Harzek

"Zaik, got any parchment on you?"

"'Fraid I gave mine to the talking owl, sir."

Talking spirit owls, magic libraries, endless shelves of all the world's knowledge, and I was fretting about parchment. What the hell is wrong with today?

"Think I have some in my pack. Stop for a second." I turned my bag around to my front, swinging it by its shoulder strap, looking within for something that would suffice, quickly enough getting my hands on some loose parchment paper, proceeding to hand it over to Zaik along with an ink pen. "Keep a map of where we go and where we've been. Don't want to get lost down here."

"Trapped with all the knowledge in the world doesn't appeal to you?" He said, following it with a soft chuckle as he took the items, I handed him.

I didn't respond. I needed to keep him on task. For his sake more than for mine. He lost about half of his squad earlier today, including his Krezk, with whom he'd been rather close. I couldn't let him think about that now. Not when we still had a job to do. Not when we were still deep in hostile territory, a lapse in our judgement the potential catalyst for a quick and untimely death.

"We'll take this half of the library, work our way down from there until we reach the ground floor." Wherever that ground floor is.

"That'll take days."

"Then it will take days. We have a job to do here and we're going to finish it."

"Yes, sir, but, with all due respect sir, what are we looking for?"

It made sense for him not to know. Zhao, despite my protests, had kept the details of this mission to a minimum, only allowing the vague detail of "it will finally allow for our Nation's victory" to slip every now and then, though all the help that was. He'd kept the others in the dark, his only reason for divulging me into more information being to appease me and gain my loyalty.

Considering I was still here, I supposed that it worked.

"Information about the water tribe. Something related to the spirits perhaps. We're looking for information about their weaknesses. Something we can exploit to gain an upper hand in this war."

Zaik nodded, more out of loyalty to me than his question being answered in any real sense. A month or more ago, I would have been yelling into Zhao's eat just how stupid this is, how he's going to get my men killed for nothing. So far, I'd been right on one count. Now I just prayed that I wouldn't be right on the other. This can't be for nothing.

Hours went by. We'd passed by four stories in that time. 4 out of hundreds I presumed. There were more books here than any number I'd ever learned to count up to. I'd followed leads, opened up books I believed would prove relevant, and had come across, in just those 4 stories, more information than anything I'd ever learned at the academy: books of geography, outlining the formation of the Serpent's Pass resulting from opposing currents from the East and West seas battering at the pass until it became the haphazard shape that it was today, theoretical papers on how all four nations had once been part of the same supercontinent, something called "continental drift" driving them about, a number of theories existing that it was pre-historic benders that, in an effort to forge their own societies, separated the continents, and a number of ancient scrolls referring to some strange creatures known as "lion turtles" who still roam around the world, taking on the illusion of moving islands.

It was clear quick enough to us that we were in a geographical portion of the library. Thus, it was only natural to try and find some information about the two poles. Zaik tracked down what he could of the South Pole while I went on a quest to learn more of the North.

We met up with one another at a pre-assigned point, scattering the texts we'd collected: atlases, scrolls, books, journals as well, compiling whatever information we could garner from the collected texts.

Apparently, both the Northern and Southern Water Tribes, despite being locked on permafrost, still supported vegetation, but only in peculiar locations, namely, the exact poles of the Earth that were claimed to once house gateways to the spirit world, creating a passageway between the two poles of the Earth.

"Maybe that could be useful?" Zaik suggested. "A gateway between the poles. The South is practically already gone. We could move an army through there, strike the North from inside. They'd never expect it."

"A good plan, but it says here that these portals no longer exist. That it's theorized they were only open when spirits used to roam the Earth."

"Spirits used to roam the Earth?"

"Apparently so."

"What happened?"

I shrugged. "Couldn't tell you. This is as new to me as it is to you."

"Found something too in this scroll," Zaik said, holding out a piece of parchment to me was an image of two worlds resting upon the backs of one another, one on the top appearing to be that of our world, housing mountains, the North and South pole, and in the center, a great mass of vegetation, below it, upside down, a far more alien land, two balls of light on either end beneath the poles, and in the center, a misshapen tree.

"What's that supposed to be?" I asked, not having enough time to read the text before Zaik turned it back around.

