The Conduit could sense them out there in the desert, and she could sense it too. The Garden. She knew exactly where it lay amid the ever-shifting sands, and she knew that the firebender and the water tribe girl were closing in on it. They would arrive by daybreak.
The Conduit pressed forward through the darkness, shielded by the shadows she could conjure at will. She flew high overhead on the back of her spirit guide, Hiei, passing over the dunes at a quick pace. She didn't want to be seen by the travelers, but she wanted to stay close in case they encountered any...problems. She knew it couldn't be that simple. The Kage Noshi wouldn't give up that easily.
The Conduit sensed that their troubles were only beginning.
She had resisted fate, had taken her destiny into her own hands, and yet the prophecy was still on the verge of playing out despite her best efforts to prevent that from happening.
After the firebender with the dual-swords had left her beneath the willow tree, the Conduit had hoped she could return to her life as it was before the interlopers had arrived. But she had no such luck, and found herself being ambushed shortly after the firebender had departed.
She had recognized her assailants right away: the Kage Noshi, an elite guild of highly-trained assassins. They were nearly as legendary as she was. And their history was intricately interwoven with hers.
A dozen of them attacked her, their faceless black masks boring down on her from each angle, but they were no match for her. It had been too long since her blade had tasted blood, and as the heat of battle rose within her, the Conduit had launched herself at the masked assassins with a fury she hadn't felt in...years. She had released Hiei from his worldly form and felt the rush as he transformed into his most powerful self: a writhing two-headed dragon as black as the night.
The Kage Noshi had recoiled in fear for just a moment, and rightfully so. She could sense it; they had not anticipated her dragon, or her power. With a murderous grin, she had thrown herself into the thick of the assassins. Her katana had bit into flesh, had severed limbs from torsos and pierced organs until the ground had run red.
In the end, The Conduit had thrown her head back and howled at the moon, consumed by bloodlust. There was something comforting and familiar in bloodshed.
She had spared only one of them. The Conduit needed him to deliver a message.
Hiei had him pinned beneath one mighty clawed foot. The man had been wounded and trembled with terror. The Conduit had torn his mask away and leaned in close, her voice a powerful whisper. All around her the breeze had picked up and she allowed her powers to leak into it. She was satisfied by the erratic pounding of his heart in response to her.
If you wish to live, you will deliver my message. Do you wish to live?
His head had bobbed, mouth gaping in panic. Y-yes. Whatever you want, I'll do it!
Who is your leader?
He had willingly given the name. Kurai.
And who offered him the contract for my head?
He had hesitated. She'll kill me if I talk.
I'll kill you right now if you don't. And I assure you that it will be a fate far worse than whatever she will do to you.
He had weighed his options for only a brief moment. P-Princess Azula of the Fire Nation. She wanted us to capture you and kill her brother and the water tribe princess.
Ah, so the man who had sought her ought wasn't just any old firebender. He was the Fire Lord himself. Is that so? And why would she want to capture little old me?
At that he had shrugged helplessly. I-I-I don't know. Those were the orders. That's all we were told.
And how had you expected to take me captive? You do realize who I am, don't you?
She had watched his throat bob as he struggled for air. The fear coming off of his skin was palpable, and she drank it in. Y-y-yes...Princess Azula told us to capture you...Kurai thought we could take you. We had a way to contain you...
That had caught the Conduit's attention. How?
I don't know. Kurai kept that to himself...but they did tell us if we captured the cat, you'd surrender. That you'd have no choice.
At that, she'd had to resist the urge to kill the assassin on the spot. Princess Azula, whoever she was, had done her research. That had made rage surge through her.
The Conduit had glowered at her captive. Then she is a fool. I cannot be captured. I cannot be controlled. She had leaned in close to the assassin and let the power surge through her veins. When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of her past lives. Deliver this message to Kurai and Princess Azula: if they try to capture me, I will end them. If they try to harm the firebender or the water tribe princess, I will hunt them down and flay the skin from their bones until they are begging for the sweet release of death. Do I make myself clear?
Terror had filled his eyes. He could only nod.
