Chapter Text
The sunset over Omashu bled a bruised purple into the horizon, casting jagged shadows across the massive stone gates. Aang, Katara, and Sokka stood in the cooling dust of the road.
Bumi, leaning heavily on his staff, watched them with a manic, unblinking glint in his mismatched eyes. He looked every bit the mad king, yet as Aang turned to mount Appa, the old man's playful eccentricity vanished, replaced by a sudden, chilling gravity. He reached out, his hand, rough and heavy as a mountain stone, landing firmly on Aang's small shoulder.
"Aang, wait," Bumi rasped, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register that caused Sokka to freeze mid-stride. "I know what you found at the Southern Temple. I know the weight of the silence you carried back from those ruins." He spoke with deep sorrow, knowing his old friend had flown back to a home reduced to ashes, corpses, and scorched stone.
Aang's face fell, his fingers whitening as he gripped the polished wood of his glider. He met his old friend's gaze. "Yeah," his voice croaked. "The Southern Temple... they didn't leave anyone behind, Bumi." He shook his head, before furrowing his brow in worry, "I also heard about the Western Temple surviving, I've heard the rumors across the Earth Kingdom." He looked down, distraught, before eyeing his friend once more with uncertainty, "But the home I knew? The monks who raised me? They're all gone."
Bumi lifted a finger, shaking it slowly. "Yes... the soft spires fell, Aang. But the place to the West, the temple that clings to the underside of the great cliffs, didn't just survive. The Fire Nation launched their fleet a century ago, and they collided with a wall they didn't expect!"
Aang looked down, a cold sense of foreboding mixing with his sorrow. "I know. The people talking in the villages call them the Matriarch's Vanguard. They say they use the wind like a blade."
"They do," Bumi countered, his eyes narrowing until they were sharp. "Because of one woman. A master of the winds who arrived shortly before the war began. An old crone now, stubborn, calculating, and possessed of a mind like a steel trap." He leaned forward with his hand resting on his old friend's shoulder, "She turned that hanging temple into a fortress of wind."
He leaned back into his staff, "I visited her twenty years ago to negotiate trade for our subterranean mining tools, and let me tell ya, she's a far cry from your normal airbender." He cracked a grin.
He smirked next. "She has been looking for you for a century, Avatar. Her scouts have been searching every corner of the world. She doesn't care much for destiny, but she cares a whole lot about winning a war. Go to the Western Temple. Face the one they call the Grand Matriarch. If anyone can teach you what it takes to survive a real fight, it is her."
Sokka stepped forward, his expression darkening with a sudden realization as he crossed his arms. "Wait. The Grand Matriarch?" He looked from Bumi to Katara, his mind rapidly connecting the stories they grew up with. "Katara, think about it." he looked to his sister, "Gran-Gran told us the old stories. Our tribe didn't just guess that the Fire Nation fleet was coming on the Night of the Comet." his eyes widened a bit, "The only reason our entire village survived that night is because a secret message came from the West, telling Chief Hado to hide everyone deep inside the ice caves."
Katara's eyes widened as she gasped, her hand flying to her necklace. "The old scrolls... the ones that warned us how hot the fire would burn when the comet arrived. Sokka, you're right. The elders always whispered that we owed our lives to a guardian in the western mountains."
Katara placed a gentle hand on Aang's arm, her expression a mix of fierce protection and cautious optimism. "But is it safe? If the Fire Nation couldn't take it a hundred years ago, they must be watching it like hawks now." she reasoned.
Bumi let out another gravelly cackle, leaning back on his staff. "Safe? Probably not! The Grand Matriarch doesn't do 'safe.' But she's been a thorn in the Fire Lord's side longer than I've been eating rock candy. If you want to see the sky turn into a nightmare for anyone wearing red, that's your stop."
Aang didn't say a word. The crushing weight of his dead world hadn't vanished, but it had shifted. He wasn't flying toward a ghost town, but he wasn't flying toward the peaceful sanctuary of his dreams either. He pulled the old king into a sudden, tight hug. "Thank you, Bumi. For everything."
