past lives, Aang."

"Wow!" He started to walk around, taking it all in. "There's so many!"

Sokka frowned in skepticism. "Past lives? Katara, you really believe in that stuff?"

"It's true," Katara protested. "When the Avatar dies, he's reincarnated into the next nation in the cycle."

Xun walked away from them, coming up behind Aang who now stood looking up at an older man wearing the traditional Fire Nation style of beard and topknot. In that topknot, a crown of flame was pinned—and the only Fire Nation Avatar she knew of to wear that crown, she remembered, was—

"Aang, snap out of it!"

While she had been staring up at the statue, Aang had gone into a sort of trance. He returned to himself when Katara shook his shoulders, calling for him, and looked confused. "Huh?"

"Who is that?" Katara asked him.

"That's Avatar Roku," he told her, just as Xun had guessed, "the Avatar before me."

"You were a Firebender?" Sokka asked. "No wonder I didn't trust you when we first met."

"Sokka," Xun protested, but she couldn't argue much with that. The prominent Firebenders in her life, after all, weren't exactly prize models of character.

Katara smiled an apology to her, then looked down at the base of the statue. "There's no writing. How do you know his name?"

"I'm not sure," Aang answered with a smile. "I just know it somehow."

Sokka sighed. "You just couldn't get any weirder."

The tone of the pipes called their attention back to the door, then. It was a low, haunting note, and Xun felt a shiver run up her spine as she searched for its source. A shadow appeared, long and thin in the light from the door, and Sokka pulled her back behind a statue so she was out of sight. "Firebender," he hissed quietly. "Nobody make a sound."

"You're making a sound!" Katara whispered back, to be shushed by Aang a moment later. They all crouched low, and Sokka readied his war hammer.

"That Firebender won't know what hit him," he muttered, tensing his muscles. He came around the curve of the statue upon hearing a weird sort of trilling noise, and he and Aang blinked slowly at the small creature crouched in the doorway.

"Lemur!" Aang said excitedly.

"Dinner," Sokka disagreed.

Aang laughed. "Don't listen to him," he told the lemur. "You're going to be my new pet."

"Not if I get him first!"

They looked at each other, a challenge in their eyes, and charged.

Xun sighed and dropped her head into her hands, dread settling deep in the pit of her stomach. "This is not going to end well."

"How do you know?" Katara asked, ignoring the boys to wander among the statues.

"Katara… He's going out there, and Sokka isn't going to be thinking of covering up helmets and armor and…and bones. He's going to stumble across remains of the genocide, and you know it."

The Waterbender bowed her head and sighed, stopping by Avatar Roku again. "You're right. Come on, let's—" Go, she would have said, Xun knew, but then Roku's eyes lit up with a blue glow. That light leapt to the next statue in the row, and the next, all the way up the walls. "Aang!" she cried, and together the girls raced for the door.

... ... ...

The explosion led them right to Sokka, who was getting up from the dust with a groan. "What happened?" Katara called over the sound of the whirlwind.

"He found out Firebenders killed Gyatso!"

"Oh, no! It's his Avatar spirit! He must have triggered it! I'm going to try and calm him down!"

"Well, do it," Sokka agreed, "before he blows us off the mountain!"

Xun crouched low by the wall with Sokka, bracing herself against the force of the wind. It was an angry wind, not light and free as the breeze that tangled with her unbound hair in the sky, but horrible as a firestorm in the hot desert. It lashed hungrily at her robes, pulled taut on her braid, and roared with the voice of a hundred thousand souls crying out in agony.

The glowing Avatar rose into the air as Katara crept closer, every inch a victory at this point. "Aang," she implored, "I know you're upset. And I know how hard it is to lose the people you love! I went through the same thing when I lost my mom. Monk Gyatso and the other Airbenders may be gone, but— you still have a family!" She paused for a breath, shouting out, "Sokka, Xun, and I, we're your family now!"

There was something in the way Aang held himself now as the cyclone of air whipped around him. The words seemed to register at some deeper level as he hovered there in the sky, and slowly, gradually, he lowered to the ground. Xun and the siblings stood together as the winds died down, and as a group they approached the still form standing in the middle of the ruined structure. His eyes and arrows still shone with that brilliant starlight, but Xun could tell that he was listening, that Aang was there. Sokka recognized this, too, because he smiled. "The girls and I aren't going to let anything happen to you, promise," he assured the younger boy. Katara took Aang's hand in her own, and the glow faded away.

Aang toppled into Katara's arms, and she caught him as he fell. "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

"It's okay," Katara told him, "it wasn't your fault."

"But you were right, and if Firebenders found this temple, that means they found the other ones, too."

"They did," Xun confessed, kneeling down. "When my mother brought me to the Western Temple two months ago, the complex was empty. There was no life, no laughter, just us."

Aang closed his eyes. "I really am the last Airbender."

Katara held him close, and Xun scooted up to Aang's other side and wrapped her arms around them both. "You have us," she promised him. "I know it's not the same, but you have us. And as long as you're alive, there is hope. The Airbenders will return, slowly, with time, but their numbers will increase through the generations and your people will be strong again."

... ... ...

They had a burial ceremony for Gyatso, as much as Aang could manage in his grief, and then Xun wandered away as Aang returned to the Sanctuary to ponder events and the future. Sokka tagged along with her, poking his nose into lonely rooms and empty corners, and frowned thoughtfully. "Where are all the bodies?" he asked. "I don't mean to sound callous, but… Gyatso was just left there, and the Firebenders he faced. Where is everyone?"

