The cage door clanged shut behind me, and eighteen thousand people lost their minds.
I'd heard that sound a hundred times in my career. Every time, it did the same thing: it made the world small. No more noise, no more lights, no more cameras. Just me, thirty feet of canvas, and the man on the other side of it who wanted to take everything I'd built.
"Dante! Dante! Dante!"
I rolled my neck, felt the vertebrae crack, and bounced on the balls of my feet. Forty-two fights. Forty-two wins. Seven title defenses. They called me the Greatest of All Time, and I'd stopped pretending to be humble about it somewhere around the fourth defense. Humble doesn't win belts.
Across from me, Viktor Kozlov cracked his knuckles and stared like he wanted to eat me. Six-foot-four, a wrestler's base, hands like cinder blocks. He was the best challenger I'd ever faced, and I respected him.
I was still going to put him on his back.
"Remember," my coach shouted through the cage, "he wants the takedown. Don't give it to him!"
"I know, Coach."
"Then act as you know!"
I grinned. Behind me, tucked in my gym bag in the locker room, was a battered paperback box set that I'd read so many times the spines had gone soft. Four-time world champion, and what kept me sane on the road was a cartoon about a twelve-year-old monk and his flying bison. Don't laugh. Nobody ever does twice. I'd made too many people watch it with me.
The referee stepped between us. "Touch gloves."
Kozlov's glove hit mine like a hammer. The bell rang.
Round One!
He came out swinging, and he was fast, faster than the tape had suggested. A right hand grazed my cheek, close enough that I felt the wind. I slipped left, tagged him with a jab, then another, and circled out before he could close the distance.
Fight rhythm is a language. After enough years, you read it without thinking. Kozlov's rhythm said shoot. His weight kept dipping on the back foot, his eyes dropping to my hips. He was setting up the double-leg, and he was going to commit to it soon.
I let him think he'd hidden it.
When he shot, I was already moving. I sprawled, hips heavy, and drove my forearm into the back of his neck. His face hit the canvas. The crowd roared. I spun to take his back, and he scrambled out, furious, and we reset in the center of the cage.
"You're fast," he growled, thick accent, blood in his teeth.
"You're predictable," I said.
It was probably the wrong thing to say. It felt great, though.
The round ended with me ahead on the cards and him angrier than when he started. Back in the corner, my coach shoved a water bottle into my hand and talked about hips and angles while a cutman pressed ice under my eye.
I wasn't really listening. I was looking at the lights.
The arena had a retractable roof, and tonight it was open to the sky. The promoter had made a whole spectacle of it: fight under the stars! But the stars weren't out. A storm was rolling in from the west, black and heavy, flickering with silent flashes deep inside the clouds. They'd said it would hold off until midnight.
It was a quarter to eleven.
"Dante. Dante. Eyes on me."
"I'm here, Coach."
"You win this next round, and he's done. His gas tank's already low."
I nodded, spat in the bucket, and stood.
Round Three!
I don't remember the exact moment I knew I had him.
It was somewhere in the middle of the third, when his jab started coming a half-second slower, and his feet stopped chasing me. Kozlov was still dangerous, still throwing bombs, but a fighter who's breathing through his mouth has already started making his peace with the outcome.
I feinted high. He bit. I dropped my level and slid inside his guard, landing a left hook to the body that I felt through three layers of muscle. He folded. Not all the way, just enough.
Enough was all I needed.
Right hand. Clean. Straight down the pipe.
His eyes went glassy. His knees unlocked. The crowd rose as one, a wall of sound that hit my chest like something physical.
Finish him, said the animal in my head.
I stepped in for the last shot.
And the whole world turned white.
I didn't hear it first. I want to be clear about that, because everyone assumes you hear the thunder. You don't. Not when it's directly overhead. The light comes first, so bright it erases everything, and then the pain comes, and there's no space between them at all. It was like being grabbed by the spine and shaken by something the size of the sky.
The roof, I thought, absurdly. They left the roof open.
My body locked. Every muscle fired at once. I saw Kozlov's face, wide-eyed and frozen, and I remember thinking that he looked younger than I'd realized.
And then there was nothing at all.
I'd always imagined death would be dark.
It wasn't. It was quiet, which was somehow worse, and it was gold, a soft, endless golden light with no source and no horizon. I wasn't standing. I wasn't floating. I just was, a thought without a body.
Well, I thought. That's it, then.
"That is a remarkably calm reaction," a voice said.
It came from everywhere and nowhere. It sounded like an older man, a child, and a thunderclap, all speaking in the same breath. I tried to turn toward it and found that I had a body again, or the memory of one, glowing faintly in the golden light.
"You're God," I said. It wasn't a question. Something in me knew.
"Among other names." The light in front of me rippled and condensed into a shape: tall, robed, face never quite settling on any one set of features. "I find that names matter less than people think."
"Did I win?"
The shape paused. If I didn't know better, I'd have said it looked amused.
"You are dead, Dante Vale, struck by lightning in the third round of your forty-third professional fight, and your first question is whether you won."
"It's the only question that matters."
"Kozlov was unconscious before you hit the canvas," God said. "The fight was ruled a no-contest. For what it is worth, you would have won."
I let out a breath I didn't technically have. "Good. That's... good."
"You are taking this well."
"I fought for a living. I made peace with the idea of ending early a long time ago." I looked down at my hands, glowing and strange. "I just figured it'd be a knee. Or my brain, you know, after enough years of taking hits. Not lightning. Not indoors, basically."
