By Agni's Grace - Urge (2024)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Azula felt her world shift as she watched her brother - perfect balance, almost as acrobatic as her new friend Ty Lee, consistent winner of the floor is lava and bane of her winning streak’s existence - plummet off of the roof of the palace. as she realized that her brother, son of Agni, third in line to the throne, is as human as the people that serve them. As she watched as he reached out to her, too startled to scream, eyes wide with fear. As his leg crumpled beneath him, as his head struck the ground, as she practically flew down the post underneath the eaves to go to her brother. When she had shoved him, she never thought that he would actually fall, she just wanted him to be scared – he was always so strong, so surefooted, and she had just been so angry that she had lost to him yet again – voices that she occasionally heard whisper to her started up, louder than ever, as her hands fluttered above her brother’s prone body. ‘Monster,’ said a voice that sounded like her mother’s, the intonation the same as the time she had caught Azula setting fire to the turtleduck pond in a fit of rage after a particularly demeaning tutoring session from a fire sage. ‘Weak,’ a voice like her father’s, cold and distant and holding great reproach for the emotion she was suddenly showing her brother. a distant voice, next, joining in the chorus, with a voice like bells - telling her to—

Her brother’s eyes fluttered open, and then tears started to leak from them as the pain registered in his young body. As he opened his mouth in a heart-rending wail, all of the other voices were drowned out as she heard her brother, every day for their entire lives, telling her that he loved her, one way or another – no matter what she had done to him, no matter how she had outdone him, no matter how father favored her over him, his rightful heir – that he loved her. And as she yelled for a guard, for her mother, for anyone to help them, as she reached down and strung her brother’s broken and sobbing form over her diminutive back, she realized something that she had denied for too long – that she loved him, too.

Her mother sat her down after Zuko’s leg was set and he was in a drug-laced dream to abate the worst of the pain. “Azula, what you did – I cannot believe that you could be capable of such cruelty-”

At her mother’s words, her vitriolic tone, something in Azula broke. Her resolve, perhaps, to be the unbreakable heir to her father’s legacy, if not his throne, as he wanted her to be; her spirit, definitely, rebelling under the casual cruelty to which she had been subjected and had been subjecting it to in turn. And with that last straw that broke the proverbial ostrich-camel’s back, so too did the dam that had been holding back her tears for hours.

(She realized, in her mind, that her father had not come to see her brother. That her father had not come to see her. Had not even sent an advisor to check on their wellbeing.)

Ursa startled to see the tears well up in her daughter’s eyes and startled even harder when Azula threw herself into her arms. It had been – too long – since Azula had sought her out for comfort like this. Years, even, since she had even shown that she would need comfort. Ursa wondered when she had stopping thinking of her daughter as a child and begun thinking of her as nothing more than Ozai’s favorite. As Azula cried inarticulate, ignoble tears more befitting of a peasant child with a scraped knee than those of a girl fifth in line for the throne of the line of Agni, she felt that illusion melt away, washed away by the salty tears soaking the front of her kimono, and her arms settled around the shaking form of her daughter, no older than six, as she stood watch over Zuko.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Azula calmed. Her sobs settled into hiccups, and then the sighing sniffs of a child who has fully cried themselves out. “I didn’t want him to fall, Mother,” she said, in the quietest voice Ursa had heard her use in years. “I was – I was so angry with him. He had won the ground is lava again, and – he always, always wins, and I just wanted him to – to be-”

Here, she paused. Ursa remembered how Zuko was at this age, and how sometimes his words would fail him, especially when talking about how he felt. She waited and was rewarded when her daughter began to speak again. “I wanted him to say I did a good job,” Azula finally said. “Lu Ten always tells me good job when I win, and I wanted Zuko to see that I was doing a good job.” She looked up at her mother, eyes round and brows furrowed. “I pushed him, because I was mad – but I didn’t mean for him to fall, I swear, Mother, I sw-”

Ursa pulled her wayward turtleduck into her lap, muffling her words. She hugged her daughter, tight, like she hadn’t done in years. “I know, Azula,” she said, kissing her head. “I trust you. But I still need to make sure that you know what you did was wrong, and dangerous. You could have hurt your brother much worse than he is – it is only by the grace of Agni that he will be able to walk away from this, instead of being rendered immobile.” She felt Azula nod against her chest and continued on. “Someone will have to help him with his daily duties, and he will be walking with crutches for at least a few months, the healers tell me. And he will be unable to work on his katas.”

Azula startled and stared up at her mother. “But – if he can’t work on his katas-”

Ursa understood, then, that her daughter had been suffering just as much from Ozai’s teachings as Zuko has suffered in his neglect. Azula understood the inherent punishment that would come to her brother for his perceived failure, even though he had not been the one to cause his injury. Ursa pursed her lips, and then smiled slightly as she lighted upon a solution. “What we will have to do, instead, is work on his inner connection to his fire. And yours, too. I will inform the royal tutors of the change in curriculum, effective as soon as Zuko has finished his course of laudanum.”

“Won’t father be-”

“Angry? No, of course not. Lu Ten had to undergo a period of training such as this when his mother passed away. It has only strengthened him as a bender.”

Internally, Azula worried that her mother was unable to grasp the ambition of her father. Father wanted she and her brother to outstrip their cousin in prowess and skill, and any setbacks were sure to be taken poorly.

Ursa saw the continued fear on her daughter’s pale face. “And besides – I will request an audience with Fire Lord Azulon to have the curriculum approved. He will understand.”

At this, Azula felt herself infinitesimally relax. Grandfather, while not a kind man, was less prone to hot tempers as her father, and had approved the curriculum for Lu Ten. He may make some adjustments, as Lu Ten was older when it had occurred, but it was possible that it would remain the same, since she and her brother were far more advanced than their cousin had been at their age.

(A small voice in her head asked her why that was, why they were being pushed so hard, in a voice that rang with bells. Azula would kindly ask that voice to shut up with its inconvenient observations.)

Ursa carried her daughter to bed that night, long hours after she had fallen asleep in her arms, watching over her brother. She had refused to leave his side. Ursa was not sure what had changed in her daughter, only that something had changed. When she was outlining the curriculum to present to the Fire Lord later in her chambers, she paused to reflect. Azula had been suffering. Azula had not turned to her for comfort until this had happened. Why had that been?

(The word that had haunted her for months rang out. Monster, she had called her daughter. Ursa wanted to sob. How could she have said something like that to her only daughter?)

(Both of her children needed protection. From their father, and from the rage that their mother harbored deep inside. Ursa resolved to become that protector, and to shore up the walls that held her rage at bay. She would not injure her daughter again.)

Azula had awoken as her mother had settled her between her covers. Groggily, she felt her mother kiss her on the forehead, tell her that she loved her – how long had it been, since her mother had last said that to her? – and sweep out of the room. She shook herself slightly more awake and crawled out of bed, to the shrine in her room that she meditated at every morning with the rising sun, the shrine to Agni and to the other gods about which her silly uncle had told her. She offered her prayers and thanks to the gods, particularly whichever one had decided to take mercy on her brother’s fall. She felt a breeze brush past her bangs, one that sounded like a sigh, and thanked them more fervently. She hesitated, then continued with the request that had been resting heavily upon her heart.

“Please let Mother keep loving me. Please let Zuko keep loving me,” she whispered, not sure who she was asking anymore.

She did not bother asking for her father’s love.

As she wearily climbed back into her bed, she swore that this accursed day would be the last time that she would hurt her brother. As her eyes closed, she heard the voice that had been haunting her all day – the one with the bells – whisper to her. “I have heard this oath,” it said, and then she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

Ursa’s request for an audience with the Fire Lord was granted early the next morning. While her choice as Ozai’s wife had always been a political one, the old man had grown fond her his daughter-in-law – far fonder, it must be said, than he was of her husband. He had known her, after all, as she was growing older, had been a strong godfather to her – her parents fervent to know that their connections to Avatar Roku were that of blood and not of loyalty – had attended the very plays and productions she had been so proud of in her youth. So, as he played the role of indomitable Fire Lord, and she played that of the obsequious Princess, he smiled softly to herself as the flames shrouded his face when she knelt in front of him. “Rise,” he said to her, and she sat back on her heels from her deep kowtow into seiza. “Lady Ursa,” he said, my daughter, he did not say, “for what reason did I receive this request?”

“Fire Lord Azulon,” she began in what he recognized as her this is a very formal occasion and I must not forget it voice, “Prince Zuko broke his leg yesterday when playing with his sister. As such, the katas and forms that he is currently being taught are largely unable to be performed. I would like to submit a formal request to restructure the curriculum to accommodate this injury, and I have provided an updated possible course for him to undertake in its stead.” She took a deep breath and soldiered forward. “It is similar to those courses that Prince Lu Ten took after the death of Princess Kionchee, and I have been reassured by the royal tutors that it will be an accordingly difficult course to further his education while he is incapable of more traditional instruction.”

Azulon waved his hand at his clerk, who was nodding from slightly behind Lady Ursa, holding a sheath of paper that he assumed was the outlined curriculum. “This is acceptable, but Princess Ursa, I must know – how did this come to pass? And why is this the first I am hearing of the injury?”

Ursa looked up at Azulon, startled confusion evident on her face. “Fire Lord Azulon, I am not sure why the news is only reaching you from my lips – I sent a page to Prince Ozai with the information, and I had assumed he would explain our absence from your esteemed presence at dinner.”

Azulon had noticed, but his f*ckless son had not deemed it important to tell his father, apparently, instead choosing to explain it into nothing. His temper flared slightly, and the flames surrounding the dais flickered almost imperceptibly. He nodded, finally, seeing the fear tighten Ursa’s expression. “And the source of the injury?” he prompted.

At this, Ursa grimaced. “Well, they were on the roof.”

“Ah,” he remarked, making a mental note to ensure the guards were on a more careful lookout for children climbing up to the eaves. “Did he slip, then?”

Her grimace contorted into something even more regretful and upset than it had been. “Unfortunately, it seems that his sister pushed him.”

Azulon’s control on the flames slipped, and they jumped several feet, not so imperceptibly this time. “Princess Azula pushed Prince Zuko from the roof?”

“No – I mean, ah, no, your Majesty, her intent was not to push him from the roof – but, it seems, in a fit of anger, she did push him. He lost his footing then and stumbled off the roof.” She sighed. “I understand that it sounds like she was doing it out of malice. I have spoken with her, and she has shown me more regret than I ever expected to see from her. I must hope that she was being genuine with me.”

Azulon settled his face into one spindly hand. He had dealt with four assassination attempts in the past six weeks, and now he was worried about fratricide from the fifth in line to the throne. “Lady Ursa, I understand that this may be written off as a child’s temper, but I cannot let it stand as it is. She will need to be punished,” he finished, steel in his voice. “Do I need to devise a fitting punishment, or am I to assume that you have created one already?”

Ursa’s grimace did a nervous flip, and she nodded, pulling a scroll from her sleeve. “I wrote this out last night to obtain your approval, as well,” she started. “I am, as always, your servant. ‘The Princess Azula shall be barred from firebending for two weeks and shall attend meditation sessions with the Fire Sages twice daily. She will be the sole assistant to her brother for a month, and will, in the time that he is in lessons, attend to the commands and instructions of the Fire Sages in the completion of their duties. All of this shall be done without complaint and without protest.’” Ursa glanced up at the inscrutable expression of the Fire Lord. “Is this acceptable to you?”

Azulon thought for a moment, then nodded. “Amend the firebending statement – I would like her to work solely on her ability to temper a flame and extinguish it instead of fanning it. The only fires she shall work with will be those I set, and she will spend an hour in meditation with me every two days.”

Ursa nodded, then sunk back into a kowtow. “I follow your will and Agni’s,” she murmured in the traditional wording of their forebears. Fire Lord Azulon dismissed her with a wave of his hand and watched her go with a ball of rage eating into the pit of his stomach. He knew that this anger that his granddaughter had come from his son’s prompting, but he knew not what to do. He needed to protect his legacy. If this was how it had to be done, then so it should be.

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

Azula learned of her new training sessions with her grandfather that afternoon. Her mother had told her that she was forbidden from use of her inner flame unless in the presence of Fire Lord Azulon, and of her sessions with the Fire Sages. Obviously, she would be assisting her brother – she was the one who created the need, out of a fit of childish anger (you are a child, just an extraordinarily powerful one, said the bells), so she should well be the one to help him – this was not a concern to her. She only hoped that it would help Zuko keep loving her. The only part that made her quail was the time spent in direct supervision of the Fire Lord. While her grandfather loved all of his grandchildren, his love was cold in a way that Zuko’s was not. It was driven by a desire to see all parts of his legacy succeed and thrive, at least as far as she could see, and she worried that he would see through her powerful façade into the heart of her lack of control – over her temper, over her inner flame, over every aspect of her life –

But she steeled her nerves as she stood outside of the grandiose doors to the throne room, feeling her heart flutter in her breast like an injured dove-cricket. She had to do this; her mother had told her that this was a demand placed upon her by the Fire Lord. This did nothing to quell her terror, of course, but it made it all the more absolute that she must succeed. As she waited for the doors to swing open and her presence to be announced, she wondered what would happen if she failed. Would she be sent away, banished to some remote colony until she came of age and would be married off? Perhaps sent to the cloisters in isolation for a year? She continued catastrophizing until a sunbeam passed over her head with the feeling of a warm blanket settling over her shoulders, and suddenly she felt like she could stand tall (as diminutive as that was) and do what was required of her. Yes. She could.

She had to.

Finally, finally, the doors swung open wide. It was a gaping maw swallowing her into the dark throne room, the moat of fire ringing the dais acting as one of the only sources of light in the entire room, the rest fading into the background in comparison. Why Fire Lord Azulon had chosen this arena to test her, she couldn’t fathom, but she had a feeling it was to make her appropriately fearful for what her grandfather had in store for her.

“Princess Azula,” came the low, reproachful voice of the Fire Lord. She did not visibly swallow, but only because her mouth was suddenly so dry that there was nothing there to ease the way. “You have committed a grave offense against your brother, and therefore, against the crown. The Lady Ursa has explained to you your punishment, has she not?”

Azula had assumed the traditional kowtow as soon as she had stepped in front of the throne and straightened only enough to nod. She knew better than to speak without permission in the throne room and would only respond to a direct verbal command from the Fire Lord to speak in his presence in this room.

“Sit straight and speak, child.”

Taking her cue, she responded affirmatively. “I submit myself to your guidance and instruction, Fire Lord Azulon.”

The Fire Lord’s form was virtually invisible behind the high wall of flames from her perspective in seiza on the floor. She imagined she could see him nod, but it might have merely been a trick of the flickering light. Her heart continued to pound. Suddenly, the flames split. “Come, child,” he beckoned, indicating that she should take a spot on the lower dais. As she climbed the stairs, she felt less like she was ascending to the glorious hand of Agni and more like she was climbing to a noose to hang herself, a cliff with no bottom in sight. But still she quashed her fear and proceeded. Weakness would be rooted out, she reminded herself, as her father had always said.

She sat in seiza once more waiting for further instruction. The Fire Lord scrutinized her face, brow furrowed and frown deep in his long beard. After a heavy pause, he sighed. “Today, Princess Azula, you will be working on control. You will return to me every other day until I have deemed you acceptable.” He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a candle, lighting it with only a wave of his hand. “You will attempt to take control of this flame from me and extinguish it. I do not expect you to manage this feat; however, I do expect you to exceed all expectations I might have for you before we move on to the next stage of your training.” He set the candle into a brazier next to the throne. “You may begin,” he finished as he waved a hand to the attendant who knew that was their cue to begin allowing in the next petitioner.

Azula knew that her grandfather had set her an impossible task. She knew that, despite his increasing age, he was the most powerful bender in the Fire Nation, outstripping both of his sons by leagues. But she was never one to accept impossibilities as the inflexible things they made themselves out to be, so she set to her task with a singlemindedness that even the most stalwart of monks would have envied.

She could not fail. She wouldn’t allow herself.

For the next hour, Azula sat cramped in seiza, using all of her might to attempt to prevent Azulon’s candle from burning down, to steal control from him. Once or twice, she thought she had it, but just as quickly as she had grasped the flame, it had been snatched back from her. All she was able to do was temper its heat slightly, reducing the rate at which it burned. At the end of the hour, signified by the clattering peg from the timekeeping candle that had been set up specifically by the attendants for this exercise, she did not move. Azulon finished with his petitioner and turned back to her with a slightly raised brow. “You are not to use your bending outside of my presence unless under direct order from the Fire Sages,” he finally said, taking in the sweat beading his granddaughter’s face and the pallor it had taken on. “I will see you in two days. You are dismissed,” he said, waving his hand at her and turning his face away from her.

“Yes, Fire Lord Azulon,” she murmured, sinking back into a kowtow and then standing gingerly. She left the room and only dared to slump once the doors were closed behind her. She felt like crying. Was she ever going to be able to bend again? If it was that difficult to just steal seconds, how would it feel to try to sustain her thievery? To have the full force of his attention on the candle, instead of having him think of it only in the back of his mind? She dreaded the day. She had no idea how she would be able to make it happen, only that it had to so that she could protect her brother – if she was never able to firebend again, then her father would take all of his anger out on Zuko for ‘causing’ the problem.

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

Azula had spent three weeks flitting in and out of Zuko’s periphery. She helped him get from place to place, seeming to pop into existence before he knew he needed help, doing everything except getting him ready for the day and his bathing (which, he had to concede, would have been wildly embarrassing, and he didn’t think that her fingers, as nimble as they were for a child two years his junior, were nimble still enough to fashion his daily garb into a presentable fashion around his set leg and crutches. She would see him from place to place, arrange him and his things, and then disappear – where to, he had no idea; when his mother had told him that he was to undertake new coursework, he had automatically assumed that both he and Azula would be doing it together, as they had been since he had presented his first sparks (some time after hers, she would be the first to explain).

But when he had sat with a new tutor and looked for Azula’s place at the table, he had noticed that there was no second seat. And when he had looked up for her, confused, he had realized that she had spirited herself away yet again.

He was getting to be frustrated. He hadn’t had more than a second to speak with his little sister since his accident, and no time at all that wasn’t strictly supervised. He wanted to ask her what she thought of his progress on control, and his foray into theoretical work that even Lu Ten had struggled with. (His tutors were privately very impressed – for having what they had been told was a shoddy grip on firebending, he grasped difficult concepts with ease, and his control and precision was remarkable for an eight-year-old princeling. But of course, they would not tell the prince this – to tell him would be to imply that they expected his failure.) But Zuko hadn’t had even a breath to talk to Azula about it before he was being whisked away to the next place, constantly being kept busy. And even when he wasn’t busy, she was, disappearing off to do who-knows-what with who-knows-whom. It was absolutely infuriating, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it all.

The opportunity presented itself on an uncharacteristically soggy day in Caldera, when the torches on the walkways kept guttering out because of a strong wind and wet raindrops soaking through the oil keeping them alit, and his tutors – who lived outside of the palace, as they were not the ones that his father preferred to keep close for constant drilling – were unable to come for his normal coursework. He sent a fervent thanks to Agni for finally listening to his increasingly desperate pleas to have enough time to see what Azula was doing and hobbled his way down the hall before she could be called, having had woken up before the sun normally rose and gotten himself dressed without ringing for his attendant. He knocked on Azula’s door, and hearing no response, let himself in with all the confidence of an older brother intent on making himself known.

Azula was not in bed as he thought she would be – in fact, she was curled up in a blanket in front of what looked to be a makeshift shrine. Azula very rarely let him into her quarters, preferring to swan about in his and disrupt the placement of things, like that time that she had shifted all of his furniture a bit to the left, just enough for him to keep stubbing his toes but not enough that any accusations he levied at her would actually stick. So he looked at everything in her room with new eyes in the way of a sibling who was doing something they were not supposed to be doing. He noticed that the bed looked undisturbed, like she had never crawled beneath its sheets the night before, and that the jewelry box at her vanity had disgorged its contents everywhere. The ribbon that she wore in her hair was thrown across the chair, and he could see the glint of knives hidden in a hastily-shut drawer. There was a painting of her favorite scene from Love Amongst the Dragons on the wall, as well as a family portrait in a more prominent place. But his eyes kept swinging back to the shrine.

It wasn’t like the one in his room, or his mother’s. He had no idea what his father’s shrine to Agni looked like, as he was very much not allowed in his father’s room. He knew that Lu Ten’s shrine had been littered with devotions to Agni from across the Fire Nation and its colonies, collected or sent back by his father and mother when she lived. But this had figures on it that didn’t match with the usual colors or symbols that Agni was represented by. In fact, it had some figures that rested there that Zuko would swear were from… other nations?

He inched forward, pressing one figure over a black and white swirled signal etched with the bas relief of two fish, when his crutch knocked his little sister’s foot, and she sprung out of her cocoon, arms raised as if to throw a fireball, but without their signature flames wreathing them. Azula looked terrified, and he raised his arms, trying to soothe her – he imagined that he had just given her a terrible fright, waking up in the middle of a storm to someone unexpected in her room. “Azula, it’s me!” he cried, seeing her darting eyes settle and calm, the storm in them giving way to a more still anxiousness. “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching towards her and then thinking better of it. “I didn’t mean to scare you, I was just coming in to try to talk to you, and then I saw you on the floor, and I thought that I should wait for you to wake up because if you’re sleeping on the floor that must mean you’re really tired and I wanted to look at your shrine-”

At this, Azula’s eyes widened, and her gaze flicked to the assortment on the table. “It’s not what you think,” she said, voice quiet and scared. “Uncle – Crown Prince Iroh – he sent them to me, with stories, I didn’t know where to put them-”

Her voice held an uncharacteristic waver, one that made Zuko pause. “Azula, I’m not mad – I just wanted to know what was on there. If Uncle sent them to you, then they can’t be bad. Don’t worry,” he said, and was startled to suddenly have an armful of his little sister throwing herself under his reaching arms.

Well. This was just to be a day of surprises, wasn’t it?

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, and as lightning flashed outside of the window, Zuko got a good look at his little sister’s face for the first time since that day on the roof. She was wan, drawn, and pale in a way that looked unhealthy. He wondered when the last time he saw her take more than two bites of a dish before pushing it away, and then wondered why he hadn’t seen her running about with her two friends. “I never wanted you to fall, I just was so mad, I thought that you’d just be scared and then we’d keep playing – I was so scared when you fell, I thought you were dead, I don’t want you to die, please don’t die, please-”

Zuko hugged his sister back, her words dying into soft sobs, muffled by the silk of his robes. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he soothed, whispering the words and praying to Agni that he was telling the truth. “Azula, I know,” he said, pulling her slightly away from his chest so he could look her in the eyes. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. I could see it in your face when I started to fall, how scared you were.” He hugged her close again, still shocked that she was allowing him to do so. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s okay, I’m here. I’m still here.”

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

Azula had been aware, in the abstract way that one is aware of a fly buzzing in the corner of a room, of her persistent, nagging fear that her brother would hate her forever and that he would stop loving her before he had stumbled into her room that night, but she hadn’t really acknowledged how badly she would have reacted if he had done what she had almost expected him to do. What her mother had almost done when she understood the gravity of what Azula had done on the roof.

She had cried in front of her brother. Cried. She hadn’t cried in front of Zuko since she was a child. (You are a child, the little bell voice rang gently in her head, easily ignorable for once in her life.) It was embarrassing, and weak, and all of the horrible things her father would say to her, but for once in her life, she felt safe. Her brother’s arms were around her, and he knew that she hadn’t meant to hurt him. She couldn’t bring herself to ask him if he still loved her – she hoped he did, more than she hoped for anything else in the world, but she was so scared – what if he said no? What if he hedged like her mother had for the past two years of Azula’s life? So she left her worst fear unspoken, her deepest hope buried in her heart.

The past few weeks had been trying. Azulon had increased his concentration steadily on the flame, and every time she thought she had overcome, she realized her folly. His power was insurmountable at her current stage, and to think otherwise would be to fail from her hubris, putting her own life in danger and, more importantly, that of her loved ones. Her mother had assured her that she would be allowed to return to coursework soon, after the first month of Zuko’s convalescence was done. What her mother didn’t understand was that, compared to the undertakings Ozai expected of them, her new daily tasks were akin to a vacation. She had spent the first week with the Fire Sages doing grunt work – the part of her that had been raised to expect things be done for her had raged against the repetitive scrubbing and endless fetching that they had tasked her to, but it had just as quickly calmed after she first attended a meditation session with the brothers that made up the Fire Temple in Caldera.

Azula had gone to many prayers and ceremonies to Agni; she was of Agni’s blood, after all. But the ceremonies that the Royal Family deigned to attend were not always those, she learned, that were closest to their God. The pomp and circ*mstance that gilded the experience for her as a member of the nobility were all but absent in the worship of the Fire Sages.

She supposed that calling them austere would be a bit too harsh, and to call them simple would be a discredit to the services. The posturing that she had become used to, with her grandfather leading services as the country’s leader under the tutelage of the Fire Sages – something that she privately thought Azulon chafed under, the country’s structure placing the knowledge of the Head Sage over that of the Fire Lord – was entirely absent in the worship that the Fire Sages undertook. But even without all the trappings, their care for the tasks that Agni entrusted to them resonated with Azula in a way that her grandfather’s booming voice never had.

They started every service with the ringing of the ceremonial gong, followed immediately by a ringing of bells, ranging from deep to ever-so-light in tone, so twinklingly faint that it almost didn’t register. They chanted deep and guttural chants that were so ancient in tongue that Azula had to concentrate to understand what they were saying, working every piece of her brain that had ever defied a language tutor, saying that she would never use it, so why should she learn it?

(Privately, Azula wondered why her mother had insisted she learn the ancient languages when Azulon deemed them superfluous. He held services not in the ancient tongues but in modern language, ostensibly to keep them accessible to the people. In her second week with the Sages, she had indulged her curiosity and read the ancient texts harbored in the cloisters’ library, ones that shocked her – ones describing the love that was shared between all nations, the harmony that the Avatar was supposed to bring. Texts that were seditious, describing not an Air Nomad Army, but a group of peaceful monks that went where the wind took them.

Texts that seemed to have been charred around the edges. Texts that were placed in strange places among books that had nothing to do with the others that surrounded them.

Texts that would ensure the destruction of the Fire Sage Temple entirely, if Azula were to say something.

Texts that Azula surreptitiously slipped back into their dim corners, sending an absent prayer to Agni that they would persist, should she choose to return to them.)

After the bells at the beginning of the services had stopped echoing in the nave and their chants had quieted, they would make the shape of the flame and ignite a small flame. This, she was allowed to join, as agreed to by her grandfather; she found that keeping the flame steady and unobtrusive was easier after her practice with control, but that keeping it gentle instead of burning was far more difficult.

Her flames wanted to consume. Even when the flame was small, it flickered blue, and hot, and steady, not suitable for the tranquil meditations that her uncle so loved and that she suspected he had learned at the hands of the Fire Sages, rather than his father, not suitable for the ablutions that involved passing a soft gold medallion through the flame over and over until it gleamed. The first time she had tried, it had begun to melt, and it had only been saved by the calm hand of a Sage passing over the medallion and wicking the heat away.

(She hadn’t even known taking heat away was something they – she – anyone – could do.)

So she practiced. She practiced until her eyes danced with spots from staring at the light and her fingertips became covered with soot from the dust motes that burned as they passed through her flickering flame. The Sages almost didn’t know what to make of her single-minded determination to tamp her own heat until she could do what took many Sages years to perfect, but nonetheless humored her, leaving initiates after services there with her to quell the heat when the medallion softened time and again. It took her too long by far to get to the point where the initiates declared her flame safe enough to participate in the ablutions without a supervising Sage.

(What she deemed ‘far too long,’ the Head Sage marveled at. She had grasped the concept in a fraction of the time that it took most of their initiates, and the tranquility it seemed to bring her was what many Sages spent years trying to achieve. Privately, he wondered that, if she had not been born to Agni’s bloodline, or had been born to a less… important branch, if she would have joined the Sages in more than just exercise, but in their ranks as a Sage herself. He knew he could not offer this as an option – frankly, the Fire Lord would be just as like to murder him as not for the thought – but it was obvious that Agni shone onto the Princess in a way that it had not shone onto her father or grandfather.)

Once she joined them in truth, she found the repetitive motions and low chants soothing in a way very little else had been. In a way - only ever to be admitted in private and to Agni - that she found the ocean lapping at the black shores of the volcanic sand of the Caldera to be. In a way that felt faintly heretical towards the power and strength that her father and grandfather valued, but in a way that she knew that the Fire Sages would respect. Not that she would ever tell them.

Even in the cloisters, she suspected – knew, even – that the walls had ears.

(What Azula didn’t know is that those ears didn’t report back to any of the Royal Family. That those ears were of a more… floral sort. That if those ears had any inkling of her feelings about the meditations she was learning from the Sages, they would have been more than pleased. But that was a discovery she would not make for another several years.)

But as her flames became softer and more controlled, she had to fight less and less with her grandfather during their practice sessions. She was more able to slip past his barriers and iron grip with what she thought of as soothing words, whispering to the little flame and convincing it to let her hold it, nurse it, strengthen it. She felt a little jump whenever she could temporarily grasp the little flame, almost as if the flame itself felt joy when it was under her… protection? No, not protection, that would be foolish. Control. She noticed her grandfather’s attempts to steal the flame back took him more concentration and time than they had at the beginning of their exercises, and that sometimes, he would actually falter in his speech, glancing away from the petitioners and having to make eye contact with the candle to take it away from her. Privately, she felt this was a triumph.

And then one day – almost exactly a month since Zuko fell – she managed to do it. She had wicked the little flame away, and had whispered it to sleep, feeling her grandfather trying to coax it into flaring back to life the entire time. She had held the ember still, promising it that it had done a wonderful job, that its time was finished for now, and thanking it for its service – in the way that the Sages had taught her to do when extinguishing sacred flames. While she knew, objectively, that this was not a sacred flame – not blessed directly by a sage, not kindled on a specially-braided wick dipped into wax with a prayer inscribed on each layer – she had begun to think that all flame was privately sacred, that anything brought forth by Agni had to be.

(She had read many treatises in the cloisters that agreed with her, all older than the current school of thought, but nonetheless valid, she had been assured by the Sages that worked in the library. The more current essays never discussed the sacredness of flames – they spoke more of the utility of flame in their lives – but never refuted what their predecessors theorized.)

And it had guttered, and sparked, and slept. Her grandfather – no, he was again the Fire Lord – stared at her in surprise. Azula knew that he was simply disappointed that it had taken her this long to get to the point of enough control that she could manage this simple task – at her age, he had probably done this with dozens of candles at once, taken from his own father – but she was nonetheless pleased that she had achieved it. After a moment of silence – during which the servants surreptitiously slipped from the room, petitioners having had left just before she had made her successful attempt at flame extinguishment – the Fire Lord let out a deep breath, closing his eyes. The flames ringing the dais did not rise, but she felt an almost imperceptible increase in temperature, and suddenly worried that all she had done, by taking so long to succeed at his challenge, was raise his ire.

She hoped that the consequences would only fall upon her. Her mother had done what she thought was best, she had no idea it would take Azula over an entire moon cycle to achieve what should have been done in half that time.

She lowered herself from seiza into a kowtow, slowly, quietly, trying to avoid her grandfather’s notice until after he decided to open his eyes. Eventually, after what felt like a small eternity, the Fire Lord spoke. “Rise,” he said, his deep baritone almost startling her, despite knowing that it was inevitably coming. She did so, keeping her gaze lowered, settling back into seiza, fists clenched and placed in full view on her thighs. “You have succeeded at the task I have given you. The Fire Sages have reported satisfaction with your efforts and assistance in the cloisters and temple. You have been a diligent servant to your brother during his convalescence. With this, I release you from your bond and allow you to return to your lessons and standard routine. You will have to work doubly hard to catch up with the lessons you have missed. I will not accept anything less than perfection, as always, and if word returns to me that you are not meeting those standards, there will be consequences.” Azula nodded, staring at the base of the throne. “You are dismissed,” he finally said, after a few more heavy moments of silence, during which she could feel his gaze on her head and the temperature around him slowly increasing. The heat abruptly fell, and the flames in front of the dais parted. She bowed, stood, bowed again, and backed down the stairs, hands holding the shape of the flame. The doors to the throne room opened enough to let her escape, then closed again in front of her.

And for the first time in almost a month, she felt like she could breathe.

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

Zuko was starting to suspect that his little sister was avoiding him. When her punishment ended a week and a half ago – months earlier than their mother had projected and braced him for – he expected her to be the same Azula, teasing him and beating him in every assessment and generally being the pest he knew she was capable of being. But instead, she continued to disappear for hours at a time, in the mornings and nights, when they had their limited ‘freely unstructured play time.’ Lu Ten had shown up multiple times, expecting to see Azula’s bright eyes, only to be disappointed when Zuko couldn’t tell his cousin where his sister had gone. It was deeply frustrating to be out-snuck like this – he was still reliant on a crutch to get around, and its distinctive ‘pok’ noise meant that he wasn’t able to be nearly as silent as he had been just a few months before. And that wasn’t even mentioning his difficulty scaling the wide posts that lined the walls to perch himself in the rafters – even if his mother hadn’t forbidden it until he was given a clean bill of health by the healer, he wouldn’t be able to manage getting more than three feet off the ground without the use of his second leg!

