The Rise of Kyoshi

The Return

Jianzhu sat by Hei-Ran’s bedside in the infirmary. She was alive, but she hadn’t woken up yet.

If he were ever to tell his story in the future, to document his journeys and his secrets, this part would stand out as the hardest road he’d traveled yet. Murdering Hui and the other sages in his own home was nothing. Drinking the poison himself to blunt suspicion, trusting in the training that the departed Master Amak had put him through as well as Yun, was nothing. A good number of servants were dead as well, the ones who’d used the leftover boiled water he’d dosed for their own cups.

Nothing. All nothing compared to seeing his last friend in the world laid low. This sacrifice had been the hardest.

There would be aftershocks, ones that altered the landscape of the Earth Kingdom. The western coast had been decimated of its leadership, especially by the Mo Ce Sea. Certainly, some of the sages who’d drank his poisoned tea were corrupt or incompetent, but many others were as invested in bringing strength and prosperity to the nation as he was. It would take time for the effects to be felt by the common populace, but the parts of the country farthest from Ba Sing Se had without a doubt been greatly weakened.

There would be an outcry from the capital. Investigations. Accusations. But Hui had inadvertently laid the foundation for Jianzhu to come out of this mess clean. He’d identified and rounded up the sages who were not fully on Jianzhu’s side, including some that were a complete surprise. That had been the whole point of telling Hui he’d lost the Avatar in the first place.

If Hui had felt the remaining sages in the other half of the kingdom were out of his reach for this gathering, even with the damning evidence of the Avatar running with daofei, that meant those particular officials were truly loyal to Jianzhu. When the time came to reveal the true Avatar, he’d would be in a better, more secure position, having tested their limits.

The chamberlain had done exactly what Jianzhu had wanted him to. Only, too fast and too aggressively. That miscalculation had forced him to turn his own home into a charnel house. It had cost him Hei-Ran. He would dig up Hui’s bones and feed them to bull pigs for it.

He got up, his knees still a little shaky from the lingering effects of the poison, and brushed a long strand of hair out of Hei-Ran’s sleeping face. Her constitution, her inner fire, had saved her life, but only just. Once he had the time, he’d devote every resource he possessed to healing her fully.

Though, if she’d been awake the past day or two, she certainly would have killed him for what he’d done to her daughter.

He’d revisit the matter later. Right now he had an important meeting to prepare for.

They buried Lek in a field outside Zigan’s cemetery instead of claiming one of the unused plots within its borders. He wouldn’t have wanted to rest too close to abiders, Kirima had explained.

The grid of headstones off to the side resembled an orchard, each gray, fruitless tree carved with the name and date of its owner. Kyoshi counted off the rows, burning into her memory the approximate distance so she could come back to this spot in the future. Following the Si Wong tradition, they’d eschewed any markers, taking care to cut the sod in strips that could be replaced and patted back down. The desert folk considered the simple embrace of the land the only honor worthy of the departed, silence the most fitting eulogy.

Standing there over Lek’s invisible grave, Kyoshi couldn’t have spoken about him anyway. She had the tongue of an animal in her mouth, the howl of a beast in her chest. Lao Ge was right about mercy having its price.

She’d shown Jianzhu mercy with every thought that went through her mind not dedicated to his destruction. Each smile and moment of laughter she’d shared with her friends had been an act of dereliction. This was the cost of forgetting Jianzhu, of not whispering his name before every meal, not seeing his shape in every shadow. And Kyoshi would never stop paying for it until she confronted him.

“What are you going to do?”

Kyoshi glanced up from the patch of grass that cloaked her sworn brother. Kirima had asked the question, her eyes red and hard. Wong and Lao Ge waited for an answer as well.

“I’m going to finish this,” Kyoshi said, her voice the breaking of branches and rending of cloth. “I’m going to finish him.”

“What about us?” Wong said. He had the same hunched, plaintive look as when he was waiting to hear whether or not the Avatar would stay with the group after their escape from Hujiang.

Kyoshi had to give him a different answer this time. She held up her hand. “Here is where we have to part ways,” she said.

