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Zuko stared into the dark sockets set in the bleached skull in front of him. He’d seen these skulls before and never thought much of the fact that they had once belonged to living creatures. But now that he’d seen a dragon in the flesh, looking at the skull made his stomach turn. He could almost see eyes shining out of the darkness. Zuko grimaced and turned away.
“Dragons don’t really belong to anyone, do they?” Sokka said. “So I’m not even sure who you would return them to.”
Zuko turned to look at him. He and Suki had been helping with what Zuko’s royal advisors kept calling his “pet project.” Despite the fact that several ambassadors from all over the Earth Kingdom had brought up the Fire Nation’s looting of artifacts during reparation negotiations, Zuko seemed to be the only person at court who felt that returning the artifacts was important to international relations.
(Part of the reason for that may have been the alarming number of priceless Earth Kingdom treasures that had found their way into those same advisors’ personal collections.)
While Zuko always appreciated Suki’s presence—both because he knew he was as safe from attackers as he possibly could be while she was around, and because her gentle teasing helped him keep perspective—Sokka had been truly indispensable during the process of finding and returning artifacts.
Zuko remembered one governor who refused to continue with negotiations because the priceless scroll he wanted returned had been destroyed. When Zuko had offered to increase the amount of the reparation payment to compensate for the lost scroll, the governor had insisted, “You can’t put a price on a peoples’ culture .”
“But if you had to put a price on this particular item what would that price be ?” Zuko had repeated, countless times in countless meetings.
It wasn’t until Sokka finally came to one of the meetings, sick of Zuko complaining about the situation, and asked, “If you can’t put a price on this piece of culture, would you rather get nothing for it?” that the governor relented.
So, as much as Zuko thought it was silly at first, Sokka had earned his self-appointed title, Senior Official Minister of Artifact Repatriation . It was better than Senior Official Bedfellow to the Captain of the Guard , at least.
In this way, little by little, Zuko and his friends were clearing the palace of the spoils of war.
Objects that were man-made and could be claimed were easy enough to return once they were found and identified. And even if the original owner couldn’t be found, Zuko and his Minister of Artifact Repatriation were able to find someone who could take care of an object until someone claimed it.
The dragon bones were another story. They weren’t technically spoils of war, and like Sokka said, they didn’t belong to anyone. But they were a symbol of Sozin’s destructive rule. They were still part of the Fire Nation’s legacy of violence, the legacy Zuko had dedicated his life to undoing. So the dragon bones had to go. But where?
“What would you do with human bones if you had them?” Suki asked.
Zuko was about to speak when Sokka answered for him, “we actually found some human remains once,” he said grimly. He glanced at Zuko, apparently deciding not to tell the rest of the story. “We were able to figure out where the person was from and send them where they belong for burial rites.”
That part wasn’t quite true; the remains were still waiting for Aang to come and bring them to the Southern Air Temple along with some of the relics Zuko and Sokka had found.
The memory, while painful, gave Zuko an idea. “Maybe dragons have their own burial rites,” he suggested.
“But there are only two dragons left in the world, right?” Suki pointed out. “And I’m pretty sure they don’t speak human.”
Zuko forced himself to look back at the dragon’s face—its skull, rather. He remembered the last time he had seen a dragon’s face, had felt the warmth of its fire around him and saw colors that were somehow so much more than colors. Ran and Shaw may not have spoken the way humans do, but they had knowledge to share.
“No they don’t,” Zuko said. “But I may know some people who speak dragon.”
Zuko heard Appa before he saw him. In his letter, Aang had said he would arrive at the palace around midday. Whether or not Aang arrived somewhere when he said he would depended entirely on whether Katara was there when he left (or whether she would be there when he arrived). He had been spending most of his time at the South Pole with her, but was called all over the world to resolve conflicts. This time Aang was coming from training new air acolytes at the Northern Air Temple. Without Katara to make sure he left on time, he was several hours late getting to the Fire Nation.
As eager as he was to see Aang, Zuko was just as glad for the extra time to spend with Suki and Sokka. He had cleared his afternoon (with some difficulty) and invited the two of them over for tea. Suki and Sokka were draped over each other on the pillows on the floor, while Zuko leaned back on his elbows and watched them. If it weren’t for his robes and his crown, and Suki’s uniform, they would look to anyone who came in like three ordinary young adults, lounging on an autumn day.
It was nearly sunset when the sound of Appa’s roar summoned the three friends out of their haze. They rushed to get themselves put back together to go meet Aang outside the palace.
“Sorry I’m late, Hotman,” Aang said when he touched down. He immediately leapt off of Appa’s back and pulled Zuko into a hug.
“It’s good to see you, whenever you get here,” Zuko assured him.
Aang hugged Sokka and Suki in turn and let Zuko lead them all back inside. They were able to pass several more hours, eating dinner and then after-dinner tea together, before the reason for Aang’s visit came up. He would have come to see them all anyway, but returning the Air Nomads’ relics—and the remains—demanded his attention in a way that a simple visit with his friends wouldn’t have.
“I should probably take everything back as soon as possible,” Aang said when Sokka asked how long he would be staying.
“We would have started packing it up for you, but we weren’t sure how,” Sokka said apologetically.
“Sokka was worried he was going to break something,” Suki added. Sokka shot her a look, but she just smirked.
“That’s okay,” Aang said. He had his usual cheerful disposition, but it was hard to miss the sadness in his eyes at the task in front of him. “Will you guys help me pack though? If you have time.”
“Of course,” Zuko answered.
Aang smiled at him, genuinely now. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”
Suki took a sip of her tea. “I’m sure Zuko’s just as glad for an excuse to get out of some of his meetings,” she said over the rim of her cup.
“Still, it’ll be nice to have someone else there,” Aang said.
Zuko knew he was going to have to get Aang alone to ask for his help. While their friends knew about the dragons, they had kept the Sun Warriors secret from them. It wasn’t that Zuko and Aang didn’t trust their friends, but when the chief had told them not to tell anybody about his people, they didn’t want to take any chances. Besides Uncle, Zuko and Aang were the only people who knew that the Sun Warriors were still alive.
After dinner, Zuko was able to convince the Kyoshi Warriors accompanying him to give him a moment alone with Aang as he walked his friend to his room.
“What’s going on?” Aang asked.
“I was wondering if you would help me with something,” Zuko said. “It’s about the dragons.”
Aang’s eyes widened. “Did you find more?” he asked eagerly.
Zuko shook his head. “It’s about, well…” Aang continued to stare eagerly, waiting for details. “You know how Fire Lord Sozin started the tradition of hunting dragons for sport?” Aang nodded. “Well, we have some…bones. In the palace. Skulls, mostly.”
The look on Aang’s face made Zuko’s heart constrict. Aang looked sad, almost disgusted—not at Zuko, but at what he’d revealed. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.
Zuko looked around to make sure no one was listening. The Kyoshi Warriors were a good distance away, respecting his privacy while still close enough to intervene if something happened. “I was wondering if you would come with me to see the Sun Warriors again,” Zuko said in a low voice. “I think they’ll know what to do with the dragon bones.”
Aang’s face lit up again. “That’s a great idea!”
Encouraging words from Aang were hardly unexpected, but Zuko still smiled at the praise. He had felt so often that nothing he did was ever enough. There weren’t many people around to tell him he was doing a good job, or doing something right.
“When do you think you’ll be able to make the trip?” Zuko asked.
Aang furrowed his brows. “We should probably do it soon, otherwise I don’t know when I’ll have the time. Can you leave tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Zuko asked incredulously. “What about the—”
“It can wait,” Aang said quickly. “This is important.”
“Your peoples’ culture is important too,” Zuko said softly.
Aang smiled weakly. “I’m the Avatar,” he shrugged. “Everyone is ‘my people.’”
“But—” Zuko began. He stopped himself at the almost pleading look on Aang’s face. “Okay. We can go tomorrow.”
“Great,” Aang said with a nod. He turned to open the door to his room and asked over his shoulder, “See you for meditation at dawn?”