He glowered at the bowl of rice sprinkled with salmon-salamander and fire flakes in his hand and felt the porcelain warming beneath his fingers. Scowling, he thumped the bowl down on the low table with a clank and sat back in a sulky slump. His mother gave him a rueful smile, glancing at his sister’s empty spot and not even bothering to look at his father’s untouched cushion at the head of the table. Azula had been eating before Zuko had even entered, finishing moments after he sat down, bowed to their mother and been summarily excused. To do what, Zuko had no idea, but he was deeply annoyed that she was ditching him after their ‘come to Agni’ moment in front of her altar. He thought that he had made it clear that he was on her side! And now she wouldn’t even look him in the eye!

Angry, and feeling more than a little entitled to know what she was up to, he asked his mother what Azula could possibly be doing with her time outside of their coursework. Ursa chuckled and placed her hand demurely over what was threatening to become a full-blown grin. Privately, she was relieved that Zuko had not tried to distance himself from his sister – she was realizing that such a course of action would have driven Azula further into her father’s grasp and away from what could be considered ‘good.’

“Your sister is meditating with the Fire Sages and helping them with their ablutions. She’s told me that she has found great peace in the cloisters. Would you like to visit?” At Zuko’s eager nod, she let her smile free. “Then I suppose you’ll have to find time after your coursework this afternoon. She should be almost done and will be joining you in the classroom in a bit. I’ll alert the Sages to expect another little firebrand in their midst,” she said, reaching across the table to pinch her son’s nose, something she knew he hated because it made him feel like a child, but enjoyed, nonetheless.

As Zuko scarfed down the remainder of his breakfast in a decidedly unprincely way and hoisted himself to standing using his crutch, nearly skipping out of the door, Ursa sighed and relaxed infinitesimally. Fire Lord Azulon had come to her after Azula had ‘passed’ his test, in as much of a rage as she’d ever seen directed towards her. He was infuriated that his trials hadn’t taken Azula longer, had insinuated she must be cheating somehow, but Ursa suspected that he was just incensed that Azula’s power was threatening to eclipse where he had been developmentally at his age. Agni forbid that the Fire Lord be happy that his progeny was improving on his techniques. She feared that her daughter would be the subject of his ire, but he had been deeply appeased when told that Azula was still attending her sessions with the Fire Sages.

Ursa personally thought that it was a deep folly to assume her daughter’s interest in the work of the Sages wouldn’t lead to greater mastery – their fire came from Agni, and though the Fire Lord had a special connection to Agni, beneath him only slightly in strength came the Fire Sages. She, personally, had seen her husband bested twice in Agni Kais by Fire Sages. Though Sages, by definition, were not allowed to use their Agni-gifted fire in acts of aggression, they were able to react in defense, and the spinning dances they’d employed to elude Ozai in his anger and self-righteousness had lasted hours – not a single burn on them – until they finally slipped under his flagging defenses and held a tiny, pinpoint, brighter-than-bright flame up to his neck and forced him to yield. Azulon had the bad habit of underestimating those who were unwilling to challenge him, and very few Fire Sages desired to challenge the Fire Lord, He-Who-Was-Chosen-By-Agni, in any way; those that did desire as much had been swiftly shuffled away to the furthest corner of the colonies, where their seditious thoughts and words would have little impact on Azulon’s reign. So Azulon thought that his granddaughter, on the precipice of surpassing him, was spending time with those who would make her weaker, who would only encourage her to gentle her flame. This was not the way of the flame that Azulon had learned from Sozin, cultivated by his father to burn all of the Air out of the world, and so it must be inferior.

Ursa was not so sure that this held true but was more than willing to let him suffer under the illusions he cultivated for himself. She suspected that if the Head Sage saw fit to challenge Azulon, that he might even win – though how they would get to that point, she had no idea. Perhaps a directive from Agni himself? But why would Agni ever go against his own Chosen, she scoffed at herself – there was nothing she could think of that would lead the Head Sage to an Agni Kai against the Fire Lord.

She stood after finishing her own meal in a more sedate manner, feeling her energy flag, as it had been more often in the past few months. Ozai wanted another child – he claimed that he was dissatisfied with Zuko, his sparks only coming a few months prior, so much later than Lu Ten’s, and his own, and his brother’s, and now, his daughter. ‘An heir and a spare,’ he had said offhandedly – and only rolled his eyes when Ursa pointed out that he already had an heir and a spare. He had been coming to her bed more often in recent weeks, at all hours of the night, and while she prayed to Agni that it would take – to spare both of them the animosity that festered unspoken between themselves – she remembered how many tonics and fertility supplements she’d had to take to keep her children. She remembered how many miscarriages she’d had, how many broken nights she’d spent sobbing herself to sleep after another failed attempt, another life lost before Agni had a chance to lay his hand on their hearts. But she knew that it was her duty as the Ozai’s wife, and that he would never let her forget that fact.

She sighed, and shook her head, pressing a hand to her temple. It would do her no good to think about what could have been with Ikem, or to compare her husband to her first love. And it would do no good for her children, living or yet unborn, to fill their heads with nonsense about maybes and what-ifs. No, she needed to steer Azula onto a kinder path, one where she knew that she was loved, and that her brother could be her greatest strength if only she would allow it. A path where Azula could see the good in people, in herself. And her son… Oh, Zuko. Infallibly kind at only eight years of age, wanting to save every lame turtle-duck that came across his path at risk of his own health. She feared what might come of that self-sacrificial nature, of his intense need for justice, if he could not temper himself and learn moderation. He showed every emotion of his plainly for all to see, and while that was acceptable for a boy, it would only harm him in the life at court that he had to look forward to as the firstborn child of a second son. So that is where she would lay her focus – in her children, who needed her at her best. And her best they would get.

--

Zuko had spent months dogging Azula’s footsteps to and from the cloisters, and he had taken to gentling the flame faster and more naturally than she had. It had infuriated her at first, until a Sage had taken her aside and reminded her a lesson that she thought she had learned months ago – that she did not need to be the best at everything that she attempted, and that having “competition” would do her some good. While it would drive her to be better – (she thought that the Sages might know her too well at this point – they understood exactly what to say to soothe her. She would have to consider those implications) – it would also allow her to have a companion on the journey to Agni that she was partaking.

Secretly, Azula wondered if the Sages wanted her to join their ranks. She had considered it, one late night in front of her altar. She thought that the Fire Lord would allow it, but her father would rage and rage and – oh, she just knew who he’d turn that rage onto, to force her to stay as his perfect pawn. She had worked so hard to keep Azulon from turning his eye onto Zuko; she would not allow that hard work to be ruined because of a moment of wanting something outside of her sphere. So, she embraced learning all that she could about sagacity from outside of the order, with the unspoken understanding with the Head Sage that her learning, at best, would allow her to act as a go-between for her cousin when he ascended the Flame Throne.

But despite her brother’s talent for gentle, kind flames, the kind that were perfect for blessings and heating tea, he had no patience for the theory. He could meditate with the best of the Sages, but Azula thought that he might just be going off into a daydream for hours at a time, more than he was thinking about the all-encompassing presence that was Agni.

And Agni did press upon them in the cloisters – much more than she had thought was possible. Agni was in the dust motes that danced through the beams of light, He was in the tealight candles that danced at the edge of altars, He was in the stained-glass windows and the iron and the stone that absorbed His heat. (She didn’t know when she’d begun thinking of Him with that emphasis, but it had felt so right that she couldn’t very well stop now.) She knew that Zuko felt it, if only at times – sometimes they would still at the same second, as if struck by something otherworldly.

(The Sages noted this happening with higher frequency as the siblings became more attuned to the will of Agni. In private, they were shocked – Agni had rarely shown such favor to any of his children, and it had been decades since the last one born into the royal line. They wondered why this was happening and prayed to Agni for enlightenment in how best to guide the children with which they had been so unexpectedly trusted.)

But Agni did not only follow them in the cloisters. On the nights where her brother was able to escape his minders – especially after his leg healed and he was better able to scramble into the eaves as he had been wont to do – he would join her at her private altar to pray. Azula reluctantly began divulging the stories that their Uncle Iroh had been telling her about the trinkets that he brought back… and the myths behind them that she found buried in the cloisters’ library. She was careful to censor the more volatile parts of the stories, not wanting to upset the delicate balance she hoped she was finding with her brother, but gave him the basics – Tui and La were lovers, said to have come to the mortal realm for their desire to never be parted, Oma and Shu learned from the badgermoles – “no, Zuko, it is not a plush toy, it is a religious artifact, now give her back!” – and how Tui was Agni’s sister, divided by the earth, but always coming back together by merit of their familial bonds and love for one another. How Agni was a protector at heart, and not only the raging flame that He could be. How the Air Nomads – yes, Nomads, Zuko – held every life to be equally sacred. This was the point that she most feared her brother would not understand and was therefore the secret that she eased him into the slowest. She had been dismayed when she had learned the truth – buried even further in the catacombs than she had ever been, than she thought anyone had been since Azulon took the throne – and she was still grappling with that truth herself. But, she reasoned, what was done was done, and she knew that Sozin’s lie wasn’t what was pushing Azulon to win this war – that the work they were doing to bring civilization to the rest of the world was Important and that’s why he needed to finish the work.

(This was something that niggled in the back of her brain as ringing false, but she couldn’t bear to face that idea. Not yet.)

And as they learned about the world around them, outside of the Fire Nation, they grew ever closer to one another and to Agni. In her dreams, she would hear laughing bells and feel warm sunlight on her face.

She hadn’t had a nightmare in weeks. And though she knew it would not last, she thanked Agni for his kindness.

Chapter 7

Chapter Text

When Lu Ten returned from his annual season-long training with Master Piandao, he was disappointed to find that his young cousins were now both embroiled with learning in the cloisters.

He had turned thirteen on the last day of his time with Master Piandao and had been looking forward to a grand celebration with his cousins and friends. His friends seemed enthused by the idea, but he had to go to his Aunt Ursa to get his message to his cousins – he had missed them at every turn, and if he didn’t know better, he would have thought they were avoiding him. He told Ursa as much and she only laughed at him, assuring him that that was not the case at all.

When he had seen his aunt, wan and thin save for the disproportionate swelling of her belly, he had been deeply alarmed. His father had told him that his aunt was with child once again, and while he had thought, perhaps foolishly, that this was wonderful news – another cousin to spoil! – he now understood the undertone of worry in his father’s letters. When he asked her about her health, as politely as he knew how, she simply patted his head affectionately and assured him that it was no worse than her pregnancy with Zuko. Azula had been easy, she told him, but Zuko had been a very difficult gestation, causing her sickness every morning and evening, to be so tired she could barely walk unassisted… at least this time, she said, she was able to keep food down. She’d directed him to go to Azula’s room after he had taken dinner with Azulon and his father, and she would ensure that Azula and Zuko were both there to wait for him before they retired to bed.

After dinner, he shouldered his way into Azula’s room without waiting for an invitation in and was rewarded for his troubles by two troublemakers nearly knocking him down. (He had to admit, the simultaneous attacks from the ceiling and below the bed were unexpected, but they wouldn’t catch him like that again.) “Lu Ten!” they cried, Zuko’s voice raspy in the way that Lu Ten associated with intense firebending training. He worried that it may be too intense, if the charred edges of Zuko’s hair were any indication, but that was a problem for him to assess at a later time. “How was your training?” Zuko continued as Azula clambered up Lu Ten’s back. “Did you earn your sword?”

Lu Ten laughed. “You and I both know that Master Piandao has very exacting standards before one can claim to have forged their sword in his smithy.”

“That’s not a no,” Azula lisped, the gap where her two front teeth had been winking at him conspicuously as she leaned over his head from her perch on his shoulders, her bangs dangling in front of his face.

Lu Ten reached up and tugged lightly on them, causing his littlest cousin to scowl and pinch his nose in retaliation. “Astute observation,” he said nasally. “What do you think you can infer from my non-answer?”

Zuko’s jaw dropped. “You mean – he gave you your sword? You finally got one?!”

Lu Ten smirked and dropped Zuko a wink. “You’ll both find out if you come to my nameday celebration, but not a moment before that, understand?” He knew that this was simply tempting them to attempt a break-in to his chambers to ferret out the sword, but what they didn’t know was that Master Piandao was returning to the Caldera for the first time in almost a decade to present the sword, and Lu Ten’s Mastery, at the name day celebration. So to put it simply, there would be nothing for the terrible duo to unearth.

Master Piandao had not been very happy with Lu Ten’s idea to achieve his mastery before he reached legal age in the Fire Nation but had understood the priority when Crown Prince Iroh had written him, describing the… ultimatum, shall they say, that Fire Lord Azulon had leveled upon them. The Fire Lord was displeased that the Heir Presumptive was taking so much time to learn something as trivial as swordplay when his firebending needed ‘intensive, prolonged focus with more rigorous tutors’ to reach the level that Azulon thought was, at the very least, a minimum of competency. Piandao would argue that the level of competency that Prince Lu Ten had achieved was higher than that of many of the High Generals of the Fire Nation, and that he could easily challenge the records and feats of many a previous Fire Lord. But those arguments would mean nothing to Azulon, and Piandao knew that; while Azulon did not want his heirs to surpass him while he still sat on the throne – no, that would breed rebellion, usurpers and possibly even a coup – he wanted them to sit just below the peak where he rested his laurels. And unfortunately for Iroh and Lu Ten both, Lu Ten had not yet reached the penultimate summit.

His ability to lightning-bend was dismal at best, stunted by his apparent inability to separate the negative and positive chis within his body in even the slightest manner. The best he had been able to manage was a slight charge of static in the air before the chis had collided back together within his chakras, something that had hindered his regular firebending for weeks after. And Azulon knew this and raged against it. So, the Fire Lord had told his father that this was the final summer that Lu Ten would be allowed to spend with Master Piandao until he was able to manage the ultimate strike of Sozin or lightning-bend without causing harm to himself. The unspoken ‘or die trying’ had hung in the air heavily after Iroh had conveyed this message to Lu Ten and had truly impressed upon the young boy the urgency of the situation.

Because of this – and Master Piandao’s unwilling familiarity with the determination of the Fire Lord to get what he wanted, at any cost – Piandao had advanced Lu Ten’s training. The month that they had spent together had been spent training incessantly, with far less painting and calligraphy than before, and far more drilling than Lu Ten thought was possible. He learned stances and katas that Masters were still learning, advanced forms that were almost too difficult for his young body to manage – but he persisted and succeeded. When they were not drilling, they were meditating and learning of the way of the sword. Lu Ten probably slept no more than four hours in any given day, but he was beyond determined to earn what he had been working towards since his childhood – and if this was his last chance, Agni would go out before he would let it slip away.

When he had finally bested his teacher in a spar, it had been almost bittersweet. He could hear the jingling of far-off bells – probably the ones that Fat had put up around the altar to Agni – and a swift wind had caressed the fine hairs that had fallen from his topknot. He had offered his master a hand up from the dirt and had been surprised when Master Piandao had not released his hand once standing, instead choosing to reel him in for a tight embrace. “Master Piandao,” he had said, utterly confused, “is this… part of the mastery ceremony?”

With one last squeeze, Master Piandao had released him. “No, Lu Ten. I simply felt the need to congratulate you in the way that my mother taught me best. You have far exceeded my expectations of you, ever step along our journey with one another, and I have never been so proud to grant a mastery as I am today. I only wish that the burden that comes along with the title didn’t have to fall to your shoulders so soon.”

Lu Ten had suspected that they were talking about something much more serious than a simple mastery of swordsmanship but had chosen to say nothing that day. He had chosen to say nothing about their conversations to his father, or to his grandfather when he had presented himself as returned to the court. Something told him that his grandfather would not appreciate the insinuation that lay heavy in Master Piandao’s words, and that his father would only brush off his concerns. So, he waited, and ruminated, and prayed to Agni about it.

Agni had not yet given him a response, but he was hopeful that he would hear one soon. Though he was not particularly close to the voice of Agni, he had never been abandoned in his true times of need – and he knew that this was important.

Zuko pulled him out of his thoughts by tugging more aggressively at his fingers. “Lu Ten, when do me and Azula get to go train with Master Piandao?”

Lu Ten laughed, shaking off his morbid thoughts, too old in character for a prince of thirteen, whose greatest concerns should be perfecting his forms and flirting with courtiers. “Azula and I, Zuko. And I imagine that if your mother has anything to say about it, not for a good long time!”

--

Lu Ten was sparring with his father in the courtyard after a largely uneventful birthday celebration. He had been presented with his blade with all the pomp and ceremony that was appropriate for a mastery, especially when obtained by one of the line of Agni, and his grandfather had introduced him – or rather, re-introduced him – to many eligible young women that he had known since birth. Few of them were any easier to smile at than they had been at his last birthday celebration, but the Fire Lord need not know his private thoughts about the grossness of the general concept of romance, so he had wisely kept his hand on the hilt of his sword hanging pendulously at his hip and a courtly smile pasted across his mien. His cousins had caused the requisite amount of chaos, even with Azula not instigating as she had the year prior, and his aunt had even made a brief appearance to smile beatifically at him, take his head in her hands and drop a kiss onto his brow, driving him to a show of embarrassment that he didn’t truly mean.

For some reason, it felt more… significant than her easy shows of affection had been in the past. But he hadn’t had much time to linger on that thought as she was pulled aside by a visibly annoyed Ozai and chided for leaving her chambers in her ‘state,’ perfectly audible to the closer gentry. Fire Lord Azulon had calmly parted the crowds and ushered his son and his daughter-in-law away from the ballroom, and Iroh had grimaced as the doors closed behind the trio. While Lu Ten wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen, he knew the force of Azulon’s ire firsthand, and did not envy his uncle for being the focus of such intense disapproval.

The next morning, Iroh had woken Lu Ten at dawn, as was their tradition, to offer their prayers to Agni in the courtyard where a memorial for his mother was maintained. They did this every year on Lu Ten’s birthday, as well as Iroh’s, and likely would for the rest of the birthdays they shared in the royal palace in Caldera. After this and a light breakfast consisting of a small bowl of rice and some salted fish, they had bowed to one another in a different courtyard – conspicuously missing anything flammable – and begun to spar.

Lu Ten was always surprised at how ruthless his father was on the battlefield, be it sparring or in a true Agni Kai – the only two instances he’d had the opportunity to see his father at what was, arguably, his best.

(Privately, Lu Ten thought his father’s best was in quiet moments shared over tea, or when he caught him fondly looking over Zuko’s katas, and most recently, teaching Azula Pai Sho – she had never had the patience for the game before Zuko’s accident, but she was slower to action, more contemplative than she had been before, and Iroh had moved to begin a slow smothering of his niece in the kindness that her father often withheld.)

He knew that his cousins were most likely watching – it was early, but Azula rose with the sun, and Zuko rose when Azula pounced on him, so the chances that they weren’t lurking in the shadows that the rising sun cast across the terrace were low. It seemed that Iroh was determined to give them a show – he was in fine form, leaping and twirling in ways that surprised the War Council on a regular basis.

Showing off, Lu Ten privately thought, for his son and any other young eyes that might be on him.

Intercepting a particularly strong blast, he whirled it about his head and pushed it into the sky to dissipate into small explosions. So he was showing off, too, but it was his birthday, so he gave himself a pass, and by the grin on his father’s face, the bit of showboating had been appreciated. With a nod, his father indicated that they should transition into the new kata that Iroh had been teaching him – a kata that had to be performed with two people. He’d called it ‘The Dancing Dragon,’ which felt a little theatrical to Lu Ten, but he had to admit… it was fun.

Twin gasps sounded from behind a post to his right as he and his father ended in their final pose, fists touching. Lu Ten thought that his father’s fire had shimmered into a different color during this kata – not just blue, like Grandfather’s, but a whole rainbow – but it snapped back to its usual golden tones too quickly to be certain. The gouts of flame that had left their hands had been more sure and steady than they were on his own, and he was thrilled to think that he was, finally, getting stronger.

Iroh broke their arch first and turned to their not-so-secret audience. “Come out, you two troublemakers,” he groused good-naturedly. Two sets of giggles sounded as Lu Ten’s cousins emerged from their hiding spot, but only Azula had the good grace to look even slightly abashed when his father waggled his finger at them. “If I recall correctly, you two are supposed to be having breakfast with Princess Ursa,” he chided half-heartedly. Lu Ten would bet a pound of gold that Aunt Ursa had sanctioned this particular deviance. She probably appreciated the quiet – she had left the celebration shortly after his grandfather had pulled them aside, looking no worse for wear, though his uncle had the look of a kicked dog, and Lu Ten had seen her anxiously massaging her belly as she left with her handmaidens. A morning off from her two terrors was likely rare and deeply relaxing for her.

“But Uncle!” Zuko broke in – bad manners, Lu Ten could hear his court master saying in the back of his mind – “Azula already finished her dawn prayer with the Sages, and I did my katas perfect twice! Mom said we could watch!”

Azula elbowed him, and he finally looked a bit chagrined. “Well… she said we could watch if you said it was okay. I’m sorry.” They bowed in unison – a move borne of apology, but with twitching fingers that belied how excited they had been to witness what was going on.

“We got here after you had already begun your spar, Uncle Iroh,” Azula started, still bowed. “I thought it would be best to wait until after you had finished combat to interrupt. I didn’t – didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” she finished, her voice catching oddly in the middle of the sentence. Lu Ten remembered how withdrawn Azula had been after Zuko’s accident, and the truth of it that Aunt Ursa had shared with him before he’d left for Master Piandao’s. Before his fall, Azula wouldn’t have cared about a singe during a training spar and would have interrupted freely if she hadn’t thought there would be consequences. But her flames were almost… cautious, now, and more controlled than even his own, despite his additional years of training.

Lu Ten’s father’s face softened, the faux-scolding falling off his mien like the shed skin of a okapi-gecko. “Ah, Princess Azula,” he sighed, slowly crouching (knees cracking like fireworks) in front of the young royals. “I appreciate your thought, as this old man would not like to be burned on this most fine of days,” he started with a small smile, “but you cannot keep skulking about like this – you are royalty, and you should be proud to walk in the light of Agni.” Lu Ten watched as Zuko’s face lit, lips stiffening and posture settling into a strong base, while Azula only glanced up, unerringly seeking the ever-moving sun, mouth twisting. “How does this sound: on the mornings that Lu Ten and I will be sparring, you two will have an open invitation to observe. Only to observe, mind you, until your masters say that you can begin live sparring with us – I will not see you hurt under my watch. Agni knows that your grandfather would be upset with me!”

Azula blinked, hard, and it made Iroh pause and observe her carefully for a moment. He gently reached out his hands to both his niece and nephew and grasped theirs, holding them together in front of his chest. “I am very glad you both have joined us today, for our greeting to Agni with a dance that came from the original firebenders. One day, I hope I will be able to teach it to both of you. But for now, it is Lu Ten’s birthday, and I do believe that we have a sumptuous tea waiting for us in the south tea galley.”

His comment about tea broke whatever spell he’d cast over the courtyard, and birds that Lu Ten hadn’t realized had gone silent began to sing once more. Zuko laughed, and Azula muttered something about kooky fuddy-duddy uncles with leaf juice addictions, and Iroh breathed a deep sigh as he straightened back up, releasing their hands and placing his hands on his hips. “The last one there has to make the tea!” he said, his words more effective than anything else he could have said to get the royal children to get moving – Lu Ten liked tea, but they all knew that Iroh would make them brew and re-brew it until it was perfect, and that was a special kind of torture on days as beautiful as this was becoming.

Chapter 8

Chapter Text

Her mother’s health was deteriorating rapidly, and despite Agni’s kind rays caressing her face today, Azula could not see a way to solve this problem.

Pregnancies had always been difficult for her mother, something she’d known as soon as she had been old enough to recognize when her unflappable mother was not herself. This time, though, she had the wherewithal to ask why these pregnancies never resulted in a sibling, instead of simply accepting it as it was.

Lo and Li had explained to her that the reason that she and her brother didn’t have several more siblings at this point was that her mother’s womb had not been blessed by Agni to carry their siblings to term. Azula had been skeptical, ambushed the royal physician, and asked what the real reason was.

After much prying and many ‘why’s, Azula found that the physician wasn’t entirely sure why her mother couldn’t carry to term. He suspected it had something to do with her weaker constitution not being able to reckon with the ‘undoubtedly immensely strong embers of Agni that were being kindled within her,’ which Azula, again, thought was bullsh*t.

(She’d learned that word a few weeks earlier when she overheard one servant complaining to another and had taken to using it regularly in the privacy of her own mind. It fit a good deal of the situations that occurred within the Royal Palace of Caldera, in her opinion.)

As such, Azula went on to do what she did best: dig and dig and dig until she found a satisfactory answer. She didn’t like it when her mother was too weak to braid her hair in the way she preferred, and she didn’t like it when Zuko’s face fell when they were waved off by concerned ladies-in-waiting before their evening bedtime stories (that he claimed to be too old for, but endured ‘for Azula’s sake’), and she especially didn’t like the fact that her father prowled about even more angrily than usual when Ursa couldn’t join him at court affairs. So she was determined to make sure that, whatever was wrong with her mother, it would be better as soon as possible.

She found a small scroll in the back of the archives in the cloisters, written on what looked to be animal skin, that described the difficulties of pregnancies as faced by women in the Southern Water Tribe. Azula could see why the firebenders who had retrieved this scroll from the southernmost tip of the world had kept it – it described things that the Fire Nation’s royal physicians barely had a grasp on. As it turned out, waterbending healers, relying on their understanding of the flow of fluids in the womb and the blood in the body moved, had discovered that many early terminations had to do with bad flow. They had used their waterbending to stimulate the womb to retain the pregnancy longer in times of instability, and it had worked.

Azula had never been so angry to find out that all of the waterbenders of the Southern Water Tribe had been wiped out than that afternoon, when she’d run to her mother with what she thought might be a solution. Yes, she supposed they’d have to take a war prisoner or two from their cells, but they would be happy to help if it meant they’d have better accommodations and were helping in the glory of Agni, obviously. When her mother had smiled wanly at her, pulled her close and whispered the sad truth – that all of the waterbending war prisoners had perished years before, too far away from their element and their people – Azula felt something twinge in her chest that she didn’t know was capable of twinging, and a dull anger suffuse her being. She’d cried in her mother’s arms, angry tears hot and stinging on her face, at the grim injustice of the fact that the people who could have helped her mother feel better no longer existed.

She supposed that the Northern Water Tribe had some healers, but the scroll had described bending that was not practiced in Agna Qe’la, according to the scholars that were experts on the politics of the two Tribes – any bending invented in one tribe was rarely shared with the other, and was only ever brought over with inter-Tribal marriages of a political nature. Those had stopped when the raids began, and the Southern Water Tribe had started losing benders. So the chance that the Northern Water Tribe had any knowledge of what was, essentially, a niche form of healing that was not helpful in battle, were slim to none.

Sozin’s war is not just, she thought. She knew that it was traitorous, and mentally hastened to amend the statement: Our wartime rules demand that healers be spared, and the female, non-combatant healers of the Water Tribe have not been spared. And now, it’s too late to correct it.

She’d hugged her mother tightly that afternoon, for longer than she had in years. Her mother had seemed shocked when she had willingly wrapped her arms around her middle, gentle around her belly, but had quickly tightened her grasp on her daughter, holding her in her lap as best she could. After Azula loosened her grip, her mother released her, giving her hair one last stroke and telling her daughter that she’d do a special braid for her the next morning. Azula had smiled, bowed to her mother – ever a disciple of protocol – and left.

Ursa had wondered what had gotten into her daughter, and mourned the knowledge lost in this endless war, and hoped that, by Agni’s grace, she’d be able to keep this baby. Ozai had made it clear that it was a necessity, at this point, to have another child, and that he was beyond frustrated that she hadn’t been able to provide him with another to secure his legacy. But, that was a problem for later. For now, she needed to nap. Her legacy was her existing children, and she would do everything in her power to protect them – and that meant taking the time that she needed to take to be well-rested so she could pour her love into them.

(Agni glowed a little brighter in that moment, setting over the horizon, sending a playful, twinkling beam to brush over Ursa’s face.)

Azula spent that night praying at her little altar. Her tears had dried for her mother, because she didn’t want to add to her stress, but they came trickling back, and then pouring forth, as she wished, and wished, and wished. For the first time in months, she didn’t know what to say to Agni. She didn’t know how this war could have gotten this bad – that healers, of all things, had been targeted so effectively to eliminate them. Azula knew that there were waterbenders across the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation that were undercover – generations of intermarriage had led to bending cropping back up in families long thought to have lost their bending, but those benders that had abilities outside of the norm would either be entirely untrained or hide their abilities forever. She couldn’t find anyone to help her there. And fire… fire couldn’t heal, not in the way she needed. It could warm, it could protect, it could nurture, but it couldn’t manipulate the flow of chi or water in a womb to allow a woman to hold her baby.

The small candle she had lit on her altar jumped with her spiking anger. Fire could burn, and burn, and burn, until it was the only thing left, and that just wasn’t fair. The elements were supposed to be in balance, and now, there was an entire element missing, and half of one was gone, too. And she had no idea how to fix the balance – it wasn’t like she could simply will an airbender into existence, and the Avatar, who was supposed to be in charge of the Tui-damned balance, was either dead or in hiding, like a coward. The next Avatar was supposed to have been born into the Southern Water Tribe, and there had been no records of that, but Agni knows that the Fire Nation had done everything they could to prevent that birth – or at least, to prevent the newly-born Avatar from realizing their power.

She was thinking on this – stewing over her anger, letting the fear she had suppressed around her grandfather loose into the vat of rage she was brewing – when she noticed the rotating fish ornament that represented the moon and sea begin to spin. A breeze brushed her bangs into her eyes, and she blinked, startled.

When she opened her eyes, she felt her jaw drop. Standing in front of her was a spirit – well, what else could it be, having simply appeared before her with no noise and looking as if she could pass her hand through its belly with no more effort than dipping a toe into the pond.

“What,” she hissed, unable to articulate anything beyond that thought. Her mind was whirling just as quickly as the fish on her altar continued to swim, running from fragment to fragment.

“Oh, no,” she said after another moment where the spirit only stared down at her, its dark hair flowing out behind its back in undulating movements. “I’m actually going crazy.”

Azula could only think of the scrolls in the cloisters that spoke of Sages that had gone insane after intense prayer, struck down by blindness, or by unhearing ears, or any other number of ailments that left them completely unable to continue on as they had been. She thought of the Sages that had starved to death because they could not be pulled from their ablutions, of the Sages who had screamed that they’d rather be dead than not be in conversation with Agni. The stories had been few, but effectively branded themselves into her mind, and – she must have done that, gone too far, if she was seeing a spirit so obviously not Agni in her room.

At Azula’s pronouncement of her impending insanity, the spirit’s full lips curved up into a smile that looked more like a shark-porpoise’s grin than anything reassuring. No, the female voice rang out with a susurrus that sounded like the waves washing over the beach at Ember Island. Not now, by any means.

Tucking that tidbit of possibly-prophetic information away into her head for later (was the spirit talking about the bells? She had known that was a bad sign), she furrowed her brow at the spirit. After a moment, she hummed and repeated a prayer that she’d read in a (likely stolen) Water Tribe scroll.

A prayer, she thought with some exasperation, to La. For there could be no other explanation for the way that her gauzy curtains swirled like seaweed in an eddy, for the strange ripples of light that were dancing across her ceiling, except that La, of all spirits, had seen fit to visit her, of all the petitioners in the world.

A prayer for safe passage across stormy, treacherous seas. The first she had translated when she’d found the cache of prayer beads from the Air Nomads, and the stones from the Earth Kingdom, and the scrolls from the Water Tribe. The one that she now understood that she, as a child of Agni – no, as a child of the bloodline of Sozin, of Azulon, of Ozai – would have to say every time she undertook a sea journey, to pray that this would not be the time that La would take her revenge on the line that had taken so many of her chosen from her.

Well, suffice to say that she had never anticipated using it in direct supplication to the goddess herself. Otherwise, she would have spent more time on perfecting the pronunciation – the guttural sounds still sometimes got away from her, in the more traditional script and language that the scrolls had been written in several centuries before, versus the common tongue that had been adopted as a form of pidgin in the ports and had slowly transformed into the standard language of all of the nations.

As the words rolled off of Azula’s tongue, the grin fell off of La’s face, leaving her mien even more terrifyingly blank. Wise of you to say those words now, little dragon, La said, but safe passage requested in that prayer does not mean that you will not undergo trials unlike any that you have undergone before. It simply means that I will not unnecessarily hinder your progress – the seaworthiness of your boat is your own responsibility, as are the winds and the sails that will carry you along.

Azula noted what La had so conspicuously left out – that necessary hinderance would be leveled as she saw fit, and that she planned to do so with extreme prejudice against Azula if ever the chance arose. With that implicit threat, Azula, a girl with wisdom beyond her years and the wit to wield like a knife, bowed deeply in the fashion of Water Tribe supplicants. “Your will is unstoppable, and I would never think to change its direction.”

La surveyed Azula, her sleeves and skirts billowing out despite the heavy furs that lined the hides as she circled. If you had said that several months ago, I would have drowned you where you stand for daring to lie to a goddess, La murmured. But now, despite it all, I think you actually meanit. Or, perhaps, because of it all.

I have heard your pleas for your mother, child. Azula looked up, shocked. She certainly hadn’t been praying to La for help with her mother’s pregnancy… but she also supposed that this was part and parcel of what La did. Tui would have been the better choice – he has always been the kinder of the two of us, but what’s done is done, and he chose someone else to make into his champion. La made the word champion sound suspiciously like the way the royal advisors used ‘charity case,’ but Azula chose not to comment.

