Chapter Four

The heat had gone, but the pulsing remained, along with the soothing sound of water running over rocks. It was like a voice, singing to itself some song of triumph that made her feel small and shrunken. She wanted to feel that way, better to go unnoticed by whatever had been calling to her. She wanted to run, broken leg or no, into the snowfield where the cold would drain the life from her and leave her hard as ice under the snow. It would be better than the voice finding her.

Azula woke and was swiftly reminded by her leg that she wasn't running from anything should it find her. She envisioned her leg as some large, sucking parasite that was slowly taking the life from her and replacing it with coldness and pain. She wanted to believe it explained her dreams but knew that wasn't the case. In addition to pain, her thirst and hunger were back in force, and she picked her head up to look for Sokka in the nauseating green light.

He was nowhere to be seen, and she remembered the journal he'd been talking about. She doubted he understood half of what he claimed to have read and figured he'd gone off to look at the body he talked about having discovered.

"Probably to prod at it more," she muttered, rubbing her temples and noting happily that she could easily think about other things than the pulsing heat which had drawn her here.

Her mind was now on the corpse Sokka had likely gone to investigate, and she hoped his savage intellect was able to glean something from the remains, such as what caused them to be there.

It was a long time before Sokka returned, during which Azula fell asleep a few times only to be woken with a start by a feeling of dread and panic. Her leg had punished her each time she woke with such violence that she started to become irritated with herself.

Sokka came into view of the fungus light carrying a makeshift sack, which he set beside her and opened it to reveal a dozen or so dull red mushroom caps.

"I had a few," he said, handing her one. "They don't taste bad."

She took it and learned they tasted like nothing. The top skin was a bit tough but the underside was moist and barely required chewing. She ate two and found that for mushrooms they were rather filling as well.

"You've done well," she said after taking her last swallow.

"I did," he agreed, eating one himself. "There's a lot where I found these so eat up."

She took another but felt like she might have to take her time eating it. "The journal was correct, then," she said, breaking the comfortable silence.

"Yeah...you still want to know about what killed Hoplo." He didn't phrase it like a question.

"Of course."

Sokka took a deep breath and told her about the expedition, how it went mad, and how Hoplo appeared to have shared the same fate as the rest of his comrades. She stopped eating as he talked about the madness and described Hoplo's last entry where he talked about a web of life separate from everything, a city, and something that had been set loose.

"What do you think it means?" she asked, wishing she had someone aside from a savage to bounce her opinions off.

"I thought he was crazy," Sokka said matter-of-factly.

"Thought?" Azula raised an eyebrow at him, silently asking for an explanation.

"Yeah..." Sokka was sitting cross-legged, his hands dangling over his knees. She saw his fingers twiddle as he stared down the dark passage where Hoplo's body lie. "I took a closer look at his body. I couldn't tell you for sure what killed him, but he looked like he was having a rough time. His clothes are torn, and his skin looks like it was scraped and cut. He might have broken bones, but it's hard to tell what rotting did to him and what happened before he died."

"Can you tell if he starved?"

"I don't see how he could. He knew all about what was edible down here and what wasn't."

"Maybe he took a bite of something that wasn't," Azula said.

Confusion crossed over the Water Tribe boy's features. "Why would he do that?"

She shrugged. "Perhaps it was too dark to see what he was eating, or maybe he didn't know as much about poisonous mushrooms as you give him credit for. Maybe he did it on purpose because he had gone stark raving mad, like the others."

Sokka seemed hesitant. "That could happen to you, you know. The madness."

"I'll be fine," she said sharply. "These poor fools likely had no idea what they were dealing with, but my mind is not only as strong as iron, but I also have some context they didn't."

"And what would that context be, exactly?"

She hadn't thought this point out as thoroughly as she would have liked and cursed herself for speaking in the first place.

"I...well...There's something here that causes certain people to have strange thoughts and dreams. I'll just ignore them and be fine."