Zuko smiled. “I’ll see you then. Sleep well.”
“You too, Hotman.”
Zuko was in a world he often visited in his dreams. The setting wasn’t always the same, but he could tell he was there by the way the air was charged with energy.
This time it was a forest, thick with underbrush and ancient, gnarled trees. He could barely make out their trunks in the persistent gloom, and a creeping dread had begun to settle deep in his chest.
In the corner of his vision, something massive and sinuous wound through the trees, making no noise as it went. When he turned to see, it vanished into the dark. Two more of the mysterious creatures wound their way out of sight just before he could get a good look, but he caught a glimpse of a hind claw and the dread cinched tight around his spine.
Then, without warning, all three figures leapt down from the treetops to twist and writhe and whirl around him in a lurching half-dance. He remembered the sleek power of the masters, and felt his stomach twist at this sick parody. Then they slowed, and he could suddenly see why they moved so wretchedly.
Each dragon, instead of a mane and horns and powerful jaws, had only a ragged stump of neck.
Their heads were missing.
The Sun Warrior Chief set his mouth in a hard line while Zuko explained what became of the slain dragon’s remains.
“So I was wondering if you knew what we should do with them,” he said when he finished his story. “What they would have wanted, I guess.”
Zuko waited for the Chief to respond. He exchanged looks with Aang, who wore a worried expression similar to Zuko’s.
Finally, the Chief spoke. “If humans had not intervened, the bones would have stayed wherever they fell when the dragon reached the end of his natural life. The bones must be buried, to undo the damage done to the dragon’s spirit.”
“All of them?” Zuko asked.
The Chief looked confused. “Yes, all of them. Why wouldn’t you bury all of the bones?”
“Well, here’s the thing. We don’t necessarily have…all of the bones. Of each dragon,” Zuko explained. “Usually it’s just the…head.”
“Then you will need to find the other bones,” the Chief said simply.
“Find the other bones?” Aang asked. “How are we supposed to do that?”
“Where do you think they would be?” the Chief replied.
Zuko thought for a moment. “Probably wherever the dragon was killed.”
The Chief nodded. “Then that is where you need to go. In order for the dragon’s spirit to be whole, its body must be allowed to return to nature, whole. The creature’s spirit cannot rest until its body is at rest.”
Zuko felt a churning in his stomach. He thought it might be guilt at the thought of those majestic creatures wandering the spirit world—possibly headless, like they were in the nightmare. Whatever the feeling was, he didn’t have time for it. He had work to do.
Zuko stood and bowed to the Chief. “Thank you for your help.”
Aang rose and bowed as well. “We won’t let you down,” he added.
The Chief laughed. “It’s not me you have to worry about,” he said. “I don’t imagine the dragon spirits are too happy about their treatment. I’m surprised they haven’t made their displeasure known already.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Zuko saw the sunlight glint off of something golden on the far wall of the room. He turned to look closer and realized it was the sunstone he had foolishly picked up when he and Aang had first traveled to the Sun Warrior’s city.
Just as he was about to look away, Zuko thought he saw the sunstone move. He looked back, and sure enough the stone was shaking. He turned back to the Chief and said, “Um, sir? Is something wrong with your sunstone?”
The Chief waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Wait. So we have to track down the bones of every single dragon?” Sokka asked incredulously.
The four of them were sitting on cushions around the tea table in Zuko’s quarters, as they often did when they had time to spare.
“I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be easy,” Zuko said.
“Your feeling was right,” Sokka scoffed. “There are over 150 dragon skulls in the catacombs, and probably hundreds more still being hoarded in someone’s mansion.”
“There are detailed records of who killed each dragon, and when and where,” Zuko replied. “It’s just a matter of compiling the information, and then…”
“And then actually going and finding all of the bones ,” Sokka countered. “Do you know how hard it is to find bones underground? That’s why people bury their loved ones underground, because it’s really hard to find the bones .”
“Toph could probably help,” Aang pointed out. “She says bones are a bit like metal and she can sense them.”
“That would make it easier,” Sokka agreed. “But we’d still have to go to hundreds of sites. It could take years .”
Zuko’s stomach churned at that last part. It was one thing to commit himself to a long project like this, but to ask his friends to give up years of their lives? They very well might get sick of him by then.
“If the bones are already buried, why can’t we just put the skull back where the dragon was killed so it’s buried too?” Suki asked.
“The dragon’s head has been separated from the rest of its skeleton for so long that the spirit is fragmented,” Aang explained. “We need to bury the whole skeleton together so the spirit can be whole again.”
Sokka rolled his eyes. “You really believe that stuff?”
“I know I have to do something,” Zuko answered. “And someone who knows more than I do says this is what I’m supposed to do. So I’m going to do it. Besides, what’s the harm if we’re wrong?”
“How about: it’s going to take a really long time?” Sokka said.
“And there are other things we could be doing,” Suki added.
“I just have a feeling that this is important,” Zuko said, with as much finality as he could. He knew he couldn’t make his friends help if they thought it was a bad idea. He also knew that they would help if they knew he felt strongly enough about this. If he was going to ask his friends to embark on a project this big, Zuko had to be sure he had a good reason for it.
The problem was, Zuko wasn’t entirely sure why this was so important to him. He just…knew. And he hoped his friends would trust him.
They did, of course.
Mai, it turned out, was more than happy to fill in for some of Zuko’s responsibilities while he undertook this project. With the others’ help, it wasn’t going to take so much of his time that he needed to call his uncle or transfer responsibilities officially, but it made him feel better to know that someone would be there to run things while he was gone. Especially because that someone was his brilliant and terrifying ex-girlfriend, who made even the most cunning of Zuko’s ministers quiver in their pointed boots.
Mai would have made a good Fire Lord, Zuko thought, in a different world—a world where that was what she wanted.
Sokka, despite his complaining, was thoroughly in his element researching the circumstances of each dragon’s death. There was one full skeleton in the collection, which Zuko had originally thought to inter first since it was already complete.
“No,” Sokka had said, “we should save that one. We need a reference to know whether we have all the bones or not. Ol’ Reffy’s coming with us.”
Sokka had named the skeleton “Reffy”—short for “reference.” The project itself Sokka was calling “Operation: We Must Really Love Zuko To Be Doing This.”
The intent behind keeping detailed records of each dragon’s conquest and death hadn’t been to make an operation like this easier, but the process of tracking down where exactly each dragon had died was indeed easier than they’d thought it would be.
So, armed with Reffy the skeleton—dismantled and carefully labeled—and a map of the area where Dragon #1 had died, the gang headed out on their first dragon interment mission.
The key to finding the bones would be earthbending, like Aang had said. While Sokka researched and Katara helped and Suki and Zuko tried to continue to do their normal jobs, Toph had been helping Aang brush up on his seismic sensing. While bones were not bendable like earth, they could indeed be sensed using earthbending. The team would rely on the earthbenders to narrow their search area to somewhere they could dig.
The team touched down in a small town about an hour’s flight from the palace city. Each of them took their positions: Toph and Aang sensing the ground through their bare feet for bone deposits; Katara, Sokka, Suki and Zuko gathering their excavation tools; Appa and Momo guarding the dragon’s skull and the reference bones, as well as the lunches they had packed.
Zuko had faith in Toph’s abilities, but he was still surprised when she called out, “Found one!” after only two minutes.
“I’ll get this one,” Zuko said.
“Buddy system, remember?” Suki chastised him. “Katara goes with you.”
Zuko would have protested that he didn’t need Katara to protect him, but history would have proven him a liar. Besides, he was just as glad for the chance to catch up with her.
Toph led Katara and Zuko down the hill into a cluster of trees. “There are a couple around here,” she said, pointing in a circle. “Not too deep below the surface.”
“What are we looking for?” Katara asked.
Toph turned the side of her head in Katara’s direction, her mouth set in a flat line.
“Right,” Katara said sheepishly.