"Says here that, despite a vast difference in scale, the spirit world and the physical world exist parallel to one another. It says that if a line were to be cut going down the center of the Earth as well as the center of the spirit world, the closed spirit portals would align with the Northern and Southern poles, and in the dead center, where the Foggy Bottom Swamp lies for us, apparently 'The greatest spiritual center in our world next to the two poles', would, in the spirit world, translate to something known as the 'tree of time.' Any of this making sense to you?"

I shook my head. "Oh thank fuck. I thought it was only me."

He set it down. It had already been, for the most part, common knowledge that our worlds overlapped, the occasional spirit sighting near the Solstices telling us that our worlds were closer than we believed. I couldn't deny, however, that the newfound knowledge of the Swamp did set me somewhat at unease, though it did, however, explain a lot of what had happened there during our expedition.

"This doesn't really get us much closer," I said with a yawn. "We should settle down for the night."

"Is it even night, sir?"

I shrugged as I removed my bedroll from my pack, setting it down, saying, "Doesn't really matter anymore. But we should conserve our energy. Won't be of much use if we're half asleep."

The mention of sleep seemed to awaken a hidden exhaustion within the boy as he stretched his arms with a yawn, saying, "You know. Now that you mention it, it has been quite the day. I could use some shuteye."

I nodded, saying, "I'll keep first watch. You get some sleep."

"With pleasure, sir." He undid his own bedroll, setting it down.

My watch passed by quicker than I'd expected it to, my eyes drifting around the great structure, trying to comprehend just how long we'd be here. We didn't have food to last us months of exploration. Sooner or later, we'd have to call it quits and regroup if we couldn't find what we were looking for. But who could know if this place would still be here when we returned?

No.

We had to find what we were looking for. Not for our own sakes, but for the Fire Nation's. I scoffed. Zhao really has gotten to me, hasn't he? The fallacy of sunken costs, I supposed? I'd already lost so many damn men for this. I had to force myself into believing that it was for a reason. If I stopped believing that they'd died for a reason, I might just end up going insane down here.

My own watch came to an end soon enough, and I went to bed with the pit in my stomach that left me closing my eyes to fall asleep, praying that my lost friends had given their lives for a reason.

The next day came, destined to be yet another day of wandering through a never-ending library in search for something we prayed actually existed.

The geography section eventually became one of astronomy, talking of celestial forms, the other bodies in our solar system, the sun, all of that.

It wasn't too long ago that mankind still believed us to be alone in the world. How quickly things seemed to change.

It was only a little over 150 years ago that the Fire Nation explorer and navigator Ajorok Rasan had circumnavigated the globe, finding a route to the Earth Kingdom due West of the Fire Nation rather than East, finding only vast ocean and scattered archipelagos that occupied the otherwise barren sea between our two worlds. Likewise, it has only been around a century ago that Aizone Sai, another Fire Nation born, invented the high-powered telescope, realizing we weren't the only planet, and in fact resided in something he coined the solar system, a number of planets that revolved around the sun.

We really have come far in not a lot of time. It helped justify everything, I supposed. People no doubt had their doubts about the war, but when everything was put into perspective, were we wrong? Before the colonies had been established, that area of the Earth Kingdom's eastern coast had been warring dutchies and baronies, savage tribals, and avaricious trade companies attempting to make a profit from the unrestrained warfare.

Now? Now they were hubs of industry, society, cultural exchange, law, order, and security.

Notwithstanding, Zaik and I spent the hours of that day going through shelf upon shelf of text, finding reference to any number of space-related phenomena ranging from topics as simple as the phases of the moon to others as strange and offwordly as some complete and total alignment of the planets in the solar system, an event dubbed "Harmonic Convergence." A fanciful name for some floating rocks getting in a straight line.

Everything here, whether useful or useless, so many things I'd never been taught growing up in the Fire Nation. Perhaps there was a reason to it, myself seeing no reason why a soldier such as I should be wasted learning about the occasional coincidence in the alignment of the planets.

Notwithstanding, I could no deny that some of it was useful, though old news to me. The phases of the moon directly relating to the power of the waterbenders. The texts I found, however, made little to no reference to the real-world applications of these celestial occurrences, analyzing them rather, to a degree completely disconnected from anything else, completely impartial, neutral, focusing only on that field. Something I, as a matter of fact, found to be admirable, even if it did hinder connecting anything to something that may be useful for our endeavor.

There were other documents I found to be more interesting-works speaking of events known as solar and lunar eclipses, the former being the perfect obscuration of the sun by the moon, perfectly located between the Earth and the moon to cut off the flow of light, the latter referring to when the moon was caught in the shadow of the Earth, no light of the sun being reflected onto the Earth's surface. The "red moon" it was prone to being called.

