The training field sat on a broad stone terrace at the western edge of the temple, with nothing between it and the sky but a low wall and a very long drop.
I'd walked past a hundred places like it in the show without ever really looking at them. In person, it was something else. The terrace was wide and flat, ringed by prayer flags that snapped in the wind. Beyond the wall, the mountains stepped down into the clouds, white on white on blue, so far and so quiet that it felt like the edge of the world.
Six kids stood in a loose line in the middle of the terrace. Five of them, I corrected myself as I jogged up beside the master. I was the sixth.
They were all about my age. A tall, serious girl with her robes tucked neatly at the waist. A round-faced boy bouncing on his toes like he'd been told to hold still and was trying very hard to disagree. Two giggling kids at the end whispering to each other, and a small boy with enormous ears staring at me like I'd arrived on a comet.
"Aang's late again," the bouncing boy whispered.
"Aang's always late," said the girl.
"I'm not always late," I whispered back. "I'm just... occasionally early for other things."
That got a snort out of her, which I counted as a win.
"Quiet, all of you," said the master, and the whispers died at once. He stepped in front of the line, hands folded into his sleeves, and looked us over one at a time.
He was a lean man somewhere in his thirties, with a long face, sharp cheekbones, and eyes so calm they seemed to be looking at something just past you. The arrows on his head stretched down to his hands, which meant he'd earned every single one. He didn't look like a fighter. He looked like a man who'd never once been in a hurry.
I'd fought men like that. They were the worst ones.
"My name is Master Pemba," he said, his voice soft and even. "I will be your teacher in the art of airbending. Some of you have met me in passing. Some of you have not. Today, that changes."
He let the wind fill the silence for a moment.
"You are here," he said, "because you are children of the Air Nomads. Do you know what that means?"
The girl's hand shot up.
"Yes, Dolma?"
"It means we can bend, Master."
"Every one of us," Pemba agreed. "Every Air Nomad who has ever been born."
I'd known that, of course. It was one of the quiet, strange facts about this world. In the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, and the Fire Nation, bending was a gift that only some people had. In the Air Temples, everyone did. A hundred percent. No exceptions. It was one of the things that made the Air Nomads so unlike the rest of the world, and, I'd always thought, one of the things that made their loss so devastating.
"Does anyone know why?" Pemba asked.
Nobody answered. The big-eared boy looked at his feet.
"It is because of how we live," Pemba said. "The other nations build their lives around the world of the flesh. Cities, armies, farms, kingdoms. We build ours around the world of the spirit. We live on the mountaintops because they are close to the places where the two worlds touch. We eat, sleep, and breathe beside them. Our ancestors did the same for thousands of years, and their children, and their children's children. Over time, the bond between us and the spirits grew so close that it became part of us."
A chill ran down my arms.
Wisdom, a soft chime sounded in the corner of my vision, has increased.
I almost jumped. A tiny translucent window had bloomed at the edge of my sight, small and unobtrusive, like a notification on a phone.
[ WISDOM 4 → 5 ]
I forced my face to stay still and kept listening.
"Because of that bond," Pemba went on, "the wind answers us. It is not something we command, the way the Fire Nation commands flame or the Earth Kingdom commands stone. It is something we ask. And because we ask, the wind listens."
He paused, and one corner of his mouth lifted.
"This is why you have been allowed to run and leap and tumble on these cliffs since you could walk. Why you have played at gliding with the older children and chased the sky bison through the clouds. You were not wasting your time. You were learning the wind's language without knowing it."
Ding.
[ WISDOM 5 → 6 ]
It was a very quiet ding. I decided to take it as a compliment.
"Your lungs have grown," Pemba continued, pacing slowly in front of the line. "Your balance has sharpened. Your reflexes have quickened. All of it, the climbing and the playing and the games, has been preparing you. But that was the childhood of your art. Today, it ends."
A few of the kids shifted nervously. The big-eared boy gulped.
