The city of Omashu rose out of the mountain in stacked layers of stone and houses, carved terraces and steep roads, the whole place looking like it had been built by a giant who'd gotten bored halfway through a staircase to nowhere, and people moved in later. Normally, from the air, it felt… playful. Like somewhere you could glide and laugh and pretend the war was just a bad story adults told.
Today it was weapons, armor, shouts and fear.
Below, horns blared. Bells rang. People ran with bundles clutched to their chests, eyes wide, mouths open around prayers. Earth Kingdom soldiers crowded the outer tiers, bracing behind barricades, hauling stone into fresh defensive angles, shouting orders that sounded brave even when the voices cracked.
Aang angled down hard, a cut through the wind that made his stomach float. He could still feel even at that distance Arzayanagi like heat coming off a kiln, and it scared the hell out of him. People crowded the walls, took defensive positions against the Fire Nation. But he knew they were going the wrong way, and they were moments away from death if he couldn't turn them back.
Aang didn't have a better word for it than awake. He couldn't recall why he even recognized Arzayanagi, but he knew it had never, ever been like *this* before.
He skimmed over a wall, dipped between rooftops, and aimed straight for the palace at the top, because if he was right, the difference between "Omashu survives" and "Everyone dies" was going to be measured in minutes.
Guards shouted as he landed on a balcony and sprinted inside.
"Stop!" one of them barked. "Fire Nation spy!"
Aang threw his hands up without slowing. "No! No, I'm not! I'm not with them, I'm the Avatar, I'm here to warn you, please!"
A pair of earthbenders planted their feet and yanked their arms up. The floor bucked. Stone started to rise in a wall.
Aang didn't even think. His breath snapped out of him in a sharp gust, a clean cut of air that threw the earthbenders back and right off their feet. Dust puffed. Pebbles rained.
He shot through the remaining gap before their shock could turn into a second attempt. "Sorry! Really sorry!"
"Get him!" someone yelled behind him.
"Do NOT get him," a new voice bellowed from ahead, echoing down the corridor like it had found the building's bones and decided to use them as a drum. "That is a royal order."
Aang slid on both feet with glider staff in both hands on a gust of air that planted him right in front of the throne, where a wizened old wild-eyed man with an entirely incompatibly well muscled body was holding out his large, weathered hands, not at Aang, but to the sides to halt his own soldiers from rushing in and skewering the poor boy.
He wasn't pretending to be feeble today. There was no wobbling old-man act, no harmless smile to lure you into underestimating him. His stance was planted. His shoulders were square. His hands were stained with dust of much defensive work already done that morning, and the stone under his feet looked subtly shifted, like the palace itself was braced and waiting for his command.
He took one look at Aang and said, "Well, Aang. Took you long enough."
Aang stared, panting. "What?"
Bumi snapped his fingers at the guards. "Hold. Everyone hold it. He's no threat, this boy is the Avatar."
The guards froze. "The Avatar? No way!" one breathed out far louder than necessary.
Aang held up his hands anyway, desperate to be believed. "I can prove it, I can, I can do this, see?" He spun a quick airbending circle, a tight cyclone that made banners flutter and loose papers whirl up like startled birds. "Airbending! Definitely the Avatar!" he frantically added.
Bumi waved a hand like he was swatting a fly. "Aang, knock it off, you're scattering the defense plans," he said impatiently as he snatched a fluttering parchment out of the air. Although he narrowed his gaze at whatever was on it and said. "Or I suppose this is the lunch menu, but we already ordered. Either way, I suppose none of our plans accounted for you skidding in here a hundred years late!" He grinned and had himself a kooky laugh. "I'd loved to have messed with you, Aang, but the Fire Nation has gone and mucked it all up." He sighed and deflated a bit. "It's me, Bumi. The fools actually let me be king!"
Aang couldn't help but have a giant smile. "Bumi?! Oh, wow! Um—but seriously!" And the elation lasted barely a breath before his heart was pounding so hard again he could hear it. "You have to evacuate the side of the city facing the Fire Nation! To the other side or something, I dunno, but everyone is going to die if you don't!"
Bumi's eyes narrowed just a little. Not disbelief. "What do you know?"
