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“No, we’re not doing incense.” Nyahitha’s approach seemed to forgo as many spiritual trappings as possible. He’d left behind his ridiculous fake Fire Sage outfit and wore a simple cotton robe, notably devoid of any clan symbols.
“You know, I just thought of something,” Kyoshi said as he sat down across from her. “If it doesn’t work out with Kuruk, you could guide me to Yangchen. She mediated between humans and spirits.”
Nyahitha let out a long hiss through his teeth. “I . . . don’t think Yangchen will be as much help as you think.”
“That’s nonsense. Yangchen was the perfect Avatar.” Or at least better than Kuruk in every way possible. “She’d be able to help me somehow.”
“If you reached her, maybe. Some sages, including me, believe you have to go down the chain of your past lives in reverse order if you want to communicate with them. You can’t talk to Yangchen or the older Avatars before you manage to connect with Kuruk.”
“Great!” Kyoshi said, throwing up her hands and breaking her meditative posture. “So on top of everything else, Kuruk’s a wall keeping me from my full potential!”
“He’s not a—I swear, I would have known you were his reincarnation from the start and saved the Earth Kingdom a lot of trouble had they brought you before me! You two are exactly alike!”
Kyoshi sputtered, indignant to her very core. How dare—the nerve of him to insinuate such a—
Nyahitha quickly constructed a list on his fingers. “You both idolize Yangchen to a fault, you’re both stubborn as rocks when it comes to what you want, and neither of you have any control over your emotions! Mark my words, you’re going to botch up bad someday because of your personal feelings, just like he did!”
“I’m glad you could tell all of that from the two conversations we had!” Kyoshi had thought the days of mystical tutors unilaterally declaring who she really was inside were over, but apparently not. “Now can we get down to business?”
Nyahitha wiped his mouth and calmed himself into a state more becoming of an Avatar’s spiritual guide. “There’s a number of ways Kuruk might talk to us,” he explained. “The most straightforward is if you were to simply have a vision of him. This method tends to be successful in locations with meaning for the past Avatars. This spot right here was where Kuruk would meditate and recover from his own spiritual journeys.”
A vision in an important location to the Water Avatar. That could explain his appearance in the Southern Air Temple. And, she thought with some displeasure, the wreckage he’d made of Yangchen’s island.
“The downside is that any messages you get from a vision tend to be one-way only,” Nyahitha said. “Not as useful if you have to ask him questions. Another way to have more of a conversation is if he took over your body and spoke to me in person. I would have to relay whatever you want to ask him.”
Kyoshi frowned. She was distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of being possessed by someone else. Kuruk was one of the last people she wanted controlling her body, even if he was her own past life.
Nyahitha noticed her reluctance. “If you don’t like that, the final method, which is the most difficult and least likely to happen after one session of practice, is if you managed to meditate your way into the Spirit World. There, you could talk to him face-to-face. This is the level of communing that most people associate with the Avatar’s abilities. It’s the m
ost efficient and clear way to draw on the wisdom of previous generations.”
He paused.
“But?” Kyoshi asked.
“Kuruk’s spirit isn’t necessarily going to be there to greet you. And your body is rendered physically helpless while your spirit is on the other side. And sometimes you don’t remember anything you learned once you come back to the physical world.”
Maybe she was better off inhaling the gas inside the dirty tent. “Communing doesn’t sound like the great and useful power it’s described to be.”
“Nothing is useful until you practice it.” Nyahitha brought his hands together, fingers to fingers, palm to palm. After a deep breath he drew them apart, creating a small, flickering fire in the empty space. It hovered in the air, the size and gentleness of a candle flame.
His voice lost its cantankerous edge. “Focus your attention on this single flame,” he said. “It is one flame, and it is many. It changes with every moment.”
Kyoshi relaxed into the shape of her guide’s words. “No fire is ever the same fire,” Nyahitha said. “No Avatar is ever the same person. You and the flame change with every moment, every generation. You are one flame, and you are many.”
The sounds pouring forth from Nyahitha turned into echoes of themselves, an overtone, a reverberation. They lost their meaning and found their weight. “One and many. You are the flame. One out of many, one and the many.”
The clouds picked up speed. The trees whispered in her ears. The stars winked, yawned, and turned in for the night. Nyahitha’s voice became her own. She was repeating after him unbidden, and crowds of her selves shouted back in response, a swearing-in ceremony where she was the leader and follower at once.
And then.
THE MESSAGE
The ice of Agna Qel’a was so clear and pure Kyoshi instinctively rubbed her arms to warm them. Despite the sudden shift, the yanking of her mind across the world, she knew exactly where she was and what she was looking at. She had the certainty of being here before.
Kuruk sat at a great feast, long tables of ice laid out with raw and roasted meats, choice slivers of fish. To him and the rest of his kinsmen, the glacial hall was warm and bright as could be with the heat from dozens of blubber lamps, and they laughed at the shivering foreign dignitaries in red furs and green coats who tried to raise their cups with their thick mittens for toasts. Over the course of the night he pried at his elders, asking them, How did you know? What were the signs? He hadn’t ever bent the other elements until they told him to try, confident in his success. Weeks ago, he’d been astonished when the glowing crystal they gave him rose into the air under his command.
The sages of the Northern Water Tribe only gave him mischievous grins in response and assured him the unrevealed procedure had gone flawlessly, an auspicious sign for his era. Yangchen’s successor would be worthy of her legacy and her peace would continue for a hundred generations. Kuruk gave up, smiled, and nodded. Though tonight was meant to be a celebration, everyone else’s absolute certainty in him kept the joy from fully reaching his heart.
