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PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-4197-3505-9 eISBN 978-1-68335-798-8 © 2020 Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved. Nickelodeon, Nickelodeon Avatar: The Last Airbender, and all related titles, logos, and characters are trademarks of Viacom Internation Inc. Cover illustrations 2020 Jung Shan Chang Book design by Brenda E. Angelilli Published in 2020 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below. Amulet Books is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com So I tell this story a lot at panels and interviews, but I want to preserve it for posterity here. During a time when I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and before I had ever written a novel, I thought about becoming a TV writer. To become a TV writer, you have to demonstrate your skills by writing a spec script, an episode of a currently running show—essentially, fanfiction. I had just watched Book Two: Earth of the original ATLA, so I wrote a spec script where Sokka feels bad about not being a bender, and finds a cool master to train him. In my spec script, he was going to learn to fight with Wing Chun and gadgetry (in retrospect, the result would have been a lot like Asami). From these creative beginnings, I would never have dreamed that in the future, I’d be establishing canon for the Avatar world. In the truest sense, I have you, the fans, to thank for this opportunity. You’ve kept your love for this universe burning brightly for more than a decade, and the most I could ever hope for as a fellow fan and author is to add to your enjoyment. These books are dedicated to you. Thank you all so much. Sincerely, F. C. Yee PROLOGUE “Boy!” Yun clawed at his own neck until he drew blood. The feeling of slime and teeth lingered on his skin. “Boy! Stop your sniveling!” He remembered Jianzhu lighting the incense. He remembered the sticky- sweet smell and the deadness it created in his limbs. Stingjelly venom, his training told him. He’d only just started his doses with Sifu Amak. Yun blinked and tried to make sense of his surroundings. His hands clawed into wet, porous moss when it should have been the dust of the mining town under his fingernails. He was in a mangrove forest. The sky was the color of acid. He crawled around, the juices of a swamp sucking at his knees. The trunks of the leafless trees twisted and gnarled as high as hills, barely lighter in color than silhouettes. Screened by the loose weave of branches, a great glowing eye stared at him. It was the eye that had spoken. The eye that told him he wasn’t the— A pain, terrible and familiar, wracked his stomach and folded him in two. His forearms splashed into the swamp water. The landscape around him began to shake, not from earthbending but from something rawer and more uncontrollable. He wasn’t. End of sentence. He was nothing. The shallow water danced, raindrops on a drum, spiking into geysers. The shoreline swayed, rattling the trees, bucking and clashing them together like the antlers of beasts locked in combat. Yun dashed his head against the ground in a frenzied corruption of a student bowing to their master. Jianzhu. His entire mind was a screamed name, a single screeching tone on a broken flute. His skull thudded against the brackish mud. Jianzhu. “Stop it, you miserable little brat!” the eye roared. Despite its anger it shrank back from him, afraid of his throes of agony. The ground squeezed and fluttered, the heartbeat of a man falling to his death, pounding louder and louder before the final impact. Yun wanted it to stop. He wanted the anguish to end. It hurt so much, to see everything he’d worked for shredded to sparks and dust. It was destroying him from the inside. So let it out. The whisper came to him in his own voice. Not the eye’s. Not Jianzhu’s. Put the pain outside. Put it somewhere else. On someone else. The rip started at his feet, a pinprick in overstretched silk. The tear birthed itself in the water and raced into the banks of the earth like lightning cracking the sky. The ground split apart, releasing all its quaking tension in one swift cataclysmic burst. And then . stillness. Yun could breathe again. He could see. The trembling had worn itself out, spent its energy in the creation of a long lesion in the ground, an unnatural wound upon the landscape. Swamp water poured into the injury, masking a depth he knew he shouldn’t explore. Things were so much clearer when there was relief. Yun used this moment of respite to look around. The musty grove resembled no forest he’d ever seen. The dim light in the sky came from no discernible sun. This place was a hazy reflection of a real landscape, painted with ink that had been thinned too much. I’m in the Spirit World. He backed away from the ravine that lay before him, not wanting to be dragged in by the force of the water’s flow. Turning around, he pulled himself to drier footing using the exposed roots of a leathery tree. The air smelled like sulfur and rot. Master Kelsang had told him about the Spirit World. It was supposed to be a beautiful, wild place, full of creatures beyond imagining. The realm of the spirits was a mirror held up to its visitors, a reflection of your emotions, a reality that shaped around your own spirit’s intangible projection. Yun flexed his fingers, finding them as solid as they could be. He wondered if the gentle monk had ever explored a nightmarish bog like this one. They’d never talked about what happened if you entered the Spirit World while you were still in your body. The rustle of branches gave him a start and reminded him he wasn’t alone. The eye. It watched carefully from the darkness of the forest, circling him on translucent appendages studded with what he knew to be human teeth. He’d felt its bite back in the mountains when it had sampled his blood. A pulsing panic rushed through the chambers of his heart. Yun knew he was on borrowed time. He tried to remember what Jianzhu had called the spirit. “Father . Glowworm?” The eye suddenly rushed closer, socketing itself in the gap between two nearby trees. Yun shrieked and fell backward on his elbows. He’d made a mistake. A crucial, invisible barrier had been broken by saying the name aloud, and now he was more connected and vulnerable to it than ever. “I call myself that,” the spirit said. Father Glowworm’s pupil darted around unnervingly, the iris squeezing narrower. Its gaze had the heft of a probing tongue. “Now, child, I believe you owe me your name.” Like a fool, Yun had fallen into the role of the bumpkin from cautionary Earth Kingdom folktales, the poor field hand or woodcutter who fell under a curse or was simply eaten. He could only think of how he’d be consumed. Rasped into pulp, maybe, and absorbed into the slime. “My name is Yun.” His palms were slick with fear. In some of those tales, the stupid boy survived through sheer pluck. Yun was already prey; his only chance was to become interesting prey. “I—I—” His poise was failing him. His slickness under pressure that had impressed the Fire Lord and the Earth King, the chieftains of the Water Tribes and Head Abbots of the Air Temples alike, was nowhere to be found. Maybe Avatar Yun had the confidence to talk his way out of this, but no such person existed anymore. Father Glowworm shifted in the trees, and Yun knew he was going to die if he didn’t say something quick. His mind leaped back to the moments in his past when his fate was cradled in someone else’s hands. “I wish to submit myself for consideration as your student!” he yelped. Was there a way for a single eye to look surprised? The forest was silent except for the rush of falling water. “I . kneel before you as a humble spiritual traveler seeking answers,” Yun said. He shifted around so his posture matched his words. “Please teach me the ways of the Spirit World. I beseech you.” Father Glowworm burst into laughter. It had no lids to narrow, but its sphere tilted upward in the universal direction of amusement. “Boy, do you think this is a game?” Everything is a game, Yun thought, trying to still his shaking.

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