The Painted Lady was silent as they finally arrived. The bubble broke through the surface, but Katara noted with some confusion that they hadn't spent nearly enough time rising to be at the same elevation they had started from. Still, the ice fell away to reveal an open sky framed by smoke-ringed mountains. They were in a valley lush with green and humming with gentle life. From their vantage point, Katara could see little more than dense forests to one side giving way to plains on the other, both marked with packed dirt walkways. The bubble that had carried them to this valley was in a large pond bordered with smooth paving stones, and the Painted Lady wasted no time stepping onto the earth. The ice of the bubble began to crack without the Painted Lady's attention and the three teens scrambled to join the spirit on solid ground.
"Where are we?" Katara asked, regaining her sense as she looked back at the pond which was clearly only two or three feet at its deepest point.
"This is my home, deep under the river." Katara found herself blinking wordlessly as the spirit's voice now longer drifted through her thoughts, but through the air as the woman spoke to them for the first time. "This place is a natural meeting place between the physical and the spiritual worlds. You may notice many things that seem strange to you. It'd be easiest for now if you simply accepted these happenings' existence."
The Painted Lady led them away from the pond and down the path towards the forest. The trees were ancient—tall and thick and all manner of colors, though most were familiar greens, browns, and reddish hues. The spirit spoke as they walk, talking idly about their surroundings and pointing out plants that would be unfamiliar to the three: trees with silver leaves that clinked like coins in a breeze, white vines topped with pure black flowers climbing the oaks and birches like any ivy, shrubs that sprouted feathers to hide their fruit from curious birds. Her voice filled the silence until the trees suddenly were behind them. Before them was a massive body of water stretching across the horizon, as well as the first building they'd come across . Standing along the dirt path, the structure was built from wooden planks, and the look of its porch and gentle slopes along the edges of its roof reminded Katara of an entire village of wooden buildings by the sea and her heart panged at the thought of Suki and Kyoshi Island.
"You will be able to explore the area and the house later. For now, it is time to meet your masters… I, Uisce, shall be your master, Katara. I was the first to teach the Moon to bend, just as Rhyu taught the dragons, as Awyr taught the sky bison, and as Cruinne taught the badgermoles."
"The original masters…" Zuko breathed softly. The Painted Lady, Uisce, laughed softly.
"Yes. We each chose our students carefully, knowing they'd impact the world far beyond our own individual influence."
"And I think so far we've chosen alright," a new voice announced as the door was slammed open to reveal a somewhat stout, though definitely muscled, man wearing a light green tunic that contrasted with his dark skin. The stranger's eyes were a bright green that glinted as he stepped into the sunlight, arms held out towards the new arrivals. His hair, cropped short, stayed perfectly in place even as he moved suddenly towards Uisce. The waterbending master with practice patience ducked swiftly as the man's stride shifted into a tackle, but she found herself tumbling down when the man abruptly changed directions and swept her legs out from under her. Uisce sputtered indignantly. "Too slow, Uisce."
"Cruinne, would it really be so horrific to show Uisce some sort of respect?" More people—spirits—came from the house. The one who appeared first, and the one Katara believed to have spoken, was a woman bearing swirling blue tattoos accents with dark purple, not unlike Aang's mastery tattoos. She had long flowing white hair that reach just towards her lower back that was left loose, wild. Behind her was another man with dark red hair and dark eyes that glittered almost with a metallic shine against his pale skin. The last man was taller and leaner than the first, and his mouth was twisted into a dark scowl as he regarded his fellow man.
"Is it my turn, dear one, or yours?" he asked, eyes darting to Uisce. A mischievous light entered the water spirit's eyes and she smiled brightly. Her hand lifted up and icicles sprouted from the ground without any discernable source, sharpening and lengthening very quickly beneath the man who'd attacked her. The man, Cruinne, rolled away from the ice and sighed.
"You used to be fun."
"And you used to behave in front of our guests," Uisce said sharply before shaking her head. Smiling again, she turned back to gesture towards the teenagers. "May I introduce our new pupils? Katara, of course, is my student. Rhyu, this is Zuko. And Cruinne, Toph."
Zuko tensed as Rhyu stepped close to him, eyes sharp and appraising as he surveyed the former prince. He would never admit it aloud, but Zuko was afraid of what Rhyu would see with that piercing gaze. Would he see how Zuko had faltered and struggled with bending as a child? Would he see the years of not good enough and again and the pain of the burning? The shame he'd felt during that fateful Agni Kai, and the complexity of the shame and self-loathing he felt years later? Would Rhyu see Ozai in the son, as Zuko did in his nightmares? The source of this imbalance was in his blood—in the man who had started this terrible war, but also in the man who had ignored its start for sentiment.
Rhyu was silent for an endless moment as he peered down at Zuko, gaze so sharp that the teen felt as if his body was flayed, exposing the blemished soul beneath.
"Potential," was the fire spirit's final judgement. The man then turned, walking away from the house without another word, and Zuko was startled into a still silence. Rhyu continued walking away, and Uisce smiled gently at the teen.