"The universe has a sense of humor." The shape tilted its head. "You were extraordinary, Dante. You pushed a human body to the edge of what it could do and then past it. I do not often offer this, but I am offering it now. You may be reborn."
My heart stuttered, which was strange for something that no longer existed.
"Reborn," I repeated.
"In any world you choose. Any world ever dreamed, written, or imagined. I will place you there, and you will begin again."
I should have thought about it. Careful, strategic people think about it. They weigh options, they ask about rules, they negotiate terms.
I'd already decided the second the word any left its mouth.
"Avatar," I said. "Avatar: The Last Airbender."
The light rippled again, and this time I was certain it was amusement.
"Of all the worlds that exist, you choose a story about children and wars and bending?"
"It's the best story ever told."
"Many would disagree."
"Many are wrong." I stepped forward, and the golden floor that wasn't a floor hummed under my feet. "I've watched it forty-one times, and I mean all the way through. I know every episode, every line, every fight. I know what Aang does right, and I know where he goes wrong. I know Ozai's schedule better than his own generals. I know where the Fire Nation's secrets are buried and who's going to die before they should."
"And you wish to change it."
"I wish to finish it right. Without the pain. Without the hundred years of war and the dead who didn't have to die."
God was quiet for a long moment.
"That is a noble reason," it said. "Or a very arrogant one."
"Can't it be both?"
The laughter that rolled through the golden void was warm and enormous. I felt it in my bones, in whatever I had instead of bones.
"I like you, Dante Vale," God said. "Very well. The world of the Avatar. What else do you ask? I will not give you everything, but I may give you something."
This was the part I'd been building toward, whether I'd known it or not.
I'd spent my life chasing limits. Every training camp, every cut, every brutal sparring session, I'd been looking for the wall, the place where my body said no further, and then I'd gone through it. That wasn't talent. Plenty of men had more talent than me. It was refusing to accept the ceiling.
In that world, ceilings would be everywhere. Bending forms. Elemental mastery. The Avatar State. Everything the show had taught me was a limit.
"A system," I said.
"Be specific."
"Something that tracks growth. Measures it, rewards it, pushes it. Something that lets me train and improve in ways the world says I shouldn't. No cap. No ceiling. If I earn it, I can grow past it. Past anything that world considers possible."
The shape went very still.
"You ask for a great deal."
"I'm simply asking for a way to break through my limits and become far stronger than anyone else," I said.
The golden light seemed to lean toward me, studying me, weighing something that had no scale. I stood there and let it. I'd faced down the best fighters on Earth. I could stand being looked at by God.
"Granted," it said at last.
The word landed like a bell.
"There will be costs," God continued. "There are always costs. A power that knows no ceiling also knows no mercy. It will ask more of you than you expect, and the world you are entering will not forgive mistakes. Do you accept?"
"I accept."
"You do not even wish to hear them."
"I'll find out when I get there." I grinned, and it felt like the old grin, the cage-door grin. "That's how fights work."
"So they do." The shape lifted a hand, and the golden light brightened, swallowing everything. "Then go, Dante Vale. Go and be better than you were. And remember: a story can be rewritten, but only by someone willing to bear the weight of the pen."
The light swallowed me whole.
Cold.
That was the first thing. A thin, crisp cold that stung my nose and filled my lungs with air so clean it felt like drinking.
The second thing was the floor—smooth stone under my knees, polished by centuries of bare feet. My legs were crossed. My back was straight. My hands rested on my thighs like I'd been sitting there for hours.
My hands.
I stared down at them. They were tiny. Round-knuckled, brown, soft with the baby fat that hadn't yet decided to leave. Each one was about the size of a fist I'd once used to break a man's jaw.
No, I thought, heart pounding. No way. It actually worked.
I looked up.
I was in a circular chamber, high-vaulted and open-sided, facing a sky so blue it hurt. Wind moved through the room with a low whisper, carrying a faint scent of incense and cold stone. Far below the open walls, mountain peaks rose through a sea of clouds, and a vast, impossible landscape of white and green stretched to the horizon.
Five older men and women sat in a half-circle before me, draped in saffron and orange robes: shaved heads, serene faces, tattoos of blue arrows spiraling down their scalps and foreheads.
Airbenders.
I was sitting in front of the Council of the Southern Air Temple.
A tight, strange feeling swelled up in my chest, too big for a six-year-old body. Awe, mostly. I'd been watching those arrows on cartoon bald heads for most of my life, and here they were, wrinkled and weathered and real, with real eyes watching me, real breath fogging in the cold.
One of them, an older man with a long gray beard and bushy eyebrows, cleared his throat.
I looked over at him.
Nothing happened. He didn't speak. He just waited, eyebrows lifted.
Another Elder, a stern-faced woman on the far left, folded her hands into her sleeves. "Aang."
My name, I realized. My name now.
"Aang," the bearded Elder said, and his tone had the patient, heavy weight of a man who'd already said it twice. He leaned forward, the wooden beads at his collar clicking together. "Do you know why we have called you here?"
Something floated into the corner of my vision, a faint shimmer, like heat rising off a summer road. A small translucent window flickered in the air, too faint to read, humming with quiet patience.
Later, I thought. One problem at a time.
Six years old. Cross-legged on the ancient stone floor of the Southern Air Temple, about to be questioned by the five people who would one day decide whether the Avatar was ready for the weight of the world.
I took a slow breath. I thought about forty-two wins, one lightning strike, and the only story I'd ever loved enough to die for.
Then I looked up at the Elders, and I smiled.
"No, Elders," I said, and my voice came out high, clear, and small. "But I'd really like to find out."