Qinchao Village had an air to it that many visitors found off-putting. Over half the inhabitants belonged to the clan of Chin, making outsiders feel like they were talking to the same person and being watched by the same set of eyes, no matter what part of town they did business in. There was a degree of tightfisted wealth that drew attention away from a set of bizarre customs and holidays that appeared nowhere else in the Earth Kingdom, many of which revolved around dolls and effigies, small ones for the home and great towering ones in the square for public festivals.

Qinchao folk were insular, even compared to Yokoyans. They exalted their status with borderline treasonous statements, like “A citizen of Qinchao and a subject of the Earth Kingdom,” where wordplay and order implied their priorities.

A long time ago, Kyoshi and a group of other young maids had been allowed a few days of chaperoned leave to visit Qinchao. Jianzhu had sternly warned them not to run afoul of the law there, lest bad things happen before he could rescue them. The other maids giggled and proceeded to ditch Kyoshi with Auntie Mui while they ran as a group from street to street, trying wine for the first time and flirting with actors by the outdoor theater.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened. They’d all come home safely.

But Kyoshi remembered the sense of foreboding she’d had back then as she entered the gates through the circular walls and made her way to the teardrop-shaped town center. There’d been a darkness below the clean-swept streets and ghostly hues of the village that she’d sensed would burst through the surface someday.

She must have been looking into the future. That day was today. And that shadow from the deep was her.

She walked down the main street, unconcerned by the stares she drew. With her headdress adding to her height, her makeup done in a fresh coat of red and white, and the heavy armored bracers strapped over her wrists, she looked half a performer who’d lost her troupe, and half a soldier without her battalion. She attracted attention, openly and without hesitation, like she’d never done before in her life.

This was who she was now. This was her skin. This was her face.

The Chin clan’s crown jewel was the great stone teahouse in the center of town. Unlike the ramshackle Madam Qiji’s with overnight rooms above a common area, the unnamed establishment was a three-story structure devoted entirely to food and drink, in the manner of larger cities like Omashu and Ba Sing Se. Residents of the village would spend all morning there, enjoying tea and gossip. It was the most obvious place for Jianzhu or her to wait for the other.

Kyoshi lowered her head and stepped inside. The restaurant was built with the second and third floors as mezzanines, letting her see the tables filled with boisterous conversation raining down from above. Waiters carried trays of stacked bamboo steamers through the aisles, calling out their contents, pausing when beckoned by a guest to place small dishes of glistening dumplings on the tables.

The man behind the counter gaped at her and waved toward the dining area. Either it was open seating, or he was too taken aback to deny her entrance. She spotted a table on the ground floor that was still being cleared and moved toward it. Chairs squeaked against the floor as people turned in their seats. A server coming the other way down the aisle nearly dropped his tray and backpedaled as fast as he could.

Kyoshi took a position facing the door so she could see who came and went. The dirty dishes in front of her vanished as if she were a shrine spirit who’d be displeased with any used-up offerings that lingered too long. Once the table was clean, she placed a round, smooth stone in front of her. Then she waited.

Eventually, her stillness allowed the other patrons to go back to their business. The chatter around her picked up. The music of songbirds could be heard from the second floor; a gathering of elderly men had brought ornamented cages to show off new specimens in their collections to each other.

Customers filed in through the entrance over the course of the morning. She took note of their builds, gaits, and faces, waiting for one of them to be Jianzhu. It was only a matter of time before he came.

Her former employer walked in and immediately spotted her sitting at the far table. He seemed slightly stooped. His handsome face was wan, haggard, like he hadn’t eaten or slept in days. His hair and beard had been combed, but not to his usual impeccable standards. He looked older than she remembered. Much older.

Jianzhu settled into the chair across from Kyoshi. An enterprising waiter, seeing that a normal person had joined her at the table, came over to ask them what they wanted. Jianzhu sent him packing with a glare.

The two of them drank each other in.

“You look terrible,” Kyoshi said.

“So do you,” he replied. “The shirshu poison hasn’t left your system completely. I can tell from the way you’re a little slow-blinking.”

He put his elbows on the table and leaned on his hands, giving her an exhausted half smile. “Did you ever realize the animals weren’t tracking you, personally, to begin with?” he said. “I gave them Rangi’s scent, not yours.”

“You were hunting her the whole time instead of me,” Kyoshi murmured. His ruthlessness was beyond her comprehension by leaps and bounds.

