Avatar: The Last Dragon Prince

Chapter Seven: Down to Earth

Welp. Honestly, if you're still reading this fic, thanks for sticking it out with me because I have clearly proven to be all kinds of hopeless when it comes to actually updating said fic :3 it's been what? Over a YEAR? Sorry bout that, folks.

Without further ado, onto the next chapter!

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Callum was fairly adaptable.

He learned one spell from Claudia and that became the crux of his magic. He learned that the dragon prince was alive and, without too much deliberation, decided to ally himself with an elf assassin he barely knew to return him to Xadia. He had an aptitude for gauging situations and analysing them accordingly.

So even now, as he watched Aang 'learn' this earthbending craft through the school's moon gate, he was sure that it wasn't working. Had he ever seen real combative earthbending in motion? Not unless the floating rock action counted. But however it looked, he was sure Aang was learning it wrong, if he was learning it at all. Unless, for some odd reason, learning involved being buried in a pile of sand.

"How's it looking?" Rayla did not lift her sight from her blades as she asked the question.

"It doesn't look like it could get any worse, if that helps."

The same could not be said about their stuck-in-another-world situation – one that he believed he caused. Suddenly, he didn't have enough air.

Ironic for a Sky Mage.

"Callum?"

He broke out of his daze to find Rayla looking at him, her gaze surprisingly gentle. It should have offered comfort but it only made him feel guiltier.

"I'm going to look around. There's a bit of primal magic to research in this place, all the good stuff." He patted his satchel and offered a weak smile that no one bought – not even the siblings that didn't know him all that well.

With that, Callum walked off into the town and tried to shake off his doubts, his guilt. While it had been a pathetic excuse, he figured he might as well make good on it. They were in lowlands so his connection to Sky Magic was relatively weak. Strong enough for aspiro but not strong enough for fulminis.

This new town of the Earth Kingdom they were in seemed quite relaxed so far. Before his mother married King Harrow, he would go out into the marketplace in Katolis capital and it was always bustling, always full of life and action. Here, activity seemed to lull – not in a boring way, just in a pleasantly calm way.

At least it would be pleasant if it did not provide the perfect atmosphere for his mind to be plagued with a million and one thoughts zigzagging across each other yet never making any connections.

He still did not know why he had something of a connection to the Sky Arcanum but he felt the magic at his fingertips, barely-there sparks of aether. From what he understood, the avatar came from a different child from different nations in a water-earth-fire-air nation cycle. Like the avatar, could it be that he was also chosen to be a mage despite having no Primal magic heritage? Or was it just a fluke?

He looked up at the clear sky, at the sun shining through rolling cirrus clouds, and hoped the answers would come billowing down as if that was how anything worked, here or in his own world. He didn't even know what he wanted answers to even if he was infused with answers – leaving this world was his most immediate problem but far from the worst.

The sunshine began to feel tingly on his pale skin and he turned his head back down, only to find none other than his brother standing in front of him. Safe to say, he was more startled than he should've been.