Jet was smiling.
For the first time, since those short hours ago when the blade had fallen, when his family had been murdered viciously, wrenched from him – he was smiling.
The woman had stopped screaming, but she was still sobbing uncontrollably. Jet studied her idly, twirling the bloody knife, kneeling beside the dead carcass of the gallant mare. The red sash tied around the horse's neck was soaked so dark it hardly passed as red anymore; the wound at its throat was still pulsing vigorously, and Jet waited as it slowed. He was waiting, waiting for life to cease from the cursed horse, that horse that had borne monsters and killers and devils. And when its pulse faded, when the agony had at last consumed her, he would kill the woman too.
From somewhere in the back of Jet's mind his sanity still lingered, but it was encased with such a thick fury that his conscious was all but lost. He hated himself for that small bit of sanity, and he comforted his tortured soul in knowing that he could disregard it. His pain could be reflected in others - he could make them more miserable than himself - he could avenge his family.
He had discovered several things in the last hour: that the ankle was an excellent place to strike to inhibit a man, especially a strong one; that a horse's neck, while the most likely place to kill, is terribly thicker than a man's and requires much greater precision and strength; and that babies cry when they see knives. But most importantly, he learned he could kill.
And he learned that he was terribly good at it.
The woman looked up at him imploringly, the bloody bundle wrapped lovingly in her embrace. Jet ignored her. He was listening.
Thump. Thump.
It's fading.
"Why…dear Roku, why…my…my l-little boy…" her voice broke and she began to sob again.
Thump…thump…….thump….
Almost.
"How…monster, how ever…my baby boy…no…."
Thump….
An eerie silence enclosed the dead horse and amplified the woman's ramblings. The dark hair fell over Jet's eyes as his smile widened. It would all be complete soon. It would all be over. The agony, the despair, the pain. For both of them.
The woman continued to whimper, her despair not yet turned to wrath, but getting there. Jet knew the tides of her feelings and felt the oncoming rage stir within her. She would want to kill him, like he wanted to kill her, like the man wanted to kill him, like the Fire Nation wanted to kill his family.
He felt the fire rear into her gaze, felt her voice begin to tremble with a note that wasn't grief. The knife ceased twirling and Jet tensed. His muscles fitted together in a not so unified way, being as he was still relatively knew to this. The woman, furious, let out a scream of rage and lifted her head in the beginning of a leap.
She never made it into the air. Her hair washed over her face as she plummeted to the earth, as Jet pulled the dagger from her stomach.
She lay there, convulsing terribly, clutching the mortal wound in a desperation to cling to life. Jet watched her half in amusement, waiting for her to give in to death. She started twitching and the pool of blood was forming from the incision. It collected in a gruesome puddle that grew to her ankles and she vomited twice. Her breathing turned raspy and still Jet looked on, curbing the swelling in his throat, never blinking, engraving the moment in his mind.
It would teach him mortality. It would teach him discipline. It would teach him apathy.
There was a low, rattling cough, and she lay still. Still as the slashed mare, still as the decapitated soldier, still as the stabbed infant.
And in a moment, Jet was gone, his feet flying across the earth with an unnatural speed that reflected the precision of the moment, the still dripping blood of the dead woman.His mind, once so full of innocence, turned to cunning as he hummed to the tune ofthe pulse in his neck. His smile was entrancing.
I will destroy them all.
And now he knew how to do it.
The forest between the valley and the sea was enormous, hundreds of miles from one end to the other, built from the thickest, tallest red-golden trees on that side of the earth. Secrets were buried there that even the long-dwelling Earth Kingdom race had never heard of, myths and fairytales that lingered still beneath the animosity of the overbearing tree limbs, hanging like ancientarchways over paths that had long been washed away. These secrets grew dark and twisted as Jet passed by them,tortured with the boy's own cursed fate. And beneath the trees, as Jet began his long years of work, the forest itself grew dark from the inside out. The forest became the guardian.
And Jet became its secret.
