Episode X: Bumi and the Guru
94 years ago (Bumi age 19), early winter.
--
The man smiled. Bumi stared at him, slack-jawed, but he did not seem to notice.
"I was not expecting you," the man admitted. He said it with a serene wisdom that came off to Bumi as very arrogant, as if he expected practically everything that happened to him. Bumi frowned.
"That's odd. I did make reservations." The man chuckled musically.
He was tall and dark-skinned, and of the sort of appearance that made his age impossible to guess. He could have been fifty; he could have been one hundred and fifty. He had a short, fluffy gray beard and, except for a ring of hair stretching from ear to ear, was completely bald. His eyebrows were long and punctuated the great dark depths of his eyes. He looked harmless enough, and Bumi might have dismissed him a fool were it not for the undeniable twinkle of intelligence imbued in the man's gaze. The man's body was thin, almost skeletally so, like a mahogany grasshopper. A modest toga was all he wore, even in the howling cold.
"I am Guru Pathik." His face was calm and passive, as if he was admiring a very great painting that no one else could see.
"Bumi," Bumi grunted. The Guru smiled and nodded. He closed his eyes in concentration.
"You have come a long way, Bumi." It was not a question. Bumi was immediately torn between liking the man for his obvious geniality and hating him for his arrogance.
"Yup," he admitted at length. The Guru said nothing, merely sat, perfectly still with closed eyes. Bumi crossed his arms and looked down at the peculiar man. They remained like this for some time, locked in a contest of wills (on Bumi's part, anyway).
"The friend you seek," Pathik said, interrupting the quiet, "lives still." Bumi was surprised enough that he forgot to be mad at the Guru for correctly guessing another thing about him.
"What? You have seen him?" he asked expectantly.
"I have not," Pathik admitted.
"Where is he?"
"I do not know yet."
"What happened here?"
"I do not know." Bumi growled and struck the wall in anger, leaving a fist sized crater.
"How, then, do you know Aang is alive?" he challenged, gesticulating with both hands. The Guru smiled.
"I had a vision," he said simply. Bumi's head drooped. He leaned against the doorframe and rubbed his eyes in frustration. "A vision," Pathik continued, "of helping a young monk and his sky bison. It came to me years ago. There I was, eating my lunch, when I felt a sudden pull in the endless web of invisible strings that weaves this world together. They always manage to call during lunch!" Pathik chuckled at his own joke. Bumi rolled his eyes.
"And what did this vision tell you to do?" he asked skeptically, already wondering if this Guru was worth his time.
"Nothing. It showed me my connection to the Avatar, showed me I would one day meet him and help him in his task."
"Meet him where?" Bumi asked, "At the Southern Air Temple?" Pathik laughed as if Bumi were merely a precocious child who had asked a charmingly brainless question.
"I do not know where."
"What are you doing here, then?" Pathik looked around, his dark eyes taking in their surroundings.
"It is a lovely place to think about things, isn't it?" he asked, arching an eyebrow. Bumi leaned on the banister and looked out at the forest of tall mountain spires piercing the cloud layer below. His mind, usually racing, felt somehow calmer, more methodical here.
"Yes… yes, I suppose it is," he admitted quietly. They sat in silence for a time. Eventually, Bumi got bored, stood, and brushed his dusty hands on his pants.
"You're sure you don't know what happened to the airbenders?" he asked, supposing it couldn't hurt to make sure.
"I am sure." Bumi sighed. The Guru was useless. He would have to figure it out himself. He made for the door.
"If you are looking for answers, you may find some in the longhouse," the Guru called.
--
Bumi had technically passed the longhouse on his way up, but he did not go there now. He fully explored several of the paths he'd not yet taken first, purposefully avoiding the Guru's help. No doubt the Guru had had some crazy epiphany within the longhouse and believed it was a particularly spiritual area or some other such tripe. No, Bumi demanded hard evidence, clues from which he could logically deduce Aang's fate. Unfortunately, no matter where Bumi went he could not find any of these aforementioned clues. The temple was clean and abandoned, bereft of people both living and dead. He began to get so frustrated that he'd assign wild meanings to the most innocuous things, like an askance book on a kitchen shelf (perhaps a secret, fifth temple was described therein!). He skimmed through half of the cookbooks on the shelf before finally stopping himself with a mental kick to the backside. He cursed his weakness. He was becoming foolish with impatience. He would solve this mystery yet, he just had to remain in control.