Jianzhu rubbed his face. “Bringing you back without some kind of leverage would have been pointless. You never would have listened to me. You made that perfectly clear before you ran away.”

“I should have seen this coming,” Kyoshi said. “You traffic in hostages. You’re no better than a daofei.”

Jianzhu frowned at her. “The fact that you think so means you need proper training and education more than anything. It’s time to stop this nonsense, Kyoshi. Come home.”

“Where’s Rangi?”

“She’s ... at ... HOME!” Jianzhu yelled. “Where you should have been this entire time!”

His outburst didn’t draw much attention from their nearest neighbors. Father was obviously incensed at Daughter for dressing up and running away. Nothing they hadn’t seen a hundred times before.

Kyoshi doubted very much that Rangi was strolling the gardens of the mansion at her leisure, waiting for her. Jianzhu had grievously dishonored the Firebender by shearing her hair. To avoid retribution, he would have had to imprison Rangi. Or worse.

Kyoshi fought back against the anger that ran through her body. In a hostage situation she needed to remain as calm as she could. But her knee shook a little, contacting the table, causing the stone to wobble.

The rattling noise it made caught Jianzhu’s attention. He looked at the round rock. “What is this?” he said. “Another child’s toy you picked up while you were gone?”

Kyoshi shook her head. “It belonged to someone who should take part in bringing you down.”

“We’re wasting time here with your games,” Jianzhu snapped. “What are you going to do, if not what I say?”

She couldn’t speak her revenge out loud. Now that she was close enough to reach out and place her hands on Jianzhu’s neck, telling him to his face that she sought his death would have been a reverse incantation that sapped her will. She was afraid that if she gave voice to her hatred, it would turn to dust like medicine that had sat unused for too long.

“See?” Jianzhu said at her silence. “You came here without a plan. Whereas I’ll tell you exactly what I’m going to do if you don’t stand up, walk out of here, and follow me home.” He brought his face closer. “I’m going to collapse this building and kill everyone in it.”

Kyoshi’s eyes widened. Her mind skipped over debating whether he would and focused on how he might. She knew he wasn’t bluffing.

“That’s the trouble with these structures made completely of stone,” Jianzhu said. “They break instead of flexing. Which makes them horribly vulnerable to earthquakes.”

Kyoshi glanced around them. The restaurant was packed with oblivious townsfolk sitting on floors of stone, their backs to walls of stone, a roof of slate over their heads. In the hands of Jianzhu, it was a death trap. A mass grave in the waiting.

The threat was as real as could be. “You’d be living up to your daofei name,” Kyoshi said.

Jianzhu froze. Kyoshi thought perhaps she’d insulted him to the point where he’d forget he needed the Avatar, that he’d reach across the table and simply end her life. But he clapped his palm over his own mouth and started to shake.

Tears flowed out of his eyes. It took Kyoshi a while to understand he was laughing hysterically. She’d never seen his true laugh before, and it was a quiet, spasmodic attack that claimed his whole body. She flinched as he pounded his fist on the table.

With great difficulty, Jianzhu gathered himself. “You want to know how I earned that name all those years ago?” he whispered, leaning in with a co-conspirator’s trust. “It’s a funny story. First, I made an example out of the few Earthbenders among the Yellow Necks. I took my time with them. Then I told the rest that whoever dug the deepest trench to hide in by sundown would be spared, free to return to their homes. Only the ones who lagged behind would be killed.”

He chuckled in satisfaction. “You should have seen it. They dug as fast as their wretched hands could take them. Some of them killed each other over a shovel. They jumped into their holes and looked up with smug little smiles thinking they’d be the ones surviving, not their compatriots.”

Kyoshi wanted to throw up. There was no word for what Jianzhu was.

“And there you have it,” he said. “Five thousand fresh graves dug by their own occupants. I simply swept the earth over the top. Like I once explained to a former pupil, strength is bending people to your will, not the elements.”

He sighed as he shelved the good memory back with its neighbors. “You’re very hard to bend, Kyoshi. But if you give me no other option, after I kill everyone here, I may have to go home and cut Rangi’s throat—”

Lek’s last bullet zipped from the table toward Jianzhu’s temple. It stopped before making contact. Jianzhu rocked in his chair from the effort of counteracting her bending, one hand crooked in the air. With great effort he lowered the stone back to the table, pushing against her the whole way.

