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Ignoring the pain, she looked around for Jianzhu. He wasn’t to be found in the thin scrub surrounding the base of the mountain. She snapped her head upward at the sound of stone moving.
The earthbending master descended casually, stepping down a flight of stairs that he created himself. Where a more orthodox bender would simply raise a solid platform from the ground, Jianzhu gathered planks of stone and assembled them at will beneath his feet, using the same technique he’d reached Tagaka’s ships with. It looked like the earth itself was bowing to him, prostrating under his immense power.
Kyoshi spotted a boulder behind him large enough for her to lift and rooted her feet to the ground. She pulled it toward them, not caring that she was also in its path.
Jianzhu didn’t bother turning his head. He reached behind him with one arm and the room-sized rock split along its grain, letting him pass through the gap. The two half spheres kept going and narrowly missed clipping Kyoshi as well. She forced down a yelp as they collided with the ground behind her.
Jianzhu looked at her with the same thoughtful expression he once reserved for Yun. “I’ll have to teach you to do more than simply go big,” he said.
Kyoshi tried the only other basic tactic she knew of, breaking the opponent’s foundation. She aimed her intent at the base of his stairs. She’d take them out along with a huge chunk of the slope.
But after rooting herself again and throwing the mother of all arrow punches at the mountainside, the only movement she got was a geyser of dust. The stairs barely trembled. She tried again. And again.
Jianzhu was taking deeper stances now, spiraling his arms in time with hers, and suddenly she knew why. He was reading her. Smothering each movement of earth she attempted. Nulling her out. She was a child pulling on a door an adult was holding closed.
Jianzhu stopped right in front of her, his platform raising him up so that he was eye level with her. Aside from the dust on his clothes, he could have been leaving a meeting in his house. She’d been unable to touch him in the slightest.
“Kyoshi,” he said with a warmth that made her sick to her stomach. “You are the Avatar. Don’t you know what that means? The responsibility that you now have?”
He ran a hand through his hair and bared his teeth like he regretted what kind of bushes he’d planted in his garden. “Kyoshi, I’m not a fool, and neither are you. We’re not going to pretend you’ll ever truly forgive me for what happened here. What I’m asking you to do is weigh our loss against the future of the world. Don’t let Yun’s sacrifice be in vain. Embrace your duty and let me teach you.”
Yun’s sacrifice?
Our loss?
Her teeth crushed fresh wounds into her lips. She’d thought she’d known hate before. Hate had been a hollowness inside her, the dull ache that she’d been forced to cradle as she stumbled through the alleys of Yokoya, dizzy with hunger and sickness. Hate had been reserved for her own flesh and blood.
But now she understood. True hatred was knife-edged and certain. A scale that begged for perfect balance. Yun lay on one side of the fulcrum. Her only responsibility in this life, as far as she was concerned, was to even the weight.
She swore to herself. One way or another, she
was going to know what Jianzhu looked like when he did lose everything he held dear.
Kyoshi hurled a Fire Fist, a move she knew nothing about. But whatever firebending she had in her had been used up. It came out as a normal punch, stopping short of his face.
Seeing her so desperate to harm him cracked his mask of serenity. He frowned an ugly frown and clenched his fingers. Two small discs of stone slammed into Kyoshi’s wrists from the left and right.
It happened so fast she didn’t have time to flinch. The stones shaped themselves around her hands and joined each other in front of her body, forming a set of thick shackles. They were as snug as a bone-doctor’s splint and as unbreakable as iron.
The bands of rock rose into the air, taking her with them. Her shoulders clicked painfully under her own weight, and she writhed like an insect caught on sticky paper, madly kicking her feet without purchase.
Jianzhu held her like that, a carcass for inspection, before slamming her back down. The stone shackles merged with the ground, and she struggled on all fours. He’d forced her into a full kowtow, a student’s posture of submission to their master.
“Had you the essentials of earthbending, you could free yourself,” Jianzhu said. “You’ve gone neglected long enough, Kyoshi. You’re weak.”
Her palms sunk deeper into the ground the more she tried to resist. There was no denying that he was right. She was weak, too weak to fight him the way she needed to. The distance between them was simply too great.
“So much wasted time,” Jianzhu said. “I could have taught you sooner, if only I hadn’t been distracted by that little swindler.”
That he wasn’t done being cruel to Yun was a final kick to her gut. It was incomprehensible. She couldn’t keep the tears from flowing down her face. “How could you say that?” she screamed. “He worshipped you, and you used him!”
“You think I used him?” Jianzhu’s voice grew dangerously quiet. “You think I profited from him somehow? Let me give you your first lesson. The same one I gave Yun.”
He stamped his foot, and a thick layer of soil clamped itself over Kyoshi’s mouth, a muzzle with no holes for her to breathe. She began to choke on her own element, her lungs clogging with grit.
Jianzhu swept his arm behind him in a wide, encompassing arc. “Out there is an entire nation crammed full of corrupt, incompetent people who will try to use the Avatar for their own purposes. Buffoons who call themselves ‘sages’ when all it takes in the Earth Kingdom is having the right connections and paying enough gold to plaster such a title on your brow.”
The map of Kyoshi’s vision curled in on itself. Her toes gouged furrows in the dirt, trying to push her body toward air. The pounding in her head threatened to burst her skull.
