Before, Kuruk always though of death as cold. He supposed everyone did, it must’ve had something to do with the terrible sensation of frostbite or the way bodies slowly cooled after their owners had taken their last breathes. But death wasn’t exactly cold. It wasn’t exactly anything at first.

And then it was everything. Colors and shapes and sounds he had only seen in dreams. The spirit world as had never seen it before. Gone where the dismal swamps of gray and green, the catacombs of disgusting landscapes where he had battled not only for his life, but for the lives of hundreds- sometimes thousands- of innocents, ignorant to the fact they were ever in danger in the first place.

It took what seemed like forever but could just have easily been a single moment for him to lock eyes with Yangchen. His predecessor, the perfect avatar. The very person he had strived to be alike for the past seventeen years, and had almost grown to resent during the past five. Meeting her like this was... new. It felt less like speaking with a ghost and more like looking in a mirror. He touched his hands, his face, his chest, to convince himself this was real. He supposed it wasn’t.

After a moment, Yangchen spoke. “I’m sorry.” Her voice sounded like it always had. Gentle, like the wind. She had sometimes applied a determined force behind it, when she had lectured Kuruk for hours about his everlasting spiritual failure, but it was gone now, replaced only by an overwhelming sense of sorrow.

Kuruk didn’t know how to reply. “I am too.” What a pair the two of them were, one revered across the nations, the other a laughingstock of an avatar, yet both here, standing in the same field of blue and violet, the same expression of sorrow and apology on their faces. They had both failed the world they were supposed to keep safe. It felt completely and utterly terrible.

As Kuruk stared into the eyes of his predecessor, he felt a tear running down his cheek, and then another. He saw it mirrored on Yangchen’s face- it was like his own. She stepped forward and embraced him for the first time in both their lives. The avatar cried for the world, for their failures, together.

“We’re going to fix this.” Kuruk whispered. “We can’t give up now.”

Yangchen nodded as she stepped back from her successor. She smiled, kind and warm and forgiving. “I believe in us.”