Okay, new book, new album. The inspiration for this book is Up by Peter Gabriel, and for this chapter is "More Than This".
The cold pre-dawn air of the desert bit into her skin as she walked away from the warmth and safety of her home. The familiar softness of the shifting sand between her bare toes was her only source of comfort.
Finally, she stopped behind the rise of a dune. She had no idea how long she had walked, but the house was now little more than a distant shadow on the horizon and the stars were beginning to disappear as the sky was streaked with true color. Digging her toes into the sand, she felt for the presence of other people, or of any animals large enough to be a danger, and met with only the wind-shifting sand and the reassuring scurrying of small creatures just beginning to stir from their burrows.
"Are you here?" she asked out loud, turning to scan the barren landscape that stretched out endlessly in all directions.
The space around her was empty, but as soon as she spoke the air began to shimmer, as if with a desert mirage. Between one blink and the next the Boy was there, all washed-out and see-through, still looking serious and without his cheerful smile or his reassuring words.
"Yes," he said, standing before her, "it's time to start giving you answers." Now that she was ready to listen to him, though, he did not seem eager to talk, and Lien was struck by the unhappiness in his eyes as he turned his colorless gaze upon her. "You must have questions."
"Who are you?" she whispered.
It had never before occurred to her to ask. He had always been there, just as her limbs had always been there: she would no more have asked why she had two legs, or why her arm was attached to her body. Then, too, the memory of him had faded as she had aged and his visits had tapered off, and had she thought about him at all she could easily have convinced herself that the kind Boy who'd always provided comfort in her darkest hours had been the invention of her own lonely, desperate mind. This time, however, there was no pretending: Lien was old enough now to know that this was no mere imaginary friend who stood before her now, and she had learned enough of the world to know that most people did not have see-through spirit friends that no one else could see or hear.
"Lien, I'm you."
"I can't be just imagining you." Lien's hands were beginning to shake. "I saw you in the Spirit World, you—"
"You're right," he agreed, interrupting. "That's not what I meant." He held up his hands in supplication. "My name is Aang, and you're not imagining me. I'm your previous life."
Lien could only stare, uncomprehending. She also knew that most people could not remember their past lives, much less be guided or comforted by them.
"Why are you here?" she asked at last, because it was the only thing she could think to ask, because even though she now knew that the answers were out there waiting for her she still did not know the right question.
"I'm here because you're… different… from most people. You must have noticed before…" He paused, let out a sigh, and then plunged on. "Have you ever wondered why you can bend both water and earth?"
"I… I just can. There's nothing special about it…" The trembling in Lien's hands had now spread to her voice.
"Is that so?" Aang asked gently. "Tell me: how many elements can Katara bend?"
Katara, who'd been the first one to tell her to talk to the sand, but had never even attempted to bend sand herself… "One."
"What about Zuko?"
Zuko, begging her to know whether her bending was back yet, because healing abilities were restricted to waterbenders, and he had only fire… "One."
"And the other benders you've known? Nara? Xi Wang?"
"One…" Her voice was now coming out in a whisper.
"You've mastered two elements, even though there isn't a single other person alive who can bend more than one. Don't you want to know why?"
This time, Lien could not respond at all. The Boy's words had touched something in the back of her mind, something she had never questioned, or perhaps it was something she had carefully not thought about for all these years, for actually hearing someone say it straight out also tickled the ghost of a memory, something that had happened so long ago that it was now nothing more than a fuzzy blur…
"It means you can bend more than one element."
"Lien," the Boy—Aang—repeated now as he stood before her, his eyes locked with hers. "You're the Avatar."
"What does that mean?" The word was not one she knew, had not heard before except maybe once or twice in passing—yet hearing it now was enough to make her palms sweat and her heart pound madly against her ribcage; her voice, when she spoke, was now coming out high-pitched and panicked.
In response, Aang held out his hand. "Let me show you."
There was only one place that Lien had ever been able to touch him. Biting her lip, she nodded, and placed her hand in his.
Immediately his faded, washed-out skin acquired healthy color, his clothes flushing with shades of yellow and orange that made her think of a desert sunrise. Looking around her, Lien saw that they no longer stood among the dunes, but were now sitting up among the clouds, atop the back of the same large flying animal that he had once used to guide her to Katara—Appa, she thought that his name was.