Unfortunately, without benders here, my power is limited. I cannot teach a firebender to utilize the waters of the womb like I can my children. But I can teach you what my benders would show their non-bending brethren, my other children, to do in their absence. And this will have to be enough for you, little dragon, as I am being far more generous that I would normally be for one of your kind. At this, the spirit looked over at Azula’s rudimentary altar, and her glacial expression thawed incrementally. But even if you have known not what you were doing, the care you have shown to our place in your prayers has spoken to me in a way that a fire bender has not been able to do in the better part of a century.

Azula stilled as La swelled forward, her hand swinging up and two fingers resting in the center of Azula’s forehead, the thumb parallel to the ground. The touch was real, and brought the briny smell of the ocean into Azula’s nose, and suddenly, she was terrified of what she would owe the spirit after this. La laughed, a choppy, harsh noise, and Azula wondered how much of her thoughts La had been hearing and choosing to ignore. You will owe me much, little dragon, La said, and I will collect in time. For now, take this knowledge and share it with your healers, and try to keep your mother safe. On with you.

And with those words, Azula was swept into a pelagic trance, far from everything she had ever known, with only the sound of bells to keep her company.

Chapter 9

Chapter Text

Ursa was, to put it lightly, utterly bemused at the sudden intense attention that Azula was giving her pregnancy.

For a six-year-old to be this well-educated about pre-natal care, of all things, was simultaneously hilarious and disconcerting. Ursa would worry that Azula had discovered her ‘bargain’ with Ozai, where she begged for one more chance to give him another child – the threat underlying that, if this pregnancy, her third since Azula, were to result in another unviable babe… that she would have no more chances to try – but Azula showed no signs of concern for her mother’s ultimate fate, or her continued presence in the castle, but rather only worry for her immediate health.

Azula had tromped into Ursa’s room the morning after their talk about waterbenders soaking wet and looking more like her old self than Ursa had seen since before Zuko’s fall. The look of sheer disdain mixed with outrage and deep-seated annoyance almost made her laugh – it was good to see that her too-serious daughter could still be subjected the normal human emotions of a child, instead of only those of a sixty-year-old Fire Sage. When asked why she was dripping onto Ursa’s floor, Azula only shook her head (aggressively, like a polar-bear dog trying to shake its fur dry) and muttered something about ‘stupid prayers needing even stupid-er lessons.’ Instead of giving any real explanation, she rolled back her little shoulders, pointed at the soft mat in front of Ursa’s little table, and demanded she lie on her back and let Azula try something.

Ursa had eased back with the assistance of a few servants and, by the time Azula had toweled off her hair, was lying on her back, completely unsure of what her daughter’s plan was. Azula had come over to her and knelt, her face losing its annoyed undertone and looking, for the first time in a while, unsure of herself. Ursa had reached up and raked a hand through Azula’s bangs, telling her daughter that she trusted whatever her plan had been.

Azula had talked as she worked – she told her mother she was going to try heating specific points she’d read about to improve blood flow, and to try to stimulate the baby to move and grow strong. The little pinpricks of heat had soothed aches that Ursa didn’t know she’d been harboring, and she felt the baby wriggle within her belly with more vigor than it had displayed in weeks.

This ‘procedure’ had continued daily, with an assortment of palace healers coming to observe. Those that could bend would mimic what Azula did, so it wouldn’t take up her time – though she often came to the sessions to hover over her mother anyway. Zuko came, too, watching with bright eyes and an arm thrown around his (begrudgingly embraced) little sister. Ursa had her doubts at first – as had the healers – but her appetite had improved considerably, and the swelling of her skin had lessened. She was still ill, but for the first time in months, she was beginning to believe she’d be able to bring this pregnancy to term.

Azula would drop by unannounced any time there was a gap in her schedule. There was no rhyme or reason as to what she would want – sometimes she would simply stare at her mother, brows furrowed, eyes unfocused and drifting like flotsam in the tides; others, she would give an extra massage. When asked where she’d learned these techniques, she showed her mother the scroll and had explained that she had been up all night wondering how a firebender could apply the methods in their own way, and that it was a guess, but that she prayed she was right. Ursa wasn’t entirely sure how a child would have come up with these ideas, but Azula had been proving that she deserved the title of prodigy every day since she was born, and this seemed to be no exception. Luck and guesswork had carried her daughter far, and persistence helped to bridge the rest of the distance.

(Ursa began noticing a slightly briny scent in her room on mornings where she felt particularly whole and hale. She wondered on her daughter’s phrasing of praying, and the fact that the fish in the turtleduck pond would follow Azula when she walked by or gather at her toes on the rare occasions that she dipped them into the water.

Coincidences, surely.)

Ursa was entering into her thirtieth week of pregnancy, the furthest along she’d been since she’d had Azula, when everything went wrong.

There had been whispers of discontent from the colonies for years, now. No one knew to take these more seriously than any others – rebellion, Ursa had learned, was often quashed in its infancy, rarely leaving the cradle where it had been nurtured.

So, when screams sounded in the servant’s wing, Ursa had thought there was a fire, or that one of the Komodo-rhinos had escaped their enclosure and was trying to eat their way through the panty, or any of the other smaller issues that screams usually indicated. She never suspected that it was a group of assassins, come to kill the royal family in its entirety, a coup supported by someone from the inside.

When a guard rushed to her, his sword covered in blood and his plate singed, she’d paled and bolted, unheeding of his cries to take shelter. Her children – her babies – they were in danger. She tried to remember where Zuko was scheduled to be at this time – yes, with his firebending instructor and Prince Lu Ten, close to a bunker – and Azula –

Azula would be walking, alone, from the cloisters to her music lesson. She had no one to protect her. And with Iroh out of the palace on a short trip, and Ozai and Azulon able to slip into the protective catacombs from the throne room –

Azula would be the only one the assassins could find. The only ones they could take, or kill, or – any number of things. And if Ursa knew anything about her husband and his father, she knew that they would be more than willing to consign Azula to death – or a fate worse than – rather than concede to any demands that would be levied for her safe return.

And Ursa would not, could not, allow that to happen.

Ursa’s speed rivaled that of the swiftest air benders of yore that day. Pregnancy notwithstanding, she was on a mission, and it would not hinder her in her search. She swept through corridors and courtyards, her hands on the knives she habitually kept tucked in her sleeves, ready to throw with deadly accuracy at a moment’s notice. She heard a cry – Azula – and burst through a doorway to see her lovely, brave, strong, absolutely terrified daughter in a defensive stance, flames ready, facing down a man three times her size.

One of her daughter’s arms was cradled to her body, crooked in a way that Ursa knew meant it was broken. While her son had begun his training in kicks for firebending, Azula had not yet progressed to that level, on her grandfather’s recommendation, and so she was only able to block the gouts of flame that the assassin was relentlessly throwing at her. With that thought, Ursa hurled the knife into the joint of the armor on the assassin’s shoulder and deep into the meat of his back. She flung herself at him as he howled in pain and began to turn to face her, every bit Avatar Roku’s granddaughter, fearsome in her own way, teeth bared and slashing at him with steel knives. She dodged his flames as best she could around her distended belly, staying mindful of protecting her unborn babe, but her priority was instilling as much pain into this man as necessary to render him unable to hurt her family ever again.

She cried out as he caught her leg in a jab, the flesh there sizzling, and heard Azula echo her cry. “Hide!” she tried to tell her daughter, but much to her dismay, Azula disregarded her words and leapt into the fray. Azula’s own defense was forgotten, with brutal jabs and swirling slashes pushing the assassin away from Ursa. The distance gave Ursa the opportunity to throw thrice more – leaving her with only her dagger, slightly longer than her forearm, the one that her mother had pressed into her hands when she had first left her home for Caldera and that had never left her side since.

Two of the knives found purchase in the assassin’s left thigh, but the other flew wide, leaving him enraged and debilitated, but not incapacitated. He jabbed out again, hard enough that Azula was forced to dive out of the way of the flames, and advanced upon Ursa once again. He struck, struck again, and then—

Pain. Immense, fiery pain engulfed her as she turned her back on the flames that she could not hope to dodge, recalling the lessons her father had impressed upon her when facing a firebender – protect your hands, protect your face, protect your airway, and pray to Agni for mercy. She wanted to gasp, but knew that the superheated air around her would only scald her airway and kill her faster. When the firebender paused to take a breath – ‘flames come from the breath,’ she recalled Prince Iroh once saying in instruction to his son – she whirled, disregarding the impossible agony that was her back, the silk threads burned away and floating in the air around her as she leapt forward and slit the assassin’s throat.

He staggered away, his hands coming up to his throat, gushing blood and trying to stem the flow. Her knife, hewn well and kept razor-sharp, had done its job, and he collapsed in seconds.

With his defeat, Ursa’s body finally began to fail her. She felt a splash of water between her legs, and knew that, even if she were to survive her burns, she would not survive the day in the Royal Palace without the baby. Azula came up to her, little hands fluttering, unsure of what to do, and finally decided to prop her mother’s sagging frame up as best she could. Ursa distantly heard Azula begin to scream for help – Agni, did Ursa hope that the rest of the assassins were dead, or her daughter would have to protect herself – and drew in several ragged breaths. Shock, she thought, almost disconnected from her body. I’m going into shock. She knew that was bad, and she knew that there was only a small chance that her baby would live if it was delivered. But she had to try.

“Find a healer,” she told her daughter. “I will wait here.” Azula looked at her – oh, her beautiful daughter’s face was covered in tears – and nodded, grasping her mother’s hands, letting her sink into a settee in the hallway that Ursa had not noticed they’d stumbled into.

“I love you, Mother,” Azula said, voice wavering, barely waiting for Ursa to murmur her words back to her before she flew off to find someone to help.

It was an agonizing eternity before she registered hands on her once again. She could hear Azula’s cries, and slitted open her eyes to see her daughter being held back by the healer’s assistant as the healers picked up the settee and began moving her. She reached out a hand towards her daughter, and then-

Black. Bells. The smell of brine.

Nothing.

Chapter 10

Chapter Text

Crown Prince Iroh was not a man quick to anger. He was renowned through the Fire Nation (and reviled in the Earth Kingdom) as a tactician, able to see past the immediate options and far into the future. But this – what his brother was doing – was simply reprehensible and could not be tolerated.

He knelt before the throne, before his father, barely containing the trembling of his balled fists in his rage. His brother, kneeling on his right, had presented a candidate for – for a new wife. For a replacement. For a path to a new child.

Only four days after Princess Ursa had tragically miscarried and passed away after saving her daughter from assassins, Ozai was persuading his father to forego the traditional year-long mourning period for a passed spouse to allow him to remarry and ‘renew the legacy of Sozin’s line,’ as if he didn’t have two wonderful, precocious children already. As if he were the Heir Presumptive, and not, in fact, third in line, after his own brother and his nephew.

Iroh had known that Ozai had been plotting something since the moment he strode into the infirmary, glanced only momentarily at the draped body of his late wife, and asked if the child had survived. When the healer had begun explaining that Princess Azula – who had been, at that time, clutched to Iroh’s chest, sobbing incessantly, shielded from the grim sight of her mother’s body as her arm was reset and the burns she had not been able to defend against were covered in salves and bandages – was alive, and would recover, Ozai had shaken his head and made a noise that Iroh could only equate to disgust.

“Not that one,” he had said, and Iroh had watched his upper lip curl. “The baby.”

The healer’s face had fallen, and he shook his head. “We tried to preserve the lives of both Princess Ursa and your babe, Prince Ozai, but it was too early and the babe was too weak. Your wife’s wounds were too catastrophic. They both passed shortly after we found them.”

Steam had puffed from Ozai’s nostrils at that, and he had looked enraged. Iroh had hoped it was for the assassins that had cost him his wife and child, but-

“Useless,” he’d hissed, almost too low to hear over Azula’s slowing sobs and juddering breaths. Ozai had turned on his heel, not bothering to check on his daughter, and Iroh’s slow rage had begun.

He’d rushed back to the palace after hearing the alarm bells from the Royal Firebending Academy, which he’d been visiting as part of his efforts to standardize education around the Fire Nation. He’d felt an old fool when he’d surveyed the damage – over a dozen dead Royal Guards, five servants, and one Fire Sage; burned doors and tapestries littering the floors – and realized that, had he been there, he could have prevented much of the damage.

He should have known better than to leave the palace when an insurrection was brewing. Had he missed the signs from Agni? Could he have known it was coming?

All of those questions had fled his mind as his son had sprinted up to him and thrown himself into his arms. Prince Zuko had followed closely, tear tracks reddening his face. Iroh had drawn him in as well, knowing the look of a child needing comfort well. When he’d looked about for Azula, Lu Ten had whispered that she’d been coming back from the cloisters and that- that-

Iroh had deposited his son and his nephew in Lu Ten’s rooms, and practically sprinted to the infirmary to find his niece. He’d found her there, inconsolable, being held down by the healers as they attempted to mend her arm, throwing herself off of the bed to try to get closer to her mother.

Princess Ursa. Her mother, who had died to save her child. Who Azula had cried out to, for whose death she felt wholly responsible. Azula had promised to be better, to do better, to be the perfect child that her mother had always wanted if only she would come back. She’d cursed Agni, and Tui and La, and any number of other spirits for letting her mother pass. Her venomous words had dissolved into incomprehensible cries as Iroh had picked her up and held her in iron arms, and she’d stayed there for hours after her father had come and gone.
Iroh would never have expected his brother to be quite so callous as to plan something like this – his plotting for the throne was on display in this request, his disdain for his two eldest children reprehensible. Ozai had gathered a list of eligible young noblewomen and was presenting it to their father as if it was all but sure. Iroh’s eyes had skimmed over the list as Ozai had unfurled it from his sleeve – all of the women on the scroll were, in Iroh’s estimation, younger than Ozai by half, and none were the same type of firebrand that Ursa had been before her marriage. Malleable, weak, and unlikely to challenge Ozai in anything – little more than a vessel for his potential progeny.

Iroh was sure that their father would make Ozai wait, would ridicule this plan for the fallacy that it was. When the Fire Lord only hummed contemplatively, Iroh’s eyebrows lowered even further and he felt his face growing hot. He barely contained the steam building in his chest – a display of a loss of control like that would only result in his father banning him from the throne room for this discussion, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that Iroh was going to have to be the one to temper the vices that abounded in this room.

“Father,” he began, voice steadier than he felt, “the traditional time of mourning for a spouse of so many years is a year. Surely, that cannot be abbreviated for anything less than six months.”

Ozai, the desert snake-rat, was ready with a counterpoint as soon as the words left his mouth. “Father, you know that the Fire Sages have predicted that I will beget a firebender stronger than any seen since your own illustrious birth that will lead the Fire Nation to glory. Obviously, Zuko is nowhere near strong enough and never will be, and Azula is less concerned with the glory of the Fire Nation than she is of the books and dust with which she spends her time.” Ozai paused, as if hearing the sedition in his words for the first time. “While Prince Lu Ten will obviously one day take the throne, he needs strong support from his family. I only fear that my two existing children will not be able to provide that for him, and that, if I have no more children, the prophecy will go unfulfilled and may bring ruin to the Fire Nation.”

Fire Lord Azulon was a superstitious man. While Iroh understood that his father held no particular loyalty to any other than himself, he put more stock into portends than Iroh thought was strictly wise. And it was obvious, now, why Ozai held such sway with their father in this moment – Azulon was of the mind that, if Ozai’s line stopped with Azula, the Fire Nation would suffer.

That his legacy would suffer.

Vain old man.

“You will wait until the seventh day to present your suit to the woman that I choose. You shall be married on the tenth day.” Azulon looked at Iroh, his eyes wily. “I understand that this is not the traditional period of mourning, but what must be done for the good of the Fire Nation must not be delayed. As such, the royal family, including your new wife, will wear the colors of mourning and decline all social invitations for six months, and will wear bells of sorrow for a full year. This is nonnegotiable. Ozai, you will join your son and daughter in daily prayer at the late Princess Ursa’s shrine for the full year. If I hear that you have neglected these duties, there will be consequences.”

So, his father was afraid to create a vengeful spirit out of Ursa, but not circ*mspect enough to realize that it could all be avoided – including the whispers and speculation that were sure to follow the marriage announcement – if only they were to simply wait.

“Iroh, to you I leave the duties of arranging the pyre. Do not fail me. You are both dismissed.” Their father waved his left hand carelessly, indicating the door, and a servant brought Ozai’s proffered scroll to the Fire Lord to peruse. Iroh and Ozai bowed, stood, and left.

Ozai’s smirk was insufferable, and Iroh barely resisted throwing his brother into the nearest wall and shaking some sense into him. “I cannot believe you would dishonor your late wife’s memory in this way,” he hissed. “She provided you two wonderful children and saved one of them from a fate of death or worse. And this is how you would repay her?”

Ozai rolled his eyes. “She provided me with a subpar firebender of a son and a superstitious, willful brat of a daughter. Wonderful, they are certainly not. And they would never fulfil the terms of the prophecy, and I would simply hate for that to fall back upon you, or your son.” He bowed, much shallower than was required in deference to the Crown Prince, a mockery of court manners. “Glory to Agni,” he drawled, walking away, radiating smugness. “And with any luck, we shall hear the squalling of a babe in the next nine months.”

The bells that rung in the courtyard sounded duller than usual that evening, and the soft sobs that echoed from Azula’s room mingled with the chimes of the windcatcher that hung in Iroh’s window long into the night.

Chapter 11

Chapter Text

Their mother’s death had left Zuko and Azula adrift. Their newly renewed closeness was the only tether they’d had aside from their uncle and cousin to the love and kindness that their mother had given them, and Azula had often feared it was a pitiful substitute.

In their mother’s absence, Ozai’s efforts to turn them into his ideal progeny had only redoubled. He was harsher and more heavy-handed in his punishments than he had ever been before, and Azula and Zuko had the burns to prove it.

The first time that Azula had woken up from a nightmare of flames and charring flesh, hair tangled beyond belief, she’d gone instinctively to her mother’s room to have it combed. When she realized that her mother’s room was empty, that the white, billowing sheets covering the furniture were not covering her mother from view, she’d broken down crying. She’d gone to Zuko’s room and nudged him awake, tears rolling down her face. Zuko had woken, confused and disoriented, but hugged his sister nonetheless and, seeing the mess that was her hair and the mother-of-pearl inlay comb that had once belong to their mother clutched in her hand, asked her to teach him how to comb through it properly. Zuko’s hair was long, after all, but nowhere near as long as Azula’s. He’d made a fine mess of it at first, pulling and tugging at her scalp every time he attempted to pass the teeth through her silky hair, but with some elbows thrown and instructions given, he’d managed.

He'd combed her hair every night after that. He didn’t have the oils and perfumes their mother did, but it helped Azula sleep more soundly.

To be reminded that, despite her failure, despite being the reason that their mother was dead, he still loved her.

(Not your fault, the bells quietly chimed in her lowest moments. You were but a child. Still are but a child. Not your fault.)

Their mother’s and brother’s funeral pyre had been lit on the same day that their father had told them that he was remarrying. That they were to behave at the ceremony three days later, and to not question her authority. Azula had been shocked at her father’s callousness to the demands of mourning as dictated by Agni but knew better than to argue. Zuko had tried but she’d pulled him back from his startled rising before their father had noticed, and she’d grasped his hand and squeezed until he understood – it was imperative that they not protest. If they tried, it might spell only worse things for them.

Their new stepmother was only eleven years older than Zuko, little more than a child herself. She’d done her best to attract as little attention as possible, knowing that her very presence was flouting the traditional mourning guidelines of the Fire Nation. Not that she’d had a choice, Azula reasoned – it had been made very clear that the Fire Lord himself desired the union, and loyal citizens of the Fire Nation had to accede to the Fire Lord.

To add insult to injury, her father had begotten the girl with a baby less than three months after their marriage, and she’d been much healthier than Ursa had been during any of her pregnancies. Their father had looked insufferably smug about it for days, until Uncle Iroh had yelled at him in the private dining room for his disrespect to his late wife’s memory.

Their father had joined them for prayers at Ursa’s shrine for three months. His presence was grudging and angry, and he never did the prayers right. Zuko hadn’t noticed at first, but as they got more flagrant, he’d picked up on it and had been inconsolable – he worried, the sentimental dum-dum, that without the right prayers, their mother would get lost in the Spirit World without reaching Agni’s glory. While she didn’t necessarily share his concerns – their mother had been too strong and self-assured to ever get lost in the mists – Azula had whispered into some ears, and a Fire Sage had joined them every morning since, in the name of adding Agni’s grace for a princess so distinguished as to give up her own life for the stability of the Royal Line of Agni.

Ozai had shaped up quickly after that – while the Fire Lord had allowed him to remarry, he was just superstitious enough to believe that blatant disrespect for the dead would be a harbinger for doom. When the Fire Sage had brought the report of misspoken prayers and incorrect bows – things that had been trained into the royal family since birth – Azulon had taken action. He had impressed upon his youngest son what the consequences to his own person would be if vengeful spirits were to bring bad luck to the royal line. Until the year had passed, he had joined them as respectfully as Azula had ever seen him – wisely, she thought, he kept his mouth shut, and let the Fire Sage and Azula lead the prayers.

(Azula had been getting worried, not just for her brother’s emotional well-being – the bells had been getting louder and more discordant with every day that Ozai had made a farce of the ceremonies, and while she still didn’t know exactly what they meant, she did know that the angry noises they’d been making were decidedly not good.)

Azula and Zuko visited their mother’s private shrine once a week, on the day that they had no lessons. This was a shrine that she had made in one of the smallest courtyards when she had moved to the palace, to the local spirits of Hira’a and Caldera, to honor her heritage and her future at once. Once they had been born, their mother had made a point to bring them to the shrine with her on special days for the spirits, to keep them rooted in tradition. Before Zuko’s fall, Azula had thought that it was a pointless exercise, speaking to spirits - especially ones so far away that probably couldn’t even hear her.

She knew better now.

(The smell of brine, the chiming of bells…)

They went to this shrine because, secretly, they found her Fire Lord-approved and -designed shrine was impersonal. It was ostentatious in a way that their mother had never been. While Aunt Xinwei – Uncle Iroh’s late wife – had an official shrine that was personal to her, it was that way because Iroh had spent painstaking time on making it perfect for her legacy. Their father hadn’t even given Ursa’s shrine a second thought. This small shrine, forgotten by all but the two of them, held more of their mother than the austere shrine officially dedicated to their mother ever would.

On those days that they visited they spoke to each other about the memories they held of their mother. Azula found that many of her earlier memories were tinted with anger at her mother and bereft of the love she now knew her mother had for her. Zuko told stories of a mother that had played with her all of the time, of Ursa being so excited for her little girl, of silly hairstyles and shimmery baby clothes and games of dress-up that Zuko had not-so-begrudgingly participated in. Azula felt the pain that many children in the Fire Nation felt poignantly in those moments, of losing a parent too young to have many memories with them.

They had lost an entire lifetime, an entire future with their mother that would never come to fruition. They would never get to see Ursa’s face grow lined with age, would never hear her complain about the grey hairs they were giving her.

Zuko held her hands tightly when they spoke of things Azula couldn’t remember. He reassured her – quite unnecessarily, Azula would think – that their mother had loved them more than anything else.

(If Ursa had passed before Zuko’s fall, Azula knew that there would have been nothing Zuko could have said to make her believe it. She thanked every spirit she knew by name and even some that she didn’t that she knew it now.)

She felt her failure to protect her mother and unborn brother less acutely with every passing day, the stabbing pain turning into a dull throb that only ached when she pressed at it. She’d cursed at La at first, her anger that she had been left so entirely unprepared for what had been coming uncontrollable. La had appeared once more, in a dream, after Azula had barely resisted destroying the little shrine in her room in a fit of angst.

The spirit had been dark, darker than she had been before. Her voice was filled with the crashing of waves in a typhoon, Azula’s own anger miniscule in comparison. Azula, in her dream, knew that the anger was not directed at her – not truly – in a way that she wasn’t sure she would have understood in her waking hours. The anger was for the sheer disrespect that the line of Sozin was showing for a warrior’s death.

Azula had been confused – her mother was no warrior, as adept as she had been with her knives in that moment. Ursa had been an actress, as she’d told her children a mere month before her death, and an herbalist, and well-taught in self-defense, but would never have qualified herself as a warrior.

With a rush of information akin to a breaking wave, La had informed Azula that anyone who had died in a battle was a warrior in her eyes. That anyone who had scarified themselves for their children was to be venerated above all else in Tui’s. When Azula had felt helpless, unable to implement the demands that washed over her without raising deep suspicions of those around her as to her seemingly bizarre rituals. They would recognize the otherness of Water Tribe prayer and ceremony, and beyond that, would it not anger Agni? Was this the debt that she owed to La, despite her mother’s ultimate demise?

La’s rage had subsided, then. Azula understood that she wasn’t expected to do the things that La and Tui wanted, but that they were still outraged that they were being denied what they viewed as a claim to a soul most noble.

La had tried to soothe her – while Azula felt cool, and washed in calm, she’d known that it was not La’s usual realm. No, that was moonlight, which danced over her face as she slept. As Azula cried bitter tears, their salt adding to La’s power, the ocean spirit attempted to reassure the little warrior that she had done all she could. That she should stay the course and trust the stars to guide her where she needed to be.

When Azula woke that day, on the morning of her seventh birthday, she’d felt settled in a way that she had not since her mother’s passing. She knew that she would always miss her mother – deeply and irrevocably – it suddenly felt less difficult to continue without her.

No, she had things to do. A brother to protect. Bending to master.

Their stepmother had her baby within a year of Ursa’s death. The baby was a perfect boy, born at the highest degree of Agni. The Fire Sages said they saw the spark of Agni in him, and Prince Ozai lauded his new son as the salvation of Sozin’s line. The Fire Lord commended his son for his success. The relief on the newly-dubbed Princess Roshu’s mien when the Fire Lord congratulated her was almost comical – but Roshu was no buffer when it came to Ozai’s ‘training’ regimens for his eldest children.

Azula and Zuko’s time in the cloisters was abbreviated – Zuko’s firebending lessons redoubled, leaving him aiming for perfection, for forms that Lu Ten hadn’t achieved until he was four years older than Zuko was. Azula was allowed to continue with her morning ablutions, but all other free time was spent thrown into lessons on military strategy, court manners, and politicking. Her firebending lessons were less lengthy than Zuko’s – Ozai’s declarations that Zuko had far to go to catch up to his little sister were an obvious ploy to pit them against each other, but it was obvious that the Fire Lord didn’t want her to advance too quickly.

(A year ago, Azula would have said that he was being kind, trying not to potentially exhaust her inner flame or damage her chi pathways. Now, she suspected that stymying her like this was borne of fear of his own childhood achievements being surpassed.)

Azula’s lesson in politics and court manners soon provided her the boon she’d been seeking: the art of flattery. She’d been looking for a way to keep attention away from Zuko, to keep him safe no matter what and realized that the best way to do so was to outshine him. If her father thought that molding Zuko into his image was a lost cause, perhaps the forges that Zuko would be subjected to would be less incendiary – maybe he’d walk away with less burns and scalds than he was.

She couldn’t risk telling Zuko all of her plan – the dum dum was a complete blabbermouth and couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. Maybe her life, but certainly not his. So she gave him hints – mentioning that she thought Azulon might let her spend more time with Zuko if she caught up to his lessons, that they could train together. That she was worried that Ozai might turn a critical eye on their little brother – dubbed Sozurai, in a strange, self-aggrandizing portmanteau of Sozin’s name and Ozai’s – and that he was too young to have even shown sparks, but what if Ozai started testing him in the way he had tested her as a babe?

Zuko was old enough to remember the coals that Ozai had held to his baby sister’s fingertips, and the candles that were always dangerously close to the crib. It was enough to help him understand why Azula was doing what she was doing.

(He still felt left behind, lesser than. His father was very good at reminding him that he was inadequate for the title of the line of Sozin.)

Azula wound her way into her father’s favor in the same way that she had so painstakingly unwound herself from being solely dedicated to him a year before. It chafed, having to flatter and wheedle him so, but it was effective – though she overheard him saying that he feared she was altogether too dedicated to the worship of mere spirits to the Fire Lord, he mentioned in the same breath that she was committed to learning from him more than she ever had been before Ursa’s death.

He slowly persuaded the Fire Lord into allowing Azula to begin more advanced lessons, contingent on the fact that he would be the one to teach her directly. While Azula harbored no disillusions about the reason for this training – to advance his own name over Iroh’s, and to provide his perfect heir an unparalleled teacher and protector until he, too, surpassed Azula’s achievements.

(When she held Sozurai, she would hear the bells more distinctly. When she could concentrate past the new-baby smell and the constant grabbing at her bangs by pudgy hands, she could sense that his inner chi was a small, flickering thing, weaker than Zuko’s ever had been – he may have come from a powerful firebending lines, she harbored serious doubts about the possibility that he ever would become the prodigy that their father insisted he would be.)

(The fact that her father couldn’t sense the same was a blessing for his new wife, Azula supposed.)

They grew. They aged. Things changed.

Zuko and Azula were a duo against the world. Uncle Iroh had been sent away to conquer Ba Sing Se the day that their mourning robes were discarded – the Fire Lord had grown restless at the lack of progress made under the interim commander of the armed forces and sent Iroh to take over the efforts. Azula had tried her best to be stalwart, but the warm hug Uncle Iroh had enveloped her in had taken her over the edge. In the year between her mother’s death and the end of their mourning, Iroh had taken she and her brother under his wing. While he was still her Uncle Fuddy Duddy, and he was overly obsessed with Pai Sho and tea – Zuko still called it hot leaf juice, and while she liked to pretend her palate was more elevated, some of the more noxious brews really did taste like dirt – Iroh had done all he could to provide them with the love and structure that they now lacked.

He wasn’t perfect – no one could replace their mother – but he did his best. And that was all she could ask for, truly.

(Iroh wondered at her little shrine, and the stories she asked for when he offered to tell them. She wanted to know more about the spirits than any other child he had ever known, and more often than not, she would come to him days after the tale with a question or a correction.)

(Zuko mainly wanted Iroh to read out play manuscripts. He was bad at the voices, but Zuko assured him he was getting better.)

So when he left, it was with wet robes from two young children, and wet cheeks of his own, as he had hugged his own son goodbye. It was against decorum, but Iroh was already being sent to the front, and his father was quite deliberately looking the other way.

Lu Ten became their advocate after his father’s departure, but his increasing responsibilities kept them apart for days at a time. So Azula and Zuko continued to turn towards one another.

And Azula continued to pray, and read, and listen, and learn.

Chapter 12

Chapter Text

The day of Zuko’s eleventh birthday, Azula began her worship to Agni with an extra prayer to Tui and La. While in the interceding years between her mother’s death and now she had only seen La once more, the knowledge that the favor she owed the great spirit weighed on her, so on the high holidays of the Water Tribe, she would acknowledge them. Nothing wrong with a little flattery to smooth the jagged edges of the sins of her kin.

(It had been a brief intercession with La, on a trip that Ozai had taken his family on to Ember Island. It had been strange and uncomfortable, and Azula had escaped one night to sit on the beach and meditate away from the interference of a toddler or an angsty older brother. The water had touched her toes from where it lapped up onto the beach, and she’d smiled, not breaking her concentration on her flame, and wiggled her toes in response. She’d felt more than heard La’s laughter, and a stronger breaking wave had led her to scramble up and away from the ocean. When she’d finally fallen asleep that night, La had appeared to her, and caught her full in the face with ocean spray. Azula had woken with salt on her lips and with the knowledge that she was doing well. She’d made Zuko play in the ocean with her for hours the next day.)

Uncle Iroh was doing exceedingly poorly in the Earth Kingdom – that is, if one were to listen to what her father said. As someone who, as a rule, did not trust her father, she read the letters her uncle sent to Lu Ten and to the Fire Lord (when allowed) herself. While Iroh had not yet pierced the walls of Ba Sing Se, the city was entirely cut off from the rest of the Earth Kingdom, the embargo of the Fire Nation complete and aggressive. And the Fire Lord was pleased with his eldest son, even if he hadn’t yet been able to complete the impossible task he had been given.

The Fire Lord was teaching his eldest three grandchildren directly the intricacies of the politicking expected of the members of the Royal Family. He had warmed to Azula over the course of the years since Ursa’s death – Iroh had begun training her in chi direction, and Ozai had taken over her offensive training. While Azula was unsure why, she treated him like any dangerous pet that Zuko would bond with – cautiously, and with respect, and it seemed to work.

(Privately, Azulon had once again began viewing her as his granddaughter and not as a potential usurper of his records when she’d been unable to produce any hint of blue flame after her mother’s death. He would be loath to admit it, but he was incredibly proud of how quickly he’d beaten Sozin’s milestones and had begun to resent his granddaughter for overtaking them. When her progress had slowed, it had been a great balm to his bruised ego.)

In their lessons, Azulon spoke to them about the methods being used in the war, and how the colonies were kept in check, and how they, eventually, would be used as political pawns in the great game that they played. Zuko, ever looking for love and approval from his father and grandfather, absorbed the information like a sponge, showing their grandfather a new side of him. While he was not as vicious as Azulon would like – ‘If we could keep them safe and lose less soldiers, what does it matter if it takes an extra two weeks?’ – his methods were sound.

If some of those methods were later presented at war councils, and used, well – Zuko would only have been proud to hear that his ideas were worth employing.