"Don't thank me yet, kid!" Bumi wheezed, patting Aang's back with a heavy hand. "She's going to put you through the wringer. Tell her the 'Mad King of the Mountain' says she still owes me!"
With a rush of wind under him, Aang leaped onto Appa's head. Katara and Sokka scrambled into the saddle behind him. With a sharp snap of the reins and a shout of "Yip-yip!", the great bison heaved himself into the air. Leaving the stone peaks of Omashu behind, Aang looked toward the West. The foreboding was louder now than the hope. He was going to a home that still had his people, but he feared they had traded their peaceful ways for violence.
The meditation chamber was a hollowed-out sphere of stone hanging over a three-thousand-foot drop, open to the currents that howled through the canyon. Tanza sat cross-legged in the center, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow and rhythmic. To a casual observer, she looked like any other ancient master seeking enlightenment.
In reality, she was a radar dish.
She had long ago perfected the technique of Atmospheric Attunement. By vibrating the air molecules in a microscopic radius around her skin, she could feel the ripples of the world for miles. Every gust, every thermal, and every physical object displacing the air was a blip on her internal map. She felt the steady, familiar heartbeat of the Temple, the soft, fluttering currents of the Aspiration Spires where the pacifists dwelled, and the sharp, turbulent wakes left by her Sentinels practicing high-velocity dives in the Vanguard District.
For Tanza, the air was a series of tactical vectors.
Suddenly, a disturbance rippled across her consciousness. It was far to the east, miles beyond the outer perimeter. It was large, far larger than a messenger hawk or a stray crane-fish. It moved with a heavy, rhythmic displacement of air, a slow and steady beat that she hadn't felt in over a century.
Six tons of biological mass. Low-frequency wing beats. Non-ballistic trajectory.
Tanza's eyes didn't snap open. Instead, her brow furrowed as she cross-referenced the sensory data with her internal archives. There was only one creature that displaced air with that specific, lumbering signature.
A sky bison.
Tanza's brow furrowed, a rare outward display of mental friction. Her sensory net was absolute, the air did not lie. The bison was old, the displacement of its weight suggested a fully matured bull. But the riders?
The ripples they left in the air were light, their lung capacities small, their heartbeats quick and erratic, the unmistakable signatures of children.
'This makes no sense', she thought, her teeth grinding. 'The boy, Aang, vanished a lifetime ago! If he had lived like a normal man, he would be a withered husk by now. If he had died, a new spirit would have been born among the water folk, then the earth people. But the world has been empty for a century!'
Her mind raced through the possibilities. Was it a trick? A Fire Nation illusion? No, firebenders couldn't mimic the weight and feel of real air like this. Could it be a miracle? Or...
A cold, familiar bitterness pooled in her chest. He stopped. It was the only explanation that didn't involve the gods she so loathed. Her eyes snapped open with a glare, "The boy didn't grow up," she whispered, her voice like dry leaves. "Somehow, he stepped out of time entirely. He stayed a child while the world turned to ash, and now he expects to fly into my home as if he just stepped out for a stroll!?"
The sheer irresponsibility of it made her blood boil. She had spent a hundred years turning this temple into a fortress to keep her people from the grave, losing friends and watching the seasons change from a cold stone seat, and the 'savior' was arriving as a young boy who hadn't even hit his growth spurt.
She stood up, her ancient joints popping like dry twigs. Her confusion was rapidly being replaced by a very sharp, disciplined anger. "Sora!" she called out, stepping toward the edge of the drop.
Her lead guard, a woman whose face was as still as a frozen lake, dropped from the ledge above. "Grand Matriarch?"
"We have a visitor," Tanza said, her eyes fixed on the eastern horizon where a white speck was finally appearing through the clouds. "It seems the Avatar has returned. Specifically, the boy from the old stories, as young and useless as the day he left." She scoffed.
Sora blinked, her calm breaking for a fleeting second. "A child? But... how is that possible?"
