Warning! Unmarked spoilers for The Dawn of Yangchen!
Common enemies make for strange friends...
The Legacy of Yangchen is a 2023 novel by F.C. Yee, and the sequel to The Dawn of Yangchen, and the fourth entry into Chronicles of the Avatar series. It takes place a few months after the original novel, chronicling the last leg of Yangchen's journey to becoming the Avatar she will be renowned as several centuries after her death.
Avatar Yangchen has succeeded in bringing a measure of stability to Bin-Er, but her successes have been limited to a single city, and rumors concerning Unanimity—a weapon capable of total obliteration—have led to increasing tensions among the Four Nations.
Desperate to restore diplomacy, Yangchen attempts to de-escalate hostilities between heads of state. But in the wake of a brutal assassination and the freeing of Unanimity, Yangchen is forced to bring Kavik—the trusted former companion whose betrayal crushed her—back into her fold.
As the Four Nations teeter on the brink of conflict and she begins to unravel the power-hungry Zongdu Chaisee's true agenda, Yangchen is forced to measure the worth of humanity, and how much can be sacrificed in the name of balance.
Tropes:
- Ambition Is Evil: The full explanation of Chaisee's goal is given near the end of the story: She seeks to have the world leaders make the zongdu position a lifelong and hereditary one, enabling her to rule Jonduri until her death, as well as provide her son with wealth, status and power after she's gone. It's also implied that she plans to secretly extend her influence over the other shang cities until she's ruling them from behind the scenes.
- Batman Gambit:
- Ayunerak pulls one of these on Yangchen early in the story, in order to get her to evacuate Kavik from Agna Qel'a and allow him to continue traveling with her. To put it simply, she takes Kavik - who's currently being hunted by agents of the Northern Water Tribe Chief due to his knowledge about Unanimity - into the city without having any plan or means to get him back out safely, leaving Yangchen with little choice but to let him leave on Nujian with her. If she didn't do this, Kavik would most likely get himself captured, and then Yangchen would have little option besides hope that he doesn't blab about Unanimity.
- The climax of the Taku arc features two. The first has Kavik threaten to snitch on Kalyaan to Chaisee in order to get his older brother to turn on her, relying on Chaisee's reputation for being brutal to caught spies to get what he and Yangchen want. The second, intended to be used in case the first fails, is Jujinta giving Kavik a non-lethal but convincing stab wound that Akuudan later pretends to aggravate in front of Kalyaan to force his cooperation, this one relying on the belief that Kalyaan still cares for his family despite everything he's done. The first of these fails, but the second succeeds.
- Benevolent Conspiracy: The Order of the White Lotus turns out to be a subversion, with them spending most of the book trying to either retrieve the combustionbenders from Yangchen's captivity, or get their hands on the people who know how to make more. They justify it on the basis that in their eyes, they're the ones best suited to have control over such a world-changing power.
- Call-Back: The previous book had Yangchen semi-blackmail Kavik into becoming one of her companions, while jokingly saying she'd let him sleep on her offer. At the end of this book, she asks Kavik to continue helping her, having forgiven his previous betrayal. With Yangchen no longer having any means of compelling him to accept, Kavik laughs and replies that he'll sleep on it.
- Call-Forward:
- While playing Sparrowbones with Yangchen and Kavik, Chaisee and Iwashi reveal to them that the Fire Nation's Saowon clan are preparing to go to war at some point in the far future.
- Chaisee's Unamity project didn't involve just creating combustionbenders. She also attempted to create lavabenders and chi-blockers as well; the former was entirely unsuccessful, the latter only having one known practitioner due to the rest getting themselves killed in an unsuccessful attempt to escape the island where they were being trained.
- Carpet-Rolled Corpse: Yangchen is forced to do this in order to smuggle Kavik out of Agna Qel'a early in the story. Due to her being less than fond of him at this point, it's strongly implied that she deliberately drags her heels when saying her farewells once he's in the carpet.
- Chekhov's Gun: Bloodlacquer, the refined resin of itchleaf trees that has a liquid state capable of passing for actual blood, is first seen being used in the design of a particularly morbid Sparrowbones table. During the endgame of the story, Akuudan, Tayagum and Kavik use it to make an injury administered to Kavik look worse than it actually is to Kalyaan, in order to get him to spill the beans on Chaisee's plan.
