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masterghandalf) wrote2024-01-29 03:26 pm
masterghandalf) wrote2024-01-29 03:26 pm
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MG Reads Embers: Chapter Fifty-Three
Warning: This chapter contains a battle sequence, some of which features the undead.
Chapter Fifty-Three
We open with Zuko on the border of the spirit world, surrounded by mists and shadows; he’s looking for Asagitatsu’s spirit, but doesn’t even know what that looks like, and he knows this place would be dangerous even if Koh wasn’t planning something. Zuko is dressed as the Blue Spirit, and nearby he sees Shirong in black with his hat wreathed in blue fire, and Langxue surrounded by a halo of his past lives. Langxue leads them on – he promises that following the shore will lead them to the volcano spirit, because they need it to and they’re yaoren. Zuko doesn’t think that should matter when they can’t bend, but Langxue knows Asagitatsu is out there. Shirong, meanwhile, is distressed that he can’t bend and doesn’t have any weapons, which makes him feel helpless. Zuko snarkily suggests that if anything attacks, he can hit it with his hat, which looks like it has Azula’s fire on it. Unfortunately, names have power in the spirit world – by naming Azula, Zuko has called danger down on them. He thinks to himself that Koh and Makoto are deceivers and draws his swords to face a threat from the waters. We cut to Iroh and Amaya staring up at where the yaoren climbed the caldera. Iroh is worried, so Amaya makes him help her haul stuff off the ship. She promises him that Zuko will be fine; Iroh remembers that when they were last here, Zuko got bitten by a rattle-viper and said he was “fine” then, too. Amaya promises him that Zuko has help this time and leads him over to the makeshift docks where Donghai the smuggler wants to talk to him. Donghai is angry and spins a tail about how the Freedom Fighters who he was holding on his ship staged a mutiny and called a dangerous spirit down on them, before a company of seagoing nuns managed to subdue it. Iroh doesn’t believe a word of it, except maybe about the nuns. He recognizes some of the jugs Donghai has from the monastery he, Zuko and June attacked. Apparently, the abbess said these are for the volcano – Donghai thinks she’s crazy, but she also saved his neck, so he’s listening to her. Suddenly, he, Iroh and Amaya all realize there’s something wrong with the water, and Donghai yells for his men to repel boarders.
We cut to Shirong, as he remembers Langxue’s warning that though the Avatar can safely wander the spirit world at will, yaoren are more vulnerable. He sees Zuko slashing at the attacking waves with flames on his sword; Langxue explains that, at the moment, they’re caught between the spirit world and the real world – they can bend here some but have to combine it with spirit as well. Langxue hadn’t realized that Koh would find them so quickly, and then suddenly Shirong has a sense of something that reminds him of the plague spirits he’s fought before, but far more powerful. A voice out of the darkness greets Langxue as Hyourin; Langxue taunts it back, but Koh’s voice dares him to say that where he can see him. Langxue thinks Koh can’t reach them here, and they’re definitely not going over to his territory. Koh taunts him for being rude, while the Avatar is so polite; Zuko tells Langxue not to let it get to him, since Koh is deliberately trying to manipulate him. Right now, they need to focus on the mission. Langxue agrees; he tells Zuko to focus on finding Asagitatsu, while he’ll keep Koh distracted. Zuko turns and runs off, while Shirong stays behind to help Langxue. Koh chuckles about how they’ve failed and how ignorant the Avatar is. Langxue decides to start singing to annoy him – ninety-nine bottles of wine on the wall – and Shirong stops his ears against the Face-Stealer’s enraged howl. We cut to some of the Fire Navy marines as they can’t believe what they’re seeing – they think this sort of thing only happens in spirit tales. Sergeant Kyo orders them to get civilians to higher ground; Fushi is to go with them and fry anything that gets too close. Suzuran is better off than they are. We cut to Tingzhe Wen as he gets Jinhai on Asahi’s back and tells his family to get back from the water. He hopes the sun will help them, but as he watches ranks of Fire Nation dead march out of the sea, he can only pray to Guanyin for help.
