Avatar The Last Airbender: The Shadow of Kyoshi Read online

  “What does it say?” Jinpa asked.

  “It’s an invitation to visit the Fire Nation.” A debut on the world stage. She swallowed the nervousness that had suddenly clumped in her throat.

  Jinpa saw her hesitation and clasped his hands together, beseeching. “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Avatar. The Four Nations aren’t going to let you remain out of the public eye forever. Please don’t tell me you’d snub the Fire Lord, of all people.”

  Kyoshi mulled it over. She doubted the ruler of the Fire Nation would waste her time with a frivolous request for help. And her frustrations with her own country were threatening to push her past her breaking point. A change of scenery might be called for.

  “And it’s a holiday festival,” Jinpa added. “You might even have fun. You are allowed to enjoy yourself from time to time, you know.”

  Leave it to an Air Nomad to fall back on fun as the last argument. “You can write back and tell the Fire Lord I am honored to accept his invitation,” she said. “We’ll start planning the trip tomorrow. I don’t think I can handle any more business for today.”

  Jinpa bowed solemnly, hiding his satisfaction that finally the Avatar was stepping up to her responsibilities. “No one needs their rest more than the Avatar.” He left the room for the office they’d set up down the hall.

  Alone, Kyoshi stared at the cream-colored paper in silence. She hadn’t mentioned to Jinpa the portion of the letter that tipped the scales in favor of the visit.

  It was a very specific piece of news at the end of the Fire Lord’s message. The former Headmistress of the Royal Academy had returned home after a long convalescence in Agna Qel’a, the capital of the Northern Water Tribe. So had her daughter. Perhaps the Avatar would like to see them, given the three had been acquaintances in Yokoya? They certainly wished to see her.

  Acquaintances. Kyoshi didn’t know it was possible to feel such relief and distress at once. She wasn’t in the Fire Nation yet and already she could picture who was waiting for her, the walking blaze of pure heat and confrontation. In the darkness of her exhaustion, a point of shining light beckoned.

  Rangi.

  Kyoshi carefully folded the paper and tucked it into her robes, close to her thumping heart. Despite her secretary’s wishes, she was not going to be getting much sleep tonight.

  PAST LIVES

  Jinpa’s bison Yingyong had only five feet instead of the usual six. As a calf he’d been attacked by a predator and lost his left forelimb. As an adult, the injury caused him to list slightly to the side when he was flying, which required Jinpa to give a gentle tug with the reins in the opposite direction every so often to maintain a straight course through the air.

  Kyoshi had gotten used to traveling in Yingyong’s arcs. Kelsang’s bison Pengpeng was busy raising calves of her own at the Southern Temple in a well-deserved retirement, and Kyoshi had never expected their relationship to be permanent. Pengpeng might have been willing to put up with her, may have even liked her, but only a single Air Nomad could truly partner with one of the great beasts for life.

  She and Jinpa flew a little lower than usual on their way to the Fire Nation, close to the green waters of the Mo Ce Sea, where the air was warm and easy to breathe. The beautiful weather allowed it. Scoops of clouds drifted overhead in the blue sky, providing little pockets of shade for them to dip between.

  If Kyoshi missed anything from those days after she fled Yokoya on Pengpeng’s back, it was these little in-between moments of travel. Most people would have assumed that floating on a bison with the breeze against her face was calming, but for Kyoshi, the upside was very different. Taking to the air gave her the assurance that for once, by default, she was doing the best she could. There weren’t any faster ways to get from one point to another than a sky bison. She had no other options to fret over.

  An unsecured bag began to slide from one edge of the saddle to the other. Jinpa gave the reins another little yank, and Yingyong righted himself. Kyoshi caught the sack and tucked it under a lashing. “Is he okay?” she asked. “Does he need to rest?”

  “Nah, he’s fine,” Jinpa said. “Lazy boy got distracted by a school of winged eels. Didn’t you, boy? Who’s a lazy, distracted boy with a poor attention span?” He gave Yingyong an affectionate scratch behind the ear. “But if you do want to stop, there’s an opportunity up ahead with an interesting piece of history. A small island where it’s said that Avatar Yangchen performed her first act of waterbending. Want to see it?”