Two hours of exploration with nothing to show for it later, however, Bumi finally swallowed his pride and entered the longhouse. He was desperate for something useful and really, who knew? Maybe the Guru's crazy epiphany would rub off on him.
--
Bumi's jaw dropped in surprise, which was at least a little surprising in itself, considering this was exactly what he had been looking for. It was no crazy epiphany. It was a tomb. Red clad corpses lay in piles all about the squat little building. Dozens and dozens of them, skeletal hands still gripping halberds and swords and all manner of wicked implements. Bumi had to duck under the low doorframe and shift one man's remains out of the path. The corpse's arm separated from its shoulder like a damp pretzel. Far from repulsed, Bumi stared at the arm in enrapt curiosity before tossing it into one of the piles.
Time had apparently proceeded slower atop the nomads' mountaintop strongholds, but it had proceeded nonetheless. Fibrous roots slithered their way through the building's dirty canvas roof, meandering across the walls. The bodies were surprisingly intact, no doubt due to the cold air, but they had clearly rested here for some time. Amongst the heaps of slain Fire Nation soldiers, Bumi could see the occasional scrap of orange clothing. Smaller, frailer bodies, not so armor laden. Airbenders. Bumi poked about at the piles, holding his torch aloft as he rifled through them. Thirty-six firebenders, all heavily armed and armored. No doubt elite shock troops. Twelve airbenders, all adult males. No doubt cut down with little trouble by the trained Fire Nation forces.
One former airbender in particular bore a wooden medallion around his neck. He was seated at the back of the room, bathed in the slightest halo of light from where a hole torn by the encroaching plant roots allowed the dim morning sun to pierce. He sat against a pile of snow, his head slumped down into his chest, skeletal eyes peering at the floor. Bumi felt a twinge of pity well up within him, not for himself, for he had never personally known Gyatso beyond that he was a master airbender and much beloved by Aang, but for Aang. The Avatar had lost a friend and mentor, someone desperately important to him. Bumi wondered if Aang would ever recover. Worse yet, if Gyatso had perished here, that meant he was not, in fact, secretly training Aang in the bowels of some hidden mountain cave.
Bumi regarded the body for a while. It was odd. It seemed to him that someone so wise as Gyatso would look peaceful in death. It would have been the romantic thing for him to do, to die looking completely at ease with the world. Gyatso didn't look peaceful. His chin was bowed into his chest as if in submission, his arms were splayed as if in incredible pain. Gyatso looked like he had been speared to the wall. Bumi reached forward and, ever so gently, angled Gyatso's skull back to lean against the wall, letting the former monk stare forward more naturally. He didn't know why it mattered; no doubt Gyatso cared little for his body's position at this point, but it felt comforting to do this honor to someone who no doubt deserved it.
Bumi left the longhouse and resolved not to return.
--
As he chewed the jerky sandwich that was his lunch, Bumi idly wondered if the Guru ever descended from his balcony. From his vantage point now, seated on a small courtyard next to a statue of Gyatso himself, he could just make out the Guru's form, still sitting atop the narrow balcony, a mere speck of a gargoyle on the building towering above him. He certainly looked like a permanent piece of the temple's decoration.
Bumi continued to stare. He did not understand this Guru Pathik. Someone had tended this temple since the Fire Nation attack. Gyatso had certainly not killed all of those firebenders, and even if he had, he certainly had not piled them neatly about the room and then pinned himself to the wall. Someone else had put many of those corpses there. It was probably the Fire Nation, Bumi decided. They seemed like the sort of people that would be perfectly happy to leave their dead behind.
Still, Bumi did not see how the Guru fit into all of this. Furthermore, while twelve airbender corpses was considerably more helpful than zero, it was still many dozens shy of accounting for all of the temple's former residents.
Bumi tried to envision the battle. The Fire Nation must have snuck into the temple at night, as quietly as possible. Using traitorous or, perhaps, prisoner earthbenders, they chiseled the great winding path Bumi had ignored on his way up the mountain. They would have snuck into the temple, filed into every room, then suddenly attacked all at once. The airbenders would not have stood a chance in open combat. Completely unaware, disorganized, and lacking any contingency plan for this sort of thing, many would have been killed in mere moments. Many would have been children, with and without their ritual tattoos. The Air Nomads were singular in all being gifted benders, but also the least interested in the combat implications therein. (In peacetime it was hard to construe earthbending as useful for anything but building, so when there were no buildings to be made, tournaments and wrestling and bendoffs and all manner of destructive entertainment filled the void. Airbenders did not do this.) Some of the adults, at least, would have tried to coordinate an evacuation, while others no doubt would set to blasting their foes off the mountainside. The firebenders would target the sky bison with everything they had, hopefully to rob the nomads of their escape. It must have been a massacre.