We cut to Jee on Suzuran as he watches in horror – he’s seen plenty of death before, but he’s never seen the dead rise and attack under their own power! He blasts one zombie as it attacks him, rallies his crew, and calls for Sadao. Right now, he thinks Sadao’s tendency to indiscriminately set things on fire might be just what they need… and he wants to know just what these things are. We cut to Meixiang as she answers that question, telling Tingzhe that they’re the unsanctified dead, and there’s so little here to burn them. The Wens’ older children want to stay with them, and Min has a bit of knowledge in fighting spirits from his Dai Li training. He and Jia start bending sandstone walls, and as more dead start rising, Tingzhe pitches in. We cut to Huojin, trying to get civilians to safety as he watches Suzuran blast the dead with its catapult. He worries that he’s not trained to fight spirits, and is glad when Corporal Moriaki, Shoni and Fushi show up to help. Moriaki leads them inland while Fushi blasts the dead behind them; he asks Huojin if he’s familiar with stories of the drowned, and Huojin has never heard anything like that in his life. Moriaki says that they’re evil incarnate, but their group isn’t in as much trouble as it seems. His father once fought a similar creature – they’re dangerous and can spread their curse to anyone they kill, but they’re also not intelligent. They’re not following in plan – they’re just drawn to attack the living to feed on their life-force. Soon, they come into sight of Iroh and Amaya – Amaya is bending water into massive balls of ice in the air, and then Iroh lights the ice on fire as they launch it at the dead. We cut to Zuko, wondering how he can find a spirit that doesn’t want to be found. A voice tells him he doesn’t, and he finds himself facing an image that shifts back and forth between dragon and woman that’s replaced his own reflection in the water. Zuko greets Makoto as Great-Grandmother, and guesses that if she’s here, he must be close. Makoto taunts him that Asagitatsu will never accept someone of Shidan’s blood; Zuko taunts her back, pointing out how angry she must have been when Azulon matched Ozai and Ursa. He wonders why she broke the alliance between Asagitatsu and Byakko, and in return she promises to destroy him. But Zuko knows that, for all her power and cunning, Makoto is still a living dragon, and she doesn’t have much power here. Makoto agrees she doesn’t have much power here… at least, not without help. And she has help. She takes her dragon form and blasts Zuko with fire.
We cut to Saoluan and Teruko watching the battle; Saoluan wants to go down there, but Teruko thinks they should hold their ground. People are dying down there, but Zuko, Langxue and Shirong are depending on them – and if they fail, everyone from here to Ba Sing Se might die. And so, no matter how horrible it is, they have to sit here and watch… at least, until the monsters come for them. We cut back to Zuko fighting Makoto, desperately wishing Iroh had taught him more about dragon-slaying. The only advantage he has is that Makoto is huge, even for a dragon, and that makes her slow and clumsy when trying to fight a human – on the other hand, she can do things with firebending even Azula can’t do. Finally, Zuko manages to grab her mane and lets her hoist him into the air as she tries to shake him off. She promises to burn him, but Zuko knows what she’s like, because he knows Azula, and Ozai, and Azulon. He knows she’s focused entirely on getting what she wants, no matter who gets hurt – and right now, what she wants is to kill him, but if she does it now, she won’t get to enjoy it. Makoto roars in rage and dives towards the waters; she’ll only get to watch Zuko die for a moment, but that will be enough. Still, she’s impressed – she’d thought Azula was Ozai’s true heir. Suddenly, Zuko can see into her thoughts, and sense how much she misses Sozin, her true equal, who would have burned the world for love of her but was taken from her too soon by the Avatar’s curse. Zuko shuts her out and focuses on waterbending, freezing the waves solid. Makoto can’t pull up in time; she crashes into the ice and vanishes. Zuko had realized she’d entered the spirit world through his reflection; he banished her the same way. He pulls his burning shirt off, and suddenly realizes the fire still clinging to it is somehow alive. He can tell it wants him to take it home – and home is the spirit of the volcano, across the water in the spirit world proper, fast asleep. Zuko tries to figure out how to do this, promising himself to have a word with Langxue after he gets back. Finally, he starts using fire to bend the sand on the beach into a sort of glass bowl to cross the water. Carrying the fire in the bowl, he bends a path of ice across the water and crosses it; once he’s about halfway, as close to the true spirit world as he can get without losing his bending, he tosses the bowl, and watches it shatter on the dragon’s snout. The dragon awakens and breathes the flames in, and Zuko gets sucked down under the waves. He thinks he’s drowning again, and then the dragon spirit catches him and hauls him out. She warns Zuko that danger is coming; he passes out, the last thing he remembers being the flicker of a warm tongue.