- Death of a Child: Raitei, a combustionbender no older than thirteen, dies after he uses the technique to try assassinating Yangchen, killing her bison Nujian in the process.
- Didn't See That Coming: Kavik and Yangchen's ultimate plan to stop Chaisee by threatening to expose Kalyaan's role as Henshe's spy in order to force him to turn to their side hits a snag when it's revealed that Kalyaan - who also happens to be the father of Chaisee's son - had already confessed this to her a while ago and been forgiven for it, a course of action considered very unlikely due to Chaisee's reported harshness towards enemy spies. It's downplayed though in that it was suspected that Kalyaan might not play along; he just did so in a way no-one could've expected.
- Doomed Hometown: Chaisee is revealed to come from one of these in the prologue; her island implied to be the same one where Unanimity was trained was famous for its pearls and sponges that were retrieved by skilled divers without bending, until exclusive rights to the waters were bought by a foreign merchant; envoys from that merchant came and burned Chaisee's village to the ground out of spite.
- Dramatic Irony: The reason that Kavik doesn't give up the chi-blocker Hsien up to the White Lotus is that he believes that chi-blocking, being hand-to-hand combat as opposed to bending, could never upset the balance between the four nations. Avatar Korra might disagree there.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Kalyaan’s love for Kavik is what allows the heroes to get the final pieces of information they need for Yangchen to confront Chaisee. Team Avatar injure Kavik and withhold medical attention until Kalyaan starts talking. Notably, this was Kavik’s idea, knowing it would be the only thing that would make his brother break.
- Fate Worse than Death: A subversion. Yangchen eventually finds Jetsun within the Fog of Lost Souls at the end of the story, but learns that, in contrast to her fears, her older sister is able to remain unaffected by the torturous effects of the fog. At the same time, she's also able to provide relief for a proportion of her fellow victims, and is by all appearances happy to do so indefinitely.
- Fictional Board Game: In addition to franchise mainstay Pai Sho, this novel has Yangchen and Kavik play Sparrowbones against a pair of Zongdus; it's similar to Mahjong, and Sparrowbones is actually a pun off of the fact that "Mahjong" means "little sparrows".
- Foreshadowing: Prior to Yangchen, Kavik and Jujinta's arrival on the island where Unanimity was developed, there are a couple of details that hint at Yangchen already knowing the island's location prior to sending Jujinta, Tayagum and Akuudan to steal information about it.
- While Yangchen claims to have deduced that Chaisee was ferrying supplies to the island through stolen records, Tayagum never came to such a conclusion when he looked at those same records himself. Yangchen excuses this as her having studied the zongdus' use of codenames more than him, which admittedly could be true, but there's also nothing to suggest that she couldn't have lied here for the sake of her cover story.
- Yangchen, Kavik and Jujinta later have to scout a region of the ocean that supposedly contains the island's rough location. Pointedly though, Yangchen doesn't bring along Tayagum, the member of the team with the most experience in wayfinding. Then again, it's not like she needed his help to pinpoint the island's location.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Thanks to his deliberate misdirection of Yangchen in the previous book, Kavik is this for the rest of her team here, with Jujinta full-on attempting to murder him when the two of them see each other again.
- Impossible Task: The Rejection Ritual for being banished from one of the Air Temples takes this shape because it's considered bad form to tell someone outright never to return. Before being allowed back, Yangchen is tasked with gathering a blue panda lily, the shadow of a breeze, the sinews of a spirit, and the material possession that will fill the emptiness that lies in every human being.
- Last of His Kind: Thapa attempts to Invoke this, taking the opportunity during his escape to kill the other Combustionbenders, in order to make himself more valuable. Played With when it is revealed that Yingsu actually survived; but by the end of the book she is now the last Combustionbender alive.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Yangchen's ultimate solution to the Earth King's vengefulness and Chaisee's determination to set herself up as zongdu for life is to let her, Kalyaan, and their son go free, but she also lets Earth King Feishan know that Chaisee is the one who tried to assassinate him with combustionbenders and the only one who knows how to create more. This ensures that Chaisee won't risk drawing attention to herself with power grabs and that the unstable, paranoid Feishan will waste his time and resources tracking her down. Yangchen simply breaks even in the game, and stands at the ready to push things in one direction or the other as suits her.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- Kavik choosing to help Kalyaan smuggle Unanimity to Bin-Er in the last book, alongside the implication that someone in the Order of the White Lotus leaked information about Unanimity has made the post-Platinum Affair situation even worse, with Earth King Feishan gearing up to go to war with the Fire Nation and Water Tribes, with the other nations fearing that they have no choice but to do the same. Yangchen at one point tells Ayunerak and Kavik that while she had originally planned to repair the divisions caused by the Platinum Affair, right now she'll be lucky if she has a few cities left over once the world's done fighting.
