Lieutenant Zhao

I wasn't in charge of the mission. It shouldn't have been surprising given what had transpired in these last few days, but I couldn't help but feel offended. I was a lieutenant. A group of this size, it should have been under my command. Should being the key word. I had to be accountable for my actions. I would never regret the choices that I made, I couldn't afford to do so in this line of work, but I could at least be capable of understanding consequences. This is the Fire Nation, and the Fire Nation demands perfection. Doing the right thing the wrong way is just as punishable as doing the wrong thing. Intent is irrelevant. What matters is execution, quick and decisive.

So instead of holding the command of this task force, I was serving under Lieutenant Harzek, a colonial. I had nothing against the colonials so longer as they had proved their loyalty to the Fire Nation, to their Fire Lord, but too many times in the past, the opposite had proved the case. AWOLs, desertions, terror-strikes, you never knew when they'd choose to abandon their sworn duty. 97% of all desertions were from colonials. They'd all been caught. The Fire Nation was efficient that way, no treason went unpunished. Until my old master. I pushed the thought out of my head, returning my attention to the map in front of me of the Eastern Nip Sea. We weren't being sent out against the Separatists as I thought we would have been, especially yesterday when we'd recovered the body of a private Zerick, 22, born on Ember Island. It was the job of any officer to be capable of losing men under their command, and the responsibilities that came with it, most notably informing the deceased's family. Rather, we were being sent to the Eastern coast, the swamp, uncharted territory.

"Sounds like a good way to get ourselves killed," had commented ensign Zu'nik. Idiot. But I couldn't help but feel the same, thought I wouldn't dare to speak out against a superior, not anymore. But as I looked at the small entourage of men around me: 20 men, 1 transport, quickly speeding towards the coast, away from our blockade, I felt exposed, almost naked. None of us were army. There were only a few firebenders among us, me included. We were wearing Navy armor, nothing overly protective, and were underarmed just as badly. Lieutenant Harzek had said he'd brief us when we were halfway to the coast, so now, I was just studying maps. There was a reason we had a blockade here, because land routes couldn't go through the swamp, and to go around it would bring you over the mountains, which was a lot of work to cross only a few hundred miles of sea. That swamp, lot of Fire Nation personnel had been lost there, lot of men went in, many less came out, if any. So as much as I considered Zu'nik an idiot for speaking out as he'd done, it didn't stop me from being upset when his petitions had gone ignored, because me, as well as everybody else aboard this vessel, seemed to be plagued by the same question.

So I studied the maps that only covered the coast, down to every pebble, but the hundreds of square miles beyond that, completely dark. What the hell am I doing? This isn't going to help me. What I need right now is somebody who knows what the hell is going on.

Somewhere, sometimes along the way, we'd reached the halfway mark, and so Harzek rose, and spoke. "Listen up!" he called, instantly earning the attention of the 19 men seeking answers to the range of questions that were all on our minds. "To answer your immediate question, this is not a combat mission. This is a diplomatic mission to establish relations with a tribe of natives residing within the so called, 'Foggy Bottom Swamp.' The purpose of this contact, as strange as it may sound to some of you, is to shed some light on the recent 'superstitious' and 'paranormal' events occurring in the Nip Sea as of late, interfering with our operations. There are multiple reports leading us to believe that this swamp and its inhabitants are closely connected to the spirit world. Our mission is to learn the 'how' and 'why' of what is happening, and, if possible, bring an end to it. Any questions."

Nobody lacked for them.

"Sir, with all due respect," started ensign Zaik. "Why the hell are the ones being sent to do this and not some of the Fire Sages or some shit?"

"The Fire Lord had placed them under investigation for suspected treason and they aren't available to lend us assistance."

"But why us?" asked Krezk.

"Because General Shu chose us, and where command sends us, we go."

"And the newbie?"

By that, I knew he was referring to me. General Shu had picked the men chosen for this mission from the same ship, likely figuring it would improve unit cohesion. All had known each other for at least a few months, all except for me.

