The curious distinction of studying beneath a prominent scholar in the Earth Kingdom is that one does not merely attend lectures but also becomes similar to a page following a renowned warrior or celebrated general. In both worlds, apprenticeship begins not with mastery but also with burden-bearing, the novice shoulders the instruments of the trade long before fully understanding them. Satchiko had seen such customs among her own people too with young girls carrying valuable blades they could not yet wield. Yet here, in the polished arteries of Ba Sing Se's bureaucracy, the burden is simply some light parchment and books rather than some hefty polearm. Brushes replaced curved swords. Scrolls supplanted steel. Compared to serving as sword-bearer to a Kyoshi Warrior, ferrying documents is almost indulgent in its gentleness.
Almost.
For while the weight of paper was negligible, the weight of observation was not. Satchiko felt the periodic scrutiny of passing officials, robed ministers, ink-stained clerks, solemn bureaucrats who drifted through these grounds like austere spirits bound to ledgers. Their glances were not hostile, merely measuring the first student of the White Scholar himself. In Ba Sing Se, even silence appraised.
Shan, intent on widening her comprehension of the city's intricate administrative lattice, had taken her through department after department. Or at least, the ones someone of his station can assess. Although a Zhuangyuan, he technically isn't employed yet.
There were civil registries, archival chambers, taxation halls. To Satchiko's untrained eye, they differed little. Each giant chamber or administrative building appeared an echo of the last with men and women bent over desks, approving or condemning scrolls whose characters dissolved into inscrutable geometry.
"Shan," she asked, her tone perilously casual by the standards of cultivated Ba Sing Se discourse. "Why is my sister not accompanying us? Would it not be safer for her to guard you against an ambush?"
Though it was true that Mayumi's outward identity as an armed bodyguard grants her certain rights to employ violence, the pupil is also influenced by the wish to be by her sibling's side. Nevertheless, the White Scholar winced, only inwardly. The question itself was unnecessary, but more than audible. Within the inner districts near the Royal Palace, security is not a matter of speculation. Armored sentries stood immobile in their iconic heavy brigandine, halberds upright as iron saplings. Palace guards patrolled with disciplined regularity. Violence here would be less a crime than an impossibility.
"Your sister has been entrusted with a delivery of importance," Shan replied with measured composure. "In similar fashion, yours truly too must remain subject to the expectations of my own esteemed mentor."
At that, Satchiko's thoughts turned toward Han Fei. If the man styled himself a museum director, his office would surely lie near the Upper Ring palace complex, somewhere deep among these labyrinthine annexes and stone corridors. It was not implausible that Shan now guided them toward him.
"It is generous of you to show me how you scholars work," she said. "But what is expected of me when I meet your teacher?"
The simplicity of the inquiry belied its gravity. Shan slowed his pace almost imperceptibly. The comportment of a pupil reflected upon the educator, and to present one insufficiently tempered before a figure of Han Fei's stature invites critique not merely of the student, but also of a scholar whose prestige was newly acquired.
A faint sigh escaped the man donned in white, less of irritation than of calculation. Earth Sage disciples were bred in rhetoric and philosophy from childhood, their literacy lacquered to brilliance. Satchiko, by contrast, is obviously far from speaking with eloquence and poetic speeches. Should Han Fei, an architect and inheritor of a doctrine so often attributed to tyranny, perceive inadequacy in her, what verdict might he render upon Shan's tutelage?
"Shan, I think it's fine," Satchiko said before he could reply, somehow sensing the reluctancy. "I can wait somewhere near here while you go see him."
There was a slight pause in the White Scholar's expression, before resuming.
"A reasonable proposal," he conceded. "Yet one that does not exonerate your progress."
Inwardly, even Satchiko admitted restraint is wiser than audacity. To present herself prematurely would risk exposing her unpolished ability both as a scholar and an Earthbender, as well as the halting grasp of Earth Kingdom philosophies. Taking a page out of her own sister's caution, it would be far better to not have Shan's competence questioned on her account.
"However, as your tutor, it would be improper to diminish one's pupil," Shan emphasized. "Which is why yours truly is slightly confused by your willingness to refrain from meeting the esteemed Han Fei, which is indeed a slight deviation from what is expected of most students with similar age."
She considered this. A man of Han Fei's reputation drew supplicants as flame drew moths. Aristocrats and merchants alike would clamor for the distinction of proximity. Yet Satchiko felt no such urgency. Titles and associations were ornaments, and she had not yet earned even her own.
