The air at the summit didn't just bite; it chewed.
Moved back from the blade and Zane let him to him he was a dog on its last feet.
Vane Thorne stood on the lip of the cave's ledge, his boots crunching into the frozen permafrost with a sound like grinding teeth. His old Fire Nation military cloak, frayed and scorched at the hem, snapped violently in the wind, a tattered flag of a life spent in service of a throne that had long ago forgotten his name.
Behind him, tucked into the jagged throat of a stone crevice, Kael watched. The boy's fingers were white-knuckled, gripping the cold, porous rock so hard his nails bled, the copper scent of his own blood lost to the howling gale. He didn't feel the pain in his hands. All he felt was the suffocating, erratic heat radiating from his father's back.
Vane was burning his life force. It wasn't the controlled, rhythmic breathing of a soldier anymore; it was the desperate, suicidal flare of a candle reaching the end of its wick.
Every exhale sent a cloud of steam into the air that shimmered with orange sparks.
"He's here!" a voice shrieked from the darkness below, thin and sharp against the mountain's roar.
Zane Arlo stepped into the flickering orange light cast by Vane's presence. The assassin looked different up here than he had in the humid depths of the harbor. The mountain air had paled his skin to the color of bone, and the limp in his stride was more pronounced, a permanent reminder of the child who had humiliated him in Harbor City two years ago. Behind him, four Syndicate hunters fanned out.
They weren't bulky men, they were lean, fast, and draped in hooded robes that billowed like the wings of carrion birds. They carried heavy iron chains and weighted bolas—tools designed to snag a bender's limbs and break the flow of their chi.
"Move aside, Thorne," Zane said, his voice barely audible over the wind. "You're a dead man walking. I can hear the rattle in your chest from here. Give us the boy, and I'll make sure your end is quick. I might even bury you."
Vane didn't answer with words. He took a wide, low stance, his lead foot digging a furrow into the snow. He drew a deep breath, and for a second, the orange glow in his chest dimmed, pulling inward toward his core. Then, he exhaled.
A wall of flame erupted from his outstretched palms. It wasn't a focused strike; it was a desperate, physical barrier—a roaring curtain of fire that turned the falling snow into a blinding screen of steam. The heat was so intense it caused the surface of the obsidian ledge to crack and pop.
"Now, Kael! Run!" Vane roared, his voice cracking with the sheer effort of holding the line.
Kael scrambled deeper into the crevice. He knew the path—a narrow, rib-crushing tunnel that came out on the western face of the Spire. But as he turned to flee, he heard the metallic snarl of a chain.
One of the Syndicate hunters, a man named Koren, had circled around the ledge using hooked climbing claws to scale the sheer face. He hadn't gone for Vane; he had gone for the gap.
A heavy, iron-linked chain whipped through the air, coiling around Kael's ankle with a sickening, heavy clank. The weight of the iron was immense, dragging Kael's small, wiry frame backward. He hit the stone floor hard, his chin slamming into the grit, the impact sending a jarring shock through his skull.
"Got the brat!" Koren yelled, bracing his weight to haul Kael out of the crevice.
"Kael!" Vane turned, his concentration breaking. The wall of fire flickered, the heat dying down just enough for Zane Arlo to see his opening.
With a flick of his wrist, Zane launched a hidden spring-blade. The steel whistled through the steam, burying itself deep into Vane's shoulder. The old soldier gasped, his fire sputtering into grey smoke.
Kael watched in slow motion as the other three hunters closed in. Vane fought like a man possessed, throwing haymakers of raw, unrefined heat, but he was outnumbered and fading. A heavy mace wielded by a hunter named Basal caught Vane in the ribs. The sound of breaking bone—a dull, wet snap—echoed off the cave walls. Vane went down to one knee, a glob of blood coughing from his lips and freezing almost instantly in the mountain air.
"No!" Kael screamed. He kicked at the chain, his right hand igniting in a frantic, undisciplined burst. The heat singed the leather of his own boot, filling his nose with the smell of burnt hide, but the iron stayed cold, mocking him.