"Because his firebending master was none other than Jeong Jeong, and Junior Lieutenant Zhao is more informed about the spirit world than any of the rest of us are here." Which isn't saying much. Just hearing Jeong Jeong's name brought back emotions I would've rather kept suppressed for the moment. I looked around me, none shared the sentiment. The rest don't know, do they? It hasn't become public knowledge yet. Rather, their grazes were focused on me, the odd one out. The one who supposedly knew 'everything' about the spirits. And I looked at him, as though asking him, "Why?", and his look said it all. He wanted to be here no more than any of his men. To him, this was a death sentence for them to babysit me so I could do…something, though I wasn't sure what. And I hoped to whatever Spirit I wasn't being sent to eliminate, that I'd figure it out soon.

The coast was almost upon us, and we began our final preparations. Helmets were donned, gloves were equipped, and supply packs were loaded and closed.

"Fireteams A and B!" called Harzek. "Form a defensive perimeter around our landing zone! A to the North, B to the South. Fireteam C secure our landing zone and protect the package." That was me, I guess, the only one aside from the lieutenant without a fireteam.

And in a matter of seconds, we'd reached the shore, our ramps lowered, and fireteams A and B went about their tasks while fireteam D made a dramatized effort of forming a turtle shell formation around me. What a bunch of children. Looking at their faces though, the term "children" wasn't far from the truth. The oldest among them seemed to be no older than his mid-twenties, and Navy too. They haven't seen what real war is like. Odds are they'd spent their entire careers part of the Armada, any combat they found themselves in, supported on all flanks by 10 other battlecruisers.

I was escorted onto the beach, and out ahead of us, not 20 yards away, forest began, and soon beyond it, inhospitable swamp land. How the hell did we expect to find what we were looking for in there?

"Reports say that there is a mother tree, a banyan-grove in the center of the swamp land, towering larger than any of the others. It's rumored to serve as a site of worship for the swamp's inhabitants."

"How do we plan on finding it, sir? We splitting up?" asked an ensign whose named I hadn't yet remembered, clearly terrified at the prospect of splitting up into smaller groups.

"Negative, ensign. We'll be travelling together. Strength in numbers. You'll notice that each of you are carrying flare guns with 5 cartridges each. We'll be trying to stick together, but if we're to get split up at any point, and you lose your flare guns or are out of ammunition, the mother tree is our rendezvous. "

"What about our transport?" Zaik asked. "Aren't we concerned about some Seppies nabbing it from us while we're not looking?"

"The transport will return to the blockade. It will come back to us when we've completed our mission, signaled with a flair. Any more questions?"

"Sir," prompted Krezk. "If you don't mind me asking again, what's our actual mission. Meaning, how will we know when we've gotten what we came for?"

And so, Krezk voiced the concerns that not only he had, but so did every member of this squad, myself included. Nobody was really expecting to find anything. All this talk of spirits, the paranormal, we didn't deny their existence, but we denied our ability to even come close to understanding it, something we were sent to do today, to understanding this other world. He wasn't asking when we'd finish our mission. He was asking how far we'd take this before we were all dead.

Harzek sighed. He knew that as well, and he was just as reluctant to be going into these swamps as anyone else was, and so he answered, "If there's nothing for us to see at the mother tree, there's nothing for us to see. It would just have been one failed attempt to gain an edge. Nothing more, nothing less."

He was already preparing for failure. They all were. In a way, so was I. But I had more riding on this than any of them. If this failed, so did my career, so did everything I'd been working towards my entire life. This couldn't fail. I couldn't fail.

So when Harzek turned his eyes towards me, towards the reason they were all here, the reason their lives were put in danger, I returned the gaze with nothing less than total confidence. This was going to work. And if it didn't, I will have wished that I died in these swamps than returned empty handed.

And so we commenced our march into the forest, fireteam A at the head, fireteams B and C covering our flanks. Over the rustling of the shrubbery as we entered the darkness, the last thing we could hear of the coast was our transport's engines spurring to life once more and returning to the safety of the Western Armada.

We knew the geography. We were expecting the march to last around a day until we reached the mountains surrounding the swamp. It would take another day to hike up them, and a day to descend. Then we placed the time it would take for us to navigate the swamps at approximately three to four days. These were the estimations we'd come up with beforehand, and so we'd packed accordingly. Our bags were laden each with 3 weeks' worth of MREs in case of a worst-case scenario and to accommodate for the journey back. Alongside that, we were each packing first-aid kits, enough water to last us, along with survival supplies spread between us such as rope, hunting equipment, etc.