"I have not earned that right," she answered, the same conviction with which she had once delayed the claiming of her own golden headdress. "I do not yet understand the customs of Ba Sing Se's learned circles. It seems wiser to become worthy before standing before that old mentor of yours."
Her reasoning, though unsophisticated in form, possessed an integrity that did not escape the scholar's notice. For one so alien to Ba Sing Se high culture, her instinct for propriety was unexpectedly sound.
Shan inclined his head in a restrained bow, acknowledgment mingled with something approaching contrition. Perhaps he had indeed read too deeply into her hesitation. Maybe he had momentarily burdened her with the legacy of a frowned upon philosophy perpetually shadowed by accusations of severity and tyranny. After all, Satchiko's truest ambition was disarmingly modest. She sought only sufficient mastery of Earthbending and return home, not to inherit some intellectual dynasties nor to perpetuate governance doctrines debated in palace halls.
The pupil watched the White Scholar depart, his pale robes dissolving into the winding arteries of walls and archways that clung like stone ivy to the main royal palace. Within this labyrinthine bureaucracy of courtyards, one might risk losing not only one's direction, but one's purpose.
Meanwhile, the novice had been instructed to wait in a nearby garden while Shan conferred with Han Fei on the ceaseless machinery of Ba Sing Se's daily affairs both big and small. The meeting is expected to take hours. Perhaps longer. Yet what might have felt like tedium instead became a reprieve. The garden she selected as her provisional study was hushed and mercifully removed from the shuffling cadence of passing officials. It is a little sanctuary of trimmed hedges and obedient blossoms, a cultivated silence amid political gravity. A fitting place to wrestle with the obstinate Earthbending scroll Shan had entrusted to her care.
The parchment crackled softly as she unfurled it. Its ink on paper, precise yet infuriatingly abstract, depicted a figure summoning the earth with poised inevitability, as though stone were built as an extension of the body. The instructions, dense with technical annotation, might as well have been written in another tongue.
No matter how diligently she studied the forms, or how faithfully she mirrored the illustrated stances, the element remained unmoved. The ground beneath her boot is deaf to imitation.
"How troublesome," Satchiko muttered, exhaling through fatigue as another attempt yielded nothing but dust unsettled by her own footwork.
She was aware dimly that manipulating palace walls or landscaped earth might invite reprimand. But such anxieties dissolved under the weight of a harsher truth. She could not move so much as a pebble. The earth did not acknowledge her, let alone obey her will. Even the gardeners who occasionally drifted past the garden's entrance regarded her with mild perplexity. A girl in simple robes, arms sweeping through the air beside a small fortress of books and scrolls. Eccentric, perhaps. Dangerous to the surrounding flower beds? Hardly.
At last, she lowered herself to a patch of grass and retrieved a strip of dried Elephant Koi meat, which is astonishingly well preserved despite its long journey from the island. As she chewed in silence, her thoughts turned inward and sharpened.
How long would it take to compel this stubborn element into submission?
And beneath that question, there is another quieter but more corrosive fear. What if it never yielded? What if every hardship endured on the broken and uneven roads to this city, the blood, the cold, the humiliation, had all been undertaken for nothing?
The birds ceased their chirping, as though the garden itself paused to consider her tormenting doubt.
She looked up. A small fledgling had tumbled from its nest, which perched precariously atop a tilted roof beyond the dividing wall that separated public grounds from the palace's more secluded sectors.
Of course, the officials who traversed these grounds are not close enough to notice. Even if they did, who in their right mind would risk scrambling up tiled roofs for the sake of a hatchling?
But Satchiko's upbringing as a girl from a remote island village had not been one of stillness and decorum. Scaling walls and vaulting eaves were reflexes, not feats.
Unaware, or perhaps naively indifferent to the invisible codes governing this citadel of power, she climbed the wall and vaulted onto the roof when no one is looking at this general direction. The clay tiles shifted faintly beneath her weight, but she advanced with the confidence of a trained warrior. Besides, as talented and intelligent Shan may be as a scholar, not even he had suspected that his mediocre pupil possesses such acrobatic prowess.
The fledgling chirped weakly as Satchiko scooped it up and restored it to its woven cradle.
Perhaps it was a universal law, one should not wander too carelessly beyond one's appointed station.
