Chapter Text
They have to find the Avatar. Firelord Azulon had been very clear on that.
The Avatar was dangerous. The stories told of Sozin’s attack on the Air Nation made that perfectly clear. But when the Avatar had failed to appear among the water tribes, it had been assumed that the Avatar cycle had been broken and that the Avatar Spirit had died with the young air avatar.
Avatar Yang had proved them wrong. Under the guise of the Green Spirit she had been a constant thorn in the Fire Nation’s side and caused Iroh no shortage of headaches as he tried to prove himself as a General in the Earth Kingdom. Her capture and execution at his brother’s hands had eliminated one problem but did not break the cycle. The Avatar would be reborn, and they had to find them before they once again became a threat.
The problem, Iroh thinks, is that it is not entirely clear on how they are supposed to find the Avatar. By logical deduction the Avatar should be reborn among the Fire Nation. (Assuming of course the cycle didn’t skip fire like it had apparently skipped water.) But even assuming that the Avatar had been reborn in the year after the Green Spirit’s execution that still left hundreds of thousands of new babies and no way to tell which among them had the Avatar Spirit.
The fire sages had burned a mountain of oracle bones, trying to divine the identity of the new fire avatar based on the way the bone cracked and burned. But the omens proved contradictory, inconclusive, and in one case even mocking. Nothing that brought them any closer to figuring out who the Avatar was. When pressed for explanations, one sage had cautiously suggested that perhaps malicious spirits were trying to prevent the Firelord from discovering the Avatar. (Being very careful not to imply that the Firelord’s actions in any way may have angered the great spirits who guarded the Avatar cycle.)
In any case, the usual methods weren’t working. So Iroh had been tasked with finding another way of determining the Avatar. The problem Iroh was finding, as he went through the scrolls and codices in the royal library, was that there was next to no information on the Avatar at all. Firelord Sozin had been very zealous in making sure there was no information that could contradict his version of events, and his censors had gone through the library destroying nearly everything about the Avatar that they could find. The only scrolls Iroh could find that talked about the Avatar were either vague on the details or were clearly written after Sozin’s purge of the library.
It was why he had resorted to picking random scrolls off the racks and skimming through them trying to see if there was anything in them that might help. His current selection was not looking promising, talking mainly about the various kinds of toys children in the Fire Nation had played with over the ages. He was just about to put it back on the rack when a passage caught his eye.
...among the Air Nomads for example, the toys that a child chooses to play with has great significance. When the elders of the temples know that the Avatar has been born among them…
The Air Nomads. Not the Air Nation. Only the Fire Nation calls them the Air Nation. (He knows that now.) This might be one of the scrolls Sozin’s censors missed in their purge.
All the children in the temple are gathered together and one by one shown to a room filled with hundreds of toys. The children are then instructed to pick four among them to play with. Among those hundreds of toys are four particularly special ones. They are the toys that the previous air avatar played with when they were growing up. The Avatar’s reincarnated spirit will recognize those toys and be drawn to them for the fun and comfort they once provided. Thus the child who picks out those four toys and no others is known to be the Avatar reborn.
Toys! Iroh’s mind boggled at the thought. Yet it made sense the more he thought about it. Children were often closer to their past lives than adults who had grown into their current one. It was not impossible that somewhere in their soul they would recognize their old childhood playthings and be drawn to them.
I was once permitted to watch this process at work. All the young girls in the Western Air Temple were gathered together and one by one led into the room with the toys. In among those toys the elders had hidden the avatar relics: a turtle whistle, a spinning drum, a painted hogmonkey, and a wooden fan. While some of the children picked out one or two of the relics, none of them proved to be the avatar by picking out all four toys.
Iroh’s mind started to think about how they could actually try something like this. They had the national census along with the records of families who had moved to the colonies. It would certainly be possible to round up all the children of the correct age in every town or village and subject them to this test. They would need a lot of toys to do it, but that wouldn’t be a problem. However, they would need to find toys that a previous avatar had played with as a kid. Iroh silently cursed to himself. There were relics of Avatar Roku that the fire sages had preserved in their sanctuaries, but all of them were from his adult life. Avatar Yang’s family had fled to Ba Sing Se when their connection to the Green Spirit had been revealed. They were beyond the reach of the Fire Nation for now, and that was assuming they had even held onto any of Yang’s childhood toys. Perhaps they could send an expedition to the ruins of the air temples to see if they could recover the avatar relics themselves. It had been nearly a hundred years since their defeat but it was possible that such relics might have survived. Or maybe they could make replicas of the relics. There would be no way of knowing if that would work. But, if they commissioned old Mr. Aang, it would certainly be possible for the old man to make them a set. A turtle whistle, a spinning drum, a painted hogmonkey, and a wooden fan were certainly within the old man’s skill to make.
Something niggled in the back of Iroh’s mind.
A turtle whistle, a spinning drum, a painted hogmonkey, and a wooden fan.
His memory flashed back to a warm sunny morning. Lu Ten had been playing in the garden and Princess Ursa had brought her own children out to enjoy the day. He had even sat down with little Azula and showed her how to play pai sho. She had picked it up with surprising speed, he remembered.
Lu Ten had gone off to play with Zuko, who had brought some of his own toys with him. One of them had been a whistle, he remembered that. Had it been shaped like a turtle? There had been a drum too, one of the ones you spun around so that the beads on the end of the strings made the rhythm. Mr. Aang made excellent ones. Practically every child in the Fire Nation had one. There had been a wooden fan, one with a little string you pulled to make the fan spin. Lu Ten had shown it to him, fascinated with how it worked. Had that been a wooden hogmonkey they had played with on the edge of the terrace?
He couldn’t remember.