"Asami, stay back!" Korra yelled, facing down the giant red eye shining with rage. She clenched her fists, summoning the energy she needed to push the eye away from the hole in the tree with a wall of air. She didn't have to strike, however, since the massive eye blinked once, twice, and then retreated from view. Korra almost let out a sigh of relief until a giant talon took its place, pounding away at the tree's only entrance, claws scraping at the wood.

Korra knew that Wan Shi Tong would tear the tree apart to get to them, so she decided to meet the threat on her own terms. She did not want to turn into a trapped animal waiting for death, helpless in a dead-end. So when the claw retreated, perhaps preparing for another strike, she hurled herself through the tree's great eye in a whirl of wind. She emerged into the open air, a flailing speck in the wide sky.

Wan Shi Tong turned to her, mouth open, bizarre avian teeth glinting in the grey light. In a swish of black feathers, he retreated from Korra's downward strike, avoiding the licks of flame she sent sparking from her fists. He rounded for her, screeching incomprehensibly, spreading his wings and striking forward with his sharp talons. Korra airbent a gust under her, flying over the massive claws, and hit the ground with such force that the earth cracked and crumbled beneath her feet. She lifted the crumbling stones around her, throwing them toward the rampaging bird. She smiled when she saw that she hit him straight in the forehead with the heavy rocks, but he did not buckle beneath their force. He only screamed louder, lunged harder, grew angrier.

Korra tried to subdue him with fire, but he swiped the flames away with one flick of his powerful wings. She tried to beat him down with water, but the blows slid off his feathers, and he only puffed up like a sparrow in a birdbath. She threw gusts of air at him, but he only took them under his feathers and lifted himself higher with their power. She tried to stomp him into the ground, but that only strengthened his stance. It seemed that whatever she tried only made him more powerful.

When Korra, furious in her desperation, threw a clumsy strike, spear of fire missing him by a mile, he took this opportunity to pin her to the Tree of Time's gargantuan roots. She felt his talon, cold and hard, clamp around her waist and shove her into the hard wood. Any air she had left in her lungs was expelled in a painful gasp, and she found herself staring into the greedy red eyes of the cursed spirit. He opened his mouth wide, and she could see down his throat, into the all-consuming darkness that had eaten him, and was now about to eat her too.

"Korra!" Asami had emerged from the tree, sliding down a root to the ground.

"Get back!" Korra yelled, but Asami did as she usually did—execute a timely rescue. She grabbed a fragment of a boulder Korra had thrown at the giant bird, and tossed it their way. It flew through the air and hit Wan Shi Tong on the head, right as his teeth were about to close on Korra. He let out a reeking hiss, turned his head toward her, and decided she might be better prey than Korra.

Asami, practical as always, calculated her odds of survival and began to run. Wan Shi Tong bounded after her, feet kicking up stone and crushing the earth like some giant, ancient reptile.

Korra stood and chased after them, trying to get close enough for a finishing blow. If Wan Shi Tong did anything to Asami… Korra didn't know what she'd do. So she decided it was better if she never found out. She desperately ran after the two, trying to prepare a good stance for a powerful strike.

She got there a little too late. Wan Shi Tong, much faster than Asami, had caught up and now swept out with his massive wing, catching her straight in the chest. She flew back into the tree, smashing her head and back against its petrified surface. With a pained gasp that seemed to come from both her lungs and Korra's, she closed her one remaining eye and went limp.

Korra drained the massive reservoir of spiritual energy that burnt inside her, letting the light and power overcome her. She followed the instructions of her furious instinct, and with a twist of her body, spun a powerful wave of air at Wan Shi Tong.

The giant bird, caught up in the hurricane, flapped to safety, screeching.

In his moment of recoil, Korra bent a long string of healing water from the air around them, wrapping it around Wan Shi Tong. She breathed life into the water, turning it a brilliant gold and encouraging its power to dampen the anger of the giant spirit, to turn him back into the benevolent but strict persona he had once been.