"Find anything useful?" Zaik called down to me from where he'd been, a few rows away, himself checking through a number of texts.

"Not particularly," I said, stowing away the texts I'd been perusing, not finding much of any note within them. "You?"

"Nope," he exclaimed, slamming shut a rather heavy looking piece I'd noticed him dwelling on for a while, approaching me where I was instead. "Damnit!" He called out. "This is going nowhere."

"We'll find something," I said, trying to reassure myself more than him.

"Or we'll just waste time here that we should be spending in the field, you know, actually doing something to fight for our Nation."

"Zaik, we'll find something. Just gotta hold it together."

"At least in the field, we'd be dying for something real. Out here, our guys getting killed fighting fucking sandbenders of all people, who we're not even at war with, what's the point? What did Krezk die for?"

What did Krezk die for? He'd been killed with a spear of sand impaling his side, leaving him to waste away in a sandstorm that had likely already buried his body beneath tens of feet of desert. He'd never be found, his family would never have closure, he was lost to all space and time as far as anybody was concerned. And what had he died for? A shot in the dark, a slim chance of a secret strategy that would win this war for us? What the hell did he die for? "He died for his country. And we should all be so lucky to die as he did, fighting for something that can change the tide of this war."

"Do you really believe that?"

My eyes turned to the ground beneath my feet. What do I even believe anymore? Before I could answer, I heard a shuffling of feet to my right, and turned to face the same creature we'd seen out in the desert-that foxlike animal, just standing there, looking at us.

I stood there quiet, while Zaik, pacing a few steps back, said in a quivering voice, "Easy there, boy. We'll leave you alone. Just don't uh-just don't eat us. Please."

I turned to him, annoyedly questioning what the hell he was saying, then turned back to the pup, saying to Zaik behind me, "He's not going to eat you, Zaik. If he didn't eat us in the desert, why would he do so here?"

"Maybe the terrifying owl sicced him on us?"

I looked back on the fox, wondering myself if that was a possibility, but the animal made no move to attack us, instead just sitting there, head tilted to the side, questioning.

"Do you think he understands us?"

The animal tilted its head to the other side, eyeing us still. "I think he does?" I said, more as a question than a definitive answer. "Wan Shi Tong did mention they have a strange connection to humans."

"Maybe he's trying to help us. The owl called them knowledge seekers. Think he could lead us to what we're looking for?"

One way to find out. "Hey there,…boy. We're looking for information about the Water Tribes. Do you think you could help us?"

Still deathly quiet, the animal turned, making in a full toe sprint away from us, stopping suddenly, lifting one of its forward legs, pivoting its head to face us.

"I guess," Zaik started. "He wants us to follow?"

I shrugged, facing him, figuring we had nothing better to do, and so, myself collecting a few minimal texts I believed possessed some worthwhile information, followed.

The fox was kind enough to wait for us to make pace with it before continuing, heading now to a flight of stays which it promptly descended, still beckoning for us to follow. I couldn't tell you how low we got until we reached a segment of the library that seemed more of a midsection, the platforms leading in all 4 directions of the room, no bookshelves lining the walls, but rather, 4 doorways, and above them, the banners of the 4 nations, each leading into a wing that seemed to be appropriately decorated.

My eyes danced around the room, noting the uniqueness of each entrance, that of the Fire Nation wing being flanked by 4 golden dragons, guarding the entrance as vigilant sentries. What secrets of our nation could possibly be lying in there?

My eyes now turned, searching for the segment most relevant to us, and sure enough, sitting right behind a seated fox, was the banner of the Water Tribe, on each side of its entrance, a statue of a Koi fish, one facing upwards, the other downwards, as though if they swam close enough to one another, they could fit perfectly with each other.

"Well," started Zaik, scoffing as he caught up from behind me. "That answers that question."

I couldn't help but let the slightest of grins slip as I bent over and gave the furry guide an appreciative pat on the head for his service, Zaik following suit as I had already moved on, entering through the massive doorway that led into the wing that seemed wholly dedicated to all things Water Tribe.

I suppose I should have been expecting it, walking into such a room, but it felt as though I'd found myself immediately behind enemy lines the moment I stepped foot into that wing of the library. All around me hung Water Tribe memorabilia, shelves laden with pertinent texts gathered all around, one inclined to think that we sat at the very heart of the Water Tribe itself. In a way, I suppose we did. I had my doubts that even Agna Qel'a, the capital of the Northern Water Tribe, possessed this much knowledge on themselves.

