Avatar: The Last Airbender Created By: Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko
Avatar: The Last Airbender Owned By: Nickelodeon, a subsidiary of Viacom
All original content and characters © Acastus
Chapter XLVI – The Message
Ying and Wang had razed huge sections of Mequon's outer wall, but they would never launch stone again. Iroh did not know their names, but he and every Fire Nation soldier manning the remains of the outer fortifactions cheered the success of Captain Mongke and his strange prisoner. Just before dawn the massive siege engines had ignited one after the other in a dazzling display of spark and flame.
The Fire Nation army had attacked immediately as Iroh had promised. Battle now raged amongst the flaming and rapidly disintegrating towers of wood and metal. The clearing in which the great siege engines had been set up was choked in billowing clouds of thick, grey smoke that periodically left the combatants completely sightless. Iroh and the bulk of his First Corps had wisely approached from the windward side of the battlefield and had slain many defenders while they were disoriented from the smoke when they themselves were not.
Once the obvious targets had been eliminated, Iroh and his infantry had charged, sweeping clean the confused patch work of trenches and breastworks hastily erected by the advancing earthbenders the day before. The breach in the enemy front was wide and deep, the casualties minimal for the damage inflicted. Iroh and his immediate companions broke into the clearing occupied by the flaming siege engines with vengeful smiles and hearts thirsty for revenge.
The eldest son of the Fire Lord launched blasts of fire in rapid succession at the confused Earth Kingdom troops before him. Many wore the light green uniforms of the artillery battalions. Few of them were earthbenders and the grim Fire Nation infantry slew them without hesitation or mercy.
Suddenly the young general found himself knocked to the ground by a massive blow to the chest. Iroh instinctively rolled away from the direction of the strike, but he was struck again, this time on his back. His breastplate protected him from death as it had many times before, but he had the wind knocked out of him. As if from a distance he observed that he would be unable to firebend for the few seconds he knew he would need to save his life.
He rolled twice more and came up on his knees to see a huge green clad grenadier wielding spiked maces in each hand. His opponent's armor identified him as an officer, and his grey hair and facial scars marked him as a veteran. He was joined by two other Earth Kingdom soldiers wearing the traditional round helmets and wielding the long spears favored by the cavalry.
Iroh stood, desperately trying to regain his breath. The grenadier strode forward, without a trace of emotion on his grizzled features, and raised his weapons to strike again. As his companions followed suit, a blast of fire struck the spearman on the right. Distracted for a split second, the grenadier shifted his stance towards the new threat. The young general seized the opportunity. He leapt forward and delivered his opponent two sharp blows to the neck, his trachea making a sickening, crunching sound as it collapsed in his throat.
The grenadier dropped his weapons and clutched desperately at his neck. Dreadful gurgling noises erupted from his mouth as he tried to breathe through his crushed windpipe. Iroh, still reeling and trying to recover his own breath, narrowly avoided the other spearman's well timed lunge. He managed to swallow a deep breath before grabbing the roundhead's exposed spear shaft and yanking it out of his hands. The spearman barely had time to register his surprise before another blast of fire of exploded in his face, killing him instantly.
Tilting the spear tip downwards, Iroh turned to where the grenadier had fallen heavily to the ground, his weapons useless beside him. Looking to where the other spearman had been, Iroh drove the spear squarely into the chest of the grenadier. The grizzled veteran had fought his last battle and his struggles soon ceased. With a twist Iroh removed the spear from the corpse and threw it to the ground.
The spearmen were dead. The battle continued around him, but the encounter was clearly over. The twin behemoths had collapsed as their structure burned.
Behind him Iroh saw several of the Fire Nation soldiers who had accompanied him on the charge. To his surprise he recognized one of them, Lieutenant Diem. Briefly he remembered the young soldiers' reaction to his orders at Nomura. It seemed another lifetime, and though it was clearly the same person, Diem himself seemed a different man entirely. Gone was the wide eyed innocent who had recoiled in horror at the Crown Prince's refusal to accept the surrender of an honorable opponent.
Captain's bars now rested on his shoulders. His stance wide, his root solid, he had clearly just launched the blast that had felled the spearman on the young general's left. Diem stood up straight, looking past his superior into empty space with a distant, vacant look, and saluted. The soldiers around him followed suit, their terrifying horned masks concealing their humanity.
Diem was also undeniably drunk. After saluting, he burped quietly and began to sway ever so slightly. He hadn't shaved in days. His subordinates remained at attention and did not react.
Iroh, his breath restored, returned the salute and approached the younger man.
"Greetings, General, lovely night for a fight, isn't it?" Diem observed without a trace of cheerfulness.