He was greatly interested by this turn of events. “How?” he said as they fought over control of the rock. “When you left, you lacked the precision to bend a piece of earth this small.”

Kyoshi’s spread fan fluttered under the table, hidden from his sight. The strain was much greater for her. “I fell in with a different crowd,” she said.

“Hmph.” Jianzhu looked mildly impressed. “Well, I hope you’re happy with what you’ve learned. Because now you’ve doomed everyone here.” He reached up with his other hand and pulled the roof down.

Kyoshi matched him, bringing her second fan above the table. A tremor went through the building and died down before it could register as a problem with the patrons. Perhaps a very heavy wagon had passed by. The slab roof stayed where it was, though a trickle of dust drifted onto a few tables, causing annoyed shouts from the third floor.

By now a few people were looking at them, drawn by their bending poses. Run, she wanted to scream at the gawking bystanders. But she couldn’t. Her entire body was tensed to the breaking point, her throat frozen. It was taking every ounce of her effort to oppose Jianzhu’s strength.

But as her eyes wandered up to his, she saw that he seemed almost as taxed. His shoulders were trembling, like hers.

“I do need to give your—” he said before cutting himself short. He was likely going to say he needed to give Kyoshi’s new friends his compliments. But he couldn’t manage talking under the strain.

He noticed her noticing his little moment of weakness. With a surge of anger, he pointed his leg to the side and tried to blow out the supporting wall. Kyoshi made a silent scream as the effort to keep it intact tore a muscle within her body along her ribcage.

She fought through the pain and managed to keep the destruction down to a single crack running from floor to ceiling. The wall held.

Jianzhu’s jaw flexed. He bared his teeth. He and Kyoshi warred in stillness, their whole beings locked in opposition, a perversion of neutral jing where they only appeared to be doing nothing. Vibrations began to grow through the building again, the slight rattle of cups against saucers. The patrons on the ground floor nearby might have suspected this girl and this man were to blame, but their hesitance to move kept them within the reach of danger.

The sounds of conversation blurred and slowed, as if the air itself had frozen over. Men and women in Kyoshi’s peripheral vision turned their heads at a snail’s pace. Their sentences drew out like moans.

Kyoshi might have been pushing against Jianzhu so hard that she no longer knew what was real. She heard a footstep echoing in her ear, and then another.

A cloaked figure walked with purpose toward their table. Neither she nor Jianzhu could move. It was as if a third presence had joined their struggle, clasping its hands over their interlocked bending, squeezing them together.

The person who stood over them with all the familiarity in the world threw his hood back.

It was Yun.

Had she the ability to breathe, Kyoshi would have choked. Sobbed. This was a dream and a nightmare, her highest hopes and cruelest torment poured together in some horrific concoction and flung in her face. How had he survived? How had he found them? Why had he come back, now of all times?

Jianzhu’s shock at seeing Yun nearly broke the volatile hold he had on the stone around them. Kyoshi could no longer tell who was in control of what, with their bending commingled together, only certain that if she released the tension by moving or speaking or blinking, the whole enterprise would come tumbling down. The three of them were locked in a private delirium, a prison of their own making.

Yun said nothing. He looked at them with a faint, beatific smile. His skin had the glow of a healthy adventurer back from a successful trip, neat stubble lining his jaw. His eyes twinkled with the same warm mischief that Kyoshi remembered so well.

None of this kept a blinding, nauseating sense of wrongness from pouring out of his body. People had always been drawn to Yun like metal to a lodestone, and Kyoshi had been no exception. But he’d changed. There was something essential missing from the otherworldly being in front of her. Something human.

The boy she’d loved had been replaced by a hollow scaffolding, wind blowing through its gaps. The nearby customers who’d so far tolerated her strangeness recoiled away from Yun like he was a rotting corpse, scraping chairs over the floor in their haste to create distance. They couldn’t bear to be near him.

Yun noticed the bullet on the table. Its presence filled him with delight and his face lit up as if he’d seen the object before. He reached over and slowly plucked the stone free while Kyoshi and Jianzhu were still fighting for control of it, tearing the rock from the combined bending grip of a great master and the Earth Avatar. To Kyoshi it felt like he’d ripped a hole in the empty space, removed the moon from the sky itself. She could almost hear a sucking noise as the bullet left her and Jianzhu’s grasp.