“Some of them are sticking out of the ground,” Toph said as she turned to go.
“Thank you!” Katara called out to her. “You’re the best!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Toph said back.
Zuko frowned when he got to where Toph had directed them. The forest floor was covered in leaf litter. It would be impossible to see anything coming out of the earth without removing the leaves.
“It would be kind of useful to have airbending right now,” Katara said.
Zuko looked at the brush in his hand. It was definitely more suited to painting a house than excavating a dragon skeleton. “Or a broom.”
Katara looked around at their dig site, twirling her garden trowel in her hand. “I guess we just…start digging?”
“I guess so.” Zuko knelt down and started brushing the leaves aside to expose the ground below. He felt like he was back in the garden with his mother looking for weed sprouts in the soft soil.
To Zuko’s surprise, it was only a minute or two before Katara gasped and said, “I think I found one!” She held up what looked like an elongated rock, grey and mottled and only a little larger than a finger.
“Is that big enough to be part of a dragon?” Zuko asked.
Katara turned the bone over in her hand. “Human skeletons have a lot of tiny bones, especially in the hands and feet,” she said. “This could be part of a finger. Let’s keep digging.”
Zuko moved over to where Katara had exposed the surface of the soil. “It must have been helpful for Sokka to have someone who knows anatomy when he was studying the bones,” he said.
“Actually, Sokka probably knows more about bones than I do,” Katara pointed out. “He’s been hunting since he was a little kid. He could probably gut a tiger seal with his eyes closed.”
It occurred to Zuko how lucky he was to have friends with that kind of knowledge. This project really would be impossible without them.
“I know he seems grumpy,” Katara said after a moment, “but Sokka is actually really excited about all of this.”
Zuko nodded. “I get why he—why everyone’s hesitant about the Fire Lord spending his time digging for dragon bones.”
Katara shrugged. “It makes sense to me. The dragons were the original firebenders, so it’s kind of obvious that you, as a firebender and leader of other firebenders, would want them to be at peace.”
Zuko kept brushing leaves aside, but his mind was wandering. He had been thinking about his debt to the dragons as a way of making up for the harm his ancestors had caused. His mind flashed back to the moment of staring at the skull in the catacombs and the pull he felt in his gut.
“Mostly it’s just the right thing to do,” Zuko said after a moment.
“Well, whatever your reason, we’re here for you.”
Zuko stopped working for a moment and looked over at Katara. “Thank you,” he said, “that means a lot to me.”
Katara gave him an amused smile. “What are friends for? I know you’d do the same for me, if anything happened to the ocean or something.”
“If the ocean is ever in peril, I’ll be there,” Zuko said with a smile. He dug his hands into a pile of leaves and caught his palm on something sharp.
“What is it?” Katara asked at the sound of him hissing from the pain. She took his hand and squeezed it to draw a bit of blood out of the wound, eliciting another hiss from Zuko, then bent a bit of water over it until the wound closed up.
Carefully this time, Zuko reached into the leaf pile and pulled out what looked like a curved knife made of ivory. “I think I found a claw,” Zuko realized.
Katara’s eyes widened. “There’s got to be more around here.”
Zuko put the claw down next to the finger and kept digging.
The sound of crunching leaf litter from a little ways away drew their attention. “Toph and I finished marking out where the rest of the bones are,” Aang said. “How’s it going over here?”
“Aang!” Katara called out. “Could you help us?” She pointed to the leaf litter. “This’ll go a lot faster with a little wind power.”
Aang knelt down next to them and blew a breath of wind over the leaves to expose the soil. Zuko could see a pattern of what looked like stones sticking out of the dirt. Aang ran his eyes over the ground and blew again, more gently this time.
Katara gasped. After a moment, Zuko saw why: the little stones clearly formed the shape of a dragon’s front foot. Fingers curled into claws and came together at the wrist, connecting to an arm bone, and another, and another.
Zuko reached out to touch the place where a dragon’s paw used to be. He thought he felt a spike of energy when his fingers touched the bone, but it might have just been nerves. Still, it was thrilling to see even part of a skeleton so intact.
“Zuko,” Aang breathed. Zuko looked over at him and saw that he was smiling. “It’s—”
“I know.” Beautiful, Zuko thought, and tragic.
Several hours and a few snack breaks later, the gang had all the bones collected in a hole they had dug. Sokka had counted and recounted the bones to make sure all 307 were there; the skull, gingerly lifted on a pillow of earth and placed on top of the pile, made 308.
“I hope you can rest now,” Zuko said softly. He stepped aside so that Toph and Aang could cover the grave.
Sokka put a hand on his shoulder. “One down, 172 to go,” he said with a smile.
“That we know of,” Zuko added grimly.
“Hey.” Sokka turned Zuko to face him. “We did good today.”
Zuko looked out into the setting sun. He might have been imagining it, but he thought he saw a faint outline flying out to the horizon.
“Yeah, I guess we did.”
It should have occurred to at least one of them that there were people in the world who dug for bones for a living, and that they might be able to help. But it wasn’t until a professor of archeology from Ba Sing Se University wrote to Zuko asking to meet with him that he realized he could use professional help, or that professional help even existed. There were very few historians left in the Fire Nation after the war. Certainly there was no one who made a career out of digging, literally or figuratively, through the Fire Nation’s history.
“How did you find out about us?” Zuko asked once he and the Earth Kingdom professor had sat down for tea in his study.
The professor pulled a newspaper out of her bag and handed it to Zuko. It was a Fire Nation newspaper, one of the ones that had taken advantage of Zuko eliminating the sedition laws and now published article after article dragging Zuko’s name through the mud.
This article seemed no different. The headline read, “Fire Lord Bonehead: Zuko’s Wild Ghost Chase,” and went on to describe how Zuko had lost his mind and had decided to go chasing spirits, possibly because of undue influence from the Avatar.
“I’ve always been a fan of yours,” the professor said.
“Not always, I imagine,” Zuko said under his breath as he continued to skim the article.
The professor continued, “Since you’ve been Fire Lord you’ve done more to recover lost Earth Kingdom artifacts than my department could in the last 100 years.”
“Considering they were being hidden in my country, I don’t see how you would have recovered them otherwise.”
“Another Fire Lord might have collected them for his own museum,” she pointed out. Then she laughed. “Could you imagine? A Fire Nation museum, selling Earth Kingdom citizens tickets to see their own history.”
Zuko wasn’t sure why she was laughing. The idea sounded horrific.
“So anyway, when I found out that you were trying to excavate dragon skeletons, I took a sabbatical to offer my services.”
Zuko felt something warm growing in his chest. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “Thank you.”
The professor smiled gleefully. “It’ll be my pleasure! I’ve never excavated a dragon skeleton before. I mostly work with human remains.”
Zuko thought of Aang and wondered if the professor might be able to help him as well.
She took a sip of her tea. “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you doing this? I assume you’re curating the skeletons for some kind of exhibition.”
“Um, no,” he replied. “The genocide of the dragons isn’t exactly the kind of history worthy of an exhibition.”
“Oh, forgive me—”
“It’s alright,” Zuko said quickly. “Um…”
Zuko realized that he was actually a little embarrassed to share the reason behind the project. He had given just enough details in his press release that the scandal newspapers took the word “spirits” and ran with it. But if this professor was going to help him, she deserved to know why.
“The spirits of the dragons who were killed have been unable to rest because their skeletons were fragmented,” Zuko explained. “So we—my friends and I—are taking the skulls in the palace’s collection and burying them with the rest of the dragon’s skeleton. Once we’re sure we’ve located all of the bones.”
The professor looked at Zuko as if he’d grown a pair of dragon’s horns. “You mean you’re excavating all of these dragon skeletons just to…bury them again?”
“Yes,” Zuko answered, trying his best to project more confidence than he felt. “That way their spirits can rest.”
“How do you know all of this?” the professor asked. She no longer sounded confused, but intrigued.
“Um…” Zuko scrambled for an answer that wouldn’t expose the Sun Warriors. “I’m friends with the Avatar. He knows all about spiritual…matters.”