Of course, it might not have been. Bison were more alert than humans, and perhaps one had smelled the incoming threat and lowed a warning. Practically the whole temple might have escaped, Aang included, and perhaps only the adults working to get the last few children to safety had perished. This was little better, however, as the escaped airbenders would no doubt find a similar situation at each of their other temples.
It was too early to tell. Bumi wiped his mouth, and continued his search.
--
Bumi clambered his way around the temple for hours, and unfortunately, the more he investigated the less likely it seemed that any of the airbenders had escaped. He found the occasional pile of Fire Nation armor, usually hidden in the snow or elsewhere where it might have been missed by whoever had cleaned up the temple after the attack. The strange, winged helmets glared at him fiercely.
More foreboding still were the bison carcasses. In the shallow valley that stood in front of the temple, what Bumi had originally dismissed as mere snow drifts were actually immense bodies. Their sturdy ribcages were the size of a room and their jet-black horns still pierced the layers of snow from their position atop their great, flat skulls. Bumi idly ran his hands along one of the beasts' enormous shoulder blades, feeling the bumpy, pitted bone slide past his fingers. He wondered if one of them might have been Appa and again felt a pang of pity, but he could not be sure from their skeletons alone.
Bumi carefully scrambled over the valley's rocky edge, hoping to investigate the great hive of holes he had viewed from afar. There were no handholds or paths, befitting a society of people that did not need them, and so Bumi had to sink his fingers deep into the rock just to prevent himself from falling to his death. He inched his way along the side, feeling the wind attempt to dislodge him. The cloud layers below swirled threateningly.
Ever so steadily, Bumi climbed a complete lap over the tall cylinder of rock upon which the valley rested. The holes he had seen turned out not to be rooms, as he had suspected, but only very shallow indentations. Three feet squared, less than a foot deep, with sloping edges, they seemed good for little else but decoration. Bumi grumbled angrily at having expended so much effort for so little information, but stubbornly refused to give up. He began a second lap, in case he had overlooked some feature on his first trip.
The second lap accomplished nothing but further tiring Bumi. Cold, frustrated, and too exhausted to climb all the way out just yet, Bumi eventually reached one of the narrow recesses in the wall and tossed himself inside, glad to receive some respite from the howling wind. He carefully sat on the thin ledge of stone, which was obviously not designed for sitting on (or at least not for people so large as Bumi). He braced his legs against the rock and leaned back to rest. He had combed through nearly the entire temple. If he gave up here, there was nothing left to do but recheck the places he had already seen. Unless there was some hidden passage or something he had otherwise overlooked, he was out of leads and yet he still did not know in full the airbenders' fate. What was his next move? Bumi gently pounded the back of his head against the wall in deep thought. The steady rhythm and brief bursts of pain made him feel a little better.
Suddenly, Bumi stopped. A peculiar image had formed in his mind. He thumped his head once more against the wall, more carefully this time. A pulse of movement echoed through the great spire of stone behind him, bouncing throughout the mountain's intricate geometry before returning to Bumi's waiting ears a fraction of a second later. A realization began to coalesce. Bumi thumped one of his hands, hard, and strained to listen. Over the whistle of the wind and the distant roar of the ocean, Bumi could just make out the sound of a multitude of open spaces cut within the mountain's stone sides. The vibrations traveled a great distance, betraying the presence of thousands and thousands of these narrow caverns. Bumi thumped again and again, each time getting a clearer picture of the mountain's innards. Each of the indentations was hiding a secret opening.
Thusly inspired, Bumi climbed out of his uncomfortable perch, grabbed one of its edges, and pulled. The square indentation came out with surprising ease, like a stone lid. Bumi nearly dropped it, but tightened his grip and held fast. A narrow tunnel extended into the rock, its opening whistling like a flute now that it was exposed to the howling wind. Bumi peered into the darkness at the cloth-wrapped object within. The shape quickly resolved itself to be a body, neatly dressed and entombed in the mountain, thousands of feet above ground. Mortified at his inadvertent disrespect, Bumi hastily replaced the stone lid, which slid in soundlessly.