And so the march began. This may not have been the army, trained in ground-operations, but even in the navy, we were soldiers. As young as the men surrounding me were, I had to give them credit where credit was due. They survived their training, and not just any upstart half-baked trainee could make it to the Western Armada, and they demonstrated that here. The lack of discipline they'd shown ashore was gone now as they maintained their marching order, keeping on alert for Separatists activity, never leaving their guard down. Then again, the day had just begun. What remained to be seen was how long the discipline would last. How long until boredom took over, and men started cracking jokes, squandering their rations, and forgetting that we were in Separatist occupied territory, but so far, they'd surprised me. The one's who, aboard the transport, had protested the loudest, now followed Harzek's orders as thought they were coded into them from birth. There was something commendable about it. Then again, they'd known him far longer than the half a day I had.

The march went by soundly enough. We were making good time, landing at 1400, nearly halfway to the mountains by 1700. We stopped for a 5-minute break to catch our breaths and drink some water, only consuming at most half of our day's supply, then continued.

"No sign of any seppies so far," said Zaik, Fireteam A, breaking the silence that had been maintained since landing save the occasional order from Harzek.

"Please don't fucking jinx us, Zaik," said Krezk, from Fireteam C.

Additionally from Fireteam C, the ensign whose name I'd finally put to Zayli, a more femenine name, something I'm sure his squad mates had already made fun of more than enough times, said, "Maybe they assume nobody is stupid enough to go into the swamps?"

"Tell that to the hicks that call that fucking sludge hole 'home'," grumbled Krezk.

"They got hicks in there?"

"Tribals," corrected Harzek. "But hicks aren't too far off, but that's enough on the matter. Cut the chatter if you would."

"Yes sir."

"Yes sir."

"Yes sir."

Soldiers were like clay, molded by whoever was in charge of them. An officer who tolerated no outbursts such as this would keep them disciplined but would only prepare them for his own command. They would respond perfectly to his commands, but under the charge of any other, they'd be lost, and, if they'd lost their CO in combat, there would be no room for flexibility. They'd be lost, confused, scared, dead before they even remembered the chain of command as they'd only ever known one singular commander.

If you tolerated too many outbursts, however, you'd groom your men for independence, but too much so. They'd no exactly how to act without their CO, even when he was around. His command would fall on deaf ears, and the longer it went on, the harder it would be to restore discipline, to make these men soldiers again.

In what I'd seen of him so far, it seemed to me that Harzek had found a middle ground of sorts, by no means an easy feat. The fact that he wasn't the biggest fan of me made him no lesser of a leader as far as I was concerned

The sun was setting now, to our backs as we headed further east, beginning to feel the incline of the mountain ahead of us, following its trails to make our ways up, at least so much so that we were above the forest tree line. Ascending this would be the task for tomorrow. For now, what mattered was being able to find a good enough area to set camp, a place we eventually found a few yards up, a nice clearing with enough space for us to set up camp, pitch our tents, start a fire, and take a good 30-minutes to eat our MREs for the day before settling down for the night.

Chatter was quiet. There was no better time to do it, but in a way, we weren't long enough into this op that it became standard. There was still a sense of disbelief in questioning why they were here to begin with. I couldn't hope but feel a tang of guilt. I knew how it felt to be assigned on a pointless task. I'd served under the same captain for almost 7 years, being held back at every turn, but I'd rather be held back than thrown at a task that seemed certain to get me killed. I wondered if the silence would break. Nobody did. It was odd, normally, I would have welcomed the silence, but now, I knew that the silence was filled by the stares they gave me. It wasn't me who sent them here, it wasn't me who was responsible, but I was the "package" so to speak. I was their burden. And they hated me for it. If anybody higher up the chain of command were here, those gazes would be directed at him, but right now, I was as close t the problem that they'd get. They hated me for it, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I looked up the mountain, knowing that swampland lay beyond. I still had no idea what I was going to do once I was there. I had no idea what even to ask. "How do I stop the water spirits attacking my men?" Right. Like that would work.

I was still looking up the mountain as I sat in front of my tent, taking off my boots and armor before crawling into my sleeping bag. Fireteam A had watch for the night. Fireteam B tomorrow, and so on. I would have welcomed having watch right now. Any distraction, any more time to just think would have been welcome.