Still without words, Yun held the rock out, making sure Kyoshi and Jianzhu could both see it. Then he cupped that hand to Jianzhu’s chest.

Jianzhu’s eyes bulged. Kyoshi felt his earthbending flare outward and was forced to compensate. Yun gently put his other hand, still stained with black ink, to Jianzhu’s back. After another second passed, he showed them what had traveled between his palms.

The stone, now covered in blood.

Yun didn’t wait for Jianzhu to finish dying. He winked at Kyoshi and turned to leave. Jianzhu teetered in his seat, gagging on blood, a dark red patch spreading from the tunnel in his chest. The waiters screamed.

It was everything Kyoshi could do to contain Jianzhu’s earthbending death throes. More cracks raced along the walls, big and loud enough to draw the notice of the patrons. At the door Yun paused and looked back at Kyoshi, seeing her duress, how she was barely holding the teahouse together. He grinned.

And then he bumped the table.

The foundations of the building rose and fell at his command. The impact knocked people to the floor. Kyoshi lost her grip on too much of the stone, and the roof began to crumble. Yun vanished.

A sheet of rock the size of a window crashed to the first floor, narrowly missing a waiter. She could feel the makings of a stampede beginning to form. There were too many pieces collapsing around her. The world was falling apart before her eyes.

Lao Ge had insisted.

Despite her protests that she didn’t need to unlock the secrets of immortality, he’d made her join him in his daily longevity exercises. She’d told him flat out that she considered the concept bunk.

“This isn’t spiritualism,” he said. “You don’t have to believe. You simply have to practice.”

He’d taken her to the same spots that a guru would meditate in, the curves of flowing rivers, the stumps of once-massive trees, caves bored into the cliffside. But he’d also filled her ear with counterintuitive nonsense.

“Instead of blocking everything out like how you would normally meditate, take it all in,” he said while they rested in a meadow on their way to Taihua. “Notice each blade of grass in the same moment you would notice a single one.”

“I would have to have a thousand eyes to do that!” she’d snapped.

He shrugged. “Or an infinite amount of time. Either would work.”

The riddles never ceased while they prepared for Te’s assassination.

“Divide your body in two,” he said, while she practiced heating and breaking a piece of scrap metal. “Then divide it again, and then again, and again. What would you have left?”

“A bloody mess.” She burned her hand and yelped.

“Exactly!” Lao Ge said. “Put the pieces back, and put them back again, and again, and again one more time, and you’re whole once more.”

“A human being isn’t a block of stone,” she said, showing him her reddening thumb for emphasis.

“That’s where you’re wrong. The illusion that the self is separate from the rest of the world is the driving factor that limits our potential. Once you realize there’s nothing special about the self, it becomes easier to manipulate.”

To Kyoshi that had been the easiest lesson to take in. She was nothing special. She had never been anything special. That was a mantra she believed in.

Her eyes glowed, but only in a brief pulse. She didn’t need to express her mastery over multiple elements like she had during her duel with Xu. Just one. The stone was her, and she was the stone.

Her mind was everywhere, dancing along the tips of her fingers. She’d let go of her fans, but for now, it didn’t matter. Kyoshi felt the shape of each piece and how one fit into the next, making it so easy to put them back together. She wouldn’t have been able to say whether she meant the teahouse or her own being. According to Lao Ge, there was no difference.

There was a stumble of disruption, almost like ants crawling over her arm. The customers on each floor scrambled for the exits. She watched them run along shattered tiles held up by nothing but her earthbending. Each step the panicking crowd took was its own distinct little thump, another weight to catalog. It was no great trouble to her.

When the last of the occupants had fled, Kyoshi got up, maintaining the form of Crowding Bridge with one raised hand while she stuck her fans back into her belt with the other. She looked at Jianzhu, slumped over. Her revenge encompassed within a single body.

It seemed so bounded and finite. How could such a container have held the volume of her anguish, her wrath? If any feeling at all pressed through the numbness of her unity with the earth around her, it was the ire of a hoodwinked child who’d been promised the end of her bedtime story only to see the candle-lights snuffed and the door slam shut. She was a girl alone in the dark.