“Oh, of course!” The professor laughed lightly and took another sip of her tea.
The first piece of advice Professor Gu gave them was that they would need more than garden trowels and paintbrushes to properly excavate 100-year old skeletons. She gave them a list of tools they would need: specialized shovels and brushes of various sizes, as well as sieves, buckets, ropes, pulleys, and wagons. And gloves. Those would be important.
The second piece of advice was that it was unlikely that the six (now seven) of them were the only ones who would be interested in helping to recover the dragons’ bones.
“Archeologists usually travel with teams—their students, volunteers from the area. No one would think to undertake a project of this magnitude with only five other people.” She laughed again.
A quick letter to each leader of the air acolytes recruited another two hundred—Zuko reeled at that number—people to their cause. Aang directed each group to a kill site and provided them with the dragon’s skull and a plaster cast of Reffy’s skeleton, which Professor Gu had helped Sokka make.
(Sokka was particularly proud when they were able to bury Reffy, since he felt he had gotten to know the dragon over the course of the project.)
With several teams working all over the Fire Nation and Western Earth Kingdom to reinter the dragons, Zuko was able to return to his duties full-time. Things were going so well that Mai joked that he’d have to watch out for an oncoming coma for doing the right thing.
In spite of all that was going right, Zuko couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something was going to go wrong. He should be the one out in the field, sweaty and dirty from the work. It was his nation, his own ancestors who were responsible for the dragons’ disappearance. It didn’t seem right to have someone else paying for his peoples’ crimes.
When he told Mai all of this, her response was simple:
“Get some sleep, Zuko.”
Zuko was in the dream-world again, standing at the end of a field. At the other end lay a green dragon, its wings folded against its body and its head resting on its forearms.
Zuko held a hand out to the dragon, telling it to come.
The dragon raised its head. There was no fear in its eyes, though Zuko knew it was one of the dragons who had been killed by a firebender.
Slowly, the dragon pulled itself to its feet. It was favoring one leg, limping its way across the field towards Zuko. When the dragon reached him, it collapsed again and began licking the injured leg.
He knelt down to examine the dragon’s leg. With a little coaxing, the dragon held out its paw for Zuko to look at. Where the front of its shin should be, there was a gaping hole, dark like the lifeless sockets.
Zuko woke up in a cold sweat. He threw on a robe and rushed past the guards at his door.
“Are you alright, Fire Lord Zuko?” one of the Kyoshi Warriors asked.
Zuko ignored her and kept walking at a brisk pace to his study. He thought he heard one of them say, “Get Suki.”
When he got to his study he cursed his poor organization skills. His desk was piled with scrolls, but he knew the one he was looking for had to be there.
Zuko heard the door to his study open. “What on earth are you doing, Zuko?” Suki demanded. She was wearing a green silk robe and her hair was mussed.
“Looking for something,” Zuko answered. He found the scroll where he kept his log of the dragons who had been reinterred and started to read through it. He didn’t know how he would know which dragon he was looking for until one entry stuck out to him.
“Eighteen!” he cried out when he saw it.
“Eighteen what ?”
“Dragon #18. Reinterred at Kei Tong Mountain in the Northern Fire Nation.” He looked up at Suki. “One of its bones is missing.”
After dragging Aang to the gravesite of Dragon #18 and digging the bones back up to confirm that it was, indeed, missing a bone, Zuko had Aang take him to where the air acolyte team responsible for Dragon #18 had taken their next assignment.
“I don’t know if you’re aware of this,” he said when he addressed the group, “but one of the dragons you buried is missing a bone.”
The air acolytes murmured anxiously among themselves.
Their leader stepped up and spoke. “I assure you, we counted all of the bones before we buried them. All were accounted for.” She pointed to a girl in the crowd, who had her eyes downcast. “Se-yeun counted them, she can tell you. Right, Se-yeun?”
All of the air acolytes turned to look at the girl. She looked up at Zuko, her eyes wide with fear.
“Could we speak to Se-yeun alone?” Aang asked.
The leader nodded. “Of course.” She beckoned for the girl to come forward.
Aang and Zuko took the girl aside. “Se-yeun,” Aang said gently. “I think you know something about what happened to the missing bone.”
“I—I didn’t think anyone would notice,” the girl stammered. “I only took one.”
Zuko felt fury rise in his chest. “Well you thought wrong!” he snapped. “You’ve jeopardized this entire project, the balance between humans and spirits—”
“Zuko,” Aang warned.
Tears began to roll down the girl’s cheeks. “Please, sir, I didn’t know.”
Aang spoke before Zuko had a chance to continue. “Where is the bone now?” he asked.
“I…” The girl looked nervously over at Zuko. He realized he’d been blowing smoke from his nose.
“It’s okay,” Aang assured her. “You’re not in trouble.” He gave Zuko a pointed look.
The girl cleared her throat. Tears were still streaming down her face. “I ground it up—”
Zuko took a step forward before he felt Aang’s hand on his chest stopping him.
“What did you do with it?” Aang asked.
“Well, in my village, it’s said that dragon bones can be used as medicine.” She sniffled. “People used to collect the bones of dragons who died or were killed and grind them into powder to make a healing tea.”
Zuko felt not only anger but disgust rising in him. He tried to keep his voice even as he asked, “Are you saying you ground up the bone and fed it to someone ?”
The girl nodded, her eyes downcast. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that my mother is sick—” She took a hiccupping breath, “—and I didn’t know what else to do.” She began to sob, snot as well as tears running down her face.
“Excuse me,” Zuko said under his breath. He walked away, not caring where he was going. He just needed to get away before he did something he would regret.
When he finally got out of earshot of the others, Zuko let out a shout and a blast of fire breath. The heat in his lungs and the energy of the scream soothed his anger a little, but he was still fuming, so to speak.
“Did that help?”
Zuko turned around and saw Aang looking at him with his eyebrows raised. It wasn’t a judgmental look, just one of concern.
“Not really,” Zuko admitted. “It’s just—” He let out a sharp, smoky sigh. “Our whole project might be ruined because of that stupid peasant !”
Aang’s expression changed. “Zuko!” Aang chided him. “Who do you sound like right now?”
The word “peasant,” in Azula’s voice rang in Zuko’s head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just…”
The truth was, Zuko was judging the girl as much for thinking bones could be used as medicine as for jeopardizing the project. It was a belief held by rural people, simple people. People he had been raised to think were lesser. But understanding the girl’s motivations didn’t change the fact that a bone was now missing—and Zuko would have a harder time trusting that no others would be taken.
“What do we do now?” he asked after a moment. “We can’t exactly get the bone back.”
Aang looked up, his face thoughtful. “In your dream, the dragon had a limp, right?”
Zuko nodded. “Because its shin bone was missing.”
“Well,” Aang said, “there are worse things than having a limp.” He shrugged and gave his signature half smile. “At least it’s not missing its head.”
Aang’s nonchalance disturbed Zuko. As the Avatar, shouldn’t he be the most invested in the welfare of the spirits?
Then Zuko considered what he said: There are worse things than having a limp . He was right. As much as Zuko wanted every dragon to be whole and at peace, the reality was that at least one dragon was going to be missing a shin bone in the spirit world. And there was nothing Zuko could do about that.
“I guess you’re right,” Zuko finally said.
Aang sighed with relief. Zuko hadn’t noticed how much tension his friend had been carrying. Aang was worried about him .
“I should apologize to…” He gestured, trying to remember the girl’s name.
“Se-yeun,” Aang said.
Zuko nodded. “Right.”
Aang brought Zuko back to the group, where Se-yeun was sitting with her face in her hands. She stood when she heard the two of them coming.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” Zuko said. The girl still looked scared. He softened his face, which he’d been told many times tended to drift into a frown. “And I understand why you did what you did,” he said gently. “Have you given your mother the medicine yet?”
“Yes, sir,” the girl—Se-yeun—said quietly.