"You might want to follow, young one," she advised gently. Zuko blinked, brain finally kicking back into gear, and he stumbled over an incoherent sentence—perhaps a thanks, or a goodbye to his friends?—before running after his new master. Uisce smiled after the two before returning her attention to her own new student. She had already more-than approved of Katara. In some ways, Katara reminded her of Tui, the gentle spirit that had been so enamored with the physical world that she'd convinced La to run away to spend their eternity on the mortal plane. Though Yue—another comforting, quiet girl who was so like Uisce's student—had taken up the mantle of the moon, Uisce was looking forward to the attention and devotion a new student required. Each pupil came with their own challenges, and Uisce looked forward to delving into the work ahead of her. "Come, Katara. We have much to discuss."
Uisce waited for Katara to react before leading the young waterbender into the house. They'd have time to approach the water later. For now, Katara would be able to give a full report of her own abilities before Uisce could set out a plan for the bender's education. The two disappeared into the house, leaving the earthbenders alone. Cruinne, not satisfied with a judgement as simple as Rhyu's, looked Toph squarely in the face.
"So I hear you're supposed to be pretty good," he began, stopping when Toph smirked up at him.
"I'm the best earthbender ever! Well, best human," she amended after a brief hesitation. "Learned straight from the badgermoles."
"And badgermoles learned it from me, little girl." He grinned at the scowl that twisted Toph's features. "How'd you rate your standard earthbending?"
"Kickass."
"We'll see about that. Metalbending?"
"Easy," she returned, crossing her arms. Cruinne refused to let his surprise shift his body weight and hummed in as condescending a tone as he could manage. After millennia with Rhyu, he was pretty good at it.
"How about molten metalbending? Or, better yet, lavabending?" he challenged. Toph froze and Cruinne grinned, laughing loudly. "We'll be having some fun, you and I!"
Rhyu strode purposefully up the mountain, pausing every forty paces to wait for his newest student to catch up. The trip to the base of the volcano was easy thanks to the transportation system Cruinne had—with much grumbling and complaints—designed using magnetism, but Zuko's challenge for the day was to climb to the peak. As Rhyu calmly took in the sweating, struggling form of his student, he understood that this would be Zuko's challenge for months to come.
"Are you going to give up?" he asked at each pause, waiting to gauge Zuko's reaction. It was an interesting character study, Rhyu had decided. At first Zuko had almost seemed to be withholding a laugh at the mere suggestion. As the altitude increased—and the incline with it—that near-laugh had faded quickly. Now, hundreds of feet above where they'd started, Zuko hardly had the breath to speak, let alone laugh. Still, the boy continued to climb. Rhyu watched the boy stumble, catching himself roughly against the rocks. A sharp rock ripped into his arm, the cut shallow but messy, and Rhyu cleared his throat. He intended for the boy to get stronger, not killed.
"You may stop now."
"But I'm not at the top," Zuko said, breathing heavily and scowling down at his new injury. Rhyu nodded.
"You are not. You are not ready to climb this mountain in one stretch. When we have finished, you will be able to do it but for now you must rest. When you are ready, we shall move on to our next task." Rhyu left the boy where he was and ventured laterally along the mountain until he reached the path Cruinne had carved. This training would have to be done intervals, but there were ways to set the challenge a little differently. The purpose of using a volcano as a training site came from the benefits of being surrounded by one of the element's purest sources. Marching up and down a mountainside would give Zuko the physical strength that he was going to need to master some of the greater bending forms, but immersing himself in the heart of the volcano would be the surest path to truly understanding fire.
Rhyu found Cruinne's handiwork easily. While the man might be disagreeable and rough, Rhyu could never say that the earthbender did anything half-way. Carved into the mountain was a network of tunnels that, if accessed from the surface, provided an easy path to the heart of the volcano. A magnetically charged tramcar ran through the tunnels so that any level of the volcano could be reached at any point.
Shaking of the satisfied smile that seeing the transport had caused, Rhyu returned his attention to his newest student. He was intimately aware of the pride of Zuko and his people. Fire was his element, and it was very easy to see why anyone would easily believe it to be the vastly superior element. Despite his pride, Rhyu had admitted years ago that the war was not the proper way to educate any others on the truth of the matter. When Sozin launched his attack on the Air Nomads and Rhyu was forced to watch as Awyr began to wither away, the war became far too personal.
The original masters were all closely linked to one another. While they themselves may not have been borne of the same genetic line as human families typically are, they formed their own bonds. Fire could not live without air, and Rhyu had come to see Awyr as a sister of sorts. Together they had amazing potential for growth and power, even if that power had to be respected to be wielded safely. Each of the original masters drew power from their elements, but also from the benders in a self-sustaining loop. When the Air Nomads were made all but extinct, Awyr's abilities, powers, and influence over the physical world were all but extinguished. At the same time, over the course of the war, fire benders grew in numbers and in strength. Rhyu found his abilities strengthening, allowing him to perform feats of bending that had once only been possible with his sister's aid. But true power, energy in its rawest forms, is temperamental. They were spirits, not gods, and the destructive potential that coursed through Rhyu was unnatural. The unbalance the war had caused was a double-edged sword, and it made Rhyu uneasy.
