Chapter Text
BOOK 1: AIR
A hero is one who wants to be himself.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
His throat was caught in a scream, sore and raw. His skin burnt. The pain was like being crowned with burning stars. A grid of light, burned directly into his brain. As the pain went on it changed and became transmuting. He felt as if he were hovering in an emptiness in the centre of the world, his body’s every quiver of life coming to him from across some vast distance.
In the back of his mind, he heard the cold cackle of a madman’s laughter. Aftershocks of fear thrummed through him. Bitter resignation. When he finally let out a breath, he could still smell the remnants of the forest.
His eyes opened on pale sandstone, high grandiose ceilings. He blinked and the walls remained the same. Flicked his gaze to the side. The intricately carved whorls and loops of the shutters looked strange, and when they rattled in the wind the clacking was like some desert snake.
In a burst of clarity, he noticed that the air moved wrong. Blunt. Heavy. He felt the breeze fiercely as though he were an insect with antennas attuned for it. It was too vibrant. Expressive. It waned and rose, ebbed and flowed and would twist and writhe. Buzzing like a hive of wasps against skin.
Everything was unnerving and unfamiliar. The deep night-shadows that gathered among the polished ceiling beams seemed to glower.
His perspective was low to the floor. Sandalled feet and long, draping garments fluttered past. He couldn’t comprehend the murmurs of words around him. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it was enmeshed in thick tree sap, his arms and legs as if mired in tar. The truth of his situation became obvious when he lifted his hands to the lantern light: blubbery flesh, red and tiny.
In his dreams he saw himself, understood himself for what he was. Young, small, vulnerable; confused, frightened, desperately dependent—no, a fallen soldier; aged, worn, and weary. A crying mass of flesh—a dead martyr. Awake, he stared out and tried not to drown under the deluge of muddled, incomprehensible thoughts.
Inside him was a little boy and a thousand dreams, and he could barely recognise either; trapped in a knuckled grip between understanding too much, and too little.
The Northern Air Temple was home to cold weather and warm people. The north wind when it blew was an assault, outdoors, and even through the temple walls. He slept under layers of fur and sheepskin in a small basket of woven bamboo, but the arctic breeze brought a chill so deep it hit bone. Still, the monks smiled warmly year-round: a weedy people, quick to laugh, brimming with wizened men and eager boys. There were no women. No mothers and fathers.
Family invoked images of jeering, stifled hopes and few joys; of cold, lonely nights, missed meals and red-hot shame.
He thought he might prefer something different.
What felt like a dozen different men took care of him in ever-changing rotation, each with a shaved scalp and a strange arrow-shaped blue tattoo on the base of their forehead, above the brow; they wore large, draping robes of orange called habits and strange pendants lined with beads. However, it was mostly in Ceba’s large hands he found himself.
“Ren,” Ceba murmured every night, as his large head peeked into the basket. He was bigger than the rest of the weedy men that burped, fed, and changed soiled clothes, and he smiled twice as wide. He had great round eyes, the heavy jowls of a squirrel, a long, brown beard and moustache. There were other words, but he didn’t understand those only: “Little Ren.”
Air Nomads spoke as they lived, unhurried, slow and rolling. They drew out their vowels, rolled their words over their tongues like sweet custard. They moved like they were weightless, as though gravity didn’t apply to them. Ren would look out through an unshuttered window on a spring or summer or autumn night, unable to walk so just watched instead, as they rode gliders and took to the sky with some transfixing emotion, like pure exuberance, like unfiltered glee. Under the moon or sun, the sky belonged to the Airbenders, or so he had come to understand.
The sight of which filled him with joy, and also disquiet.
Sometimes birds would fly too close to the cliffs along the monastery's underbelly and as the Taihua Mountains winds swelled, their small little bodies would bash into the rocks. They would decay, skin peeling away from the bone, and it would smell like rotting fruit left out in the sun. There, in the shape of the skeleton of those poor birds, he saw the resemblance of a glider.
Yet when Ren flew in his dreams, he saw a long dark wood with a feathered end.
When Ren was two, they brought him to a room filled with toys. Off to the side, four council elders stood watching, their heavy beads and master’s pendant marking the vastness of their knowledge, silent.
“There are thousands of toys here,” Abbot Bankei said. The elder stood thin and straight, like a polished walking stick, and his long, droopy white whiskers shook as he made a sweeping gesture at the hall festooned with relics. The unveiling of so many toys had a brightening effect on most of the children. But Ren didn’t smile. He watched the abbot steadily until he blinked. “You may keep any four of your choosing.”
The sun was high enough to melt snow off the roof, and the dripping flow of water splattered on the ground. The silhouettes of novices queuing up for their toys could be seen outside through the window-paper. The air was full of excited chatter. Ren was silent.
“Is he the one that—”
The voice was idly curious, but Ceba wouldn’t let them finish the thought. “Go on,” he urged from behind him.
Ren glanced back as Ceba made a shooing motion, and he returned his gaze to the toys. A bison whistle, a wicker ball, a misshapen blob that might have been a stuffed turtle duck, painted marbles, a coiled whalebone spring, one of those flappy drums that made noise as you spun it back and forth between your palms, a contraption with revolving blades at the end of a stick that could be spun rapidly until it took off into the air like a tiny scorpion-bee. The toys looked as worn and beaten as the outside of this building.