The Conduit had pulled back then and called Hiei off. The dragon had transformed back into his cat form and had leapt onto her shoulder as the man scrambled away backwards on his hands, unwilling or unable to take his eyes off of her.
Once he had gone, the Conduit had set about eliminating the corpses. It was gruesome and exhausting work, but she and Hiei had piled them on top of one another and burned them with black fire until they had been reduced to nothing more than ash. Not even their weapons remained.
The Conduit had relished the feeling of using her powers; she hadn't used them much in her self-induced exile. It was like a good stretch after sitting still for far too long.
With that grisly task taken care of, the Conduit had left. It was no longer safe for her in Jinsan. She knew that the Kage Noshi would come for her again, or worse, they would come for the young couple who had found her in the first place. The Conduit knew it all led back to that spirits-cursed prophecy.
Damn the White Lotus and their Oracles of Destiny, she had thought as she fled into the night on foot.
The Conduit only hoped she hadn't made a mistake by sending the fire and the water bender off to the Garden of the Desert. The Conduit knew how the Pond of Enlightenment worked; she hoped that she hadn't overestimated the scarred young man. She didn't believe she had, though. She sensed a familiarity in him, an almost kinship with herself.
He too had taken his destiny into his own hands and came out on top.
The closer the pair got to the Garden, the more she was certain she had made the right choice. She could feel the Garden calling out to him the same way it called out to her. She was a being of spirits; he was enlightened.
The Conduit had kept her distance from them. She didn't want them to know she was nearby. She needed them to reach the Garden and learn its secrets without any more interference on her end. Whatever was going to happen needed to happen without her meddling in it. She had knowledge they didn't; she didn't want to jeopardize the fate that the prophecy had in store for them.
Truthfully, the only reason she had followed them was to ensure that the Kage Noshi didn't attack them. The Conduit could sense that the two of them were powerful benders, but she didn't know if they could hold their own against the elite Kage Noshi. It wasn't a chance she was willing to take. There was too much at stake.
She wondered about this so-called Princess Azula, who had contracted the Kage Noshi. She couldn't say for certain whether the princess knew the one true way to contain her and her powers, but the Conduit had long since given up on leaving things up to fate. She needed to be careful.
The Conduit suspected that Azula had somehow gained access to the library of Wan Shi Tong—that was the only place left in the world that contained any real knowledge of her. It was a place that was practically impenetrable and nearly forgotten, or so she had thought.
The Conduit had made sure to erase the history of Conduits from all of the earthly records that she could find, although she had clearly missed something: the firebender and waterbender had come bearing Tatsuya's necklace. And there was that nasty little bit of business with Azula knowing more than she should have.
She was beginning to think she had made a grave mistake.
Seeing the necklace and being reminded of her unpleasant past had dredged up memories and feelings the Conduit had buried deep within herself, feelings and memories she wasn't quite ready to face. And seeing it against the throat of a water tribe girl had only added insult to injury. But the past was the past, and for all of her power, she couldn't change it. It was ancient history, anyway.
The owner of that necklace had brought nothing but pain to her predecessor and had driven him to an early grave. Certainly, those events had led her to who the Conduit had become, but it hadn't stopped her from searching out the conniving witch and avenging Tatsuya for her betrayal.
It wasn't until after her quest for revenge had been fulfilled that the Conduit decided she was in control of her own fate. That was when she made the decision to go against everything she was, everything her ancestors had been. She didn't want to risk the same fate that Tatsuya had succumbed to, and so she had closed herself off from the world.
For nearly twenty years, she had lived in seclusion in the frozen tundra of the South Pole, hidden away from the clusters of tribes.
As time passed, she realized that she hadn't changed: her face had only aged fractionally from how it had been when she had taken the life of Tatsuya's lover at her body's age of twelve, despite the decades that had passed since then. She had expected herself to look...old. Not like a child.
Somehow, the Conduit had stopped aging.
Soon after that, she realized that there was something wrong with the balance, both within the world and within herself. The world had felt...wrong. She had felt wrong. She had felt empty, incomplete...unbalanced. As did the world. She had tried to ignore it—she did ignore it, for another ten years. She had turned her back on the world, and she tried to convince herself that she didn't care what happened to it. But her resolve finally crumbled.
