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She was sitting in a green field that rolled gently into the distance. On one side of the horizon was a row of trees that looked placed by hand, applied to the top of the hills like Kyoshi’s eyebrow lin
er when she wore her makeup. Opposite the forest was a tall peak jutting high into the air after a few false starts. Lines of clouds converged to a point behind it, as if the mountain were a sun emitting beams of light.
Her predecessor in the Avatar cycle was dressed more casually than the one time he’d fully appeared before her. Kuruk was without his furs and wore only a light blue Water Tribe summer tunic. His arms and neck were still adorned with the sharp teeth and claws of beasts, strung through by leather thongs.
He made a crooked little half smile that tugged one side of his face higher. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the longest time. But I needed your help to do it. An Avatar talking to their past lives requires true willingness from both ends.”
His message to her in the Southern Air Temple. Need your help. He hadn’t been asking for a favor from beyond the grave. He needed her help in order to communicate properly. Of all the stupid, unclear ways for him to put it. “What did you want to talk about?”
“The same thing as you. Your boy. Him and Father Glowworm. I can guide you to what you seek. It’s why you’re here now, isn’t it?”
So she hadn’t been wrong in going to North Chung-Ling to get Kuruk’s help. Congratulations to her. Vindication felt about as good as drowning.
She should have just kept her mouth shut and taken whatever assistance Kuruk was offering. But there was an unsettling calmness to their conversation. It was happening in complete silence.
Something was off. “This is the Spirit World, isn’t it?” she asked. “Where are the spirits?” The two of them were the only beings sitting in the vast field. Kyoshi had little to base her expectations on, but unless the plants and rocks themselves were alive, this place was as devoid of life as the dried patches of the Si Wong Desert.
Kuruk winced. “Most spirits tend to give me a wide berth.”
“Why?”
He didn’t want to say. But he was talking to himself. Lying was pointless. “Because I used to hunt them.”
Kyoshi rubbed her face, feeling the cracks and lines with her fingers. Lao Ge had mentioned it once. Kuruk, the greatest hunter that ever walked the Four Nations. The trophies that had decorated his body the first time he manifested before her in his full regalia. If slaying beasts in the physical world no longer posed a challenge, then it wasn’t so far-fetched that a reckless, thrill-seeking adventurer like Kuruk would turn his eye toward spirits. Being the Avatar would have given him the means.
“You,” she said. It was hard to speak through the grin ripping her mouth apart and difficult to see through the tears streaming down her face. “You are something else.” Letting her feelings run loose was like putting boiled herbs to a burn. It was necessary and painful and it had been postponed long enough.
Kuruk swallowed, unable to meet her gaze. “It’s not what you think. Yangchen—”
“Don’t you dare!” Kyoshi giggled. Her tears flew down her own throat as she gasped. “Don’t you dare bring her into this. You’re not worthy of her legacy. Your name belongs in the gutter with mine.”
Here she was, in the middle of the most sacred act an Avatar could perform. Except she was Kyoshi, and Kuruk was Kuruk. Had there ever been a worse duo in history, disaster followed by catastrophe?
The hilarity of her situation snuffed itself out like a candle with a glass placed over it. A dead, airless feeling followed. “This isn’t fair,” she said. “None of this is fair.”
The earth around her began to ripple. She heard a flitting, flipping sound like the pages of a thick book being swiped. Starting from the horizon, a crack in the grass began to zigzag and spiderweb toward them. Pieces of the terrain itself started falling into the rift, making it clear that she and Kuruk stood not on solid ground but a fragile, thin surface.
This wasn’t bending. It was a reflection of the wounds she’d suffered. Here in the Spirit World, her pain had substance.
“I hate you!” she screamed at Kuruk. The tear in the ground revealed a shade of color underneath that Kyoshi could not explain in the language of the Four Nations. It was the tint of the abyss, the background swirl of chaos. If she fell into it, there would be no coming back. “You had everything handed to you! Yangchen gave her legacy to you, and you squandered it! You left me a world full of nothing but suffering and misery!”
The collapse picked up speed, racing toward her and her past life, threatening to drop them both into a twisted new existence. The landslide consumed the trees, the grass, the sky, abrading reality, shrinking her mind. Nothingness, in an onrushing wave.
Kuruk gazed at the annihilation coming for them both. And in response, he gave her a look of complete surrender. “You have every right,” he said gently.
At the very last second, the crumbling halted at the edge of their feet.
Did she?
No, she thought. She didn’t.
She didn’t have the right to lose herself in her rage and let it take her to oblivion. No matter what she’d been through. She wouldn’t allow herself to become a human scar, a compendium of personal loss. She had the obligation to be more than the sum of her grievances with the world.
Gradually, shard by shard, the surfaces and planes of the Spirit World floated back into place, raised from the chasm they had fallen into, affixing themselves to each other like a plate being mended with gilded lacquer. Whether it was her doing, or the work of forces beyond her control, she wasn’t sure.
Either way, it was slow going. Rebuilding always took longer than destruction, cleaning a mess more time than making it. Kuruk watched the landscape repair itself, neutrality still lingering in his expression despite the fact he’d nearly taken a plunge into the terrifying beyond with Kyoshi.
“You came here for answers,” he said to her, holding out his hand. “I have to show you something.”