I turned to enter my tent when I felt a presence behind me. "Junior Lieutenant," Harzek said.

"Lieutenant" I answered, not trying to antagonize him.

"I don't have time to waste on small talk. These are my men. They are my responsibility, and I want you to answer as plainly as possible. Do you have any damn idea what you're doing here?"

I considered how to answer that. I wondered if I should lie, and say that I knew what I was doing, but at the end of the day, it was still a lie, and it would change nothing, so I only answered as plainly as I could. "Not yet."

"And what the hell is 'not yet' supposed to mean."

"That no. I don't know what I'm doing."

"Then why the hell are you here, and, better yet, why the hell am I here? Why the hell are my men here?"

"Because my master-"

"I know who your damn master was. That doesn't explain why they send you, some upstart officer who I doubt listened to anything a man as renowned as your master said that didn't have to relate to advancing your own ends."

He wasn't wrong. Jeong Jeong always spoke of the dangers of power, of the dangers of fire, how it could control its user easier than we could control it. But at the end of the day, did anything he say matter anymore? He was a traitor, who knew where his lies began, and where they ended? At the end of the day, he served his own goals, which advanced the question, if I couldn't trust his own words, then why was I here? "I know that my master focused on many aspects of the world outside of the one where we live."

"The spirit world?"

"Yes, sir."

"So you're saying that we're here just to chase spirits?"

"That's what you said during the briefing."

"Because maybe that's all I was told, but I have a hard time believing that me and 18 of my men are being sent out solely for the purpose of getting spirits to stop messing with us. Maybe I just have a hard time believing that our command is so stupid so as to justify throwing men at a world that, according to the laws of the universe, we cannot attack back against! What else is there to it, Zhao?"

"I'm sorry to tell you, but there's nothing more. We've been sent to find and remove the water spirit as a threat. There's not much more I can say."

"So you're saying you know absolutely nothing."

"I'm afraid that I am."

"But you agreed to do this?"

"I agreed to serve my nation to the best of my abilities."

"Don't give me that patriotic bullshit. You think if you do this, everything will be forgiven, right? That you might even be given a promotion if you did this, past your initial rank of lieutenant?" He wasn't wrong. The idea had crossed my mind more than once. "You're not a patriot, Zhao. You're a glory hound. This nation and its soldiers are just a means to an end for you. If you felt you could gain more glory in the Earth Kingdom, you'd go there in the blink of an eye."

"That's not-"

"It is. You've endangered the lives of Fire Nation soldiers more than once to advance your own aims. Just a few seconds later, and you would have killed everybody aboard the Retribution, aboard my ship, but that didn't matter to you, did it? You knew protocol, that the destroyer was our ship to chase, but you chose to pursue it, not caring that you were breaching protocol, and endangering the lives of the men in the blockade you chose to run."

I didn't have anything to say right now. I didn't know what I could say. I regretted my actions, but he wasn't wrong. I regretted my actions for what they cost me, not for what they could have cost others. I always told myself I loved my nation, but how much of that was even true? But at least one thing made sense. I'd compromised the safety of these men once before already. What assurance did they have that I wouldn't do it again?

Harzek continued, "I follow my orders, so I'll go along with this, but your safety is meaningless to me. You look after yourself. I'm here to keep my men alive for as long as possible. Not to look after you. If you fall behind, if you take a different route, if you don't leave when we pack up, that's your own damned fault, but I will not let you endanger my men a second time. Now go to sleep. We wake at 0500 to march. Join us, or don't. It doesn't matter to us. We're here to talk to tribals that worship a tree and get some answers. Whether you're here for it or not, it doesn't matter to us." And with that, he left, and as I allowed myself to settle in for the night, there was that knot in my stomach that told me he was completely right. That I had no purpose here. I was the closest thing they could find to somebody well-versed in the spirit world. I was a scapegoat if anything. I was nothing more than that. There was nothing I could do that the rest of these men couldn't. So I closed my eyes as I tried to lie to myself as the night came that I would prove them otherwise, that I would serve my purpose, but at the end of the day, I don't think even I was capable of convincing myself of that.