Wan Shi Tong would have none of it, though. He shrieked, beating his wings, driving the helix of water away. Korra struggled to gain control over him, to impose her will and force him to heal, but he twisted and lashed out so powerfully he shattered her cage of healing water, spraying beads of gold light like a glowing mist.

Korra knew then that she would not be able to subdue him by force. A desperate fear emerged in her heart, and she wondered if she should just throw Asami over her shoulder and run as fast as she could from the giant bird.

But a voice inside her told her not to. It told her to listen. It was a command barked to her in a thousand different languages spanning a thousand years and miles, but its unanimity was overwhelming.

Listen.

So she stopped, quieting her muscles, quelling her fear. In a display of calmness that surprised even herself, she sat down, folded her legs and lay her palms across them, open, receptive.

Her fear was gone, and the conflicting, agonizing voices in her head had fallen silent, leaving her alone. There was only her inner spirit and Wan Shi Tong. The massive bird stared her down before jumping in to strike, mouth agape, ready to swallow.

Wait, and listen. The key to earthbending.

She did not remember who had told her that bit of wisdom or when, but she knew what to do. Just as Wan Shi Tong's head dove down to swallow her up, she gently tapped her hands to the ground, palms up. Two small but strong pillars of soil burst upward and framed the owl's neck. Wan Shi Tong, collared to the hard earth, screeched and flailed, open mouth only inches away from Korra. She sat there, still as a rock, looking into his eyes.

Deep in the glowing red abyss of his gaze, Korra faced the insurmountable magnitude of his pain. She felt the paralyzing agony she had experienced in the Tree return to her. It cut her skin, it crushed her bones, and deep in her soul, it violated her autonomy. She felt the shame and helplessness of captivity, the agonizing explosion of power drawn from her body. She, like Wan Shi Tong, could only watch in silence as the pain overtook the land, corrupting all it touched.

Wan Shi Tong had gone still before her. She reached out and placed a hand over each of his eyes, breathing in that pain, anger, shame. She let it fill her lungs, blackening their walls. Unlike her experience inside the Tree, however, she was able to control the anger, letting it flow through her blood in an eternal loop, never leaving, never releasing to wreak havoc outside her.

She swallowed her own pain, trying to understand, to listen. And in a moment of spiritual adeptness she had never before known she had, she absorbed Wan Shi Tong's pain and made it her own. The screeching that echoed through the air came from both her and the giant bird as he writhed and struggled against the agony, and she almost lost her grip on him. But she held on, determined to understand, and she absorbed his trauma, redirecting it into the ground, turning hard stone to dust beneath her.

The kind of spiritbending that linked her and Wan Shi Tong did not have the hard, harsh elements of ice-bending that Unalaq's methods had. It was holistic, it did not require a cage, an imposed will—it was still, silent, ever-absorbing.

When Korra released her black breath, smelling of the plague, she opened her eyes. Wan Shi Tong, or what was left of him, lay before her, deteriorating. Bits of him fell like sand, or ash, and Korra stood, her heart wringing.

"I didn't want this to happen," she told his remains.

Wan Shi Tong didn't reply; his eyes turned a pale pink and were swallowed by the shadow of ashes. Korra turned away from him and made her way to Asami, who lay curled on the ground. When Korra bent down and shook her shoulder, she opened her one eye and struggled to sit.

"Korra… I…" She shook her head, trying to coax consciousness back into it, and blinked a few times. She looked past Korra to the pile of ashes, and gasped. "Did we… did you just kill a spirit?" she asked. Korra slowly helped her to her feet and led her over to the corpse.

Still consumed by the mysticism that had allowed her to absorb Wan Shi Tong's pain as her own, Korra looked down at the pile of ashes and repeated what Iroh had told her: "Spirits never die, they only change."

Guided by an instinct she couldn't explain, she bent down and reached out for the crumbling corpse. Beneath the layers of grey, lifeless dust, she spied a flicker of movement. Asami watched her, both intrigued and probably disgusted, as she gathered a small pile of ash. The pile wiggled, made a few chirping sounds, and shook itself, shedding black flecks.

In Korra's palms, pale grey and coated in soft down, was a tiny owl chick.