Chapter 79: The Boy Who Touched the Sky
The weight on Aang's chest was a physical thing, a heavy, cold stone of disappointment that made every breath an effort. The Mechanist's well-meaning tour had been a special kind of torture, a slow, methodical unveiling of a crime scene where the victim was his own childhood. Every hammer clang was a nail in the coffin of his memories. Every strung-up laundry line was a defilement of a sacred space. He felt like a ghost haunting his own home, invisible and screaming while the new occupants just… lived.
He'd drifted away from the others, from Katara's sympathetic looks and Sokka's pragmatic curiosity. He found himself on a high, isolated balcony, one of the few places that seemed relatively untouched. He gripped the smooth, sun-warmed stone of the railing, his knuckles white, and stared out at the endless, beautiful, indifferent sea of mountains. The view was the same. It was the only thing that was.
He was so lost in the ache of it all that he didn't hear the soft, rhythmic whirring sound approaching from behind.
"Hey."
The voice was young, friendly, and without a trace of the defensiveness he'd heard from the adults. Aang turned, his expression still clouded with a sorrow too deep for a boy his age.
It was the boy from earlier, the one the Mechanist had called Teo. He sat in a remarkable chair, a contraption of polished wood and cleverly interlocking gears, with two large wheels that he propelled with a hand crank. His face was open and bright, his eyes sparkling with an intelligence that was immediately disarming.
"You're Aang, right? The Air Nomad?" Teo asked, rolling his chair closer until he was side-by-side with Aang at the railing.
Aang just nodded, not trusting his voice. He expected pity, or more explanations, more justifications for the invasion of his past.
But Teo didn't offer any. He just followed Aang's gaze out to the horizon. "It's the best view in the whole world, isn't it?" he said, his voice full of genuine awe. "I never get tired of it. Sometimes I think I can see all the way to the spirit world from here."
Something in his tone, a shared sense of wonder, made the hard knot in Aang's chest loosen just a fraction. "Yeah," Aang managed, his voice rough. "It is."
"My dad says your people built this place to be close to the sky," Teo continued, not looking at Aang, as if speaking to the mountains themselves. "That they loved the freedom of it more than anything. I think I understand that."
That got Aang's full attention. He turned to look at Teo, really look at him. He wasn't seeing a symbol of the desecration anymore. He was just seeing a boy, a few years younger than him, who talked about the sky with the same reverence Aang felt in his own soul.
"How?" Aang asked, the simple word loaded with a century of loneliness.
Teo finally turned to him, a brilliant, excited grin spreading across his face. It was a grin that could light up a room. "I'll show you."
With a practiced flick of his wrist, Teo unlocked a mechanism on his chair. He reached down and pulled out a compact, wooden and canvas object. With a series of swift, confident movements, he unfolded it, and it blossomed into a beautiful, expertly crafted glider. It wasn't like Aang's; it had a more rigid frame, a slightly different wing shape, evidence of its human, rather than airbender, origins. But the spirit of it was the same.
"My dad built it for me," Teo said, his voice bursting with pride. "Based on the old designs we found carved on the walls. He figured out how to make them work for… for anyone."
The unspoken words hung between them. For someone who can't walk. For someone who can't airbend.
"You… you fly?" Aang whispered, the concept so beautiful and so painful it almost hurt.
"It's the only time I feel truly free," Teo said, and the honesty in his voice was like a key turning in a rusty lock inside Aang's heart. "Up there, it doesn't matter that my legs don't work like everyone else's. The wind doesn't care. It treats everyone the same. It's just you and the clouds and the whole world spread out beneath you like a map. It's… it's the best feeling in the world."
Aang looked from Teo's hopeful, shining face to the glider in his hands. This wasn't a defilement. This was a tribute. A desperate, brilliant, human attempt to reach for the same beauty his people had lived and died for. The anger that had been boiling inside him began to cool, replaced by a confused, aching sense of connection.
"I… I know the feeling," Aang said, and for the first time since landing, he felt a genuine smile touch his own lips. It was small, and it was sad, but it was real.