Eventually, the next day came, I having to wake myself up in the midst of the rest of my squad already packing up, getting ready to leave, likely wishing amongst themselves that I wouldn't wake up, one less burden to carry. Inevitably, amidst the commotion of a disassembling camp, I did awaken. And so, another day began after I managed to catch up with the rest of my squad. Luckily for me, when it seemed I only had myself to look after, it wasn't hard to keep pace with 19 tightly knit soldiers. I knew they held me in regard, which was perhaps better than in low regard. For all they were concerned, I didn't exist. They wouldn't let me slow them down or endanger their lives as they seemed so adamant to view my intentions. I was invisible. And right now, that seemed just what I needed.

I knew how to ration my food and water. Hadn't ate breakfast and was still on yesterday's supply of water. I'd learned the hard way not to overindulge, how to make the msot of what little I had. So as we scaled these mountains, each step a chore of its own, the dwindling oxygen, rising temperatures of Spring, and precarious nature of each step slowly wearing us down. We'd stopped twice before noon. We were nowhere near the top of the mountain, myself estimating we were a third of the way there. It seemed the squad's efforts to ignore my presence were working, as they now were beginning to chat amongst themselves, cracking jokes, arguing from time to time, not that I could hear. I took my breaks, my meals, my time, away from the rest. I'd taken the rear guard, allowing myself to trail a few yards behind the others, giving both me and them the space we needed away from one another.

From time to time, I'd turn around to set my eyes on the landscape we were leaving behind us as we slithered across the side of the mountain like a zigging and zagging snake. From where we now were at 1330, about, at least, I could see the Nip, the fleet hidden from view, but its plumes of dark gray smoke never ceasing to indicate our iron grip over this waterway. I should be fighting Separatists right now, bot marching towards a PR stunt of an operation, a mission with about as much logistical value as finding the Avatar. That venture had been abandoned long ago when Sozin had died, still unable to find the "one threat" to the Fire Nation's security. From time to time, the occasional zealot would rise up to the challenge, and would organize some grand expedition to find and retrieve the Avatar. It was a foolish venture, children playing at war games, but it was all folly. The Air Nomads had been eliminated for 20 years before Sozin finally succumbed to his ripe age of 102, never finding his lost quarry. By that time, he'd abandoned the throne, allowing Azulon, who didn't share the same zeal, to assume more relevant duties. The Avatar was a forgotten memory now, lost for nearly 100 years. Odds were too, he was already long dead, likely having died during the genocide itself, born among the water tribe, never found, probably dead, reincarnated, likely dead again. For all we knew, we were already in possession of the Avatar and we didn't even know it. Not that it mattered. If the Avatar was really a threat, then they hadn't deigned to make themselves so in the last hundred years that the Fire Nation has spent conquering the world. Why would they show up now?

It was all just a tale we told ourselves to keep us on guard, to remind us that we dare never become complacent, never allow ourselves to be taken unawares. It was all just for show, much like what I was in the middle of doing now. Nobody denied the existence of the spirits, much less myself who had seen their damaging effects up close and personal. And I agreed that something had to be done, but if I was the one to do it was a different conversation entirely. I hadn't ignored the words of Jeong Jeong as Harzek seems to assume I had. I listened to him, I respected him, I trusted him. And he betrayed me. I shook the thought aside. He betrayed his Nation. I shook the words in my head away once more, needing to focus as my gaze fixated on the horizon ahead of me, just putting one foot in front of another, hugging the cliff wall, not daring to take one wrong step. I acknowledged the words that he had taught me, but his recent actions did throw his teachings into a new light, but there was wisdom to be learned from the enemy. To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Jeong Jeong had said that, "Man views themselves as the masters of the universe, no power above them, but we are not alone in this world. We share this world with plants, animals, the spirits, and who knows what else. They may inhabit a world separate to our own, but we lest not forget that they have the ability to interfere with us, while we lack this selfsame ability. We are not alone in this world, and we are by no means its masters."

In his words, Jeong Jeong surrendered himself to the world. I realized that now. I thought he had spoken of humility, of understanding, but I saw the message beneath his words. It wasn't man he referred to. It was us, the Nation he used to call his own. The country he turned his back on. My fists clenched, feeling the heat, the rage, the fire rising within me as I took one step in front of another, not even looking to see where my foot landed. He had given up, switching sides because he believed we had already lost. He was a coward! I kept on marching. But he was wrong. It was man who banished the spirits to their world. They were the ones hungry for power, the ones seeking to dig their class into our world, fueling our conflicts, our wars. My vision was blurring, but I kept on marching. The spirits had overstepped their bounds, had broken the fragile peace, and it was up to us to restore the order. We'd done so before. We would do it again!

