Chapter 127: The Power of the Avatar
The Avatar stood at the shattered edge of the Spirit Oasis, where the sacred walls met the city's pain. The gentle hum of the place was gone, replaced by a deeper vibration, a thrum in the air itself. It was not coming from the moon. It was coming from him.
He did not run. He walked. Each footfall on the ice-claimed street was deliberate, a sovereign surveying a domain under assault. The distant clamor of battle, the shouts, the roar of flames, the screams, which had been a chaos of noise, now resolved itself into a map of suffering in his mind. He could feel the push and pull of every desperate water whip, the guttering panic of each defender, the greedy, consuming heat of the advancing fire.
He reached the central canal junction, the place where Master Pakku had made his stand. The water here was churned and filthy, littered with the wreckage of war and worse. Fire Nation soldiers, seeing a lone boy in orange and yellow, a target, broke from their platoons and charged.
Aang did not look at them.
He raised a hand, palm open, not in a fist. It was a gesture of invitation.
The canal did not just rise. It unfolded.
A wall of water, wide as the canal itself and thrice the height of the surrounding buildings, peeled itself from its bed with a sound like a continent sighing. It did not crash. It simply stood, a sheer, shimmering cliff of liquid, defying gravity, reflecting the full moon's light and the city's fires in a terrifying mosaic.
The charging soldiers skidded to a halt, their fury turning to gibbering terror. They looked up, and up, at the impossible aqua.
Aang closed his palm.
The wall leaned forward and fell.
It was not a wave. It was an avalanche made of sea. It did not knock the soldiers down. It enveloped them, swallowed them whole, and kept moving. It filled the street from wall to wall, a solid, rushing mass that scoured the stone and ice clean. When it receded, pulling back into the canal with a deep, groaning suction, the street was empty. Not a body, not a weapon, not a scrap of cloth remained. They were simply gone.
He walked on, following the path of the invasion towards the great breach. The Fire Nation, sensing a new, catastrophic threat, turned their machines of war on this single, small figure.
From the decks of the closest ironclads anchored in the harbor, and from siege engines repositioned inside the wall, the air tore with the THWOOM of heavy catapults. Not flaming boulders now, but specialized rounds: spheres of compacted, burning pitch; canisters that shattered on impact to spread clinging fire; massive, blunt stones meant to crush.
The first volley darkened the sky, a swarm of fiery meteors and deadly shadows descending upon the Avatar.
Aang stopped. He looked up.
He brought his hands together in front of his chest, then swept them out and around in a great, sweeping circle.
Every drop of water in the nearby canals, every trickle of meltwater, every ounce of moisture in the frozen air, answered the call. It streamed towards him, a billion converging threads, weaving themselves into a spinning, colossal vortex of water that encased him. It was a whirlpool standing on end, a furious liquid tornado.
The projectiles hit It.
The burning pitch spheres plunged into the churning wall and were extinguished with furious hisses, vanishing into steam and black, harmless sludge. The fire canisters shattered against the water's relentless motion, their contents diluted and drowned before they could ignite. The massive stones were caught, spun violently around the vortex's perimeter like pebbles in a sling, and then, with a final, whip-crack surge from Aang, were hurled back the way they had come.
They smashed into the catapults that had launched them, into the decks of ships, into groups of firebenders. The retaliation was precise, impersonal, and devastating.
From the decks of the flagship Inferno's Heart, Vice Admiral Takeda watched through his spyglass, his blood turning to ice. "Concentrate all fire! Every bender, every engine! On that boy! He must be the spirit they worship! Kill it!"
The order went out. A coordinated barrage the likes of which the Northern Water Tribe had never seen. Concentrated jets of fire from a hundred benders merged into a roaring, continuous stream of orange-white hellfire. Catapults thumped, trebuchets groaned, launching their payloads in a unified storm of annihilation aimed at the vortex.
Aang, within his spinning sanctuary, felt the pressure. The heat was immense, boiling the outer layers of his water shield into a cloak of scalding steam. The impacts were constant, a drumbeat of attempted murder.
He ceased his circular motion.
The vortex collapsed. But the water did not fall.
It gathered.
It piled upon itself in front of and around Aang, rising, shaping, growing. It was no longer a shield. It was becoming a monument. A form.
