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But she couldn’t bring herself to try to imagine fitting compensation. Why exactly did Shing, a powerful man, deserve to exploit a catastrophe and become richer at the expense of his citizens?
Indeed 🧐
using a nearby Fire Nation minister as cover the way a swordsman fighting a duel in a bamboo grove might use the plants as a check on his opponent’s blade.
Sokka!
In Chaejin she saw a man who wanted power for its own sake and was willing to burn his own country to get it. How utterly familiar. You know what to do with such men, cackled Lao Ge.
Lao Ge knows what’s up ✊
She wasn’t afraid of learning it would take a great battle for her to save Yun, or a quest through the worst places in the world. She was at home with such things. “I can fight it,” Kyoshi said. “Just tell me how.”
“Enemies are enemies, but no one can shame you like your own family.”
“You can have your past, or you can have your future. Not both.
There would be consequences for choosing her personal attachments over all else, in the long run.
She wasn’t describing the truth of Kyoshi’s thoughts. But thoughts didn’t matter. Only actions and their outcomes.
“I believe I have to make peace with my own choices, just like everyone else.”
Human beings could drape themselves in titles and etiquette, but at their hearts they were all the same animal.
The fact of the matter was the world grew Jianzhus by the bushel. They sprouted from the soil and multiplied from the seas. People sought to emulate Jianzhu with every fiber of their being.
She wouldn’t allow herself to become a human scar, a compendium of personal loss. She had the obligation to be more than the sum of her grievances with the world.
Rebuilding always took longer than destruction, cleaning a mess more time than making it.
Destroying the spirit had cost him a piece of his own, somehow. He was bleeding inside, losing something more vital than blood, vitality leaching away in a manner no healer could fix. He was cold. Him, a child of the north who laughed at blizzards and swam laps around icebergs, was cold. Nothing pumped through his veins.
Death and time made everyone small, reduced them to trivialities.
The settlement bore marks of cheap, rapid construction, the type of boomtown constructed to exploit opportunities and people in equal measure.
Pushing dirt around from one place to the other was a burden and obligation shared by the lowly of every nation.
It had been decided long before she was born that power was adequate compensation for losing what she most held dear.