We cut to Saoluan as she fights the drowned, thinking that usual warrior’s training is useless against creatures that are already dead. Teruko, blasting them with fire, says they’re not outnumbered – it’s just a target-rich environment. Saoluan doesn’t much care for her sense of humor; suddenly, one of the drowned grabs her and tries to drag her down, only to be blasted away by Teruko. And then the earth begins to shake, and something bursts from the top of Asagitatsu’s cone – the spirit of a dragon. The dragon breathes fire down the slope; it’s harmless to the living but causes the dead to disintegrate. After the fire passes, she sees Langxue and Shirong waking up, both agreeing that maybe taunting Koh wasn’t wise. Zuko also wakes up, coughing up water; Langxue reminds him he told him to stay out of the water, and Teruko says there’s something he needs to see. Langxue points up to show them the spirit of Asagitatsu as she finishes burning away the dead and then alights protectively atop her cone. She announces to the newcomers that they may try. We cut to Iroh, who thinks that’s not a terribly warm welcome. Amaya thinks that destroying the undead was good enough for her. She examines Zuko, determining that he’s burned but not seriously; he should get some rest for a few days, and sleep in the sun where he can. She’s more worried about his lungs. Still, so long as he rests, she thinks he’ll be fine. Iroh, meanwhile, has something he wants to ask Amaya, and he knows now may not be the best time, but he’s not sure if they’ll get a better one – will she marry him? She watches him for a while, and then pulls out a red cord and says that Saoluan has very good taste in wine. Iroh asks if that’s a yes, and Amaya says it is. They embrace, only to eventually find themselves being watched by a rather grumpy Zuko. Iroh says they are – Asagitatsu is awake, Koh can’t hurt them here anymore, and they have permission to live here. They do need a name; Zuko chooses Dragons’ Wings, after the old tradition of offering shelter. Zuko then tells Iroh and Amaya to keep doing what they were doing, and that he’s just tired; Amaya guides him out, but thinks he’s upset. Iroh says he just misses Ursa, and also misses what he could have had with Ozai, had Ozai been a better father. Amaya thinks that Zuko’s reaction is normal for someone whose widowed parent is marrying again. For now, she wants to go somewhere a little more private to show Iroh just how friendly she can be. He thinks that this is a glorious day, indeed.
MG’s Thoughts
This chapter… I actually liked most of it! A good spirit world journey is always fun (even if this one was just to the edges, not the spirit world proper), we had some good action scenes (I like the bit with Iroh and Amaya using the fire ice – teamwork!), and some important plotlines were advanced significantly! My bigger issues have less to do with the chapter itself, and more with its overall place in the narrative. For one… Koh. Koh ends up feeling rather defanged here; he can’t actually hurt our heroes in the weird spirit world-borderland they’re in, and his dialogue is mostly just standard villain taunts. Compared to his awesomely creepy canon self, this Koh just feels like a generic demon (and even when we learn Embers!Koh’s backstory and true motivation, I don’t really think that changes) and I think it cheapens the character. Speaking of cheapened characters, I don’t like the implication that Sozin’s motivation in Embers wasn’t about trying to conquer the world so he could forcibly remake it in his image, but simplyout of love for an evil dragon… I think it diminishes Sozin, and also further undercuts the Fire Nation’s role in having been the primary aggressor in the war in the first place (since Makoto was behind Sozin, and Koh was behind her). I also don’t terribly care for the Iroh/Amaya relationship, but that may just be because Amaya has rubbed me the wrong way more than once in this fic. And for the chapter as a whole, well, part of the problem for me is that it feels fairly climactic – Koh’s army of the dead and Asagitatsu have both been partially neutralized, Zuko has faced Makoto and defeated her, albeit inconclusively – but we still have almost forty chapters left to go. It can’t help but feel like it's undermining some of what Vathara has set up as the overarching threats, as if Aang had already faced and escaped from Ozai and blunted the power of Sozin’s Comet circa “Crossroads of Destiny,” with the rest of the show proceeding as normal from there. But maybe that’s just me. Like I said, I think this chapter is mostly good on its own, it only highlights a few of my issues with the fic overall.
