—It seems that tower was determined to fall —he said at last, with a resigned sigh—. My efforts to prevent it were in vain.
He gave Appa a pat on the back.
The bison, understanding the signal, trotted over to the spot where the meteorite had landed. The hooves of his six paws echoed on the cracked stone as they approached the smoking crater that had opened in the center of what had once been the temple's main courtyard.
Aang slid off Appa's back, and his bare feet touched the edge of the small crater that the meteorite had carved into the stone. The ground was still warm, and small wisps of smoke rose from the cracks. He peered in cautiously, ready for anything.
But what he saw left him speechless.
At the bottom of the crater, there was no meteorite. There was no space rock, no incandescent metal fragments, no remains of celestial objects. Instead, a boy of about nine or ten lay motionless on the cracked stone.
His hair was a silvery white that reflected sunlight with an almost metallic gleam. The clothes he wore had been completely scorched by the fire of atmospheric entry. His body was covered in bruises and contusions wherever the skin peeked through the remnants of fabric. He breathed with difficulty, his chest rising and falling in an irregular rhythm, but he was still alive.
Momo jumped from Aang's shoulder and scampered toward the edge of the crater.
—Wait, Momo! —Aang reached out a hand—. It could be dangerous.
The winged lemur ignored him. He had already slid down the crater's slope and was approaching the unconscious boy with curiosity. Aang held his breath as Momo stopped beside the child's head, tilted his own, and with the same delicacy he used to handle his toy ball, began gently tapping the boy's forehead with a finger, as if trying to wake him.
The boy's eyes snapped open.
He sat up so abruptly that Momo took a step back. His chest swelled in a deep breath, as if he had just emerged from the depths of a lake. Then he went still, his shoulders tense, his gaze sweeping the surroundings with absolute confusion.
Aang then noticed his eyes. They were heterochromatic: the right one was white as milk, barely a visible pupil, while the left was as black as charcoal. Both darted back and forth, moving from the temple ruins to Appa, from Appa to Momo, from Momo to him, as if nothing he saw made any sense.
—Hey, hi —Aang said, raising a hand in a peaceful gesture—. Are you okay? What's your name?
The boy looked at him. His heterochromatic eyes fixed on Aang, but there was no response.
—Can you speak? —Aang insisted, lowering his voice slightly, as if talking to a frightened animal—. What's your name? Where do you come from?
The boy blinked with even more confusion, but did not answer.
Aang frowned. He took a step deeper into the crater, crouching down to the boy's level.
—I'm Aang —he said, touching his chest with an open palm—. Aang. And you? Do you have a name?
The boy tilted his head slightly. His lips moved for an instant, but no sound came out. Aang tried other words, continuing to ask questions, gesturing with his hands, pointing at objects, and drawing symbols in the air. But every attempt crashed against the same wall of silence.
—I get it now… It's not that he doesn't want to answer. He just doesn't understand what I'm saying.
And indeed, that was the case. Noah could not understand the language Aang was using. But his mind was already working. Every phrase Aang uttered was analyzed, broken down, and compared by his brain. The grammatical structures were beginning to take shape in his mind like a still-blurry but increasingly defined map.
Momo, meanwhile, had climbed up Aang's back and, without warning, tapped him on the head with his small claw.
—What? —Aang turned to the lemur, frowning—. You want us to bring him with us?
Momo squeaked affirmatively.
—But I don't know if…
Aang left the sentence hanging. His doubts were reasonable. A child had literally fallen from the sky, wrapped in fire, without a single logical explanation. He didn't know if it was a threat, an omen, a trap, or an accident. He didn't want to get involved more than necessary. He already had enough to deal with: the Renegades, the stolen scroll, and a temple that had collapsed twice in the same day.
But then, unintentionally, he made eye contact with the boy.
Noah's left eye suddenly glowed. A crimson glimmer burst from nowhere, a red light like blood that spread across the sclera and drew a pattern of black pinwheels spinning slowly around a crimson pupil, which quickly transformed into the pattern of a star. The Mangekyo opened.
Aang went still. His pupils dilated, and his jaw relaxed. It was barely a second. Then, Noah's eye returned to normal, black as charcoal, with no trace of the crimson glow. And Aang recovered as if nothing had happened, running a hand over his head with a sigh.
—No choice, then —he said, his voice tinged with a resignation he didn't fully understand—. I can't just leave this kid here, especially after the previous attack. I guess I'll take him with me to Republic City first, and then figure out what to do later.
Aang made a motion with his hand, and the air around Noah became dense and soft at the same time. An invisible current enveloped him and lifted him from the ground. Noah felt his feet lose contact with the stone and his body float upward, weightless as a leaf carried by the breeze. His eyes widened, and he looked at Aang with an expression of pure childlike wonder.
Aang laughed and lifted himself and Momo with the same ease. The three of them floated gently onto Appa's back.
—Appa! Yip, yip!
The great white bison stretched out his six legs, beat his huge flat tail, and rose among the clouds with the same natural ease as a leaf gliding across a pond. The wind whistled through his fur, and within seconds, the ruins of the Eastern Air Temple became a blurry smudge among the mountains.