It was a mausoleum. Bumi struck the wall and listened carefully. He could barely feel the fuzzy outline of a body in each of the pits. Thousands and thousands of airbenders, going generations back, buried above the clouds, dead as they had lived. Bumi felt a mixture of great guilt at being in such a place with amazement at its construction. The stonework was perfectly done, so immaculately cut that the tombs seams were completely invisible. Had he been just a little less stubborn he might have missed it, the most important clue so far. Bumi apologized to the monk he had disturbed and scrambled his way back up to the valley.
--
Bumi stood in the center of the valley, feeling his mood deteriorate. The wind had slowed and a gentle snowfall had begun, casting the world into a peculiar sort of quietude.
So the airbenders really were dead. Many of those entombed below his booted feet were fresh enough to have died in the Fire Nation attacks. Dozens and dozens of them, all slain in one man's insane bid for dominance. Bumi hardly knew what to do. He had nursed this possibility in his mind from the very beginning, but now that it had come to pass it struck him like a ton of bricks. He had been holding onto hope, that narrow possibility that he was wrong about the ways of the world, but again, he had been proven right. Victory had been handed to him, but Bumi didn't feel like celebrating.
So what did he do now? He could hardly leave until he had proven Aang's fate, whatever it may be. He had to know the truth, even if it was bad. Did he start opening the tombs, one by one, until he found the corpse that seemed most like his friend? That didn't strike him as a good time, but he could not at the moment think of an alternative. For the first time in his difficult journey he seriously considered giving up. The temple was dead. With his last thread of hope snuffed out, what was previously a beautiful monument to the Air Nomad culture now appeared only a grisly and disgusting tribute to man's evil. There was no hope to be found here. Bumi hung his head in sadness.
Suddenly, Bumi heard a chirrup, a long trilling note that carried through the air. He lifted his head to look. A white object was flickering in and out of the air, spinning gracefully in long, ornate arcs. A winged lemur. Bumi watched the creature fly with elaborate flourishes, its apparent jovial mood quite unfit for the site of a massacre. It chirruped again and alighted on the curved black horn of one of the snow-covered bison skeletons. It sat and stared at Bumi with wide green eyes.
Bumi laughed halfheartedly. The creature's comical demeanor brought unexpected cheer to his heart. It set to cleaning itself, licking the membranous flaps that hung from its arms with its bright pink tongue. As Bumi watched it, a seed of optimism was planted in his mind and new hope grew. This creature had survived, even without the airbenders around to feed it and care for it. No doubt it missed them and the games they would play with it, but it had escaped the carnage. Bumi guessed it probably spent its time flitting from mountaintop to mountaintop, eating what little fruit the high altitude plants yielded naturally.
The lemurs were not extinct. They had found themselves in the very same position as the airbenders and had survived. Their numbers would dwindle, no doubt, but they were not gone from the world. The same could be true of the airbenders. Nay, the same should be true of the airbenders. Aang was not dead. Even if every airbender had perished, even despite the column of casualties Bumi stood on at this very moment, even despite every piece of evidence to the contrary, something in Bumi's gut assured him this. Aang had escaped. The Guru had even said so.
Bumi mentally kicked himself for that last thought. No, Aang was not dead, but Bumi would not conclude this until he had the proof to back up his hunch. The Guru's 'vision' was not adequate. Bumi had simply missed something in his first run through the temple. Some clue had escaped his notice. He just had to look harder and he would find it.
Bumi turned to look at the great temple with its forest of towers and buildings and wondered where he should begin. Where might he have missed something? The lemur was now occupied in licking its shoulder. It stretched its arm out and worked diligently, moistening every square inch. In the process it looked like it was pointing to a series of squat buildings, nestled in the shadow of the temple's towers.
Bumi sighed. Those buildings were as good as any.
"Alright then, lemur," he said, earning an inquisitive chirp. His boots crunched in the snow as he resumed his mission.
--
As Bumi shut the door of the last of the rooms for the second time that day, he laughed a little at his own expense. He had let the lemur's timely arrival turn him soft and mushy. The little creature had just been cleaning itself; how would a lemur know where Bumi should investigate? Spending so long in the air temple was having a weird effect on him. Bumi vowed to get what he needed and leave before he felt the urge to shave his head or something.
