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It begins and ends in fire: around her, within her, beneath her. She is herself and not herself. The girl she had been - afraid of even the hearth - is burning, she thinks, in the village below. She reaches for water, but some ancient dream stays her hand.
Let it burn, Niki.
Her heart stirs something in the flames around her; her feet, bare now that the soles of her boots have melted, touch and do not touch the ash beneath. This is heartfire, and fear, and fury. This isn’t what I wanted. Fire required ambition, the texts had said. It was controlled rage, precisely directed drive. She had always been too afraid to use it.
Avatar Phoenix, they will call you. A voice in her ear. Come, love. Let’s draw the flames away.
She dreams of easier days. The forest burns around her.
Niki had had a quiet childhood. In the backwards reaches of the Earth Kingdom, she had grown up surrounded by stone and peace; she’s told it had taken weeks for the news to even reach them that the old water Avatar had died. She, of course, was too young to remember. Niki had been born in early spring, as the earth began to blossom around her, and the stone had known her name.
Earthbending was not easy, but it was natural. Her parents saw her sculpt earth at four years old - her elder mother, de facto leader of their village and prematurely aged by the position, had resolved to teach her to read and write. Her younger mother, with bright blue eyes and skin darker than even the strong, tanned shade of the Earth citizens who worked in the fields, had taught her the principle of jing. Waterbending - her mother’s native art - wove negative and positive jing together in tandem, moving fluidly between attack and defense, push and pull, letting the water do what it would. Earthbending, Niki learned, was similar. Its emphasis was on neutral jing, on holding fast, enduring, enduring, refusing to bend or break. Tides weathered coastlines, but cliff faces held firm. At last, then - when the moment was right - earth struck, with all the gathered energy it had weathered.
It dug its heels into the ground and demanded no, you move. Niki knew how to endure, to weather; her mothers lamented, though, that she refused to strike until something threatened to break her. Still, earthbending was her native art, and she learned it like a child learning to sing: piece by piece, day by day, until what had been laborious in those early days came to her without a second thought.
(Sensing the earth around her - listening, not bending or shaping but feeling, waiting, letting herself know - came so easily it almost frightened her. She could feel the footsteps of armies on the earth, miles away. She could sense earthquakes ten villages over. She could feel the villages and cities and kingdoms clinging to the earth’s crust like barnacles; deep below, shifting under the surface, was magma.
There was something, too, under Niki’s surface; at five, then at seven, then at seventeen, she could feel it bubbling. Shifting, heating, cooling - like she was a thousand women at once. Like if she truly, truly broke, something other than tectonic force would erupt from her. Her parents taught her to read, and she learned from old Fire Nation texts on the nature of such things: precise control. She was not a firebender, of course. But this force beneath felt just like something smouldering.)
She had been twelve when water first sprung to her touch, beyond reasonable doubt. Old compared to some, perhaps. But her native earth had drawn her focus, her energy - and perhaps no one had really noticed when, if she was nervous, the well near the house would rumble ominously. Perhaps they put it down to the earthen bricks, rather than the water within. Water had felt the same to her as earth for as long as she could remember - she could feel its presence, its shape - but her younger mother had avoided teaching her water-specific bending principles for fear of clouding her earthbending training, and so she had never drawn upon it. Until now. Until she had leant over the well, feeling something akin to it brimming within her, and - afraid of fire, of heat, of that deeper sensation - she had pulled.
Only her mothers saw. They kept her quiet. The world would know her when she was ready.
Water, once she had pulled on it - like a dam breaking - was a cascade. It was as easy as, easier than, breathing. She turned to it first, before earthbending, at least in private; learned the push and pull, that interweaving of jing, the way she could flow into and through and around the world and learn its shape. Rather than weather, and endure, and refuse to break, she learned to bend; her elder mother remarked, once, that she was becoming a pushover. Her younger mother retorted that she was learning to compromise. Niki wove push and pull together, and then, later, earth and water; when the river near their village broke its banks, she and her mothers diverted its course, that silty muddy floodwater, and kept their village safe. Her village kept her quiet too, after that. Not that anybody came asking - they heard tell that someone was searching the Earth Kingdom for the new Avatar, but why would they try such distant backwater villages? No, they would search the cities first. When they came, perhaps she would show herself. For now, she taught herself earth and water, learned the ways they were similar and the ways they were almost opposites. There was something else within her, though. Like she was coming to a boil.
(She knew, of course, that two necessitated four. There were no dual-benders - only the Avatar. But all-powerful diplomats were beyond her scope; she was only Niki of her village, her mothers’ daughter, coming into herself day by day. Avatar Niki was something for the future. For now, all she had to do was learn.)
(Fire, when it comes, is everything she feared. It’s heartfire and soulfire and something smouldering in her chest, undeniable, revelatory. Glorious. There had never been much fire in their village; their climate was warm, even during the nights, and for light there had always been the stars, and they had set and risen with the sun, like most rural farming villages. On the rare occasions that candles had been lit, though, Niki had feared them.
It had been easy - too easy - to tug a candle-flame her way. This was not the push-and-pull of water, or even the final, decisive attack that came when earth had had enough. This was tight, vicious control; she felt her breath shudder in her chest, tugged the flame closer and closer, like a writhing snake - then shut her fist. Extinguished it. Without effort.
Her palms smarted, then scarred. She could not love fire. Not when all it did was devour.)
