Chapter 2: Shangri-La
After a year of hunting, travelling and generally just trying to survive in the wild, she finds a breath-taking sight. A lush, verdant valley filled with tundra, animals and a stunning crystal-clear river. The mountains framing the shot, bring down slow, sweeping gusts of wind, the mist in the air giving an ethereal beauty to the place, often associated with depictions of Shangri-La.
The spiritual air of nature fills this place. It's as though the very valley itself is alive, welcoming the weary wanderer to her resting place. She feels in herself that she might like to stay here, it might very well one day be host to her grave.
Shaking off that morbid thought, she makes her way through the quiet place, she feels a sense of untouched peace worm it's way into her soul; a calmness that's never been felt.
If there are spirits here, they aren't those of man. There are no paths, just clearings between dense then sparse forests that line the river and crawl up the snow-capped mountains.
The refreshing, clean air is a balm to her soul, she knows that when she finds a safe place to settle that she'll be doing nothing but crying. Tending to her wounded soul, allowing herself to finally grieve for her parents and start the first steps of healing.
After a few days of exploration and camping out, she finds her way up towards the source of the river, a small cave with a clear pool of water, reflections shimmering off the walls like an aurora, with a backdrop of calm, running water.
Only when she has safe shelter, water and hunted enough food to last a few days, does she allow herself to breakdown. She spends the next few days not doing much besides crying and sleeping, only getting up for the necessities.
She spends the next few weeks meditating to help process their deaths, allowing herself to come to terms with the loss. More than that, she allowed herself to mourn for the passage of her last life.
Violet died at the young age of 21 in her sleep, not knowing how, with an empty, lonely social life but with lost potential for that to change. This life isn't different in that sense, the parallels compounding the issue. In the end she was always a little too different from the others, too sheltered, to make many friends.
Eventually she starts practicing bending again, it's all she has left of her parents after all, the meaningful connection makes it slightly painful to begin again, but she finds it freeing and beautiful in a sad way, bending away her tears to form water sculptures of her parents to give something to talk to, like others talk before graves, allowing herself to find a sense of closure before sending them away.
She slowly comes back to herself after a month or so of hunting, exercising and meditation; she finds herself reading the scrolls she saved, the last of what's left of her village, besides the clothes, bag and bedroll.
It will clearly take her years before she's ready to try some of the more advanced bending, in the meantime she can be creative with what she has.
To start with she decides to learn how to bend using her entire body, the advanced control will be useful for later techniques and if she should find herself either in combat or, God forbid, captured, being able to bend with her face would make tying her arms annoying rather than totally debilitating.
The main thing she's excited to experiment with, now that responsible people can't stop her, is bending water into its different forms of ice and vapour. Luckily the valley has plenty of both in the form of snow and foggy mist.
She also wants to eventually be able to bend metal, but that will be years in the making. For now, mastering her control of her own body takes precedence before she begins to move the world around her.
Time passes as she slowly grows up, experimenting with bending mainly in ways to make her life easier, focussing on quality of life versatility, rather than combat.
She spends a few months besides her meditation, training and hunting, learning how to do things like: bending earth into structures, giving her easily made buildings and huts; using a mixture of earth and water bending to clean both herself and her clothes; bending her sweat to cool her faster when she's hot or bending water away from her when she's cold; bending water vapour from the air into water.
The last one is especially taxing, in order to make this easier she started off with doing this with mist.
More recently however, Keira has been working on bending water between its three states, as fast as she can. Knowledge of basic physics can only help her in this, her deeper fundamental understanding of the world gives her an edge on other benders when determining how to go about bending in creative ways.
This, in conjunction with being raised by two people who could explain spiritual meanings behind earth and water, allows her to truly excel in her experimentation at a prodigious rate.
She later starts working on shaping water to then bend it into ice, allowing her to quickly form tools and weapons from ice. She eventually is able to form and send arcs of sharp ice careening around her.
