Chapter 10: Floating Garden

One year before the Great Comet. Southern Air Temple.

Gyatso pulled me aside one morning meal and told me to come with him. He didn’t say where. That was how he handled Aang’s training too, the two of them disappearing for hours while the rest of us ran drills on the south terrace. For all I knew those sessions were still Pai Sho and fruit pies.

He took me to the spinning gates on a morning cold enough that my breath made little clouds in the air between us.

I hadn’t been near the gates since I was nine. The monks taught them as a dance, a way to dodge without attacking, and at nine I’d already decided I needed to learn how to fight back. So I’d gotten through them well enough to pass and never looked back.

They were on a raised circular platform at the eastern end of the training grounds, a two-thousand-year-old mechanism of flat wooden panels mounted on vertical spindles, arranged in a dense grid. When an airbender sent a gust into them, every panel would start spinning at once, each on its own axis, creating a maze that would knock you sideways if you tried to force your way through. The goal was to weave from one side to the other without touching the panels.

“It is time to wake them up,” Gyatso said. He was standing at the base of the platform with his hands folded in front of his robes.

I bent a gust into the gates and the panels started turning. The sound they made was somewhere between a whistle and a hum, the air moving through the spindle gaps at different pitches depending on how fast each panel spun. I’d heard that sound so many times during Second Breath training that I’d started to hear it in my sleep. It only stopped once I’d advanced to the next tier.

“That is a pleasant breeze, Sonam. However I did not bring you here to dry laundry,” Gyatso said.

I bent more air into the gates. The panels blurred.

“Show me what you remember.”

I stepped onto the platform and moved into the first row. The panel on my left came at me and I ducked under it, stepped around the next one, and caught the timing on a third. My body was reading the openings like it had at nine, tracking the visual pattern, timing my steps to the rotation. I made it through four rows before a panel clipped my shoulder hard enough to spin me sideways. The one behind it caught my hip. I stumbled out the side of the grid and stood there rubbing my shoulder.

Gyatso was still standing at the base of the platform. “Go again,” he said.

I went in again. This time I made it through five rows. A panel caught my elbow on the sixth and I lost my rhythm entirely, three hits in two seconds, the last one square across the back.

I walked back to where Gyatso was standing. The panels were still spinning behind me.

“When you were young,” he said, “how did you pass through these gates?”

“I read the openings and timed my steps.”

“Yes, that is what you did.” He looked at the spinning panels. “The openings are a test for the eyes, the gates a test for the body. You passed by seeing, yet you were supposed to pass by feeling.”

Gyatso picked up a leaf that had blown against the base of the platform and held it out to me. “Do you know why this leaf passes through the gates?”

“It goes where the air takes it.”

“Yes, and it cannot resist.” He set the leaf on his palm and bent a gentle current under it. The leaf rose, turned once, and settled. “As a bender, you have a choice. To push forward or to change direction. The leaf has no such choice. It must go where the air goes.”

He let the leaf fall.

“Try once more,” he said.

The panels were still spinning. I stepped back onto the platform and stood at the entrance to the grid. A panel swung toward me and my hands came up before I could stop them.

Be like the leaf.

I dropped my hands. The panel came and I turned with it. The next one came from my left and my body followed the air it pushed ahead of it, stepping where the current was already going. I made it through five panels before something clicked and for about three seconds my feet went where they needed to go without me telling them to. Then a panel caught my hip and I stumbled out the side of the grid.

“Very good,” Gyatso said. “Come. There is something else.”

I followed him down toward the lower corridors, still thinking about those three seconds in the gates. My body had read the air better than my brain ever had. If I could get that working reliably, I’d be able to anticipate strikes coming before I noticed them and bend on instinct without thinking through every move.

We went past the dormitories, past the storerooms, and down the route I’d memorized during evacuation drills. But instead of turning toward the bison caves, Gyatso took a narrow path that opened onto a ledge I’d rarely visited.

A waterfall poured out of a cave mouth in the rock face about thirty feet above us, snowmelt dropping past the ledge into the clouds below. The spray made the stone slick under my feet and the air tasted like wet rock. The ledge itself was maybe twenty feet across, recessed into the mountainside far enough that the valley wind couldn’t reach it, but the roar of the water filled the whole space.

“Close your eyes,” Gyatso said.

I closed them.

“Point to where I am standing.”

All I could hear was water. Gyatso could have been anywhere on the ledge. So I guessed and pointed ahead of me.

“Open your eyes.”

He was to my right, about six feet away.

“Close them again.”

I closed my eyes and stopped trying to hear him. My hands came up on instinct, ready to push a current out and feel where it hit something. I caught myself and put them down. Gyatso hadn’t given me permission to bend.

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I stood there on the wet stone and tried to feel something, anything. After a while of getting nothing, I let my hands drop and just breathed, in and out, again and again. And there it was. A faint pressure on my right side, barely there, like the air was leaning against me. I turned my head and it stayed on the same side.

I pointed to my right.

“Open.”

He was exactly where I’d pointed. The air had been pressing against my skin this whole time, carrying information I’d never thought to notice, and it was the strangest thing I’d felt since I first bent air.

“Well done. Very few have achieved the Fourth Breath at your age. In fact, the only other is Aang,” Gyatso said. “The nineteenth tier is air current sensing. This part of your bending was always there, but your ears and eyes never gave it room to be free.”

“How far can it reach?” I said.

The monks taught sensing as a defensive skill, but it was more than that. With it, I could feel a fire nation soldier coming around a corner before he saw me. I could bend blind in smoke and still attack them.

“I do not know your limits yet. Tonight, stand at one end of your dormitory corridor and see if you can feel Dawa breathing three beds over.”

We practiced for an hour. Gyatso moved to different spots on the ledge and I pointed with my eyes closed. He set a stone on the ground and asked me where it was. I could find him within a foot by the end but the stone was harder. I couldn’t narrow it down past a three-foot radius.

I walked back to the dormitory and ate a late breakfast alone. Dawa was sitting near the kitchen door, his breathing rattling like it always did. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to feel him from across the room. Nothing. I went back to my porridge.

After breakfast I pulled out the six copies of the Foggy Swamp coordinates I’d written up. Time to hand them out.