He reached for the Shiver. Umi, help me! The spirit didn't respond with a shield this time. It was terrified. The presence of the "spirit-water" Zane had used earlier acted like a beacon of static, jamming the connection between the boy and the entity. Umi coiled tight around Kael's heart, shivering in a way that made Kael's entire left side go numb and heavy.
Zane Arlo walked past the broken form of Vane Thorne, stepping toward the crevice where Kael lay pinned. He looked down at the boy with a cold, clinical curiosity. "You caused a lot of trouble, kid. Makoa had to pay a lot of people to track a ghost across the peaks."
Zane reached down, grabbing Kael by his matted hair and hauling him up. Kael thrashed, his small fists thudding against Zane's armored chest, but it was like hitting a stone wall.
"Leave... him... be..."
Vane's voice was a wet wheeze. He was trying to stand, his fingers clawing at the icy ground, leaving red smears in the snow. His eyes were unfocused, looking at a son he could no longer clearly see.
Zane didn't even look back. He kicked Vane in the side of the head—a casual, brutal motion. Vane's head snapped back, hitting the edge of the ledge with a sound that signaled the end. He didn't make another sound. His body went limp, sliding inches toward the precipice.
"Father?" Kael's voice was a whisper.
The world went silent. The wind seemed to stop. The only sound was the heavy, rhythmic thud of Kael's heart, drumming against the numb void in his chest.
The weight in his chest—the Fire and the Water—suddenly slammed together. It wasn't the "dance" he had practiced. It was a collision. A violent, chemical rejection. Kael's skin began to smoke. Not from firebending, but from the sheer friction of his chi tearing itself apart.
"Something's wrong with him!" Koren shouted, backing away and dropping the chain. "He's glowing!"
Kael didn't feel like a boy anymore. He felt like a boiler with the pressure valves welded shut. He lunged at Zane, not with a strike, but with a primal scream. An explosion of superheated steam and jagged ice shards erupted from his body in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radius.
The force was enough to shatter the stone beneath them. Koren was blown backward, his chest shredded by ice shards that moved like shrapnel. Zane Arlo was thrown against the cave wall, his armor cracking with a loud snap.
But the recoil was devastating. Kael's ribs snapped under the internal pressure. He felt his left arm—Umi's side—go completely dead, the nerves fried by the sudden surge of heat.
The ledge groaned. The explosion had compromised the frost-wedged granite. With a sound like the mountain itself groaning in pain, a massive slab of the Spire broke away.
Kael felt the ground vanish.
He was falling. He saw the stars spinning above him, the dark silhouettes of the Syndicate hunters staring down from the shrinking ledge. And he saw the body of his father, Vane, falling alongside him, a silent, dark shape lost in the abyss.
I have you, a faint, dying ripple echoed in his mind.
Umi surged. The spirit didn't try to bend the air or the clouds. It did something far more intimate. It flooded Kael's internal systems, wrapping itself around his shattered bones and ruptured organs like a liquid cast. It drained every ounce of its own essence to create a pressurized cushion of fluid within Kael's skin.
Kael hit the jagged rocks of the lower ravine three hundred feet below.
The impact should have turned him into a red smear. Instead, there was a wet, heavy thud. Kael's body bounced once, sliding into a deep snowbank at the edge of a frozen river.
Umi had taken the hit. The spirit had used itself as a shock absorber, sacrificing its consciousness to preserve the vessel.
Kael lay in the snow, his eyes staring at the gray sky. He couldn't move. He couldn't feel his legs. His right side—the Fire side—felt like it was filled with molten lead, pulsating with a dull, angry heat. His left side was a void. Umi was gone. Not dead, but dormant, a silent, heavy weight at the base of his spine.
He tried to call out for his father, but his throat was filled with blood. He watched as the snow began to cover him, turning his world white.
The Syndicate would come down to check for a body. They wouldn't find a boy. They would find a mound of snow.
Kaelen Thorne, age eight, closed his eyes. The "Shiver" was gone. The only thing left was the burn.