"You've probably figured out already that the Avatar is the master of all four elements." At Aang's gesture, more ghostly images appeared among the clouds: a man with long white hair and beard, a woman with a painted face, and Aang himself, all with glowing eyes, all bending air, water, earth, and fire to their will. "I know that you've already mastered water, and that you've been learning all that you can of earth. You'll be able to bend fire and air, too, by the time your training is complete… but that's only the first part of what you need to know."
"Why?" It was, she knew, the question that Aang was waiting for her to ask, even though he hadn't yet answered it. "Why me and no one else?"
Aang sighed. "I asked the same question when I first found out. And to be honest… nobody knows. That's just the way it's been, since the beginning of history. When the old Avatar dies, the next one is born, to the next element in the cycle. It's not something anybody can control. The only thing we can do is accept it."
He fell silent for a moment, and Lien did not speak either, and he let her take the few minutes she needed to think about that, to process it. "Why didn't Katara and Zuko tell me?" she whispered at last, looking away from the powerful bending and glowing eyes of the past Avatars and down at her hands where they lay in her lap.
"Zuko did try, once," he said softly, and she looked back up at him, staring into his face and finding only compassion. "You reacted so badly that they decided you weren't ready, and that it would be better to wait until you were older."
Reacted badly? Aang wasn't telling her specifics, but it was there in his voice. What had she done?
Lien shook her head. "I don't remember."
Didn't she remember?
Aang tugged the reins.
"Bending multiple elements isn't the only thing you can do," he elaborated as she inched forward to join him atop Appa's head. "All of your past lives are still with you, and in times of direst need, you can call upon the full force of the Avatar spirit, which will make you more powerful than any other bender."
Peering down over the side of Appa's head, Lien saw that though they were in the Spirit World, they had not left the desert: they were in fact venturing deeper into the Si Wong, and when she cast her eyes forward she could make out a collection of tents on the ground below them—and they were heading right for it.
Appa dove. Rather than leveling off for a landing, though, he seemed to be picking up speed, and Lien threw her hands in front of her face with a gasp of fear. The expected crash, however, did not come, and when she lowered her eyes to shakily blink at her surroundings she saw that they had passed through the wall of one of the tents, and had been deposited inside on the ground. Appa had disappeared, leaving her alone with Aang.
The tent was not empty. There were sandbenders standing in the corners and by the door, and on the floor, she could see Katara, Nori, and Xi Wang, all with bound hands. Aang pointed, his gesture indicating the center of the tent. "Look."
Even as she turned her head, a scream rent the air, and shakes went uncontrollably up her spine and limbs as she recognized Zuko's voice. As her gaze followed Aang's pointing finger, she saw a young girl standing on the ground, eyes glowing an inhuman shade of blue-white, and streams of water swirling all around her in a deadly maelstrom. Katara and Xi Wang were shouting, Nori was crying, and a few seconds later Katara, now freed, entered her field of view, voicing frantic reassurances as she struggled to bend the water away long enough for her to get close.
"Is that… me?"
Aang nodded. "The Avatar State is your greatest weapon—and also your greatest weakness. Once you learn to control it, you'll be almost unstoppable, but until then, it can be triggered by intense emotion, with no awareness or restraint—which makes you a danger to both yourself and others."
As Aang finished speaking, her younger self's eyes slipped closed, and the water splashed down to soak the packed-sand floor of the tent. Katara sobbed as she held Lien's unconscious body in her arms.
Between one blink and the next, the scene changed. Unconscious Zuko, battered and covered with blood. Unconscious Lien, lying on the floor next to him. Katara kneeling between them, water coating her hands as she pressed one to Lien's chest and the other to Zuko's.
As Katara worked, she frowned, and then turned to focus entirely on Lien with one last worried glance over at Zuko. As she held the water to Lien's chest her shoulders sagged, and she wiped the back of her wrist across her forehead with an expression of utter exhaustion.
"Calling on the Avatar State like that can take a lot out of you," Aang explained as she watched, frozen, "before you know how to control it. Doing it when you're so young, and starving, and still recovering from injuries can be life-threatening. It gets worse, too." He turned away from the ugly scene, and Lien gladly followed him, not wanting to keep looking at herself or the others when they were in such a horrible state.
They were standing in the open desert now, nothing but empty dunes as far as the eye could see. "I told you that whenever the old Avatar dies, a new one is born in his or her place." Lien nodded. "If you die in the Avatar State, though, that line will be broken, and there will never be another Avatar again."