“Is your mother feeling any better?” Zuko asked.
Se-yeun shook her head. More tears spilled from her eyes. “I stole from you,” she sobbed, “from a spirit. And it didn’t even work.” She covered her face with her hands and continued to cry.
Zuko realized he was reaching out to the girl when she fell into his arms. He held her until her breathing steadied.
When she’d calmed down a bit, Aang offered to take the girl’s mother to an herbalist institute he knew for treatment.
“You know what’s kind of funny,” he said when he was filling Zuko in a few weeks later. “Well, not funny, but kind of a coincidence, I guess. Se-yeun’s mother has an illness that’s weakening her bones. So the bone tea probably did help, even if it’s not for the reason Se-yeun thought.”
Zuko wasn’t sure if that made him feel any better.
Soon, more reports came in of dragons who were missing bones. Zuko thought back to what Se-yeun said about the people in her village collecting the bones of dragons who had been killed. He realized with a sinking feeling that there may be many more dragons wandering the Spirit World, still broken because of his ancestors’ crimes.
He looked back over the list of dragons who were missing bones and the location of their resting places. Some of them were in the Earth Kingdom, but most were in the Fire Nation.
The vast majority of the time, being Fire Lord was hugely inconvenient. But Zuko realized that, as Fire Lord, if there were dragon bones still hidden somewhere in the Fire Nation, he had the power to find them and bring them back.
If only it were that easy.
“You can’t make it illegal to own dragon bones!” Justice Minister Guan protested. “Buying and selling, perhaps, but what a man owns is already his.”
Zuko planted his palms on the surface of the table to keep from forming fists. “We’ve been over this,” he said, addressing the group. “If we as a nation are to restore our honor, we will have to make sacrifices.”
“I don’t recall the dragons asking for a trade deal,” Foreign Affairs Minister Zaiku said dryly.
“We’d just as soon pay reparations to the Air Nomads,” Guan chimed in.
“We are paying reparations to the Air Nomads,” Zuko reminded them. “We’re paying for Aang and the people who have volunteered to help him to restore the temples we destroyed.”
Civil Affairs Minister Ye scoffed. “I know we may seem old to someone your age, but none of us were around at the start of the Hundred Year War.”
Zuko looked around at the table of surly old men; men who had been hiding other peoples’ possessions in their houses, whose status was earned through killing and pillaging. The red of their robes no longer signified the strength of fire or the passion of a people, but the blood on their hands that would not wash out until the entire nation had cleansed itself of over a century of sins.
“I’m calling for a recess. We can resume this discussion in the morning.” Zuko stood, not even waiting for the ministers to stand and give their perfunctory bows before he left the meeting hall.
“It’s like they don’t care!” he said to Suki as she walked him back to his study. “They know how awful the war was, and all of the harm that the Fire Nation did—half of them fought in the war! Or if they didn’t, their fathers and brothers did, while their sisters tortured war prisoners and trained more men to go and kill.”
Suki nodded sympathetically, like she often did when Zuko was venting.
“But all they care about is getting to keep their trinkets. Don’t they care about restoring the Fire Nation’s honor? Don’t they understand how much the rest of the world hates us?”
“Maybe they should try living as a refugee in the Earth Kingdom like you did,” Suki suggested.
Zuko smirked, his mood lightening a little. “I don’t think a single one of those old windbags would survive working in a tea shop in the Lower Ring of Ba Sing Se.”
He stopped walking for a moment. “What if I can’t do it, Suki?”
Suki cocked her head. “Can’t do what?”
“There are already bones we won’t be able to recover. What if there are whole dragons we’re never able to find?”
Suki paused before asking her next question. “Why does it matter so much that you find every single dragon bone?”
The simple answer was that the Sun Warrior Chief had told him to. But beyond that, it was about undoing what his ancestors had done. Every bone they failed to recover, every dragon that would never be whole and at peace, was another weight on his already heavy conscience.
“Because if I know that there are some out there, I won’t be able to stop thinking about how I couldn’t finish what I started.”
Sokka sent a cryptic message a few days later that he had something big for Zuko. A glare from Zuko stifled the giggles from the page who delivered the message. There was no other context though. So cleared his schedule for the time Sokka had indicated, unsure what to expect.
When Zuko stepped into the room, he saw Sokka standing over a table covered in swords.
Sokka looked up when he heard Zuko come in. “Oh good, you got my message!” He gestured to the swords. “Piandao just dropped these off. He wanted to see you but you were busy, so he told me to say hi for him.”
Zuko walked up to the table and picked up one of the swords. “What are these for?”
“They’re steel, made with dragon bones.”
Zuko dropped the sword back onto the pile like it had bitten him. The pile suddenly seemed much larger than it did before, now that each sword represented another line of investigation—more time spent, more dead ends, more frustration.
“Where did he get all of these?” Zuko asked.
“Some of them he made, but a lot of them were gifts,” Sokka explained. “He kept track of who gave him each sword, so it should be easy to track down which dragon the bone dust came from and where the rest of the bones might be.” Sokka fingered the tag on one of the swords, written in Piandao’s neat script, detailing who had given him the sword and when.
Zuko rubbed his temple. “Right. Easy.”
“It’s actually a pretty cool idea,” Sokka said, turning one of the swords over in his hand, “using dragon bone dust in a sword to give it the power of the dragon.” He looked over at Zuko and put the sword down. “I mean, if it wasn’t a gross violation of the dragon’s spirit.”
Zuko’s eyes fell on Sokka’s necklace. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” Sokka nodded. “Is everything made out of bone…spiritual, I guess?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do all animal bones contain the animal’s spirit? Or just more…spiritual animals. Like dragons, and…us.”
Sokka shrugged. “If you believe all animals have spirits, then, yeah they would.”
“So…” Zuko struggled with how to phrase his question. “If you believe that animal bones contain the animal’s spirit, but you use the bone anyway—”
Sokka seemed to sense that Zuko was floundering and cut in. “I think it depends on why you’re using the bone,” he said. “Or why you killed the animal in the first place. Back home, we used animal bones all the time because, well, they were there and it wouldn’t make sense not to. Otherwise it’s just sitting there decomposing.”
“But what about the animal’s spirit?” Zuko asked.
Sokka grinned and said, “I need to take you hunting sometime.”
It sounded like a non sequitur to Zuko, but Sokka continued, “It gets really frustrating sometimes because animals are smart . But then when you’ve got it cornered and you give the final blow and you can already taste it—” Sokka closed his eyes, presumably imagining the taste of fresh meat. He sighed and opened his eyes. “Anyway, there’s this sort of blessing you do when the animal dies,” he explained. “To thank it for…giving itself to you.”
Only then did Zuko realize that Sokka was answering his question. That happened a lot with Sokka: a simple answer to a question became a convoluted story. Or a very long and complicated story was given in a single sentence.
“So you thank the animal when it dies?” Zuko asked.
Sokka nodded. “And you give it some time to pass before you start taking it apart.”
“Pass…into the Spirit World?”
“I meant just to die, but if you’re into the spirit stuff then yeah.” Sokka looked down for a moment. “I made the mistake of not waiting long enough once to start gutting a seal and…the noise it made.” He shuddered. “So yeah, you try to make sure the animal has as comfortable a death as it can.”
Zuko nodded. “And then you can start using its bones.”
“Yup.” Sokka touched his necklace. Zuko wondered if Sokka could tell he was staring at it. “You know I don’t read much into the things people say about spirits,” he said pensively. “But I do get a weird feeling sometimes, though—not with my weapons, just with the necklace.” Sokka looked so much like his sister in that moment, touching his necklace pensively. “I don’t know how to explain it but it does feel…alive, a little bit.”
“Where did you get your necklace?” Zuko asked.
“It’s actually a warrior’s carcanet.”
“You called it a necklace.”
Sokka rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “They’re the bones of the walrus-whale we killed on my first hunting trip. I was 12, and it was one of the best days of my life. Scary, but…thrilling, in a way I haven’t felt since. And the meat was the best stuff I’ve ever tasted.”