And the room was beautiful too. At the far end of the room, as an ornate carving in the stone wall, was the insignia of the water tribe, the rolling waves within the image circle of the full moon, saying nigh everything there was to be said about where we were.

"This is-" Zaik started, unsure of how to finish even as he began. "This is-"

"Amazing," I said. "Everything about the Water Tribe. In this room alone."

"Which begs the question. What are we looking for?"

"I don't know. Something about a weakness the Water Tribe possesses. Anything along those lines. Something that can help us defeat them."

"And…where should I start looking?"

"I don't know!" I exclaimed, already looking through the shelves. "Just start pulling out books."

And so we did, going through them, not quite sure what the hell we were looking for in particular, the two of us merely searching desperately for something that could give us the edge.

And the hours rolled by. I reached a section entirely about the Water Tribe capital, about its architecture, its design, its passageways, underwater caves that led under its ice into subterranean tunnels beneath their palace. A detailed overlay of the terrain north of their city, outlining its hazards and proper navigation through it, leading essentially to the city's backdoor.

Zaik and I had the documents sprawled out across the floor, going through them one at a time, cross analyzing them with one another, putting together connections where and when we could, the accounts, blueprints, and documents we found in such thorough detail that it was frankly frightening. Neither of us missed it. Just how convenient it was. Everything we could ever need. Right here.

It was too easy. And if this library has this much on our enemy

"-Then what does it have on us?" Zaik finished, himself having been talking in the exact same words as my train of thought.

Our heads turned up from the writings on the floor to look at one another, a mutually shared fear in both of our eyes. If we had everything on our enemy we could ever want here, then what could they have on us if they found this as well.

"Go," I said. "See what's there. I'll stay here. I think I'm on to something."

He nodded, standing before asking, "Sure you don't need any help, sir?"

"I'm sure, Zaik. Thank you.

I was on to something. I truly believed that I was.

I had found a number of battle reports involving Water Tribe forces of all known tribes-Northern, Southern, and Foggy Swamp, though the latter was very rarely involved in actual fighting, this being limited to recent years. They even have accounts of battles from just months ago. How the hell? I don't remember any foxes watching us as we fought.

I had them all sprawled in front of us, organizing them into 2 piles: Water Tribe victories, and Water Tribe defeats. The victories held in common many similarities. Namely, battles fought during nights, full moons in particular. But defeats, on the other hand, most had occurred during the day, those during summer in particular. However, there were some that stood out, and the way in which they were written, hell, the casualty numbers on their own, they spoke of something entirely unusual.

Battles in the dead of night, resulting in complete and total defeats, but more interesting than anything else, all occurring during full moons, their enemies not other waterbenders, but earthbenders, firebenders, hell, even nonbenders. Those reports however, those of Water Tribe losses during full moons, they shared something in common. The moon they spoke of these conflicts occurring under, it was red.

And so I read all the further, read of the moon, read of the Water Tribe's worship of it, read of their traditions, their customs, their beliefs, of the two fish by the names of Tui and La who eternally circled one another in the capital's spirit oasis, the symbols of the tribe's belief in their two closest elements: the moon and the sea, explaining the statues that had guarded the entrance to this room.

And in that same document that spoke of the tribe's beliefs, it spoke of the entire purpose of Agna Qel'a, how it was not simply a capital city, but a shield, a shield for these two simple fish.

What the hell is-

"Lieutenant!" A rushing Zaik called to me as he stormed back into the Water Tribe ring.

It had only been around 30 minutes since he left. What could he have found in that sort of time?

"Private?" I called out to him, confused. "What is it, Zaik. You find something?

"Yes, sir! It's bad, sir! The enemy! If we don't do something about it, they'll destroy us before we can finish this fight!" He was grasping for every lungful of air he could take between his exclamations, seemingly burnt simply from his effort of running here. What could possibly have been so bad?

"Well, what is it?"

"It's-"

"As selfish as the last human who entered my library." It was that same voice that would interrupt Zaik, myself turning to find the shadow that had been enveloping me out of nowhere belonging to Wan Shi Tong where he stood directly behind me, facing down, his eyes boring into my skull. "I suppose I should not be surprised. If there is one thing all you humans have in common, it is that you are terrible liars."