Azula had begun spending more time at the cloisters in the evenings after her lessons concluded. She, Ty Lee, Zuko and Mai would play on their rare days off, but those incidences were quite infrequent. Lu Ten tried to argue to their father that they should get more time to enjoy their childhoods, but those arguments often fell on deaf ears. Azula felt lucky that he had been able to get to the Fire Lord and whisper about sending her to the Royal Firebending Academy to ‘learn about the manner of a lady’ before her father had been able to espouse the benefits of staying home under his tutelage indefinitely. So, her time in the cloisters was a great boon, only granted under the condition that she show adequate progress in her firebending.

The Fire Lord was grudgingly impressed when she completed katas with difficulty far beyond her years. And so, every month, he granted her the permission to continue with her daily hour with the Fire Sages.

During that hour, she read as much as she could get her hands on. She found katas that were long abandoned as showy, or too unaggressive, or just completely archaic, and practiced them endlessly. When she would bring one out to show Azulon what she was learning in the cloisters, he would usually give her an indulgent smile and ask her how it would help her in her pursuit of Sozin-style bending. Invariably, she would tell him that it simply helped with her control, and that these new forms were a different kind of challenge that she had to work through.

She did not show him the forms that mimicked the shape of waterbending, whips and multi-limbed shrouds of flame, waves of flame that ebbed and flowed like the tides. She did not show him the whistling tiny balls of flame that would whirl about her like the hastily scribbled sketch she found of a young Air Nomad with big ears and a bigger smile, marbles flying around his head. She had not yet found any scrolls or descriptions for Earth-style firebending but suspected that the elements were more or less incompatible – while both firebending and earthbending required a strong base, earthbending was moving something with solid weight – and firebending embraced fluidity and the ungraspable nature of flame to its advantage. These scrolls were secrets that she jealously hoarded, telling no one about them – while she wished she could share all she was learning with Zuko, she knew he would pull out a move in a different style in a moment of desperation and expose it all.

Zuko was altogether too good at slapping different styles together and winning, now. It infuriated their father that he was incapable of sparring in just one way, but Azula counted it as a win – the more unpredictable Zuko was, the less likely he was to get burned because he was doing the usual steps that Ozai could anticipate.

The scrolls were one of Azula’s two secrets that she kept from her brother. That one was seditious at best. The second… well, she suspected that La’s non-confirmation of her impending insanity was finally coming true because of it.

She had been seeing a new spirit for a week now, and she suspected that she was imagining it. After all, she’d never read anything about any spirits local to Caldera that wore nuo masks of red dragons’ faces. The nuo mask reminded her of Zuko’s mask from Love Amongst Dragons, but what kind of spirit went to see plays in its free time? No, she suspected that it was trying to gain her trust and trick her into some terrible trap that she’d never see coming. As such, she had been decidedly ignoring it ever since its appearance.

It had been getting more persistent with time, and more aggressive. While it didn’t yet seem to be corporeal (another point to the ‘absolutely in her head, she was going crazy’ category, as most spirits could interact with their environment, even in small ways), it had been closer every day. While it had started just peeking around corners and over the shoulders of courtiers, it was now dogging her every step, barely more than two arm’s lengths away. It would sit across from her at every table she chose and stared at her in every reflective surface.

She refused to meet its eyes. She wouldn’t give it (or her deranged subconscious) the satisfaction.

It was garbed in simple, if well-made, white clothes – a nenju and suikan paired with a sashiniku, giving off an otherworldly purplish glare that hurt her eyes when the spirit (mental apparition) rested in her peripheral vision. It had long, unbound black hair, glossier than even the most vainglorious courtesans’, that draped effortlessly over its shoulders.

(Azula knew that spirits lived by different rules, but oh, what she wouldn’t give for hair that cooperated like that. Zuko was saying that they were too old to dress each other’s’ hair, so Azula and the handmaidens had made a tenuous peace that involved tight braids to sleep and very slow brushing and dressing in the morning. If she left her hair unbound like the spirit, it would have been knotted to Koh and back by midday luncheon.)

She’d been jumpy as it got closer. She’d lashed out at Lu Ten when he’d placed a hand on her shoulder from behind – she’d been too distracted to hear him approach. A significant lapse, for her, one that made her cousin’s brow furrow in concern. She’d snapped at Zuko when he’d tried to get her attention that morning and regretted it immediately when his face had shuttered.

This spirit was driving her insane. Or, well, maybe her insanity was driving her to spirits. She couldn’t be sure.

So, while she acknowledged Tui and La on the morning of the Winter Solstice, she prayed to Agni above all. The winter solstice was notorious for letting in dark spirits, and she was… honestly, she was terrified that this would be the day that the spirit would gain the ability to grab her, that it would gain enough corporeality to hurt her – or that she would do it to herself, if the spirit truly was a figment of her imagination. She prayed to Agni to burn away the impurities of her soul that had gathered since the summer solstice, rededicating herself to His worship… praying that, above all else, she would not hurt her family. That nothing more sinsister would hurt her family.

(Ozai, she compromised, could deserve to be frightened out of his wits. But not hurt. He would only be more dangerous if he was hurt.)

When she opened her eyes, the spirit was kneeling next to her, head bowed. While not praying in the same way Azula prayed, it was undeniable that it was at least mimicking her methods – hands folded on its lap instead of shaping the flame but swaying slightly in a non-existent wind. Azula barely resisted jumping away – stopped only by the reflection in the brazier on the shrine that showed a crest of sunrays around the spirit’s head.

The rays faded as the spirit looked up, the spell broken. It tilted its head like a fox-lemur, as if it was asking her a question.

“Fine,” Azula spat out. “I’ll acknowledge that you’re real. That was as much of a sign from Agni as I’ll ever get,” she muttered. The bells in the courtyard gently chimed – it wasn’t yet the hour, but a stiff, cold wind whipped through her window seconds later. “But I don’t like that you’ve been following me, and I don’t like you.”

The spirit only shrugged in response. How infuriating.

“I don’t know what you want. Any chance you could tell me instead of making me wonder?” She looked over the spirit. “In that mask, I seriously doubt that you’re the debt that La spoke of.” The spirit shook its head – at least that was something.

“So not La’s messenger… then what?” she mused to herself. She stood, beginning to pace – a habit that both she and Zuko had picked up from Lu Ten, one that she wasn’t fully sure actually helped her to think, but at least it made her feel like she was doing something. “Are you just here to annoy me?”

The spirit looked like it was laughing – no sound accompanied it, but its shoulders shook.

“Ugh,” Azula said, rolling her eyes. She side-eyed the spirit, still kneeling in front of the shrine, and groaned again. “I don’t know what to do with you, but I must go. Do NOT follow me,” she admonished. “You’re too distracting and I need to be on my best form today.”

The spirit didn’t follow her as she left to take breakfast with her family. It was Zuko’s birthday, and Lu Ten had been quite insistent to their grandfather that Zuko had earned a true celebration with his outstanding growth in tactical work this year. Azulon had, shockingly, agreed, and breakfast was a veritable feast of Zuko’s favorite foods.

Since their mother’s death, he had lost his horrible table manners, and Azula found herself mourning the innocent brother who would slurp and scarf his favorite treats. She knew that this was safer – no chance for admonishment from their father, and fully capable of presenting himself in society without Ursa’s soft touch to smooth over his faux pas but mature for his age. Too mature by far.

(The bells reminded her that no nine-year-old should have to manage the balancing act that Azula had become quite adept at. She shook her head imperceptibly to all but Lu Ten, whose brow furrowed once again.)

He sat with perfect posture, ate with perfect poise, and spoke with perfect manners. When they were not with their father, he relaxed, and when it was just the three of them, he was almost able to act his age. They’d both had to grow up too quickly.

The day was largely uneventful – the only gift that Zuko received from their father was the offhanded promise to begin sending him to Master Piandao starting in the summer, with a nod from their grandfather in approval when Zuko had turned a hopeful face to him. He’d begun beaming and Azula’s mood settled – even if this was just a way for their father to get Zuko from underfoot for a month at a time, it was something that Zuko had been desperately craving ever since Lu Ten was awarded his sword mastery. Lu Ten and Azula heaped Zuko with gifts, and the small party held for Zuko was pleasant enough. Sozurin had begun to string together words into rudimentary sentences and said ‘happy Zuko!’ loud enough to make the assembled group laugh after hearing enough people wish him a happy birthday. Even Princess Roshu had given him a small gift of a scroll of a new play she had heard of from her friends outside of Caldera, and Zuko had pressed his lips together and bowed deeply, his eyes filled with tears at the thought their fading violet of a stepmother had given to his gift.

His birthday celebrations had always been small, given the significance of the day being the shortest of the year, so most of the party had trickled home by the time the sun began to set. The wind had been howling all day, and she’d only seen the spirit once, during the party, watching over the group from a balcony above the ballroom. It was cold, colder than usual for Caldera in the winter, but the braziers around the rooms had kept them warm throughout.

As Zuko, Lu Ten and Azula had walked back to their rooms, Azula noticed the spirit once again. It simply waited for her at her room’s entry, and she kept an eye on it as she said her goodnights to her cousin and brother.

As she walked up to it, she raised an eyebrow. “What do you have planned for me, then?” she asked as she closed the door behind her.

The spirit extended its hand to her wordlessly.

Azula knew the risks of taking any unknown spirit’s hand like this. She was liable to be whisked off to the spirit world, or at least away from her corporeal form, and she might be left to find her way back on her own. But Agni had shown His approval of this spirit, so…

Fine, she decided. She would trust this spirit, for now. She placed her hand in its larger palm and everything went dark.

When she opened her eyes (when had she closed them?), she saw a small settlement in front of her. The sky was a dusky twilight, striking despite the late hour for the sun that lingered above the horizon. The settlement was made of ice – of ice!

With a start, Azula realized what this settlement must be. It was one of the villages of the Southern Water Tribe, one on the coastline. She whipped around to stare at the spirit. “Have you brought me here only to taunt me? To show me the failings of my line?” She was incensed – she knew, better than most, what the sins of her forefathers were. She knew that if any Southern waterbenders had still existed, she may have been able to save her mother – their healing was legendary and, with the right methods, could save any life from the brink. But there were no more Southern waterbenders. There was no hope. There was no future here except for a tribe struggling to eke out a way of existence in an environment so inhospitable that, without their bending, the best they could do was survive.

The spirit stayed silent and only looked towards the village once again. Azula followed its line of sight and saw nothing of note – some children playing outside of fortified walls, a small battalion of warriors monitoring the skyline for anything unusual. In her anger with the callousness of the spirit, she stomped off – or, stomped as well as a disembodied soul could. The lack of footprints in the snow only served to make her madder.

Finally, Azula reached the children. One looked to be around Zuko’s age, and the rest were her age or younger. There were two teens watching over them, or at least pretending to as they carved away at shark-whalebone trinkets.

One of the young girls in the group was crouching over a mound of snow, concentrating. Azula’s focus drifted across the other children – the boy was poking at a block of ice with a strange bent knife, and the other three girls were in a circle singing some song she didn’t recognize and playing hand games. Suddenly, the girl crouched over straightened up, the snow grasped in her hands turning to –

Water? Azula felt her jaw drop in a lapse of manners that surely would have set her court tutor to tears. None of the other children had noticed yet, but as the girl floated the wibbling ball of water over to the boy, she saw the eyes of the other girls get large. When the boy turned to the girl with an annoyed ‘What, Katah-’ and saw the ball of water, his jaw mimicked Azula’s, and he began spluttering like a landed octopus-tuna.

The attention of the guards was drawn as – Katah? – laughed and kept floating the ball. “I knew I could do it!” she cried, making the ball glimmer in the perpetual sunset. “I finally got it to float!”

So, this was not a discovery of an unknown skill, Azula realized. This was a new development in a girl coming into her own powers – ones that had no remaining teachers from whom to learn. No, Katah was on her own, completely and totally – and, Azula knew, in danger for these powers.

Azula had not heard any whispers of Southern waterbenders in the meetings she was allowed to attend, so she could only hope that the lack of rumors meant that no one had discovered this young girl or spoken about her to any outsiders. Azula knew that the Water Tribes were fiercely loyal, but that one small misspoken word to the wrong ear and the raids would resume with a fury.

Was this girl the Avatar? Azula wondered, pausing to think. If so, that would mean that the last airbender had finally passed. Her heart panged, and she wanted to mourn, but there was no time for it. No, Azula had to set plans into motion once again if she wanted to preserve this young girl’s life.

(She realized in that moment that this was the debt that La had spoken of. It was as clear as the full moon resting in the sky above the girl’s head, sharing the vast horizon with his brother Agni.)

Katah’s concentration faltered, and she looked over her shoulder directly into Azula’s eyes. Azula saw her gasp and once again, everything faded to black.

When Azula opened her eyes, she was once again in her chambers. She whipped around to look for the spirit – there. “Are you a messenger? Some sort of protector?” The spirit tilted its head back and forth – something like that, it seemed to say. “And I’ve been tasked to protect that girl. By La,” Azula said, more a confirmation than a question. The spirit nodded.

Azula let out a very unladylike swear that her mother would have been deeply disappointed to hear from her daughter’s lips. “Nothing is ever easy with you spirits, is it?”

Chapter 13

Chapter Text

Azula had to go about this very carefully. She couldn’t let Zuko know what she was up to, and she certainly couldn’t give any indication as to why she needed the information that she was seeking, because that would almost certainly tip her hand and push her grandfather to take action.

When the Fire Sage found her in the cloister library, desperately seeking information on how to make discreet enquiries, she thought that she was finished. Even if she could convince them that she wasn’t planning anything outwardly seditious, they would suspect her and the reporting back to her grandfather would only increase. Her actions would be stymied, and she would have to throw herself into redirection that was sure to be exposed by any war advisor with half a brain to their name. The scrolls and books and journals she had pulled down would spell out her planned course of action to anyone if they only cared to look.

Instead, Fire Sage Ukyo only looked down at the papers and nodded once. “Let’s clean this up, and then we shall play a game of Pai Sho, Princess,” she said, eyes glinting. Azula prepared herself to be slowly tortured for information over a game that she had only begrudgingly learned under Uncle Iroh and began ordering her lies in her head.

If she told the right ones in the right combination… maybe she could convince Ukyo that she simply wanted to hear what was truly occurring on the war front? That she knew Uncle Iroh was fudging things, and that she wanted to help, so she was trying to set up some sort of information network? It was farfetched – too farfetched, she thought, but she had no better plans than that.

When Fire Sage Ukyo didn’t ask her a single question about her research over the game, Princess Azula began to doubt herself. When, on their third game – after two losses – she saw an opportunity for the White Lotus gambit, her doubt transformed into suspicion. She had read mention of White Lotuses in centuries past, before the war had begun. They had been a group of scholars that met between countries to share philosophy and camaraderie, as well as the occasional high-stakes game of Pai Sho. (The most notorious of all the games had resulted in the city of Omashu being lost by the then-Earth King, winning it its independence, and establishing it as a strange proto-democracy, its elected ruler equal in power to the Earth King in perpetuity.) Was this a test?

She did not take the gambit opportunity on this round but waited for the next and – yes. Ukyo was setting up the gambit as surely as anything, quietly waiting for Azula to recognize and take it.

At the heart of it all, Azula was at a crossroads. She loved her country – Agni knows that she did. But she didn’t love the transformation it had undergone since Sozin’s time and the beginning of the war. Gone was the hearth that flame lived in, and what was left was only a raging bonfire, intent on hurting everything in its path. She couldn’t see a route where she could fulfil her obligation to La, correct the course that the Fire Nation was on, and at the same time, not betray – well, her grandfather, at least.

The modern texts said that the power of the Fire Nation lay upon the shoulders of the Fire Lord. The ancient texts, the ones written in obsolete tongues, the ones left unadulterated by revisionist histories and corrupted minds, spoke of a power granted by Agni to His people, one that was strengthened by respect and love and dedication, not fear and resentment. They spoke of how the Fire Lord’s first responsibility was to Agni’s people, and how all actions undertaken should be for the glory and by the grace of Agni.

Azula doubted that her father had ever given a damn about Agni’s grace once in his entire life. And even Azulon had forgotten his commission and raison d’être – to act as a mouthpiece for and the hand of Agni on this plane. No, he acted for his own glorification and his own pride, and this war was nothing more than a show of it.

(She hoped that Uncle Iroh acted with Agni in his heart, but she worried that he, too, had forgotten the old lessons. He had been raised at Sozin’s knee and was as ruthless as many other commanders in the Fire Nation Army, pushing forward in the name of the Fire Lord – not in the name of Agni.)

Her loyalty to her people and her country battled with her debts to the spirits and her antipathy for her ancestors. She would rather throw herself upon La’s mercy – not that she suspected La had much mercy – than put her people at risk. But would protecting this girl, presumably the next Avatar, put her people at risk?

She feared the wrath of the Southern Water Tribe. Not only had her grandfather stolen away all of their waterbenders, he had taken the measures needed to systematically destroy every one of them. In the years since her mother had passed away, Azula had investigated and become privy to more information than she did previously – Azulon himself had told she and her brother how they had sought out any report of a waterbenders with great prejudice to prevent the Avatar from being born. His justification for the beginning of the raids was that the waterbenders had been attempting to take over the Southern Air Temple as a raid point of their own, to better attack the Fire Nation colonies and home islands.

While Azula didn’t doubt that they were trying to take it over as an outpost – fifty years abandoned, they might as well – she doubted that it was, in truth, to attack the Fire Nation. Reports of piracy had only ever been limited, and the Southern Water Tribe had most likely been trying to establish a route to trade or to visit their sister tribe in the North – with the more accessible and more protected routes through the Fire Nation closed to them, they would have to pass through several dangerous seas and bodies of water to have any sort of cultural communication. The lower outpost would have served well for a foothold to repair ships after leaving the inhospitable waters of the southern gyre and the wind drifts that cast off the islands surrounding the Southern Air Temple.

But that initial move of perceived aggression had set off a chain that had led to every single waterbender in the Southern Water Tribe’s death. The Southern Water Tribe had withdrawn – its trading was virtually nonexistent with everyone except Kyoshi Island, and even that was rarely more than twice a year. They hadn’t sent out one of their legendary raid parties in the better part of three decades. Despite this, Azula knew that their anger and wrath was far from extinguished – she suspected all it would take for them to come together against the Fire Nation was a central figure to band together around.

Katah could be that central figure. The first waterbender born to the Southern Water Tribe in over two decades, likely the Avatar, would be their best chance at revenge on the people who had torn their cultural fabric asunder. And the Water Tribes, according to everything Azula had ever read, believed in revenge served bit for bit.

She knew that La would like revenge. She was less sure about the nature of that revenge – would La seek to extinguish all firebenders in the world? It would be more than La had ever done before, but Azula remembered the series of tsunamis that hit only the home islands when the raids had first begun fifty years ago. The Fire Sages had assured the Fire Lord that they were incidental and only a result of volcanic eruptions underwater – Azula thought that it was more likely a result of La’s wrath. There had been no earthquakes preceding the tsunamis, no warning – only entire villages and cities wiped from the face of the planet in one fell swoop, exceeding all known high lines and historic tsunami stones. Would La choose to take her revenge through the Avatar in such a catastrophic way?

No, Azula decided. It fell to her to make sure that La would only take her revenge on the perpetrators of the atrocities that the Fire Nation had engineered for nearly a century now. If that meant her, fine. She would divert her anger from her brothers and her cousin and protect this possible-Avatar as well as she could – and hope that, with time, Katah could be persuaded to not take out the blood price that the Water Tribe would be well within their rights to demand against the people of the Fire Nation.

The white lotus tile sat heavy in her fingers. She stared at the board, not daring to look at Fire Sage Ukyo.

The crossroads beckoned.

The click of the tile sounded deeply final to her own ears as a breeze made the windchime in the window tinkle melodically, and Fire Sage Ukyo gave her a rare smile.

“We begin.”

Chapter 14

Chapter Text

Katara had never been the most patient child in the South Pole. She had been accused of being impulsive, reckless, and worst of all, annoying – though that last one was mainly from her brother, Sokka, who currently held the title for Most Irritating Child of the Chief, in her humble opinion.

As such, after an especially excruciating day of mind-numbing chores where she had been forbidden from playing with water by Gran Gran – it wasn’t her fault that the laundry had gotten wet again last time, Sokka had bumped her when she was trying to float the water from the well to the hot pot without having to carry it and her concentration had been completely broken – she flew outside without a second thought. Gran Gran called after her, reminding her to wear her hood, but the snow flurrying around her face was distracting enough that she barely heard.

The weather was changing quickly, as the village elders had expected from the halo that had been surrounding the sun and Tui for the past day. The hunting party that had set out two days ago had brought back in a productive harvest earlier this afternoon, so that was a relief to her mother, Katara knew. But she had some time to play and practice her bending until the tides changed, so off she went with her sled and the polar bear puppy that she and Sokka shared responsibility for.

Sokka had been training with the warriors lately, which frustrated her to no end – she knew that the warriors of the tribe were traditionally men, but there were some women that joined them in their exercises and mock-battles. Nonetheless, her father and mother both said that she was too young to join in. Katara’s arguments that Sokka was no taller than her and even moved slower fell upon deaf ears, and she was relegated to chore duty when she wasn’t learning about healing herbs and survival skills with the other children of the village.

At least Sokka still had to wash his own stinky loincloths and socks. Mom wasn’t letting him get off that easy.

She reflected on the story that their mother had been telling her a few days ago as she worked on a weaving as Katara looked on. It was a story about Tui and La and their love, and how they balanced one another out. She’d heard that story a million times, and when she complained and said as much, her mother had hummed thoughtfully.

“Have you heard about Tui’s brother, then?”

Katara had shaken her head, and her mother had smiled. “Now first, you must remember that Tui and La are male and female, both and neither, whenever they so choose. The only static rule that they have is that they are in balance at all times. But while La is Tui’s chosen lover, found in the spirit world and who crossed over with Tui before the spirit portals closed to live on our plane, Tui’s brother is constant and unchanging.

“Tui and his brother were tasked with lighting the sky by the great spirits above. Tui took on the night, and his brother Agni, the day. They agreed to split their time evenly, to allow their children to always have a guiding light. Agni shone much brighter than his brother, but Tui’s mirror-like surface reflected Agni’s light in softer tones and allowed humans to sleep without fear.

“Soon, they realized that Tui ran much faster than his brother – quite often, he would overtake his older brother, and laugh as he lit the sky during the day. When both were below the horizon at night, the stars would dance without their siblings overshadowing them, leaving enough light for humanity to manage. On some days, Tui’s face would reflect less light, and some days, more – his face was ever-changing, while Agni’s was unwavering. This is how Tui discovered that he could change into a woman, or someone in between, or someone who was neither. And Agni smiled upon the changing faces of Tui always.

“But one day, Tui crossed in front of her brother. Agni was completely cut off from the world except for his corona, casting the world in shadow and fear. With no way to reflect her brother’s light except back to Agni, Tui realized her error – but it was too late to change her course. No, they discovered that her run would carry her in front of her brother every so often, and that they would both have to pray that, when their faces were turned away from the world, nothing would happen that they could have prevented.

“Alas, that was not to be – while humanity cowered, the spirits would run amok, unhindered for once by Agni’s glare. So, Agni and Tui wept in those moments for the humans that they had come to love.

“It was many eons before they discovered they could teach their chosen ones, their champions, how to bend. They first taught the spirits that had chosen to take form in the bodies of animals – the creatures of the bodies of water that cover the face of our world. These were the easiest to teach – they had been coexisting with the push and pull of the tide for eons, and while most only had small talent, to move faster or smoother, there was one being that had a distinct skill with the ebb and flow of water. The sea serpents were the first true benders, able to use the ocean as they wanted, and creating new gyres where none existed before. La accepted these new changes into his seas, and Tui saw that they were good. So, with this, Agni and Tui turned their attentions to fire. They taught the sea serpent’s sibling, the dragon, how to access and manipulate Agni’s eternal flame, and charged the dragons with protecting the source of firebending until the end of the world. For you see, while the waters are unending and ever-renewing, fire must have fuel to continue. So, the dragons, gifted with the ability to bend fire, vowed to protect them forever.”

At this, Katara had pulled a face. “But Mom – firebending is bad. Everyone knows that.”

Her mother had tutted. “Not so, Katara! Firebending is not bad, just as waterbending, earthbending, and airbending are not bad. There are bad people who may take advantage of the gifts that the great spirits have given us, but that does not make an entire element bad. We need fire here in our village to cook our food, to smoke our meat, to have enough water to drink! I know that the Fire Nation is scary, and what they’re doing is not right, but that does not mean that firebending is bad. It just means that they have lost their way from Agni, and that they don’t know how to find their way back. You must believe in peoples’ ability to be better.”

Katara was skeptical about the truth of her mother’s words but held her tongue when her mother started the story again. “But humans still did not know how to bend on their own. The great lionturtles had the ability to grant bending to humans, but after the spirit portals were closed many eons ago, humanity left the lion turtles and forgot how to bend. Tui and La struggled to teach their chosen people how to bend – until one day, when a curious little girl sat watching the tides flow in and out under a full moon. She began to mimic the movement of the ocean with her hands, and felt the air around her – her chi was attuned under the full moon, and suddenly, the water began following her hands, and not the waves of La.

“The little girl returned to the ocean every night of that lunar cycle. She found that it was hardest to control the ocean when Tui did not reflect the light of Agni, and that it was easier when the moon smiled down upon her. She practiced until she could move the waters during the day, and even when Tui was not in the sky. She became strong, and grew older, and shared what she had learned with the people of her tribe.”

“But what about the sea serpent?” Katara asked, deeply curious. “Wasn’t she mad that she wasn’t the only one who could move the water?”

“Oh, that’s a story for another time, my little isopuppy. Be still – for I am almost done.

“Agni watched as his sister’s chosen people learned how to work with her element once again, organically, without the blessings of the lion turtles. And he turned his eyes to his first benders, the dragons, and bade them to teach the people who lived below their mountaintop lairs.

“The dragons were jealous – they had hoarded the knowledge granted to them, and protected Agni’s eternal flame, every day since they had been given the gift. They thought that humanity, who had forgotten the blessings of the lionturtles, did not deserve such bounties, as they had not worked to protect the eternal flame, and sullied Agni’s name by creating impure fires with the ores found in the earth. But Agni persisted and made a pact with the dragons: if they would teach humans how to bend, how to utilize Agni’s flame, then he would grant dragons with knowledge that humanity did not have about the origin of his flames, for them to guard and grant as they saw fit. So, the dragons agreed, and they taught Agni’s chosen how to hold his flames and use them to stay safe.

“The spirit portals were closed, and Tui’s eclipses were less dangerous for humanity. The groups worked in conjunction in places where they lived to complement each other’s skills and supplement any weaknesses. They learned, with time, that not all amongst them could feel the pull of the tides and the moon, or warm themselves from inside with the flame of Agni. It became evident that the flow of chi was critical. And so, many strong lines of benders formed to protect the gifts that Tui and Agni had given them. Tui and Agni are in a dance across the sky, playful and unending, and without them or their kindness, we would not be able to exist as we do.”

After a pause, reflecting on the end of the story, Katara had another question. “Is that why Sokka can’t bend? Because his chi is stupid?”

Katara’s mom laughed, and then sorted her expression into something less mirthful. “That’s not very kind of you, Katara. His chi isn’t stupid, but it is different from yours.” She sighed, looking suddenly wistful. “I wish there were someone here to teach you. Kanna – your Gran Gran – says that there are benders in the North that cannot access water, but who can feel the flow of chi and can utilize their own to help with healing, especially of the mind. We don’t have anyone who can do that, but that is not to say that there are not people all around us who have different types of access to chi than you or I do.”

Katara thought on this for a moment, then said, “Does that mean Sokka’s chi is really good for being a know-it-all?” Katara’s mom had smiled broadly and shaken her head, and that had been the end of that.

The story about the balance of fire and water had stuck with her for days now. She knew that her mom had told her because it talked about the way that waterbending started, and it talked about when she would be strongest and weakest. She still didn’t fully understand why the sun was part of the story – sure, he was the reason that the moon shone, but…

She paused. If she was weaker when there was less light to shine, does that mean that her powers were tied to the sun, too?

She looked up and scrutinized where the sun would be, sitting languidly above the horizon as it had for several weeks and would for several weeks more, if not for the clouds that had stolen in.

She could see the bulging of the clouds that had covered the sky since she’d last looked up, the bottom of the dark sheet that had masked the sky drooping like the teats of a polar bear dog with a new litter. She had just begun learning what the clouds meant from Gran Gran and her friend Nuhanu, but she hadn’t ever seen this one before. She looked at her polar bear puppy uneasily, the small whines that he was making unnerving her. When she turned around, looking for the village, she realized that they had ventured much further than she had intended to as she was lost in her thoughts.

The village was nowhere to be found, and fear gripped her heart in icy claws. She turned to her polar bear puppy and made sure his harness was on securely, then stepped back onto the sledge, clicking her tongue to get him moving. He sniffed the ground, looking as scared as she felt, but began in the same direction that their tracks came from.

The wind rolled the clouds in rapidly from the sea, and they were upon her far too quickly. The snow began in little flurries at first but was swiftly too dense to see through.

Whiteout. The one thing that Katara had been told to never leave the igloo in, that her best bet was to stay warm and stay inside. But she was outside now, and she needed to get home, or –

She wouldn’t think that. No, she couldn’t think that. She prayed that her polar bear puppy would be able to track their scent, but it became evident that the trail was lost as he settled onto his haunches after sniffing ineffectively for several long seconds.

Katara sent up a prayer – to Tui, to La, to whomever was listening – that she may find her way through this snow.

Snow was water, right? So, all she had to do was clear away the water. Theoretically, the idea was sound, but Katara had only just been able to levitate discrete balls of water. The tiny flecks of water were like a constant inundation of information when she tried to focus on them, and the water held in the clouds demanded her attention. She didn’t know how to stop it, how to protect herself, so she withdrew her senses and tried to shut away her waterbending. She felt tears sliding down her face as she yelled for her mother, her brother, her father to help her, but heard nothing in response.

Until – was that a bell?

Her head turned, trying to follow the sound. It happened again, and her polar bear puppy perked up its ears, too, co*cking his head to the side.

Suddenly, Katara saw a terrifying red face with a gaping maw and teeth longer than her hand emerge from the snow. She gasped, falling back over the edge of the sledge, and threw her arms up to protect herself. She could see no body, but the face did not change expression. It was like it was frozen – no, she realized, it was a mask. And it did have a body – covered in white clothes unlike any she had ever seen before. They certainly were too thin to keep the being warm, but they did not move in the winds that howled across the tundra, and she knew, without a doubt, that it was a spirit.

Katara had not met any spirits before. In fact, they did their best to avoid attracting the attention of spirits in her village, as they lacked the waterbenders that would have, in centuries prior, appeased them. So, this spirit, with a mask unlike any that were used in her village, red and angry and tortuous, was terrifying in its unwavering presence.

Was it here to hurt her? Or to watch her die? As it stretched out its hand, she flinched away, raising her parka-clad arm to cover her face, her tears renewed. When nothing happened, she dared peek past her arm. The hand remained extended, unmoved since she looked away. It flexed its fingers – human fingers, Katara saw, but paler than anyone she’d met before. “I just wanna go home,” Katara said, the words torn from her throat almost without her consent. The spirit flexed its fingers, and Katara took only a moment to consider before placing her mitten into the bare palm before her.

The spirit’s fingers were at once intangible and solid, giving Katara no resistance but tugging her along, nonetheless. Katara wondered if the spirit was focusing on making its hand more human, or if all spirits were like this when they interacted with the human realm. The black hair that had been hidden from the front was obvious when Katara looked up at the spirit, but all other distinguishing characteristics were hidden from view. They walked along in silence – Katara, holding on to the lead of her polar bear puppy and the hand of the spirit, crushing through freshly fallen snow, and the spirit, unerringly moving forward, its feet never leaving a mark.

The snow was denser still than it had been, but the spirit kept her moving. Katara was shivering, now, and her puppy was staying close to her side, but she was beginning to get sleepy. She knew that was bad, Gran Gran had told her so many times, but she could barely hold her eyes open. Her steps were rapidly turning into staggers, and her tears had long since frozen on her face. The storm was unrelenting.

And, as suddenly as the snow had begun, the gates to her village loomed in front of her. She cried out, her voice raw and trembling, and stumbled forward, pushing them open. Her puppy ran ahead of her, straight to the kennels, and Katara was grasped by strong hands wrapped in mittens and hoisted into sinewy arms, pillowed by a heavy parka. She looked up and saw Bato, his face terrified, as he began to run towards her igloo. She glanced over his shoulder and saw the spirit’s mask, clothes already lost in the whirls of white, linger beyond the boundaries of the village. Katara raised one hand to wave her thanks, and with a flurry of snow, the spirit was gone.

As she was lowered to the floor of her igloo, her family clamoring around her and crying in relief, she felt a warming that began within herself. She opened her eyes – when had she closed them? – and saw a shade of a girl her age, kneeling next to her pallet of furs, hands extended over Katara’s belly. The girl’s pale brow was furrowed, and her dark hair fell over her eyes repeatedly despite the girl’s attempts to blow them away.

Ah, Katara thought. This was the girl she had thought she had seen all those months ago, outside of the village. She had convinced herself that she’d only been snow-stunned, the light playing tricks on her mind, but it seemed it was no midnight sun madness. This girl – this spirit, Katara assumed – was going to stick around. As she slipped into a weary sleep, having been given warm broth to drink and warmed blankets to bury herself under, she wondered what this spirit was trying to do, with her hands held out like that. She wasn’t even moving them like the water – how silly.

