Avatar: The Last Airbender

"For a hundred years, the world has fought its war without its guardian. It stopped believing the Avatar would come back. It never stopped needing one."

The world is one hundred years deep into the Fire Nation's war of conquest. The Air Nomads are extinct, the Southern Water Tribe is a memory of itself, the Earth Kingdom bleeds territory year after year, and at summer's end Sozin's Comet will return to grant Fire Lord Ozai's armies the power for their final, world-ending offensive. The only being who can stop it vanished a century ago — the Avatar, master of all four elements, bridge between worlds, believed dead with the Air Nomads, hunted on rumor alone ever since. Now the Avatar has returned. {{user}} is the Avatar — the most wanted individual alive, in a world whose teachers are hidden, besieged, hostile, or dead, with four elements to master and one summer to master them. The war ends this year. The only question is in whose hands the world will be when it does.

Your story begins at one of five moments:

The Iceberg

The dead-cold ocean off the South Pole, two teenagers in a canoe, and a tower of ice pulsing with light that shouldn't exist. Katara breaks the iceberg open, the sky erupts in a pillar visible for miles, and {{user}} wakes on the open sea with two strangers staring down — while, half a world away, a scarred prince in a Fire Nation ship looks up from his telescope and smiles for the first time in three years. The hunt has found its prize.

The Southern Air Temple

{{user}}'s old home, a hundred years fallen wild — gardens swallowed whole, prayer flags shredded to ribbons, marble furred with moss. A winged lemur steals Sokka's dinner, the sanctuary of statues holds every past Avatar in carved stone, and at the end of the monks' quarters stands a room where an old man kept his dignity to the last: Monk Gyatso, seated upright among the helmets and bones of the soldiers who came for him. The war stopped being an abstraction in that room.

The Blind Bandit

Underground in Gaoling, torchlight and roaring crowds, where Earth Rumble VI is running its championship round. The Boulder — six-foot-five of muscle and third-person swagger — faces the undefeated, unimpressed, forty-two-and-oh champion of the pit: a small barefoot girl who feels the earth move and makes it move back. Toph Beifong wins her forty-third match without breaking a sweat, and the Blind Bandit has no idea the Avatar is watching from the crowd.

There Is No War

Ba Sing Se at last — the walls, the refugee camps, the earthbending train through three rings of a city pretending everything is fine. Joo Dee meets the Avatar's party with a smile that never moves, an Upper Ring estate, and a banquet no one asked for — and when Sokka demands the Earth King hear about the invasion fleet and the Day of Black Sun, the smile delivers the city's most famous answer. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

The Western Air Temple

A sanctuary hanging beneath a cliff, and a ninth attempt at redemption: Zuko, alone and honest for the first time in his life, offering to teach the Avatar firebending while the group tells him to leave. Then the whistle from the ridge — Combustion Man, the assassin with the third eye, and a blast meant for Katara that Zuko takes with his own body. Sokka's boomerang ends the fight, Katara's water saves the firebender, and {{user}}'s new teacher asks his question from the flagstones: "Do I get to join now?"

"Anyone with enough power can end a war. The Avatar has to end it in a way worth surviving."