The evening sun hung low in the sky and cast scarlet shadows over the earth. It was pretty like that: half-set and red and pink and gold.
Red light touched the surface of the river she walked by, its flow heading south as she went north. All the ground within a meter of the river was damp despite rain not having fallen in a while. Her feet hurt from walking so far; how long had it been? two weeks? If she was right, then it'd been just about. Her shoes were already beginning to look as burdened as they were, dirty and torn in some places. Her socks looked worse.
There were people weeping on the other side of the river, she noticed. A lot of them were adults, but some of them were children her age and some were younger. The adults moaned in pain, despair etched on their faces as their thin bodies writhed around on the ground just across the way. Gung Shu river was not a big river-- in fact, it was rather small and very thin in comparison to others around the world from what she knew; the suffering people could reach their arms about a third of the way across. Their dirty fingers beckoned her over, their hoarse voices begging for anything that she had to give. But Kuvira had nothing. She had nothing to give them.
The children cried. Their wails went up high and churned the water, made the adults' ears bleed. A lot of them dipped their hands into the river to try and drink, or they dragged themselves in-- to bathe maybe, or drown themselves to escape the misery. Kuvira's eyes widened when she saw them and the river, when she witnessed their bodies sink to the riverbed and the water turn with their blood. She realized it wasn't the sun turning the river red.
With the horror of it only growing inside her, her breaths came quicker and her heart beat faster. She covered her ears to escape the horrible sound of the people's suffering. She ran away with her hands firmly over her ears, following the river's path. But the horrible noises never went away.
Instead she ran right into a woman on her side of the river, headfirst. Kuvira backed away from her to see that the woman's clothes were torn and dirty, just like her own, but they were also covered in blood. The woman raised her shirt and showed Kuvira the ugly gash across her abdomen, the broken bones and singed flesh. She cried for help, for aid, for water or food, and cursed an unintelligible name all the while. But Kuvira didn't even have those things for herself. She didn't know the owner of the mangled name. Frightened and plagued by guilt, Kuvira ran away from this woman too. She ignored the woman's pleads to save her children and abandoned the river altogether. She couldn't take it anymore-- she couldn't take it anymore.
Kuvira ran nonstop into the woods.
She was grabbed. She looked up and saw a soldier dressed completely in dark green, a maleficent mask of the same color covering his face. He wore a battle helmet and possessed no obvious weapons, so he must have been a bender. Curious rings of metal hugged his biceps and his calves. His gloved hands were rough and harsh as he handled her, pinning her to the ground despite her violent attempts to be free of his vice-like grip; she never took anything lying down. Kuvira growled, and she thrashed. She bent the earth and she bent the metal and she hurt him with his own weapons.
And yet he never let go.
She was dragged to a camp. There were others there, some dressed like her in tattered cloth and some that were cleaner-- newer. All of them were hunched over and working, regardless. Some of the nicer-looking people seemed faimiliar to her.
But before she could place who they were, Kuvira was thrown to the ground at someone's feet. When she looked up, following black boots to moss green trousers to forest green coat to metal bands to black eyes, she saw the woman in charge of the camp.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew this person as herself.
It was startling, yet Kuvira's attention was captured by her own black eyes-- black holes, pits into the cold depths of her very own soul-- and she was shown the desolation and loneliness and rot festering inside of herself through them. With her every strained and fearful breath, the holes in her own face gaped, widening, dilating and expanding like a slowly encroaching sickness. The ink of her own eyes then dripped down her own face as streaks on paper until Kuvira was consumed, sucked into her own void, and everything was black.
All the air was stolen from her lungs, replaced with frost, and her breathing stopped.
You will get what you want.
IIII IIII IIII
Kuvira jolts up from where she lay on the stone floor, heart racing, mind spinning. Her skin is damp and her lungs can't seem to snatch enough air with each inhale.
Well. . . that hadn't lasted long-- sleeping. If it can even be called that. It's only been-- what? two or three hours? she guesses-- after she'd closed her eyes to try and rest, and not a single one of those flimsy, fleeting seconds did Kuvira get any rest. She steadies her breathing and recalls the images from her dream while carding a hand through her hair-- she's tired, but she decides that the ominous dreams fabricated by recalling her pitiful childhood and unsuccessful campaign are too much and definitely not worth a few more hours of sleep. So she doesn't try to go back.