"I don't know about that, Captain, but you have my thanks for your timely assistance."
"No thanks necessary, Highness," Diem replied as he pulled a thin flask from underneath a gauntlet.
He never met Iroh's eyes, instead looking past him to the horizon. The Crown Prince recognized this as "the thousand yard stare", a look shared by all those who had seen the worst combat.
A stone projectile landed between them, exploded into dust and showered them in fragments. Iroh brushed himself off. Diem ignored both the shower of stone and his commanding officer, instead opening the flask and taking a long pull.
Iroh drew breath to comment, but the final collapse of one of the burning towers drowned him out. A quick survey of the clearing told Iroh that this battle was over. A few dozen Earth Kingdom defenders, all of them artillery operators, had surrendered and been rounded up by Fire Nation troops.
"Not to worry, General," Diem assured without looking at his superior, "I know what to do."
He replaced the flask under the forearm of his gauntlet and marched towards the prisoners, his detachment in tow. The remains of the siege engines continued to burn, sending huge columns of black, oily smoke into the morning sky.
A small troop of Fire Nation soldiers entered the clearing from a path that lead around the hillside. Several smaller trails of smoke rose into the sky from behind the hill. At their head was Captain Mongke, a wide and feral grin on his face.
"Hail, General Iroh!" he saluted, "We just torched three smaller catapults on the north ridge."
"Well done, Captain," Iroh beamed, returning the salute, "You have done your part and we have done ours."
"Yes, General," the severe looking officer agreed, "All in all a good days work."
"It's not over yet," Iroh observed, "What happened to the outlander?"
"He did his part too, then he was gone."
Behind them Iroh could hear orders shouted at the Earth Kingdom prisoners.
"Gone?"
"Yes, he disappeared the moment we set off the charges."
"Strange."
Mongke snorted and nodded his head.
"General, I've been on campaign for nine seasons, been all over this savage continent, and I've met a lot of weird people, but that one might just be the strangest."
"Did he say anything else?"
"Nothing. Not a word after we left. He set the charges, killed half a dozen dirt slingers with those weapons of his, and then disappeared right when I lit off the 'works."
Iroh rubbed his chin, lost in thought.
"He's long gone, General," Mongke asserted, "and we've got a much bigger problem. Earthie cavalry is right on our heels! They'll be here in a few minutes at most!"
The sound of firebending behind them caused Iroh to whirl around and step to Mongke's side. The green clad prisoners screamed in agony as they burned alive, surrounded by Diem and his men. They remained frozen in the bending stances they had just used to deliver death to the captives.
One prisoner, clutching her face as her skin melted off her bones, staggered over to the captain who promptly kicked the dying woman's legs out from underneath her. He stepped back as she crumpled to the ground, dead.
The stench from the burning bodies was unbearable. Diem regarded them with an expression every bit as inscrutable as his masked companions.
Iroh and Mongke approached the young captain. How many times had he done something like this in these last months?
"Regrettable, but necessary, Captain," Iroh finally remarked in a retrospect voice, "You have learned a bitter lesson."
"Yes, I have learned, General, I have learned everything I need to know to serve the Fire Lord and the Fire Nation with honor," Diem replied, still swaying slightly, his eyes fixed on the burning corpses, "I attended the University of Nomura and graduated… with honors… at Lake Myojin."
A Myojin veteran. That explained it. The survivors were all scarred, including Nikon and Chieng. Many had turned hard and implacable, their expressions frozen in vacant, yet stony visages of dull hatred. Some, like Diem, had turned to drink. Some had killed themselves, as Nikon had intended, or drank cactus juice in the desert. All had acquired the "thousand yard stare."
Diem pulled out his flask once again and took a drink. He saluted once more without looking at Azulon's son or acknowledging his colleague.
"Companies!" the Myojin veteran roared suddenly, replacing the cap on his flask, "Fall in!"
The captives were dead. There was nothing left to contain. Ignoring the stench of burning bodies and murder, hundreds of masked soldiers fell into parade formation. Diem began to shout orders in preparation for the incoming cavalry attack.
"That one's broken, General," Mongke observed quietly, his arms crossed.
"Maybe we all are, Captain."
"Ha! I'm not broken, your Highness," Mongke retorted with scorn, "My comrades and I have no regrets."
Iroh met Mongke's hard eyes and cocked an eyebrow.
"Yes, Captain, I can see that."
The conversation ended as the ground began to tremble with the approach of thousands of hooves.
Iroh was filthy and exhausted. Another day of combat had passed and it was now late evening. He stood at the head of the operations table on the bridge of the Constellation, his hands propping up his upper body. The elder "map buddy" directed two younger staff members to add markers to the appropriate places on the map to represent newly identified enemy units.