The cluster of squat, domed buildings had yielded nothing. They had once been the young airbenders' rooms, Bumi had decided. Each dome was perhaps eight feet across and rather minimalist in its furnishings, with a bed carved into a wall and a simple desk as the only furniture. All of the monk's possessions could be comfortably kept on a narrow shelf, a mere few inches deep, that spanned one side of the bed. Bumi recalled how unfairly modest he had found his assigned accommodations when he was a scribe in Omashu, but at least he had things to put in his room.
Bumi pondered the monks with an aloof sort of wonderment. That they could be so uninterested in material wealth and comfort was hard to place to a boy raised in the Earth Kingdom. Bumi himself had never been interested in money for money's sake, nor had he demanded particularly opulent living conditions, but the idea of not possessing money at all was strange and foreign to him. Ultimately he decided that to each went his own, but he wasn't planning to give up his wealth any time soon. Money could buy power and freedom to do what you want, which, along with being a mad genius, pretty much formed the backbone of Bumi's identity. Bumi the power-and-freedom-to-do-what-he-wants-guy.
Bumi recalled how, though the young scribes had lived sparsely and with little cheer, Antius and the other adults had actually been rather well off. Antius had possessed a collection of rare books that was probably worth a fortune, while Bumi hadn't even been allowed to keep the desert iguanamundi he had caught in his room. Bumi wondered if the same was true of the airbenders. Though the young boys might not have had any worldly goods in their rooms, perhaps the mentors were secretly hoarding wealth in theirs. Bumi decided he would investigate.
The adults' rooms, as he soon discovered, were set into the cliff walls above the boys' rooms. They were hard to see from any sort of distance, being of an invisibly perfect sort of construction rather like the mausoleum, and Bumi had originally dismissed them as mere storage caverns. There would be a sick sort of irony if the one place he elected to check last had the clue he needed, but frankly, Bumi didn't see much danger of this. He simply wanted to see if the elder monks were as holy as they forced their students to be.
--
Bumi was torn between being very cross at the sick irony of finding the most important clue in the place he had elected to check last and very pleased at finding the clue at all. It turned out that the elder monks were as holy as they forced their students to be, at least judging by the contents of their rooms. The rooms were slightly larger, it was true, but no more than was fitting their slightly larger occupants. Bumi still had to duck his head to fit inside. They were also similarly sparse, the most opulent object in the entire complex being an umbrella. Bumi had been somewhat disappointed to have not found any corruption on their part, but his disappointment largely evaporated when he found the letters.
In one of the rooms, in a carved wooden box that looked as old as the temple itself, Bumi found a small stack of papers. It became instantly clear that they were the property of the late Gyatso himself. There were a few by Pathik, but one in particular stood out.
It was from Aang. It was hastily written and melodramatic, the sort of thing every little boy dreams of writing whenever tensions at home run high. Aang was terrified. He had witnessed a meeting. He accused the world of not caring about how he felt.
"It's too much," he wrote, " I can't do this I'm just one kid! I can't be the Avatar anymore. I'm sorry. You will have to find someone else because I won't do it anymore. I am taking Appa and running away. Do not worry about me, I will be all right.
--Aang
Bumi sat on the bed and stared at the wall. This was the answer, then. The letter wasn't dated, but it had been at the top of the pile, only beneath a work-in-progress letter that Gyatso was writing to the head monk in the eastern air temple, warning him of the situation. Aang had run away at the last moment and thus was not present when the Fire Nation attacked. Aang had survived. Here was the solid proof Bumi needed. His friend was still alive.
It was with a heavy heart that Bumi, letter in hand, climbed back down the cliff face.
--
That evening, as the sun slowly dipped below the endless sea of clouds, bathing the temple in red and orange, Bumi rejoined the Guru on his balcony. He had spent the last hour or so reading and rereading Aang's letter, strangely reluctant to accept his victory. Hard to believe though it was, though, his task here was complete. Unfortunately, he still had almost three days to kill before Tarka would return to give him a ride, so he figured he'd try to enjoy Pathik's eccentric company.
The Guru made no outward sign as Bumi appeared in the doorway. As before, his eyes were closed and his body folded in a meditative pose. Bumi watched him quietly for a few minutes before clearing his throat. The Guru's eyes opened.
"Oh. Hello again. Did you find what you were looking for?" Bumi nodded. He felt strangely compelled to sit and did so, imitating the Guru's pose with some difficulty.