Kuvira sits up and sighs, her eyes closed against the all-consuming emptiness of her emerald cage. It's only slightly better than seeing the ghostly cavern stretch out before her.
Blindly, she reaches for her stack of papers and pen. It isn't hard to find them; she always keeps them on her right, behind the chains. She savors the weight of the items in her hands before setting them down and poising the pen over the paper.
She can't escape the memories; she might as well write them down.
IIII IIII IIII
Volume I
A Retrospect
Chapter II
My Exposure to the Conditions of the Kingdom
There was a time in my childhood where I was completely alone in the world. Fortunately for me, this period only lasted about a year; unfortunately, I met plenty of other children on the streets whose circumstances were much worse than mine during this time of my life.
When I first ran away from my home in inner Ji Qiang, I had the childish disillusion that I was going to do what I'd envisioned a year before: become a scientist. I didn't know how, and I didn't really know when, but I was sure that somehow, sometime soon I was going to gather intellect and do great things. I quickly discovered the first night I spent on my own that I would have more important things to worry about, like food and shelter, before I could do such a thing.
My first night alone, I don't think I slept at all. After running almost nonstop from my house to the outskirts of the inner city, I was exhausted and found a large tree to lay under as I recovered, but I didn't trust my situation. I was fearful that an adult-- or even another child-- would approach me while I was unaware. It was largely this instinct that kept me alive for the next year.
My hunger had abated by the morning after, but I felt weak from having nothing to eat or drink in days. This knowledge set me on a search that led me to not only food, but transportation. I spotted a farmer's cart stopping at the local market and stowed away on it just before it left. The more ripe fruits and vegetables that the farmer hadn't been able to sell became my breakfast and lunch that day, and while I hid in the corner of the cart out of his immediate sight, I huddled underneath some of the burlap sacks and miscellanious tools he kept in addition to the produce. The trip was long, and I don't think I'd ever been so hot in my life, though the possibility of my immaturity dramaticizing the event is likely.
My luck ran out once the farmer arrived to his land. He came around back to check on his things and found me. I was driven out rather aggressively-- apparently I wasn't the first to have hitched a ride on his wagon and steal his food-- and forbidden to set foot on his land ever again. I didn't mind being banned very much. Now that I knew what this farmer was like, I was actually rather glad that I had learned early on that he was not a reasonable target.
Perhaps most despicable of my year alone was the necessary evil of having targets; after the farmer, I walked and found myself in another resident area, and I reasoned that the law of this new life I lead was to steal or die. I learned which people were easier to steal from, when it was easier to steal from them, just how much I should take to avoid too much suspicion, and I even became involved with other poor children who had been forced to resort to theft. For a brief period, I joined this group on the streets who had scraped together something of a club or society for themselves. I lived with them in the small slums on the outskirts of Ji Qiang in an abandoned shanty home for the first two months or so after my defection from the inner city. Many of the kids were around my age, but a few were older, in their teens. As the law of the jungle mandates that the strongest lead the pack, the teens were in charge of our little group. And it was with these children that I had my first experience with corruption.
Human nature mandates that simply having power is not enough, that power means nothing if you don't use it-- and, in most cases, is useless if not abused. This isn't reality, of course, but it is part of the Human Condition to needlessly raise the stakes of survival as a consequence of societal advancement. Amongst the other kids in the slums, all of whom were younger and weaker than them, the teens reasoned that they could call the shots, that they could better themselves at the expense of those who could do nothing about it, and that they could get away with it by threatening to make matters even worse for those who rebelled. I suffered their tyranny only for as long as I had to. What I hadn't told anyone was that I was a bender, and that if I wanted, I could attack any of them. By Raava's grace, I was pardoned any altercations where I had to seriously defend myself before I took the time to hone my abilities. I eventually fought my way out from under the teens' control once my earthbending ability was adequate. I'm not aware if my actions liberated any other children or not-- at the time, I didn't care-- but that was the first and last time that I would allow myself to depend on anyone else in such a way.