Even when it shatters, she can bend the result into needle-thin spikes and form a razor-sharp vortex that cuts even into rock with the ease of a chainsaw, the fast movement doing more to cleave through it that the edge of the blades themselves.
At the start of her second year in the valley, at 7 years old she tries to focus on gaining a better sense of the water in and around her, with better control of her body than she had before she hopes she can be successful.
Using meditation as a basis, she slowly increases her fledgling sensory abilities.
After not making much progress, she reluctantly begins sensory deprivation training by shutting out the light from outside by earthbending the entrance to her home fully closed.
Focusing on the sound of running water, she is slowly able to gain a picture of its route through the earth, finding multiple springs and offshoots that eventually feed back into the river.
Her range begins to peter out at about fifty metres she guesses, it doesn't sound far but that at that range, with a perfect sense of everything along its path is a staggering amount of information. She can only guess that it's the spiritual side of her doing most of the work, she knows she isn't geared for it biologically.
After a month of this, making sure to spend time outdoors too so her eyesight doesn't wane, she begins to do the same with earth instead.
Slowly finding the geological contents of her location doesn't sound like much for now, but eventually she hopes to use small vibrations in the ground to find whatever lies upon its surface, essentially giving her an instinctive map of any area around her, but, for now, finding the heavy iron and copper composition of the mountain will have to do.
Outside of her sporadic sensory training, she focuses on changing the state of matter of earth and water, specifically through heat, temperature and vibrations.
On the earth side of things, she works on being able to shape rocks by breaking and making chemical bonds, shifting and vibrating rocks, spinning and moving earth around her. She focuses primarily on trying to change the structure of the molecules themselves.
It's slow going, as expected really, she has the image of what she has to do to form the right structures; but trying to bend earth in that way is difficult. She makes progress, but it's slow, to start with, she focuses on separating the different elements in the earth, eventually she hopes to make custom compounds and materials.
For now, however she decides to head in a different direction, first she uses her geological sensing to find and bend coal and graphite to the surface, giving her a large source of carbon to work with. She starts by continually applying pressure and shaping the coal with vibrations, it takes a few weeks for her to make progress but eventually a small amount crystalizes into diamond.
She uses her progress with coal and her original experiments with purification to begin shaping the graphite into nanotubes. This is much harder. Conceptually it's at the same level, however purposefully manipulating the structure at that scale is insanely hard, netting in barely any substance. This may take a while, she realises.
On the water side of things, she finds that she is able to create an artificial triple point for water, using her chi to spiritually guide the water with her understanding of its concept.
She also begins to work with what little she remembers from chemistry, forcing the ionic structure to change, in order to shift the molecules of water that make up the structure of the ice without breaking it, making it seem as though it flows like water. This essentially results in more 'magical-looking' techniques like moving ice armour (which Keira totally doesn't spend a while being a dork with, shut up).
Later on, Keira spent some time having fun using water bending to replicate sound waves in water vapour, giving her a way to propagate sounds directly to where she wants to.
This lead to her experimenting with mist control and further control of water vapour in clear air, never being without a weapon was a small price to pay, even if it's only to form ice flechettes, being able to send them flying at high enough speeds to shred through leather is good enough for her.
After further thought she began to make 'threads' of water vapour in the air, allowing her to vastly increase her range by sharply decreasing the 'cost' of effecting water at range, ultimately it's not so much as energy being used but mental fortitude and being able to concentrate on a lot at once, her early lessons with her father that built up her endurance coming to mind, sending a twinge of sadness through her.
She decides to honour him and her mother by coming up with exercises that bring it all together, working up from the foundation she built with him to build up her tolerance for more mental strain over time.
After a few weeks of practice, she is able to follow threads spanning the width of the valley, she hopes to eventually have the range to reach the clouds. Doing the same with the valley's mist proves to be much easier.
She finds herself able to aptly thin and thicken the mist at will, creating shapes and sightlines, forming miniature cyclones and tornadoes is fun too.
She works heavily on the sensory side of things, finding it much easier to meditate with the mist all around her, bending on a level that has previously alluded her – bending with only her breathing.