Aang rushed on before Bumi could interrupt. "There's a firebender with Arzayanagi. It's like, it looks like a spear. I know it looks like one, but it's… more like a prison. For spirits? Very, very, VERY angry spirits! They're way more awake than they should be, I can feel it! Something really bad must have happened, I don't know... I just know if he uses it, thousands of people are going to die!" His voice strangled and cracked at the end, both the terror of failing to save them and the guilt of feeling like it was his fault in the first place.
Bumi's face went very still.
Earthbenders and soldiers all still around waiting for a command from the king gasped and stared in horror at Aang's words, but many looked uncertain, and there were suspicious whispers playing tag among the loose formation of men halted in their tracks while chasing Aang.
"You're sure," Bumi said.
Aang swallowed hard. "Yes."
Bumi didn't argue. He didn't laugh. He didn't make answer riddles or do any strange silly things, he didn't even make him hop on one foot for a moment just to say he tested the boy. He simply clapped his hands once, sharp enough to cut through the room.
"Messengers!" he roared.
Servants appeared like they'd been waiting in the walls.
Bumi spoke with the speed of an avalanche. "Full retreat to the far side of the city. Now. Pull the defenders off the outer wall tiers. Clear the middle rings first. Make it loud. Make it urgent. I want every civilian moving like their hair is on fire and the wells are all on the far side."
The servant's eyes went huge. "Sire, the outer tiers are our—"
"Not today," Bumi snapped. "Today they are a death trap."
The servant bolted.
Aang stepped forward, breath catching. "I can help. I can move people faster. I can… I can carry them."
"Good," Bumi said. Then his expression flickered, quick and strange, like he'd almost smiled. "Try not to drop anyone I like."
Aang didn't wait for further permission. He sprinted to the window, leapt, and caught the air. His glider snapped open, the world dropping away beneath him.
He flew.
He flew like he was late to stop the end of the world.
Down in the mid-tiers, a group of soldiers were still setting up a barricade, stubborn and brave, and completely doomed if they stayed. Aang swept down, landed, and threw his arms wide.
"Retreat!" he shouted. "King's orders! Move!"
They stared like he was a hallucination.
Aang grabbed a soldier by the shoulder, gentler than the panic in him wanted to be. "Please. There's no time."
Several men looked ready to accost him when they heard horns blowing in a sequence they understood. They looked to see men rushing down from the palace, shouting and too far to hear, but it must have been obvious what was going on, because they finally moved, shouting for others, dragging what supplies they could carry, leaving behind the neat lines of defense that had made Omashu feel invincible.
Aang darted from street to street, roof to roof. He scooped crying toddlers into their parents' arms. He yanked carts out of bottlenecks with gusts of air. He lifted an entire cluster of people on a pillow of wind just long enough to hop them over a clogged staircase that had become a choke point for fleeing civilians.
Everywhere, the city's sound changed.
Less stubborn shouting. More urgent rushing. Less "hold the line." More "move, move, MOVE."
"Wait, why are we leaving the defenses?" One soldier challenged, seeming at a loss and looking to the Fire Nation army beyond the city, but one of those messengers shouted. "King Bumi's orders! Fire Nation has some superweapon! Stay here and you're dead!" That got the man moving after one shocked expression, and Aang breathed with relief. It seemed Bumi was taken very seriously by his people, so he didn't have to do much convincing.
Aang rose again, circling higher, scanning.
And then he saw it.
The natural stone bridge that led toward Omashu's main approach was a pale taut ribbon over the valley, a perfect path for bottlenecking an army, but only one lone figure stood at its far end.
Even at this distance, Aang could feel him—Lord Arza—like a weight. Tall. Still. Armor catching the sun in sharp edges. Waves or spiritual pressure magnified his presence to Aang a thousand fold or more. It was held upright like a standard, pointing to the sun nearly at the top of the sky.
Arzayanagi.
The Fire Nation army wasn't right behind him. They had peeled back, leaving a wide empty ring around the man on the bridge as if caltrops lined the dirt.
Aang's stomach turned.
He dipped lower, passing a rooftop where a fluffy white cat crouched, ears flat, tail puffed. It was clearly on edge, but knew not where to run.
Aang almost didn't stop. Almost.
Then the pressure in his ribs spiked and he knew he had seconds, not minutes.