Sokka thought for a moment. “You know, people back home say that no animal is any more spiritual than any other animal.” Another seeming non sequitur, but Zuko followed along. “From that point of view, dragons are just like any other animal. And so are we.”
“But that would mean…wouldn’t eating animals be like cannibalism?”
“You don’t have to believe it if it makes you uncomfortable. I mean, I’m the last person who’s going to tell someone not to eat meat.” Sokka thought for a moment. “I guess the Air Nomads kind of went the other way: they believe all life is spiritual so they don’t eat animals. But at the poles we don’t have a choice. Not a lot of vegetables, you know.” Sokka shrugged. “So we find a way to deal with it.”
“Do you believe that? That animals are equal to humans?”
“You know I’m not super into spirit stuff. But if you ask me if animals are just as worthy of respect as humans then yeah, absolutely.” Zuko’s disgust must have shown on his face because he added, “You’re wondering how I’m able to kill and eat animals if I think they’re equal to humans.”
“Yeah,” Zuko admitted.
“Honestly, it’s hard to imagine not thinking that, but I guess…here’s how I see it: this was another life, not that different from yours. It kind of softens the blow to your ego when one gets away,” Sokka chuckled. “But it also makes you grateful, I guess. Surviving another day isn’t inevitable, it’s something you have to work for. So on days when it’s really hard to get out of bed, I remember that a lot of people worked really hard to make sure I didn’t starve to death as a kid. To me, it’s not really about whether the stuff about spirits is real, it’s more about what we do with the stuff we know. How it impacts the things we can actually see and touch.”
Sokka paused. “This might sound kind of weird, but I wonder if thinking animals don’t have souls or don’t deserve respect makes it easier to think other humans don’t. Not saying everyone who hunts platypus bears for sport supports genocide, but—”
“No, I see what you mean.” Zuko thought back to the human skulls he and Sokka found, the ones still sitting in a storage room waiting for their last countrymen to take them home. They had the same deep, dark emptiness in their eyes as the dragons did. It had never occurred to Zuko that someone who eats meat could believe that animals are in any way equal to humans, but what Sokka was saying made sense.
“Thank you for explaining all of this to me,” Zuko said after a moment.
“No problem.” Sokka looked thoughtful again. “I like talking to you,” he added. “You listen.”
Zuko furrowed his brow. “Do most people not?”
Sokka shook his head. “No, it’s not that. Just that…it’s just nice that you want to hear all of this stuff.”
Zuko smiled. “Of course. I like talking to you too.”
Zuko figured Mai was the best person to bring along to determine the provenance of the bone dust swords. Most of them had been given to Piandao by nobles, and Mai was always better at dealing with those than Zuko. For instance, Mai knew that writing to let them know ahead of time that he would be visiting would reduce the likelihood of the visit ending in disaster, as opposed to showing up unannounced.
Their first visit, to a woman of the Fujiwa clan, was scheduled on an “auspicious” day at her request. “That’s good,” Mai had said. “Appeal to her sense of tradition and maybe she’ll come around some of the spirit stuff.”
At first, Zuko was able to make conversation about classical culture and—Spirits help him—the individual achievements of every one of her family members for the last three hundred years.
“Now, about the matter I mentioned in my letter,” Zuko finally said during a pause in the woman’s speech about her second cousin’s invention of some obscure poetic form.
The woman nodded eagerly. “The sword my father gave to Piandao. It is truly a marvel of craftsmanship, is it not?”
“It is,” Zuko agreed. “Piandao—”
“A truly extraordinary man,” she interrupted. “My father gave Piandao the sword to thank him for training me when no one else would. He should have kept it, passed it on to his heirs. It is a great honor that he has given it to you.”
It wasn’t Zuko’s place to point out that Piandao, being what older Fire Nation folks euphemistically called a “man who cooked his own rice,” wouldn’t have heirs. So he let it lie. “He mentioned that it was made with dragon bone dust?”
The woman sighed proudly. “My father, Dragon Shou, killed the beast himself.” Zuko had to keep himself from cringing. “Spirits watch his soul, he passed two years ago.”
Zuko frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“May you restrain your sadness and adjust to the change,” Mai added. She shot Zuko a subtle look. Again he was glad he’d brought her along; his incorrect choice of words could have made things very awkward. The woman bowed her head graciously.
“Could you tell us a bit about the dragon he killed?” Zuko asked.
“Dragons,” she corrected him.
Zuko tensed. “Dragons?”
“My father was the greatest Dragon of his time. He killed nearly a dozen in his lifetime.”
The name Shou Fujiwa did ring a bell, but no one person was recorded as ever killing more than seven. “Exactly how many?” Zuko asked.
“Eleven.”
“And what did he do with the other skulls?” Mai shot him a warning look.
The woman just smiled. “Do you want to see them?”
“Yes,” Zuko answered before Mai could protest.
The noblewoman took them to her father’s bedroom and showed them inside. Zuko’s stomach turned at the sight that greeted them: an ornately carved bed that sported a massive dragon skull in each corner. They were gilded in a pattern that resembled traditional war paint. Gold joinery had been used to attach the skulls to the bed posts, as well as various other bones sticking out at grotesque angles.
“I was conceived in this bed,” the woman said proudly.
Zuko swallowed down bile. “Lady Fujiwa—”
“Please, you may call me Hua.”
“Lady Fujiwa, I’m going to have to requisition these in my capacity as Fire Lord.”
Lady Fujiwa blinked. “Excuse me, my lord?”
“As part of an ongoing national effort—”
“You mean to steal my family’s treasures from me? What gives you the right?”
“I’m…the Fire Lord?” Zuko glanced nervously at Mai.
Mai stepped forward. “Fire Lord Zuko means you no disrespect, my lady. In fact, he means to honor your father’s legacy—”
“Oh no, I know exactly what you’re doing with our nation’s monuments: handing them out to every Earth Kingdom governor with a sob story. Groveling on your knees for your honor just like you did as a child!”
“That’s enough!” Mai snapped. “Zuko is your Fire Lord whether you like it or not, and you will show him the proper respect.”
The woman looked past Mai to glare at Zuko. “You know nothing of respect.”
Later that afternoon, Zuko and Mai relayed their failed efforts to Suki, Sokka and Ty Lee over tea.
“I’m impressed, Mai!” Ty Lee smiled.
Suki shrugged. “I probably would have thrown a punch or two.”
“Which is why he didn’t take you,” Mai said.
“Fair enough.”
“So what now?” Sokka asked. “Is there some way you can…I don’t know, force her to hand the skulls over?”
“I guess I could challenge her to an Agni Kai,” Zuko answered. His stomach dropped at the thought. It wasn’t exactly a precedent he wanted to set so early in his reign. “But it isn’t just the skulls either. She has more swords, and other bones, and who knows what else hidden away.” Zuko sighed. “Maybe you were right, Sokka, and this whole thing is pointless.”
“I never said it was pointless,” Sokka protested. “I actually think what you’re doing is important.” Everyone, including Zuko, shot him an incredulous look. “Okay, I had my doubts in the beginning, but I always knew your heart was in the right place. I just wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into.”
“But what is the point if I—if we will never be able to fix it?”
Sokka thought for a moment. “Remember that Earth Kingdom governor who was giving you a really hard time?”
“Which one?” Suki laughed dryly.
“The one who wouldn’t accept any of your compensation offers for some thingamajig that got lost because he said that you can’t put a price on a peoples’ culture.”
Zuko nodded. “I remember.”
“Well, he had a point. To be honest…” Sokka hesitated, as he often did while having these conversations with his Fire Nation friends, even after all these years. Zuko gave him an encouraging nod. Sokka sighed. “Nothing you do is actually going to fix what the war did to the rest of the world. There’s no way to replace everything we lost.” His voice grew quiet at the end. Suki reached for his hand, but he gently shrugged her off.
Zuko felt a little tightness in his throat. “Are you saying...it’s wrong to give reparations?”