The Conduit left her self-imposed exile and ventured out into the world again. As she did, she realized that many things were different.
She eventually traveled into the Earth Kingdom and learned what had changed in the world: the Fire Nation had attacked. They had eradicated the Air Nomads and were laying siege to the other nations. But what of the Avatar, her counterpart? She discovered he had disappeared thirty years ago, when the world needed him most. Some said that he died with the other airbenders, and others said he had been reborn amongst the water tribes, which was why the Fire Nation had begun to lay siege to them.
This explained the imbalance she felt within herself. With her parallel gone, the Conduit had been polarized. She surmised that was why she had stopped aging, as well.
The dark side of her had whispered that this was the perfect opportunity to strike. With the Avatar gone, the Conduit could rise up and assume control of the world. She had the power to do it. The Fire Nation would readily bow to her. The world could be hers; she could watch it go up in flames and bathe in the blood of her victims.
But decades of isolation and years of feeling incomplete had changed her in ways she hadn't even acknowledged. While she always felt the thirst for bloodshed and destruction, she no longer desired power. What the Conduit truly desired was to remain in the shadows, hidden and unknown. That hadn't changed once she had left her seclusion behind. If anything, the current state of things only solidified it.
Much had changed in her time away from the world. The Warriors Guild, who had once been determined to end the Conduit cycle and their reigns of anonymous terror on the world, had gone extinct. She also learned after some digging that the Kage Noshi, the once loyal followers of the Conduit, had wiped them out and became nothing more than sellswords, having forgotten their roots during her absence. She wasn't sad to see them go though; she had no need for them anymore.
But there was more. The Southern Water Tribe was experiencing unrelenting attacks from the Fire Nation. They were capturing the waterbenders, searching for the Avatar. The Conduit understood the logic: the last Avatar would have been an airbender. With the Air Nomads gone, the next Avatar would have been a waterbender. And as the reincarnation cycle alternated between the north and the south, the next one was due to be a Southern waterbender. But the Conduit knew that the Avatar wasn't there...at least not as a waterbender. Of course, there was also the chance that the Avatar had left the South, but that didn't quite sit right with her.
She could sense the Avatar's spirit, but it was fleeting, weak. She supposed she could have tried to find him, but the Conduit saw a new opportunity: she could truly live now, without the worry that the Avatar would come for her. Without her nemesis hanging over her head, the Conduit was free to do as she pleased. She felt that she had been reborn.
She mostly stayed true to herself. She didn't want power. But just as one couldn't stop the tides, she couldn't help her bloodlust. So the Conduit had made a promise to herself: she would only take the lives of those whom she felt deserved it, and only those who came across her path seeking her out.
And so what if she manipulated the rules to be in her favor? The Conduit traveled along dark roads, where crime and violence were commonplace. And as time passed, she made her home amongst thieves and murderers, in brothels and hostels. In places such as those, there was never a shortage of depravity. No one would miss the souls of those she took for herself. She could have her fill of death.
Through all of that time, she did not age. She remained twelve years old in appearance, which only worked in her favor, as people did not suspect a young girl to be a cold blooded murderer.
She remained neutral about the war. If the Avatar wasn't there to fulfill his duty, she wouldn't do hers either. It didn't seem right, somehow, even with her decision to forsake what was her duty by birthright.
Years later, the Conduit had known the moment the Avatar had come back to the world. She had felt his spirit rise, and was surprised to see that it had come from the South Pole. What were the odds that he had been there that whole time, right under her nose? But the Conduit let it be. He had awoken to quite a mess.
The Conduit had still been in the Earth Kingdom at that point, and she was able to glean tales of the Avatar's adventures as she continued to live amongst the degenerates and criminals. She was surprised to find out that he was just a boy, but it seemed to explain why she hadn't aged either.
He seemed blissfully unaware of her existence and that they even had a connection, and for that the Conduit was grateful. Without the Warriors Guild or the Order of the White Lotus to point him in her direction, the Conduit was certain she could continue to live her life of anonymity.