For the next three months, I wandered Ji Qiang with nothing but the same three bundles of clothes-- the first from my home in inner Ji Qiang, the second and third from unsuspecting merchants in the markets while I was with the other children-- and a shallow canteen that was empty more often than not. I bathed when I could, which was just often enough to not be rare. The state of Ji Qiang has a narrow river that cuts through it from north to southeast, and I often followed this river for direction. When I was lucky, I came across a secluded section of the river where I could have my privacy. When I was clever, I swindled enough silver pieces from passerby to afford one night in a hostel, and I bathed there. Washing my clothes was an even greater luxury than bathing at this time of my life.
Along my travels, I learned that the eastern side of Ji Qiang was worse off than the western side, and that there were no ports along the southern coast. Southeastern Ji Qiang was just a few taxes away from being impoverished, actually, and northwestern Ji Qiang flourished. I eventually learned, once I'd left Ji Qiang and matured in Zaofu, that this was due in part to the Fire Nation population in the northwest that maintained solid trade relations with wealthier Fire Nation merchants. I'll elaborate more on this discovery in a later chapter.
At some point, I can't really remember when, I decided that I'd had enough of Ji Qiang, and that my scientific pursuits-- which I had not forgotten for longer than a few moments at a time-- might better come to fruition elsewhere. Being only seven, I had elementary knowledge at best of how things worked, so the simple solution, it seemed to me, was to go to the ports in the north and steal passage on a boat. So I followed the river running through the state, stole a map to give myself a better clue, and steadily made my way to the northern ports on foot. It took weeks and many stops and detours, and I was forced to swindle another pair of shoes along the way because of the damage that the trek wraught on my first pair.
I realize only now just how ignorant I was to the conflict going on around me as I traveled. The civil war still raged eventhough I had parted from my father, and sometimes I came across a camp with recuperating soldiers-- on which side of the war, I don't know, the army men often dressed as commoners and the commoners as army men-- or an abandoned battlefield. The stench of blood and the sight of wounded people would come closer to the river because the river was the unspoken line, the border between the northwest and the southeast, and battles waged across that line. I was spared the heat of battle, but I did encounter men and women and children who were hurt beyond repair by their enemies, and I was begged by adults for rations, and I witnessed ravaged earth upturned by vicious attacks by one side on the other. And despite all of this, all I knew was that this was the fight my father was in and that I needed out of it. My pace hastened from the day I first saw blood in the river and only grew faster with every step I took.
Once I finally arrived at the docks, I simply stowed away again. I wasn't aware that passengers needed passes and that overseas crews were strict about the number of passengers on the boats because of the scarcity of food in the middle of the ocean, but it didn't matter. My situation called for taking the risk-- I had few other options to choose from, most of them were as appealing as taking my chances on the boat, and starving was a common likelihood amongst them all so there wasn't much of a difference to me.
The ship set sail in the evening and arrived to the mainland on a dewy morning two weeks after. Along the trip, I stayed below deck, crouched behind barrels, fighting over scraps with the rats. I didn't bathe, and I hardly swindled enough water from forgotten canteens to survive. But I did. And once I heard the crew shouting about the mainland, about Gaoling and Tu Zin and the port and merch, I knew I had finally arrived to my destination. Sneaking my way off of the ship seemed more difficult than sneaking on it, but I managed, and I fled into town at the first opportunity.
The ports of Gaoling were bustling and alive, and didn't look too bad. The merchants there seemed decently successful and there was an even greater diversity of Kingdom-born people all around me. This prosperity enjoyed on the very fringes of the Kingdom mislead me to believe that I had finally found where I wanted to be.
For as soon as I left the port, I was met with a poverty more severe than I thought possib--
IIII IIII IIII
Kuvira catches herself as she begins to drift off and her chin meets her collar. Her head snaps back up as the final traces of childish hope fade from her heart, replaced with the cold and unforgiving wisdom of an adult, her eyes readjusting to the dark. She fights it all back by forcing a small spurt of chi through her blocked points, making her channels burn, and dwells on that pain instead to clear her head of red water and gray skies (or, at the very least, force her to focus on the problems she has now and not the problems she's already escaped). The searing sensation grounds her here.
Kuvira's hair is falling around her face in inky black tendrils again, obscuring some of her view of the paper and the pen in her hand, but she doesn't brush them aside. She keeps writing.
IIII IIII IIII
--le.