“Not at all! You definitely need to keep doing that.”
“Then if you don’t mind me asking,” Ty Lee cut in, “what are the reparations for ?”
“Well I can only speak to the Southern Water Tribe, but we need the reparations so we can rebuild. Move on, you know? What the Fire Nation really owes us is a future that’s not defined by what we lost.”
Suki looked impressed. “That was really well said.”
“Don’t sound so surprised!”
“I’m gonna be honest,” Mai said, as if she ever wasn’t. “I always thought the money was about us trying to make ourselves feel better about, you know, being the worst country ever.”
Then Suki chimed in. “I guess it’s one thing for the rest of the world to forgive the Fire Nation—which is definitely easier when they’re paying to help you rebuild—and another thing for you all to forgive yourselves.”
The group was quiet for a while after that. Not an uncomfortable quiet, just a thoughtful one.
Several months of searching and some appeals to the press brought a few dragon bones their way; a hefty reward offered to anyone who turned in a dragon bone brought many more. Zuko wasn’t sure if it was the fact that he was going out on more digs and spending more time around dragon bones, but he was able to tell that many of the bones were definitely not from a dragon.
More nightmares came with each report of missing bones. Zuko would wake up and pore over his logs, willing the numbers to be smaller. His friends all had suggestions of varying vulgarity for ways he could relax, but none of them involved a magical solution that would return the missing bones.
The project had started with 173 dragon skulls, plus one full skeleton. By the one-year anniversary of Zuko’s visit to the Sun Warriors with Aang, 78 dragons had been reinterred with their skeletons intact, including Reffy. 52 dragons had been buried with at least one bone missing; at least ten of those were missing more than half the skeleton. 39 dragons were scheduled for excavation and reinterment over the next few months.
Seven of the recorded kill sites were inaccessible because of natural disasters or damage from the war. Another eight now had houses, farms, or factories built over them. The skulls of those fifteen dragons would have to wait to be returned until Zuko could find a way to access the remaining bones.
Another four skulls had been discovered, with no clues about their provenance. They sat in the now nearly empty Dragonbone Catacombs, awaiting an uncertain fate alongside the other unclaimed relics.
A year had passed, and Sokka calculated the project’s success rate at 68.5% (69% if you rounded up, he pointed out when Zuko frowned at the number).
During that time, Se-yeun’s mother succumbed to her illness. Her physician at the Herbalist Institute had been able to extend her life by a few months, but the end was inevitable. In her letter to Zuko and Aang, Se-yeun said that her mother was stronger and happier in those last months than she had been in the past year, and that she passed comfortably in her sleep.
When Aang went to see her to offer his condolences, she gave him a gift which he was now showing to Zuko.
“Here,” Aang said, handing Zuko a long, thin package, carefully wrapped in brown paper.
Zuko gingerly took the package. “What is it?”
“Se-yeun wanted to give the dragon its bone back, so she used her mother’s ashes to make this,” Aang explained.
Zuko stared in wonder at the package. “She’s…giving us her mother’s ashes?”
“Well, giving them to the dragon.” Aang nodded. “Open it.”
Zuko warily unwrapped the paper, careful not to touch the surface of what was inside. He pulled back just enough of the paper to see that it looked like a plaster bone cast. Just like the ones they had given volunteers as references.
“It’s in the shape of the shin bone she took,” Aang explained. “So the dragon can use it as a sort of prosthetic. She got the idea when she saw healers at the institute making prosthetic limbs for war veterans.”
Zuko felt a pull of guilt at the memory of his cruelty to the girl. He wondered if she was doing this because he’d made her believe that her mother’s life was somehow less worthy than the soul of a dragon.
“So I was thinking that we could try making casts of some of the other missing bones,” Aang continued. “We could even use the bone dust that we don’t have a source for—”
“I think it’s time we made the trip to the air temple,” Zuko said. He put the plaster bone down on his desk. “I like your idea,” he added. “But this gift just made me think…” He tried to put his train of thought into words and finally settled on, “Humans are important too.”
“Are you sure you have time?” Aang asked.
“I promised you we’d do this over a year ago,” Zuko reminded him. “And the only reason we didn’t was because you put everything else on hold to help me.” He smiled gently. “I’ll make time.”
“Really, you don’t have to,” Aang insisted. “I’ll take care of it when I get around to it.”
Zuko furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand. Weren’t you looking forward to returning the remains?”
“Well I wouldn’t say I was looking forward to it,” Aang said bitterly.
“That’s not what I—” Zuko shook his head. “I just want to know why you’re still stalling.”
“Stalling? I’m not stalling!” Aang snapped. “ You try dealing with everything the Avatar is supposed to do and finding time to help your friends and rebuilding an entire culture!”
“I don’t understand why you’re mad at me, Aang! I’m just trying to help.”
“Well you can’t!” Aang’s voice broke. “Don’t you get it, Zuko? Even the dragons have someone left to help them heal and I…I have no one. There’s no one to tell me how to make this right.”
Zuko began to realize what had been troubling Aang about returning these remains, why he had been stalling. “You mean…”
“The rituals to help those peoples’ souls pass on were supposed to happen when they died, not a hundred years later,” Aang explained. His breath was shaky. “Their bodies were supposed to be given as offerings to the birds and left to return to nature. There isn’t supposed to be anything left .”
In all this time, it hadn’t occurred to Zuko that Aang wouldn’t know what to do with the remains. He’d assumed his friend would be eager to put the lost souls to rest, but of course there wasn’t a ritual on hand for victims of genocide to find peace a hundred years too late.
“What have you done with other remains you’ve found?” Zuko asked.
“Said as many prayers as I could remember.” Aang shrugged and wiped a tear from his eyes. “Burned the bones and scattered the ashes.” His breathing grew shaky. “But now I keep thinking that I did it wrong, and now they’re all lost in the Spirit World because I couldn’t help them.”
“You…” Zuko struggled to find words that would help. “You did your best,” he offered.
Aang shook his head. “I don’t even remember all the prayers, Zuko. I was able to find a couple more in books, but most of the books in the temples are ruined. And I just…don’t remember everything.”
“What about the other Avatars?” Zuko asked. “Some of them were Air Nomads.”
“Yeah, Yangchen has been helping, but…no one’s been in this situation before. No one’s had to rebuild an entire culture before.” Aang’s voice was strained. “And none of them have had to put on a funeral for a person who got turned into an object .” He clenched his fists. “That…isn’t supposed to happen. None of this should have happened!”
Zuko brought an awkward hand up to his friend’s shoulder. Aang leaned in, let Zuko wrap his arms around him, and finally let some of his tears fall.
“I know nothing can replace what you’ve lost,” Zuko said gently. “But I’m here if you want to talk.”
Zuko felt Aang shake his head against his shoulder. He held his friend a little tighter.
After a while, Aang pulled away and drew himself up to his full height—which even at seventeen (plus a hundred) was seriously tall.
“Thanks,” Aang said, wiping more tears from his eyes.
Zuko realized what he needed to say. “What do you need?”
Aang looked taken aback. It made sense—he was probably so used to giving help, and now he was receiving it.
“I need… they need to be able to let go,” he said after a moment. “For us, death was the final stage of detachment. Every Air Nomad’s final reward is that their soul is detached from their bodies. It’s the ultimate freedom.” Aang laughed dryly. “I guess I’m never going to get that, since my soul’s just going to attach itself to someone else no matter what I do.”
Zuko had never heard such a pessimistic take on the Avatar cycle. He made a note to ask Aang about that later, when he was feeling a little less raw.
“So, letting go,” Zuko began. “How should we do that?”
Aang sighed heavily. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Hey,” Zuko said, smiling softly. “We’re the Fire Lord and the Avatar. We’ll figure something out.”
Aang’s eyes were still glistening, but there was hope in them when he smiled back.
A year and a half after he’d set out to put the dragons to rest, the project had gotten as far as it was going to go. It was time for Zuko to face the Sun Warriors and tell them that he had tried his best, and failed.