As it turned out, even without their divine interference, the world was heading down a path where balance would never be restored. For a brief moment, the Conduit had thought that time had come when the moon had left the sky. But then she had returned, and the Conduit knew the war still waged on. Then, at last, the Avatar had ended the war. The Conduit had actually applauded him for that.
With the war over, the balance had been restored. She continued to live in unknown corners of the world. She kept her powers subdued. And she had started to age again. The Conduit didn't know if the Order of the White Lotus was still around, or if they would even remember their duty to teach the Avatar about her if they were.
But the Avatar didn't need to worry about her.
Life had been so peaceful that the Conduit had forgotten about the prophecy—or rather, she had believed she had been able to subvert it by forsaking the instinct for power that flowed through her blood. She had felt the stirrings for months and had pointedly ignored them. Hoping—foolishly, she now realized—that she could continue to avoid what the Oracle of Destiny had foreseen to be.
The Conduit hadn't been lying to the Fire Lord when she told him she had no desire to fulfill the destiny. She was not interested in joining the Avatar in a battle that would only end when the two of them destroyed one another for good. Personally, she wanted to go on living, thank you very much, and she suspected that the Avatar likely felt the same.
But that hadn't stopped the Mother Willow from seeking her out in dreams. The Conduit had been plagued by her for months before she had encountered the firebender. She filled the Conduit's head with images of fire and blood and whispered to her: this is your destiny. You feel the call of destruction in your blood; you must give in to it.
The Conduit could see her fate: locked in battle with the Avatar at the peak of a volcanic crater, with ash and smoke filling the air. Two opposites giving their all, pouring every ounce of their power into a fight that might destroy the world before they destroyed each other...but in the end, they would. Their powers would collide with such force that the two of them would be obliterated in the process.
And that was why she had sent the firebender and the waterbender to the Pond of Enlightenment. She knew—had known all along, really—that destiny could not be so easily changed when it was professed by an Oracle, and she knew that the world's only real hope lay with the Fire Lord and the Water Tribe Princess.
She could sense his determination, and hoped it would be enough for the Pond to give him the answers he needed to understand.
And there was more to the prophecy than just the Conduit and the Avatar. The firebender—the Fire Lord—was under attack. The Conduit knew now that his sister, Princess Azula, had plans to depose him and claim the throne for herself. That alone was a testament that the prophecy was coming true.
If the princess could capture the Conduit and was somehow able to take control of her powers, it would be easy enough for the princess to dispose of her brother..
The world had yet to see the full extent of the Conduit's power, and she intended to keep it that way. She would do whatever it took to make sure the Fire Lord and his companion changed the prophecy. His rule could not falter; the Conduit and the Avatar could not battle.
In the distance, she could now see the Garden. It was a dark mass nestled in a canyon against the pale sand. She could feel its power, could sense its pull on her. Dawn's first light was beginning to tinge the edges of the sky.
Below her, closing in on the Garden, she saw the Fire Lord and the waterbender cresting a sand dune. She watched the Fire Lord pull his mount up short and point towards the Garden. They had seen it, too.
Hiei twitched below her.
She tore her eyes from the Fire Lord and looked down at her spirit animal. "What is it, Hiei?"
Trouble.
The Conduit looked out over the sands and saw nothing amiss. But she trusted the dragon-cat's instincts—they had saved her skin more than once—and as she cast her eyes toward the mountains in the south, a warning bell of danger went off in her head.
Coming down the side of the plateau were a mass of dark shapes: the Kage Noshi, riding their mongoose lizard steeds and heading straight for the Fire Lord and the waterbender under their cover of shadows.
The Conduit tightened her hold on Hiei. "Let's go."
You said you wouldn't interfere.
She dug her knees into his shoulders, her face setting into a grim scowl. "I said, let's go!"
The dragon-cat grumbled. As you wish.
His black wings beat against the sky and he flew faster toward the waterbender and the firebender. The Conduit only hoped they would make it in time. The Kage Noshi would get to them before she and Hiei would, even with his full speed pulling them through the lightening sky.
Just hold on, the Conduit thought to the Fire Lord. Just hold on until I get there.
The fate of the world was depending on it.
I hope you guys enjoyed this inside look at the Conduit. This chapter was really fun to write.