This training would call for Rhyu to teach Zuko as much as possible, but there wasn't an eternity available to them. The world would continue to fall apart while the teenagers trained, and there would come a day when the world was truly balanced on a knife's edge. Ba Sing Se had been reclaimed by the White Lotus, and the Northern Water Tribe retained its own sovereignty, but the war machine of the Fire Nation was only gaining more momentum. Eventually, the powers would shift too far or too suddenly, and not even the spirits may be able to call upon the strength and power to reverse the damage. Their training would have to be compressed as much as possible to ensure that they did not reach the point of no return.
He knew that Zuko had gone through immense troubles in his past. Even if he hadn't watched Zuko since Uisce's had brought the Avatar's companions to the attention of the spirits, Rhyu could effortlessly mark Zuko's efforts to carry the weight of his past. Rhyu admired the boy for his courage, for his evolved dreams for the future, but there was a seed of disquiet beneath his esteem. Zuko had potential to be great, but greatness didn't necessarily engender gentleness.
Rhyu watched as his newest student continued to catch his breath, worries surfacing and growing more distinct as Zuko's hand gently pressed against his newest wound. A grimace twisted the teen's mouth, but Zuko held his hand to his chest until some of the tension relaxed out of his shoulders. That was interesting…
Fire bending as pain relief, Rhyu mused thoughtfully. Zuko, oblivious to his master's thoughts, rolled his shoulders back as his grimace faded away to a satisfied line. More or less recovered, the teen took a deep breath before moving to rejoin his master, preventing Rhyu from falling back into his own unsettled mind.
He would teach Zuko as much as he had time to. He could only hope that the teen's humility would combat the power Rhyu would grant him.
Awyr watched with some curiosity as her companions drove their new students into the ground. Even Uisce, who was best at acting gentle and poised, took Katara to the water's edge after a lengthy discussion on waterbending forms and had nearly drowned the poor girl with a few careful movements that Katara didn't have a prayer of anticipating.
The three teenagers were gifted benders, and they were masters as far as the human understanding of bending functioned. The biggest issue preventing any one of them from progressing much further into true mastery wasn't even a fault borne from their own personalities or proclivities. Perhaps it was a consequence of learning bending from distinct sources, but nearly all humans were dreadfully uninspired when approaching the elements. That simple lack of imagination was expressed in a million ways, but the one that had always struck Awyr as the most interesting was the concept of metalbending. Human understanding and conceptual knowledge of the elements was so firmly rooted that millennia had passed before a small blind girl discovered the art out of sheer desperation. Toph had been nothing short of remarkable when she had trained herself into bending metal, and Awyr knew that that alone was enough to convince Cruinne to take the girl as a student.
The three students were separated by distance now as each of their masters discovered the limits the teenagers believed they had, but Awyr knew better. Everything in the world was connected, and so much more deeply than even the most enlightened humans might comprehend. That would be the largest advantage the masters could grant their students, but it would take time.
A sharp pain interrupted her musings and Awyr found herself struggling to stand for a brief moment. Her hands groped blindly for a surface to support herself, and she eventually guided herself into a chair with quiet annoyance at her own weakness.
Frustration was all that was left to her now. She was so full of passion once, so full of rage and heartache and hurt but that was all gone now. Her last ties to the physical realm were quietly being cut, and she was left with nothing but numbness in their wake. There were just echoes of her touch now. There were a scattering of sky bison left, in the untouched wilds of the world, but they'd fade away as the Fire Nation consolidated their strength and filled the map of the nations with flames. There were children too, that bore the echo of her influence, but they too would fade. Without the spiritual guidance of the monks, without the teachings and influence of the bison, those children would never grasp the potential gifts harbored in their spirits. It might carry on in some way, but Awyr would never see it manifest again.
She used to fly, free and untethered and full of joy and love for the world around her. She would teach the sky bison to twist the winds beneath them, teaching the young ones to trust the breezes and fall into their hands as old friends. One didn't control air, after all, they simply guided it and were guided in turn. Airbending was a gift, and it was one shared by a collective appreciation of how the world was always spinning and turning and breathing as one.
Tears sprung to Awyr's eyes, and she regretted that she couldn't even truly understand what she was mourning now. Now there was only weak irritation. Even sorrow—the dark and terrible grief that had overcome her as her body shook and her voice cracked and the winds whirled impotently around her—was faded away with the rest of her. Every facet of her existence was worn away by the toll of this war.
Her eyes were still shining as the pain began to ebb, and she looked out towards the lake. Katara and Uisce were still dancing in a spar of sorts on the surface of the water and seeing them coaxed some levity back into Awyr's tight chest. Whatever power left to her was devoted wholly to this plot. Her powers had waned, never to return as they once were, but she still harbored hope that she alone would bear this burden. She would gladly take it—accept all the world's pains and grievances—if it secured the future, even if that future didn't have a place for her.
Published 5:17, 7.24.20