  She did, honestly. Kyoshi held an intense curiosity about one of the greatest Avatars in history, her predecessor from two generations ago. Yangchen was the woman who’d done everything right. She was the Avatar whom, to this day, was still invoked by people for protection and luck. Kyoshi often wished she understood Yangchen’s leadership like a real scholar. She’d been making do with her commoner’s knowledge of the blessed Air Avatar who’d successfully kept the world in balance and harmony.

  She would study Yangchen’s work more the next time she returned to Yokoya. There had to be useful materials in the mansion’s great libraries. Right now, though, she was in a hurry. “We don’t need to land. I’ll take a look from above.”

  “Of course, Avatar. I’ll let you know when it comes up.”

  Kyoshi settled back into her seat. The letter under her jacket made a slight rasp against the fabric and a loud scrape against her nerves.

  She hadn’t communicated with Rangi in a long time. Messenger hawks had trouble withstanding the extreme cold of the north, where her mother Hei-Ran had been recovering. As a new Avatar, Kyoshi was always on the move. The mansion was as far away from the Northern Water Tribe as a point in the Earth Kingdom could be. It seemed like the world had conspired to keep them apart and mute their voices.

  She wanted to think about something else. Or talk to someone else. She still found it hard to make casual conversation with Jinpa, and a bison saddle was a large, empty seat for one person. She was more accustomed to fighting for space with at least four other people, jostling shoulders, complaining about whose breath stank from eating too much pungent food.

  After a while she felt Yingyong turning into another roll, sharper this time. “So . . . where’s this island?” she asked Jinpa as she balanced herself against the rail. The sea was a flat sheet with nowhere to hide for a landmass.

  Jinpa leaned into the circle and examined the water. “Hmm.

  Everything I’ve read said it should be around here. I don’t see anything but that dark patch under the surface.”

  “Look, if we can’t find it, we can just go. It’s not important—”

  KYOSHI.

  She screamed as a bolt of pain drove into her skull from temple to temple. It seized her by the neck and scoured her vision into a blur. Her hands went limp and lost their grip on the saddle. Kyoshi keeled over the edge and fell off the bison, her ears filled with the sound of her own name.

  She hurt the entire way down. A sharpness like daggers bounced from one side of her head to the other. It found an outlet down her spine where it could ransack her body. She was barely aware of how fast and far she was plummeting.

  KYOSHI.

  A man with a deep voice called to her, his words shredded by the wind speeding past her ears. It wasn’t Jinpa.

  KYOSHI.

  The shock of cold salt water as she hit the ocean was a relief from the heated agony. She lost her sense of up and down. Her limbs drifted weightlessly. When she opened her eyes, there was no sting.

  Out of the endless blue, a figure drifted in front of her, mirroring her slackness in the water, as much of a prisoner as she. The shape of it was hazy, an ink painting dipped in a river, but she knew who the apparition clad in Water Tribe furs was.

  Avatar Kuruk.

  —KYOSHI—NEED YOUR HELP TO—

  The voice of Kyoshi’s immediate predecessor in the Avatar cycle was much louder in the water, his native-born element. It thundered between her ears.

  —KYOSHI—YOU MUST—I CAN’T—IT CAN PASS—

  A hand plunged through Kuruk’s body, dissolving it into the surrounding liquid like thin syrup. It grabbed Kyoshi’s lapels and tugged her toward the surface. The salt water, which hadn’t bothered her until now, dug into her eyes with a vengeance. Forgetting she was still below the surface, she gasped for air and got her throat splashed for her troubles. If Kuruk’s spell could have kept her from drowning indefinitely, it was broken now.

  Jinpa kicked toward the rippling sunlight, holding tightly to her with one hand. At first Kyoshi tried to help him by swimming upward herself. It took her an embarrassingly long time floundering like that to remember she was a Waterbender surrounded by water. A quick raise of her arms and a rolling bubble carried her and Jinpa to the surface.

