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

by F.C. Yee

She did her best to ignore the pain of her arm losing circulation and her heart falling into a pile of ribbons.

“Where you go, I go.”

🥺

“We shared a meal,” Wong said, looking genuinely hurt. “We beat up lawmen together.”

“Both sides” was a rhetorical weapon used by hypocrites and the ignorant.

You love to see it.

“It can’t be that bad,” Hui said, hoping with his entire heart it was truly that bad.

Me whenever I get a republican fundraising email

Flight was normally a feat restricted to the pure of heart.

He knew nothing of leadership besides making demands and doling out cruelties when they weren’t met. Control by tantrum,

“You know what you felt, watching me lie on the canvas?”

*sob*

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Rangi said. She tried to smother herself with the palm of her hand. “It shouldn’t have gone this way.”

“You think you don’t deserve peace and happiness and good things, but you do!”

A warm glow mapped Kyoshi’s veins. Eternity distilled in a single brush of skin. She thought she would never be more alive than now.

You’d sully yourself with me?

Kyoshi watched the stars fade in and out of the sky, screened and unveiled in turn by the clouds that were as invisible in the darkness as black-clad stagehands moving the settings of a play. She was waiting for the others to fall asleep. She waited for a particular hour that belonged neither to this day nor the next, when time felt jellied and thick.

“For me, it’s because he’s my man. Listen. Governor Te is brutally incompetent and corrupt. His people go hungry, he skims from the Earth King’s taxes to enrich his own coffers, and in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t have a good policy for handling daofei.” “Those aren’t excuses to murder him!” “You’re right. They’re not excuses—they’re ample justifications. I guarantee you that many citizens have suffered immeasurably from his greed and negligence, and many more will die if he is allowed to keep breathing.”

“Te and his ilk are parasites leeching strength and vitality from the kingdom. Imagine yourself as the predator that keeps the land healthy by eliminating the sources of its weakness.

O.O

“What gives you the right to decide?” she asked. “Are you part of another brotherhood? Are there more people like you? Is someone paying you?” He shook his head, dodging her questions. “Doesn’t everyone have the right to decide?” he said. “Isn’t the Avatar a person like me? Someone who shapes the world with their choices?” She was going to protest that no, the Avatar had the recognition of the spirits and Four Nations, but she found her tongue tied in the wake of his argument. He gripped his forearms behind his back and gazed across the canyon. “I would declare the lowliest peasant is like the Avatar in this regard. 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.

Again! With emotional content this time!”

Me @ game of thrones finale

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.

*weeping*

“I can’t cheer up. I’m in Horse stance.”

“White symbolizes treachery, a sinister nature, suspicion of others, and the willingness to visit evil deeds upon them.”

“You’re not a very good apprentice,” he said tonelessly.

“You forget, Xu,” she said, and a legion of voices synchronized in the eye of the storm. “There is always someone who stands above you in judgment.”

*virgo intensifies*

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. And Xu had exhausted his.

Kyoshi didn’t know what to make of the cruel, unusual man. He seemed to constantly need a powerful figure to tell him what to do. “Begone,” she said with the last of the echoes in her throat.

“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.”

Then let it be so, she thought. She would fight her ill fortune, her bad stars, and protect those who might despise her to the very end of her days.