The robes that wrapped around my body this morning weren't the loose, grimy folds of training or meditation. These robes were ceremonial robes—the robes of the Fire Lord. Deep crimson, edged with black, and heavy with embroidery. The phoenix threads wrapped around my shoulders, gold woven so tightly into silk they caught the light like flashes of electricity before the storm. They chafed uncomfortably under my arms. Not because of ill-sewn stitches, but because they still felt foreign. But still, I wore them. Not for symbolism. But because today wasn't question day. Today was answer day.
The sun blazed down upon them when they brought him out. Wrist cuffed, knee-scraped from journeying, Earth Kingdom robes—tattered pale green with fraying edges, stained reddened now at the cuffs. His eyes were sunken, lips dry, but he stood with his back held straight. For that, there's respect. Stupidity can masquerade quite effectively as courage when you are sufficiently removed from consequence.
The platform of execution stood, built just hours before. Red streamers streamed in the sulfurous wind. Behind the ridge, Yudai Province troops and highland firebenders stood in neat ranks, formation unblemished. This they needed. That, Daisuke had explained, was "The court cannot dine upon doubt indefinitely, my Lord. Offer them something with bone."
Baishi stood right behind me, his hands clasped together, unchanging. He hadn't uttered anything since morning.
The ceremony began. Low chanting of the Fire Sage made the air throb. Barely could I see. My gaze was locked upon the man standing before them. Earth Kingdom spy. That was the choice. No trial. There wasn't any need. When the Fire Sage died, and the Earthworks discovered excavation beneath our aquifers with entries in their record with this man's signature—well, there is eloquence in silence at such times. The whisper of poison. The path in ash.
They didn't hiss, neither did they cheer. They repressed breath, shallow and expectant.
I stepped outside.
"I speak," I declared, my voice ringing out over the volcanic gale, "I, Fire Lord Gonryu. Voice of flame. Defender of the Red Sky. Chosen of the throne."
The soldier shoved the captive ahead of him onto the ground. He would not kneel. I saw him grinding his jaw. A stubborn one. Or just someone who had little left.
"You trespassed where you didn't belong," I declared, my tone calm. No need. "You played your part in the murder of the Sage. You brought poison to soil where you didn't have permission to tread."
He spat, but not upon me, upon the rock. It splattered upon hitting the hot ground.
I gazed down at him, not with anger. With comprehension. For I recognized the flavor of desperation.
"I do it, not out of revenge," I told him. "And not out of appearances' sake."
He looked up, and at last he spoke. His voice cracked but remained whole. "Then why?"
I edged nearer, permitting the silk to slide over the rock.
"Because then," I explained, "the flame does not stay in my hands."
My right hand lifted.
It would not shake.
I sensed the storm's lightning before it revealed itself. It solidified out of the backbone, wrapping around the heart like the storm's snake. My breathing relaxed. My eyes closed. The world contracted into a wire of wrath, of right, of righteous wrath—and then I let go.
The bolt was silent.
No thunderstorm. No dramatics. A white hot flash shattered the sky with one sweep and dissipated into burnt stillness where one man fell to the ground.
No scream. His heart sank prior to him managing to get anything past the constriction in his throat. The body just hung there for one further breath, and then fell inward, clouding the air with steamy wisps of smoke.
There was freshness in the air. Freshness as crisp as only lightning is. No decay, no ash—but just ozone, and an end.
The air picked up.
I gazed out into the crowd.
No word.
They didn't require them.
Row after row, they bowed, their slow tide of black and crimson robes dipping towards burnt earth.
And yet, still, I remained. Without pride. Without regret. Simply with the weight of the deeds done. Of the tasks that remain, at times, when you sit on the throne that breathes flame.
Baishi accompanied me as we both descended from the platform.
"He didn't say anything," Baishi whispered.
"Words would have made it worse," I replied.
Baishi looked away. "Did it help?"
I didn't reply. Not at first. We trudged on, boots sinking into loose grit, topping the basalt stairs under the execution gallows. The air smelled of burnt rock, and my wrist still throbbed where the lightning burst out of my fingertips—an empty ache that encapsuled the bone, like trailing aftertastes of an experience too tangible to recall. There was no flame in me anymore. Still. The type of stillness that comes after you have screamed in a chasm and the echoes have dissipated.
"It suited them," I concluded at last, nodding my head towards the ridge upon which sat the nobles' conclave. Their armor still reflected the sunlight with the luster of beetle-shells, and they looked like an army of chesspieces someone had put in place. "And that sufficed for the time being."
Baishi grunted. "And you?"