Chapter 15

Chapter Text

Prince Lu Ten, Heir Presumptive to the Obsidian Throne, had joined his father at the war front on his sixteenth birthday. The ‘gift’ that his grandfather gave him, at the prompting of his ‘loving’ Uncle Ozai, felt more like a punishment than anything else. He didn’t really care that Azulon had joined Sozin in the purging of the Air Army holdouts at the young age of thirteen and that he was getting to be ‘almost too old’ to whet his blade for the first time; he was learning about the country that he was destined to rule and the work he was doing was too important to abandon.

But as he knew intimately, one did not argue with the Fire Lord, even when he spoke through his advisors (lackeys, he thought less generously). So, he had bowed his head, shaped his hands into the flame, and thanked his grandfather for the opportunity to join his father in pursuing the glory of Agni.

He worried for his cousins. Zuko was only eleven, and Azula, nine; their mother had been gone from their world for a little less than three years. Their father had shifted his favor to their toddler half-brother in very obvious overtones, frustrated with Zuko’s unorthodox methods and Azula’s quiet refusal to emulate Ozai in every manner, turn and technique, though he trained her endlessly in a seemingly fruitless effort to shape her in his image. Their stepmother might as well be a puppet, for how much she spoke and acted without Ozai’s direction, never stepping in when their father’s punishments turned extreme. Lu Ten had been acting as Ozai’s foil for years, intervening when needed, ensuring that their grandfather paid attention to his second son’s children. And Agni, was it needed – Ozai’s benign neglect from when Ursa lived had transformed into a cruel focus that he had set upon his children. Zuko had learned to keep a court face in his father’s presence, bending to his demands – desperate to earn his father’s love. Azula, on the other hand, had changed deeply since her younger years – her time with the Fire Sages had taught her patience and a modicum of gentleness, even if she was still more ruthlessly efficient and powerful than Lu Ten had ever thought a child could be capable of. He worried that, without himself to give her what she so needed – love, reassurance, and guidance – she would fall into Ozai’s lap and he would finally be able to manipulate her how he had desired for years. So when he’d been told of the plan, and how there was no way to get out of it, no matter how much he argued, he’d gone straight to his cousins and told them exactly what was happening.

Zuko, as he’d expected, had burst into tears and clung to him. Iroh had been on the front for months at a time for the better part of two years at this point, and his cousins had followed him around like puppies ever since their mother passed. Azula, on the other hand, had gone still, and had gotten a faraway look in her eyes. It took minutes while he soothed Zuko, his sobs finally settling into upset hiccups, but finally, Azula’s eyes refocused on his face, and the tears had begun to roll down her still-chubby cheeks as well.

Lu Ten hadn’t expected Azula’s tears. He hadn’t expected her to take his hand as gently as his father had always held theirs and try to extract a promise from him that he would be ‘as careful as he could be, please, we can’t lose you, too.’ At this, Lu Ten had joined in the waterworks, all of them doing their best impression of waterbenders in a rainstorm. They’d held on to each other for an hour, and Lu Ten had promised not to take any unnecessary risks – “Your honor won’t be questioned, and glory isn’t worth it,” Zuko said bitterly, wise beyond his years from his coursework in military theory (and the extracurricular work Azula had thrust upon him in the form of handwritten accounts of the first fifty years of the war effort, describing how glory was selfish and only served to hurt the people that were on the ground making the effort, and how honor was something that could only be lost if the action taken was not under the light of Agni). He'd told them to be kind to their little brother, when they could, and mind their stepmother and their father. He’d told them to listen to the Fire Lord and aim to please him. He’d told them that their most important goal was to protect each other, and never let anyone turn them against one another. And he’d told them that he’d write once a week, each of them getting their own letter, and that he would be back as soon as he could.

He had never expected to be gone for a whole year without seeing his cousins. It seemed like every time his unit was about to take leave, something would happen to keep them there. It was beginning to wear on them, and they were tired. They weren’t as sharp as the new recruits, and things were slipping.

It was on a night that things were slipping quite dangerously that Azula appeared to him in a shimmer of light. The moon was dark and the winds over the plains of Ba Sing Se were still, as if all of the great spirits were holding their breath.

“Lu Ten!” he’d heard as he was standing watch outside of their encampment. He’d looked around, deeply confused – no one called him that here; they only ever used honorifics with him, though he’d long since stopped caring, and besides that, the voice had sounded… terribly young. He hoped that the draft rules hadn’t changed in the time since their last orders. Sixteen was already too young, he thought privately, to shed the blood of others. Seeing nothing, he drew his blade from its place at his hip – best be ready for the worst, he thought, ready to yell the alarm if it was the ambush he feared it might be.

“Who’s there?” he called in a low tone, looking in the darkness for the source. “Show yourself!”

A put-upon sigh, a tug on his robes, and a small bell chime, and he whipped around, sword raised, only to be faced with an apparition that looked unerringly like Princess Azula. He paled, his sword shaking, and said, “Oh, Agni, tell me you’re not dead.”

Azula snorted an incredibly undignified snort, and co*cked her hips, putting her hands to rest upon them in a manner that was deeply ‘preteen.’ She looked to be in her daily wear, with her hair loose – quite unlike her, Lu Ten thought, but that was neither here nor there. “No, dum-dum, I’m not dead.” She paused. “Well, probably not, anyways. I think I kind of got… hm. Stolen by a spirit? Again.”

Lu Ten barely resisted the dropping of his jaw. Spirits, if anyone was going to be able to play off being taken against her will out of her body and dropped halfway across the world, it would be Azula. But wait.

“Again?” he asked. “This has happened… before?”

“Oh, just a few times,” Azula said offhandedly. “It’s usually far less abrupt than this. It usually just wants to show me something. Maybe do something for it.” She gestured over Lu Ten’s shoulder, and he glanced to see a spirit wearing a red nuo mask and white robes standing motionlessly by the treeline.

Lu Ten paused and reconsidered some of the tasks that Azula had undertaken since her mother’s passing in a new light. They’d always seemed to come out of the blue and possess her with a fervor that rivaled his father’s when he was pursuing a new tea strain, and she only would rest when she’d seen her goals accomplished. Some were small – privately reordering the royal library in a way that ‘simply makes more sense, Lu – I mean, even Wan Shi Tong would cringe at the state of things, his foxes wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of this place;’ redoing several of the courtyards (with the approval of Princess Roshu, who was ostensibly in charge of the aesthetics of the palace, as the highest-ranking woman in the Royal Family) to change the way the sun fell across them and the wind played through, and her strangest quest to date – keeping the raids of the Water Tribes from resuming.

Really, he supposed he wasn’t supposed to know about that one, but he had been more observant ever since the winter solstice that Zuko had turned eleven. It was like something had touched his temple, that morning, and his eyes had sharpened – he noticed things that he never would have given heed to before, and patterns took on new significance.

Azula’s efforts against the raids were almost paradoxical to him. She listened with as much verve as her brother when Azulon spoke and seemed to take his military lessons to heart. When he had asked Zuko in a roundabout way what had been happening, Zuko had no idea what he was talking about. But nonetheless, she had deterred their grandfather from restarting the raids – he had become concerned with the idea that there may be more waterbenders rising against him, and she had soothed his fears with honeyed words and quick, incisive wits more than any of his war advisors had yet been able.

She’d leveled him in one argument that Lu Ten remembered with particular clarity – the Fire Lord was sure that the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe was on the verge of declaring war, and she had laid out facts that Lu Ten had no idea how she’d gotten access to with such devastating clarity that there was no counterpoint any of them could make.

“The Southern Water Tribe, even if it had any benders, had learned that declaring war only attracts unwanted attention. Any hostilities towards the Fire Navy have long since stopped, and their Chief likely has neither the manpower nor the will to consign his men to death like that. We have a tenuous peace, at best – any raids would only drive them over the edge into outright aggression. At this point in time, he likely weighs the loss of his men more heavily than any paltry military victories or small revenges that they might be able to take, but if we renew the raids, we will have made the first move. Beyond that, have you even heard of any reports of waterbenders in the South Pole? The reports you’ve let us read have pointed more to a faction of waterbenders hiding out in the Earth Kingdom, not anything from south of Gaoling.” She had then scoffed and crossed her arms derisively. “And beyond that, Grandfather, how would any sort of waterbender learn how to fight when all of the people who may have taught them are sequestered away in the North Pole, ignoring their sister tribe? They pose no threat to us as they are but beginning aggressive maneuvers would only waste our manpower and expose us to threats from a newly angered chief. The old chief died the better part of two decades ago – this chief has never faced a raid and has likely forgotten the anger that the tribe held for us. It would be fallacious to listen to the whispers of unreliable sources coming to war councilmen who only seek their own veneration.”

Their grandfather had listened, and his fear had stilled, and the raids had not begun again. No rumors of waterbenders seeking revenge came from the South Pole, and Lu Ten had almost forgotten about it until now. She’d kept dropping hints to their grandfather whenever he’d seemed more anxious and redirected his focus to more pressing issues – Lu Ten had wondered if she had simply wanted to focus the war efforts on more important causes, but now thought that there had been a deeper reason.

“What did the spirit bring you here for?” Lu Ten whispered to his little cousin, curious.

“I don’t know,” Azula said, “but I aim to find out. Stay here and stay alert. I’ll be back soon.”

Azula flickered away, and Lu Ten waited for what felt like an eternity.

When she finally returned, he was shocked to hear what came out of her mouth. “Uncle Iroh has breached the Outer Wall of Ba Sing Se!” she exclaimed. “The front is moving forward; it looks like your unit is about to be deployed to attempt to take the Inner Wall – you must promise me to stay safe,” she said fervently, grasping for his hand with fingers that passed through his palm.

Lu Ten’s confusion returned tenfold – why had his unit not been alerted that the Wall was almost breached? If they were moving to the front, they should have had ample time to prepare – but as he thought this, the crier that mustered their unit began his duty, awakening those who were sleeping with a new order from the front. When he turned back to his cousin’s spirit, she was gone, as was the spirit in the mask that had accompanied her. A feeling of foreboding settled over his shoulders as he returned to his tent to pack his things, and he couldn’t get the fact that he'd been unable to complete the promise out of his mind.

The following day felt impossible – Agni’s light beat down upon them as they marched towards the front, their tactical strike unit being transferred into the front lines. It just didn’t make sense, he thought, for their small team to be deployed in this manner. They were not trained to fight large armies, but rather for small incursions that required precision and stealth. Perhaps his father was attempting to infiltrate Ba Sing Se and using the fighting to distract the earthbenders?

Once they established a small camp, they were given only two hours before they were pushed onto the battlefield. Lu Ten felt the hours of lost sleep weighing heavily upon his stamina, and his firebending was muffled in a way that it hadn’t been since he’d first been deployed. His chi was sluggish and unresponsive, his confusion and worry about Azula’s ominous words and apparent connection to a spirit leaking into his psyche. The fighting drove on, and his strikes were slower.

Suddenly, the ground in front of their unit erupted, and earthbenders poured out. His adrenaline spiked – these looked stronger than the other benders he had been fighting, and many of his men were fatigued to the point of error. Why hadn’t his commanding officer recalled them before this? Why had they been sent out so soon?

“Let me help,” he heard Azula’s voice in his ear, and felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as she took control of his chi.

It was bizarre, watching his own hands make shapes that he had never made before. These were katas that he had never learned, ones that he suspected she had learned not from Azulon, Ozai or any of her other tutors, but rather had either invented or rediscovered. He spared a wry thought for the cleverness of his cousin before his hands begun to circle in the air in a way that he recognized from his father.

Lightning bending. As far as he knew, Azula had not yet been taught this skill, and likely wouldn’t be for many years – as strong as she was, her chi pathways were not yet formed enough to manage to contain the sheer power caught in the lightning. And he had been unable to manage it – his focus was never cool enough, never grounded enough, to keep from blowing himself up. His hands continued to circle, gathering ever more sparks, until one moved forward, breaking the flow and discharging the lightning into the earthbenders rapidly closing in upon him.

Himself in particular, he realized, seeing that his unit had either been killed or stolen away – he had been alone on the battlefield until Azula had taken his body into her hold. The men he – she – had struck were dead, their hearts stopped by the blast entirely. His arms relaxed, dropping fractionally, and he knew Azula had released him. The battle around them had almost frozen - everyone had seen the blue lightning streak across the plain, and it was evident that the Earth Kingdom knew that lightning spelled certain doom. The earthbenders began to rapidly retreat, and when the drums of the Fire Nation’s army began to beat rapidly, he knew that they were calling for an advance. He looked at his hands and heard Azula’s whisper reassuring him that he could do it again if he needed to. He started to move forward when his progress was arrested by something protruding from the sleeve of what looked like the leader of this group – his conical hat knocked askew and his long-sleeved robes fallen akimbo where his corpse lay, he had led the attack against Lu Ten and the other, similarly-dressed men had deferred to his movements while they still lived.

The scroll was from the Earth Kingdom, that was undoubtable – but when he unrolled it, he realized that the plans for the Fire Nation Army’s advance were laid out in plain text before him. They had been betrayed.

The scroll described Lu Ten’s unit, their standard, their skills, and their location to a tee. It was smeared – written hastily, then – but had undoubtedly been why all of this had felt off. It was manufactured. Whoever had given the ultimate order to move his unit to the front, either they or someone in their camp had betrayed them, offering up the heir to the Dragon Throne – a two-fold blow, for if Lu Ten perished, the words reassured their reader, surely the Crown Prince would be too distraught to continue his assault on the city and would withdraw.

Lu Ten made a decision, at that point, to retreat. He had to regroup and communicate this with his father – there was a mole in the operation, and it had cost his friends and comrades dearly.

Chapter 16

Chapter Text

To say that Azula was unsettled would be a bit of an understatement, mused Zuko as he watched his sister pace endlessly in his room. She hadn’t stopped muttering in over half an hour, and she tugged fiercely at her bangs in the way she did when she knew she wasn’t seeing something that she thought should be obvious.

(Personally, Zuko never thought that the things she thought should be obvious ever were, and often struggled to follow the rabbit holes she seemed to unerringly find like the most tenacious of shirshus. But that was just him. He never claimed to be Azula, who was, inarguably, in a class of her very own.)

Finally, she stopped. Her eyes went a little hazy as she looked out of the window to her right, staring up at the crescent moon. She turned to him after a moment, looking him in the eye, and said, “Lu Ten is in danger.”

Zuko went from languidly lounging on his bed to bolt upright in seconds. His hand reached for a sword that was not resting on his hip, and he almost tripped in his haste to untangle himself from the sheets. “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice shaking.

Azula rarely said things to him that she did not mean, or at least, fully believe to be true. This was one of the biggest changes that he could remember since before his accident on the rooftops – before, he wouldn’t have hesitated to suspect that every single word that came out of her mouth was a tacit untruth, but now – Agni, he believed her. If she thought that Lu Ten was in danger, then it only could mean that he truly was.

(Zuko had noticed that his sister often slipped away to the cloisters to confer with the Sages. He had wondered if they were giving her information that he wasn’t getting until he’d snuck after her one day – his skill for stealth was still far greater than hers, and after his leg had fully healed, he hadn’t waited to re-acquaint himself with the rafters and hidden spaces between the walls. On that day, he’d simply watched his sister play several uninteresting games of Pai Sho and look at old maps that were nearly a century out of date and read – of all things – a book on constructing windchimes. He had concluded that she was simply better at reading between the lines during the meetings they were allowed to attend, and that their grandfather was probably telling her things that he thought Zuko would not want to know. Azulon knew that Zuko was a bit of a bleeding heart and kept the worst things that the Earth Kingdom did away from his ears – he was considerate like that.)

(Was Grandfather keeping news from the war front from him? What was going on? Why wouldn’t Azula have told him about it like she always did?)

“I think that someone is trying to target him on the battlefield,” she finally said, looking anywhere but his eyes. “I’m worried.”

“How do you know?” he asked, knowing that he should take her words at face value but simultaneously desperate to know her source.

Azula pursed her lips and finally met his gaze. “Agni sent me on a spirit journey to the battlefield. I was watching Lu Ten. He almost died. None of the protocols were followed, and there was a message in the hands of one of the Earth Kingdom soldiers that told them exactly how to find him, and that if they killed him, Iroh would give up.”

Zuko grasped his sister’s hands with his recently-grown ones as her lips began to tremble. “I kept him safe,” she said, her voice wobbling. “I kept him safe, but he could have died. I was so scared, Zuzu. I don’t know how to keep him safe – I can’t get back.”

Agni, they were young. Too young to be dealing with things like this. His sister was only ten, and he was barely twelve. They could never get sent to a battlefield at their ages, and he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their father would never believe them. Nor could they go straight to Grandfather, unfortunately – he believed in spirits, but would be altogether too suspicious of something as nebulous as a ‘spirit journey’ to heed their words.

He turned to Azula, whose tears were flowing freely now. “I think we need to pray,” he said, wrapping her into a hug. It wasn’t as good as Uncle Iroh’s, and it was nowhere near as reassuring as their mother’s had been, but it was the best he could do. She clung to him, and he was reassured that at least it was something.

They went to Azula’s shrine – Zuko knew that it was where she preferred to pray to Agni if she couldn’t go to the cloisters, and he wouldn’t begrudge her this when she was so obviously distraught. When they reached it, he noticed that it was in more disarray than usual but didn’t comment on it. As they knelt in front of it, Azula leaned into his side. “What if He doesn’t listen?” she asked, her voice small.

“He will,” Zuko said with a confidence that he had to admit he did not feel. “He has to.”

They must have knelt in front of the shrine, shoulders pressed together, for over an hour. They stayed silent for the duration, both of them sending up desperate pleas to Agni to protect their cousin. As Zuko felt himself slipping into the meditative trance that he only occasionally could achieve, and that he was sure Azula had been in for the entire time, he felt the air still around them, and heard a bell sound in the distance.

For a moment, he thought that he could hear Agni’s words, ringing out clearly. The voice told him not to despair, and to be calmed. That their prayers had been heard, and that they would be heeded. That the threat had passed, for now, and would not return for a time.

Next to him, Azula gasped. The spell was broken, and Zuko turned to her. “Agni talked – He talked to me!” he stuttered, stunned. While he had sometimes felt the presence of Agni when meditating in the cloisters with Azula, this was the first time he’d heard His voice. It was melodic and so beautiful that it made him want to burst into tears of his own.

Azula nodded, mouth agape. “He spoke to me, too – He told me to look within the dragon’s nest.”

Zuko considered this information with all the weight that his twelve-year-old mind could muster. “Are there dragons in the Fire Nation?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

“No, Dum Dum, Uncle Iroh killed the last dragon. That’s why he’s called the Dragon of the West. He literally told us the story before bed at least once a month.”

Zuko blushed, the derision in his sister’s voice evident. “Right, I forgot. Um… Then what do you think it means, Azula?”

“I don’t know,” she finally said, it coming out more like a whine. “The first time that Agni directly answers a prayer of mine, and He gives me a thrice-damned riddle!”

They stared at the shrine together in the waxing moonlight. “He told me not to worry, ‘Zula,” he murmured. “That the threat was passed. I don’t think He would lie to us.”

Azula took this in with a sober look on her face. “You’re right,” she said, nodding. “All right. I will try to determine what Agni meant later, but if He says that Lu Ten isn’t in any danger, then we must believe Him.”

Zuko glanced at his sister’s expression and decided that he couldn’t leave her to her own devices that evening. “Come on,” he said, standing and pulling her up with him, “let’s go get some sleep. Will you stay in my room? I think I might have bad dreams otherwise.”

(Zuko was kind enough not to mention that he hadn’t had a bad dream in two years, while Azula had them on a weekly basis. Azula was prudent enough not to thank him for his kindness.)

As he tried to sleep, his baby sister stealing all of his sheets as she was prone to do, he thought about what he had heard from Agni. Agni hadn’t told him that Lu Ten was out of danger – only that the threat had passed. He slipped into sleep, wondering if that meant that the risk was going to come back – or if he hadn’t left the danger at all.

--

After weeks’ worth of research, and two letters from her cousin reassuring her that he was neither dead nor injured, and that he had been able to continue bending lightning after that first strike on the battlefield – “I think my chi meridians have changed, and they’re better at conducting it through me without losing it,” – Azula was sure that the dragon’s nest that Agni had referred to was literal, and referred to the ruins that she had seen mention of in texts from half a century before her time. The only issue was that there was no documented location for these ruins – as far as she could tell, they were north of the home islands… which left an entire f*cking mountain range to investigate and rule out. Because yeah, of course that was going to happen.

“Oh yes, Grandfather, I want to explore the mountain chain north of here for a dragon’s nest that probably exists. No, I don’t know where it is, and no one else seems to either, because Uncle Iroh never said anything about a nest. Oh, why do I want to go? You see, Agni told me…”

Yes, she thought wryly to herself. That would be the perfect way to be thrown into the looney bin. Or, at the very least, scrutinized far too closely to continue on with her communications with the spy network in which she’d found herself embroiled.

Not happening, she decided. Which, again, limited her options. Agni, what she wouldn’t give to be older than ten – what an awful age to be, she thought, to be too young to go where she wanted without explanation but too old to blame any missteps on childlike innocence.

Azula had been very decidedly Not Thinking About It. The thing that she had done in a moment of desperation on the battlefield. She had begged La to tell her what had happened – how she had taken over her cousin’s body, how it had worked, that she hadn’t hurt him – she had felt his bones grinding past each other, had felts the sinews stretch and twist – and La had taken her into her arms in a dream, once more, for the first time in years.

La’s words were soothing, but the knowledge that Azula now held was immense and terrifying, as frightful as the depths of the sea that La held as her own. La told her of spirit possessions, and body walking, and how she could not do what she had done for her own gain, or she would risk losing herself and succumbing to the darkness that lie dormant, deep in her belly, as it did for everyone. Of how what she had done kept her cousin safe, and that she had proven herself a blooded warrior. She had wept, then, in her dream and in her bed, realizing that she had killed.

Her mother had never wanted her to kill anyone, she had cried out, grasping La’s furred coat as desperately as she ever had. Azula had promised to protect her loved ones, why did that have to cost her so much?

Bells, then. La had whispered things that she never wanted to hear, and Azula knew that war and battle meant compromising pieces of your soul that she had guarded as jealously as a dragon guards their hoard. She knew that the only way to protect her brother from the pain she was undergoing was to try to end this was as soon as possible, to protect him, to protect Lu Ten, to protect Uncle Iroh and all of the citizens of the Fire Nation as well as she could.

Death was inevitable. Killing was now something she had already done, and she couldn’t even mourn properly, enemy combatants as they were, killed not by her own hand but by her own actions.

Her heart rent again that night. When Zuko awoke to hear her sobbing, she felt him gather her into his arms and sit upon the balcony in the light of Tui, rocking her until they both fell asleep once again.

Chapter 17

Chapter Text

Prince Ozai, third in line to the Dragon Throne, was absolutely, monumentally, and incandescently enraged.

His plans had been carefully laid. Painstakingly, he had constructed a false trail of papers that would point fingers to a disgruntled military clerk under Iroh’s command for the source of the leak that had led to Prince Lu Ten’s untimely and incredibly tragic death at the hands of the Earth Kingdom. He had a spy network that had slipped the information to the head of the Dai Li detailing how to destroy the linchpin that would unhinge Iroh’s entire operation without ever touching the paper once. He had even been slipping his father hints that Iroh’s inability to piece the wall was a failing of the most personal sort – not an impossibility, but rather, and unwillingness to follow through with the orders of his sovereign. And Azulon had even begun to believe him!

But the worst had happened. The Outer Wall had been pierced months ahead of schedule, and he’d been forced to move, his spies scrambling to send out false orders to bring Lu Ten to the front lines. He’d trusted the Dai Li to do their f*cking jobs correctly and to kill the little brat that was usurping his birthright, but no, they’d had to go and get electrified.

Where had the bastard learned to do that, anyway? He’d been absolutely useless at it when Azulon had tried to teach him and had only made piddling amounts of progress under his too-soft father. If Ozai had cared to take over his instruction, he never would have accepted the mediocrity present in the boy – would have burned it out with his own two hands – but why would he have ever wanted Lu Ten to be stronger when all he really wanted was for the little worm to die, and die horribly, so that he would get to see his brother’s ruination firsthand and slip into the gaps that were already beginning to show in the Fire Nation’s Royal Court.

He had an heir, and two spares – his youngest, the prophesized, had sparks, and his eldest siblings would have to understand that they were being passed over in favor of a more promised son. He knew that Azula would understand – since their mother’s death, she had become far more malleable than she had been before, and he almost wished he had hired the assassins that had stolen in and killed her years before he had actually done so. Imagine if he had – Azula would be the perfect pawn in the game that he was playing.

As it was, she was very close to perfect, but her annoying habit of thinking of Agni first was just so irritating, and her tendency to stare at things that weren’t there and hear things no one else could frankly unnerved him. Zuko, he had decided, was a lost cause. Altogether too soft, even if he so desperately wanted the affection of his father that Ozai could ask him to walk barefoot over burning coals and he would. He had none of the talent of his sister, unfortunately, and though he had the drive, Ozai had written him off as a candle that would never grow into a blaze.

So, he placed his hopes onto his youngest son, his training beginning earlier than it had even with Azula – his sparks were still strangely small and cool, but they were there years before Zuko’s had shown themselves, so he remained unconcerned.

Still, though – he had been expecting the news of Lu Ten’s death from the head of the Dai Li almost three days ago, and had become increasingly anxious as time eclipsed, only to walk into his father’s study this morning and find that, not only had Prince Iroh pierced the Outer Wall and held the line, Prince Lu Ten had finally discovered his aptitude for lightning-bending, and had killed what seemed to be a tactical team of elite Earth Kingdom soldiers singlehandedly, and had continued using this skill as needed over the course of the next few days.

The Fire Lord’s candles had been happily roaring away.

And Ozai’s rage smoldered like a coal secreted away into a corner of a long-forgotten room, ready to ignite the dust and detritus to burn it all away.

Ozai was the inferno that the Fire Nation needed to finally end this war and prove its dominance, to take over the world as his grandfather had dreamed of. He would find his way into the Dragon Throne eventually, but he knew as well as any that today was not that time.

Ozai waited. And on he smoldered.

Chapter 18

Chapter Text

When she was on a rooftop, all of the whirligigs and chimes and distractions that fluttered around Ty Lee’s mind would still, and she would lean into the air and imagine that she could fly.

She couldn’t, of course, as she had discovered the first time that she had leaned a little too far and tumbled to a scrabbling stop at the edge of the gutter that limned the Ty family’s courtyard. No, but something, some niggling something in the back of her mind told her that if she just knew how to do it, she could do it. Even so, she reasoned, that little voice was probably just childish fancies (she sounded a lot like Azula when she said that, and it made her giggle a bit) and dreams, and she should avoid rooftops, especially after Zuko’s accident.

Trying to avoid climbing up and testing her balance on the beams of the roof and the parapets that dotted Caldera was like trying to tie her hair up with one hand behind her back – futile and agonizing.

The wind brushed through her bangs – recently self-cut in an effort to stand out from her gaggle of sisters – and she smiled into the breeze, cross-legged on the little platform that she’d installed a few months ago with the begrudging help of Mai.

Ty Lee was, generally speaking, a very optimistic and accommodating young woman. That’s what her mother liked to say, anyways, whenever someone complimented the Lady Ty on her brood, and whenever her mother was able to remember Ty Lee was, in fact, Ty Lee, and not one of her sisters. On the rare occasions that Ty Lee was on her own, she didn’t feel very optimistic or accommodating – she felt deeply annoyed that she was one of a set and not one of a kind, and that Mai and Azula were closer to each other than she was to either of them, and that Azula was barely having them over to play any more at all.

The bangs were only her most recent effort to declare her individuality. Unfortunately, her sister Ty Lao had caught sight of her new haircut and had begun making complaints to her mother that she wanted bangs, too – so Ty Lee figured that her newfound identity would be short-lived as a one-off. She was the middle of seven sisters, and was unremarkable, as Ty Lum liked to tell her: she was too late to be the first, and too early to be the last, and she didn’t have any special skills like the rest of her sisters – her tongue wasn’t sharp like Ty Woo’s, her fingers couldn’t play the harp or the flute or make beautiful origami, her dancing was subpar at best and she sank like a stone whenever she attempted anything other than a marsh-doggy paddle. All she could manage to do was cut her hair (badly) and do the same flips that the rest of her sisters perfected weeks before she did.

A particularly strong gust of wind blew a speck of dirt into her eye, and all of the calm she had been cultivating fell apart like a poorly constructed human pyramid. “Monkeyfeathers,” she muttered, blinking rapidly – while Mai had recently taught her some new bad words, she felt guilty using them. Instead, she still used some nonsense words that had been written down in a picture book she and Azula had giggled over together when they were no older than seven, and she refused to feel like a kid for doing so. Besides, she was a kid, so what was really the harm?

She squinted into the sun as it beat down on her. Unlike most of the girls at the Firebending Academy, she had always pinkened up most unbecomingly in the beams of Agni, and it was probably the worst thing about herself, if she had to pick. Sunburns were nothing to brag about in a school full of firebenders – they were resistant to it, and it was just another thing that marked her as ‘less than,’ and if she was being honest, it drove her a little crazy.

Mai didn’t get burned, but that was because she used copious amounts of a special cream that her mother got smuggled in from Ba Sing Se.

Sighing, she climbed down from the roof. While the wind was beautiful, she knew that she probably had schoolwork she was forgetting about, and even if she didn’t, her mother would certainly have some tasks that needed doing sooner rather than later. Best to head off the scolding that would commence and just be the ‘accommodating young woman’ her mother thought her to be.

Hours later, nose buried in a book that she was supposed to have read a week ago for class, she was surprised by a visit from none other than Azula herself. Ty Lee felt her eyebrows jump behind her new bangs as she bounded up to Azula, barely remembering to form her hands into the flame and bow before throwing her arms around her friend. Azula rarely visited – the Fire Lord and her father didn’t like her leaving the palace for long periods of time, probably because she had so much extra work to do with the Fire Sages and with learning all the things that she needed to know to eventually be a good advisor to Prince Lu Ten.

(Azula had confided to her, on Ty Lee’s birthday last year, that she wasn’t sure what kind of advisor she would be for Lu Ten if it came down to it. Azula’s aura was feeling particularly small that day, full of fear and the self-loathing that came down upon her every once and a while, but it was pierced through with little bubbles of happiness and something that felt warm and fuzzy that Ty Lee couldn’t quite place. When Ty Lee had held Azula’s hand and assured her that she was going to be the best advisor a Fire Lord could ever want, those bubbles multiplied, but the forlorn sense of something already being set in stone did not change, and Azula’s answering smile had stayed melancholy.)

Azula patted her on the back in the way that she always did when she was surprised with a patented Ty Lee Hug, then settled into the embrace momentarily before pulling away. “As delightful as it is to see you again, Ty Lee, I was hoping to get your opinion on something.”

Ty Lee’s eyebrows were practically in her hairline at this point, the muscles in her face twitching as she took in Azula’s statement. “What?” she asked, deeply confused and more than a little dumbfounded. “But… you never ask me for advice!”

Azula looked almost… embarrassed? when Ty Lee’s unthinking statement passed her lips. “That is something I think I need to rectify,” she muttered, looking anywhere but into Ty Lee’s eyes. Finally, she glanced up, and Ty Lee was shocked to see the blush sitting high in the princess’s cheeks. She was embarrassed! Oh, day of days – Ty Lee had never seen it happen before!

“Let’s go somewhere quiet,” Ty Lee said, noticing the braid flashing around the corner of the doorway. “I think we have some eavesdroppers!” She raised her voice at this last part – the best way to get her sisters to stop listening was to let them know they’d been caught, and that they weren’t going to get any good gossip after that. Leading Azula into the small family shrine, she dropped onto the floor, her legs settling into her customary crossed pattern. Azula sat in a rigid seiza – typical, Ty Lee thought, but it always looked so darn uncomfortable! - and took a deep breath, the small, perpetually-lit candles in the shrine swelling on her exhale.

“I find myself at a crossroads,” she said slowly. Her aura was all tangled up, from what Ty Lee could read – sometimes she had a better grasp on it than others, but in the shrine, it was more clouded than ever. “You know that I am loyal to the Fire Nation above all else, and that I love our people.”

Ty Lee nodded vigorously, recalling all of the times that Azula had spoken of the glory of Agni and how the people that were fighting on the front lines were to be honored and thanked for their service, how she quietly argued with their classmates that sacrifices should be avoided at all costs and that the greater good should not require a blood price to achieve. “Of course!” she chirped, letting Azula go on.

“But I fear…” Her voice shook, her face losing its practiced calm and showing a glimpse of the uncertainty that was reflected in her aura. “I’m scared that I can’t be loyal to the Fire Nation and its future without questioning… certain things that I’ve thought to be true my entire life.” Azula looked up at Ty Lee, her eyes swimming with – oh, monkeyfeathers, those were tears.

“Lu Ten almost died on the battlefield less than a fortnight ago,” Azula whispered. “He was betrayed. Someone is leaking Fire Nation secrets and I don’t know who, or why, but they want my cousin dead.”

Ty Lee was generally an optimist, yes. But when presented with the very real, tangible fears of her best friend, she was overwhelmed with the sense of despair that leeched from Azula’s very essence. If Azula couldn’t figure it out, who could? She was the smartest person that Ty Lee knew, and she was only ten! Most adults were too stupid or too blind to see what was going on in front of their noses, and liked to ignore what they didn’t want to see; how were any of them gonna fix the problem?

