"Aang," the bearded Elder said again, with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world. "Do you know why we have called you here?"
I did, of course. I'd known the second I saw the arrows on their heads.
But a six-year-old who suddenly knows everything is a six-year-old people start asking questions about, so I put on my best innocent face, the one I'd used on referees after a questionable eye poke, and shrugged.
"No, Elders."
I'd said that already. Nobody seemed to mind.
The stern-faced woman on the left nodded to an attendant standing near the wall, and the attendant bowed and slipped out of the chamber. A moment later, the doors at the far end swung open and a line of young acolytes marched in, carrying low wooden tables piled high with objects.
Then more tables. Then more.
They filled the floor in front of me in neat, careful rows until I was sitting at the center of what looked like the world's strangest garage sale. Dolls. Tops. Wooden animals. Kites with torn tails. Tiny clay figurines. Rattles, whistles, little painted boats, a miniature glider no longer than my forearm. There had to be thousands of them, stacked and spread across the stone like a flood.
I'd forgotten how big it actually was. On screen, it had been a montage, a few seconds of an old monk gesturing at a table. In person, it was a wall of toys that stretched halfway across the room.
This is it, I thought, and my stomach did a slow flip. The Avatar test.
The bearded Elder folded his hands.
"Aang," he said, in a gentle voice, "we would like you to look at these things and tell us which of them call to you. Take your time. Choose the ones that feel right, and bring them to us."
"Which ones feel right," I repeated.
"Yes."
Four of them, I thought. Four toys, out of a few thousand. Every one of them an heirloom of a past Avatar, hidden among the junk, waiting for the next incarnation to pick them out by instinct alone.
The thing is, I didn't have the instinct.
I had the knowledge. I'd watched that episode more times than I could count. I knew exactly what Aang had chosen, and I knew exactly where to look. But the real Aang had felt something, a pull, a sense of recognition, a thread running down through lifetimes of memory. The Avatar's spirit calling to its own past.
I sat there for a second, hands on my knees, and reached inward for it.
Nothing.
No pull. No thread. Just a small, tired boy's heart beating a little too fast, and a hundred bright, meaningless objects staring back at me.
Well, I thought. Let's fake it.
I stood up, brushed off my robes, and started walking.
The trick to a good bluff is looking like you aren't bluffing. I let my eyes drift along the tables with exaggerated curiosity, pausing here and there, tilting my head at a rattle, crouching to look at a painted bird. I could feel the Elders watching me, quiet and still.
Then I turned toward the third row and walked straight to a lumpy little thing in the corner of a table.
A clay turtle. Gray and glazed, with a slightly cracked shell and a face that looked a little too smug. It fit in the palm of my hand.
I picked it up.
Nothing. Cool clay. A tiny weight. That was all.
I put it in the crook of my arm and kept moving.
The pull-string propeller was two rows over, a flat wooden toy with a spindle and a bright red string. The wooden hog monkey was tucked behind a basket of dolls, a goofy carved animal with a smile like a lunatic. The hand drum was the last one, sitting on a low shelf near the wall, a small round wooden drum with a leather head and a leather cord tied around its handle.
I picked each of them up, one after another, and held them against my chest.
Four toys. Four relics of four lives I couldn't remember.
It should have felt like a victory.
I turned and carried them back across the room, laid them down on the stone before the Elders, and stepped back.
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
I watched their faces. The bearded Elder's eyebrows had risen, a quiet, unreadable lift. The stern woman beside him had gone completely still. Another Elder, a thin man at the end of the line, exhaled slowly through his nose, as though he'd been holding a breath for a very long time.
"Remarkable," the stern woman murmured, mostly to herself.
"Yes," said the bearded Elder.
I stood there with my hands behind my back and a hollow feeling spreading through my chest.
Here's what I couldn't tell them: I'd gotten it right, and it didn't mean a thing.
When Aang chose those toys, he said he picked them because he had liked them and yet I'd stood in front of them and felt nothing at all. No desire. No recognition. No whisper from the thousands of lives behind my own. I'd chosen them the way you choose the right answer on a test you studied for, not the way you reach for something that belongs to you.
Something's wrong, I thought. Or something's missing.
I filed the thought away for later. A very long list of laters was building up.
"That will be all, young Aang," the bearded Elder said at last, and there was a warmth in his voice that I couldn't quite read. "You have done well. Go now. Your lessons are about to begin, and you do not want to be late."
"Yes, Elder." I bowed, as deeply as a six-year-old can without falling over.
Then I turned and walked out of the room as calmly as I could, through the tall wooden doors and into the cold white hallway beyond.
The doors thudded shut behind me.
I made it exactly six steps down the corridor before the world went blue.
It didn't flash. It unfolded, like a curtain being drawn open in front of my eyes, a soft, translucent window hanging in the air at eye level. Clean lines, glowing letters, a faint hum like a server farm in the next room.
I stopped dead in the middle of the hallway.
[ WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AVATAR ]
There it is.
The text hovered there for a moment. Then the whole window shivered, and the letters scrambled and re-formed, as though the thing were thinking.
[ SYSTEM CORE DETECTED. SYNCING TO HOST. ]
[ ENVIRONMENT ANALYZED. INTERFACE UPGRADING... ]
A bar crawled across the bottom of the screen. Ten percent. Forty. Eighty-five. The window grew, spreading wider, adding panels and tabs and little glowing icons. When it finished, it looked a lot more like the menu of a game I'd have happily lost a weekend to.
[ UPGRADE COMPLETE. ]
I swallowed, glanced up and down the empty corridor, and whispered, "Stats."