"I didn't burn the wrong thing," I answered.
"That's not quite the same as helping," he replied, with the twinkle in his eye.
We strolled beneath the colonnade along the west side of the palace. The view opened out from this point: Crescent Valley below in ripples of reddish rock and brittle, crackling grasses, and beyond that the mountain range's jagged teeth cutting into Earth Kingdom soil like ink etched too harshly. Down there, the aquifers were—cut off and drained by the ones who'd approached too close, excavated too far. The earth's very blood drained with foreign hands.
The cacophony. Whistling.
Not from the wind.
From above.
I kept my back rigid. Baishi halted one step behind.
It returned, but higher, lilting, with an undercurrent of air pulled out through reed flute. Then, I felt the shift in the air. Sudden, warm. Borne on wings.
The sky above opened.
The bison came among the clouds with no fanfare. No introduction. No ceremony. Just the deliberate downward gait of an old-world creature who didn't have anything to prove. Its coat was sandstone or ash-colored, with white stripes, and over the great head, it carried two curved horns adorned with prayer beads. Sea-blue embroidery draped over the back of it—with curling script around the hem. I didn't need to read it. It was Yangchen's sigil. The one over the scroll. Everyone could see it the way one can see the storm behind the sunlight.
"She didn't waste time," complained Baishi.
"Or patience," I replied.
The bison landed with no noise that I could hear—nothing but the softness of dust blowing into the air, blowing away, as there seemed to be nothing there to disturb. The animal slowly breathed out through the nose, the warm air stroking the hem of my robe. On the animal's back, sat the individual that I waited for—only not as expected.
She fell down in one smooth motion. Barefoot. Orange-cream robes cinched tight against the tempest. Her tattoos glistening with sweat—a black bob of her that circled her shoulders and encircled her forehead, her arrows flashing against white skin. She was young. Not a child, but close enough. No older than I had been when I first heard the name Gonryu in a university lecture hall. Seventeen, or eighteen, though there was none of the doubt of youth in her demeanor. Simply quiet authority.
She curtsied. She intertwined her fingers and exhaled through the nose.
"Fire Lord Gonryu," she declared, her voice light, though not delicate. "I am Sister Tseya of the Western Air Temple. I have arrived as Avatar Yangchen's eyes."
I didn't bow. For, though my head would have known better, my body understood the cost of that, standing before my court. And she didn't seem to expect it.
"I didn't expect the Western Temple to get involved in politics," I stated.
She smiled kindly. "We don't. Politically, we do not. In balance, we do."
Baishi coughed. "I suppose it would just depend upon how one defines politics."
Tseya stared at him in confusion. "Are you the shadow, or the tongue?"
He looked momentarily annoyed. "I'm the advisor."
"Then both," she answered with the faintest of smiles.
I stepped forward, relaxing the tension. "You're here to observe?"
"I came here to understand," she corrected. "To see with my own eyes, which Yangchen is unable to do in her sanctuary. There are rumors in large numbers. They are entwining."
"And you expect them to unentwin because you flew in on a sky bison?"
"I expect there to be clarity," she declared. "Clarity tends to emerge out of the ashes."
Ow, that stung. I motioned to the courtyard behind me.
"You can start with what's remaining of the spy."
"I already saw him," she answered, nodding. "He didn't have poison in his mouth. No fear in his gaze. He knew he had done it."
The manner in which she spoke caught my attention.
"You seem to have seen it all before."
"I have seen death," she stated, and more softly, "I have seen innocent people killed. Your bolt of lightning struck home. I felt it from the clouds."
I folded my arms. "Was that your test? Whether or not I hit him clean?"
"No," she answered. "The question is, would you have done it if there wasn't anyone there to see it?"
The silence was heavy after that.
Baishi moved beside him, seeming to respond. But I held him back with my hand.
"No," I answered. "Let her talk."
Tseya bent her head, not in submission, but in acceptance. "Yangchen is accustomed to handling fire. She understands how quickly it spills from the cup when poured in anger."
"I didn't kill him out of anger," I replied flatly.
"Then prove it," she replied. "Not to me. To Crescent Valley."
I blinked. "Crescent Valley is a borderland. It's half charred rock. The other half is infested with dead sages."
"That's why it listens," she answered. "Dead earth listens differently than living earth."
I didn't like the rhythm of her speech. It reminded me of the Sages of the Fire—cryptic, circular, moralizing riddles to judgement. Still, I nodded.
"You want the tour?"
"I would like to walk," she replied. "With you."
I raised an eyebrow. "Alone?"
"No Banners," she declared. "No guards. No Baishi."