Chapter Fifty-Three
We open with Zuko on the border of the spirit world, surrounded by mists and shadows; he’s looking for Asagitatsu’s spirit, but doesn’t even know what that looks like, and he knows this place would be dangerous even if Koh wasn’t planning something. Zuko is dressed as the Blue Spirit, and nearby he sees Shirong in black with his hat wreathed in blue fire, and Langxue surrounded by a halo of his past lives. Langxue leads them on – he promises that following the shore will lead them to the volcano spirit, because they need it to and they’re yaoren. Zuko doesn’t think that should matter when they can’t bend, but Langxue knows Asagitatsu is out there. Shirong, meanwhile, is distressed that he can’t bend and doesn’t have any weapons, which makes him feel helpless. Zuko snarkily suggests that if anything attacks, he can hit it with his hat, which looks like it has Azula’s fire on it. Unfortunately, names have power in the spirit world – by naming Azula, Zuko has called danger down on them. He thinks to himself that Koh and Makoto are deceivers and draws his swords to face a threat from the waters. We cut to Iroh and Amaya staring up at where the yaoren climbed the caldera. Iroh is worried, so Amaya makes him help her haul stuff off the ship. She promises him that Zuko will be fine; Iroh remembers that when they were last here, Zuko got bitten by a rattle-viper and said he was “fine” then, too. Amaya promises him that Zuko has help this time and leads him over to the makeshift docks where Donghai the smuggler wants to talk to him. Donghai is angry and spins a tail about how the Freedom Fighters who he was holding on his ship staged a mutiny and called a dangerous spirit down on them, before a company of seagoing nuns managed to subdue it. Iroh doesn’t believe a word of it, except maybe about the nuns. He recognizes some of the jugs Donghai has from the monastery he, Zuko and June attacked. Apparently, the abbess said these are for the volcano – Donghai thinks she’s crazy, but she also saved his neck, so he’s listening to her. Suddenly, he, Iroh and Amaya all realize there’s something wrong with the water, and Donghai yells for his men to repel boarders.
We cut to Shirong, as he remembers Langxue’s warning that though the Avatar can safely wander the spirit world at will, yaoren are more vulnerable. He sees Zuko slashing at the attacking waves with flames on his sword; Langxue explains that, at the moment, they’re caught between the spirit world and the real world – they can bend here some but have to combine it with spirit as well. Langxue hadn’t realized that Koh would find them so quickly, and then suddenly Shirong has a sense of something that reminds him of the plague spirits he’s fought before, but far more powerful. A voice out of the darkness greets Langxue as Hyourin; Langxue taunts it back, but Koh’s voice dares him to say that where he can see him. Langxue thinks Koh can’t reach them here, and they’re definitely not going over to his territory. Koh taunts him for being rude, while the Avatar is so polite; Zuko tells Langxue not to let it get to him, since Koh is deliberately trying to manipulate him. Right now, they need to focus on the mission. Langxue agrees; he tells Zuko to focus on finding Asagitatsu, while he’ll keep Koh distracted. Zuko turns and runs off, while Shirong stays behind to help Langxue. Koh chuckles about how they’ve failed and how ignorant the Avatar is. Langxue decides to start singing to annoy him – ninety-nine bottles of wine on the wall – and Shirong stops his ears against the Face-Stealer’s enraged howl. We cut to some of the Fire Navy marines as they can’t believe what they’re seeing – they think this sort of thing only happens in spirit tales. Sergeant Kyo orders them to get civilians to higher ground; Fushi is to go with them and fry anything that gets too close. Suzuran is better off than they are. We cut to Tingzhe Wen as he gets Jinhai on Asahi’s back and tells his family to get back from the water. He hopes the sun will help them, but as he watches ranks of Fire Nation dead march out of the sea, he can only pray to Guanyin for help.