  They burst into the air and emptied the contents of their lungs. Kyoshi hacked and coughed until she could breathe once more. Yingyong floated in the water nearby, growling in worry.

  “Are you all right!?” Jinpa sputtered. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Kyoshi said. The headache had mostly dissipated into the ocean. “I just lost my balance and fell.”

  “Just fell?” Jinpa was as visibly upset with her as an Airbender could be. He was raising his voice. He was frowning at her.

  “It was Kuruk.” Kyoshi squeezed the sides of her head to dull the lingering throb. Her bending spared them the need to tread. “He was trying to tell me something.”

  “Avatar Kuruk!? You . . . you communed with Avatar Kuruk? You looked like you were having a fit!”

  “It’s usually not this bad. It wasn’t so painful the last couple of times.”

  Jinpa’s jaw threatened to unhinge and fall into the ocean. “These episodes have happened before and you haven’t tol
d me? Kyoshi, an Avatar communing with their past selves is supposed to be a hallowed experience, not a life-threatening seizure!”

  Kyoshi grimaced. She knew. She knew exactly how lacking her spiritual connections were. She’d found out through trial and error.

  The Water Tribe Avatar had manifested before her in his complete form exactly once in the Southern Air Temple, where he had the gall to ask her for help before dissipating just as quickly. She’d been left in a lurch, not knowing what to do with such a useless vision.

  But the experience did remind her she had access to a trove of worldly advice in the form of her past lives. A vast wealth of experience and wisdom lay at her fingertips, if she could only master her own spirit.

  Kyoshi had tried reaching out to previous generations of the cycle by meditating in the sacred places of the Southern Air Temple, wayside shrines of the Earth Kingdom dedicated to the great Avatars like Yangchen and Salai, spots of natural beauty atop mountains and next to flowing rivers. She wasn’t expecting it to be easy. She’d read that spiritualists had taken lifetimes to gain the skills of meditation, trance, and enlightenment. Kyoshi had fully prepared herself to be greeted by the silence of failure when she tried to commune with her past selves.

  What she wasn’t ready for, though, was getting jagged fragments of Kuruk.

  And only of Kuruk.

  Every . . . single . . . time.

  The results of her meditations were always the same. She would reach inwardly, attempt to harmonize with her past, and be met by the blotchy form of the Water Avatar spitting garbled nonsense. It was as reliable as a dropped stone hitting the bottom of a well. She tried deciphering his mysterious request, but whatever connection they shared wasn’t strong enough for her to figure it out.

  And the sessions often hurt in a teeth-rattling, convulsive way. That was why she’d never asked a sage who’d been to the Spirit World to guide her in meditation. She feared the same reaction as Jinpa’s if anyone saw her fail so loudly and painfully. An Avatar who struggled to reach her past lives was one thing, but an Avatar who was violently rejected and roughed up by the process like a thief caught sneaking into the wrong house was another. Kyoshi didn’t need her legitimacy doubted more than it already was.

  Eventually she’d stopped trying to commune. She hadn’t been the greatest admirer of Kuruk anyway, and if he was the only past life out of a thousand generations willing to make contact with her, then she could do without. But sometimes her predecessor forced the issue and appeared unbidden.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said to Jinpa. “Occasionally, I’ll have a vision of Kuruk, or hear his voice. I can never tell what he’s trying to say.”

  Jinpa couldn’t believe she was talking about it like a bad knee aching before it rained. “Kyoshi,” he said, summoning the tranquility of his ancestors to keep from breaking down and weeping at her ineptness. “If an Avatar of the past has a message for you, it’s usually of the utmost importance.”

  “Fine!” she yelled. “The first chance we get, we’ll find a great enlightened master and I’ll learn how to talk to Kuruk! Now can we please get back to our other top-priority mission? Or are you somehow going to fix everything that’s wrong with me all at once?”

  The look of hurt and disappointment on the monk’s face confirmed it. Kyoshi might have been a bad Avatar, but she was also a bad master to her secretary, one who not only yelled, but insulted. Not even Jianzhu put his staff down to their faces. She would have thought her experience on the other end of the relationship would have made her better at this.