Baishi laughed, "You will get lost."
She looked him straight in the eye. "I brought a bison,"
I looked at him. Then at her. Then out beyond the edge of the valley, where the dust began to rise with the stirring of the wind.
"Alright," I replied. "But you walk at my pace."
Tseya's gaze locked with my own—bright, & unreadable.
"I will do my best."
**
We didn't communicate at first. Wind made talk simply an annoyance, and I wasn't about to fill silence with noise. The ridge-top path down into Crescent Valley curved through seams of aged firestone and sun-cured slopes with dry, fissured surface over decades of sun, each step creaking with rust-colored dust. She trailed behind, neither lagging, neither stumbling. No echo of her boots. She'd walked in the very weightless precision that I'd grown accustomed to in birds too intelligent for cages.
I didn't lead her down the soft slope. That would have been to the outposts that were no longer there or the broken aqueducts where Fire Sages would offer libation during harvest festivals. No, I led her along the burnt side, along the fractured rocks where sulfur accumulated in thin breaths, where the ground still retained sparks of lightning from battles so distant they would have passed out of memory of anyone who didn't have their ashes stored in their head.
"You forgot water," I declared at last.
"You didn't ask," she answered.
It almost made me smile.
We climbed onto a branch of rock where the plateau curled over like an ancient vertebral column. I stood there, let my vision sweep over the blackened plain below where the illusory path of the Earth Kingdom started cutting into the horizon. The village was now a remote outpost, an island of rock and flame over the ridge.
"Do you see that?"
"Yes."
"What does this inform you?"
She stopped speaking for an instant. Then: "They're not scared. Whoever is building that—he's not building that to provoke you. He's building that because he already considers himself owner of the land."
I nodded. "That's good."
She glanced at me with her head slanted. "But he doesn't,"
"No," I answered. "He doesn't."
I pulled her further into the folds of the valley. The sun beat unrelentingly down upon us the further we went—towards the furnace-center of this place. It didn't dry like salt, or crisp like sand. It condensed. Heat with substance. You couldn't breathe too fast, or it stole the air back.
We reached a depression in the floor of the valley where the earth was black, soft,—where water would collect before the aquifers became ruptured. The plant growth here died in a strange manner. Curled in upon themselves as though they were in fear. Tseya crouched to survey one, sweeping away from the fossilized stem.
"You're don't sound like a warlord,"
"I'm not one."
"No," she agreed. "But you're acting like someone preparing to go to war."
I turned my head towards her. "Wouldn't you?"
She lifted an eyebrow. "I'm an air nomad."
"That's not an answer."
She stood upright, gazing at me. "No. It is a decision."
I breathed slowly in through my nose. "You think I want war?"
"I think that you know how to use fear. That does not mean that you want War." She gestured over her shoulder, to the distant peak where the execution had happened. "You spoke eloquently today. But I have yet to decide if it was meant for the Earth Kingdom... or your own country."
"They are identical."
"No," she affirmed, certain now. "They're not. One looks with the eyes. The other with memory."
That stung more than I would admit. I turned away, slumped against a circle of stones half-buried in soil. A hearth, I suspected. Charred around the edges. It hadn't seen flames in many, many seasons.
"Used to be a Fire Sage watchpost," I explained to her. "Stored stories here. Records. The kind that do not make it onto the council scrolls."
She sat next to me. Said nothing.
"They spoke of this glen in terms of singing," I breathed. "Where the sun hit the rock at the right angle, the winds slicing through it like a flute. One could feel the whole mountain breathe."
Tseya closed her eyes for an instant. The wind whizzed past. "It still sings," she said. "But not for you."
I looked at her. Not because I was surprised—only because I was struck. Such candor didn't exist in the palace. Outside here, though, it was all that mattered.
"You speak like you have lived for more than nineteen years," I answered.
'I've listened to people who have," she answered.
"And what do they say about people like me."
She rose, dusting her robes. "The flames can cleanse, or can devour. But they always leave ashes, one way or the other."
I stood up, slowly. The winds swirled, and momentarily the scent of dust from the Earthworks wafted my direction.
"I don't want this land to end in ash," I said to her.
"I believe you," she half-whispered, barely audible. "But belief's not why I've come here."
"Then why?"
"To see if the Fire Lord was a man trying to hold a crown… or if he was the crown pretending to be a man."
We just stood there for a while. The valley fell silent again, that deep, dry silence that would somehow make even thought seem noisy. I went back the way that we had came through. And this time, I didn't go ahead.
She walked with me.
Neither behind.
Nor in front.
Together.