"I don't care how it's possible, I only care that he's here," Tanza snapped with an old glare still prevalent in her eyes. "Send the riders. Tell them to box that bison in. Do not hurt them, but do not let them land near the peaceful halls. Force them down onto the Great Landing!"
Standing up with creaking bones with the assistance of her staff, Tanza turned away from the precipice, her wooden staff clicking rhythmically against the stone floor as she began the long walk toward the Great Landing. Every step was a reminder of the century she had endured, the cold winters, the constant vigil, and the weight of thousands of lives held in her calloused hands.
"If he thinks he's coming home to a graveyard, he's in for a lecture," she muttered to herself, her breath hitching slightly from the exertion. "And if he thinks he's coming home to a playground, he's in for even worse."
As she moved through the upper halls, the dual nature of her world was on full display. To her left, through the open archways, she could see the Aspiration Spires. There, the wind was soft, carrying the scent of incense and the low, melodic chanting of the monks who still spent their days in prayer and meditation. They wore the bright, traditional saffron robes, their lives as gentle and unburdened as the air itself.
To her right, however, was the Great Landing, where the air felt sharper, colder. Here, her warriors moved with purpose, their robes darker and cinched tight for flight, their eyes constantly scanning the horizon.
Tanza emerged onto the massive stone platform just as the white speck in the distance grew into the unmistakable form of a sky bison. She watched as her riders swooped in from the clouds, four on each side, forming a tight, silent diamond around the creature. They didn't attack, their presence simply a firm, unspoken command, 'You land where we tell you'.
She stood at the very center of the landing area, leaning on her staff, a tiny figure against the backdrop of the massive hanging towers. Her heart didn't thump with the excitement of a reunion. Instead, it simmered with the frustration of an officer whose most important soldier had missed the entire war.
Before long, the bison began its descent, its massive tail thumping the air to slow its momentum. As it touched down, the dust swirled around Tanza's feet, but she didn't flinch. She watched as a young boy, barely taller than her staff and wearing the unmistakable orange of the old world, peered over the bison's head with eyes wide enough to swallow the sun.
Tanza waited for the dust to settle. She waited until the silence was heavy enough to be felt. Then, she took a single, deliberate step forward, her sharp eyes boring into the child's soul.
"You're late," she rasped, her voice cutting through the wind like a blade. "And by the look of you, you haven't grown an inch in a hundred years. Explain yourself, boy. Where have you been while the rest of us were getting old?!" She snapped at him.
The Great Landing was unlike anything Aang remembered. As Appa descended, shadowed by the silent, disciplined circle of riders, Aang looked down at a wide stone plaza that seemed to hum with a strange, cold energy. On one side, the temple's ancient, delicate spires hung like lace against the cliffs, smelling of familiar incense. But the landing itself was stark and functional, lined with rows of sturdy gliders and overseen by people whose eyes weren't filled with the usual nomadic wanderlust, but with a sharp, piercing focus.
As Appa's heavy feet finally thudded onto the stone, Aang peered over the bison's head. His breath caught. Standing in the center of the clearing was a woman so small and bent she looked like a gnarled root, yet she held herself with the authority of a mountain. Her robes were a deeper, weathered shade of saffron, and her face was a map of deep lines, but it was her eyes that stopped him, they were blue, sharp as ice, and crackling with an intensity that made his knees weak.
Joy, sudden and overwhelming, surged in his chest. She was old, older than anyone he had ever seen beside Bumi, and she looked angry enough to swat a dragon out of the air, but she was Air Nomad. His people were here. They had survived!
Aang let out a shaky breath and offered a small, shy smile, his shoulders hunching up toward his ears. "I... I'm sorry?" he offered, his voice pitching up in a confused, hopeful question.
The old woman's reaction was instantaneous. She slammed her wooden staff against the stone with a crack that echoed through the canyon like a lightning strike. "Hogwash!" she barked, the force of her voice nearly blowing Aang's hood back. "Don't you 'sorry' me, boy. A hundred years of silence isn't fixed by a shrug and a stutter!"
