The Hall of Records crouched on the mountain's northern shoulder like an old crane—bones of blackwood, plum tiles glazed the color of winter sky, eaves hung with wind-chimes that spoke in silver syllables. By dusk, mist had pooled across the stone steps, and the lanterns along the balustrade glowed like patient eyes.
Aang arrived with the work-dust still on his sleeves. Elder Han's token hung from a cord at his neck—thin, bronze, stamped with a single character: Entry. It pulsed faintly with a warmth that was not heat. The moment he crossed the threshold, the world quieted, as if even the mountain held its breath.
Inside, stacks of bamboo slips and silk scrolls climbed the walls in lattices. The air smelled of cedar and ink. A single candle burned on a lacquered table, its flame steady despite the drafts that slipped under the doors. A figure hunched behind that table stirred.
"Outer disciple," the figure said without looking up. The voice was old and soft, like tea poured from a clay pot. "Token."
Aang bowed and set the bronze disc on the table. The figure lifted her head, revealing a woman with hair as white as paper and eyes the color of wet stone. Wrinkles inked her face in careful lines; her gaze was needle-sharp.
"Record Keeper Yun," Aang said, the name blooming from Feng Mu's memories. She was rumored to read men's souls the way other people read lists.
She turned the token between thumb and forefinger. The wind-chimes beyond the eaves briefly harmonized with the motion, as though answering. "Elder Han's hand," she murmured. "Hm. The fields finally birthed a wild sprout." Her eyes rose to him. "Name."
"Feng Mu," Aang said. Then, because it was true and because he preferred honesty to masks, he added, "Though I have walked under other names."
Record Keeper Yun's mouth almost smiled. "Haven't we all." She slid open a drawer. "Foundations first. Our sect's roots are the Cloud and the Blade. For Cloud, wind techniques and light-foot arts. For Blade, thunder-iron body and sabers that drink lightning. Your affinity has already been sniffed by the elders. You will not hold thunder. You will hold sky."
She laid three silk-wrapped scrolls on the table, each sealed with wax. "Read the names. Choose with the humility of someone who knows nothing, and the courage of someone who intends to know."
Aang ran his fingers over the seals, feeling the quiet there. He could sense qi woven into the scripts like veins in leaves. He read:
Azure Cyclone Scripture: a foundational method for refining qi, circulating it through the twelve principal meridians and opening the minor winds.
Cloud-Treading Steps: a movement art that balanced lightness with control; the notes warned against impatience and broken ankles.
Breath of the Hollow Sky: an advanced breathing method that thinned the boundary between lungs and world, risky for those without calm hearts.
He paused at the last one. Something old in him—the air-nomad stillness he'd kept through wars and weddings and winter nights—leaned toward it like a reed toward water. But another part of him, steady and pragmatic, recognized peril.
"Azure Cyclone," he said at last, tapping the foundational scripture. "And Cloud-Treading."
Yun's eyes warmed by a single degree. "Sensible. The Hollow Sky devours clever boys who confuse talent for steadiness." She broke the seals with her thumbnail, and the scrolls unfurled like breath. "You may copy the first three layers by hand. Nothing leaves this room but memory and ink-stained robes."
She set brushes and inkstone before him. The act of copying was not punishment but initiation. Aang ground the ink slowly, letting the scent anchor him. The characters rose beneath his brush in strokes that felt like steps on ice—deliberate, balanced. As he worked, he read.
The Azure Cyclone began simply: seat the breath below the navel, guide it through the Sea of Qi, trace the lesser rivers along ribs and spine, and circle the Heavenly Pivot at the crown. But stitched between the lines were cautions: do not force, do not chase, do not burn the dantian into smoke.
Cloud-Treading was stranger. Its early drills described walking with the knees hardly bending, the soles barely kissing the ground—"as if your bones remembered feathers," one note said. The diagrams traced footfalls like commas, breath like the thread between them.
