The Ashes Stairs
(The triple apology of fire)
So. I'm alive, I've been hiking for ten days and seeing beautiful landscapes, my feet hate me. I didn't get any review, but I DID hope while I was there, so I guess I've reached my goal!
Damn, I forgot to thank my beta-reader in the first chapter! Thank you so much, Avocadolove!
Sorry for posting the second chapter a bit later than planned. Hope you have a good reading? Second POV is Zuko.
Soon all parasites will turn to ashes
He hasn't seen a single cloud all day. The air is trembling under a veil of dust, distorting the dry, inexorable landscape of dead grass and yellowish stones.
The pole's endless ice looked almost pretty in comparison.
His own sweat burns his skin. The sun has beaten down on him since the breaking dawn; Zuko sighs in relief as the oasis' shadow and the evening air caress his face. It should feel ironic, the relief. But this white-hot sun, barely reaching the horizon after one interminable day, would not bother him in the least if it were normal.
A light fragrant with the ocean's fresh and salty air, warming a dark earth, softer and richer than any oasis of this giant desert of stones. A golden light pouring down into bright green forests, a perfumed heat that does not vanish like a mirage as soon as the night falls… The sun.
This distant, metallic glare, saturated with dust, he wishes he could give it another name.
Nothing ironic here: what he really hates is the dust. The dry, stinking dust irritating his eyes and throat, seeping into the rags that serve him as clothes, rekindling his thirst. This dust that manages to make him dread Agni's light, the very core of his bending.
Zuko shakes his head. He wants to burn all the dust in the world, but sweat has bitten his face for too long now: his features are too rigid for him to even express anger. Cannot speak.
His body stiff with a whole day of riding, the banished prince laboriously passes one leg over the saddle and loosens the girths. The ostrich horse's chest is heaving; it struggles against the reins and clicks its beak reproachfully. It can smell the lake next to them. Its head sinks into the water before Zuko is even done tying it to the nearest tree.
The teenager lets himself sink to the ground, exhaustion making him briefly forget his own thirst. He presses his face to his open palms, slowly massages his temples, and grimaces as he notices he stinks nearly as much as the animal next to him.
He has been riding since dawn.
Six days have passed since he and his uncle parted. (Sometimes he forgets why they did.)
Three weeks have passed since the Fire Nation branded him a traitor (Why, he still does not even know why…)
Ever since, he has done nothing but run away. He chose this direction at random; he doesn't know where to head in those stupidly huge lands. There is nothing there, nothing to find, he has not seen a village since dawn. Zuko absent-mindedly runs his fingers through the damp grass, then lets droplets of water slide down his temples and neck to cool them down. He really is thirsty… All day long he has seen nothing but ugly piles of angular rocks, arid places only degenerate Earth peasants could consider habitable. For the umpteenth time he finds himself wondering what moronic reasoning might have urged his ancestors to sacrifice thousands of their men to colonize one giant heap of dust.
If only he could give all the lands in the world and finally go home…
Zuko violently shakes his head to stop this trail of thoughts, to not have to remember that no ship nor mission will give him back his homeland now (why?). He really is thirsty. The lake in front of him isn't exactly the purest oasis: the whole place is infested with buzzing insects, but he hasn't drunk since almost ten hours.
Just when he plunges his hands in the dark mirror of the lake, slightly wrinkling every time an insect brushes the surface, he notices the strange form of the creatures surrounding him. The insects are nearly shapeless: tiny white, slimy worms, squirming grotesquely at the end of two buzzing wings. Earth Kingdom parasites. Schist mosquitoes, he thinks their name is. The water must be filled with their eggs.
The banished prince drinks in long draughts, trying to not think about the invisible things swarming in there.
Schist mosquitoes don't live very long unless they can grow in the human body: their larvae enter the veins, creeping through the skin's pore, and swell as they strip the host of his strength. That's why those creatures mostly come out in the evening, when they are most likely to find a prey made thirsty by a day of work. Or by a day of travel.
That's what he has been told, in any case. He doesn't remember whether the warning came from his uncle or from a peasant, in the village he went through at dawn, who would have for some reason felt invited to go and talk to him. It probably was a peasant.
For a second, the shadow of a derisive smile appears on his lips.
After drinking, Zuko splashes some water on his face. With a grimace he finally takes off his tattered, foul-smelling clothes, whose greenish colour seems to try and insult him. He has grown a lot thinner these past days. His skin is grey with dust. Maybe after some time he will look just like the dark, emaciated figures of the Earth Kingdom.
