Kuruk Flashback

Kuruk opened his eyes. He was no longer in Yangchen’s meadow near Yaoping, facing Kelsang under the starry sky. He realized the source of his Air Nomad friend’s conflict with his elders when it came to what the Spirit World looked like. The realm beyond the physical was different things to different people at different times.
The Avatar was alone, his friend nowhere to be found in the hissing gray swampland. They’d lost each other somewhere in the journey. The water around Kuruk slithered with—not life, but something akin to it and all the more unsettling for the closeness. A scream and the beating of a drum were all he could hear, incessant, hysterical, and only when he braved the foul water and flailed his way to a solid shore did he find the source.
A spirit. Not one of Kelsang’s playful creatures but a monstrosity the size of a house, gripping the ground with arms like spider limbs and bashing its featureless head against the earth over and over again, causing itself horrible pain but never ceasing its assault, nor its shriek that came from no discernible mouth. Before he could swallow her horror and try to speak to it, a long tail wrapped around his neck and hoisted him into the air.
Their forms were crushed together. Revulsion seeped through his skin, a feeling of being tied to a corpse. The creature hurled him to the ground and he bounced like stuffed rags, blacking out from a pain to his ethereal form that did its best to mimic the physical. Before he lost consciousness, he caught a glimpse of what the spirit was attacking so ferociously with its skull. It was a pond of ice. The reflection on the silvery sheen was a hillside view of Yaoping Town.
Kuruk woke up with a gasp. Kelsang was still sitting across from him, his eyes closed, murmuring pleasantries like he was attending a tea ceremony. Kuruk got up, ignored the looks of surprise on Hei-Ran’s and Jianzhu’s faces, and stole his friend’s glider.
He rode his own furious squall of airbending to Yaoping. There was no time to explain to the others what he knew in his heart. That monstrous spirit had found a crack between the Spirit World and the world of humans. If it broke through, it was going to slaughter everyone it came across.
There was only one place where someone could see the town from above like Kuruk had, and that was the entrance to the salt mines in the neighboring mountain. He landed the glider and stood before the hole in the world, the gaping maw of darkness. He summoned his courage and ran inside. Better to cross through the rift and go on the attack in the Spirit World. He would have his bending that way. Kelsang had said so.
He found the enraged spirit and began to fight it. He didn’t know how long the battle raged. He only knew with grim certainty that the right Avatar had been chosen for this task. This foe was a beast, and he was a hunter. A hunter struck fast and true, and was merciful to their prey. A hunter approached their duty with solemn respect.
It took bringing all four elements to bear against the maddened spirit to bring it down, but bring it down he did. He was victorious. The town was saved. All would be well.
The next morning, his friends found the Avatar crawling blindly through the streets of Yaoping, foaming at the mouth.
It was days before he could speak. 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.
He tried to tell Kelsang, Jianzhu, and Hei-Ran what happened and could not. The words stuck in his throat. He made up a story about a mischievous spirit tricking him into losing his faculties for a moment. Like what happened to wandering children in ominous folktales.
His friends left him to rest in the bed of an inn. They looked for a doctor. The doctor came by, said there was nothing wrong with his body, and told him to rest. He wanted to die.
One day, when everyone else was out, a friendly maid came by and gave him some distilled wine in defiance of the doctor’s orders. It burned his throat going down, the first sensation in days that cut through the chill. He drank more, and more, feeling the liquid press against the wound inside him like a red-hot iron to a severed limb.
When the maid smiled and gently laid a hand upon his chest, the Avatar clasped it like he was drowning.
He couldn’t remember the woman’s face. But he remembered those of his friends when they happened upon the tangle of limbs poking out from under the covers and the broken bottles littering the floor. Kelsang didn’t judge. Jianzhu didn’t care, being of the opinion that if the Avatar had a certain desire, the Avatar should slake it. Kuruk would only understand the difference in their reactions later in his life.
And Hei-Ran, though she would never admit it, lost a great deal of respect for him in that moment. The door to the Firebender’s heart, while not locked forever, had been firmly shut. There was always going to be a portion of her closed off to those who couldn’t master themselves.