"Sorry," he whispered to the cat, and scooped it up mid-glide. The cat made a furious noise and dug claws into his sleeve. Aang didn't care. Better his sleeve than the cat's entire life, and he set it down on a quick glider turn to scamper off into the shadows of the far side of the city.
He soared toward the far side tiers, scanning for stragglers. It seemed earthbenders were getting people out with emergency use of their delivery system, a bumpy ride but a quick way to move a lot of people, but it was hard to just find everyone.
There.
An old lady, hunched and confused, standing in the open street as people had already all streamed past her. She turned in slow circles like she'd lost her way.
Aang's throat tightened. "Hey! Grandma! Move!"
The old lady blinked at him, not understanding. "Have you seen my kitty cat?" she said with a dopey smile and most of her teeth.
Aang breathed out with frustration, but dove, and wrapped an arm around the lady's shoulders. She yelped, but Aang hauled her up into the air like he was stealing her from the clutches of death itself.
Then the bridge lit. Not flame, just light. Even in the midday sun it glowed far brighter.
Something had opened the prison gates. The inmates were flooding out...
The air around its spearhead shimmered. The spear's tip shed sparks that didn't fall. They hung suspended, as if they wanted to watch the show. Even from his distance, Aang heard the sound.
"AR-ZAY-A, AR-ZAY-A, AR-ZAY-A!" A thin, rising keening, like a chorus of voices trying to scream loud enough to be heard from the other side of a thick steel wall. As he set the old lady down to be ushered off by a helpful soldier, it didn't seem anyone else could hear it.
The man on the bridge moved, lifted the spear with one hand as if to throw it like a javelin, slow at first, like a ritual. Like he was presenting it to the world and waiting for its permission to go on. Then he shifted his stance, planted his feet, and drew it back.
Aang's mouth went dry. He couldn't make his lungs work right.
No one else reacted as he did, because only he could see them.
They poured out of the spear like superheated glowing orange smoke made of people.
Hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
They weren't fully solid. They were burning outlines, vaguely human-shaped, their faces indistinct, their bodies wreathed in flame that didn't drift upward but clung to them like rage. Each formed a spear of pure fire, glowing so bright the air around the tips turned white.
Nobody else reacted to the wraiths. They could see the fire spears, though.
Aang watched an Earth Kingdom soldier look up, eyes widening, as if he'd suddenly realized the sky was full of knives.
Lord Arza thrust forward.
Every spirit thrust with him.
In perfect sync, as if they were the same body wearing a hundred burning skins.
The spears launched.
Not thrown like javelins. Fired, like a volley.
They screamed through the air in a high, tearing whistle that made Aang's teeth clench so hard his jaw ached. Trails of flame carved arcs across the sky, curving toward the middle rings of the city like a meteor shower with intent.
Aang's mind went cold in one sharp slice. He looked down and saw, impossibly, one more figure in the target zone.
A young boy of five or six, standing on a balcony and calling, "Mama! Mama, where are you?!"
"No," Aang whispered.
He threw his glider into a dive towards certain death, a nearby solider shouting "wait!" as he reached out, but there was no time.
The spears kept coming.
They were far away, but fast as arrows launched many times farther.
Aang buffeted against the air hard, bent it into a bulwark, a rushing wall of compressed wind that risked a brutal crash if he was slightly off. The air screamed around him, and for a second it felt like it would tear his clothes off. He dropped, half fell, half crashed, boots skidding on stone as he caught the boy mid-roll and hopped, one foot off the railing and he was flying.
Aang had to squint from the spearlights, feeling the heat curl his monk robes as he held the frightened boy on his other side, and his still open eye danced for a path that wouldn't put him at the end of a flaming arc. The shrieking whistle of the coming death was so loud he couldn't even hear the boy's screams.
The first spear struck.
The explosion wasn't just loud. It was a spiritual shockwave.
Aang felt it through his bones. The ground jumped. The air punched him in the chest, and threw his glide off by a dozen feet. But he was a natural, and used that pressure to boost himself higher. A second bloom of orange-white fire blossomed outward, and the stone around the impact turned black in an instant, like it had been branded. Nothing in its radius remained.
Then the third. Fourth. Then so many it stopped being individual and became a roar.
Hundreds of them ripped across the city, each turning one or more buildings not even to rubble but mere soot and shadows.