She slowly makes progress, from being able to contract and expand the mist at will with her breath, to moving it in gusts and forming streams of mist in the air.
Eventually this spurs on her sensory training to the next level, using a combination of earth, mist and water sensing to build a map of the valley without moving, it takes her days of practice before she's able to do it from different locations and then weeks to do it while moving.
Halfway through the year, she makes enough progress on combining her myriad of senses and multitasking with water and mist threads that she feels she is ready for the next step: cloud and weather bending.
Being able to make it rain at will is a gamechanger, it can give her potentially army killing techniques, given enough time she's sure that she'll be able to make ice storms that could shred any oncoming force to pieces. In the end she hopes to get it to the level beyond Gears of War style razor-hail, making facing her in open air a death sentence.
Over time, she wants to reach the level of control to be able to target individuals at will to avoid collateral damage and accidental death, rain can potentially be her non-lethal option in the meantime, of course.
For now, she focuses further on sensing, trying to get a handle on the fundamentals behind it in order to try and sensing chi itself.
To this end, she hypothesises that chi flows between everything, a spiritual energy source that is generated and concentrated around living things, potentially based on souls. To test this, she spends time meditating with her eyes closed and her back against trees.
The first thing she finds, is the water running through the roots, up into the trunk and into the rest of the tree. After a while, she is able to let that fade into the background and look deeper.
It takes time, she's not sure how long she spends at it, but she finds a sort of warmth, running through the tree, surrounding it, ebbing and flowing. It's breath-taking. It's a metaphysical experience on the level of a religious experience. Slowly, she drags her attention from the beauty of the life of the tree to herself. She wonders what she feels like in comparison.
With the shift in focus comes new discoveries. She is Bright. She shines warmly in the world; her chi burns bright against a dull background. It changes with every breath, every heartbeat.
She begins to truly see for the first time.
It runs through her veins, it's bound in strong bones and corded muscle, power, a solid core with flowing blood vessels, surrounding, penetrating and moving through her, her vital organs are steady and protected, safe within her hard skeleton.
She tries to see deeper, finding she is made from the elements, she feels hints of it, but she doesn't just want to feel.
She wants to see, her chi moves to her head in response.
It's something else entirely.
She sees her entire past, who she is laid bare before her. Her strengths and her faults. Her broken bonds and healing trauma. Her hunger for knowledge, her compassion for others, her cold anger, ruthless HATRED for what was taken from her. It snaps her out of it. She realises the direction she's been heading in. Preparing for war.
It sends her to shocked tears, the melancholy revelations of what she's become, the danger of who she could be, it breaks her heart. She takes a few breaths to stabilise herself.
She readies herself and her thoughts, she wants, no needs, a new direction in her life.
Taking a step back, she instead focuses outwards, beyond herself, beyond solid earth surrounded by and augmented with water.
She feels the peaceful valley again. She feels the calm breeze, the foraging, hunting animals, the living, breathing forests, the calm river that rages in parts, the tall, unyielding, stoic mountains, the twin ranges walling in the ethereal place that she now calls HOME.
It brings her back to herself.
She's linked here now, settled, at a stage of peace. But she's also afraid. Afraid the peace will end, and the Fire Nation will bring its endless wars here and she hates it.
She realises, consciously for the first time, that she will protect this place, she is now its guardian. She has found her place in this world; she will bring Hell to protect her slice of Heaven. No matter the strength of her enemies.
War will come.
She feels the inevitability of that hold true. The statement echoing certainty in her soul. She will be ready, for she will live in peace. She makes her decision, her new direction.
She will prepare for the war to reach her, but she won't stop it from letting her have peace. She won't let it scare her anymore. The fear and anger fade, they settle into a calm and ready acceptance.
Her chi settles in response, hardening.
She will not bow, she will not break, she will not bend before the war to come.
She has found peace and she is happy with it; she will not let a fear of the future take that from her.
It reminds her of an old saying from her last life. If you want peace, prepare for war. She internalises and makes it a part of herself.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.