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Kyoshi heard footsteps clattering from the other end of the gallery. Chancellor Dairin had rallied a contingent of guards, blocking off the far exit. From the way his eyes darted to the walls, his first priority was the safety of the paintings, not the well-being of anyone near them.
One of the soldiers stepped forward to launch a barrage of Fire Fists. “No!” Dairin screamed, hurling himself over the woman’s arm. “No flames!”
Yun stood trapped between the Avatar and the palace guard. “Stand down!” the squad captain shouted at him. “You’re surrounded and you have nothing to bend with!”
He glanced at Kyoshi one last time before his face layered itself back into the public figure, the charmer, the showman. He held his hands up for his new audience. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Yun beckoned with his fingers and on one side of the gallery, the Fire Avatars began to dissolve.
The crowns of their heads dripped down the walls, leaving clear wooden backings behind. The brilliant colors of the portraits bled away from their stencils like wax thrown onto a bonfire and pooled into indistinguishable clumps of reddish-brown that floated through the air into Yun’s waiting hands.
“The pigment in the paint,” Yun explained. “It’s usually made of ground-up rocks.”
“No!” Dairin screamed, his fears coming to light in a way he could never have imagined. “No no no!” The guards behind him froze, stricken with horror at what they were witnessing. This was an assault on something deeper than their own lives.
As if bolstered by his celebration, mighty Avatar Szeto resisted the longest. But he too fell, the paint of his hat running down his long face, merging with the dark colors of his shoulders, then his waist, then his knees. His great stone stamp flaked away into cinnabar dust, joining the growing mass of pigment hovering under Yun’s control. One side of the gallery was now completely blank. Instead of the wise faces of their Avatars, the portraits of the Fire Lords stared at an empty wall.
Yun held the finest work of the Fire Nation in a defiled, roiling blob above his head. And then, like a gleeful child permitted to break a jar, he hurled it on the floor. The pigment exploded in a storm of hardened pellets and sharp fragments and blinding mist.
Kyoshi managed to shield her eyes before flying shards embedded themselves in her forearms. A chunk of paint hit her so hard in the midsection that it knocked her on her back and snapped a patch of links in her chainmail, metal pouring out of her like spilled guts. Her windless gasps did nothing but coat her mouth with red dust.
By the time the blurriness in her vision cleared and the vapors from the paint explosion subsided, Yun was gone.
AFTERMATH
The voices around her merged into a whirlpool of indistinguishable noise.
Kyoshi crawled her way toward the moans of the wounded on the other side of the room, dragging trails through the dark powder coating the floor. The palace guards had been wearing armor, but mainly ceremonial pieces. She saw lacerated faces, the telltale clutching of broken ribs. And those were the lucky ones, like her. Some of them weren’t moving at all.
Chancellor Dairin had been completely unprotected. She found his body peppered with tiny holes, each one welling with blood. She tried to staunch his wounds with her hands but couldn’t cover them all. She had no water to even attempt healing him.
More guards poured in from every side, shouting in confusion. Yun must have already escaped their encirclement. Kyoshi heard more than a few wails of anguish from the hardened fighters at the damage to their culture and history.
“Out of the way!” she heard Atuat bellow. “Give me space!”
The Water Tribe doctor slid to her knees beside Kyoshi. Instead of pulling out water from the skin at her hip, she prodded the fallen guards around Kyoshi with her bare ha
nds, examining each one in turn for only the briefest of moments before moving on to the next.
“Why aren’t you helping them?” Kyoshi yelled, her hands still pressed to Dairin’s torso.
“There’s too many wounded. I have to triage who can be saved and who can’t.”
“The chancellor is dying!”
Atuat took one look at Dairin. “He’s already gone,” she said with such dismissive neutrality it made Kyoshi think she was staring at Tieguai the Assassin himself. “Don’t waste your time on him.”
Kyoshi had read the woman completely wrong. She’d assumed the great doctor would fight for every breath of every victim. Atuat’s friendship with Hei-Ran had made it seem like feeling emotions for those you healed was the key to their health. But here, she was clinically prioritizing, deciding fates quicker than she’d chosen what to drink at the party.
Kyoshi took her hands off Dairin’s motionless body, his robes sticking to her palms from the blood. She didn’t know what blessings Fire Nationals gave to the dead. She hoped her whispered apology to the poor man would do.
Atuat unslung her water skin and tossed it at her. “If you know any healing, do what you can. For the living.” The doctor placed her hands over the chest of the unconscious guard she was examining. The air around them went cold, cold enough that Kyoshi’s flesh prickled. “What are you doing?” Kyoshi asked, fighting off a shiver.
“Lowering his temperature.” Atuat’s temples pulsed in concentration. “It slows every process of the body down, including death. But if I don’t stop at the exact right time, his fluids will turn to ice and destroy his own organs from the inside out.” After a few chilling sweeps of her hands, she shifted over to the next guard and began the process anew.
“I’ve never heard of such a technique,” Kyoshi said. Freezing liquids into solids was a basic skill of waterbending. Even she could do it by now. But she’d never considered the subtleties that lay in between water and ice, nor the blurring lines between the elements inside and outside of a person’s body.
“That’s because it requires too much raw power for most benders. And not damaging anyone with such power takes too much control. Misuse the technique, apply force in the slightest excess, and it kills. So perhaps you should shut up and let me focus?”