They slammed into the middle tiers in a pattern that was almost careful, almost respectful to avoid the lower defensive structures, which somehow made it worse. Like the destruction of residences had been planned with a ruler.
Whole neighborhoods vanished. Not burned over time. Not collapsing slowly. They simply became nothing as if the stroke of brush painted over them with black.
Roof tiles spun like shrapnel miles into the air. Structures not directly caught were brushed aside like the papers he flung in the throne room, or crushed to thin sheets of rubble, caught between blasts. Aang was high in the air, his feet feeling the scorching hell below, but he had to twist suddenly.
"Hold on!" he shouted as half a wooden bridge covered in flames flew up at them.
Aang's barrier of air stripped away the fire, this feet touched the solid planks as they soared higher, and ten-thousand fragments of wood and stone struck the other side in a burst that would have ripped him and the boy to pieces instantly.
And the sound of the spirits, layered under the explosions, made his stomach twist. A hundred burning throats screaming through one spear, voices fading but clawing to stay as long as they could.
"AR-ZAY-A! AR-zay-a..." he heard them chant, and for some reason it felt like they were saying it to him specifically.
When the last spear struck, the roar faded into crackling. A sick, stunned quiet spread across the city as smoke rolled upward in heavy columns, and the middle rings smoldered like a wound.
It would have been a graveyard of thousands.
Aang knew it with a certainty that made him nauseous.
If Bumi hadn't listened. If the retreat had been slower. If Aang had hesitated. Everyone would have died...
Aang held the clutching boy to him as he pushed off the now falling bridge and had to spin around just a few bits of flying stone as he breathed out and soared to the safety of the far side. He lowered his arms as he landed and let the boy onto his feet, fell to his knees, and just breathed deeply for a moment. His shoulders felt like they weighed as much as Appa. He stared at the blackened gap in the city where homes had been, where kitchens had been, where children's toys and grandmothers' chairs and market stalls had been.
Only ash remained.
Behind him, the old lady he'd carried began to sob, soft and broken, incoherently trying to ask what was going on, but then stopped when the white fluffy cat jumped into her arms. "Oh, there you are! Such a fright! Bad kitty!" And she was all smiles again like she hadn't noticed the explosions.
Aang swallowed, throat tight. He looked back toward the bridge.
Lord Arza stood with the spear grounded again, the glow waning. The Fire Nation forces stayed well behind him, like they were giving the spear room to throw its weight around.
The spirits had sank back into Arzayanagi, one by one, like embers being pulled into a furnace. The air pressure eased and it was almost normal again.
Aang felt the weapon's hunger recede, but not disappear.
It wasn't finished.
It would do it again.
It's blind vengeance would just keep striking until it was satisfied, and that day might never come.
And Aang recoiled at the mere thought of the man, Lord Arza, deciding on his own that Omashu should burn, with no regard for the people at all. Aang's hands curled into fists at his sides, shaking. He didn't fully understand why he could see what he saw. Why the spear felt like it had a cord tied straight into his ribs. But he understood the one thing that mattered.
He could not let Lord Arza keep it.
Not for another day.
Behind him, stone groaned and rubble cracked.
King Bumi popped right out of the ground with a young couple he must have saved, and set them down to tremble. He stroked soot from his beard—apparently an even closer save than Aang's—eyes locked on the distance where Lord Arza casually strode away, back to his army, like he hadn't just attempted a one-man genocide.
He stared at the smoking scar through Omashu's middle tiers.
Then he exhaled.
"Right," Bumi said quietly. "That's enough of that."
He turned on his heel with the abrupt decisiveness of a boulder choosing downhill.
"Bring the flag!" he roared to his guards.
"Which one...?" a man wondered.
"The white one, obviously! And bring my best sandals!"
Aang's head snapped toward him. "You're surrendering?"
Bumi didn't look back. "Yeah, no thanks to any more Arzayanagi," he barked. "I can rebuild stone. I cannot rebuild people, and we don't have much city left to retreat to if that maniac does it again."
Aang remained on the terrace as Bumi left, staring at the distant figure on the bridge, at the spear that had just turned a city into a warning to the whole Earth Kingdom.
His heart steadied, panic drained and cold determination filled his chest.
He watched Arzayanagi's fading glow and made a promise to the sky.
By tomorrow, before the sun's next zenith, Lord Arza would never wield it again.