I quickly found myself in pursuit of some food to sate the aching hunger I'd been suffering for the past days. I rushed into the bustling area and then out of it, my sights set on an easier playing ground, if you will. All I found were poor people with poorer resources and the poorest things to offer. The produce that venders sold was rotten, the fish spoiled. People sat hunched over and haggardly on many corners. I remember my hunger folding over and burying itself under my thirst as time went on and I failed to find something worth stealing.
Gaoling proved to be wholly impoverished in the south, so I had no luck. I ate what I had to to survive the next days, then continued to travel further inland out of curiosity and desperation. With no obligations to school or family, I was free to do as I needed to find reasonable resources for my survival. All I found in north Gaoling, however, was a stretch of corruption in poverty's place.
The state was bare economically, but rich with culture it seemed; as I dodged in and out of a few expansive properties that belonged to struggling farmers and healthy nobles, searching for something more appropriate to get me through to tomorrow, I noticed a few peculiar things.
A man came riding through a noble's land with a bull-drawn wagon full of fine produce. Naturally, I followed him. Through a few acres of fine land came the noble's estate-- I recognized it as such because for seven years before that moment, I had been surrounded by such nice things and told to appreciate them. I knew that only people like my parents, prestigious and wealthy, had homes like the one the farmer had led me to. I hid behind some bushes to the side of the entrance a few meters away so that I wouldn't be spotted. I observed a group of four armed men who resembled soldiers come forth from their posts and greet the farmer just before the entrance, a few steps down the path.
There was some information exchanged, though I don't know what, but what caught my attention was the way that the farmer stepped aside and allowed the mean-faced soldiers to take his load of produce from his wagon. They stripped it completely bare, leaving only the bull, and instead of giving the weary farmer payment, they took from him a sack of gold and silver pieces that he offered with a bowed head.
It struck me mere moments after the obviously resigned farmer returned to his wagon and way home, the soldiers to their posts as two took the bounty further into the state, that the transaction that I'd just witnessed was very unfair. Later down the line I would learn that this practice was considered a form of kowtow, and that many lower-class farmers across the nation paid these unfair tributes to their governers (in addition to paying regular taxes to the state collector) for protection against other corrupt motives. This effectively perpetuated the kingdom's corruption on mid-scale and incited the civil wars that had been rising and falling since the time of my grandfather to now.
Left hungry and curious, I decided to follow that weary farmer to his home to ask him for some of his proper yields. But when I found him with a fragile roof over his head, a hungry family, and a bare table to mourn over, I changed my mind.
Instead, moved by some sense of compassion and new rationality, I returned a few days later and knocked on their door. I decided to try and work for my livelihood rather than scrape by stealing. I was allowed in to learn their names, though I regret that I can't recall them now, and was recruited by the family to use my earthbending and natural resilience to help them tend to the fields for the following months. Earthbending was apparently an uncommon skill in lower-class Gaoling, so what I offered was almost invaluable to them. The yields after those months were double the amount of the previous, or so I recall the farmer saying, and it was able to feed us all. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.
The governer, somehow knowledgable of the farmer's reversal of fortune, began to demand even more from him. The farmer was forced to comply, and the family and I found ourselves in trouble once more. As time passed and conditions only worsened with my contributions, the farmer was forced to relieve of my labors. Afterwards, he took me to an orphanage just outside of the Zhao area where the nobles lived. Besides his obvious compassion and humbleness, I'm not sure why he bothered, but I suspect now that he intended to shelter me from the governer's twisted eye (who probably suspected or even knew that I was a bender) while making sure that I was still cared for. I was considerably distant from all the members of that family, but I know that they cared for me-- and I for them-- more than my original family had, and I remember missing them when the time came to part.
At the orphanage, things weren't much different than at the farm. I spent both the months on farmland and the weeks in foster care broadening and gaining healthy weight back. At this point, I was eight years old, I'd spent my birthday alone under the lonely wooden veranda by the dried-up lake, and I'd lived a year of eating about one meal every day. The orphanage somehow managed to provide me and fifteen other children with three meals most days-- mainly just rice and almost spoiled fish, but food nonetheless-- so I had little to complain about.