She turned her sharp gaze toward Katara and Sokka, who were peering warily from the saddle. "You two! Out of the sky-beast. Now!" She gestured to a nearby sentinel. "Sora, take these Water Tribe children to the guest quarters in the Aspiration wing. Feed them something that isn't trail rations and make sure they don't trip over the meditation mats."
As his friends were led away, looking back at Aang with worried glances, the old woman turned her full, terrifying attention back to him. She didn't move, she simply leaned on her staff, her eyes boring into his as if she were trying to read the very wind inside his lungs.
"Now, Avatar," she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, quiet rasp. "The world is a charred mess, and yet you look like you just woke up from a nap. 'I'm sorry' doesn't cover a century of desertion! Walk with me. I want a real explanation, and I want it before the sun sets!" She barked at him in frustration.
Aang quickly scrambled down from Appa's head, before his boots hit the stone with a soft thud. He hurried to keep pace with the old woman's short, brisk strides. She didn't look back to see if he was following, she simply expected it, her staff clicking a steady, demanding rhythm against the floor.
"It wasn't a nap," Aang started, his voice small as he trotted beside her. He glanced at her face, she looked so much like the statues of the Great Sages, yet she moved with the jagged energy of a lightning strike. "There was a storm. A huge one." He patted himself and gestured back where Appa was, "Me and Appa, we crashed into the ocean!" He rushed in explanation.
He let his arms go slack and shook his head in dismay, "I didn't mean to go away, I just…" he let out a shuttered sigh, "I got scared, and I went into the Avatar State. I froze us in an iceberg to save us." He explained in short order, hoping the brief explanation would help.
The old woman let out a sharp, dry snort. She gave him a passing sideways glance. "An iceberg. How very convenient for you. You skipped the struggle, the starvation, and the fire, all for a bit of frostbite."
"I didn't know!" Aang pleaded, his hands waving frantically. "When I woke up, Katara and Sokka found me, and they told me it had been a hundred years! I thought everyone was gone, I thought..." a dark mournful looked quickly passed his features.
He trailed off. They had turned a corner, passing through a high, vaulted archway that transitioned from the cold, gray stone of the landing into a place of light and color. Aang stopped mid-sentence, his jaw dropping.
Below them, on a series of tiers carved into the sun-drenched side of the mountain, was a scene straight out of his dreams. He saw younger monks in bright yellow robes sitting in circles, their eyes closed in quiet contemplation. He saw children playing with air-balls, their laughter echoing off the canyon walls. The smell of burning jasmine and sandalwood drifted up on a warm breeze, and for a second, the militaristic tension of the landing was completely forgotten.
"They're really here," Aang whispered, his eyes welling up with tears. He took a step toward the railing, his heart aching with a relief so sharp it hurt. "You kept them safe. You kept the history alive!"
The old woman stopped and leaned heavily on her staff, watching him watch the monks. Her expression didn't soften, but the biting edge in her eyes dimmed just a fraction.
"Half of them," she said quietly. "I kept the dreamers in their gardens so they could remember how to pray. But don't be fooled, boy. They only get to sit in the sun because my other half, the ones you saw on the landing, are standing in the shadows with their eyes on the horizon."
She turned her gaze back to him, her face as hard as the mountain itself. "You were frozen in ice while I was freezing my soul to keep this place standing. Now, tell me the rest. If you're the Avatar from a century ago, why did you run away in the first place? What was so terrifying that you left the whole world to burn?"
Aang sighed, his shoulders slumping as they walked past a group of younger monks practicing their forms. "I never wanted any of it," he admitted, his voice barely a whisper. "I just wanted to be a normal kid, to play airball and hang out with my friends. Then the monks told me I was the Avatar, and everything changed." He shook his head in dismay with a downcasted look, "Everyone started treating me differently. When they said they were sending me away for more training, I got scared... and I ran."
Tanza didn't stop walking, but her staff hit the stone with a slightly harder crack. "A typical reaction for a child," she rasped. "But a luxury the world couldn't afford."
