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“Don’t touch me.” She smacked his hand away.
In the moment they made contact, it occurred to Kyoshi she wasn’t wearing her gauntlets in the Spirit World. Her hands were bare, and the red scars of lightning were nowhere to be seen, as if her memories of herself hadn’t incorporated the damage to her skin. No one had explained to her what would happen if her form touched Kuruk’s in the Spirit World.
There was a flash of light in her head. And when it subsided, Kyoshi found herself imprisoned once again, in the unbreakable cage of memory.
LOST FRIENDS
Kuruk opened his eyes. He was no longer in Yangchen’s meadow near Yaoping, facing Kelsang under the starry sky. He realized the source of his Air Nomad friend’s conflict with his elders when it came to what the Spirit World looked like. The realm beyond the physical was different things to different people at different times.
The Avatar was alone, his friend nowhere to be found in the hissing gray swampland. They’d lost each other somewhere in the journey. The water around Kuruk slithered with—not life, but something akin to it and all the more unsettling for the closeness. A scream and the beating of a drum were all he could hear, incessant, hysterical, and only when he braved the foul water and flailed his way to a solid shore did he find the source.
A spirit. Not one of Kelsang’s playful creatures but a monstrosity the size of a house, gripping the ground with arms like spider limbs and bashing its featureless head against the earth over and over again, causing itself horrible pain but never ceasing its assault, nor its shriek that came from no discernible mouth. Before he could swallow her horror and try to speak to it, a long tail wrapped around his neck and hoisted him into the air.
Their forms were crushed together. Revulsion seeped through his skin, a feeling of being tied to a corpse. The creature hurled him to the ground and he bounced like stuffed rags, blacking out from a pain to his ethereal form that did its best to mimic the physical. Before he lost consciousness, he caught a glimpse of what the spirit was attacking so ferociously with its skull. It was a pond of ice. The reflection on the silvery sheen was a hillside view of Yaoping Town.
Kuruk woke up with a gasp. Kelsang was still sitting across from him, his eyes closed, murmuring pleasantries like he was attending a tea ceremony. Kuruk got up, ignored the looks of surprise on Hei-Ran’s and Jianzhu’s faces, and stole his friend’s glider.
He rode his own furious squall of airbending to Yaoping. There was no time to explain to the others what he knew in his heart. That monstrous spirit had found a crack between the Spirit World and the world of humans. If it broke through, it was going to slaughter everyone it came across.
There was only one place where someone could see the town from above like Kuruk had, and that was the entrance to the salt mines in the neighboring mountain. He landed the glider and stood before the hole in the world, the gaping maw of darkness. He summoned his courage and ran inside. Better to cross through the rift and go on the attack in the Spirit World. He would have his bending that way. Kelsang had said so.
He found the enraged spirit and began to fight it. He didn’t know how long the battle raged. He only knew with grim certainty that the right Avatar had been chosen for this task. This foe was a beast, and he was a hunter. A hunter struck fast and true, and was merciful to their prey. A hunter approached their duty with solemn respect.
It took bringing all four elements to bear against the maddened spirit to bring it down, but bring it down he did. He was victorious. The town was saved. All would be well.
The next morning, his friends found the Avatar crawling blindly through the streets of Yaoping, foaming at the mouth.
It was days before he could speak. Destroying the spirit had cost him a piece of his own, somehow. He was bleeding inside, losing something more vital than blood, vitality leaching away in a manner no healer could fix. He was cold. Him, a child of the north who laughed at blizzards and swam laps around icebergs, was cold. Nothing
pumped through his veins.
He tried to tell Kelsang, Jianzhu, and Hei-Ran what happened and could not. The words stuck in his throat. He made up a story about a mischievous spirit tricking him into losing his faculties for a moment. Like what happened to wandering children in ominous folktales.
His friends left him to rest in the bed of an inn. They looked for a doctor. The doctor came by, said there was nothing wrong with his body, and told him to rest. He wanted to die.
One day, when everyone else was out, a friendly maid came by and gave him some distilled wine in defiance of the doctor’s orders. It burned his throat going down, the first sensation in days that cut through the chill. He drank more, and more, feeling the liquid press against the wound inside him like a red-hot iron to a severed limb.
When the maid smiled and gently laid a hand upon his chest, the Avatar clasped it like he was drowning.
He couldn’t remember the woman’s face. But he remembered those of his friends when they happened upon the tangle of limbs poking out from under the covers and the broken bottles littering the floor. Kelsang didn’t judge. Jianzhu didn’t care, being of the opinion that if the Avatar had a certain desire, the Avatar should slake it. Kuruk would only understand the difference in their reactions later in his life.
And Hei-Ran, though she would never admit it, lost a great deal of respect for him in that moment. The door to the Firebender’s heart, while not locked forever, had been firmly shut. There was always going to be a portion of her closed off to those who couldn’t master themselves.
But they bounced back. Their adventures went on. The Avatar’s friends were remarkable. He loved them so much. He loved their intelligence, their aspirations, their sheer nobility. They were simply good people. There was so much good this group could do for the world.
That was why, when the second spirit attack came, he went to face it alone again. His friends would insist on helping if they knew. But he would never, ever make them suffer what he had, not in a thousand lifetimes. They would be tainted by association with the deed he had to do.
A bad dream during a visit to the Fire Nation showed him a rift in a cenote supplying sacred water to a corner of Ma’inka Island. He ran to the cavern in the middle of the night and dove into the water, defiling it. Instead of dashing his head against the stone bottom, he swam and swam straight down until he found the mass of writhing beaks, snapping and licking their way to the surface. He stabbed with ice and he stabbed with stone, his eyes closed, the screams of terror his own. His former hunting partners of his youth would have scorned him for not performing a clean kill. He could not look upon the dying thing.
Once the deed was done, Kuruk dragged himself over the lip of the cenote, weeping water onto the ledge. The cold emptiness inside him had returned in force. He crawled like a baby until he reached the feet of a man who stared down at him in puzzlement and distaste.
The man was a Fire National from a clan or tribe he didn’t recognize. His name was Nyahitha, he said, and after receiving a premonition, the elders of the Bhanti had sent him here to give aid to the Avatar. It was clear he had trouble believing this bedraggled mess was Great Yangchen’s successor.
Nyahitha hauled Kuruk to a campsite in the jungle and performed some kind of diagnostic ritual, guiding heat along his energy pathways similar to the way a Northern healer would use the water within a patient’s body. He confirmed what Kuruk had already guessed, that coming into contact with these dark creatures and destroying them was causing damage to his own spirit. Nyahitha repaired what he could but admitted a permanent toll would be taken each time another of these battles was fought. Already, Kuruk was going to be out of the running for “Longest Era” in the Avatar history books.
Such terrible bedside manner for a doctor, Kuruk joked. Couldn’t he have broken the news a little more gently? Then he threw up blood all over the Fire Sage’s robes.
Nyahitha’s dire warnings cemented Kuruk’s decision not to tell his companions about the spirit incursions. They would follow him into any danger and give their lives to protect his. Staining the vibrant spirits of Hei-Ran and Kelsang and Jianzhu with this sickness would be a tragedy too horrible to consider. He was not going to see that happen, not even if it meant his own oblivion.