I won't.
The sensation of cold water against his limbs gives him the illusion of strength. The half-smile remains on his face as he carefully washes the scar around his eye then scrubs his arms in quick, forceful gestures.
He smiles, exhausted, as though by getting rid of his foreign clothes and of the dust that sticks to his skin like a mask, he can also wash away the false identity he has had to take on.
He isn't from the Earth Kingdom. His hometown wasn't destroyed by firebenders; he did not get his scar during a raid; nothing, nothing about this desert of jagged stones is home, he's not like them and his name is not Li!
At last the teenager can breathe more freely. A wisp of smoke rises from his mouth and nostrils. Fire starts flowing through his arteries: his body temperature is bordering on forty-five degrees already, and keeps increasing.
His face has hardened.
Let those schist creatures come. Let their larvae come through his skin, like thousands have colonized his flesh the moment his lips touched the water. Let them settle in his veins and try to grow into fat slimy worms to block the circulation of his blood and choke him from the inside. Let them try, since he isn't an Earth refugee but a firebender, and since his blood is already turning them to ashes!
Sixty degrees. Seventy-five.
It is the body temperature, the thinkers of his homelands and the officials in charge of the propaganda say, that makes firebenders superior to all other races, a people destined for conquest and war. Our blood is perfect, purified by Agni's very flames: even the foreign illnesses of the most remote lands have no holds on us.
No parasite in the world can survive touching the superior element.
His fire makes him greater than any peasant he meets, the distant voices of an old propaganda whisper to him; it makes him greater no matter how much he can lose, his title, his ship, his land, his face and his very name. His blood alone makes him superior, they say, and today more than ever Zuko longs to believe them. He would give anything to ignore the fact that, because of this same blood, cold and hunger have so much more effect on him than on any Earth man, that in order to maintain this formidable body heat the fire eats all the meagre food he can find, pumps up his strength, and has already started eating into his muscles for lack of anything else. He would give anything to forget that the slightest wisp of air, away from the equator, feels ice cold against his too hot skin, that neither the clothes those peasants weave nor the houses they build quite protect him from the cold.
His teeth and fists clench. Clouds of steam rise around him. The schist larvae are all dead now; his perfect blood is filled with corpses. Tears of frustration run from his unburned eye, but Zuko doesn't notice them. He keeps scrubbing off the dust with fierce determination, scratching his arms in the process.
Ninety degrees.
He needs this faith: he wants to believe that his fire will protect him from illnesses like it saved him from freezing to death in the North Pole. He wants to believe fire will allow him to fight all the parasites that will ever try to feed on his strength, no matter their size, no matter their power and hatred, be it a worm in stagnant waters or a princess at the head of the Fire Nation armies.
He wants to believe his fire really can cleanse his body and mind from all the weaknesses, doubts, lies and multiple treasons that have been eating into him for years. He wants to believe this fire, somehow, will one day free him from exile.
His inner fire is the only thing a hundred years of war hasn't been able to take away from him. He holds onto it.
One hundred degrees.
He would take it further, let his anger and the stubborn ambers of his hope set the air ablaze, surround himself with steam until he cannot see the outside world, let the whole lake boil until it evaporates and no schist larva can ever live in here again. However, the basic firebending has worsened his hunger. His stomach feels so empty he cannot breathe, and there is nothing left in his bag but some dry bread, hard as the rocks he endlessly passes by.
The steam comes down. Once again, he is alone in the ring of scrawny trees, whose shadows have grown nearly hostile in the declining light. Beyond them, the road Zuko has been following is swallowed by the night. The banished prince can hardly see the silhouette of the ostrich horse sleeping at the edge of the lake, feathers puffed up against the evening air. Between the branches a few stars have appeared, distant and cold.
He gets out of the water, shivering, too white in the shadows, starving and exhausted. The sun has set in the horizon: he will probably be too tired to make a fire before falling asleep. So he will have to wait in the icy wind of this foreign land, alone, until the day breaks again and covers him with dust. He misses his uncle.
Zuko starts drowsing before he's even done putting his clothes back on. He doesn't notice the surface of the lake is now as smooth as a mirror behind him: the schist mosquitoes have all fled the oasis, driven away by the formidable heat of a young bender.
And perhaps by the vague knowledge that sooner or later, all parasites end up in ashes.
Next and last chapter: And soon Fire itself (POV: Jeong Jeong)