Aang felt a smile tug at him. His old forms—the spirals, the arcs, the softness—fit into these instructions like a hand into a glove. But where bending had asked for motion to answer motion, cultivation asked for stillness to birth motion. It was less dance than gardening.
When the copies were complete, Yun sprinkled sand to dry the ink, then whisked the scrolls away with a movement so spare it was almost invisible. "You have until moonrise," she said. "Sit. Try. If your heart rattles like a bucket, I will hear you and throw you out myself."
Aang sat cross-legged on the tatami. He closed his eyes.
The Quiet Breath
He began with breath.
In through the nose, smooth as silk drawn from a cocoon. Down to the belly, not hoarded but welcomed. The room's background sounds sharpened: a bug tapping its legs against the paper wall, the wick's soft hiss, the ancient beams creaking as the mountain settled. Under those—deeper—the tide of qi, a hush that was not empty, a sky that was not void.
He let it come to him. He did not chase. He invited.
The energy seeped across his skin like morning light. He guided it with the gentlest intent through the pattern he'd copied—the cyclone's spiral, inward and up, down and around. It moved with startling obedience. Twice, the current bulged where his mortal body still carried Feng Mu's old knots. Twice, he softened, circling the obstruction, and twice, it untied.
By the time the moon leaned over the eaves, a faint ring of coolness had pooled at his navel. The first petal of the cyclone opened. Aang felt no blazing revelation, no thunder. Only a clear, clean room being swept for the first time in years.
He exhaled and opened his eyes. Record Keeper Yun watched him with her chin on her hand and that not-smile again. "Good," she said. "You remembered not to wrestle the river."
A shadow darkened the doorway. Zhang Wei stood there, two friends behind him like blunt punctuation. A bruise blossomed along his cheek from where humiliation had struck earlier that day. He bowed too deeply to Yun. "Honored Record Keeper. We seek guidance on a matter of discipline with a junior."
"Take your guidance elsewhere," Yun said without turning her head. "Discipline that cannot wait until morning is just pettiness calling itself urgent."
Zhang Wei's smile curdled. "Of course. But junior Feng Mu promised me a chat at the Dripping Cliff. It would be discourteous to leave a senior waiting."
Aang rose, smoothing his robe. He had promised nothing, but men like Zhang Wei preferred stories with themselves at the center. He could refuse; he could call the lie. He could also feel, already, the shape of this mountain's customs—the way face brushed against law, the way little tyrannies kept order from rusting.
"I won't be long," Aang said to Yun. "May I return before the third watch?"
Yun sighed. "If you return, return with your face unbroken. I keep a neat floor."
Dripping Cliff
Mist crawled along the path like a living thing. Dripping Cliff was a shelf carved into the mountain where water bled perpetually from a cracked seam, falling into nothing. Lanterns did not reach this far. Moonlight made the wet stone gleam like a blade.
Zhang Wei's friends fanned out, a clumsy attempt at encirclement. "You made me lose face," Zhang said, stepping forward. Qi coiled around his fist, a dull glimmer. "Give it back."
"Face isn't a coin," Aang said. He glanced at the drip—a steady tok… tok… like the mountain's heartbeat. "But if you'd like, we can practice."
Zhang Wei lunged. His style was all edges, no breath: the Sunder Palm, hammered at the first layer of Qi Condensation. Aang moved with him, not away—turning the angle, letting wrists meet and slide, drawing the strike past the core of his body while he exhaled. The world narrowed to hands, to wind rolling over skin. Zhang's palm thundered at air. Aang's guiding touch sent him spinning three steps, skidding on the wet rock.
Anger burned the boy's ears. He rushed again, this time with a knee aimed at Aang's ribs. Aang's footwork—fresh from the copied diagrams—placed his heel less than a grain's width off the slickness. He borrowed the mountain's tilt, borrowed the drip's timing, and folded Zhang Wei into the empty space where a blow had hoped to be. A wrist pressed. A shoulder yielded. Zhang's momentum, suddenly ownerless, chose the ground.