Ty Lee’s hands came up – to clutch her friend to her chest, to cover her mouth in horror, she didn’t know which – but Azula shocked her again by throwing herself into her embrace, lunging forward out of seiza. She didn’t sob, or quail, or tremble in the way that Ty Lee knew she would if she was faced with a problem as impossible as this. She held perfectly still, and the only sign of her distress was the desperate way that her fingers clenched the silks of Ty Lee’s tunic. Ty Lee wrapped her arms around her friend and held her, staying there for longer than Azula had ever let Ty Lee hug her before, until she finally pulled away to look Azula in the face.

Tears had made her cheeks ruddy, her fair complexion mottled and more disheveled than Ty Lee had ever seen. She smiled shakily and grasped Azula’s hands in her own. “I don’t know how to fix this,” she started, “but I do know that even if we don’t have a plan now, we will make one.”

Azula let out a tremulous laugh. “How in the world do you expect us to uncover what may be a dastardly plot in the Fire Nation Army? We’re ten.”

“Now that’s not the Azula I know,” Ty Lee chided jokingly. “Age has never stopped you from doing anything that you wanted to before, so why should we start now?”

Ty Lee thought about her family’s history as the wind blew through the shrine, the flame on the candle still swelling in time with Azula’s breathing and barely flickering in the breeze. How her grandfather’s line had very vague birth and death dates, how they put very little emphasis on wealth, but always seemed to accumulate it; how they focused not on lineage and birthright and pedigree but on how well a match was made. She thought of how they had moved towns every few years, pivoting from thriving in stark conditions on cliffs to being wealthy merchants in the south to finally, definitively settling in Caldera – for at least as long as it took for Ty Lee’s father to get married, and then moving on once again to the next place, always leaving behind a richer world and spreading the glory of the Fire Nation. “We’re adaptable, us Fire Nation folks. We can do anything we want when we put our mind to it, and no hard circ*mstance is going to keep us away from our destiny. You told me that yourself, you know – I think you’ve just forgotten it.”

Azula let out a surprised little laugh. Success – it meant that Ty Lee was getting through to her, at least a teeny tiny bit, and that was better than nothing. Ty Lee could see her aura begin to settle and clear from the maelstrom it had been just moments before.

As Azula took in her words, Ty Lee kept watching her aura. It was strange, she thought, how many colors Azula had in her aura. Most people had one, maybe two – but Azula’s was bright gold, with flashes from all ends of the rainbow. Blue would swirl in from the outer edges occasionally, sometimes sweeping across like a wave, sometimes crackling apart like the lightning Ty Lee had only once seen wielded by Prince Ozai. Today, as the grey of fear cleared, her aura was still gold, but held more rainbow in it than it ever had before. She smiled – while she wished she knew what it meant, it felt, above all else, good, and she couldn’t find it in herself to push beyond that when her friend was so obviously distressed.

Azula looked away from the candle she had been staring at, her eyes sliding back into focus as the windchimes above the entrance to the shrine tinkled overhead. “Yes,” she said, finally. “You’re right.” She nodded, straightened, and stood, holding out a hand to help Ty Lee out. Tactfully, Ty Lee did not mention that she could get up from the ground more easily on her own than with the offered hand, but instead grasped it and sprung up, settling ever-so-lightly on her toes. “Tell me, what have you heard of the Sun Warriors and their ruins?”

“That they’re horribly haunted and that they’re super spooky. Why?” Ty Lee asked, keeping her tone light though she was desperately curious about why Azula was changing the topic so abruptly. They must have something to do with one another, but for the life of her, Ty Lee couldn’t tell what.

“Oh, nothing right now. But I’ll let you know as soon as I know,” Azula said.

As her new bangs fell back into her eyes with a playful gust of wind, Ty Lee shook her head. “Whatever you say, ‘Zula,” she teased, winding her arm through the princess’. “As long as it’s no more dangerous than climbing on the roof, I’m ready.”

Chapter 19

Chapter Text

Azula had taken Ty Lee’s words to heart. Her destiny was to save the Fire Nation – no, she hadn’t been told that explicitly, but it was the only thing that made sense, frankly.

What her… alliance with La meant for that, she didn’t know. So far, none of the things La had asked of her had gone directly against the Fire Nation. Even saving the possibly-Avatar had made sense – if she could ingratiate herself to the person who was most likely to rise up against them, then she stood a chance of turning her to their side, instead of letting her rage against them with no examples of the good that the Fire Nation could bring. Letting maybe-Avatar-Katah be killed or taken by the Southern Raiders would have doubtless brought about an unending rage from La and would have seen countless Fire Navy ships sunk and the lives of untold seamen lost to the unfathomable sea. And beginning the cycle of reincarnation in the Earth Kingdom, where the Avatar could be secreted away until they were strong enough to rouse an army and take their revenge on the Fire Nation as a whole, instead of just Azula’s line, would be suicide. No, she knew that saving Katah had been the right choice, even if it had taken some effort on her part to understand why it had been the right choice.

So, saving the Fire Nation: how could she go about it? Obviously, protecting her cousin on the battlefield had been the first major action she’d taken; without his life, Uncle Fuddy Duddy would have collapsed into his grief and the warfront would have fallen apart. Any retreat under those circ*mstances from Ba Sing Se would have been painted in the blood of Fire Nation footsoldiers.

When she had asked Agni what she should do, where she should look for the traitor who so obviously wanted to bring about the downfall of the Fire Nation, He had responded directly, for the first time she had ever known. His voice had rung out in her head, sonorous and tolling - Look within the dragon’s nest for the viper that rests among them, He had told her, His words echoing in her mind like the bells reverberating through the cloisters. It lies in wait for the weakness of the West, snapping at its heels all the while thinking that it is healing the rest.

What all of that meant, she hadn’t the foggiest. But she did know where dragons had last been found, and where any nests may be – in the ruins of the Sun Warriors.

It had taken much wheedling to be allowed to see Iroh’s personal journals from the Royal Library from the time when he was hunting the last dragon. There was information missing – why, she couldn’t fathom, but it was as inconspicuous in its absence to the average reader as it was glaring to someone seeking their location, as Azula was.

She surmised that the Fire Lord hadn’t thought twice about it – his son had been hunting the last of the dragons, after all, so telling the world where the feat had occurred was likely the last thing that mattered to him as there were no more to slay. But it was all she could think about, and so she had requisitioned the travel logs of Iroh’s ships from the four-year span surrounding Iroh’s titling as the Dragon of the West.

Buried among all of the utterly mind-numbing trips he’d taken to various tea houses across the Fire Nation and through the colonies on his victory tour with his new wife, he had returned several times to Ember Island – and then, gaps in his journals and in his travel, where the Princess had been seen going about her days on the resort island and reassured her neighbors that the Prince was simply relaxing in the sun, but never seen.

(It had been a tea-judgment contest for the ages, his journals wrote, but the ultimate victor was an exotic tea that he had sampled on Kyoshi Island, deep undercover as a tea merchant, brought in from the Southern Water Tribe that consisted of tundra berries and dried sea prunes, that had reminded him of sorrow personified, with hope shining through.)

Azula marked down the time between entries and between official travel logs, noting that each gap took a week or so. When she triangulated how far he could have traveled, assuming that he was taking the fastest ship he could requisition without going through official Fire Navy channels, it left her with few options: the Western Air Temple was too far, anywhere in the Home Islands he would likely have been recognized, and while the colonies were within reach, she could find no mention in any stories or mythology of dragons that lived in the Earth Kingdom. So, she settled upon the islands just north of the Boiling Rock Prison, ruins mentioned only in passing in her history books. The cloisters held more information, but nothing definitive, and nothing more recent than several hundred years prior – it seemed that the ruins were nothing more than their name suggested.

And that posed an interesting query: why would Uncle Iroh have returned to the ruins twelve times over the span of two years? He had begun dropping off the map briefly before he reported back to the Fire Lord that he had slain the last dragon but continued to do so until the birth of Lu Ten. Why would he continue to go back after the dragon was dead?

What was in the Sun Warriors’ lost city?

She decided that the best method she could possibly take to manage to convince someone to take her to the ruins was to find some sort of significance to Agni in her research in the cloisters, and to wheedle her grandfather into allowing her to take a trip with Zuko to… ugh, discover their heritage, or some other lie he would accept. She needed to work on that.

For the time being, she continued to behave as the perfect student. She excelled in her classes at the Royal Firebending Academy, advancing leaps and bounds above her peers. Grandfather was proud of her – he was proud of all of his grandchildren, possibly for the first time in their lives, all at once; his happiness at Lu Ten’s and Iroh’s successes in the Earth Kingdom spread to his younger son’s progeny and Zuko basked in the unfettered glow of the approval of the people he looked to for guidance. Azula wouldn’t deny that it was nice to be praised, and for her accomplishments to be acknowledged, but she had a purpose beyond just impressing her grandfather – she needed to use it as leverage to get the information that she desired. She spent less time in the cloisters than she wanted to, and more time at Azulon’s elbow, learning from him as he directed her, watching from behind as Zuko did the same.

Fire Sage Ukyo proved to be a helpful resource for keeping up to date on the warfront. Though they had pierced the Outer Wall, the Agrarian Zone proved hard to overtake. It was large, and tenacious, and the earthbenders that defended the city used the varied terrain to their advantage. While Azula knew that there were easy ways to take the city – primarily, by burning everything and starving them out, demanding the head of the Earth King Kuei in exchange for enough food to keep the population limping along – this was not the method that Prince Iroh was taking.

This, more than anything, reassured Azula that her uncle was still attempting to take the Earth Nation for the glory of Agni, and not just for his own veneration. A vicious, cutthroat attack would bring their enemies to their knees, but it would destroy the Earth Kingdom as it stood, and kill many millions before their surrender. As often as Iroh employed decisive strikes in Pai Sho, he was much less willing to play the same risks at such high stakes, with the lives of innocent civilians hanging in the balance. He preferred to keep the warfare to the battlefield, and Fire Sage Ukyo told her that it was an unsteady balance that was being struck between the Walls of Ba Sing Se.

It seemed, too, that the Fire Lord was satisfied with this, for now. He was allowing his eldest son to make the decisions for the Army unfettered. How long this would continue, Azula didn’t know, but for now…

Azula cradled her aching head in her hands, bent over the desk in her room. Her newly-constructed windchime – an impulsive decision she’d made, but one that she had yet to regret – tinkled pleasantly in her window in contrast to the throbbing of her skull. She’d not gotten nearly enough sleep since Lu Ten’s near-miss, and she didn’t anticipate getting much more any time soon. Fire Sage Ukyo would assign her more readings every time she entered the cloisters – once, she’d even presented Azula with an assortment of toys, asking her to pick four. Azula had picked arbitrarily, and Ukyo’s shoulders had sagged – when she’d looked more closely at the box, she realized that the toys were older than she expected. When she’d grilled Ukyo on their origin, the Fire Sage had confided that they were past toys from Avatars, and that she had wondered…

Azula scoffed thinking about it, then cringed at the pressure buildup behind her eyes. Please. If she, of all people, was the Avatar, then it would mean that Katah wasn’t the Avatar, and that the people of the Earth Kingdom had missed the Avatar being born amongst them… and summarily dying. It was possible, she begrudgingly admitted, but highly unlikely.

(When she had asked Ukyo if the Sages were alerted to the new Avatar’s birth, Ukyo shook her head sadly. “We haven’t had a Sage that in-tune with the will of Raava in centuries,” she’d said. “We used to simply test every babe born on the day of the past Avatar’s death, but since… well. We haven’t tested any children in a long time.”)

Back to the readings, Azula thought, staring balefully at the pile resting in the basket on the far-left corner of her desk. Some of the readings were modern, gossip scrolls and coded encryptions that she had to deceipher to glean their meanings (both equally confusing to her); some were ancient texts that spoke of spirits Azula had never heard of, spirits that the scrolls warned their readers from ever contacting. Some were more banal – treaties, trade agreements, things of a diplomatic nature. But what they all had in common was that they mentioned the Avatar – a search that had gone on, at first in earnest, and later in passing, and now… idly. According to Ukyo, the White Lotus used to be guiding force for the Avatar, but they were now convinced that either he had abandoned them entirely, or that he was trapped somewhere (the Spirit World was Azula’s leading guess, but who was she to say), or that he was… simply unaware of his status.

(The few written communications that had been recovered from the Temples indicated that the Elders were preparing to tell the Avatar of his difference before the customary age of sixteen. It was assumed he had been told, but… what if he hadn’t? What if they had secretly spirited him away before he could have been told? If he’d escaped? What if, what if?)

(The scrolls never mentioned a name. It seemed to be an open secret – all of the monks knew who he was, but he was left blissfully unaware, and the letters avoided his name almost reverentially, referring to him only as ‘the Avatar.’)

Azula was decidedly not taking on that particular quest, she thought wrly. No, instead she was running around like a headless chicken-cobra trying to protect La’s favorite little Water Savage from her own stupidity. If that meant researching the Avatar, fine, but Azula certainly wasn’t going to reveal all of her Pai Sho tiles.

The White Lotus was testing her, and they trusted her no more than they decided they needed to. She treated them with the same masked distrust – after all, why would she spill all of her secrets to a group that very well might have been plotting to usurp her family? No, she didn’t think that they were the group behind Lu Ten’s would-be assassination – they were too cautious for that, and they didn’t want the line of Sozin to be usurped, they simply wanted a return to balance. But nonetheless… she was still unsure if her goals exactly aligned with theirs.

They were using each other, nothing more. She was ten, and ears in the palace. She told them what they wanted to hear, the things that would save the lives of her people, and nothing more. And they gave her access to things she needed and otherwise would never have had… but nothing more.

Nothing more.

She repeated this to herself every time she felt a pang of disloyalty singing in her chest. She wanted the best for her nation, for her people, for the people that she loved more than life itself. But she was ten, and fifth in line for the throne, and so many other things that she would have to go through to make any sort of difference. This was all she could think to do.

She had a session with Zuko and Fire Lord Azulon later that afternoon. She was supposed to show her grandfather her mastery of the burning candle trick, and Zuko was going to show the Fire Lord how he had figured out extending his flames along a blade – a party trick, for now, before he had the opportunity to go to Master Piandao and learn at the hands of a master, but one that was both interesting and novel. She shook her head, pushed away from the desk, and collapsed onto her bed for a nap. No sense in pushing through this when it would only hurt her standing in the Fire Lord’s eyes if she faltered.

--

The candle trick, she realized as she stepped into the courtyard, was a bit of an understatement for what was expected of her today. The Fire Lord sat on a slightly raised cushion in the middle of the flagstones, surrounded by what must have been hundreds upon hundreds of candles. They rose and fell with his breathing in great swells that reminded Azula of the waves washing across the shores of Caldera’s bay.

In short, it was absolutely, nerve-wrackingly terrifying, a display of true mastery, and something that she, horrifyingly enough, had to overtake him on.

She was doomed. Absolutely and completely out to sea without a paddle to speak of. Falling from a cliff without a glider. Some other Earth Kingdom metaphor that she couldn’t think of over the pounding of her heart in her ears.

Against every desire in her body, she remembered the first time she had practiced this skill with her grandfather. When it had been clear that, if she failed to steal the flame and maintain it, she would not be the only person punished for her failure. Her mother’s honor and word on the line, possibly her brother’s safety – all hinging on her tenuous control over her inner flame and her temper, only six years old and faced with a task that was gargantuan and colossal, one at which many masters would have failed if they had tried. He had told her, then, that he didn’t expect her to succeed – she had known that while he didn’t expect it, it had been an unspoken requirement that she would.

She still didn’t know what the consequences would have been if she had failed to impress upon him her efforts. She was too afraid to ask.

The flames were overwhelming in their intensity, so many bright spots in her mind’s eye and burning into her retinas. The courtyard was hotter than the day had been from their quantity, and Azula spotted one lone blue flame in her grandfather’s palms. So this was not just to be a normal test – it was another where he expected her to exceed what she was capable of, to push herself to the point of breaking in the pursuit of perfection. She desperately held in the tremble that threatened to dance through her frame and bit her lip to stop it from wobbling.

The heavy clouds above broke, then, as a solitary sunbeam stretched its rays out to her and caressed her face. It was small, but it reminded her that she was one of Agni’s children – and that, even if she wasn’t sure of herself, that He would provide her with what she truly needed, failure at this nigh-futile task notwithstanding. With this thought, she stepped forward, striding with confidence into the spot designated for her customary seiza kneel.

After a deep bow, she sank into the position she remembered holding for hours at a time in the throne room. Fire Lord Azulon surveyed her with a gimlet eye, taking in her picture-perfect appearance. (Zuko had spent an hour getting her hair to sit perfectly in its half-up, half-down style – she had begged him to do it the way that Mother had worn her hair, and none of the servants did it right.) He nodded finally in approval and gestured with the flame that sat above the fingertips of his left hand.

“Princess Azula,” he started, his voice deep and unnerving in this moment. “You have come to demonstrate mastery of the flame. As we once practiced, you shall now take these flames from me and extinguish them. After this, however, I have a challenge for you. It has been many years since your blue flame last appeared.”

Azula felt her pale cheeks flush in shame – it was a shortcoming that no one had pointed out to her, but that everyone felt the loss of. Her tutors often lamented her loss of power when they thought she was out of earshot, but Azula was the person most aware of its loss. She willed it to return. Though she had spent months practicing its control under the Fire Sages, and had only wanted it to be gentler, to not consume, its complete absence was gutting, and it felt like when her mother had died, it had died with her.

“Today, you shall practice the transfer of flame. I will place the flames upon your hands, and you shall maintain their heat. This is the next step of your training. It is time to put the past behind us and move forward into a glorious future.”

Azula nodded, murmuring in assent. The Fire Lord settled back onto his cushion, and said simply, “begin.”

The flames that had been beckoning to her finally received her full attention. They stood as soldiers in the control of the Fire Lord, rigid and steady and hothothot. She reached out to them, whispering in the way that she once did, promising nurturing and rest and sleep, the freedom to be extinguished and to then be re-lit. The freedom to do, in essence, what fire wanted to do – not to be uniform, precise, and unchanging as the Fire Lord held them.

It was, as always, a struggle. Her grandfather had not remained the Fire Lord for decades without so much as a whisper of a nearly successful assassination attempt by the strength of his guards; no, Azulon was the strongest and most powerful firebenders that Azula had ever met. He was stronger tenfold than her father, and only slightly less daunting was the gap between him and Iroh. She, Lu Ten, and Zuko wouldn’t stand a chance as they were in a real fight – she wouldn’t delude herself into thinking that she could take him on and live to tell the tale if he were serious.

But this was not a real fight, was not the life-or-death situation that Lu Ten was finding himself in daily, she reminded herself. This was a test, an exercise, a practice in meditation.

Something, she wondered as the control of the flames slipped into her grasp, one by one, beginning to flicker and gutter, that the Fire Lord seemed to be neglecting. When was the last time Azulon had sat in harmony with Agni? The joy of the flames as they passed to her and extinguished for a rest made her think that it had been a very, very long time since her grandfather had thought it was necessary. The ease with which she stole the flames was… unsettling, almost, but she could not help but feel her inner flame swell with pride. She was doing it! This nearly-impossible task that had been placed before her, and she was succeeding.

She peeked open a single eye to see Azulon staring at the flames to his right with a deep frown set upon his lined face. He looked severe, but not necessarily enraged – upset, perhaps, that she was succeeding with such proficiency, but not angry at her. She felt a tiny bit of herself relax, and shoved the thought away as Azulon redoubled his efforts to keep the flames from her.

Ah, she thought, reeling momentarily. Yes, this is what she had expected. Azulon’s grip on the will of the flames was strong, but it only served to make the flames more willing to buck his rule. It was hard to get her whispers through to them, but once she got past the molten defenses that Azulon had put up, they were more than willing to dance along to her merry tune.

Her head throbbed. Agni, but it was hard to get past those defenses. As more flames turned into smoking wicks, his attention and guard went up around the remaining ones. By the time she was down to the last few dozen, it was like trying to climb the legendary ice walls of the fortress of Agna Qel’a – her nerves burned, and the walls were nigh-impenetrable.

But this was a desperate last defense, not one built up over years and by practice and loving care. There were cracks – ones that Azula could slip through and exploit.

So with one forceful exhale, a ten-year-old princess of the Fire Nation overtook one of the longest-standing Fire Lords since the unification of the island chain, the most powerful firebender in the world. The candles swelled, sparkled, then extinguished in unison.

Azula opened her eyes. The world swam around her, a bit – it wasn’t exhaustion, but almost a second sight, where she saw baubles of light dancing around her in merriment. Several batted around the head of the Fire Lord, but he didn’t seem to notice them. Another point for the ‘going crazy’ theory, she idly thought, turning her attention away from the wisps and onto the blue flame that her grandfather still held.

She bowed, waiting until her grandfather beckoned her forward with his free hand. His brow was still furrowed, when she dared to glance directly into his face, but she had little time to think on it as he extended his fingers.

Reaching out her cupped palms, she prepared herself for the intensity of the heat that came with blue flames. Blistering warmth prickled her hands, but she held still – taking hold of the flames as they were given over to her, willingly, convincing them not to consume but to hold, to use her chi instead of her flesh as their fuel.

This was one of the first lessons Zuko had been able to teach her, when they were only toddlers. She had always been able to bend quicker, faster, brighter, but she burned herself over and over again when the flames escaped her control and went for an easier source of energy. Zuko had told her, patiently and in the small words available to young children, how to ease your own chi into a steady stream of kindling for your flames.

She thought of this lesson as she pushed her diminished supply into holding the flames at their steady incandescence, keeping them blue (flickering flickering why wasn’t she good enough yet) and remembering not to hold her breath in shock. She looked up at her grandfather – stupid tears blurring her vision, why was she crying, this was a victory – and his furrowed brow eased slightly as he gave her the tiniest, most infinitesimal fraction of a smile. She looked back at the flames and pursed her lips. As Azulon leaned away, relinquishing all hold of the flames to her, she pushed a little more of her chi, and a little more, into the blue flame, letting it roll around her palms and bead onto her fingertips like it once had so naturally. The flames steadied, intensifying – the blue was all the way through, now, and she knew that if she pushed even harder, she could get them to white-hot.

Bells tinkled above her. Do you need to make them that hot? she heard in a voice that sounded not quite like her own. The flame is happy as it is. Why must it be pushed to be more than it is ready to be? So she held the flame at blue, letting it dance, and condense, and flare out into long streams.

It was like breaking a dam, she thought. The flames that had eluded her rushed back, past the barrier that had kept them away. Strangely, it was not the scorching heat of a wildfire that she was reminded of, but of torrential rains coming into a parched desert – both were necessary, and both could be destructive, but oh, the bliss that she felt as it danced along her chi was like the first drops of a rainstorm after nothing but blistering sun for years.

The Fire Lord cleared his throat, and as she looked up, he indicated that she should extinguish the flame. With some guilt and more than some sadness, she whispered the flame away.

“You have passed, my only granddaughter. I am pleased with the progress you have made since your mother’s death, and I have great hopes for your future. With this, you have proven to me that you are ready to undertake the quest for cold fire.”

Lightning. She was going to actually learn how to bend lightning.

(You already have learned, the bells rang. Not really, she thought back, remembering the trembling in her limbs after and the way that her meridians had sparkled and cracked for days afterwards. She’d rather not fry herself to death next time.)

“Thank you, Fire Lord Azulon,” she said, kowtowing. She remained there until she heard his silk robes rustling as he rose, and she rose behind him to follow to the courtyard set up for Zuko’s kata.

After the display that she’d put on, she deeply and desperately hoped that Zuko would not disappoint.

Chapter 20

Chapter Text

Zuko had not, in fact, disappointed. She wondered if he was spending the time that she was in the cloisters reading scrolls on acrobatics, or if he had finally taken Ty Lee up on her offer of training, because the flips and spins he’d pulled off were nothing short of monumental. The flames on his katana had been steady and glowing, and left scorch marks on targets twenty feet away when he slashed at them. Azula was begrudgingly impressed – it still galled her to admit that her brother was better than her at just about anything, but his swordplay (and the fact that he’d made all of it up on his own, with just scrolls and reading to supplement) was a wonderful complement to his less-intense firebending, focusing the flames without losing any power.

Azulon had been proud of them both. It was a rare day that he admitted as much out loud, but he did, and Zuko practically turned into a little fireball of joy himself when he heard the words pass their grandfather’s lips. While Azulon had felt that Lu Ten’s firebending suffered from the distraction of swords, Zuko had circumvented that argument by integrating his firebending into his swordplay – and, if Azula was right, accidentally inventing a new form of firebending in the meantime.

Leave it to Dum-Dum to create something new as a ‘just because.’ She was not jealous, no matter what he said that night as he teased her after dinner.

(She did, however, make him promise to teach her how to use a dagger in the same way before he left for Master Piandao.)

(It was their mother’s dagger. More of a shortsword for Azula, still a child, proportionally speaking, but she nevertheless wore it in a sheath on her hip as she had every day since their mother’s death.)

(It had an inscription in archaic script that took several cross-references to decipher – it had not been the ancient firebending tongue that she had thought, but rather, a pidgin of airbending and waterbending that had sprung up and died out over three hundred years ago. She was still unsure if that meant that the blade was that old, or if the pidgin had never truly died out.)

Zuko went off to Master Piandao’s that summer with many tears – no, not from her, from himself and Sozurin, who didn’t understand why his Dum-Dum (she’d never been prouder to have a nickname stick) was leaving and not taking him along. Zuko, almost thirteen, was glad to be out from under his father’s scrutiny – while Azulon had put him under the best tutors, away from his father at Iroh’s written suggestion, to best thrive, his father would offer barbed suggestions and comments unfailingly at every dinner. It was wearing away at Zuko’s self-confidence and at Azula’s willingness to play the part of obedient daughter.

The façade that she had taken on since her mother’s death chafed like an ill-fitting set of armor. She kept it strapped to herself in an effort to keep her father’s attention away from Sozurin’s lack of promise even now, and to make sure that he didn’t turn his ire onto Zuko. The burns that she slathered with ointment every night were a testament to her dedication, and the sweet lies that she fed her father like poisoned honey were just another bitter medicine for her to stomach. He oversaw her training directly, pushing her to her limits. After her success with Azulon’s blue fire, half of her afternoons were spent in training with Lo and Li – her old teacher, Kunyon, had long since been let go.

Lo and Li were her great-aunts, technically speaking, on the Fire Lord’s side. They reminded her of her bond with Zuko – they would obviously do anything for one another, and they knew each other more deeply than most people knew themselves. Lo was a firebender, though her control over flames was tenuous at best, and Li was a nonbender. The way that it had been explained to her once was thus: twins born from a bender and a nonbender shared one womb and one flame. This flame was what gave firebenders their souls and life, though nonbenders did not need a flame to live. When two babes attempted to share one flame, it would pass between them, fading with each move, until it was too weak to go back to the other. One babe would be born with no flame, and the other, with only a flicker. But twins were so rare in the Fire Nation that it was almost unheard of, so no one had been concerned when Sozin had married a nonbender for the political alliances it would grant him.

More the fool he, Azula had thought when she was first introduced to her twin great-aunts. But as she learned under their tutelage, she realized that while they were unskilled in the practical arena, they were more knowledgeable about bending theory than anyone she had ever met.

She made slow progress under their watchful gazes, but what progress it was. Her chi meridians smoothed out and settled, her blue fire came more effortlessly than ever before, and she could swing its heat from warm to blistering in the blink of an eye.

Once, Li mentioned offhandedly a technique she’d read about to fly using fire. Obviously, Azula had begged nonstop to get the old twins to teach her the skill. After a near-miss with the stained-glass window of the cloisters, they’d taken her out to the gently sloped plains outside of Caldera to practice until she could maintain propulsion for a few seconds at a time.

When she’d hugged the old women after the first time she’d stuck the landing, they’d gone stock still. She’d frozen when she realized what she’d done and bowed deeply in supplication after taking a quick step back. The twins had simply sighed, given her a sad smile, and Lo had patted her on the back.

“You remind us of Azulon, when he was only our older brother,” Li told her several months later, when Azula asked why they always seemed so sad when she succeeded at something. “He was once so excited to make progress and loved our advice. Now it seems that he has no time for us or progress.”

Azula wondered what they meant by progress – was his skill as a firebender regressing? Was standing still enough for the head of the most powerful nation in the world? Or was it a veiled comment, some sort of implication about his ability to rule and the fact that the Fire Nation, as a whole, was no more enriched than it had been when he’d taken the throne? She pondered those questions as she read over the ledgers available to her, inspecting the costs of feeding, outfitting, and maintaining a standing army and navy, the suppression tactics that were required to keep the colonies in line, and so many more burdens on the nation’s coffers. The increased taxes on newly annexed territories hardly offset the costs, especially as those territories were often destitute after nearly a century of war.

The next step, her great-aunts told her, was being able to spark the cold fire on her own. She practiced the movements, the slow circles, in all sorts of conditions – blistering heat, torrential rains, when winds that rang not of chimes but of the typhoons that threatened Caldera every year buffeted her to the point that she could barely keep her base – until they were second nature to her, as firm and unshakable as any earthbender’s will.

She slowly began to pour her chi into the tips of her fingers as she separated the yin and yang elements, circling her hands in opposite directions and watching the sparks spring from her fingers. She was thrilled – incredibly excited –

BOOM!

Well, she should have anticipated setbacks, she thought dazedly as she looked up at the blue sky, clear except for a cloud that looked suspiciously like a grinning sloth-bear.

As Lo and Li rushed to her, propping her up, she took a quick self-assessment. Her fingertips were burning, maybe a little fried. Her hair was standing on end – damn, that would take her hours to get back to normal. And possibly most importantly, her vision was swimming.

The royal physician quickly confirmed what she feared – a rather severe concussion had knocked her for a loop. She was forbidden from attempting anything new or complicated – and that included lightning bending, Lo sternly told her.

Even Grandfather agreed that she needed to take the time to heal. Azulon never told people to ‘take their time’ for anything, much less healing, but apparently, the concussion was bad enough that he’d been the one to suggest it!

She wasn’t going to waste time, she swore to herself. She’d heal faster than anyone expected her to and be right back at it.

The best laid plans are made to be ruined, as Lo and Li did their best to show her in the ensuing weeks. They kept the eyes of a hawk on her activities, and even her visits to the cloisters were curtailed. Her meditations had to stay brief, and she was not allowed to do anything greater than a single flame at a time.

Back to basics, and technical study, she supposed. Li told her that her excitement had been her downfall – in the beginning, at least, one had to remain as even-keeled and centered as possible. Too much excitement made the meridians jitter and jeopardized the path that the chi had to take through her body. As Mai smoothed a conditioning mask onto the overly-frazzled tips of her hair one afternoon, she whined (well, Azula wouldn’t call it a whine, but Mai certainly would) about how it just wasn’t possible to not be excited when she was literally pulling apart yin and yang.

Ty Lee listened to her mini-tirade from her contorted position on the floor and turned her head to the side like a cobra-puppy. “What if you just need to, like, separate the emotions from the bending, the same way you’re separating yin and yang? You can still feel the feelings, you just need to keep them away from the zappy stuff.”

Mai paused. Azula paused. Ty Lee grinned up at them and untwisted her spine from its scorpion position.

When she attempted the concept once she was finally cleared to try again, she was beyond pleased to find that Ty Lee’s offhanded comment had been accurate. It wasn’t that she didn’t need to feel – it was only that she needed to make sure that it wasn’t fluttering along her meridians.

(She sent Ty Lee a wonderful gift basket made of her favorite mochi and dango sweets. The basket was shared amongst the three friends at school the next day, as Ty Lee explained that she had to get rid of it or her sisters would eat it all before she got more than two bites.)

(She also took the time to write a painfully detailed and accurate description of her efforts. For the future, she told herself, ignoring the annoying bells that chimed what if, what if.)

Beyond her efforts with lightning bending, she continued visiting her mother’s shrine once a week. Her younger brother joined her, occasionally, as did her stepmother – not the public one, but the little one, in the courtyard. Princess Roshu said that the courtyard was the place in the palace that she felt the freest when Azula had found her there the first time, as she rushed to apologize.

Azula understood what Roshu meant, she mused as she held Sozurai’s chubby hands and sang him a tune that her mother had taught her when she was only a year or two older than he was now. The courtyard had beautiful, dappled sunlight, breezes that carried the scent of salt water, and solid, loamy earth buried under a layer of rich grass. The pond in the middle was tranquil and was the new home of Zuko’s turtle ducks – she had been begrudgingly given the honor of being their caretaker while Zuko was away at training, and while they still didn’t like her as much as they liked her brother, they were now allowing her to pet them. Ozai didn’t come there, nor did any of the royal family, except occasionally Lo or Li when they were looking for her – but even they tended to leave her to her own devices when she mediated there.

Her mother’s shrine was the same as it always had been, as unchanging as anything could be. Sozurin would leave the flowers he collected on his toddling walks on its ledge, next to whatever offering Azula brought. Their crushed stems and bullied blooms softened her heart, and Azula suspected that her mother would have loved the child. The pain that she felt at the loss of her mother and her sibling was potent, even now, but had smoothed into something less jagged and cutting and more into a lodestone that sat in her pocket, changing her gait and the way she treated the world.