“You don’t have to go alone,” Aang said when Zuko told him.
“I took responsibility for this project,” Zuko reminded him. “It’s my failure.”
“You remember what they said when Ran and Shaw first taught us. I disappeared for a hundred years. What happened to the dragons is my fault too.”
Zuko shook his head. “You’ve done enough for the dragons,” he assured his friend. “Let me do this.”
Aang insisted that Zuko take Appa for the trip. He figured it would be less lonely than traveling on a balloon.
The man Zuko recognized as the Chief’s advisor narrowed his eyes at him when he arrived. “You didn’t bring the Avatar with you,” he said.
“No, it’s just me.” Zuko took a deep breath. “May I speak with the Chief?” he asked.
The advisor nodded and brought Zuko into the throne room.
Zuko bowed when he saw the Chief. “I’m here to tell you that I have completed the task you gave me, to the best of my abilities.”
“You were able to find and bury every single dragon bone?” the Chief asked suspiciously.
“No,” Zuko admitted. “I wasn’t.”
“Of course not,” the Chief laughed.
Zuko was taken aback. His failure had been keeping him up at night for weeks. He had been dreading going back to the Sun Warriors. And now the Chief was laughing at him. “I’m sorry?” he said.
“It’s been a hundred years,” the Chief explained. “There was no way you would be able to fix the damage done by your ancestors. But we thought it was very noble of you to think that you could.” The Chief’s face grew pensive. “Tell me, if you knew you were destined to fail, would you have undertaken this quest?”
“Probably not,” Zuko admitted.
The Chief nodded. “And the dragons you did heal wouldn’t be at rest.”
It hadn’t occurred to Zuko to think of it that way. To him the project had been atonement for his guilt over his family’s crimes. But whether or not all of the dragons had been put to rest, some of them were at peace. His own guilt…didn’t actually matter.
The Chief turned to his advisor and nodded. Zuko was about to ask what he was doing when he returned carrying the Sunstone. He held it out to Zuko.
Zuko looked at him for a moment, unsure what to do.
“Take it!” the advisor snapped.
Zuko obeyed. As soon as he touched the Sunstone, he felt it come alive with energy. The surface of the stone grew warm.
Soon the top began to glow with a golden light that came from inside the stone. Zuko saw the outline of what looked like a bird inside. Or a lizard, or a—
“Is this…?” Zuko looked up at the Chief and his advisor. The advisor was still scowling, but the Chief wore a warm smile.
As if to answer his question, the top of the stone—the egg—cracked from the heat. A tiny red nose peeked out through the crack, then a head. The little dragon blinked its golden eyes open at Zuko.
“Fire Lord Zuko,” the Chief said proudly. “Meet Druk.”
“Um…congratulations?”
“Congratulations yourself,” the Chief laughed. “Druk is yours.”
Zuko looked back at the baby dragon, who was clawing at the shell of its egg with a tiny paw. “Mine?”
“Yes,” the Chief nodded. “And you are his.”
“But I—” Zuko felt a lump in his throat when he looked into the creature’s eyes. “Why would you give me a dragon, after everything my family has done?”
“We’re not giving him to you,” the advisor said bitterly. “Druk chose you.”
“But he’s only a baby,” Zuko said. “How does he know who to choose?”
“Even before they are hatched, dragons know something we don’t,” the Chief explained. “Since we came down from our lion turtle city and settled these islands, our people have been trying to understand the dragons and the wisdom they have to share.”
Zuko furrowed his brow. “Lion turtle...city?”
“Don’t worry about your forgotten history,” the advisor smirked.
The Chief continued. “When Druk chose you as his companion, we were unsure about his decision. Just as we were unsure about the Masters’ decision to deem your uncle—a conqueror and a warmonger—worthy of the true meaning of firebending.” He smiled fondly at the baby dragon. “But when you came to us, seeking to do right by the dragons’ spirit, we knew he’d made the right choice.”
“Not that it’s our place to question the dragons,” the advisor said, pursing his lips. He looked over at the baby with the same softness in his eyes that the Chief had. “Even a baby.”
Druk had climbed most of the way out of the egg, enough that he could stretch out his wet, papery wings. He looked at Zuko and chirped.
Zuko felt something warm growing in his chest. “I’ll take good care of him, I promise.”
“You’d better,” the advisor said grimly. “Because if anything happens to that little baby, we will come out of hiding just to make you pay.”
“Easy, Ham Gao,” the Chief chided him. He turned to face Zuko and added, “He’s right, though. We won’t hesitate.”
When Zuko returned to the palace, Suki and Sokka were waiting for him.
“How did it go?” Sokka asked cautiously.
“Well…” Zuko began. As if on cue, Druk peeked his head out from where it was nestled in the crook of Zuko’s arm.
“Is that a baby dragon ?” Sokka exclaimed before Zuko could say anything.
Zuko held the baby up for his friends to see. “Meet Druk.”
“No. Absolutely not,” Suki said firmly. “There is no way you are bringing a dragon into the palace.”
“But—” Zuko’s heart sank at the idea that he would have to give Druk back. “He chose me, Suki.”
Sokka looked over at Suki with pleading eyes. At least someone was moved by Zuko’s story.
“Where is he going to live ?” Suki demanded.
“He’s small enough that he can live in my room for now,” Zuko pointed out.
“And when he gets bigger we can build a habitat for him,” Sokka added.
Zuko did his best to emulate Sokka’s expression—what Katara called his “polar puppy eyes.”
“Fine,” Suki sighed. “But I’m not cleaning up after him.”
“Me neither, but I can teach him how to hunt,” Sokka offered.
“I think he’ll be okay,” Zuko said. “Instinct and all that.”
“He is cute,” Suki allowed.
Zuko smiled fondly at his new friend. “He is, isn’t he?”
Zuko wasn’t sure where Druk would want to sleep. Sokka helped him set up a box like the one polar dogs kept their newborn puppies in, but it wasn’t long before Druk crawled back out of the box and into the bed with Zuko.
“Hey there little guy,” Zuko said softly. The dragon chirped at him and nuzzled against his hand. Zuko gave him a few scratches on the head, which elicited more chirps from the tiny creature.
“I’m sorry about before,” Zuko murmured. “It’s not that Suki doesn’t want you. She just wanted to make sure that I could give you a good home.”
Druk cocked his head curiously. Zuko knew it was unlikely that he could understand human speech, but he kept talking anyway.
“I don’t really know what you need,” Zuko admitted. “You’re probably going to get pretty big, right?”
Druk chirped an affirmation. His pupils were blown wide in the dark so that only a thin circle of red was visible around the edges. Whether or not the dragon could understand what Zuko was saying, there was affection in those eyes. Trust.
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to have children.” Zuko had never told anyone that before. He wasn’t sure why he was telling a baby dragon now. “I don’t know if I’d be any good at taking care of children.”
Zuko reached out and stroked the dragon under the chin. Druk made a low humming noise, something halfway between a growl and a purr.
Zuko smiled to himself. “But I think I can take care of you.”
Druk leaned forward, close enough that he could probably bite off Zuko’s nose if he wanted to. But he didn’t bite Zuko. Instead, he stuck out his serpentine tongue and flicked it against the tip of Zuko’s nose.
Zuko blinked, a little startled. He let Druk lick him again, a few more times until he was apparently satisfied.
Druk made another low growling noise as he nuzzled into the space between Zuko’s chin and his neck.
“Is that where you’re going to sleep?” Zuko asked.
Druk curled up and settled against his chest in response.
“Okay.” Zuko reached around and cupped the little dragon in his hand, holding him close.
There may have been nothing he could do for the dragons who’d lost their lives, or the ones whose souls he could never put to rest. But he could make sure that as long as he lived, nothing would happen to this dragon. This tiny, resilient creature who had survived a genocide against all odds, who had chosen Zuko as his caretaker for reasons no human would ever truly understand. Zuko knew he would do whatever it took to protect the little life he now held in his hands.