"I don't know that I knew what I was looking for, but I found it," he offered, staring out at the spectacular cloud formations. Pathik nodded knowingly.
"Ahh… All too often in life this is the case. Understanding oneself is as difficult as any other challenge, and no one can really know the future. You cannot trust yourself to tell yourself the truth, and you cannot trust the world to behave like it is supposed to." The Guru laughed. Bumi, too, could not suppress his grin. His opinion of the Guru soared to hear him, an expert on the spiritual world which Bumi eschewed, admit the future's unpredictability.
"So if you cannot tell the future, what is it that you do, as a Guru?" he asked good-naturedly. Pathik laughed again.
"Sometimes I wonder that myself!" he admitted. "I am kidding, I am kidding. I am a spiritual expert, a translator of the world's spiritual energies." Bumi arched a confused eyebrow. "Let me explain…" the Guru continued, "There are many incarnations of the spirit world, and they mean different things to different people. You, for instance, choose not to assign any greater meaning to the world's happenings, which in itself is a valid form of spirituality." Bumi blinked in surprise, not only at the Guru's perception but at the idea that by being anti-spiritual, he was being spiritual.
"Many people seek to know the truth," Pathik continued, ignoring Bumi's confusion, "but that is a thing that no one can say, so each person invents his own. Speculation is an important part of spirituality, Bumi, as only with careful thought personal investment can you forge a special relationship with the spiritual world. A merchant will view the spirit world differently than will a soldier, whose spirit world will in turn differ from a sailor's. It is all a matter of perspective." Bumi nodded, seeing now where the Guru's train of thought was going.
"So what is your perspective?" he prompted.
"Very good question," the Guru said, holding up a long finger. "As a Guru, my perspective is to not have a perspective. Gurus must shed all unnecessary connections to the physical world. I can see the spirit world as it is, without a lifetime of perspective-altering events to warp its appearance. I see only the most basic and pure energies of the spirit world. By seeing spiritual phenomena that have never been touched by human minds, I can advise people of all cultures and beliefs. It is the unifying principles of the human spirit that I see." Bumi grinned as he took this in.
"So you know the 'rules' of the spirit world, regardless of how you choose to imagine it?" The idea of limiting the supernatural in some way, transforming it into a causal thing that was simply difficult to understand, was a very attractive possibility to Bumi.
"'Rules' may be a strong word, but essentially, yes."
"What are they?" Pathik shook his head slightly.
"You do not understand me, Bumi. I can teach you these things, but you cannot help but to see them through your own eyes. It takes a lifetime of work to shed your connection to the physical world." Bumi frowned, disappointed.
"Alright. So once you tell me the rules, they aren't true anymore?"
"That depends on how you interpret them," the Guru said with an infectious smile.
"Alright. Tell me." The Guru nodded solemnly.
"Very well. There is no more central truth than this. The physical world and its differences are illusionary. The differences between you and I, between this temple and the bottom of the ocean, between life and death, are not what you think they are. All of existence is a tangled web of threads. Fate and uncertainty, matter and energy, being and thought, all are represented. You are connected to every other thread in the universe, whether you realize it or not. It is in reading the connections that a Guru seeks to understand the spiritual and physical worlds." The Guru fell silent and smiled broadly.
"…that's it?" Bumi asked incredulously.
"That's it," the Guru confirmed.
"Wow. That is vague." Bumi rubbed his head. "So let me get this straight; everybody and everything are made of strings, which you can only see if you don't shave or bathe." The Guru nodded pleasantly. "And these strings let you see the connections between different things?" The Guru nodded again.
"I saw that my own thread will eventually meet the Avatar's thread, and that the meeting will create a great pull in existence. It will rearrange many threads in its wake. What will happen when our threads meet, I do not know. When they will meet, I do not know. It is even possible that I will never see the Avatar personally, but I know with certainty that one of my actions will influence the Avatar, and thus the entire world, very greatly." Bumi stared out at the clouds.
"You were the one who cleaned up the temple and entombed all of the airbenders, weren't you?" he challenged after several minutes of silence. The Guru sighed sadly.
"Yes."
"You did not move Gyatso. Why not?"
"I had a vision," Pathik admitted simply. Bumi rolled his eyes.
"Alright, alright. I get it." The Guru smiled.
"And what of you, Oh Loyal Friend? What do you plan to do now?" Bumi withdrew the letter from his pocket and handed it to Pathik, who read through it briefly. The Guru nodded serenely and handed it back, as if it had confirmed his suspicions.