This is when I began to brainstorm again. Eventhough I grew more stagnant with less laboring to do, I did not grow complacent; I still desired to procure scientific knowledge and use it to revolutionize the world (the fires that fuel the dreamlike aspirations of children are not easily extinguished nor contested, so I had not forgetten or lost my passion). Sadly, the information I wanted I could not obtain. I found myself missing school at this harrowing realization, for after inquiring about it, I learned from the head of the home that there were no funds for a formal school where such information would be provided. In Ji Qiang, there had at least been a formal school in the southwest, where my family had lived, and a sad excuse for a formal school in a small eastern town I walked through on my journey. But in Gaoling, taxes were so high and economic opportunity was so low that no one, not even the esteemed governer, could afford to finance a school.
As a result of having little to do with my spare time, I often practiced my earthbending in small amounts, gaining better control over my element, and got into a bit of trouble. You see, I could not accept that the information I sought was out of my reach, and I reasoned that some vendor somewhere in Gaoling had a text detailing some of my interests. Accustomed to a way of thievery, I set out to swindle it wherever it was. I tried many shops and most times found nothing, but every now and again I would find something of use. I'm sure the head of the orphanage noticed the books I brought back with me but decided not to act on it. In truth, there were no formal authorities in southern Gaoling either, leaving crime rates high and thievery very common, so there was little to be gained or established by robbing me of my resources.
For a while-- a few weeks perhaps, just under a month-- I lived an impoverished life at the orphanage while honing my body and mind any way that I could. But things were slow. I needed to move rapidly again, accustomed to dashing around, so I went looking for something different-- anything, really.
And then I tried to steal from the wrong person.
Suyin Beifong pinned me with a wide-eyed stare-- with increduilty of which nature is unclear-- as she stopped walking past in the middle of mid-day traffic, her eyes glued to the small metal piece hovering just above my hand across the way. I remember a long moment where I stood shocked that she had noticed my seamless plight, and her eyes flicked back and forth between my face and the fist at my side which had quickly snatched her ring from the air to hide my method. When she took a step towards me, that was all the reminder I needed to run-- to disappear. I remember Suyin shouting after me as I darted into the crowd and rushed against traffic. I didn't stop running until I got back to the orphanage. The head of the orphanage took one look at me and I knew she could tell what I had done-- it was far from the first time I'd returned breathless-- and she once again turned a blind eye to my misdeed and went on her way, but I think she knew that that day was different than the others somehow.
It wasn't long before Suyin arrived at the orphanage; she must have gotten a better look at my face than I thought, or was more resourceful than she seemed. She had come looking for me. When I was sat down with her and the head of the house, I was made to return what I had stolen to Suyin. I learned shortly after that I had taken her marriage ring.
Despite my offense, Suyin seemed to take none; in fact, she took an interest. The next day, she returned with her husband and exchanged some words with the head of the orphanage. I was made to speak with Suyin again. She inquired about what I had done the other day and at first I denied it. But Suyin would have none of it, and she tossed a metal bead my way, causing me to react on instinct and catch it with a tense gesture of my hand. I had been stripped bare, my greatest secret revealed, and Suyin was so enchanted by it that she inquired about adopting me as soon as I expressed a general neutrality towards the idea. Before I knew it, I was packing my books into a bag and being taken from the one place in Gaoling besides the farmland that I did not completely abhor.
I don't particularly miss Ji Qiang or Gaoling; not enough bright memories. I'd lost much of my innocence at a very young age there, learning firsthand the cruelty of people and life. I think Suyin could see that. I'm still unsure about why exactly Zaofu's matriarch decided to pick me up back then-- my prowess and my unfortunate circumstance have seemed like enough for the longest time, but now I wonder-- but perhaps that was the simple truth of it: she wanted to rescue me.
IIII IIII IIII
Kuvira gently puts her pen down, the latest chapter of her book complete as exhaustion weighs heavy on her head. The pages containing her now immortal words are treated with more care and reverance than she affords even herself as the bearers of her final message, a finalized culmination of motive for her every step, her every breath, and she sets them behind her chains until they are to be elongated again.
Then Kuvira finally lays down to sleep, closing her eyes against the jaded emerald of everything around her and dreaming of dissenters and prison camps and blood red skies.
:A/N:
The next chapter is when stuff starts to really pick up. Kuvira gets her first visitor and both stories begin to form.