The friends hesitated, then charged as twin panic. Aang greeted them like the first two leaves of a spring gate. He did not strike—he redirected. Fingers grazed elbows; hips shifted to bleed force; a palm rested lightly on a sternum and made a tiny circle. They tumbled into each other with a wet grunt.
Wind brushed Aang's cheek. It wasn't his doing. The cliff's draft had risen, mildly curious. He smiled without showing teeth. "Practice done," he said. "Let's go home."
Zhang Wei pushed up, mud slicking his hands. His eyes were not merely angry now; they were afraid. Not of pain, but of something he did not have a name for—the way the world had refused to obey him. He spat, wiped his mouth, and glared past Aang toward the dark. "This isn't done," he said, because boys had to say such things, because endings were a kind of death.
"It's not," Aang agreed softly. "But it doesn't have to be ugly."
He left them there under the weeping stone.
The Second Petal
On the walk back, the mountain wind combed his robe and whispered against his ears. He did not bend to listen with power. He listened like a man.
When he returned to the Hall, Yun no longer sat at the desk. A linen bundle waited where she had been: two coarse sets of dark-blue cloth, a thin belt, a hemp-bound booklet titled Rules for Those Who Would Rise, and a small pouch of spirit rice. Beside it lay a clay bead threaded on cord—the outer sect's mark.
Aang bowed to empty air in gratitude and carried the bundle to the dormitory. The barracks were hush-breathing. Most slept the exhaustion of honest labor; a few snored the resentment of thwarted ambition. Aang folded himself onto the straw mat that was now his again and set the bead by his pillow. He closed his eyes to the dark that isn't dark, and began to breathe.
The cyclone turned.
Once, twice, three times through the mapped meridians. Each circuit smoothed a curl of his inner wind. At the fourth, something unlatched near his spine with the gentle click of a sliding door. Qi flowed more freely; his limbs hummed the way wood hums before it sings. The second petal teased open, not in a blaze, but like dawn easing over a quiet village.
He did not reach for more. The old lessons had taught him that grasping turned strengths into snares. He sat with it, a cup warming between palms.
His awareness, loosened by calm, touched the edges of the world and found—there—the brush of another presence. Not human. Not elder. It came from beyond the inner wall, low on the mountain, where the spirit fields gave way to the wild terraces of pine. It moved with the gait of a creature made of twigs and smoke, curious and cautious, drawn by the same draft that had climbed the Dripping Cliff.
"A spirit beast," Aang whispered to the roof beams. Not large—no drum in the footfall—but old in the way of stones and rain. The Azure Cloud Sect's manuals did not mention such a traveler near the outer grounds; either it was new, or the sect had grown inattentive.
The night bell sounded the third watch. Far away, a smaller bell chimed in reply—the wards at the south gate testing their own voice. No alarm yet. Just a question.
Aang lay back, hands folded on his belly. He could almost feel his other name, the old one, settling like a bird on a roost inside this new body. He should sleep. He would rise before dawn to haul, to weed, to practice Cloud-Treading in the lanes where lantern soot blackened the eaves. He would copy the second layer of the Cyclone when the hall opened. He would live this day and the next and those after like stones stacked into a stair.
But the world rarely permitted long staircases uninterrupted.
Somewhere below, the wards' bell woke fully and began to ring as if remembering how. The sound climbed the slopes, bounced from cliff to cliff, and landed on the barracks like cold rain. Bodies stirred. A door slid open. A whistle cut the dark—sharp, official.
Aang sat up before the cry reached them: "Outer sect! To arms! Spirit incursion at the south fields!"
He smiled a little despite himself and touched the clay bead, the ink still under his fingernails. "Of course," he told the ceiling. "Hello, new world."
He stood, tied his belt, and stepped out into the night where lanterns bloomed like sudden stars and the wind came running to meet him.