We cut to Jee on Suzuran as he watches in horror – he’s seen plenty of death before, but he’s never seen the dead rise and attack under their own power! He blasts one zombie as it attacks him, rallies his crew, and calls for Sadao. Right now, he thinks Sadao’s tendency to indiscriminately set things on fire might be just what they need… and he wants to know just what these things are. We cut to Meixiang as she answers that question, telling Tingzhe that they’re the unsanctified dead, and there’s so little here to burn them. The Wens’ older children want to stay with them, and Min has a bit of knowledge in fighting spirits from his Dai Li training. He and Jia start bending sandstone walls, and as more dead start rising, Tingzhe pitches in. We cut to Huojin, trying to get civilians to safety as he watches Suzuran blast the dead with its catapult. He worries that he’s not trained to fight spirits, and is glad when Corporal Moriaki, Shoni and Fushi show up to help. Moriaki leads them inland while Fushi blasts the dead behind them; he asks Huojin if he’s familiar with stories of the drowned, and Huojin has never heard anything like that in his life. Moriaki says that they’re evil incarnate, but their group isn’t in as much trouble as it seems. His father once fought a similar creature – they’re dangerous and can spread their curse to anyone they kill, but they’re also not intelligent. They’re not following in plan – they’re just drawn to attack the living to feed on their life-force. Soon, they come into sight of Iroh and Amaya – Amaya is bending water into massive balls of ice in the air, and then Iroh lights the ice on fire as they launch it at the dead. We cut to Zuko, wondering how he can find a spirit that doesn’t want to be found. A voice tells him he doesn’t, and he finds himself facing an image that shifts back and forth between dragon and woman that’s replaced his own reflection in the water. Zuko greets Makoto as Great-Grandmother, and guesses that if she’s here, he must be close. Makoto taunts him that Asagitatsu will never accept someone of Shidan’s blood; Zuko taunts her back, pointing out how angry she must have been when Azulon matched Ozai and Ursa. He wonders why she broke the alliance between Asagitatsu and Byakko, and in return she promises to destroy him. But Zuko knows that, for all her power and cunning, Makoto is still a living dragon, and she doesn’t have much power here. Makoto agrees she doesn’t have much power here… at least, not without help. And she has help. She takes her dragon form and blasts Zuko with fire.
We cut to Saoluan and Teruko watching the battle; Saoluan wants to go down there, but Teruko thinks they should hold their ground. People are dying down there, but Zuko, Langxue and Shirong are depending on them – and if they fail, everyone from here to Ba Sing Se might die. And so, no matter how horrible it is, they have to sit here and watch… at least, until the monsters come for them. We cut back to Zuko fighting Makoto, desperately wishing Iroh had taught him more about dragon-slaying. The only advantage he has is that Makoto is huge, even for a dragon, and that makes her slow and clumsy when trying to fight a human – on the other hand, she can do things with firebending even Azula can’t do. Finally, Zuko manages to grab her mane and lets her hoist him into the air as she tries to shake him off. She promises to burn him, but Zuko knows what she’s like, because he knows Azula, and Ozai, and Azulon. He knows she’s focused entirely on getting what she wants, no matter who gets hurt – and right now, what she wants is to kill him, but if she does it now, she won’t get to enjoy it. Makoto roars in rage and dives towards the waters; she’ll only get to watch Zuko die for a moment, but that will be enough. Still, she’s impressed – she’d thought Azula was Ozai’s true heir. Suddenly, Zuko can see into her thoughts, and sense how much she misses Sozin, her true equal, who would have burned the world for love of her but was taken from her too soon by the Avatar’s curse. Zuko shuts her out and focuses on waterbending, freezing the waves solid. Makoto can’t pull up in time; she crashes into the ice and vanishes. Zuko had realized she’d entered the spirit world through his reflection; he banished her the same way. He pulls his burning shirt off, and suddenly realizes the fire still clinging to it is somehow alive. He can tell it wants him to take it home – and home is the spirit of the volcano, across the water in the spirit world proper, fast asleep. Zuko tries to figure out how to do this, promising himself to have a word with Langxue after he gets back. Finally, he starts using fire to bend the sand on the beach into a sort of glass bowl to cross the water. Carrying the fire in the bowl, he bends a path of ice across the water and crosses it; once he’s about halfway, as close to the true spirit world as he can get without losing his bending, he tosses the bowl, and watches it shatter on the dragon’s snout. The dragon awakens and breathes the flames in, and Zuko gets sucked down under the waves. He thinks he’s drowning again, and then the dragon spirit catches him and hauls him out. She warns Zuko that danger is coming; he passes out, the last thing he remembers being the flicker of a warm tongue.
