Author's Note: Criticism very much appreciated. This sort of complicated timeline is something I am still trying to figure out. Please let me know if it is hard to follow/annoying. Thank you for reading!
The Mountains of Pohuai
Chapter One
He had been a child when I first had seen him, soaked beneath a leaking roof, swaddled in thirty pounds of armor, cloth still coveting the burn along his left temple. I, too, had been a child. Fourteen or fifteen. I was sure I was going to die, whether from capture and the pursuing justice, or from hunger or the heat. My prospects were few: locate that lone family member—a distant cousin—who was said to live in Omashu, assimilate into the masses of Ba Sing Se or else find some small, remote village where the Fire Nation had yet to ravage the earth.
For the moment, I was stranded in an Earth Kingdom port. No money. No food. The clothes needed to be forfeited, burned, but not until I could locate robes of a local color. I was lucky no one had spotted my body, washed up and raw from hours wracked by the waves. That I had survived was encouraging.
It was a sweltering day, and as soon as I planted feet on solid land, the rain poured, steaming against the earth. I ran for shelter. Stems of lightning lashed the sky and behind me the waters surged. I sprinted toward an unoccupied market stand and slid my back against the wooden base. A canvas covering wouldn't protect against much. I searched. Prayed that I hadn't survived hours at sea only to be struck down when I finally set foot down on familiar land, my homeland.
That's when I spied the boy, no more than thirteen, half his face covered, and an older man, waiting out the rain in an abandoned shack. I hesitated at first. They wore red armor, golden flames, and I knew it would be foolish to seek shelter with them. I scanned the now shuttered village. Bang on someone's door, I told myself. Anything but run into the arms of the enemy.
A bolt of lightning split a nearby ship.
With no destination in mind, I sprung out from the stand and trudged blindly.
"Here! Here!" a thick voice yelled, dampened to a whimper.
It was the old man, the soldier, beckoning me toward them. I couldn't. I froze in my place, ankles sunk deep.
Half a breath later, the hairs along my arms sprung up. A shudder, silence, and from behind me, a white light paling all before me. For that half-breath, my eyes locked with the boy's one unshielded eye. Fear and understanding reflected back at me, and I wished I had felt more than fear and understanding in my last days, months, years. Rage bubbled. I thought to jump.
Before the strike could take me, the light went out. Sound stretched back into the air. I looked to my side to see the old man, deep stance, arms extended, grappling that fierce energy and sending it back into the sky.
"Run!" the boy said, and I did. I fell into the shack, mud-smacked and shaking. Cold, burning, relieved and angry. Furious that I had been saved by a Fire Nation soldier, that now I was indebted to them, and that meant my freedom, fleeting, would be replaced with servitude.
The old man panted and wheezed as he returned to the shack. I knew I should thank him, but I couldn't. The shack offered little more shelter than the stand had. Its west wall was blown out, so we watched the sea make rough work of the ships, including a royal Fire Nation ship, untethered, swaying, a rowboat of naval men desperate to hit shore. That's how quickly the storm had hit. Minutes before, they had set off in their rowboats, expecting a peaceful arrival. Now, they would be lucky to survive.
As the storm quieted, I avoided the man and boy, and found the boy similarly disinterested in observing me. I expected the terms of my salvation to be laid upon me, for the man to tell me how I owed him . How ungrateful, dirty, pitiful I would be now if I didn't serve them in turn, but the demands never came. As the last winds cleared out, the man turned to me, observed my wretched body, and laid two gold coins on my palm.
We said nothing. They cleared out, met with their men, and I put the gold toward food, an ostrich horse, and new clothes to replace my red silk-lined, flame-embroidered robes.
Ten years later, I tried to think of this moment, this kindness, as I searched. The boy had become the Fire Lord had become a hostage had become a forgotten icon, whose brief reign ended when insurgents stormed the capitol and replaced him with their leader. The world had given up on him, had stopped trying to find him, but I knew that he was alive. I knew that it was my duty to find him.
I tried to remember that thunderous afternoon, because so much unkindness followed. I tried to remember the glint of his ember eye, that vulnerable pout, because if I dwelled on his fury, his brutality, his self-absorption and the numbing curse of his last words to me, I knew I would give up and he would be forever lost to the world.
As I passed into the forests of the spirit Hei Bai, I found the direction I needed. A maroon strip of cloth tied to a low branch and a lotus carved near the roots. It had been our means of finding each other, in those months leading up to Sozin's Comet. The forest, shot through with young oaks, smelled of ozone and the earth retained puddles of water here and there. A storm in the last few days, and yet the cloth was clean, untouched by the rain. Zuko couldn't be far.
