Time stopped meaning what it once had.
At first, I counted it. Years. Decades. Centuries. I marked eras by observation—by the slow rearrangement of spiritual currents, by the birth of new minor spirits drifting into existence like sparks from a greater fire.
Then I stopped.
Whether it had been hundreds of years or thousands since my rebirth no longer felt important. Time, to a spirit, was not a line—it was a field. Moments stretched or collapsed depending on attention. What once would have felt like an eternity could pass between thoughts, while a single hour of focused contemplation could feel longer than a human lifetime.
My mind had changed.
Not diminished—expanded.
I was no longer anchored to urgency, or fear of ending. I existed continuously, without decay. My thoughts layered over one another, recursive and parallel, capable of holding entire frameworks of understanding without strain.
And in that vast stretch of unmeasured time, I mastered myself.
Every ability I possessed—creation, perception, conceptual manipulation, spiritual causality—I explored them not recklessly, but patiently. I tested limits. I observed reactions. I learned where balance pushed back, and where it permitted subtlety.
I became strong.
Not loudly so.
Not like the spirits who announced themselves through storms, madness, or domination. I did not reshape landscapes for spectacle or demand reverence. Power unused, I found, was far more stable than power displayed.
Still, I could feel it.
Other spirits felt it too.
I was unmistakably primordial.
Newer spirits—those born of fear, of forests, of rivers and emotion—kept their distance. Older ones acknowledged me without words. I had become a fixed point in the Spirit World's topology, like a mountain that had always been there and would always remain.
And then—
Something shifted.
It began as a tremor in the spiritual substrate. A tension where none should have existed. The currents of balance twisted, not violently, but deliberately.
Vaatu.
I recognized his influence instantly.
Chaos did not announce itself—it accumulated. A distortion in cause and effect. A pressure against separation. The barrier between the Spirit World and the material world strained, thinning like overstretched silk.
Then it broke.
Not fully.
Not cleanly.
But enough.
I stood at the edge of the Spirit World and watched as the divide opened—light and shadow bleeding into a realm that was not yet ready to receive them. The material world was… crude. Raw. Untamed. No nations. No civilizations. Barely even true societies.
No humans as I would later come to know them.
Just early life, struggling and adapting beneath a sky that had not yet learned to fear spirits.
I crossed over.
The sensation was… interesting.
Heavier. Slower. Reality resisted thought more here. Concepts required effort to manifest. Creation demanded compromise. Matter insisted on rules and inertia, unlike the Spirit World's fluid obedience.
I walked briefly among it.
Observed.
Learned.
And found myself… unimpressed.
The material world had potential, but little to offer me yet. No accumulated knowledge. No philosophies. No libraries. No recorded thought. Everything was instinct and survival.
I returned to the Spirit World without regret.
My library awaited me there—vast and ever-growing. Shelves of memory, records of possibility, conceptual texts that existed only because I understood them well enough to give them form. Some volumes documented events that had happened. Others recorded paths that might one day occur.
The Spirit World remained my true domain.
Still, I made a note to myself.
One day, when humans existed in meaningful numbers—when they learned to write, to question, to seek—I would build a library in the material world as well. A place where their understanding could accumulate… and where I could learn from them in return.
Balance was reciprocal.
Knowledge always flowed both ways.
For now, however, I watched.
Vaatu's escape was not a catastrophe—yet. But it was a sign. A precursor. Something had been set into motion that could not be undone without consequence.
And somewhere in the future—far closer than the mortals would ever realize—
The Avatar would be born.
I folded my hands behind my back, gazing across the Spirit World as its currents slowly settled.
"Very well," I murmured.
"Let history begin."