As she put ridiculous bows into Sozurin’s hair – fine, maybe she was doing it to make herself laugh, but he was a child and he wouldn’t remember this anyway – she wondered if her mother was happy, now, away from the palace and family that had caused her so much grief. She knew that her mother loved Zuko, and that she’d loved Azula, but as she grew older – and paged through private diaries that her mother had left to her – she began to realize the depths of her mother’s isolation and mourning of the life that she had left behind.

The obsession with plays and oni masks made more sense, now.

Sozurin grew older. Zuko came back after his first extended stay with Master Piandao a verified expert with dual dao – a different weapon than the one he had left the palace bearing – better than Lu Ten ever had been, and, if she was being honest with herself, better than she ever hoped to be with a weapon that was not her own fire. He had turned thirteen while he was gone – she’d sent him a letter but handed him his gift once they were back in his chambers after dinner. He tucked the stage knife (“It’s dull, so you can play with Sozurin and not worry about him getting hurt”) into his belt and tucked her into the biggest hug she’d had since he'd left.

After all that they’d gone through together, Azula was still so grateful that her desperate prayers to Agni on that first night after she had pushed her brother from the roof stood true and had been heard. He still loved her, despite it all, even though he had every reason and right to hate her for what she was. When she sat in front of her shrine that night, she renewed her prayer.

Bells chimed as she fell into a peaceful, charmed slumber.

Chapter 21

Chapter Text

Fire Lord Azulon was discontented.

Well, that’s what the Fire Sages that attended to him would say to each other, in lieu of giving voice to the possibly treasonous truth. He was discontented with the way that the Siege of Ba Sing Se was progressing, with the fact that his eldest son was yet unable to pierce the second wall, that the Earth Kingdom warriors were harder to subjugate than their counterparts in less-fortified regions of the territories had once been.

They didn’t discuss the fact that it was not only the enlisted men and women of the Earth Kingdom who fought back, but that guerrilla warfare – a deeply dishonorable form of warfare that disgusted many Fire Nation traditionalists, but that fascinated those… less scrupulous types – was undertaken by the peasants and civilians of Ba Sing Se. They didn’t discuss how entire Fire Nation camps would see their food stores sunken into a soupy mire of loosened clay and sand that was too unstable to venture into without risking their lives. They didn’t discuss the fact that Azulon’s fingers crisped the edges of any scroll he read from his eldest son, that he would go entire days without eating, claiming that he knew there was a plot against him and that his food was poisoned; that his famed control over the strongest inner flame in the Fire Nation seemed to be… slipping.

That it didn’t seem to be the only thing that was slipping through the Fire Lord’s grasp.

He was still an incredibly wily tactician, they said to one another. But it was not missed by their keen eyes and ears that there were more voices whispering in his ear than he let on – and that at least two of them were younger than the age of majority. And most importantly, it was not missed that the Prince Zuko and Princess Azula were present in nearly every war council, and that after each council, they would retire with their grandfather in confidence.

And it was not missed, indeed, that he would emerge from their discussions with new ideas, tactics and stratagems that seemed… not quite as he would have crafted them, when he was a younger man and took no advisem*nt.

The Fire Sages did not think that this was a negative – in fact, they rejoiced (privately, so privately that they did not speak of it, only thought of it, to Agni, as speaking of it… they knew what consequences would bring) for the future of their great nation, that the next Fire Lord would have such strong advisors at his back that he need never worry about the loyalty or competence of those in his confidence.

(That the Fire Sages suspected that the Crown Prince Iroh might abdicate the throne in favor of his young son was another private thought many of them entertained. If Iroh were never to be crowned, and simply removed himself from the line of succession – as he had seemed inclined to do before the Siege began – there would be instability, as Lu Ten did not yet have an heir; but if he were to wait for his son to be married and for an heir to be born… well. What would it matter if there were to be a peaceful transfer of power?)

(Never mind that the Fire Nation hadn’t had one of those in nearly three centuries. It had been done before, hadn’t it?)

But the Fire Lord was, nevertheless, discontented. He raged in private and seethed in public meetings with his top war advisors, lashing out at their inability to direct resources as he saw fit, their inability to pierce the wall, and their subtle insinuations that his eldest son was stymying the war effort intentionally. So, as many Fire Sages had predicted, the Fire Lord sent a missive recalling his eldest son from the war front on a temporary basis to… discuss the next steps they must take in person.

This missive, many historians would point out in later years, indicated only the beginning of the end of Azulon’s long and… inglorious reign.

--

Crown Prince Iroh sighed. He gazed upon the scroll cast open on his desk dispassionately – he was unsurprised as to its contents, and rather only shocked that it had taken his father so long to finally send it.

The Siege on an embittered Ba Sing Se had been unfruitful, at best, and wasteful, at worst. He had advised his father years ago that, while being able to take Ba Sing Se would prove to be a feather in the cap of the Fire Nation, and liable to break the spirits of the people, it was never going to be an easy task. He had said, then, that it may even be one that would rise up against them, like an adder-cobra that had been lying in wait, sinking poison deep into the veins of those who might seek to destroy it.

To his chagrin, he had been right. The Earth Kingdom had yet proved indomitable, and each day they spent in this siege was counted in bodies. He had laid his seal over more consolation letters than any general should have to, and the blood that stained the battlefields that were pitting the Outer Ring of Ba Sing Se nourished no crops but the bones that lay in shallow graves there. He had pleaded with his father to allow him to give up – to retreat, to find another strategy that may prove more valuable and less costly, to do anything other than follow the path of ruin that lay before them, as obvious as the Avatar cycle.

This letter did not indicate a willingness to concede. No, it demanded contrition from a son to his father, subservience and acquiescence; it commanded him to return to Caldera and explain the losses in person and to find a solution to a problem that had none.

He cast his eyes over the camp he had begun to think of as his home. His son did not stay with him; it was deemed too dangerous to allow the first and second heirs to the Dragon Throne to stay in the same place in an active warzone. Never mind the fact that they would be most dangerous together, moving in sync and with the experience of a Master and his pupil, a duo that had no weaknesses, he thought bitterly, not for the first time. No, instead, he had to listen to the demands of his father – though it had the signature of Ozai all over it, as annoying as it had been to read when it was sent down.

The soldiers in his camp were good men. (And women, he thought, chuckling to himself – he was always surprised when a soldier took off their helmet to reveal the red liner worn by many women in the army limning their eyes, despite the fact that his life had been saved many a time by a woman, and that one of the strongest firebenders he knew was his niece. He knew better than to underestimate them, at this point, but the gender-neutral uniforms worn by the deployed army – thick, uncontoured breastplates, wide shoulders, thick pants – were so different than the midriff-baring uniforms that the Home Guard wore that he often forgot that his unit was nearly thirty percent women.) But they were growing tired, and jaded, and while he knew that they did not consciously blame him for their gathering discontentedness, they were having trouble not seeing him as part of the problem.

If this was the state of his unit, as well-taken care of as he ensured they were, then he shuddered to think about how the rest of the army fared. He knew that many commanders were not as generous with their rations, or as willing to replace equipment, or to even keep their horses well-rotated. His unit was but a microcosm of a deepening malaise that was slinking through the Fire Nation Army in the face of unwavering hatred and resistance from the Earth Kingdom.

The concept that they were spreading the glory of Agni to the rest of the peoples of the world was hard to keep in mind when each person they met spat ‘ash-maker’ with such disgust that it made the sternest of them recoil, when the bile and vitriol they had hoped would recede was instead ever-increasing.

He knew that many of the younger soldiers were wondering how this war could be glorious when their compatriots died in droves. When all they left behind them were razed fields and broken homes. When there was nothing glorious in taking yet another life.

It was, in short, a terminally doomed effort. Lu Ten had told him as much months ago, when they met for a military conflab (Iroh’s birthday) outside of the active war zone. And he found that he was inclined to agree.

Their concurring opinions did not necessitate the end of the effort, despite his best attempts at convincing his father as much. No, the Fire Lord wanted a definitive win, and he wanted it soon. The fact that Iroh was unsure if it was something anyone could deliver was of no concern to Azulon. This was made clear – crystalline – in the letter.

Iroh heaved a great sigh, his hands coming to rest upon his increasing belly. Too many moon cakes, he mused, not enough action seen. As a general, he was rarely on the front – too risky to deploy your Crown Prince, his advisors said. He personally thought that sounded like a load of monkey-hogwash, but he found it harder to argue as the attempts on his life became more brazen. And few in his unit were willing to spar the General – those who were not tired from fighting were not as proficient as they would need to be to face such a great firebender at his fullest, and those who normally would were exhausted. As such, he got less and less exercise as the conflict wore on, and his robes needed to be… taken out, so to speak, more and more frequently.

Azula would have much to say on that, he mused, as he stepped outside of his tent to find the nearest page. His response to his father was brief:

Expect me to arrive in Caldera soon.

--

Azula was practically vibrating with excitement at the concept of seeing her Uncle Fuddy-Duddy again. She was eleven now, practically an adult, and she was sure to impress him with her masterful grasp of lightning. She was the youngest to achieve this since Azulon himself, and only older than him by a few months. And she had begun crafting her own military strategies, ones that were being carried out on the battlefield – under the Fire Lord’s command, of course.

(Strategies that sacrificed the fewest lives possible, the bells reminded her. Go away, she said to them.)

If Azula was vibrating, then Zuko was practically ready to become lightning himself. While she had taken some time to warm up to Uncle, he had always been Zuko’s chosen confidant; their separation had taken a harsher toll on Zuko than he had let on.

(She had known, of course. She saw him carrying around the silly little knife in his boot even after he had his dao – the one that Uncle had sent him after piercing the outer wall, the one that the Earth Kingdom General had given to him upon his surrender. Not that the surrender meant much, though, considering the resistance that still emanated from within the Inner Wall.)

They stood beside their father and his wife, behind their grandfather. Zuko held Sozurin firmly, but his energy was practically infectious, as the toddler was smacking Zuko’s ceremonial breastplate every few seconds and chortling at the noise it made. No amount of hushing was effective, but it mattered little – Iroh’s ship had pulled into port an hour previous, and with much pomp and procession, he had finally arrived upon the steps of the Dragon Palace.

Azula tuned out the popinjay bleating something about an illustrious return in favor of inspecting her Uncle. He had gotten fat, she noted, her mouth twisting in annoyance. It would take forever for him to lose the stone he had gained, but no matter. She’d whip him into shape while he was in Caldera and send him with an exercise routine upon his return to the front. His face was what worried her – while he was significantly older than their father and had shown his age young, the lines on his face were not those of the beaming smiles she remembered, but rather concern, fear and the heavy weight of lives pressing down upon a commander. This was the face of a man who had known war for too long, who had seen too many good soldiers buried.

This was not the face of a man who wanted to continue with a never-ending war.

Her lips thinned perceivably as she thought about the implications. Azulon would not like pushback from his eldest son about the inevitability of their victory in Ba Sing Se. She had been trying to feed him the possibility that they would have to instead accept a stalemate instead of a resounding win for months, but to no avail – any time she would suggest anything less than absolute victory, he would lash out at her and refute her claims. So to hear it from someone that he could not write off as being inexperienced? She shuddered at the thought.

Iroh greeted Azulon with the appropriate ceremony, then moved to his brother and his sister-in-law. He greeted Sozurin, shaking his pudgy hand, and then bowed solemnly to Zuko and Azula both. She knew that any affectionate greetings would have to wait until they were out of the public eye, but Zuko looked like he was about to toss Sozurin into her arms and throw himself into Iroh’s (girthy) embrace.

He held himself together until the main gates of the Dragon Palace closed and the doors shut behind them, practically shoving Sozurin into Princess Roshu’s ready and waiting arms and rounding on their uncle, beaming that sunny grin of his that Azula had seen less and less of since their mother’s death.

Iroh laughed loudly, opened his arms, and Zuko fell into them. Azula held herself back out of habit but was yanked into the embrace by her brother. She would never admit, on pain of death, how good it felt to be held like this by an adult. Roshu tried, but… she was barely a presence at some times. Their uncle was the closest thing she had to a loving parent, and she had missed him.

Fire Lord Azulon let them indulge for a moment, then cleared his throat and indicated that they should proceed to the room where military matters were discussed amongst the Fire Lord and his chosen few. Princess Roshu gracefully excused herself and left with Sozurin, and at the Fire Lord’s indication, Zuko and Azula were made to wait outside. The doors closed on them, and Zuko gave her the look. The one that said he was going to do something fantastically stupid and eavesdrop on the Fire Lord.

Well, far be it from her to stop him – she would have done the exact same thing if he hadn’t been there.

She watched as he shimmied up into the ceiling, faster than a flying lemur after a falling lychee nut. She knew she would have to make some sort of excuse for him if he were unable to return before the doors reopened and mentally leafed through some of the options – which had they used recently? No, she couldn’t say that he had been called to attend the Sages, that had been his excuse for her only the day before.

As she mused, she watched the dust motes dance along the air currents in the hallway. There was nothing to do, she supposed, except for wait for the next step to be taken, and respond accordingly. It was frustrating to be a child – she could not openly speak up during war councils, nor could she take action on her own, as frighteningly competent as her tutors said she was in private meetings with her father and grandfather. (Yes, she had eavesdropped. She was no saint.)

But she could respond, and she would as she needed to. The White Lotus had made it clear that she was on her own with her actions, but that she should always take some sort of action if she thought it was necessary. And so she waited.

And waited.

A messenger came and took the scroll in his ink-stained hands into the council room. The messenger returned sans scroll and left, doubtless to return to the hawkery to await the next letter that the Fire Lord needed to see. The usual bustle of the palace was maintained around her, even on such an auspicious day as the return of the Crown Prince, she supposed.

Finally, she heard raised voices. Grandfather yelling at – Iroh? Oh, this was very bad.

Zuko slid down the pole to land at her feet, face drained of blood. “Azula,” he breathed. “Something has happened – something has happened to Lu Ten,” he whispered tremulously.

The doors burst open and Iroh flew out of them, his expression foreign to her. After an agonizing moment, Azula realized what it was – fear. Sheer and unrelenting terror.

“My son!”

Chapter 22

Chapter Text

Ozai watched his brother and their father argue dispassionately through half-lidded eyes. Iroh was obviously advocating for a retreat from Ba Sing Se, and Azulon was nearly rabid in his demands that they either take the city entirely or raze it to the ground. Ozai thought that Iroh’s reason boiled down to one thing: sheer laziness and complacency.

His brother was assured of his place in the succession, and he was no longer seeking glory in the name of the Fire Nation. He had an heir – and declined to provide the Fire Nation with another one – and had decided that he need not really push for victory. It was obvious to anyone looking at him, in Ozai’s opinion… and the opinions of the other Generals he had been speaking to lately. But that was of no matter – his father could see the obvious derision that Iroh held for their military efforts and the old dragon was enraged over it. For once, Ozai wouldn’t have to drop any loaded hints to get his desired results and would only have to let it play out on its own.

Sometimes, he was simply too lucky to stand himself.

Iroh was saying something inane about troop morale – who gave a Komodo-rhino’s ass if the troops were tired? They were doing what was required of them by the Fire Lord, they should be honored – and Azulon was shaking his head, his long goatee flapping around his jowls. “Absolutely not,” he roared, and Ozai rolled his eyes. What dramatics. He was the Fire Lord, he didn’t need to yell to have people listen to him.

If he was Fire Lord, he would never have to yell. He had fantasized about it at length – he would speak in measured tones, and if he really wanted to put his generals on the back foot, he would speak quietly enough that they would have to lean in. He knew that having their attention fully devoted to him was a more valuable endeavor than having them grow numb to yelling. That way, when he did yell – well, it would be all the more effective.

But that was neither here nor there. Yet, anyway, he mused, suppressing a smirk as Iroh went off on a tear about the ‘poor people of the territories’ that they were supposedly neglecting in favor of redirecting supplies and resources to the Seige. The old fool couldn’t see how this would be the final nail in the Earth Kingdom’s coffin, and how it was the last step they needed to take before they could fold the rest of the world into their palm and under their power. The Water Tribes were all but decimated already – the Southern Water Tribe hadn’t had a waterbender in nearly thirty years, and the Northern Water Tribe was stuck in their enclave, seventy years in the past.

Neither of them would put up much of a fight if they had no allies in the Earth Kingdom to speak of, and those allies would disappear or die when Ba Sing Se fell. It was the capitol, and their king reigned over all but Omashu. There were no more strongholds to speak of in the Earth Kingdom but those two, and Ba Sing Se was by far the more economically important of the two. And with no sign from the Avatar, well. That would be that.

Privately, Ozai wondered if the Avatar cycle had really been broken, or rather if they’d been reborn multiple times since the Air Nomads were eradicated, and no one had noticed. There were no Southern waterbenders to continue the cycle there, so they may have died already in the raids. Almost all earthbenders in colonized lands no longer taught their dirt-eating offspring, as practicing their bending was against the law, and those who were not yet subjugated hid their bending to avoid being drafted for the slaughter against the Fire Nation’s indomitable will and might. And if the Avatar had been born into the Fire Nation… well. There were no Fire Sages that were well-versed in the ways of the spirits to know that it had happened, and it would be foolish to test every baby in the Fire Nation.

(He thought about Sozurai, for a moment, wondering. What if… No. It wouldn’t do to get too far ahead of himself.)

He tuned back into the fruitless argument his brother was having with their increasingly stubborn father. If Iroh couldn’t see that he was losing ground, he was even more of a fool than Ozai had imagined he was. He should simply give up and try for a middle ground – instead of a prolonged Siege, they should simply poison the water supply and call it done. There was a large lake in the middle that, if they were to put the right agent in, would do most of their work for them. And even if the entire city didn’t die, they would be too weak and too broken to do more than hang their heads and surrender.

Ozai was holding on to that suggestion for a particular moment that, if he anticipated correctly, would be coming very shortly.

As he glanced out of the window at Agni’s place in the sky, he heard a hesitant knock at the door. He was unable to fully hide his grin. Oh, here it was – right on time.

A messenger brought in a scroll, yet unopened, and handed it to the Fire Lord. After bowing deeply, he left expediently – as he should, Ozai thought, almost gleeful in his anticipation. Even if he didn’t know the contents of the letter, he knew that the symbol on the corner of the scroll marked it as urgent and only for those of the highest clearance levels. And that? Rarely meant anything good.

The Fire Lord paused in his arguments for only a moment, to cursorily look over the scroll – then stopped in his pacing, his eyebrows drawing together, flying up his forehead, and his face draining of what little blood still pulsed through his body.

“Agni’s grace be with us,” he whispered, finally.

Several things happened very quickly from there. Iroh strode over, pulling the scroll from his father’s loose grasp, scanning it and – yes, Ozai thought, that was the look he loved to see on Iroh’s face. Hopelessness. Fear. Everything and more that he had hoped for when he had sent the anonymous missive to the Dai Li, one in a long series proving that they could trust his word for what it was and use his tips to strike where they would do the most damage.

If they thought their source to be a sympathetic soldier in the Fire Nation army, well, that was because he had foisted the job of communicating onto one of his bastard children that had taken up in the Army. The boy had nearly lost his life more times than he could count, but he had been promised elevation after his task was complete to become a member of the royal family.

If the lad were to come to an unfortunate accident shortly before the end of his service, well. That would just be a tragedy, wouldn’t it?

This letter had stated that the General Iroh was leaving for the homelands, and that his only son would be on patrol close to a less-monitored portion of the Inner Wall one moonless night. And the Dai Li were not stupid enough to think twice about kidnapping the Heir Presumptive when the Dragon of the West was gone – they likely thought it to be the best bargaining chip they could ask for.

Ozai’s father was not kind. He was not generous. He would not negotiate for Lu Ten’s life. No, he was more likely to destroy the city entirely, regardless of whether Lu Ten was still present and alive in the city. And he would be even more likely to do so if Ozai said the right things – which he would and began doing in that very moment.

Ozai swept over and read over Iroh’s shoulder, who had gone very still and very quiet. He gasped and tore the scroll from Iroh’s deathgrip. “This cannot be!” he exclaimed, loudly enough that he was sure that any passing servant would hear and spread the word expediently. “Lu Ten tried to assassinate the Earth King?! Why would he do something so foolish? And – he’s been captured by the bastards?”

The letter was a masterstroke in courtly language – something that Ozai was genuinely surprised by. Most of their communications from the Earth Kingdom were brusque and coarse, as he would expect of their lesser culture, but this seemed to have been crafted expressly for the purpose of driving a stake through the heart of the Fire Lord and his Heir.

Fire Lord Azulon, it read, We must inform you that the Heir Presumptive to the Dragon Throne, Prince Lu Ten, Son of the Dragon of the West, Iroh, has been captured after an attempt by his squadron to take the lives of many Earth Kingdom dignitaries, including our illustrious leader, the 52nd Earth King Kuei.

Their attempt to assassinate King Kuei was foolish, and the rest of the perpetrators have met with their ultimate fate. Your grandson alone lives, and only then by the divine mercy of our King. He has been merciful with him – while his remains bound and his bending suppressed by means we shall not discuss, he has not sustained any lasting injuries.

This is not a mercy which shall last for very long. King Kuei is enraged with the blatant disregard for the sovereignty of the Earth Kingdom that the Fire Nation has long displayed, and this latest attempt to infiltrate our glorious city and take our King’s life is the last straw. He demands a full retreat from all Earth Kingdom waters, lands and a formal end to the war that has dragged on for far too long. He recommends that you discuss this with your advisors and indicate your willingness to meet to discuss the terms of Prince Lu Ten’s release.

If these demands are not met, then the safety of Prince Lu Ten cannot be guaranteed.

You have one week.

The seal of the Earth King decorated the bottom of the scroll in lurid green ink. It was a threatening enough letter to have terrified his brother and silenced his father. Into the void he leapt again, throwing down suggestions as sharp as caltrops.

“We cannot acquiesce to these insane demands! He asks us for the impossible – to give up our rightfully won territories, to cede control of our waters to Earth Kingdom mud-slingers and Water Tribe snow-rats! Father, please tell me you are not considering this – it would be a stain upon your legacy and a scar upon the face of the Fire Nation.”

At the mention of his legacy, the Fire Lord seemed to come back to life. “No, we cannot,” he murmured. “We shall not negotiate with these fools. Iroh, we must take Ba Sing Se, and we must take it now – no matter the cost.”

Iroh’s face spelled out his incredulity plainly. “Father, he is… he is my only son. I cannot allow the Earth King to take out the consequences of our actions taken today on him! He is the Heir Presumptive! He is the future of the Dragon Throne!” Iroh’s voice had grown in volume until he was practically bellowing. His breath control was legendary, Ozai thought facetiously.

“If we poison their water source, Father, we might be able to take the city, and the Kingdom, within days. I know that it is an underhanded technique, but this siege has become prolonged, and we know where their water comes from – why not take what advantages we must and use them?”

His father was beginning to nod while Iroh’s pale face steadily flushed. “This will likely kill my son, Brother! You know this! You are only saying this to assure your place on the throne – after his death, shall you attempt to hasten mine? Our father’s? Who is next in the path of your ambition, Ozai?!”

Azulon paused. f*ck, Ozai thought, the doddering old fool was still sharp enough to realize that Iroh had a point. Ozai had been hoping that he would be too preoccupied by the thought of his legacy to realize that his true legacy, his eldest grandson, was on the line.

“There are other techniques we may try, Father – other strategies we had previously deemed to be too costly. But we cannot simply roll over and give up on Ba Sing Se!”

Iroh let out a wordless cry of pain and rage, tearing the scroll from Ozai’s gesticulating hand. He re-read the letter’s contents and his face crumpled once more, the battle between his duty to his country and his love for his son coming to a head. He raced from the room, throwing open the doors, and crying out, “my son!” for all the world to hear.

Perfect, Ozai thought. A few carefully placed rumors and Iroh’s fitness to rule would come into question, and from there, it was only a matter of ensuring that Lu Ten could not fill the role – one way or another – after Azulon died.

And frankly, even without the poisons his wife had been so adept at, Azulon was close to the edge anyway. One little push was all it would take – perhaps this was that push.

All of the pieces were falling into place so nicely, he thought to himself. He was ever-favored by the spirits, and as the harsh rays of the sun fell onto his face, he could only smile for what the future held for him.

Chapter 23

Chapter Text

Lu Ten was in what his friend Hachi would have called ‘deep f*cking ostrich-horse sh*t.’

Well, Hachi probably would have been more descriptive than that and thrown in a few extra expletives, but he was dead now, so it’s not like Lu Ten could up and ask him.

His entire unit was dead, in fact – eradicated by a band of Dai Li agents, as they’d later identified themselves, as they had patrolled a portion of the Agrarian Zone and looked for traps. Well, a trap they did find – and when the Dai Li had killed all but three of them, their arms trapped in unforgiving rock and feet bound in earth, and pulled out a scroll from the inner vest of the new transfer who had only joined their unit that morning – a scroll that had detailed a nonexistent plot to assassinate the Earth King and half of his court with a vial of poison, written in a hand that looked curiously close to his own, well. Lu Ten had known that what his little cousin had warned him of had finally happened.

He had been betrayed.

He’d been so diligent since that night on the battlefield – always looking over his shoulder, truly getting to know the men and women he fought alongside, questioning orders when they seemed even slightly off-color. But all it took was one moment of weariness and the bone-crushing desire to not have to think the worst of all of those around him, and it all came crashing down upon him.

The same way that the boulder had come crashing down on Hachi, in fact.

The would-be assassin had been killed then and there, and only Lu Ten and his commanding officer still lived. His commanding officer, Brin Wah, had told him in low tones that it was likely he would be tried for high crimes and hung in the public square in the Upper Ring accordingly – he was, after all, the superior of the unit, and this was how things went.

Brin Wah had told him not to feel the guilt of his death before they were parted. Even now, Lu Ten could hear the cries of what sounded like a mob outside of the dungeon where he was being kept, calling for the head of those who dared to challenge their king.

When the Outer Wall had been pierced, most of Ba Sing Se had not even known that a war was ongoing outside of their walls. It was only after months of gruesome fighting in the Agrarian Zone that word had begun to penetrate into the nooks and crannies of the vast city, or so the few spies that were able to evade the Dai Li told his father.

Their ignorance had been a boon in the beginning – they had only been fighting soldiers that were conscripted or enlisted, who were tired and scared and wanted to go home but could not, and there were no coordinated pushbacks from the farmers as lands were taken and claimed. But as more of the citizens of the labyrinthine enclave had discovered the truth, the hardier the plants grew and the more enraged the civilians encountered became.

These were not the civilians of outside of the Walls of Ba Sing Se – they had not neglected their bending in order to avoid conscription but had rather practiced endlessly in schools and sparred with one another until many of them could be considered masters of their own rights. The techniques the farmers had learned to easily plow their fields and harvest their crops were quite easily applied to warfare, as they had discovered, and their attacks were more devastating than the Fire Nation’s Army could let on.

Their spies told them that the Dai Li had been perpetuating a lie that there was no war outside of Ba Sing Se, that they were safe and that there was no aggression from the Fire Nation. This lie had died after days in the Agrarian Zone stretched into weeks, and into months. The formerly peaceful residents of Ba Sing Se transformed practically overnight into a militant people adept at guerilla warfare, enraged at the desecration of the last safe space where many of them had become refugees.

Brin Wah had warned Lu Ten that, as the Heir Presumptive, it was likely that he would become a bargaining chip for the Earth King. Lu Ten thought that was fair – if he were the Earth King, desperate to get the Fire Nation out of the Earth Kingdom, he would also use himself as a way to… encourage the Fire Lord to back the f*ck off.

So his language had gotten worse over two years of being in the Army, so what? It wasn’t like anyone else was in this dank dungeon to hear him spitting out curses so horrible that they’d make his late mother roll over in her grave.

(His late mother would have been far more likely to cheer him on, in all honesty, but that was something Lu Ten would never have had a chance to know.)

Lu Ten had tried to tell the Dai Li that he hadn’t been involved in the fake plot, but to no avail. They obviously hadn’t believed him.

He couldn’t hold back his flinch as he heard the verdict – trial by public opinion in Ba Sing Se for a Fire Nation Army Captain was never going to be merciful, he knew that, but –

A dull thunk rang out, the sound of a rarely sharpened blade slicing through flesh all too familiar to Lu Ten’s ears. So, he was the last, then.

The sun was setting outside of the walls of Ba Sing Se – like many firebenders, he could feel it in his core; he thought that it was maybe a bit too on the nose of Agni to set just after one of His children had died in a foreign land, in an unjust trial, for a crime they did not commit. Lu Ten was keenly aware of the fact that his candle was burning low, lower every moment he stayed inside of these walls – but he was at a loss as to what he could do to be freed.

The Fire Lord would most likely have him freed, he reasoned with himself. And his father –

Oh, Agni, his father. Did he know yet? He was in Caldera, wasn’t he, talking to the War Council about their efforts in Ba Sing Se – which meant that he would find out when the Fire Lord found out.

He buried his face into his hands – well, one hand; his left arm felt suspiciously broken and he wasn’t moving it much – and allowed himself to be overwhelmed by a moment of utter despair. This would destroy his father. And the worst part was that Iroh had been wanting to pull out of Ba Sing Se for months now – now that Lu Ten had been captured, he wouldn’t be able to do so without whispers and accusations of weakness following him for the rest of his life.

Lu Ten knew that it would be the right thing to do, anyway – he just hated that this would shadow his father’s steps for the rest of his life, and make the decision seem like one made out of weakness rather than out of humanity and the pragmatism needed to rule a great empire.

He was spiraling, he knew it, but he couldn’t help but get lost in his thoughts, as completely isolated as he was. He thought about his cousins – hell, he’d helped raise them, more than Ozai; would they know about his capture? Would the Fire Lord keep it secret, not let word out that he was being used as a bargaining chip by the Earth King, or would they know as soon as his father did? Would the entire Fire Nation know?

Agni’s balls, he was going to be a martyr, wasn’t he? Dead or alive, that’s how the War Council would advise the Fire Lord to spin it, and that’s what would happen, inevitably.

He looked around at the cell once again. Iron, of course, made to keep even the strongest of earthbenders contained. He fervently wished, not for the first time in his life, that his flames were anywhere as concentrated as Azula’s pinpoint control had become before he had left for the warfront – she would have been able to carve her way out of the metal box and, summarily, the city without so much as scalding herself, but he was just as likely to boil himself alive as he was to escape if he tried to melt the door.

Lightning: great for carving through one or two opponents at a time, bad for when you’re surrounded by iron with no discernable way out.

There were no windows on the outside wall of his cell, and Lu Ten attributed that to the fact that he was deep below street level. He suspected that he’d been able to hear the ‘trial’ because his captors and guards had purposefully left the main door open – all the better to torture him with, he presumed.

He could not see the moon as it rose, that night, and fell asleep praying to anyone that would listen that his family – his country – would be all right. Even if that had to be without him.

--

The door was flung open with no preamble, startling Lu Ten awake. How an entire squadron of the Dai Li had made it all the way to his cell without Lu Ten hearing their movement, he had no idea, but he discovered firsthand that it was a very effective intimidation tactic, indeed.

Rough, rocky hands grabbed his forearms and hauled him to his feet, unheeding of the pain in his left arm. As the rock gloves (what the f*ck, rock gloves?!) closed around his wrists, wrenching his broken arm into place, he cried out and nearly crumpled to the floor. The Dai Li pulled him upright once again and began marching him out of the cell. His hands were pressed into balls, too tight to bring a flame to life and the promise of bone-crushing violence seethed in pulsating contractions around them was enough to convince him not to try anything incredibly stupid.

Instead of taking him up the stairs and out of the dungeon, the lead agent took a stance and opened a hole in the wall. No, not a hole – a tunnel.

How many tunnels did the Dai Li have scattered around the city, like the passages of an anthill, he wondered, and did they use them without any of the citizens of Ba Sing Se knowing that they traveled underfoot? Was he never to see Agni’s light again?

Maybe that was the point, he thought. To keep him so starved for the sun that he went mad.

It happened, on occasion, he was told – when firebenders were held away from Agni for too long, they either became overwhelmed by their flames and became too volatile or the inner flame dimmed until it guttered and, eventually, went out. Either way was the end of the firebender’s life – but not before a terrible, protracted bout of madness turned them into desperate fiends, clawing for any suggestion of Agni’s rays.

He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he got to that point. He’d rather be dead, but he wouldn’t exactly be sane enough to do it himself. He’d just hope that the Earth King was more merciful than that.

The echoes of the crowd rang in his mind again, long since silent, reminding him that he had little hope for mercy here.

They walked for what felt like eons, his broken arm being jostled on occasion by his captors – on purpose, he realized, after seeing one smirk as he hissed through his teeth at once exceptionally painful wrench. No, he would not get mercy if it were up to the people of Ba Sing Se.

Finally, they stopped in front of what looked like a solid wall. He could not determine if they had gone up, or down, and knew that if he attempted to find his way out of this labyrinth he would surely perish of thirst before ever finding his way free. One of the Dai Li settled into a stance and – oh, that was unsettling. The section of rock they were standing upon began to rise and the ceiling, rapidly approaching, parted in the sparest amount of time to let them through without being crushed.

He was particularly proud of himself for standing tall, despite every instinct he had screaming at him to hit the deck. Lu Ten didn’t flatter himself by thinking that the Dai Li would give two armadillo-gila balls about his bravery, but he did know that if this were to be the last time he would see any of them – anyone, really – he didn’t want them to be able to talk about how he cried in fear and cowered before superior displays of earthbending. No, he wanted them to grouse to their compatriots about how he stood proud and faced his fate with an unwavering face, no emotions visible except, perhaps, pain.