"Aang is still alive, and now I've got proof. He ran away somewhere. I've got to go look for him, I guess, but I don't have a clue where he might have gone." The Guru nodded knowingly and the two lapsed back into silence.
"You know," the Guru commented after a moment, "I have known the Avatar still lives for some time. When you arrived, however, I was sure of it. Your connection with him is… peculiar."
"What is it like?" Bumi asked in genuine interest.
"Your threads were together before. They have drawn apart over the years and grow very faint, very far apart, as time goes on. Yours, especially. It may be that the two will never meet again. When I see one, though, I cannot help but see the other. The two threads are not together, but they are nonetheless significant to one another."
"So they never come back together?" The Guru closed his eyes.
"I do not know. They affect one another but the connections are hard to see. Your threads are bound, however, attached by the loyalty you feel for one another. As long as that loyalty remains, the attachment will never fade. Aang's spirit will never truly leave you." The Guru extended two fingers and pressed them against Bumi's forehead. An image instantly formed within Bumi's mind. A flash of white yielded a view of the great temple on which they now stood. A peculiar sort of glowing strand traveled from the temple southward, broadening and fading as it extended out to the horizon. Pathik removed his fingers and the image evaporated just as quickly.
"Your connection is weak but it is there. Aang is to the south." Bumi was dumfounded. Never had he felt such an uplifting feeling. His mouth hung agape.
"Wow," he finally managed. "Thanks."
"You are most welcome."
--
Bumi spent the next two days at the temple. During the day he occupied his time by cleaning and other such chores. It turned out the airbenders did have larger cells cut into their mausoleum for dead bison, but the Guru had not had the means to move the heavy carcasses alone. Over a period of a few hours, Bumi carried the gigantic bones one by one into the appropriate cells and, after an Air Nomad prayer by Pathik, sealed the tombs. Following the Guru's lead, he did not disturb Gyatso's resting place in the longhouse. At night he would speak with the Guru about all sorts of topics (it turned out that, sans physical connections or not, the Guru was well-versed in a great variety of mayhem, and could teach Bumi just as many pranks as Bumi could teach him) or, when the Guru was busy meditating, plan the next leg of his journey.
Early in the morning on the fifth day since he'd landed at the mountain's shore, Bumi bade the Guru goodbye and began the slow climb down.
"Good luck on your journey!" the Guru called from above. "And remember that there are always many means to an end. The connections are not always what you think!" Bumi promised he would remember, though he failed to see what that had to do with his search for Aang.
He reached the bottom in good time and only had to wait about two hours before Tarka's sailboat materialized on the horizon. The tribesman and his son leapt out to help Bumi with his gear and, in mere moments, they were off again.
--
"So… Back to Gojirun it is," Tarka said to break the quiet once they were safely away from the Patola mountain range. The ocean was calm today, and Bumi looked up casually from the map he had been buried in.
"Actually, take me South. To one of the your cities." Tarka looked surprised. Nukti, too, picked his head up from where he had been leaning over the edge, trailing his hand in the water. Bumi merely smiled casually at them.
"Which city?" Tarka eventually asked.
"Doesn't matter."
"Well… You'd be welcome at our home any time, of course, but… uh…" Bumi waved a dismissive hand, interrupting the tribesman.
"I'll pull my weight," he insisted. "But I've got to get South. The Avatar is somewhere near the South Pole, and I've got to find him." Tarka's jaw dropped.
"The Avatar?" he practically whispered, as if the Fire Nation would appear and torch them for the mere mention of that word. "You know where he is?" Bumi looked at Tarka and Nukti's expectant faces and grinned widely.
"Yes," he said after a suspenseful pause. "Yes, I think I do."
--
A/N: Well, this was going to be a short little chapter, but once again my words got away from me. I'm always worried I don't have enough to say and then I end up saying more than enough.
I hope you like my portrayal of the Guru. He is one of my favorite minor characters in the Avatar universe, and I think he is much under appreciated.
So anyway, this is kindof still part of the transition period between Bumi's childhood story arc and Bumi's adulthood story arc. Very soon (I would say the end of the next chapter but I'm wary about making that kind of promise) the next major conflict will erupt.
Next chapter: Bumi's hunt for the Avatar continues at the bottom of the world
PS: Argh! I've been trying to upload this freakin' thing for days!