I crashed into the soldier in front of me, sending him bouncing forward as I barely stopped myself from falling back. "For fuck's sake," he yelled. "Watch it!" I regained my footing, looking ahead, waiting for my vision to unblur, but the darkness remained. It was already night. How long had we been marching?

"This is a good spot," I heard Harzek's voice call from the front of the line. Unpack your things and settle down. Get some grub in your bellies along with some water and get some sleep. It's been a long day."

I heard the relieved sighs and groans that thundered around me, myself having missed on the hardships that the others around me had so clearly been beset by. I was still in shock at how long I'd been gone. It felt like I'd only been thinking to myself for a few minutes, but here I was.

"That means you too, Zhao!" Harzek called, for some reason even deigning to acknowledge me. Through the shock, I allowed myself to finally unpack, pitching my tent away from the rest as seemed the silent custom, starting my own small fire with some scattered tinder, thankfully dry. I hadn't even realized we'd reached the near peak of the mountain, and I took the time to gaze at the scene around me. The sun wasn't just setting too. It had been set. For quite a while, the stars sitting in the sky, moving ever so slowly to the point that the heavens' movements evaded our recognition, there one moment when we shut our eyes, gone when we opened them once more.

From where I was, I could only hear the mumbling of conversation emerging from the soldiers engaging in their pre-night conversation, a tradition I'm sure they'd mutually shared in the years they'd known one another. And for once, I found myself missing my old crew. Missing Izzo's naivete, Zeera's confidence and hunger for advancement that we both shared, and to some small degree, even the simplicity of Zain's command. I knew where I stood with him. There was no confusion at least. I knew what each day had in store. It was a career-killer of an assignment, but I had known my abilities, and I knew that he could throw nothing at me that I couldn't handle. But now, as my eyes trailed down the horizon, to the shadowed sludge of swampland ahead, I realized that I had no idea what tomorrow would have in store for us. Never had I been so confused about my future, no longer thinking years down the road, to my own command, my future accomplishments, but simply to the day ahead, to the unknown, of just how lost I felt in these moments. But I wasn't lost, was I? Not so long as I had a purpose. Tomorrow, it was descending these mountains, beyond that, questioning the locals, after that, doing what had to be done to stop the spirits killing my men. After that, there were only two primary objectives that plagued me most. Prior to a week ago, it had only been one, to work my way through the Fire Nation command structure, one rung of the ladder at a time, but today, I'd settled on just one more. I was going to find Jeong Jeong, and when I did, I was going to kill him. I was going to kill the man that had lied to, deceived, and betrayed me. I was going to kill my old master.

And so, on that second night, after allowing myself to eat and drink, I slept to dreams of justice, to dreams of revenge, softened by the light patter of a gathering rain outside.

I don't know what it was that woke me up this time, but as soon as consciousness had been regained, it occurred to me that it didn't matter. Because amongst the sounds of a raging storm outside, muffling the voices that were clearly yelling, barking orders, questioning the fates, there was no difficulty in understanding that something was horribly wrong, a horrible howling now picking up, drowning out all other noises. I threw off my sheets, crawling out of the sleeping bag, reaching instinctively to the armor I had at my bedside, my years of doing this time and time again allowing me to get my chest plate on first, followed by both of my legs and one of my arms by the time the stake of my tent tore loose, in a domino effect, unearthing all of the rest. I barely managed to escape polyester tomb, bag in hang, by the time that the wind had taken hold of it, flinging it into the wind along with all else I had possessed within, from the rest of my armor to my sleeping bag. My first instinct was that this was a dream, that I was about to wake up. This couldn't have been real. We'd have known if a storm like this was approaching. Just like we did last time? So when I looked around, and saw the rest of my squad, struggling to grab hold of their belongings, barely invisible behind the thick curtain of downpour, I realized, this wasn't a dream.