From her newfound vantage, Satchiko surveyed the expanse. The network of walls and courtyards stretched outward in ordered immensity like a stone organism breathing with every pulse. Ornate compounds all uniform in grandeur were arranged like monumental courtyard houses enlarged to imperial scale. Streets and partitioning walls segmented the grounds into innumerable precincts. Navigating this maze on foot would be a trial even for the initiated.
She moved lightly across the clay tiles of the building. Training as a Kyoshi Warrior since birth had made roof-walking second nature. Stealth is simple instinct.
In the distance, she noticed figures in dark, embroidered robes stationed along building entrances. They bore no visible armor and no ostentatious weapons, yet their stillness was somehow more imposing than steel. They watched without appearing to watch.
Before prudence and the fear of being spotted could reassert themselves, another sound reached her faint, rhythmic chanting carried on the wind.
Curiosity triumphed over caution.
She crossed several rooftops in swift succession, angling toward the sound's source. Among the countless courtyards many buildings away, one is markedly larger, its open sky unobstructed by excessive ornamentation.
Keeping low on the far side of a roofline, she peered towards the court. Boys, near her own age, stood arranged in disciplined ranks. Under the supervision of men clad in dark green robes, they thrust their arms forward in unison. Not only with fists, but open palms and fingers extended in rigid alignment. The movement was sharp and repetitive. Almost surgical.
Such an odd technique. The strikes resembled jabs, yet lacked the coiled force of conventional punches. It was not chi-blocking. There were no wooden dummies, no anatomical targets marked for precision. Nor did it resemble practical battlefield training. Against armed opponents or benders, bare hands are a fragile defense.
Then the formation shifted.
An instructor barked a command, and the boys rearranged themselves into mirrored ranks. The symmetry was hauntingly reminiscent of her own Earthbending lectures by Zhu Xi, though progress had eluded her entirely.
At a signal, discs of earth hurtled across the courtyard.
The trainees launched them at one another in tight intervals, stone slicing through air with lethal intent. The exercise was relentless. Several boys failed to deflect the projectiles in time, and impacts struck limbs and torsos with bruising force. One staggered. Another collapsed to a knee.
The robed men did not flinch. To them, it seem routine. But the lowly trespasser secretly spying on them, the contorted expressions of the injured were disquieting. Even in the harshest days training as a Kyoshi Warrior, intensity had never courted such open peril.
After a grueling interval, the instructors signaled cessation. Splintered discs littered the ground like broken shields. The men strode forward, stooping to gather fragments. With economical gestures, they compressed chunks of earth in their palms, molding them into compact forms.
From this distance, she could not discern the details. Yet when the instructors returned to the ranks, they distributed strange constructs, small objects fitted to both hands.
Then, in measured unison, the instructors stomped.
The courtyard floor convulsed. Pillars of earth surged upward, all evenly spaced and forming a forest of targets awaiting impact.
"Begin!" barked the one crowned with the yellow tassel helm.
In near-perfect unison, the trainees drove their fists forward, this time sheathed in compacted earth. Clay and grit flowed over knuckles and wrists like obedient armor, hardening at the moment of impact. And then strangely it dissolved. The earthen casing sloughed away from flesh as though recalled by an unseen tether. Satchiko stood too far to discern the precise mechanism of its dismissal, only that it vanished with deliberate restraint rather than explosive force.
What unsettled her most was the absence of spectacle. Assuming what she had witnessed was Earthbending.
There were no boulders hurled skyward, no tectonic bravado splitting the flagstones. The courtyard's fine pavement remained largely unbroken, unmarred by the usual violence she associated with Earthbending. During her brief excursion to the agrarian quarry beyond the Lower Ring walls, she had sought to better acquaint herself with the art. Every Earthbender she had crossed blades with on the journey favored brute strength. All unyielding, obstinate and overwhelming. That was the nature of the element she knew, stubbornness made manifest.
Yet here, on this training ground, the principle seems inverted.
This Earthbending is stripped of ostentation, almost surgical in its forms and delivery.
Questions crowded Satchiko's mind. The grueling drills, the regimented existence, the air of monastic severity, none of it felt ordinary. And then there were the robed figures.
"And who are the mean looking guys in robes?" she uttered quietly.
Eloquence had never been her ally. Words felt blunt in her mouth, inadequate to describe the long dark robes and conical helms that cast their faces in permanent shadow. The brims concealed their expressions, but not their authority. Even at a distance, she did not wish to be noticed by such sentinels.