"Yeeeaah," Sokka said. "What are the dreams of yours like exactly? You said earlier you thought the fire under the mountain was speaking to you, but that's not it, is it? "

She didn't want to tell him the truth, or at least not all of it, but now found the desire to unload her burden to be too great.

"I don't remember them well.," she began slowly. "They started with a pulsing kind of heat, back when we were at the airship. I began to hear a slithering sound as we came closer, like rocks being moved by water, but it changed we got here." Her voice had quieted to a whisper, and she had the strangest sense the cave could hear her.

"Changed how?" asked Sokka.

"It always had a kind of rhythm to it, but now it sounds like someone is talking in some language I don't understand. I can tell it's happy we're here, but that's it. My mind feels freer, too, like the voice isn't talking to me anymore, but I can still hear it." She thought that she sounded like some carnival fortune teller, and the notion made her face burn.

"That's kinda good, isn't it?" Sokka asked, sounding as though he did not think so.

"I doubt it. I may not feel drawn to this place anymore, but there's no need to bait a trap that's been sprung, is there?"

"You think something lured us here? What?"

"I don't know!" Azula said, clenching her fists. "All I know is that it's happy we're here, and hearing it makes my blood congeal."

"Maybe the happiness of others just has that affect on you," Sokka said, smirking and leaning back to eat more mushrooms.

"I'm normally quite cheerful, you know," she said, annoyed and wondering why she was defending herself to a peasant. "I'm injured, starved, frozen, and at the mercy of my enemy, so naturally I'm in a bad mood."

"I think I've been treating you pretty good considering your attitude," he said, popping another mushroom into his mouth. "You'd have probably killed me if it was reversed."

-Probably,- she thought. "I dragged you in here, didn't I?"

"So you could have a lemur-monkey to help you," Sokka said, folding his arms against his chest.

"Whatever," she said, not believing she'd wasted so much energy on such a conversation. "Hoplo. What killed him? That's what we need to know."

"You think it was some kind of spirit or something?" Sokka asked. "If it was, then we're in trouble, because the only way I see out of here is by retracing Hoplo's steps under the mountain to where he came in."

"What? Why? Wasn't our plan for you to scrap together a war balloon from the airship wreckage?"

"That's still the plan," Sokka said. "But while I was picking mushrooms, I did a lot of thinking. I don't think we can launch a balloon from this side of the mountain and not be blown into the side of it."

"Why not?" she asked, wondering if he was lying or simply wrong.

"It's really high for one thing. For another, the wind blows in from the west and does it faster the higher up you go. If we launched a balloon from this side I don't think we could get it up high enough before the wind smashed us into the mountain top. If we can make it to where Hoplo and his friends came in, we might have better luck."

She cocked an eyebrow, still not convinced of this supposed wind hazard. "Why don't we just head out farther west?" she suggested.

"Because the wind would take us back here, and I think there's a down draft up there that would drop our altitude and do the same thing as if we'd launched from the base of the mountain."

"And you base this off of what, exactly?"

"From watching the storm that blew in as we came here. I wasn't so out of it then that I wasn't paying attention."

"So in other words, you're going to drag material for a balloon through those caverns, build it on the other side, then fly us north to either a Water Tribe village or a Fire Nation ship?"

"That's kinda the plan," Sokka said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"That's going to take some time," she said.

"Time enough for you to get your strength up," he told her. "No firebender, no hot air for the balloon. So eat up." He moved the bag of mushrooms closer to her and then stood. "I'm going to go back to the airship and see what I've got to work with."

She felt like the ground had been taken from underneath her, and she covered her dread by coughing. As she hacked and wheezed, she nodded her head, telling him she agreed with his plan.

"I won't be long," he said. "There's probably nothing here that can really hurt you, so just try to ignore whatever pops into your head from outside."

"I'll be fine," she said, her lips curling back as she felt a draft of fear. "You worry about yourself out there in the snow."

To be continued...