And this was one of those moments where, friend or foe, I didn't want to be alone. I rushed to where I believed the others to be, and found them there, at their camp site, desperately struggling to grab hold of what they could, their voices as I shoved past them those of complete and utter terror. "What the hell is happening?!", "Where the fuck is Zaik!?," "What do we do?!" But amidst that, one voice I knew I could recognize, and had to listen to, "Leave the tents!" I could barely hear Harzek's voice call out. "Grab your bags! Grab your armor! We've got to get to lower ground!" His eyes caught mine as I'd entered his immediate vicinity, and for once, his look wasn't one of hatred, likely because he was too busy trying to survive. Somehow, he'd managed to fully don his armor, and already has his pack over his shoulders. "Zhao!" he called, not wasting time on by demeaning rank as he'd usually done. He must have noticed that I was as ready as I was going to be, and so he ordered, "Help the others!" I turned my attention then to the nearest man, a soldier whose face I could never hope to distinguish in the chaos in addition to the mud splattering his face. Or was it blood? I hooked my hand around the underside of his arm, grabbing his pack with my left hand, pulling him up while handing him what I could only assume was his bag, though at this point, it didn't seem to matter. We needed to consolidate as much equipment as possible.

We were between violent gusts at the moment, the only danger the rain, now added to by the occasional strike of lightening. It's getting closer. But the calm between gusts wouldn't last forever, and the howl alerted us to its threat only a fraction of a second before it hit, Harzek barely managing to utter the singular word, "Brace!" The man in my arms flew. How far back? I couldn't say, but he and I were no longer tethered. I could feel myself being lifted, but threw myself to the ground on all fours, desperately trying to secure a grip on whatever I could, unsuccessfully so feeling myself being pulled, or pushed, or whatever it was, towards the cliff's edge, now clambering for life until I felt a hand grab around my wrist, holding me steady for the next few seconds until the gust passed, and my eyes met Harzek who now let go, yelling above the maelstrom's rage, "Grab who you can and get down the mountain, now!" His orders could never be executed, a journey of that length set to have taken us a full day, during clear weather, fully rested, with 16 hours of daylight, but in this moment, that didn't matter, all that did was the singular purpose, To get to lower ground, and to survive.

I left Harzek were he was, actually finding myself hoping that he'd be alright, and rushed to the nearest figure I could see, somebody hunched over on the ground, completely unarmored, not even in their Fire Nation uniform, but their actual underclothes, but notwithstanding, I grabbed them by the waist, pulling them up, pulling them alongside me until they regained their own footing, soon stumbling beside me as we headed for the path that would theoretically lead us down the mountain. We passed more soldiers, some of which were now beginning to move on as well, helping those nearest to them to move on as well. I had no idea how many of us had already been lost thus far, or to what extent they were. There was no way to know, and no time to think on it, but only on putting one foot ahead of the other.

We were barely on the trail when it started, the first signs of it, a slosh of mud first, then a rock, then a horrifying crash as though that of lightening striking just above us, and upon me turning up, I saw it, a rushing cloud of mud, dirt, rock, a landslide, one that we were directly in the way of. And in that moment, I found myself doing nothing I never thought I would have. I placed both of my hands on the back of the soldier in front of me, putting as much pressure into my elbows as I shoved him forward, and braced myself for whatever fate awaited me.

And then it was darkness, enveloping me, surrounding me, my body no longer my own, but being carried by the fate of the world, pulling me down into the abyss, to my own grave, to a dark space in the universe where nobody would ever find me, a hole I could be stuffed in with the key tossed into an equally dark and buried hole. A hole I now found myself digging my way out of, one hand in front of another, as though I were swimming in the earth itself, desperately trying to reach a surface I couldn't see, not daring to open my eyes nor nose, but just rising, rising, rising however I could, until first, my arms rose, like the plays I'd used to watch on Ember Island of the living dead, then I saw it in front of me, the open world, and dug myself out, one handful of dirt at a time, digging myself out of the grave the world had deigned to bury me in, not done just yet. Somewhere along the way, I'd lost a leg plate on my right leg, and my right arm bracer, my pack somehow still on my back, and so I emerged, but not into light as I might have supposed, but into a world that felt jut as submerged as the one I'd emerged from, and so I looked all around me, at the world of shadows around me, the mountain I'd just descended nowhere in sight, only to be surrounded by a world of greens and blacks. So here I was, then, I'd made it, somehow, alive. But that was the easy part, I was sad to admit, because I was in the place that had claimed so many others before me. I was in the swamp, and my concerns were only just beginning.