  And Jinpa had saved her from drowning. Had she been wearing her heavy robes and bracers instead of a light traveling outfit, she might have sunk too fast for him to reach.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Jinpa, I’m really sorry. I’ve no right to speak to you like that.” He would have gotten along better with Yun. The two of them would have become fast friends and played Pai Sho from sunup to sundown. “I . . . I wish you were serving a worthier Avatar.”

  Her apology didn’t seem to be quite what he was looking for, but he acquiesced with his usual gentle smile. Jinpa clambered onto Yingyong’s withers and began wringing out his wet robes. Kyoshi sighed and plunged her face back below the surface, hoping the shame would rinse away.

  She saw something under the water that hardened her spirit again.

  The dark patch Jinpa had spotted from above was a wrecked and sunken atoll, an island blown apart and scarred by what could only be bending of the highest power. The reef structure was split and pitted, giant chunks of earth scattered like marbles, and swathes of coral had been ground smooth by unimaginably intense waterbending.

  Kyoshi recognized the telltale marks of destruction well. This was Yangchen’s island. It was the same place where Kuruk and his companions had gone so he could practice going into the Avatar State for the first time. Maybe they didn’t know. Or maybe they’d chosen a location associated with Yangchen to receive spiritual assistance from the great Air Avatar. But Kuruk, in his lapse of control, had destroyed the atoll and sunk it below the waves.

  A spot holy to Yangchen and the Air Nomads was gone because of his carelessness. As she pulled herself back onto the saddle, Kyoshi tried to model herself after Jinpa’s calm. Some very unkind opinions were running through her head, and right now, the less she thought about Kuruk, the better.

  THE REUNION

  It was strange to think that getting closer to a string of active volcanoes would make them feel better, but here they were, approaching the Fire Nation.

  Jinpa wisely avoided the plumes of noxious smoke emanating from the active peaks but wove Yingyong over the thermals in between, riding bumps of heated air in a playful, winding course. It was enough to make Kyoshi forget herself and smile.

  Clumps of settlements could be seen on the smaller islands, usually by the coasts but sometimes higher up in the mountains, where level pastures and shade-grown tea farms dotted the slopes. The landmasses formed a thickening tail that led them to the body of Capital Island, where the earth doubled over on itself to form First Lord’s Harbor.

  They swooped lower to see the city that had formed around the Fire Nation’s largest port already preparing for the upcoming celebration. Strings of red paper lanterns crisscrossed the streets, in some places thick enough to completely obscure the carts and sidewalks below. The sharp clack of vendors hammering their wooden stalls together filled the air. Kyoshi spotted one alley overtaken by a half-finished parade float. A team of dancers practiced their moves in rigorous unison atop the platform.

  “This seems like a serious party,” Kyoshi said. She secretly wished she could be down there, among her fellow commoners for the celebrations, instead of attending a state function. There’d certainly be less pressure on her.

  “You know how Fire Nationals are,” Jinpa said as he waved at a bunch of gawking children on a rooftop who were thrilled to see a bison fly overhead. “Buttoned up until the moment they let loose.”

  They left Harbor City behind and continued flying up the slope of the caldera that dominated the big island. Trees and vines clung tenaciously to the steep, rocky surfaces, and the humidity grew heavy like a blanket.

  “Should we stop here and announce ourselves?” Jinpa said. He pointed to the stone watchtowers and bunkers built into the lip of the dead volcano.

  Kyoshi shook her head. Impatience was rising in her chest, tidewater threatening to spill over its levees. “The letter said we should head straight to the palace.”

  Sure enough, the pointy-armored guards watched them fly by with hardly a reaction on their unmoving faces. Yingyong crested the edge, and the capital of the Fire Nation revealed itself like the burst of a firework.

  Royal Caldera City. The home of the Fire Lord and the highest ranks of nobility in the country. Where Ba Sing Se equated power with expansiveness, Caldera City concentrated its status like the point of a spear. Towers rose into the air, brushing shoulders with their red-shingled neighbors. They reminded Kyoshi of plants competing for sunlight, stretching ever higher lest they fall behind and perish.