The window obeyed.
HOST: AANG
AGE: 6
LVL: 1
HEALTH POOL: 100/100
CHI POOL 100/100
TITLE: Reincarnate / Avatar (Dormant)
STRENGTH: 4
AGILITY: 9
ENDURANCE: 5
WISDOM: 4
I stared at the numbers. They weren't exactly impressive, but I wasn't surprised. I was six. The bigger shock was the Mind stat, which I assumed meant I'd carried most of my brain across the gap. It was oddly comforting.
"Abilities," I said.
The window slid sideways.
BENDING AFFINITY
AIR: UNLOCKED - (Lv. 1)
WATER: LOCKED
EARTH: LOCKED
FIRE: LOCKED
Locked. All three of them.
I'd expected that. The Avatar can only learn the elements in order, and Aang had started with air, so the system probably just mirrored the world's rules. Still, seeing the word LOCKED sit there next to three of the four elements made my jaw tighten. That wasn't a rule I wanted to live with.
I was about to close the window when it chimed.
It was a soft, clear sound, the kind you'd hear on a phone when something good happens. A fresh line of text slid up under the others, glowing a hot, crackling white.
[ HIDDEN CONDITION MET ]
[ UNIQUE ORIGIN DETECTED: DEATH BY LIGHTNING ]
[ SUB-DISCIPLINE UNLOCKED: LIGHTNINGBENDING ]
I read it twice.
Then I read it a third time, very slowly.
And then I just stood there in the middle of a mountain monastery, a six-year-old with a clay turtle's worth of fake instinct and a face that had completely stopped working, and deadpanned at a floating blue window.
"You have got to be kidding me."
The window pulsed, smug as a cat.
"I died to lightning, and that's the thing that counts? I got killed by it, and now it's a skill?"
[ NOTE: CAUSE OF DEATH WAS NOT A PREREQUISITE. IT WAS A COINCIDENCE. THE SYSTEM APOLOGIZES FOR NOTHING. ]
I opened my mouth, shut it, and started laughing.
I couldn't help it. It spilled out of me in a bright, high, ridiculous giggle that echoed down the empty hall. The best fighter in the world, taken out by a freak storm in the third round of a title defense, and the universe had looked at that and decided I should get lightning for free.
Lightning. A bending style that, in the show, only a handful of firebenders ever mastered. A technique that required peace of mind, a sort of cold, perfect serenity, and that Azula treated like a toy and Iroh had to invent a whole branch of lightning redirection. It was the sort of thing a normal person spent a lifetime chasing.
I'd been handed it before breakfast.
I wiped my eyes and pulled the window back up, more carefully this time.
LIGHTNINGBENDING: UNLOCKED (Lv. 0)
STATUS: DORMANT. (REQUIRES FIRE FOUNDATION TO FULLY AWAKEN.)
"There's the catch," I muttered. "Of course."
But even with the catch, I couldn't help grinning.
I started walking again, slower now, watching the window glide along beside me. I'd been here for maybe twenty minutes, and I already had two bending disciplines open to me. The original Aang had one, and he'd spent his whole childhood learning only that.
I'm ahead, I thought. Barely out of the starting gate, and I'm already ahead.
The grin faded a little, and something steadier took its place.
Don't get cocky. Ahead means nothing until it's finished.
Let's see. I was six. The Fire Nation would attack in six years, give or take, and the Avatar, me, would vanish into the ice shortly after. That was my window. Six years to learn everything the Air Nomads could teach me. Six years to master airbending, and maybe, if I was clever and ruthless about it, to get a head start on the rest.
I had Monk Gyatso. I had the Council. I had an entire temple full of the greatest airbenders who'd ever lived, and I intended to squeeze every last drop of knowledge out of every one of them.
Then, once I'd learned what they could teach, I'd go beyond it. Water, earth, and fire came later, but I wasn't going to wait around for permission. The system said locked. Fine. I'd find the lock and figure out how it worked. Everybody has weak points.
And there was the other thing, the one that had been tugging at the back of my mind since the window first lit up.
Lightning had been a sub-discipline. Not an element. A branch.
That meant there were others.
The waterbenders had bloodbending and healing. The earthbenders had metalbending and lavabending. Firebenders had lightning and, much later, combustion. Every element had branches, specialties, twists on the principle that someone, somewhere, had worked out for themselves.
Which means someone could invent more.
I looked at the window, at the glowing word DORMANT, at the soft blue light that painted my small brown hands.
What else can I learn? What else can I make*?*
My heart was beating fast. It wasn't fear. It was something older, something I'd felt in the weeks before every title fight, standing in a dark gym with sweat running down my back and a long road ahead of me.
Hunger.
"AANG!"
The shout rang off the stone walls and nearly knocked me off my feet.
I spun around. At the far end of the corridor, a lean young master in orange and yellow was striding toward me, robes flapping around his ankles, one hand on his hip and the other waving at me like he was trying to flag down a boat.
"What are you doing?" he called. "You're supposed to be at airbending class! The others have been waiting for ten minutes!"
I flicked my hand, and the system window folded away into a glimmer of blue and vanished.
"Sorry, Master!" I called back, already sprinting down the hall. "I'm coming!"
The master shook his head as I skidded to a stop beside him, but there was a tiny, helpless smile at the corner of his mouth. "You and your daydreaming. One of these days, young Aang..."
"One of these days," I agreed, grinning up at him.
And as we walked together toward the training courtyard, with the wind rising and the mountains glittering beyond the open arches, I thought of the road ahead of me.
Six years.
It wasn't much time.
It was going to be enough.