But they bounced back. Their adventures went on. The Avatar’s friends were remarkable. He loved them so much. He loved their intelligence, their aspirations, their sheer nobility. They were simply good people. There was so much good this group could do for the world.
That was why, when the second spirit attack came, he went to face it alone again. His friends would insist on helping if they knew. But he would never, ever make them suffer what he had, not in a thousand lifetimes. They would be tainted by association with the deed he had to do.
A bad dream during a visit to the Fire Nation showed him a rift in a cenote supplying sacred water to a corner of Ma’inka Island. He ran to the cavern in the middle of the night and dove into the water, defiling it. Instead of dashing his head against the stone bottom, he swam and swam straight down until he found the mass of writhing beaks, snapping and licking their way to the surface. He stabbed with ice and he stabbed with stone, his eyes closed, the screams of terror his own. His former hunting partners of his youth would have scorned him for not performing a clean kill. He could not look upon the dying thing.
Once the deed was done, Kuruk dragged himself over the lip of the cenote, weeping water onto the ledge. The cold emptiness inside him had returned in force. He crawled like a baby until he reached the feet of a man who stared down at him in puzzlement and distaste.
The man was a Fire National from a clan or tribe he didn’t recognize. His name was Nyahitha, he said, and after receiving a premonition, the elders of the Bhanti had sent him here to give aid to the Avatar. It was clear he had trouble believing this bedraggled mess was Great Yangchen’s successor.
Nyahitha hauled Kuruk to a campsite in the jungle and performed some kind of diagnostic ritual, guiding heat along his energy pathways similar to the way a Northern healer would use the water within a patient’s body. He confirmed what Kuruk had already guessed, that coming into contact with these dark creatures and destroying them was causing damage to his own spirit. Nyahitha repaired what he could but admitted a permanent toll would be taken each time another of these battles was fought. Already, Kuruk was going to be out of the running for “Longest Era” in the Avatar history books.
Such terrible bedside manner for a doctor, Kuruk joked. Couldn’t he have broken the news a little more gently? Then he threw up blood all over the Fire Sage’s robes.
Nyahitha’s dire warnings cemented Kuruk’s decision not to tell his companions about the spirit incursions. They would follow him into any danger and give their lives to protect his. Staining the vibrant spirits of Hei-Ran and Kelsang and Jianzhu with this sickness would be a tragedy too horrible to consider. He was not going to see that happen, not even if it meant his own oblivion.
He began to take breaks from his missions with them to do research with Nyahitha. They visited the hidden library of the Bhanti, a contender for the greatest repository of spiritual knowledge in the physical realm. Together, under the peaked roofs of the stone pagodas, they pored over scrolls and tomes older than the Four Nations themselves.
They deduced that the spirits were trying to force their way through newly created cracks in the boundary between the Spirit World and the lands of humans. They did not know why or how these cracks were forming all of a sudden. Normally, places where spirits could cross over were ancient and sacred and rare. Special circumstances like the twilights of hallowed dates were required. That didn’t seem to be the case anymore.
They also searched for a better technique to subdue their foes but found none. Perhaps it had yet to be invented. Kuruk shuddered as he closed the last promising book in the Bhanti library without finding salvation.
As more attacks came, he realized he could stalk the dark creatures across the Spirit World itself, sometimes following the wake of great disturbances and storms across the ever-changing landscape, and sometimes relying on his own preternatural tracking skills, his ability to cut sign from sheer ice and bare rock and the smallest out-of-place blade of grass. On such excursions he always had to pass through a rift from the physical world to the spiritual, taking on his quarry with his physical body. Without his bending he stood no chance, and it made more sense to fight on the Spirit World side of the border, to minimize collateral damage to humans.
And so he hunted. He walked the realm beyond the physical, searching for spirits with murderous intent trying to force their way into a human population. Each time he found one, Kuruk tried his best to placate the being’s anger, at the cost of his blood and sweat and bones. Nothing worked. To save lives, he had to fight. He had to kill.
He and Nyahitha told no one what they did. They were like people graduating from petty theft to organized crime, in too deep to ever extricate themselves. By the time they reached a certain number of hunts, layfolk would have shunned them for the spirits they’d destroyed, let alone the Bhanti or the Air Nomads.