He stopped, then, and looked at her. Lien swallowed: they had finally come to it. The most important thing that no one had told her.
"Why does that matter?" she asked quietly. There: the crux of it. "What's so important about the Avatar?"
The second she spoke, their surroundings went dark. No more desert, no more previous Avatars, and no more visions of the past: now, there was only her and Aang, standing alone in a sea of black.
"It matters because, as the master of all four elements, it is the Avatar's job to maintain balance in the world. Just as we have four elements, the four nations were meant to be just that: four, with no one nation or people more powerful or important than the others.
"Over a hundred years ago, the Air Nomads, the Water, Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, and the Fire Nation all lived together in harmony—but everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Fire Lord Sozin threw the world out of balance when he wiped out the Air Nomads, began to assimilate the Earth Kingdom, and stole all the benders from the Water Tribes, and the world has continued to slide more and more out of balance since."
"So I… I'm supposed to…" Lien felt sick as the implications sank in, as the truth finally began to come clear to her.
"Avatar Roku was already growing old and feeble by the time that Sozin murdered him," Aang continued solemnly. She got a brief glimpse of a mountain of ash rolling down the side of a volcano, and the tiny human figure that was buried beneath it. "I was only a child when he made his first move against the Air Nomads, and only survived due to luck." A roiling black sky appeared and beneath it a rain-lashed sea; Aang and Appa flew amid the lightning and sheets of water, only to lose control and plunge under the waves. After a few seconds of confused fear, Aang's eyes opened with a glow, he touched his fists together, and the both of them were surrounded by a solid ball of ice.
"I slept inside of that iceberg for a hundred years." Aang's voice now had gone very quiet. "A hundred years without the Avatar, while the Fire Nation kidnapped waterbenders and nibbled away at the Earth Kingdom with one colony after another. Katara was the one who set me free."
Brought to a surface full of glaciers and snow, the ball of ice cracked open, and Aang toppled out. Looking down at him was a girl it took Lien a few seconds to recognize as a much younger Katara, and a boy she didn't recognize at all.
"By that time, though, the world had been a hundred years without an Avatar. The nations were already far out of balance, and it was about to get much, much worse.
"How exactly it happened isn't important. But Fire Lord Ozai had an opportunity, and he made one final push to subjugate the other nations once and for all. We—myself, Katara, Zuko, and some others—made our own push to stop him. I was the one who met Ozai in single combat."
Now, they stood in a landscape of barren rock pillars under a glowing red sky. Fire, more fire than Lien had ever seen in her life, baked the air around them. Looking to the top of one of the rock pillars, she saw another version of Aang, his eyes and tattoos glowing and his clothing ripped to shreds, battling midair with a man: tall, powerful, and much bigger and older than Aang was.
Lien frowned. His face… there was something about his face that seemed vaguely familiar, that tickled something in the back of her mind, but before she could give it any real thought, Aang spoke again.
"I was supposed to be the one who stopped the Fire Nation's aggression and restored balance to the world. In that, I failed."
At first, it looked as if Aang had the upper hand. His opponent was pinned. He drew back to strike with the force of all four elements. Then, though, right on the brink of delivering the finishing blow, he hesitated. He turned away, letting the elements he'd been wielding with such deadly force crash back downward as inert water and stone. He turned his back. The other man, however, was not as helpless as he had first appeared. Even as they watched, he stood, fire blooming in his hand, and delivered a blow straight at Aang's neck. Everything went black again right as it connected.
"I was unable to stop Ozai and restore balance to the world. Unfortunately, that responsibility now falls on you." Even as he faded away, she could see tears glistening in his eyes. "I'm sorry, Lien."
Then, between one blink and the next, she was no longer looking into the Boy's gray eyes but Zuko's gold ones. She had come back to her body and he was kneeling in front of her, gripping her by the shoulders and frantically calling her name.
"Lien! Lien, are you okay? Lien, can you hear me?"
Her mouth opened, but she could not speak. She could only stare back at him in horror and despair.
A/N: Sooooooooooo... how's your pandemic been going?
I was going to wait until I'd completed the second draft to actually start posting, but given the circumstances, I figured that if I can do anything to make someone's day a little bit brighter, even if that's just posting a fanfic, I probably should. As per usual, updates will be every weekend unless there's prior notice, or unless I catch Covid and die.