Air made sense to her, though it proved less easy than earth and water had been. By sixteen, then seventeen, she was poring over texts on the theory of elements, on the spiritual links behind bending; not many in her village could read, but her parents had ensured that she had learned. Air, then, was a strange dual balance of untethered acceptance: it was freedom and joy and restraint, was play and work and careful meditation. By sixteen, guilt was a shackle on her - but quieting her mind brought her solace. She couldn’t always escape it. After all - she was growing more and more aware - she was the Avatar, hiding in a backwater Earth village that had not yet been searched. Surely she should journey to the capital. Surely she should make herself known. Surely the world had need of her? Shame, then, was hers. Responsibility. Worry. The creeping, guilty hope that perhaps the world didn’t need her after all.
Learning the tenets of airbending was an impossible relief: trying to free herself of that weighty guilt, finding the impossible lightness that came with accepting it, understanding that her shame would not leave her. She would only leave it, for a short while. It was a retreat; it brought her a peace that even waterbending could not quite mimic, based so fundamentally as it was in movement. Air was movement, too, and flexibility - but she learned negative jing, and the path of least resistance, and the setting down of worry. She learned the stillness that came at the heart of it, that deep silent well of her own breath. She learned to deflect, to avoid, to wait. In a way, it mirrored the teachings of earthbending, despite their being fundamental opposites: both taught her peace.
Her airbending was clumsy when she tried to play, though try she did: tugging her younger mother’s hair, which was beginning to grey. Sweeping her fingers about her and ruffling her elder mother’s papers, to a squawk of indignation. Above the village reared a stony cliff face; earthbending had always made it easy for Niki to ascend, but now she learned another way to alight atop its distant peak.
It was from the cliff - nineteen and strangely unburdened - that she saw the invasion come. Bandits like ants: no organised army, but figures moving in tandem, wearing dark, stony shades. Only because she was so attuned at that moment - feeling the air tumble about her - did she notice them moving, amongst the trees, towards the village.
Curiosity came first. Then a creeping, uneasy fear. Who were they? What could they want? Perhaps they had come to find her. No - no one knew the Avatar was here. No one knew the Avatar was even alive. It had been nineteen years since the previous Avatar perished, and no prodigious earthbender had been found. Efforts were being made, word had come, that the villages were being searched - but it was slow going, and Niki’s village, like so many others, wasn’t even on most official maps. No one knew she was here. How could they?
(Fire and the Avatar State come hand in hand, when they erupt.)
The figures drew closer to the village; Niki leaned over the edge, unafraid, sharp-eyed, watching. Should she approach them? She couldn’t demonstrate her airbending, not publicly. Should she descend the cliff, though, the earthen way? What if they were looking for her? They’d broached the treeline now. Her elder mother emerged from her house, harried and straightening her collar - Niki could feel the way the air swept around her, the earth beneath her feet, could sense everything below her. She could not hear, though, the words exchanged.
She could feel the pulse of heat as one dark-clothed figure raised a hand. Her younger mother’s cry, from within the house; the great eruption of water that came afterwards, tugging to that quarter of Niki that still knew when to defend and when to attack. She felt the faint impact as her elder mother, slight and bent now, crumpled to the ground. She felt the smouldering, the bubbling - rising, rising.
She felt the fire below: birthed from the bandit’s hand, coming of age as it streaked through the air, dying together with her mother as it ate that grey hair, and then her skin, and then through to her bone. She felt the earth begin to char, the ash begin to gather. She felt every bandit in that gathering - one, ten, a thousand, she could not be sure, something was blurring in her - settle into their stances, gathering fire, charging it.
She felt it unleash.
What did they want? She didn’t know. She didn’t care.
Fire was pride; she had little, humble earthbender girl. Pathetic. Fire was ambition; she had hoped the world would never need her. Fire was anger, and some greater drive, smouldering within her. That antsiness under the surface. Fire was power, and unflinching will, and solely positive jing; firebenders cared not whether their flame took to them too. The scar on Niki’s palm ached. Fire was gathering below her, taking her village like a tempest.
She leapt. The heat slammed into her like a physical thing; perhaps the ends of her hair were alight. She did not know or care. It hurt to breathe, this superheated air, this ash, this dust, choking. Something was erupting in her, some ancient history, something she had always been and would always be.
Kill them. Spare them. Save the village. She was a hundred impulses, a hundred thousand lives. She choked on ash, hit the ground hard, on her hands and knees. She felt no pain. Only fire: power, force, will. What would she do? What could she? The world had come to her. The wall of flame bore down, and she opened her arms to it.
There are no survivors. She waited a moment too many; she feels the bodies in their houses, the well burning, her parents on the ground. Ash and smoke rise higher and higher on the wind. She feels herself burning. The girl? Niki? The Avatar? She does not know, only knows that some part of her is gone. The part that had been holding her back, perhaps. The part that was afraid of fire.
Let’s draw the flames away, some ancient Avatar repeats. Then we’ll find the bandits.
Yes. Phoenix Avatar, the voice had called her. She digs her feet into the ash that settles on the ground like the legends of snow, feels its flaky heat. Then - in a thunderburst of fire, of air, of earth - she rises.
Drive is grief, and fury, and regret. Firebenders without it struggled to create even the smallest of flames. Niki breaths a forest fire, chokes on it, feels it smoulder in her stomach.
Still she rises.