She turned her head slightly, eyeing him as they approached a stone archway. "You think you were special, boy? You think you're the first Avatar to wake up to a mess?" She snorted, a dry, cynical sound. "History is just one long record of Avatars trying to stop the world from eating itself. Conflict never truly dies."
Tanza's pace didn't slacken, her small frame moving with a rhythmic, mechanical precision that forced Aang to take two steps for every one of hers. She led him deeper into the temple, where the walls were lined with ancient tapestries and murals of the past.
"I've had a hundred years to read," she said, her voice echoing in the quiet hallway. "A hundred years to study the record that our monks used to hide away." She gave Aang another glance as he walked with her, "Do you know what I found, boy? I found a cycle of people who were all just as overwhelmed as you."
She moved her gaze forward as she dragged up memories of what she read, "Avatar Kuruk. The world thought he was a lazy playboy, but he spent every night fighting a secret war against monsters from the spirit world that were eating his soul. He died young and miserable so the rest of the world could stay oblivious. He didn't get to run."
They passed a massive statue of a woman with a cold, stone face and heavy fans. "Kyoshi. She was born into a world of chaos and bandits. She didn't have a temple to call home, she had to kill a man who was her own father figure just to keep the continent from shattering. She lived for centuries because she knew the minute she closed her eyes, the world would start burning again."
Aang however looked at the statues, his eyes wide. He had always seen the Avatars as powerful, glowing legends, but Tanza was describing them as people who were constantly exhausted.
"Then there was Roku," Tanza continued, her voice growing even sharper. "He spent his final years breathing volcanic ash, trying to hold back the tide of his own best friend's ambition. He failed, and he died in the smoke. And then it was your turn."
She stopped abruptly in front of a wide window that looked out over the entire Western Temple, the peaceful gardens on the left and the armed warriors on the right.
"Every Avatar is born into a storm, Aang. Some try to calm it, some try to outrun it, and some, like me, learn to build a roof that can withstand it. You ran because you didn't want to be a weapon, but in this world, if you aren't a weapon, you're a target."
She turned to face him, leaning heavily on her staff. "I studied them all to find a way to save us, because the 'Avatar' was missing. Now that you've finally back, you need to decide which kind of Avatar you're going to be. Are you going to be the monk who meditates while the fire rises, or are you going to be the shield that stops it?"
Aang looked at her, then back at the peaceful monks below. "I don't want to hurt anyone," he whispered. "But... I don't want them to die either."
Tanza let out a short, sharp breath. "Then we have work to do. If you want to keep your peace, you're going to have to learn how to defend it."
Soon though, Tanza stopped walking and turned her whole body toward him, leaning her weight onto her gnarled wooden staff. Her sharp eyes searched his face, looking for any sign of the power he was supposed to wield.
"Before you go off to find your friends and your dinner, I need to know one thing," she said, her voice steady and demanding. "How many elements have you mastered, boy? How much of the world's power do you actually have at your command?"
Aang shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his hand reaching up to rub the back of his neck. He gave her a small, sheepish grin that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"Well... I'm a Master Airbender," he started, standing a little straighter to show off his tattoos, but his voice quickly softened as he saw her expression stay flat. "And I've... I've just started on water. My friend Katara is helping me! We practice whenever we find a nice river or a pond!"
The silence that followed was heavy. Tanza didn't move. She didn't even blink. Then, she let out a scoff so full of disbelief it sounded like a physical blow.
"Water," she muttered, the word dripping with biting frustration. "The fire is at our very doors, the world is waiting for a savior, and you are currently at the stage of playing in puddles."
"I've been busy!" Aang protested, his hands waving. "There were people to help, and a volcano, and-"
"Hush," Tanza snapped, cutting him off with a sharp wave of her hand. She looked him up and down, her face full of an old woman's deep weariness. "The world is burning, and its only hope is a boy who hasn't even learned how to make a proper wave. It's a miracle we're still standing at all."
She turned away, her staff clicking sharply against the stone as she began to walk toward her own rooms. "Go. Find your friends. The guards will show you to a place where you can sleep. Enjoy the soft blankets, boy. It's the least bit of comfort you'll have while you're under my roof."