She decided to leave Jianzhu where he was, not out of any remaining spite. The path that led her to him had simply ended.

She exited into the square. There was a half ring of people around her, giving plenty of berth, staring in horror. They didn’t know who she was or how she’d saved their lives. She didn’t care.

Kyoshi let go of her focus, and the building groaned behind her. The crowd shrieked as the teahouse collapsed, sending a wave of dust over their heads.

The civilian residents of Qinchao began to flee. At the same time, she heard the clash of gongs and saw lawmen shoving their way through the masses. The officers drew their swords as they closed in.

“Don’t move!” the captain shouted. “Drop your weapons and get on the ground!”

She looked at the red-faced, nervous men clinging to their steel. Without saying anything, she dust-stepped higher and higher, ignoring their threats and shouts of astonishment, until she flew over their heads, onto the nearest rooftop, and into the sky.

There was a tree at the crossroads leading into Qinchao. It had a single dominant limb that extended sideways, with a length of rusted, forgotten chain that looped around the branch. Kyoshi wondered what had hung from the end of the chain before it snapped.

Pengpeng rolled in the grass while the Flying Opera Company sat in a circle, back from the mission Kyoshi had sent them on. A short-haired figure leaped to her feet and ran over.

Rangi buried her face in Kyoshi’s chest. She shuddered and wept, but she was otherwise unharmed.

Kyoshi cheated on the test Jianzhu had put to her. He hadn’t counted on a mere servant girl having such steadfast allies so well versed in breaking and entering. While Kyoshi faced Jianzhu in Qinchao, the rest of the Flying Opera Company raided his manor in Yokoya, using the detailed plans she’d given them to rescue Rangi.

But there was one extra body lying in the shade of the tree. She recognized Hei-Ran, wrapped in blankets. The older woman had a ghostly pallor to her face that was hard to look at. With their family resemblance, Kyoshi couldn’t think of anything but Rangi in a similar state of helplessness.

“Kyoshi, my mother,” Rangi whispered, trembling in her grasp. “We found her in the infirmary like this. I don’t know what happened to her. I abandoned my mother! I left her, and this happened!”

“She’ll be all right,” Kyoshi said, trying to pass conviction from her body to Rangi’s. “I swear she’ll be all right. We’ll do whatever it takes to fix her.” She let Rangi recover in her embrace, her sobs slowing down until they became a second heartbeat.

Kyoshi stroked the crop of fuzz left behind by the severed topknot. The Firebender flinched as if she’d grazed an open wound. “I should be wearing a sack over my head so you can’t see me like this,” she said.

There wasn’t a good way to explain that Kyoshi didn’t care one bit about her hair or her honor, so long as she was alive. In fact, it was easier for Kyoshi to rest her cheek on Rangi’s head now, without all the sharp pins in the way.

After giving the two of them time, Kirima, Wong, and Lao Ge came over.

“The operation succeeded, obviously,” Kirima said. “Once you’ve rescued one person from the bowels of a powerful Earth Kingdom official’s personal dungeon, you’ve rescued them all. You were right. Jianzhu didn’t seem to expect that you’d have us on your side. Made things a bit easier.”

“I may have helped myself to some valuables on the way out,” Wong said. His thick fingers were covered in new gold rings and jade seals, including one that allowed him direct, private correspondence with the Earth King.

Kyoshi saw no issue with that. But his knuckles were busted open and bloody. “Was there a struggle?” she asked.

“No one’s dead,” Wong said quickly. “But I had to get information the old-fashioned way from some mercenaries dressed in guards’ clothing. I may have gone a little overboard. I don’t regret it.”

He looked at Rangi in Kyoshi’s arms and gave a rare smile. “The Gravedigger took one of ours. I wasn’t going to let him take another.”

“Speaking of which, where is he?” Kirima said. “Is it ... is it over?”

Jianzhu was dead. But Yun was alive, an uncontrollable strike of lightning. Kyoshi had no idea what had felled Rangi’s mother, nor what would happen to Yokoya in the future without its guiding sage.

And despite her best attempts to sully the position, her dedication to committing every possible outrage and act of disqualification, she was still the Avatar.

Was it over?Kyoshi found she had no answer to that question at all.