The world went on. It had competent people looking after it. Kuruk, never one for meetings, where the quickest minds were forced to adopt the pace of the slowest, began to sleep through them, exhausted by the lingering pain and the wine he drank to dull it. Jianzhu would inevitably work things out with the diplomats and ministers and ambassadors by the time he woke up.
His nights were spent carousing at parties, in taverns, at contests of bending prowess, trying to feel as human as possible with as many different humans as possible. He secretly hoped Nyahitha would find a sacred text declaring the official treatment for his symptoms was to be close to life, joy, and the touch of warm bodies, but no. The hedonism of his self-prescribed “healing process” was his own weakness showing through, nothing else. Nyahitha partook in the treatment as well, surprising Kyoshi with his indulgences. The formerly austere sage pursued excess with the immoderation of a man denied.
Kuruk barely noticed his friends splitting apart. The treasures of his life scattered over the Four Nations to pursue their own paths. They’d all come to the same conclusion. They were accomplishing nothing of worth in the Avatar’s company. It felt like one day he was playing his daily game of Pai Sho with Jianzhu, and the next, he was reading Jianzhu’s letter of admonishment for not attending Hei-Ran’s wedding.
Hei-Ran. Kuruk had been out of his mind with grief when he showed up at Kelsang’s with that poem. A spirit had tried to break through the day before, and his pent-up fury at himself for lying to Hei-Ran by omission about so many different things for all these years exploded. He had annihilated the creature with the full power of the Avatar State, an unworthy act no matter the circumstances. The poem was a feeble attempt to turn back time to a point where he wasn’t such a miserable failure who abused Yangchen’s gifts, an age where he was still within reach of deserving Hei-Ran’s love.
He channeled his sorrow into more research with Nyahitha, longer expeditions into the Spirit World. He finally discovered how the tunnels to the physical realm were being created, his knowledge of beasts coming to the forefront once again. Animals often took over structures created by other animals, like how jaguar beetles would live in the vast complex mounds of angler termites after the original residents moved on to form other colonies.
The cracks in reality were being created by a single spirit. Kuruk switched his focus to pinpointing the origins of the tunnels instead of the spirits trying to use them, circling closer and closer to the source, until he encountered Father Glowworm. The World-Borer. It Within the Hole.
Finally he’d found a spirit that would talk to the Avatar. He learned Father Glowworm had the power to rasp away at the barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds, leaking wisps of its essence through the cracks it made to bask in the warmth and chaos of the mortal realm at his pleasure.
Did it take the occasional human, here and there? Yes, but what hunter didn’t snatch up choice prey when the opportunity presented itself? Father Glowworm was a wise and crafty predator. It could create tunnels to any location in the physical world, but kept the exits in deep, dark places where humans wouldn’t notice, and never lingered around the same settlements for very long. If lesser spirits wanted to make a go for the lands of humans using his abandoned passages, that was none of its concern.
Kuruk’s mistake was trading names with it. Spirits with self-appointed names were incredibly powerful and dangerous, Nyahitha had told him, and there was a power in introductions. Knowing Father Glowworm’s name finalized the curse that had been slowly building upon the Avatar over the years. It dried the ink on the contract.
Father Glowworm knew it too. The two of them were in it together for the long haul, the spirit declared. Perhaps they would have fun.
Kuruk, deadened with exhaustion, showed the human-eating spirit his definition of fun.
Their fight nearly created a gaping hole in the boundary between realms. Father Glowworm was stronger than the other spirits, and Kuruk was too stubborn to die. Their energies bit into each other like blades clashing edge-to-edge, leaving permanent notches.
With a strike that nearly broke the foundations of the bedrock around them, Kuruk wounded Father Glowworm grievously, the spirit diminishing in size and power several times over. But it managed to escape, wriggling away into an endless labyrinth of darkness.
It was an outcome the Avatar found acceptable. The disappointing secret of Pai Sho most novices never learned was that at the very highest levels, half the matches between masters ended in unsatisfying, inconclusive draws. He’d done lasting damage to his enemy, enough to ensure the spirit would keep out of the human world for at least a generation or two.
And it had marked him in return. Neither of them would ever fully heal from the encounter. They would know each other in their bones forever, like old friends . . .