She paused, looking over her shoulder with a gaze that promised a very difficult morning. "Tomorrow when the first light hits the towers, you come to the big landing. If you've learned nothing else, then we are starting from the very beginning. Now, get out of my sight before I lose my temper!"
Aang didn't wait to be told twice. He bowed quickly and scrambled away, feeling her sharp gaze following him like a cold wind.
The morning air was thin and bitingly cold, exactly the way Tanza liked it. It was an honest air, one that didn't hide its teeth.
She stood alone on the Great Landing, her small, ancient frame wrapped in the heavy, dark-saffron robes of a woman who had long since stopped caring about traditional fashion. Behind her, the temple was beginning to stir, the soft, distant hum of the peaceful monks waking to their chants, but here, the wind whistled through the jagged spires with a lonely, hollow sound.
Tanza closed her eyes, and for a fleeting second, the years seemed to peel away like old paint.
A phantom image flickered in the center of the plaza. She saw a younger version of herself, a nine-year-old girl with sharp, predatory eyes and a clean-shaven head, standing in a low, disciplined stance. She saw the ghost of Laya rushing forward, her face a chaotic map of motherly pride and soul-deep terror, pulling her young daughter into a hug that felt like a desperate attempt to keep her from drifting away.
Further back, the spectral forms of the old Council walked away in hushed, worried whispers. She watched the phantom of Matriarch Rin linger for just a moment, her milky eyes looking at the child not as a savior, but as a storm they had accidentally invited indoors. Then, she too faded into the morning mist.
Tanza opened her eyes and looked at the center of the courtyard.
There it stood. The stone pillar she had cleaved a century ago. It had never been repaired. Over the decades, she had forbidden the monks from fixing it, keeping it as a silent, jagged monument to the day the 'peace' of the air was first sharpened into a blade. The cut was still there, a perfect, diagonal slice, the once cherry-red edges now weathered grey by a hundred years of mountain rain, but still smooth as glass.
"A hundred years," she rasped, her voice a dry rattle in the quiet morning. "A century of holding the wall while the rest of the world kept moving with war."
Hobbling over with the tic tak sound of her staff helping her walk, Tanza reached the pillar shortly, within several slow paces. She reached out with a trembling, calloused hand and traced the edge of the cut.
The sound of footsteps, soft, hesitant, and entirely too light, broke her reverie. She didn't need to turn around to know who it was. The rhythmic thumping of his heart and the clumsy way he displaced the air told her everything she needed to know.
Tanza didn't move. She kept her fingers pressed against the cold, smooth stone, feeling the ghost of the heat she had once forced into it.
"You're early, boy," she said, her voice cutting through the morning mist like a sharp breeze. "At least you haven't lost the habit of waking up before the sun. That's something." She remarked in a small candid but cranky tone.
It was not but shortly after that Aang stopped several paces behind her. He was shifting his weight, his eyes wide as he looked at the massive stone pillar that had been sliced through as easily as a blade of grass. "Bumi told me a little about you," he whispered, his voice full of awe and a bit of fear. "He said you were the one who stopped the fire. Did... did you do this?" He asked with some uncertainty.
Tanza finally let her hand drop, turning slowly to face him. She looked tiny and frail against the backdrop of the mountain, but her eyes were as sharp as the day she had earned her marks.
"I did that when I was nine years old," she said, gesturing to the broken stone. "I did it because I was tired of being told that the wind could only push or pull. I wanted to see if it could bite. I wanted to see if I could make it fast enough and hot enough to stand against anything that came my way." She simply explained.
She hobbled a step closer, leaning on her staff as she peered at him. "You look at this and you see a broken monument. I look at it and I see the last time I was allowed to be a student. The years after I cut this stone, the world ended for everyone else, and I had to start building a fortress."
Aang looked from her to the pillar, his face pale. "But the monks... they taught us that airbending is about life. It's not about cutting or hurting." He furrowed his brow in denial of such a feat and technique.