Xun shook her head. "I don't know. In the Western Air Temple, I didn't see any remains as I walked through with my mother. But it's built into the side of the canyon, and with a temple that close to the Fire Nation I think the attack had even less warning than here."

"You think…the canyon…?"

"And maybe the mountainside," she confirmed gravely. She squeezed her eyes shut against sudden tears. "This is despicable! The Air Nomads had no armies, and I would drop this entire complex in my nation's lap if I could! The schools teach nothing but lies of history, sweet lies that are like honey but are poison to the heart. How can anyone justify this?"

"Those who want an excuse," Sokka answered her. "I'm sorry I ever thought you were like these monsters. It's more than clear that you're not, and I just didn't want to see it at first."

She paused at a window, looking out over a portion of the temple they had not yet explored. Would they find anything in this place? An entire home, brought to ruin… "I don't blame you for thinking it, Sokka," she assured him. "I never did, as much as it hurt. I would have been just as wary, in your place, and I am grateful to you for showing the restraint that you did. It couldn't have been easy, letting someone from the Fire Nation become a part of your tribe, after all the pain my people have brought yours."

"Not just my tribe," Sokka admitted, smiling softly at her. "You told Katara she's like a sister to you, and, well, you're like one to me, too. Katara is my sister, yes, but she's also the mother I don't remember. And you, you've been patient, and kind, and you work hard to help take care of us. You may not share our blood, but you share our heart, and I am proud and honored to be able to call you a member of my tribe, my village, and my family."

Xun threw her arms around him, and he held her close as she fought her tears. It took a while, snuffling into his shirt, but eventually she was able to speak again. "I've never had a brother."

"Well, it's going to be my job to look out for you, okay? Even if you can take care of yourself. And since I'm sixteen and you're not, that makes me the big brother."

She laughed at the haughty look he tried to affect, and wiped her eyes against her arm. "Okay, big brother," she agreed. A glimmer caught her eye from the corner of the hallway where they stood, and she broke away. Her heart was pounding in her ears as she went to investigate, with anticipation a heady drug that fueled her legs' momentum. "What is it?" Sokka asked, intrigued by her sudden distraction. Silently, she knelt down and picked up a woman's necklace, which displayed the Fire Nation and Air Nomad symbols in unity together. Xun brushed her fingers over the smooth, dark red stone, and a breath of awe escaped her lips.

"There was a story," she whispered. "My mother told it to me, one day when my father was not home, when she knew I was old enough to keep secrets. It was of an Airbender, Hanuel, who found a home for his wandering heart in a woman of the Fire Nation. Xiu. She was a noble, and it was after Avatar Roku's death, so times were increasingly dangerous for a relationship between them. But they pursued it in secret, and their love grew. And then… Aang, he disappeared, and the temples sent out search parties. Hanuel was known to be in the Fire Nation, and was sent to the southern regions to search, and was to report here after a month if Aang wasn't found before then. Hanuel knew something horrible was coming, and so could not risk bringing Xiu with him. He said goodbye the day he left to search, promising that he would come for her if he did survive the approaching storm. I think… I believe he made this as he traveled, a betrothal necklace for Xiu, symbolizing the harmony between them."

"So Hanuel was real, then?" Sokka asked. "And he was here?"

"He was here," Xun confirmed gravely, "and he died here."

The noise Sokka made in the back of his throat was strangled, and Xun turned the pendant carefully in her hand to study it closely. The cord was old and frayed, but a small strip of cloth or maybe a leather thong if she found one later, and it could be worn again. One day, she vowed, and held it out to her new brother. "Please, could you keep this safe for me? I don't know what is to come, and I don't want to risk it being taken from me."

"Why would—?" He stopped at the look on her face, and gently took the stone from her hands. "I have a pocket where it will stay safe," he said instead. "Whenever you want it back, just ask."

"Thank you, Sokka." She smiled at him, and gestured back the way they had come. "Let's get back to the others, and maybe find some food."

"Sounds great." He grinned back. "Did you find what you were looking for, then?"

"Yeah." She looked at the stone in his hand, then back at his face, meeting his warm blue eyes. "Yeah, I think I did."

... ... ...

The air was quiet, though the wind passed over them with a gentle greeting, and Xun placed a comforting hand on Aang's back as they watched the Southern Air Temple disappear into the clouds and gathering dusk. "You're not alone, Aang," she reminded him. "We're here for you, and always will be."

"Thanks, Xun," he said to her, his smile bitter. He looked a bit older than he had when she had first seen him, she realized, youth tempered with the pain of loss. It was a pain she wished he never had to experience, but she knew that all they could do was move forward and accept what was. She squeezed gently, and passed a chittering Momo into his arms so he could have the extra comfort of the small bundle of warm fur.

The stars began to appear, one by one as night crept in, and her thoughts turned slowly to the pendant hidden in Sokka's pocket. She smiled hopefully at the black and white lemur chewing on Aang's robes, an idea creeping in from the back of her mind. After all, if there was one… Maybe, just maybe, there were more out there. She wouldn't say anything to Aang yet—she didn't want to get his hopes up, after all—but she'd watch and wait, and hope enough for two of them.


[posted 3-12-15]