Avatar: The Rise of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels, #1)

by F.C. Yee

“Never wait to find out what the trouble is,” Wong said, already jogging away from the source. “By then, you’re already too close.”

But they glanced at her with wonder in their shifting eyes, the same nervousness she knew she felt when Kelsang had tracked her down for the first time and lifted her out of the dirt. You’d sully yourself with me?

“Isn’t the Avatar a person like me? Someone who shapes the world with their choices?”

All of our actions have an impact. Each decision we make ripples into the future. And we alter our landscapes according to our needs. To keep her crops alive, a farmer uproots the weeds that nature has placed in her fields, does she not?” “People aren’t weeds,” Kyoshi said. It was the best she could manage. He turned to face her. “I think it’s a bit late to claim the moral high ground, given what your aims are.”

Her resolve was wavering left and right. Not a minute ago she was yowling about doing the deed herself, feigning a hard soul, and now she was begging Grandfather to make the bad man go away.

She’d heard that sometimes the losers of an important Agni Kai would shave parts of their head bald, laying patches of their scalp bare to symbolize an extra level of humility from their defeat, but the topknot was always sacred. It was never touched except in circumstances akin to death.

“Aging is really just your body falling apart, on the smallest, most invisible levels, and neglecting to put itself back together,”

They look at themselves like forces of nature, as inevitable ends, but they’re not. Their depth is as false as the shoals at low tide. They twist the meaning of justice to absolve themselves of conscience.

Shortsighted men like Te and Xu were parasites who gnawed at the very structures they exploited for power and survival.

They were blind to the fact that they existed not through their own merits but due to the warped form of charity the world had decided to give them.

“Sure thing, sister. Or else you’ll do it for me?” He waved his hands in mockery of waterbending and made a drowning noise as he left the room. Kyoshi’s cheeks heated in frustration. And then, like a glacier cracking, they slowly melted into a grin. She noticed what he’d called her for the first time.

“You will never be perfectly fair, and you will never be truly correct,” Lao Ge said. “This is your burden.”

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

“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.”

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.

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.”

She had every intention of keeping to the same Code as her sworn family members, living and dead.