Tanza leaned heavily on her staff, a weary but knowing smile touching her lips. "I know what they taught you, Aang. I sat in those same circles and heard those same stories about the sacredness of all life. I even let my own mother believe I was just a 'gifted' child following her lead."
She gestured with a gnarled hand toward the peaceful spires of the temple, where the morning bells were just beginning to ring. "And I didn't take that away. Look back there, those monks still meditate, they still pray, and they still believe the wind is a gentle friend. I made sure they had a place where they could stay soft."
Her eyes snapped back to Aang, turning cold as a winter gale. "But I couldn't be like them. I watched the world, boy. I saw the way the Fire Nation was growing, the way they were building machines and sharpening their steel while we were picking fruit and singing to bison. I was too weary to believe that peace would last forever just because we wished it so!"
She took another slow, painful step toward him. "You think my way is wrong. You think I've stained the air with blood and friction. Maybe you're right. In your world, airbending is a dance. In mine, it is a wall."
She pointed her staff directly at his chest. "But look around you, Boy. If I hadn't decided to be 'wrong,' you wouldn't be standing here talking to a 'Grand Matriarch.' You would be standing in a tomb, truly alone, staring at the ash of your people. My 'wrong' way of life is the only reason you still have a home to come back to!" She lightly chastised him with a huff of air exiting her lips.
Wordlessly, Aang looked toward the distant spires, where he could see the bright yellow robes of the peaceful monks starting their day, then back at the jagged, cut pillar.
"I kept the peace alive for them," Tanza rasped, her brow furrowing in defiance, "-and I kept the temple to this day! Now, are you going to keep clinging to the past, or are you going to let me show you how to survive the present?" she demanded.
Hama moved through the stone corridors with a grace that age had sharpened rather than dulled. Every step was deliberate, her internal rhythm tied to the push and pull of the mountain's groundwater. She was a woman of ice and iron, a far cry from the frightened girl Tanza had pulled from the hold of a Fire Nation prison ship all those decades ago.
Tanza had asked for help with the new arrivals, but Hama knew the subtext. Her Grand Matriarch didn't just want them fed, she wanted to know if the children from the South were assets or liabilities. Specifically, she wanted Hama to see if the girl, Katara, had the stomach for the kind of bending that actually won wars.
'Always looking for the edge', Hama thought, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. That was her Tanza, always calculating, always preparing for the next storm. It was the quality Hama had fallen in love with sixty years ago, and the quality that had kept them both alive while the rest of the world burned.
She reached the guest wing, where the air was warmer and smelled of the heavy, sweet incense the peaceful monks favored. She paused outside a heavy wooden door, sensing the moisture in the room. There was a lot of it, a large basin of water, and the steady, rhythmic pulse of two young hearts.
Hama pushed the door open without knocking.
Inside, the boy, Sokka, was busy sharpening a boomerang with a look of intense concentration, while the girl, Katara, stood over a stone basin. Katara was focused, her hands moving in a slow, traditional circle, pulling a globe of water into the air. It was a beautiful, gentle movement.
It was, in Hama's professional opinion, entirely too soft.
"The form is correct for a dance," Hama rasped, her voice startling both children. Sokka nearly dropped his weapon, and Katara's water orb splashed back into the basin with a messy thud.
Hama stepped into the light, her long, silver hair flowing like a frozen river over her shoulders. She looked Katara up and down, her eyes sharp and assessing.
"But the Fire Nation doesn't dance," Hama continued, her gaze moving to the girl's blue parka. "The Grand Matriarch says you've been trying to teach the Avatar. A heavy burden for a child who hasn't even learned how to pull the frost from the air." She noted while eyeing the young girl.
Katara stood taller, her eyes flashing with a familiar Southern spark. "Who are you?" she asked, bewildered and confused.
"A friend of your grandmother's people," Hama answered, before she began walking toward the basin. She didn't look at the water, she looked at Katara. "And the woman who is going to show you that water isn't just something you move. It's something you are." She offered the girl a dark grin.