“He seems overly cautious,” one of the monks remarked. “Strangely so.”
Monk Akar sniffed. He spent his days in the archives and always smelled like ink. “They’re thousands of years old. Thank the spirits one of these kids is smart enough to take care.”
“Ren,” Ceba said, ignoring his brothers. “Don’t you want any? Are there none that catch your eye?”
Ren couldn’t look at him. Revealing his desire felt like a painful concession. “Maybe,” he mumbled. The inflection of his voice sounded strange, subtly off-kilter, as though the language didn’t quite belong to him.
Thousands of choices. Despite their repeated assurances, this felt like a test and the thought of choosing wrong, of disappointing anyone, especially Ceba, filled his stomach with rolling knots. He wandered over to the side of the room and picked up the one he liked best. Turning to Ceba nervously, he held it up.
“It’s not one of the relics,” a voice muttered in dejection. Ren’s stomach plummeted, but Ceba was smiling.
“Fantastic choice!” he boomed in his deep, too-loud voice. “And you can have three more! Four whole toys to yourself! Wouldn’t you like that?”
Ren tried not to shift. He would like that. But in his mind, the promise of more had the threat of imminent danger. An outstretched palm threatening to close on his hand. A trap designed to hurt him. If he loosened his grip on the single prize he held right now, he would walk away with nothing. Punished for believing in kindness. Ren shook his head. His knuckles whitened around the whittled owl.
Soon he was escorted out the room with Ceba’s large hand on his shoulder. He clutched the owl in his hand and refused to part with it, even as he slept.
The first night he woke screaming, he could barely recall the dream, but the sweeping terror of it had him avoiding sleep altogether. It didn’t last. His mind swam in crushing weariness for days until he passed out in the middle of the airball court. The second and third dream followed similarly. The fourth, he remembered.
He was in a small, enclosed space. A cupboard. Not only cramped and dark, but it carried a deep hunger that had his gut twisting. The morning after, he woke up so famished he ate three servings of moonpeach pie before most of the monks stumbled out of bed. The next dream was of a large serpent with deadly eyes. Then a long-necked woman with a sharp tongue and deep hatred. A half dog, half man beast that howled its fury. A pink-clad woman that demanded he pay the price of his rebellion in blood.
Once he was old enough to move out of the nursery, they placed him directly in the infirmary under Healer Fa’s supervision. Come morning, the nightmares still visited but he no longer lost his voice. When he screamed himself hoarse, Fa shook him awake before he could inflict much damage to his throat. Humiliation stirred in him each time, but it was a borrowed feeling, an empty pride as the monks would say, and he learned to ignore it—had no other choice.
Ceba bought incense from the Herbalist Institute to burn at his bedside and lead him gently into slumber. It smelled like lavender and cedar, which was said to chase bad dreams and ward off evil spirits. It never worked, but he liked the smell. Still, without exception, when Agni lowered its weary head and Tui took to the sky, the memories came, sharp as broken glass, and the world to him was a golden shimmer, millions upon millions of tiny threads crowding his gaze, shifting, waving.
He felt a sudden jerk and wrenched away, only to stare up at an unfamiliar man’s face. The infirmary was closest to the front of the mountain to provide easy access for injured travellers seeking the learned monks’ healing for frostbite, malnutrition, foot rot, snowblindness or some other ailment. They partitioned Ren off from the main section, but occasionally Healer Fa or his fluttering attendants didn’t arrive fast enough, and he’d wake from a weary stranger’s nudging.
Ren sat up, groggy and rueful. “Did I wake you?”
“I didn’t wake myself,” came the man’s droll reply. He limped back to his cot and dropped down hard.
It took Ren a moment to decipher his meaning. The language in his dreams was different from the way the people of the Four Nations spoke and easier to recall. He had already begun speaking lessons, but it proved difficult to unravel the words in his memories and replace them with these new ones.
“Sorry,” Ren mumbled, wiping a hand over his still bleary face.
“No sweat.” The man wore Earth Kingdom-green robes and a grimace. “I’m getting free meat and mead, and a place to put my head at night. Ain’t gonna start getting prissy over some screaming.”
“Air Nomads don’t eat meat.”
“Just an expression, kid.” He made a small covered-hand bow, but as proper punctuation, not as a declaration of unworthiness. Some of the other travellers treated monks as extensions of their temples, holy grounds to respect and tread carefully around. The man turned over with a sigh and said no more.
Ren turned as well and stared into the chinks of the sandstone. He lay awake, restless, heart thumping so hard with part agitation and part anger that he wondered if it would burst through his ribs. The nightmare had unsettled him, but something else kept him awake. Some vague dread.
“Harry.”
A voice. A word spoken in darkness. Clear and real and distinct.
He lurched up, eyes searching the shadowed room. He was awake, wasn't he? The voice was familiar, as was the name—like the dreams, like everything the temple was not. The room stood empty, except for him and the man. Ren threw his blankets over his head and grasped his toy owl to his chest.
The voice didn’t come again. Although he strained his ears for another hour, no further words were spoken. But he knew he had heard it.