"From today, you begin to train. Properly. You will learn forms, and breath, and discipline. You will learn to listen not only with your ears but with your body. And when you have mastered the art of airbending, truly mastered it, you will receive your tattoos."
He raised one hand and drew a slow line from his wrist to his fingertips.
"The arrows are not decoration. They are not a reward for age or for time spent. They are proof. Proof that you have walked the path and finished it. Every one of you will earn them one day, or you will not. That choice is yours."
I looked at the arrows running down his hands and felt something fierce flare up in my chest.
I'm going to earn those faster than anyone in history.
Ding.
[ WISDOM 6 → 7 ]
"Today," said Pemba, "we begin with the first lesson. The most important lesson. The one that every airbender, from the youngest acolyte to the greatest master, returns to for their entire lives."
He lowered his hand.
"Breath."
He had us sit in a circle on the cold stone, cross-legged, backs straight, hands resting on our knees. I settled into the position without thinking. I'd done it a thousand times.
"Airbending," said Pemba, walking slowly around the outside of the circle, "begins in the lungs and ends in the world. But what is between them?"
Silence.
"Chi," he said. "The energy of life. It flows through every living creature, through every breath, every heartbeat, every thought. Most people never feel it. Their minds are too loud. But a bender who listens closely can learn to gather it, guide it, and release it into the world."
He knelt beside the tall girl, Dolma, and gently adjusted her shoulders.
"Close your eyes. Breathe in through the nose. Slowly. Let the air fill you from the bottom of your belly to the top of your chest. Hold it. Count to four."
The kids obeyed. I did too.
"Now release. Slowly. Through the mouth. Imagine the breath carrying away everything that is tight and tense and troubled."
I breathed out.
"Again."
In. Hold. Out.
"Again."
I'd meditated before. Not often enough, if I was honest. A coach with a sports psychologist's degree had talked me into it years ago, a half-hour every morning before training, a dark room and a quiet mind. At first I'd thought it was nonsense. Then I'd noticed that my fights got sharper. That my reads got cleaner. That the long, ugly rounds in the third and fourth hardly bothered me anymore.
Clearing the mind was a skill. Mine had been sharpened over a decade of use.
It took me about thirty seconds to find the quiet.
The noise of the wind faded. The shuffling of the other kids dropped away. I felt my own heartbeat, slow and steady, and the rise and fall of my chest. And under it, something else. A faint, warm hum, like a coin of sunlight resting against my ribs.
There you are.
Ding.
[ BREATHING TECHNIQUE DETECTED: DEEP DIAPHRAGMATIC BREATH ] [ PROFICIENCY: NOVICE ] [ CHI POOL: 100 → 140 ]
I didn't open my eyes. I kept breathing.
Ding.
[ WISDOM 7 → 8 ] [ SOURCE: FOCUSED MEDITATION ] [ CHI POOL: 140 → 210 ]
Huh. A flicker of curiosity ran through me, but I let it pass. Don't chase it. Just breathe.
I'd noticed something about the numbers. Back in the corridor, my Chi Pool had read 12. Now it was 100, and climbing. A small note flickered at the bottom of the window:
[ CHI POOL SCALE RECALIBRATED FOR ACCURACY ]
Sure, I thought. Fine. Whatever you say.
In. Hold. Out.
Ding.
[ CHI POOL: 210 → 280 ]
Pemba's voice drifted around the circle, a low murmur at the edge of my awareness. "Do not force it. Do not reach for it. Let the breath do the work. The chi will come when you stop chasing it."
Easy for you to say, I thought. I'm literally chasing it. There's a number.
But I let go anyway. The trick with numbers is they stop moving when you watch them too hard.
Ding.
[ BREATHING TECHNIQUE: PROFICIENCY INCREASED ] [ NOVICE (2/10) ] [ CHI POOL: 280 → 340 ]
Ding.
[ CHI POOL: 340 → 400 ]
I cracked one eye open, very slightly, and looked at the little window floating at the corner of my vision.