The front lines had barely shifted from the morning of the first day of the battle. The gains made late the night before had been forced from them the following morning by Colonel Jenju's cavalry. The Earth Kingdom's final charge had only been broken by Constellation's mighty siphons and more than one discharge of lightning from Iroh's own hands. Still, the enemy artillery had been smashed with very few casualties and now only their strongest earthbenders could reach the Fire Nation lines with their stones.
After almost two days of fighting, however, Azulon's son was not alone in his exhaustion. Soundly defeated in their initial encounter with Jenju's First Corps, the thin, ragged lines of Agni's warriors staved off defeat with raw willpower alone. The destruction of the massive artillery pieces had raised a cheer up and down the line, but every soldier knew their only hope of survival lay with the rest of the army. They huddled amidst the wreckage of Mequon's outer wall and braced for the next attack.
Iroh shared his men's anxiety. Their own predicament barely registered in his mind. He was consumed with doubt and worry over his friends.
What was happening to the east?
The uncertainty had begun to grate on him almost as soon as Tien Shin's Second Corps had disappeared from sight two days before. What had begun as a niggling worry had ballooned into almost a full on panic. Dimly he remembered the agony of waiting for the all but certain news of his cousin's death to reach him while camped on the edge of the Nasu Plain. The present situation was only slightly more bearable because of the long hours of intense combat which temporarily relieved him of his burden.
It was the lulls he hated most. His body was almost at the point of collapse, but he could not sleep. He stared at the map, willing it to magically reveal the truth of his friend's fates. The chart stubbornly refused to reveal anything beyond what he already knew of his own position.
He heard footsteps behind him.
"Have we received no word from the east then, your Highness?"
The question, clear as a bell and sudden as an avalanche, startled Iroh. He whirled, suddenly wide awake.
The governor of Mequon stood before him, her white kimono replaced by a soldier's tunic and a red steel breastplate emblazoned with a phoenix. She wore a carefully knotted purple sash about her waist, and her hair was gathered underneath a helmet, plumed with gold feathers in recognition of her office.
She wore a belt and bore a skin of water and in her hand lay a scroll tube. She carried no obvious weapons.
"Rhiannon!" he exclaimed and embraced her, "I'm sorry, I stink horribly," he admitted as he clutched her.
"You're excused," she offered magnanimously, hugging him back.
He released her and met her eyes with a worried expression.
"What are you doing here!? You must go back to the citadel!"
Her countenance hardened.
"No, Iroh, I won't. I have brought the last of the garrison with me. We will face the end of your gambit together. If you fail, how long do you think I will survive locked up in my tower?"
The question hung ominously between them. He glanced briefly out the observation window to see hundreds of soldiers in colonial uniforms entering the clearing.
She turned and addressed the elder "map buddy."
"I have brought the Second Brigade of the 27th Division for deployment, Lieutenant. Please assign us a place on the line."
The old soldier regarded her gravely before bowing.
She turned back to her friend and continued.
"Gan, Nikon, your Chieng, and even that… filthy reptile, Tien Shin, all fight to protect this city. I myself have sent, no matter the lies we told ourselves in council, Colonel Zhou and the First Brigade of my garrison on a suicide mission to protect this city."
Iroh looked down. After a day of unremitting horror, he could not look at his friend and lie.
"Will you deny me then the right to fight at your side for the sake of the city your glorious Father entrusted me to govern?"
The room became still as the younger adjutants stopped to eavesdrop on the general and his childhood friend.
"No," Azulon's son finally replied, "I won't."
He hugged her once again, this time in resignation.
"You are strong and brave, Rhiannon… and I'm glad you're here."
"I know."
He released her once more and squared his shoulders.
"No, there has been no word from the east, the outcome still in doubt, but we're not giving up and we're not giving in, I swear it."
She regarded him closely. His eyes burned with the Will of Fire and she could feel his determination. He had risked everything on the most daring enterprise in the history of the Fire Nation. Her heart swelled with pride. Powerless despite her enormous gifts, she had lost her father. She had lost Xian. But today… today she was not powerless and she would not lose Iroh.
"No, your Highness," she replied, "We will not give up or give in, and for your faith and courage in this hour I bring you the message for which we have all hoped. I pray it contains the news you seek."
She held forth the scroll tube, long and thin, it was made of the lightest wood for the longest ranged messenger hawks.
"Thunder only happens when it's raining, Iroh," she remarked mysteriously, "Take it."
Iroh recognized the seal, took a deep breath, and took it. He read in silence, then his head snapped up to meet his friend's expectant gaze.
"Agni Almighty," he vowed, "We have a chance."