She had just begun to turn away when something cracked against the koi-shaped ornamental ridges beside her.
Her body locked. Instinct silenced breath and stilled muscle. A shard of the roof lay splintered at her feet, as though struck by an invisible chisel.
Then came the gradual sting.
A thin, delayed bloom of pain traced across her plain cheek. She lifted her fingers and brushed them lightly over the skin. When she drew her hand away, the palm bore a crescent smear of red. The Kyoshi Warrior regarded the blood with quiet astonishment.
The injury was shallow, no more than a superficial line. But its origin eluded her. Retrieving the remaining golden fan from a hidden pocket, she snapped it open and angled the surface to serve as a mirror. Reflected there was a narrow, horizontal cut, a scarlet boundary inscribed across her right cheek. She dabbed it clean with a handkerchief. It would not scar, she hoped. Even as someone not enslaved to vanity, a face freed of scars is still preferrable.
"Watch your aim!"
The reprimand rang from a distance, sharp and irritated. A projectile gone astray. It must have struck the roof and ricocheted from hardened clay before grazing her. Thankfully, she had not been seen.
A few steps away lay the object in question. She stooped and picked it up.
It was no arrowhead or concealed blade, merely a small earthen tile, tiny slab scarcely larger than a pebble. Yet its edges were unnaturally keen, as though deliberately honed. This is no accident of nature judging by the precise geometry.
A faint tint of crimson stained one side.
Her arm trembled just slightly as the implications settled in. If a mere graze had drawn blood, a direct strike to the eye or throat would have been fatal. Unlike arrows, which whistled their presence through the air, this thing was almost invisible. A mote of earth weaponized to kill. Deflecting arrows was child's play for her compared to evading dust.
Within seconds, she concluded. It had to be some disciplined of Earthbending that infused a harmless shard with lethal velocity. But when she studied the trainees once more, their stances bore little resemblance to the forms illustrated in Shan's scrolls. How is it fair for such people to harness such power with so little earth?
Her hand gently fidgeted the small tile that nipped her face. But soon, an even more dangerous thought unfurled, one that may betray her sister's desire for safety and prudence on this entire journey. What if this restrained and exacting art was the answer she had been seeking all her life? Strength without excess. Force without spectacle. The ability to strike unseen. Wouldn't this strange form of Earthbending be the solution handed right on a silver platter?
As she resumed her secretive spying, the session at that distanced courtyard seem to have concluded. The trainees were dismissed in orderly lines, while the robed overseers methodically leveled the courtyard, pressing targets flat into the earth as though erasing all trace of Earthbending. The strange earthen projectiles had been expended. She noted the hardened gloves around the trainees' hands, perhaps fashioned from the same material as the shard in her palm.
Without fully acknowledging the decision, she slipped the tile into her pocket, intending to leap back the small stack of books and scrolls in the garden just below. It would not do to linger where she did not belong.
And she was not alone.
At the base of the building chosen as her vantage point, which seem to be some a ramshackle joss house of a forgotten deity, figures began to gather. Four teenagers entered the courtyard that houses the structure, each bearing a broom. They wore dark green garments and moved with unnerving synchronicity, sweeping the brick courtyard in steady, disciplined arcs. Pine needles drifted lazily from the nearby trees, as if indifferent to the human order imposed below.
The sight was monotonous, almost mundane. And yet it felt like a warning that Satchiko had trespassed.
A sharp crack split the air beneath her boot.
Before she could shift her weight, the clay tile below gave way. The roof sagged, then collapsed in a rush of dust and splintered timber. She seized the edge of the opening, fingers clawing for purchase, but the brittle clay crumbled under her grip.
She fell.
The impact drove the breath from her lungs, though fortune favored her. She landed atop a mound of old trinkets and ceremonial clutter that softened the descent. Dust billowed upward in choking clouds.
Outside, the great doors aim to shudder open.
"Hey! Who are you?" a voice shouted from outside.
Satchiko swallowed a gasp, mind racing. Escape routes. Angles. but right as she was about attempt a leap towards the ceiling's hole, she froze.
At the far end of the dim hall stood an inanimate figure clad in green, face half-shrouded in shadow. Its painted complexion is pale with red streaks, its head adorned with the striking golden regalia no Kyoshi Warrior could forget.
The resemblance was unmistakable. Too glaring to ignore.