CHI POOL: 400 / 400 CHI REGEN: 4.1 / min
I closed my eye again and smiled, a small, private smile that nobody else could see.
Thirty-three times. Chi Pool, thirty-three times what it had been an hour ago. And all I'd done was sit down and breathe.
I thought about the fighters I'd known, men who trained twelve hours a day for twenty years to squeeze out an extra two percent. I'd been one of them. I'd known what it cost, in sweat and skin and years.
Here, the same effort was paying out like a slot machine.
How fast am I going to level up? I thought. It was half amazement, half amusement. At this rate, I'll be a god by Tuesday.
Ding.
[ NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT BECOME A GOD BY TUESDAY. ]
I choked, very quietly, and turned it into a cough.
Pemba's footsteps paused beside me. "Is something wrong, Aang?"
"No, Master," I said, eyes still closed. "Just a tickle in my throat."
"Mm," said Pemba. The footsteps moved on.
I don't know how long we sat there.
The sun crept across the sky, and the shadows of the prayer flags stretched slowly across the stone. My legs went numb, then tingly, then numb again. The wind shifted from warm to cool. Somewhere behind me, one of the giggling kids started to snore, and Pemba gently woke him with a tap on the shoulder.
I just kept breathing.
In. Hold. Out.
The thing about meditation, the thing nobody tells you, is that it's boring right up until it isn't. For the first hour, my mind kept wandering. I thought about the system, and the numbers, and the Fire Nation, and the way Zuko's scar would look in six years' time. I thought about Kozlov, and wondered if he'd gotten out of the arena all right, and whether the people I'd left behind were mourning me.
That last thought lasted a long time.
But after a while, the thoughts began to drift away. They went the way clouds do, slowly, without any fuss. What was left was just the breath, and the warm hum in my chest, and the quiet, enormous feeling of the sky.
It was the first time in years I'd felt completely at peace.
Ding.
[ WISDOM 8 → 9 ] [ SOURCE: SUSTAINED INNER STILLNESS ]
Ding.
[ BREATHING TECHNIQUE: NOVICE (3/10) ]
I didn't open my eyes for any of them.
"That is enough for today."
Pemba's voice was soft, but it cut through the stillness like a bell. I opened my eyes and blinked against a wash of golden light. The sun had dipped low over the mountains, and the whole sky was painted orange and rose.
Around me, the other kids slumped, stretched, and groaned. The big-eared boy flopped backward onto the stone like a dropped sack of flour. Dolma rolled her shoulders, wincing.
"You have done well," Pemba said, his gaze moving slowly over each of us. "Better than I expected for your first day. Some of you will find that your minds were louder than you thought. That is normal. It will quiet with practice."
His eyes lingered on me for half a second longer than the others. I kept my face perfectly blank.
"For the next month," Pemba continued, "this is what we will do. Every day, you will come to this terrace and practice the breath. Nothing more. No forms. No bending. Only the breath."
A collective groan went up.
"I know," said Pemba, with the faintest smile. "It is not exciting. But the foundation of everything you will ever do begins here. A tree with weak roots cannot weather a storm."
A month, I thought. A month of this.
I felt a little thrill of anticipation anyway. If a single afternoon could do this to my Chi Pool, what would thirty days do?
"At the end of the month," said Pemba, "if you are ready, we will move on to the next stage. Drilling the basic forms. Footwork. Arm sweeps. The first true movements of airbending. But not before. Not one day before."
He clasped his hands and bowed. We scrambled to our feet and bowed back, wobbling.
"The day grows late," he said. "Go. Wash, eat, and rest. The monks will be waiting in the dining hall. Tomorrow, we begin again at dawn."
The kids scattered like startled birds, chattering and stretching as they ran for the stairs. I stood still for a moment, watching the sun slide behind the mountains and the long shadows creep across the terrace.
I turned and followed the others toward the stairs, my small feet pattering against the cold stone, the whole sky blazing behind me.