Chosen by the Spirits | A male reader x Avatar the Last Airbender story

Chapter 19- The Library (part 2)

I waved at the gang before the giant owl spirit took off into the air, before unexpectedly plunging down towards the bottom floor of the gigantic library. I held onto his feathers for dear life as he plummeted, feeling the air rush past my face. 'I definitely prefer Appa to this spiritual beast' I thought to myself as we finally reached the ground floor of the library. It appeared to be made of stone and it was rather dim, lit solely by many burning torches hung on the walls. There were five different corridors, all with a different symbol above their entrances. The different corridors were marked as 'water, earth, fire, air' and 'spirits'. Wan Shi Tong perched on the floor as I hopped off of his back.

"Follow me," he calmly demanded as he walked off towards the corridor marked as 'spirits'. I did as he asked and cautiously trailed behind him. We entered the section of the library, which was unsurprisingly filled with bookshelves and scrolls. "So tell me, how exactly did a mortal being become blessed by the water spirits?" Wan Shi Tong asked me as I followed him.

"Uhh, my parents bathed me in the Northern Water Tribe's spirit oasis immediately after my birth," I tried to explain to the owl, who nodded in understanding.

"I know Tui and La rather well," he told me as we walked. "But I wasn't aware that they could place a piece of themselves into a human. Is it just you who is blessed?" he asked me.

"It is now, yeah," I awkwardly said, not wanting to discuss Yue's sacrifice, as the topic still made me upset. Luckily, the giant owl nodded in understanding.

"So why would your parents want to bathe you in the spirit oasis?" Wan Shi Tong asked curiously.

"They're ashamed at their fire nation past," I described honestly to him. The knowledge spirit had already shown that it was pointless to lie to him, so I didn't bother. "They moved to the Northern Water Tribe as refugees before I was born. They wanted me to be a waterbender so they could fit in with the tribe, I guess. They begged the spirits to bless me so that I could be a waterbender,"

"How fascinating," he uttered as we continued to pace through the library's halls. "And what about your firebender uncle. Where does he fit into this?"

"I guess he doesn't fit into it," I shrugged. "I didn't even know he was my uncle until recently,"

"Are your parents firebenders?" he continued to ask.

"No, but evidently there's firebending genes in the family," I truthfully explained.

"And that thing you did with the water. Is that due to your firebender genes?" he questioned as we arrived at a golden lectern that had a notebook resting open on it. The handwriting in the book was neat, and as Wan Shi Tong flicked to a fresh page, it became apparent that it was his notebook.

"Yes, I believe it is," I answered his question. The giant owl took out a pen and, although I don't know how he did it without hands, he began scribbling in the notebook.

"Years ago I made a hypothesis which I wrote in this notebook," he explained to me. "What would happen if spiritual matter was inserted into the human body? Or in simpler terms, what if a human was blessed by a spirit?"

"And what did you hypothesize?" I asked the all-knowing spirit.

"If I explained everything that I hypothesized, we'd be here for a hundred lifetimes," he joked, though his tone remained serious. "So let's focus on what's relevant to you: a firebender that is blessed by a water spirit to become a waterbender," he added as he flicked through his notebook to find the appropriate page. "Firstly, I hypothesized that any being blessed by a spirit of a particular element would possess a great power amongst that element. Tell me, are you a good waterbender?" he asked me.