Author's Note: This chapter is dedicated to Yagow, AKA BoomerAang18, who talked through this chapter with me. Check out his stories!

A week earlier

"Are you nervous?" Aang asked softly. He was sitting on the roof of their townhouse with his girlfriend, the night after they had returned from their trip to the South Pole and stopover in the Swamp.

"About what?" Katara asked innocently.

"You know."

"Oh." She frowned and shrugged. "Not really. Are you?"

"Kind of."

"What are you nervous about?" She wondered.

He had fantasized about it so many times, and it was always perfect, but now that it was actually imminent, he had started to imagine himself spoiling the moment in particularly humiliating ways. He had trouble putting the idea into words, though. "I guess….that I'll come on too strong, or fixate too much on your body and not on you, and make you feel used or disregarded."

"I'm not worried about that." She shook her head. "You're always so connected to me, that when you're caught up like that, it's because I am too. And when you do focus on my body, you make me feel really beautiful."

"I also think maybe I'll be so excited that my, you know, performance will suffer." He muttered, looking down at his hands.

She laughed. "I'm not worried about that at all. It doesn't have to be goal-oriented in that way."

"Oh." He blinked, feeling silly. "I guess you're right."

"I mean, even if you do, um, finish early, that doesn't mean the party has to be over."

"Right," he grinned, blushing to the top of his scalp. "I certainly won't want to stop until I make you, uh, feel really good. Or until you tell me to, of course."

"You've always been so generous with me in every other way, I always figured you would be the same when we were finally ready…."

"Giving to you, making you happy, is the most gratifying thing to me." He assured her fervently.

"I know, sweetie. It's like that for me too."

Encouraged by her words, he asked, "Do you remember our first date? On Ember Island?"

"Yes. I remember how much fun I had." She nudged his shoulder with hers playfully.

"Me too." He returned her smile. "I also remember how I was kind of…..overeager when we kissed, and it was the first time we really used tongue, and I had no idea what I was doing. That was pretty embarrassing."

"It was fine." She shook her head, a bemused smile on her face.

"Yeah, because you were so understanding about it." He reminded her. "But I don't want you to have to be understanding. I wish I already knew what to do, so I could be smooth and suave and skilled. The perfect expert lover you deserve."

She laughed aloud again. "Yeah, but then where would you have gotten that knowledge?" She pointed out.

"Oh." Other girls in his past, he supposed, was her implication, and they were both glad there had been none. Not because it would have been bad or wrong if either of them had known others before they had met, but just because dating anyone else would have been a pointless waste of time.

"You know I'm equally unskilled. Untouched." He noticed she was blushing too, but she determinedly looked him in the face, defying her own shyness. "So it won't matter. I'm glad we'll be discovering each other, and ourselves, for the first time, at the same time."

"I like that too," he took her hand, feeling more confident.

"It's a new chapter of our lives." She laced their fingers together, sharing a smile full of secrets she was finally ready to reveal to him. "A whole world we were always meant to explore together."

Aang limped endlessly around the circumference of the giant silverwood tree. Momo chittered at his side, and they found berries and nuts nearby to eat, preserving his supplies from Hei Bai. As he walked he did the math, justifying to himself that the tunnel would only have saved him about a day of walking. If half the circumference of the tree was three days' walk, the diameter had to be almost two, right?

While he used his broken glider as a crutch, the airbender remembered dancing with Katara: shaping clouds on Appa's back, twirling at a secret party in a cave, waltzing in palaces, spinning in the public square in Republic City, accompanied by street musicians, swaying slowly in his room at night before bed. It was as if the spirit world were telling him she should be there with him. As if he didn't already know that, as if his aching, unhealed leg didn't remind him with every step. Mother Maggot had offered him the choice to bring her with him, after all. And he had promised her long ago never to just disappear this way. The thought of his solemn vow, now shattered, filled him with guilt. But he couldn't square that feeling of the wrongness of his choice and her absence, with the terror and alarm he had felt upon seeing Koh the Face Stealer hovering behind her. It didn't make sense. But then, this was the spirit world. There were two-headed trolls, and talking birds, and everything was a riot of color that both thrilled and irked his eyes. He probably shouldn't expect it to make sense.

They walked for so long without coming to the other side of the tunnel that it occurred to him that he had begun walking on the assumption that the tunnel would go straight through the tree. But neither Hei Bai nor the talkative bird had said that the tunnel went straight through the trunk. He knew better than to expect spirit world geography to work in a logical way. Perhaps the passageway disappeared into the ground, coming out miles away, or maybe it ascended inside the tree, leading to some perch in the heavens. He supposed if that were true he would just end up walking all of the way around this massive tree on a crutch for no reason, only to have to try again to entertain the two-headed troll.

But on his fourth day of walking, just as he had become convinced that this would be his fate, he found a dark, wide open space cut into the trunk, about the same size as the toll's rear, and realized that he had made it to the place where he would have emerged, had he been able to use the tunnel. He breathed a sigh of relief. His journey was back on track.

"Next is the serpentine path," Aang said to himself, or to Momo, turning away from the tree.

A few hundred yards across the grassy plain, he could see a wall, so for lack of a better idea he began hobbling over to it. When he came close to the wall, he could see it was more than twice his height, slick to the touch, and sheer, though rounded at the top and bottom. It had a strange scaly pattern, covered with shapes that looked abstract at first, but which he thought might have meaning if he knew how to read their language. He thought perhaps he was meant to follow the wall the way he had followed the tree trunk, but then he saw an opening in the wall.

Shrugging at Momo, Aang stepped haltingly through the gap, only to find more of the strange walls all around. He kept walking in his limping way, following the twists and turns of the passageway, until he felt himself a little lost, and even a bit claustrophobic, surrounded by the dark, wet walls and their swirling patterns. That was when he tried to turn around and go back, but found he couldn't get out.

Stumbling into his third dead end in as many minutes, Aang couldn't help thinking of Sokka. With his passion for maps and his inventive approach to problems, his adopted brother would have been just the person to help him past this obstacle. But Sokka was back in Republic City, along with his other friends, and Aang was alone, with only his lemur to accompany him. Momo was good company, but he wasn't exactly a genius.

Frustrated with his lack of progress, Aang tried to climb the wall, but it was too tall, smooth, and slimy. His fingers could find nothing to cling to. He attempted to bend a staircase or platform to raise himself above the walls, but he found the ground was not dirt or stone, but the wooden stump of a tree as large as the one he had just walked around. Then he tried to cut through the wall using a water razor, but heard a distant animal scream of pain. Before he could react, the walls contracted around him, pinning him in place.

"Sorry!" He yelled. "Sorry!"

It seemed the maze was alive.

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