#feliandor

Hii K! I hope you're having a good day as well :)

This is a great question, and it came at a good time because the ATLA hyperfixation has been creeping back into my brain as of late. I have thought of combining Spirit Animals and ATLA before, but I haven't worked out all the details in my head.

The tricky thing is, in the world of ATLA, two of our protagonists wouldn't exist. Rollan and Meilin are fine, though, being Native American and Chinese-coded respectively. I've considered an AU with just the two of them. But in order to have Conor and Abeke in this as well, we would have to either allow other races to exist in ATLA's world or have this whole AU take place on Erdas. In any case, Conor would be an earthbender, Abeke a waterbender, Meilin a firebender and Rollan an airbender.

Let's say they all team up because of a prophecy that says four benders, each of a different element, will be able to harness the power of the Avatar and restore balance to the world. Maybe Feliandor was the last Avatar and did catastrophic damage to the planet during the last Great War. The Great Beasts would be able to control all four elements and, as it turns out, bestow that power upon a lesser creature. Kovo and Gerathon did this for the first time with Feliandor, and he almost levelled the world with his power before he was stopped. Five hundred years later, they choose a new Avatar to finish what was started -- Shane. Only by using all of their bending together are the Four Heroes able to stop him.

Imagine if Kovo, Gerathon and the Four Fallen were so massive that they couldn't help but destroy some of their own allies amidst the fighting. Especially the two traitors, because we know their soldiers were disposable to them, but the Four Fallen as well. As Uraza tangles with Gerathon, her claws rake through scores of Greencloaks. As Briggan and Kovo lunge for each other's throats, Greencloak and Conqueror and animal alike are crushed into oblivion beneath the two giants' feet. Adding to the senseless horror of it all.

What if the Four Fallen had grievously wounded Kovo or Gerathon (or perhaps both), in such a way that the results are visible in the time of the Second Devourer War and strike fear in the hearts of their soldiers? I think it would be cool if the two traitors, despite having survived the event that eliminated the Four, are permanently disfigured and only dull echoes of their former glory. Can you imagine if Gerathon's hood was torn to shreds by Uraza, her once beautiful scales marred by claw wounds that Tellun cursed to fester and rot? Or if part of Kovo's face was mutilated by Briggan's fangs and covered in scar tissue, with Essix's talon marks stretching across his shoulders, bare where the fur never grew back? They lived, but at the cost of being forever marked by the brethren they slew.

They should have explained the Fall of the Four by establishing that a Great Beast can only be killed by another. Gerathon killed Uraza and Jhi with her venomous bite, Kovo ripped Briggan and Essix apart with his bare hands. No human blade could have felled them -- it was going against two of their own that resulted in their downfall. The fact it came to this is a great tragedy. Once, Briggan, Uraza, Jhi and Essix lived peacefully, even happily, with Kovo and Gerathon. They were brethren, forged by the same catastrophe; survivors who found comfort in one another (or so I like to believe). They would have walked beside each other for eons. They should never have met in battle. And when they did, they discovered they could destroy one another. This could be one reason as to why the remaining Great Beasts retreated into isolation and did not commune for hundreds of years -- perhaps, for the first time, they were afraid of each other.

In The Book of Shane, Shane reveals that Feliandor's grave is only symbolic because "when the Greencloaks had finished with him, there hadn't been enough left of him to bury". This might be one of the most haunting sentences in the series. In A Revised History of Erdas, they dismembered him and paraded his head around, then burned him to ash. Some say Tembo kept the skull and hid it somewhere in the newly built Greenhaven, but Tembo himself denied these claims. (Meilin once searched the castle for the skull, to no avail.)

I personally would have liked to know more about the genocide of Stetriol (if it truly happened) and who took over as ruler after Feliandor. All my thinking about it led me to draft some plans for a novella about Feliandor's successor and what happened in Stetriol after the defeat of the Conquerors. His name is Lysander. He is the cousin of Feliandor and the direct ancestor of the present-day royal family, including Shane. I'm still figuring him out, but I think y'all will like him.