Six years before the comet. Eastern Air Temple.
The hands were wrong again.
I'd been staring at them on and off for six years and they still caught me at bad moments. Like right now, gripping the riding harness inside a sky bison's saddle while the animal banked hard enough to make my stomach roll. My fingers were too short. My knuckles were smooth where there should have been a ridge on the middle one from holding a pen for fifteen years. My calluses were wrong too, sitting at the base of the ring finger and the thumb pad from staff drills instead of where they used to be. Six years I'd had these hands and they still felt borrowed.
That was the thing nobody tells you about reincarnation. Everyone imagines the memories would be the hard part, or the knowledge gap, or waking up as a baby with a full adult's worth of experience crammed behind eyes that can't focus past six inches. The actual hard part is that the body never quite stops being someone else's. You get used to it. You learn to use it. But every so often you look down and expect the other hands and they're just not there.
The bison dipped and a kid behind me screamed with what sounded like equal parts joy and terror. I tightened my grip and kept my eyes on my knees. We were somewhere over a mountain range I couldn't name yet, flying east toward the Eastern Air Temple for Bonding Day. Every six-year-old Air Nomad from all four temples, gathered in one place to meet the bison that would carry them for the rest of their lives. I'd watched the show. I knew how this was supposed to go. The bison chooses you, not the other way around.
Saren, the young monk chaperoning our group from the Southern Temple, was leaning so far over the saddle's leading edge that I was mildly concerned he'd fall out. He was maybe twenty, and he loved being in the air with a kind of physical commitment that was hard to look away from. His whole body leaned into every turn.
"Those are the Kuolan Peaks down there, boys. We'll see the temple right after the next ridge." He pointed at something below us and all eleven boys immediately rushed to the left side of the saddle to look. The bison tilted. Three of them went down in a pile. Saren laughed and pushed a gust of air under the saddle to straighten us out without even turning around.
I stayed where I was.
The ridge passed under us and then there it was.
I'd known it would be three separate mountains. I'd seen it in the show. But knowing something from a screen and seeing it from the back of a flying animal at six thousand feet are different experiences. Three peaks rose out of a layer of low cloud, and each one carried its own cluster of green-roofed pagodas and hanging gardens. Bridges connected the peaks at three different heights. The widest one looked broad enough for bison to cross. The other two were narrow, footpaths strung between the mountains with nothing underneath them but a long fall into white cloud. Waterfalls dropped from caves in the rock and disappeared into the mist below. Bison circled between the peaks, dozens of them, white and brown against the gray stone.
The boys made a sound that I don't think had any actual language in it. Jamyang, the kid next to me who talked to everyone about everything, had both hands pressed flat on the railing and his mouth open.
I looked at the bridges. I counted them. I noted the construction, stone and timber, and I estimated how long it would take to bring each one down. The center bridge could be collapsed from either end by a decent earthbender. The upper two would take one person and maybe ten minutes each. Once the bridges were gone, each peak would be its own island. Nothing reaches you unless it can fly.
I caught myself doing this and made myself stop. I was six years old and I was going to meet a bison and I did not need to be running a defensive assessment on someone else's temple right now.
We landed on a wide stone platform on the center mountain's east face. The stone was dark and polished smooth from centuries of bison landings. A row of nuns waited for us at the platform's edge. They wore saffron and orange robes, their hair was cropped close, and they were smiling with the patience of women who had welcomed eleven groups of six-year-olds before lunch. We poured out of the saddle in a graceless heap. A boy named Dorren caught his foot on the saddle lip and a nun grabbed his collar one-handed without pausing her conversation with the nun beside her. She was holding a clay pot in her other hand and she didn't spill a drop.
That was impressive. That kind of reflexive precision came from serious training, Tier 15 at minimum. I made a mental note. The nuns at this temple were good.
They fed us on a terrace that looked out over the space between the peaks. Rice and spiced lentils and a green fruit with pink flesh inside that tasted like absolutely nothing I had a reference for from my previous life. Bison drifted overhead, their shadows crossing the food. A group from the Northern Temple had gotten there before us and their boys were louder than ours, which was saying something, because one of them was currently standing on top of a railing that definitely wasn't rated for that.
"You see that kid up there?" Jamyang said through a mouthful of rice. "That's Karma. He rode a wild hog-monkey down the north face of his temple last year."
"On purpose?"
"He grabbed it coming out of the kitchens and it just took off running. He couldn't let go because the thing was biting him every time he tried, so he held on all the way down to the tree line." Jamyang was grinning so hard it looked like it hurt. "The monks found him in a snowbank an hour later with bite marks all up his arms and the first thing he said was can I do it again."
As if on cue, Karma dropped from the railing, landed on a cushion he'd apparently set up underneath himself in advance, and bounced to his feet looking pleased. He was missing a front tooth. He had a scabbed-over razor nick on the left side of his scalp where someone had gotten a little aggressive with the morning shave. He looked like exactly the kind of kid who would ride a hog-monkey down a mountain on purpose and then ask to do it again.
After the meal the nuns led us down into the mountain. The path spiraled inward and the air changed as we went, going from thin and cold to thick and warm, picking up the smell of hay and animal heat. The smell got denser the deeper we went until it was less a smell and more a physical presence, the accumulated animal warmth of a space that had housed bison for a thousand years. Then the path opened out and we were in the stables.
The chamber was carved from the mountain's interior and it was enormous. One full wall was open to the sky through a gap wide enough for an adult bison to fly through. Stalls lined both sides, separated by low stone dividers. And in the stalls, the calves.
They were about the size of large carts, each one. Six legs folded under them, flat tails, wet brown eyes. They watched us come in with an absolute stillness that had nothing to do with being afraid and everything to do with sizing us up. These animals already knew what was happening. They'd been waiting.