Legs of swirling, solid current, as thick as temple pillars, stamped down, cracking the ice of the square. A torso of churning, powerful water rose, taller than the highest spire. Arms, long and vast, ending in hands of cascading fluid, unfurled. And above it all, a head, featureless, smooth, save for the glowing white eyes that now burned where Aang's own had been, and the arrow of water, stark and blue, that swept across its brow and down its back.
The Avatar had not summoned a spirit. He had become one. A giant of living water, an engine of tidal fury wearing the shape of a man.
The unified fire stream hit the water giant's chest. It did not pierce. It created a vast, hissing cloud of steam, but the giant did not falter. It took a step forward, a seismic tremor passing through the city. One of its massive hands swept down, not as a fist, but as a falling lake.
It engulfed an entire Fire Nation battalion and the two tanks they sheltered behind. The hand closed. When it opened and lifted, there was only a slick, empty patch of ice. The men and machines were at the bottom of the harbor.
Panic, pure and undiluted, broke the Fire Nation lines. They broke and ran, a red and black tide fleeing back towards the breach, towards their ships.
The water giant was not done.
It strode towards the harbor, its steps causing geysers to erupt in the canals with each footfall. The ships in the bay, the proud armada, turned their engines to flee, to bring their weapons to bear.
The giant reached the shattered edge of the wall. It leaned over, its immense, featureless face regarding the fleet below. One arm rose high above its head, fingers spread.
From the black ocean itself, a column of water wider than ten ships broadside rose in answer. The giant brought its arm down in a chopping motion.
The column of water became a blade. A cleaver of the deep.
It fell across the midsection of the lead ironclad, the Ember Fang. There was no explosion of wood. The ship was simply cut in two, as if by the axe of a god. The severed halves bobbed for a surreal moment before the weight of their engines dragged them under, sucking down hundreds of screaming men in a whirlpool of their own making.
The giant's other hand shot out, fingers extending into five torrential jets. They speared through the night, each jet finding a different ship. They did not push. They pierced, punching through iron hulls like paper, flooding holds, dousing furnaces, dooming vessels from the inside out. Ships listed, dead in the water, as dark shapes began leaping from their decks into the freezing sea.
On the walls and in the streets, the warriors of the Northern Water Tribe had long since stopped fighting. They stood or knelt, their weapons fallen from numb fingers. They were not witnessing bending. This was mythology made flesh. This was the stories of the first benders, of the Avatar's covenant with the world, playing out before them. Many fell to their knees, pressing their foreheads to the blood-stained ice, not in fear, but in awe-stricken worship. This was their Avatar. This was their vindication. Tears of relief and terror froze on their cheeks.
Master Pakku, leaning heavily on a broken spear, watched the water giant turn its gaze on the remaining, scrambling ships. He saw not a monster, but a force of nature finally, fully awake. He saw the end of the siege.
The giant raised both hands now, palms facing the chaotic fleet. The very bay seemed to inhale. Then, with a final, silent command from the small boy at its heart, it exhaled.
A wave rose. Not from the shore, but from the center of the harbor, as if the ocean floor had been pushed upwards. It was a hill of black water becoming a mountain, lifting every ship, friend and foe alike, on its terrifying slope. It crested, and then it broke, not towards the city, but outwards, towards the open sea.
It was a tidal expulsion. The wave gathered the Fire Nation armada, the shattered, the whole, the sinking, in its grasp and hurled it back, out through the broken wall, into the darkness of the open ocean. The sound was a deep, final thunderclap of water meeting water at a monumental scale.
When the waters settled, churning and foaming, the harbor was empty of black hulls. Only flotsam, wreckage, and the silently returning tide remained.
The water giant stood silhouetted against the moon for one more moment. Then, like a collapsing waterfall, it dissolved. The millions of tons of water fell back into the bay and canals with a roar that was the last echo of its power.
In the center of the now-soaked square, Aang stood alone. The glow had faded from his eyes and arrows. He swayed, his small body utterly spent, and then his knees buckled. He collapsed onto the wet ice, unconscious, as the first stunned cries of victory and lamentation began to rise from the people he had saved, and utterly terrified, with the wrath of the ocean itself.