We cut to Saoluan as she fights the drowned, thinking that usual warrior’s training is useless against creatures that are already dead. Teruko, blasting them with fire, says they’re not outnumbered – it’s just a target-rich environment. Saoluan doesn’t much care for her sense of humor; suddenly, one of the drowned grabs her and tries to drag her down, only to be blasted away by Teruko. And then the earth begins to shake, and something bursts from the top of Asagitatsu’s cone – the spirit of a dragon. The dragon breathes fire down the slope; it’s harmless to the living but causes the dead to disintegrate. After the fire passes, she sees Langxue and Shirong waking up, both agreeing that maybe taunting Koh wasn’t wise. Zuko also wakes up, coughing up water; Langxue reminds him he told him to stay out of the water, and Teruko says there’s something he needs to see. Langxue points up to show them the spirit of Asagitatsu as she finishes burning away the dead and then alights protectively atop her cone. She announces to the newcomers that they may try. We cut to Iroh, who thinks that’s not a terribly warm welcome. Amaya thinks that destroying the undead was good enough for her. She examines Zuko, determining that he’s burned but not seriously; he should get some rest for a few days, and sleep in the sun where he can. She’s more worried about his lungs. Still, so long as he rests, she thinks he’ll be fine. Iroh, meanwhile, has something he wants to ask Amaya, and he knows now may not be the best time, but he’s not sure if they’ll get a better one – will she marry him? She watches him for a while, and then pulls out a red cord and says that Saoluan has very good taste in wine. Iroh asks if that’s a yes, and Amaya says it is. They embrace, only to eventually find themselves being watched by a rather grumpy Zuko. Iroh says they are – Asagitatsu is awake, Koh can’t hurt them here anymore, and they have permission to live here. They do need a name; Zuko chooses Dragons’ Wings, after the old tradition of offering shelter. Zuko then tells Iroh and Amaya to keep doing what they were doing, and that he’s just tired; Amaya guides him out, but thinks he’s upset. Iroh says he just misses Ursa, and also misses what he could have had with Ozai, had Ozai been a better father. Amaya thinks that Zuko’s reaction is normal for someone whose widowed parent is marrying again. For now, she wants to go somewhere a little more private to show Iroh just how friendly she can be. He thinks that this is a glorious day, indeed.
MG’s Thoughts
This chapter… I actually liked most of it! A good spirit world journey is always fun (even if this one was just to the edges, not the spirit world proper), we had some good action scenes (I like the bit with Iroh and Amaya using the fire ice – teamwork!), and some important plotlines were advanced significantly! My bigger issues have less to do with the chapter itself, and more with its overall place in the narrative. For one… Koh. Koh ends up feeling rather defanged here; he can’t actually hurt our heroes in the weird spirit world-borderland they’re in, and his dialogue is mostly just standard villain taunts. Compared to his awesomely creepy canon self, this Koh just feels like a generic demon (and even when we learn Embers!Koh’s backstory and true motivation, I don’t really think that changes) and I think it cheapens the character. Speaking of cheapened characters, I don’t like the implication that Sozin’s motivation in Embers wasn’t about trying to conquer the world so he could forcibly remake it in his image, but simplyout of love for an evil dragon… I think it diminishes Sozin, and also further undercuts the Fire Nation’s role in having been the primary aggressor in the war in the first place (since Makoto was behind Sozin, and Koh was behind her). I also don’t terribly care for the Iroh/Amaya relationship, but that may just be because Amaya has rubbed me the wrong way more than once in this fic. And for the chapter as a whole, well, part of the problem for me is that it feels fairly climactic – Koh’s army of the dead and Asagitatsu have both been partially neutralized, Zuko has faced Makoto and defeated her, albeit inconclusively – but we still have almost forty chapters left to go. It can’t help but feel like it's undermining some of what Vathara has set up as the overarching threats, as if Aang had already faced and escaped from Ozai and blunted the power of Sozin’s Comet circa “Crossroads of Destiny,” with the rest of the show proceeding as normal from there. But maybe that’s just me. Like I said, I think this chapter is mostly good on its own, it only highlights a few of my issues with the fic overall.
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Of course, the next question is 'why assign him any element at all', but then she divides the humans into strict four-way divisions so why not the spirits? Never mind that elemental bending doesn't work in the spirit world which suggests that the elements may very well be of the material world only...