"Will you fly with me?" Teo asked, his eyes wide with hopeful excitement. "I've only ever flown with the others. I've never flown with a real Air Nomad."
How could he say no? This boy, who understood the sacredness of the sky better than any of the adults shuffling through the temple below, was offering him a piece of his home back. Not the stones and the walls, but the feeling. The freedom.
"Yeah," Aang said, his voice stronger now. "Yeah, I'd like that."
A few minutes later, they stood at the very edge of the launching platform, the one Aang had used a hundred times in his past life. The wind tugged at their clothes, a playful, familiar greeting. Teo was strapped securely into his glider, his hands gripping the control bars, his body thrumming with anticipation.
"Ready?" Aang asked, unfolding his own glider staff. The white wings caught the sun, glowing.
"Always!" Teo laughed, a sound of pure, unadulterated joy.
Together, they ran forward and leaped off the edge of the world.
The air rushed up to meet them, a roaring, welcoming embrace. For a terrifying second, Teo's glider dipped, but then the wind caught its wings and he soared, whooping with exhilaration. Aang fell into a familiar dive, then swept up alongside him, the airbender and the boy in the machine, two spirits dancing in the same element.
"This is amazing!" Teo shouted over the wind, his face split by a grin so wide it looked like it might hurt. "You're so graceful! It's like you're not even flying, you're just… talking to the air!"
Aang laughed, the last of his anger washing away in the sheer, physical joy of flight. He twisted into a spiral, then shot upwards on a thermal, the g-forces pulling at his skin. Teo followed, his movements more mechanical, but no less determined, no less filled with wonder.
For what felt like an eternity, they were the only two people in existence. They raced through canyons, skimmed the tops of pine forests, and soared so high the temple below looked like a toy. Aang showed him tricks, how to read the subtle shifts in the wind, how to use the currents to gain speed without a single beat of his wings. Teo watched, absorbed every lesson, his mind as agile in the air as his father's machines were on the ground.
Finally, they landed, breathless and laughing, on a wide, flat spire of rock far from the main temple. They sat in a comfortable silence for a moment, the only sound their panting breaths and the eternal sigh of the wind.
"Thank you," Teo said softly, his voice full of emotion. "I've never… that was the best flight of my life."
Aang looked at him, truly seeing him now. He wasn't an invader. He was a kindred spirit. A boy who had found a way to touch the sky despite the chains the world had put on him. In another life, he would have made a fantastic Air Nomad.
"The Air Nomads," Aang began, his gaze drifting back towards the altered temple, "they believed that freedom was the most important thing in the world. That attachments to places and things just weighed you down. That true peace came from being able to go anywhere, to be a leaf on the wind." He paused, a old, familiar sadness returning, but it was cleaner now, less bitter. "I was so angry when I saw what your people had done to the temple. I thought they'd destroyed that freedom. That they'd nailed the leaf to the ground."
He looked back at Teo, his grey eyes clear. "But you didn't, did you? You found your own way to be free. You didn't nail the leaf down. You built yourself a new one."
Teo's eyes glistened. He understood the magnitude of what Aang was saying. It was a blessing. An absolution.
"It's still your home, Aang," Teo said earnestly. "It will always be your home. We're just… we're just borrowing it. And we're trying to take care of it. I promise."
Aang nodded, a single tear finally escaping and tracing a clean path through the dust on his cheek. It wasn't a tear of anger anymore. It was a tear of acceptance. Of grief for what was lost, but also of a fragile, newfound hope for what was found.
The temple was different. His world was gone. But the sky was still here. The wind still sang the same songs. And in a boy named Teo, the spirit of the Air Nomads had found a new, unexpected, and beautiful voice.
[A/N: Can't wait to see what happens next? Get exclusive early access and read 30 chapters ahead on patreon.com/saiyanprincenovels. If you enjoyed this chapter and want to see more, don't forget to drop a power stone! Your support helps this story reach more readers!]