- It's implied early on that the Platinum Affair and subsequent mess were caused by members of the White Lotus encouraging Water Tribe Chief Oyaluk and Fire Lord Gonryu to back General Nong against Earth King Feishan, in the hope that Nong would take power and prove a better ruler of the Earth Kingdom. Instead, Feishan crushed Nong, discovered what his fellow heads of state had been up to, and thus the Platinum Affair happened.
- Paranormal Gambling Advantage: While bending can't really be considered 'paranormal' in this setting, Yangchen and Kavik cheat at Sparrowbones against Iwashi using waterbending, first so that Iwashi incurs a massive point penalty by upsetting the trove, and then by passing valuable tiles between each other and using signals.
- Redemption Quest: A good portion of the novel is framed as Kavik's attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of Yangchen and her companions after he betrayed them at the end of the previous volume, while also trying to feed information to the White Lotus so they don't rat him out.
- Rejection Ritual: After her actions brought the combustionbenders to the Northern Air Temple's doorstep and the landslide they caused nearly killed a number of the refugees taking shelter there, Yangchen is subject to this from abbot Sonam, banishing them from the Northern Air Temple permanently.
- The Reveal: Kalyaan is Chaisee's lover and the father of her son, making the baby Kavik's nephew.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: When she first sees Yongdu Iwashi's personal Sparrowbones table, painted and patterned using rare lacquers to convincingly mimic extensive bloodstains, Yangchen is brought up short in visible shock and Iwashi gives a not-particularly-sincere apology to the Avatar for forgetting her airbender sensibilities. Yangchen might have done more than blink at what amounted to a try-hard paint job for effect, but she regarded someone using the stump of a spirit infused old growth tree from the Foggy Swamp as a gaming table with sincere horror.
- Snipe Hunt: Yangchen's banishment from the Northern Air Temple takes this form, with Sonam formally informing her of things urgently needed for the temple's long term survival note , then "requesting" she bring them with her when next she visits.
- Spy Fiction: Like the previous Yangchen novel, Legacy fits this genre, a mix between "Layered Drink" (most of Yangchen's gambits rely on deception) and "Absinthe" (heavy speculative fiction, particularly fantasy, elements).
- Superpowered Evil Side: Yangchen's descriptions of the Avatar State make it sound like this at times; when she enters it, she describes a temptation to forsake her humanity that no other Avatar in the series has displayed so far. It may be connected to the attitudes of a previous Avatar known as Gun.
- Training from Hell: the last book implied as much from Thapa’s description of the training to unlock Combustionbending. Firebenders are submerged in the ocean, chained to rocks, and essentially have to use Firebending underwater; something that should be impossible. This results in the concussive force of bending breaking the chains without the flames of standard Firebending occurring. Only the benders with the largest lungs were able to withstand the training and survive. And that was merely the first stage of training.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The dynamic between Yangchen's group and the White Lotus (and by extension Kavik, who's signed up with the latter). Both factions want to keep the world in balance, but Yangchen isn't willing to trust the White Lotus on account of their previous indifference and possible role in causing the Platinum Affair, while the White Lotus aren't willing to trust Yangchen due to her youth and impulsiveness. This stops being the case at the end, at least between Yangchen's group and Kavik.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Order of the White Lotus. They claim that their goal is to maintain balance in the world, but they're willing to let the Four Nations collapse into war, go against Yangchen and make use of combustionbending even after learning of the cruelty involved in its development if it means they get that balance in the end.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Chapters 15 to 35 largely take place within the city of Taku. Near the end of this arc though is Chapter 33, "Appetite for Bitter", which takes place before Yangchen and her team traveled to Taku, and features Yangchen talking and making plans with a still-living Yingsu.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Yangchen is banished from the Northern Air Temple after her decision to house prisoners there leads to an attack on both the temple itself and the minor village below that it protects, resulting in numerous casualties.