Bunch of absolute sh*t-eaters, he thought uncharitably as one purposefully squeezed the darkest spot of bruising on his arm, shoving him forward into a walk once again.

The doors in front of him were… well, to put it nicely, imposing. Everything was lit with a sickly shade of green, and the long hallway behind him was entirely empty. The halls in front of the throne room in Caldera were lined with guards, full of activity and bustle. The unsettling quiet and stillness went a long way to make him feel wrong-footed, but he did his best to make sure that his thoughts didn’t show.

This was just another audience with yet another hopped-up member of the nobility that wants to be heard, he told himself. It’s going to be fine.

(He was very certain, in fact, that it was not going to be fine, but he refused to let himself think that.)

The gold doors parted by some unseen force – pulleys? Hidden attendants inside? Magic? – and the throne room was revealed. It, too, was nearly empty, but cavernous and the sickly green light was even dimmer here. Diaphanous silks hung above a dais shaped like a badgermole, the circular insignia of the Earth King sitting behind a raised throne to outline an otherwise unassuming man in filigreed earth- and woodworking.

Otherwise unassuming, of course, save for the strange creature sitting at his side, and the fact that he was the reigning monarch for the large majority of the Earth Kingdom. The man who would ultimately decide his fate.

Agni’s balls, he was so f*cked.

Lu Ten, Heir Apparent to the Dragon Throne, knew better than to speak first. He who speaks first loses, his grandfather had told him many times, and he had found that the old man was, more or less, right about that. He had precious little leverage to fight with here – better to let King Kuei show his hand first, and not lose whatever he had before he even began.

King Kuei let the silent fester and stretch in front of them before finally leaning forward and steepling his fingers, resting his elbows on his knees. The jade beads around his neck clicked loudly in the otherwise-silent room. “Prince Lu Ten of the Fire Nation,” he started, so quietly that Lu Ten almost had to strain his ears to hear from his position at the base of the dais’ central stairway. “You stand before me accused of conspiracy to assassinate the reigning monarch of the Earth Kingdom, and the commander in chief of the Earth Kingdom Army. What say you to these accusations?”

Kuei had given him nothing in that little speech that he didn’t already know. Damn, Lu Ten thought, they really are handing me my own rope here. This was not the desperate, impotent leader that many Fire Nation Army commanders thought dwelt behind the great Inner Wall of Ba Sing Se – this was a commander that had seen the worst of war and was prepared to deal with its aggressors accordingly.

“I will only repeat that the scroll that was found was not of my own hand, and that I had never seen it before your forces discovered it. We were simply on patrol today, with a recruit who had joined our unit only this morning, with no ill intentions. I have touched no poisons and I have plotted no murders.” Lu Ten kept his speech short and to the point. There was no use applying for mercy or trying to reason with him – the facts were the facts, and the interpretation thereof was not something he could change, especially when it was so clear that the interpreter was not particularly inclined to be lenient.

“Hm.” The Earth King grunted and looked down at a scroll – the very scroll that the recruit had been found with. “It is true that your seal is not upon this missive, and that no poison was found on any of the members of your party. But,” he said, his silvery-green eyes flashing, “that does not mean that it is impossible that you have done what you claim you had no part in. I cannot accuse you of attempted assassination, only conspiracy – a sentence which in normal times still carries a heavy sentence. But this is war.”

His voice had remained quiet and steady, and Lu Ten felt a sense of impending dread bearing down upon him.

“In consideration for your… unique status and the lesser charges laid upon you, coupled with lack of true evidence, you shall not die today.”

Outwardly, Lu Ten maintained the façade he had been practicing since his capture. Inwardly, he felt his soul quail in relief – death was not so terrible a fate, he thought, but dying without being able to say goodbye to his father – that was something he could not picture.

“You shall be sent to a cell uniquely designed to hold firebenders, one where you shall not be able to free yourself, one where you shall await the end of the war.” Lu Ten felt his brow furrow, confused – was the cell he was in not enough? It seemed utterly secure… “You shall be sent where you cannot bend, held in perpetuity until the Fire Lord admits his wrongdoing and withdraws from the Earth Kingdom entirely, rescinding his claim over the wrongfully held lands that belong to the Earth Kingdom, and begins reparations.”

That was so much more than Lu Ten had expected from the Earth King – the demands were astronomical and made no sense in terms of his personal value for the Fire Nation, did he not understand that? He was second in line to the throne, and there were four viable members of the Royal Family after him. The Fire Lord would never agree to those terms – so it could only mean, he realized with growing apprehension, that the Earth King intended for him to never see his homeland again. For him to rot in prison until he died.

For his father to be crushed by the ache of not knowing how his son fared. For the Fire Nation to self-destruct over the correct course of action to take in regard to his freedom.

Oh. Oh, no, this was so much worse than Lu Ten had feared.

“You shall be sent to Agna Qel’a.”

Chapter 24

Chapter Text

Azula couldn’t remember being this absolutely terrified since the day Zuko had fallen. When her mother had been hurt, when she had died, she was devastated, but not bone-shakingly scared like she was in this very moment. Nothing showed on her face, of course – she was too old for that, and Zuko’s face was similarly frozen in a rigor of false ‘courtly concern.’ The only thing amiss was the dust on his palms and the constriction of his pupils, just a hair too much of the whites of his eyes showing.

Save for the dust, she was sure he saw his own likeness mirrored in hers.

Uncle Iroh was openly distraught, and while no tears rolled down his rounded cheeks, he was paler than she could ever remember him being. He clenched a scroll in his fist, and she could see hints of steam rising from it – Zuko, apparently having noticed the same thing, stepped forward to pry it from his grip and read it himself.

She knew, obviously, that he had already gathered the gist of the letter from whatever he had overheard, but the details were important. The details were always important, she reminded herself as she peered over her brother’s shoulder at the missive, thinking of that day when her mother had died – how the sunlight had been just a bit too harsh, the guards just a few too many. Things that she noticed now, paid attention to, so no one else that she loved would die.

The letter was brusque and offered no details of Lu Ten’s fate save that he was not yet dead. A small relief, she breathed slightly more easily – while Zuko would have said ‘dead’ if he had heard it, she needed to read it with her own eyes.

Agni’s grace, she needed to see him with her own eyes before she would believe it.

The Fire Lord swept out behind Iroh, already directing his servants to prepare the war room. Ozai followed closely, his theatrical mask of dismay firmly in place. Zuko and Azula looked at one another, then to Iroh, who almost looked lost in that moment, and each grasped one of his large, calloused hands in one of theirs and led him down the hall. He quickly regained his vigor, and looked down at each of them, giving them a querulous smile and squeezing their hands briefly.

A reminder, Azula thought, that they were together, and that they were there for each other, and for now, that would have to be enough.

--

Lu Ten’s cell had become familiar to him, so when he was moved abruptly, with no notice, to a new cell – one that felt even deeper, even colder in the dead earth that surrounded him – he was viscerally unnerved. His escort was smaller than it had been, and they didn’t speak to him – only sneered when he looked around, trying to determine where they were going.

When he was unceremoniously blindfolded and gagged, the cold clay oppressive against his tongue, he began to fear for his life. He had wondered if the Earth King was being too generous, too kind. If it had all been a cruel trick. It seemed his suspicions were not unfounded.

Movement. Twists, turns, deeper still into the depths of Ba Sing Se. He was certain, now, that they meant to drive him insane, or else they hoped to snuff out the flame of Agni that all firebenders carried within them. They would hold him here until he was no threat to anyone on a transport ship, then take him to Agna Qel’a, where the polar winter would end him and any tenuous threads he held onto. The trek seemed never-ending and only seemed to speed as time went by.

A change in footing made him trip, crashing disastrously onto his shoulder and left knee. He hissed – tried to hiss – from behind the gag, but he quickly found that no noise could pass it. He breathed heavily through his nose and tried to maintain what little composure he felt in this viper’s den. He would not let them see him cry.

It would not be befitting of a Royal Son of Agni.

His blindfold was ripped from his face, some of his hair coming with it in the movement, but the gag remained in place. The walls were a luminescent green, emitting from a plethora of crystals, taller than he was, from every visible surface. He was glad that his mouth was covered, despite himself, as he knew that he would not have been able to stop himself from gaping. This was unlike anything he had ever seen, and it was a source of beauty that touched his soul, even in this terrible place.

The dim flame in his chest flickered as he laid eyes upon the light and grew the smallest amount. Its guttering pattern stilled and settled, mirroring the steady glow of the gemstones.

(He wondered, how, how, how, but had no time to think.)

In front of him stood a Dai Li agent, one to whom all of the others seemed to defer. So, this must have been who was pulling the strings in Ba Sing Se before King Kuei had discovered the war, the man behind the impenetrable city. Doubtless, he was still the voice in King Kuei’s ear on the most dire days of the siege and beyond.

The agent sneered, his goatee and long moustache twitching in derision at the sight of him. He waved his hand, and the Dai Li that had been standing imposingly around Lu Ten bowed, slinking away. No witnesses, Lu Ten thought. No one to tell the Earth King what had happened to his prisoner.

As the Dai Li agent stepped towards him, Lu Ten braced for the pain that he knew was sure to come, wishing against all sense that he had that his father was there to save him.

--

The war room was absolutely stifling with the building pressure. Uncle’s barely-contained breath of fire wasn’t helping the situation – every time he exhaled, superheated steam poured out of his mouth in starts and fits. She was using every bit of her semi-neglected training with the monks to wick the heat out of it before it hit the table in front of them – the wood would warp irreparably, and she had fond memories of stealing into the war room back when it was just an anteroom with her mother and brother to use the long table as a drawing surface for the hilariously long scrolls they’d paint with nonsensical scenes from plays their mother had read to them.

Now that it was a war room, it had been years since it had been used for fantastical ink paintings. The scorches that marred the meticulously oiled wood were rare but marked in their presence, a testament to hot tempers and bending fueled by rage.

Standing as sharp contrast to his fiery brother, her father seemed to retain his cool head, muttering in the corner with General Bujing. His tactics were something she’d studied extensively: as vicious as they were, her grandfather admired them for the efficacy, and it was something she strove to emulate – if tempering that cruelty slightly with the expectations of the various deities that seemed to shadow her every move.

The Fire Lord had already informed his advisors of the situation – not, she thought wryly, that they didn’t already know – the servants would have spread the word too effectively to contain; even if the walls of the royal palace were more or less impenetrable to mere gossip, the hallways were rife with it. She saw factions form and break rank around them, thronging and disbanding with as much fluidity as Koh switching between faces.

They were all formulating their proposals, she knew, ways to ‘retrieve’ the heir presumptive from Ba Sing Se. Some would make sense; some would be little more than poorly thought-out suicide missions. Some of these generals, if they had any wits at all, would refrain from speaking – the naval generals would have nothing useful to contribute, and those that ruled over the colonies hadn’t seen the realities of the war on the ground in the Earth Kingdom in the better part of two decades. But they hadn’t reached the heights they’d summited by being quiet, so they would doubtless speak up.

She and Zuko had come to several war council meetings in the last few years after Lu Ten had left, though less frequently than before. They knew to stay silent unless their grandfather specifically requested them to speak, and she felt in her marrow that it was utterly instrumental to their safety that they maintain their silence today.

This was not their sandbox. This was a war that was being fought in their names, in the theoretical names of all of the children of the Fire Nation, for their legacies, but it was not one in which they were openly allowed to have opinions about.

The Fire Lord cleared his throat, and the murmurs of the generals quieted. They knelt around the table, staring resolutely at the maquette of Ba Sing Se that had been sitting on the table for the past three years. Azulon looked at all of them, one at a time, his eyes pausing as they met hers. She refused to look away, knowing he’d only see it as a sign of weakness, and felt the fire rekindle in her belly. Months of practice wresting a flame from his control had made her no less afraid of her grandfather, but it had made her stalwart and steady in his presence, even if she felt anything but in the smallest parts of her soul.

“As you have no doubt gleaned by now, Prince Lu Ten has been captured by the Earth King. His demands may not be acceded to; they are outrageous and insulting. Our primary goal is recovering the Prince. However, if this proves to be impossible, we will need plans to exact our vengeance for this diplomatic transgression of a most egregious nature. I will hear your proposals now.”

--

Lu Ten’s body ached. The Dai Li agent had yet to tell him his name and had only watched as Lu Ten struggled to come to his knees with his hands still pressed behind his back, arm screaming with every move. He’d let Lu Ten smolder in silence for nearly five minutes before he finally spoke.

“I never thought the day would come that I would see a prince of the Fire Nation kneeling before me. I hoped that it would be your father, to be frank, but you are an… acceptable substitute.”

Lu Ten did his best to send every ounce of the hatred that he felt for this man in that moment through his eyes directly into the agent’s brain. As he didn’t boil instantaneously, Lu Ten had to settle for a fiery glare.

“Don’t look at me like that. This is war. If your illustrious father hadn’t started this futile siege, you wouldn’t even be here. I wouldn’t be here – I would be towering over Ba Sing Se from the shadows, making sure that the peace stays as it was and that no word of war ever reached our king’s ears. Blame your family if you want to find someone to blame – I certainly hold them responsible.

“But what to do with you… You say that you’re innocent, but the handwriting on the mission statement looked so terribly similar to yours. Yes, we’ve intercepted your mail, don’t act so surprised. What did you think was happening, that your family simply wasn’t responding to your letters? No, we’ve disrupted those lines quite effectively at this point, at least the non-urgent communiques. But even without your seal on the paper, it was more than enough to convince me that you had something to do with all of this.”

Lu Ten could see the gleam in the agent’s eyes that, if Lu Ten was any good at reading people, indicated that his words were no more truthful than the saccharine sweetness dripping from a courtesan’s mouth was. He narrowed his eyes and rolled his good shoulder as if to say ‘get on with it, already,’ hoping that the agent would get to the point.

The agent chuckled. “I can sense you’re becoming impatient.” As he said this, a mass hit Lu Ten solidly in the back, making him groan in agony. “You shall learn, in the coming weeks, that patience is a virtue that is highly prized in the Earth Kingdom. Who knows? Perhaps you shall come to emulate it yourself.”

--

“Patience is not something that we can afford to pursue!” one of the generals around the war table roared. “We must strike, now, and extricate our prince immediately!”

“How do you propose that we strike, General Hirosha?” the next hissed derisively. “We’ve had so much success with decisive strikes in the past with Ba Sing Se, I’m sure that this one will succeed. Do you propose that we launch a new set of attacks into the Agrarian Zone and pray that the prince will not pay the price for our hastiness with his head?!”

Azula and Zuko watched silently as the yelling around the table escalated until, finally, the Fire Lord raised both arms and demanded quiet. General Bujing’s face was pensive in a way that made Azula uneasy, and her father’s face promised nothing good to come.

The Fire Lord studied the war table’s maquettes for a silent eternity. “The outlook is grim,” he finally said, unwilling to meet his eldest son’s eyes. “I am beginning to realize that we cannot win in Ba Sing Se without necessary sacrifices, but I am still having difficulty believing that that sacrifice is my eldest grandson’s life.”

General Bujing took the opportunity to clear his throat and lean forward onto the table. “I do not believe it is inherently so, my Lord,” he said, a frenetic fire burning in his eyes. “We have just gathered a new division of recruits. They are fresh, and so eager to fight – they will be landing on the coast of the Earth Kingdom by the Eastern Sea in only a day. They were to be stationed there to train further, but if we send them north, to Ba Sing Se, and use them to spring a trap on the earthbenders, we may find our ultimate success. We could use their sheer numbers to thin out the ranks of the earthbenders and ambush the remainder with a more experienced division that would be lying in wait. While the chaos is ensuing, and the Earth King is turning his focus outside of his walls, we would send in a strike team to extract Prince Lu Ten – and, if we are lucky, truly overthrow the Earth King, once and for all.”

Azula had been right to feel uneasy – he was suggesting the wholesale slaughter of fifteen thousand children, all for a tactical advantage that may not pay dividends. Would they even know of the deaths they marched to, as they advanced on the walled city?

Koh had been a more apt comparison than she had initially thought, watching in slow motion as her brother’s face mutated into one of horror as General Bujing finished his proposal, Ozai wearing an insufferable smirk at the left hand of the Fire Lord.

She wondered, for just a moment, if Ozai had only been waiting for this chance.

--

“I am Long Feng, head of the Dai Li. I assume you’ve put together as much at this point – our reports did mention your intelligence, so I hope that we haven’t beaten that out of you too effectively at this point.” He scoffed, eyeing the bruises littering Lu Ten’s body. “I am placing you into the catacombs until we move you. I don’t want any foolish fire rats sneaking into my dungeons to attempt a half-co*cked rescue attempt – we’d be able to stop them, of course, but too many public executions in too short a time span doesn’t inspire confidence from the people in their police force, you must understand.

“Kuei believes that sending you away to the north is the most economical way of dealing with your imprisonment. I think he’s a fool,” he spat, “to think that trusting a new ally with your biggest bargaining chip is in any way going to work out in his favor, but I cannot work against him, and I can barely speak against him at this point.”

“I’m sure you’re wondering why. As I have the opportunity to air my grievances so infrequently, let me inform you as to what has occurred in Ba Sing Se after your father began his siege.

“Kuei was raised to think that the war was a thing of the past, and that everything outside of these walls was as peaceful as those within. He ascended at only four years old, you know – assassinations being what they are, and it doesn’t benefit a four-year-old to live in constant fear when they cannot reason through the next steps. By the time he was old enough, it was far too late for me to reveal the truth – and I had hope, for a moment, that the Fire Nation was content with its colonies, that it would slake its thirst for new blood on someone else. And then your father had to go and ruin it all.

“When the war was outside of our reach, Kuei had no idea that there was a war at all. We kept all information to the contrary for him for the better part of three decades. Courtiers and nobles, visiting and residents, knew that to mention the truth of the matter was to call down their own death upon themselves – or worse. So they simply did not speak of it, and all was well. Ba Sing Se was a well-oiled machine, gliding along on even the roughest days. But with the siege, things changed in the city.

“Most of them, Kuei was too self-absorbed – ignorant, I suppose, which was purposeful – to realize they were occurring right beneath his nose. What I underestimated, however, was the siege’s ability to stop any sort of livestock trade entirely.

Long Feng sighed. “King Kuei is a bit of a self-appointed exotic livestock expert. He has been heavily involved with the zoologists at Ba Sing Se University since he was no more than yea high,” he said, indicating his waist, and looking the slightest bit wistful. “Is there anyone in your family that loves animals more than their own life?”

Lu Ten involuntarily thought of Zuko, taking care of every turtleduck in the pond whenever they got sick, and of Azula, who had one ornery sh*t of a rabbit-hognose snake that followed her around the gardens on warm days after she’d nursed it back to health shortly before he’d left for the warfront. Yes, he knew what it was like. But where in Agni’s cold asshole was Long Feng going with this damned story, and what was the point?!

“When your king has been getting new animals every few weeks for his entire life, and suddenly, the flow of new animals stops? Well, he gets curious. He started doing more research in the libraries of the University, filling his time, as I thought, with pictures and descriptions in lieu of the real thing. While it may have started that way, however, it quickly turned into a king who knew nothing spying on his subjects to learn of what was going on.

“He heard about the shortages and famine and thought that he knew what was going on. When he demanded to know why people were losing family members while he was still having feasts, I wasn’t sure what to do. The great lie was nearly uncovered.” Long Feng chuckled then; a sound similar to two millstones grinding against one another raising the hair on the back of Lu Ten’s neck. “The fool had an entire plan to renew the soils and establish crop rotations to battle the famine that he was absolutely sure was happening.”

Long Feng looked away. “I shouldn’t have let him go to the walls. But who was I to stop my king? A regent, long outliving his usefulness, that was all. The farmers in the Agrarian Zone had never been policed in the same way those within the inner wall were, were never dissuaded from speaking of the war. Kuei found out.

“He threatened to have me imprisoned, you know. Tried for treason. But I was able to persuade him that I could still be a resource for him – he knew nothing of the war, and even less of how to rule effectively. He cleared the ranks of the Dai Li, deploying those I personally chose to other cities and territories, appointing from the rank and file of the army and the police force of the city. He did a good job, I will say, as much as it pains me to – apparently, he had listened to some of my lessons over the years.

“The upper ring was swiftly converted to a secondary farmland – ‘war gardens,’ he called them. The nobles were over the moon with the concept of tilling the soil. They were terrible at it, of course, but the University had been creating higher-yield plants for this specific instance. We’ve made it through the rape of the Agrarian Zone thanks to their quick actions and Kuei’s steadfast assuredness that all is not lost. There’s rationing, of course, but… we still have the will to fight, because of him.

“I could see that the tides were turning. I threw my support behind Kuei. I’ve given up any real power that I had in favor of staying on the right side of history. Besides. Kuei has no heirs – if I wanted to remain in the line of succession, I couldn’t very well be banished.

“But to find you, a prince of the Fire Nation, within our fair city, with the plot to assassinate the King before the war is won? No. I could not let that happen.”

--

Iroh wasn’t speaking up against it. Azula’s eyes darted between her uncle and her brother – she could see that Zuko was only barely holding himself back from an outburst that could put them all in danger, and she was right behind him.

“Are you suggesting that the lives of our youth are expendable?” she heard her heartsick, foolish brother say, as levelly as anything. None of the anger that was causing his hands to shake was translated into his voice, but the words themselves were like blood in the water amongst sharkogators.

“It is not a sacrifice, your Highness,” Bujing said, the oil creeping through his voice like the fogs that swept the lowlands in late fall. “It is a noble effort being put forward to further the interests of the Fire Nation. They are trained, my Lord, and will be able to fight. I would never dream of putting unprepared soldiers onto the frontlines.”

He would, Azula heard a voice say. She couldn’t tell if it was one of the war council members of if it was, once again, in her head, but she knew whoever had said it was right. Bujing was a cruel leader, obsessed with results and maximum efficiency at the cost of decimating his own ranks. He viewed soldiers as nothing more than pieces in an elaborate game of Pai Sho. He returned results, but the costs this time struck Azula as too high.

Another general spoke up. “Which division is this?” he asked, staring at the maquettes.

“The forty-first, of course.”

--

Long Feng turned his hateful eyes back to Lu Ten. “I do not trust the barbarians in the north. They have cut themselves off from the rest of the world for too long, and they know not the pain through which we have suffered. But Kuei has secured this alliance: a two-pronged force, by land and by sea, to beat back the Fire Nation and retake the territories and the seas. He doesn’t expect your grandfather to accept his terms – I believe he is simply looking for an excuse to retaliate in kind. He has learned too much of death and cruelty in the past three years, young prince – it has hardened his heart and turned him into a capricious war tactician. He is out for blood, and frankly, so am I. If that blood comes from your family, well. That is simply the way of things, isn’t it?

“Giving you to the Northern Water Tribe is a show of trust, yes, but it is also tactical – if he can pull the Fire Nation’s attention away from the city of Ba Sing Se, splitting your forces, he has a much better chance of defeating them. And it also places the Northern Water Tribe in a position where they can no longer afford to be neutral. They’ll be holding a prisoner of war, after all.

“Beyond this, while we are… quite reassured in the security of our holding cells, we do not have any that are especially effective at containing people with your… particular talents. As you can imagine, firebenders don’t live especially long in Ba Sing Se. But Agna Qel’a is a truly impregnable fortress – if you were lucky enough to escape, you’d freeze or starve long before you found refuge. And escape from their icy tombs is nigh on impossible. Beyond that, it keeps the citizenry of Ba Sing Se safe from any retaliation from your family – in this, I think he is naïve; your grandfather will not hesitate to murder innocents in favor of revenge, but I can only advise him, guide him, not steer him as I once did.”

--

Zuko bristled further.

“How do you expect a division of entirely new recruits to win against some of the most experienced soldiers in the Earth Kingdom?” the same general asked.

Bujing sneered. “Well, those of the division who have worked to better themselves will doubtless prove themselves on the battlefield. But let’s be honest with each other – they will lure the Earth Kingdom Army in with the scent of weakness, and we will rely on the ambush to take them out. The strong will survive, and those are the only soldiers we need for the complete conquering of the Earth Kingdom.”

Zuko could no longer hold his tongue. His face had gone from bone-pale to redder than the setting sun over the ocean in a matter of moments. “You can’t sacrifice an entire division like that! Those soliders love and defend our nation. How can you betray them?!”

The bells were ringing loudly in Azula’s ears, crashing through her skull as the room fell entirely silent. The flames behind the Fire Lord’s throne rose steadily until they reached the ceiling. “It is not your place to speak, boy,” Azulon hissed. “I realize now that I have given you and your sister far too much leeway in my council rooms. You have insulted a great military mind, and you must learn respect.”

Bujing sneered down at them. Azula felt a sense of foreboding – no self-respecting adult would challenge a boy, no older than thirteen, to an Agni Kai, but Bujing was cruel and had been challenged by one for whom he held no respect.

As the words crossed the general’s thin lips, the bells in Azula’s head reached a fevered pitch and tunneled her vision. The last thing she heard before she lost consciousness, crashing to the table and disturbing the maquettes in front of her, was thus:

“Prince Zuko, I challenge you to an Agni Kai.”

--

“The fool that he once was still lives within him. He is not the best at negotiation – so when this was proposed, six months ago, when we were forging an alliance – no, not about you specifically, just any high-value prisoner – he knew not to demand a higher price for a more important head. But what’s said is said.”

Long Feng smiled at him, a cruel thing. “And if you go a little insane in the polar winter? Well, I’m sure Kuei and I wouldn’t shed a tear over it.”

Lu Ten shuddered at the thought and Long Feng’s smile only twisted and grew. “But we have some time to get to know each other before your transport, oh Prince. What say you that you tell me about your family, now that I’ve told you about mine?”

The clay cuffs around his wrists twisted, and as he began to scream, Lu Ten heard the insistent ringing of bells – such sweet bells – and then nothing but his own pain suffused his senses.

Chapter 25

Chapter Text

Zuko clung to his little sister’s hand with the desperation of one clinging to a lifeline in a typhoon. She had been one of the few things in his life that he had come to feel that he could always rely on, and her collapse had… well, it had f*cking terrified him, to be honest. She was strong, stronger than him, even though he knew that as her big brother the roles should be switched. And to it have happened when it did, when Lu Ten was captured, when Iroh was wholly preoccupied with getting his son back… he was the only one in the palace that was solely focused on Azula getting better, and even still, he could only think of the Agni Kai hanging over his head.

In the chaos of Azula’s collapse, he had not had the time to accept or decline the Agni Kai. Despite this, he was sure that his hand would be forced – the Fire Lord had demanded that he would learn respect, and this challenge was likely to be the teaching opportunity that he was seeking.

Bujing was an accomplished firebender, yes, but not a true master – he knew for a fact that since being promoted to High General, he had rarely seen combat, and only did the minimum of training. Zuko, on the other hand, was far from a master – Azula was the one that was much further on that particular path, but he trained every day, in every spare moment of time, just to keep up with her. His endurance would serve him well on the battlefield, even in unarmed combat.

He looked down at his sister’s hand, lying limply in his. He pressed it to his forehead and sent a quiet prayer to Agni, for her to awaken quickly and without issue. He needed his sister to be okay, above all else. They were a team, for better or worse – he couldn’t protect her from whatever had made her faint, but he could help her recover from the aftereffects. As long as she woke up.

As long as she woke up.

--

Canyon walls rose far above her, barely visible over dense treetops that rustled softly in a wind that felt like a caress. She was standing in a red stream, the water running gently over her bare toes, and warm, yellow light pressed against her cheeks.

Azula was confused to find her feet bare – she rarely went without, at minimum, sandals, in Caldera, and this was very obviously not Ember Island. She was further perplexed at how she had arrived to this location – when she thought about it, she was met only with a wall of fog within her mind, and a sense of suddenly being in a place rather than traveling to it. She stepped out of the streambed onto a large rock and attempted to dry her feet by raising her internal temperature. When her skin remained wet, her confusion quickly morphed into anxiety. Not being able to firebend was a bad sign. She couldn’t fully recall why, but it was, nonetheless.

She heard the tinkle of bells behind her and whipped around on the rock to face their source, hands raised to strike and legs tensed to leap.

As she rapidly assessed the figure before her, she became aware of a few key facts. One, she was definitely in the spirit world, as no human she knew was capable of glowing like the rising sun. Two, she was definitely facing something far more powerful than she was – and that was on the mortal plane. Here, in the spirit world, stripped of her bending – well, she was little more than an anterpiller under a boot. Third – and this might be the most important – she was looking straight into the eyes of Agni Himself.

She gasped, and fell into a full kowtow, her knees cracking painfully onto the rock. Ignoring her discomfort, she held her breath as she trembled incessantly – this was one of the Great Spirits, the giver of the spark of life for all who breathed, the one to whom she prayed every day. And He was right in front of her.

She mentally paged through the texts of the Fire Sages that she had read, trying to recall the last time someone claimed to have seen Him in the flesh. It had been… centuries, she thought, if not millennia, since He had deigned to let one of His subjects gaze upon His face. And at least one of those times, He had smote several people for defying His will.

She sorely wished that this was not one of those times.

In her haste, she addressed her prayer to Agni – in this, at least, she was a creature of habit – but as He chuckled above her, she thought that it was a particularly stupid thing of her to have done.

“You may rise, My child, without fear of any smiting,” he intoned, his voice sonorous without being deafening. She remained in kowtow for a long moment still, knowing that this was a deity that had the power to wipe her memory from every record with just a press of His finger – would looking him in the eye be too bold? As she straightened into seiza, her eyes traveled up long, elaborately embroidered robes that looked lighter than air, following the backs of dragons to two outstretched hands. Her gaze caught there as she studied the glowing talons that decorated His fingertips instead of human fingernails – they were sharp enough to rend the flesh from her bones, if He desired, and she would be dead before she knew it. Without touching them, she also knew that they might be, in any given moment, astronomically hot – hotter than any fire she could produce, than anyone she knew could produce.

But, as those hands reached down to touch her brow – as one claw scraped gently across her face – she found that the temperature control that the Fire Sages had long-ago taught her was exercised here, in His hands. They did not burn, did not sting – they were as gentle as gossamer drifting on the wind.

She met Agni’s gaze with eyes opened wide. His skin was remarkably luminous, almost glittering, and His eyes were a molten, reflective gold, with luscious lashes framing them. His hair was not the black that she had anticipated – rather, it was bright white, with iridescent shades of yellow, orange, red and even the occasional flash of purple shining through as He shifted. It ran in glistening waves down His back, held away from His face in a ceremonial topknot that was adorned with a crown that resembled the rays of the sun coming over the horizon – self-referential, she thought in a moment of irrepressible snark. He had no facial hair but seemed to be of some indeterminate age of impeccable vitality. When He smiled, she noticed that His incisors were sharp, and that His canines were almost too large for His mouth.

As beautiful as He was to behold, she couldn’t help but tremble in fear. This was Agni, the sun, and He was speaking to her, of all people. Was she dead? Was this death? Had she left Zuko alone, facing against – f*ck, how had she forgotten the Agni Kai?

“Be still,” He said to her. “Clear your mind. You are merely here temporarily – you have not come to stay.” She took a shaky breath and willed her heart rate to slow, waiting for His next words. “I have long been watching over you, Princess Azula of the Fire Nation. You have given great honor to My name. Your work in the name of balancing the spirits – the world – for the sake of the Great Spirits has not gone unnoticed.”

Azula, if later pressed, would not admit to gaping at Agni with her mouth flopped open like a particularly stupid elephant koi. She was – stunned, was a word for it, she supposed; absolutely gobsmacked was more accurate. She knew that La had charged her with what felt like an impossible task to protect her people, and in a greater sense, to restore the balance of the elements – but to have garnered the notice of Agni over such small actions as those she was able to take? Unthinkable.

He smiled, fangs flashing in His light. “Before then, My most dedicated of supplicants. Far before then. I have been watching over your line since before your time, but both you and your brother have held My attention since you were born.” His smile looked almost sad for a moment. “You both hold the potential for great and terrible things, depending on the paths you take. I have hoped to influence both of you for the better, but there is only so far I am willing to meddle in the lives of My progeny.”

Another myth confirmed, in but a throwaway word from Agni. Azula had long heard that they were Agni’s children, that the Royal Family was directly descended from Him, but she had only half-believed it.

“You have free will, for the better or for the worse, and your choices are your own. I have been quite reassured to see the choices that you have been making. I hope that My happiness has been evident, even in times of great tribulations for you and your brother.”

Azula blinked up at him, her mouth still hanging open. At her expression, Agni blinked back, and let out a sudden laugh. “Oh, sweet child! Have you not known it was me?”

The damned bells were back, ringing louder than ever, and –

Wait.

Stop.

…

Oh, Koh take her, she was never going to live it down if Zuko found out that she’d mistaken the bells of Agni for an impending sign of insanity. Oh, what would the High Sage think? She’d read the ancient texts that spoke of Agni coming and going with the ringing of bells. She’d sat through how many prayer services with the Sages that opened and closed with a cacophony of ringing?

She’d thought she’d been projecting, or otherwise just… well, losing it. Trying to rationalize the voices in her head that still lingered, the ones that sounded like her mother (affectionate, now, completely devoid of the vitriol with which they once whispered that she as a monster who could not love or be loved), the ones that sounded like her father (hateful, deceitful, tempting her to turn on her brothers and take power for herself), even the ones that sounded like… well, like Spirits that she had yet to meet. The voice of a young boy, ebullient and giddy, telling her to listen to the way the wind blew. The serene tones of a girl, whispering legends and myths about the Moon and the Ocean from a culture she had no right to, but that she was learning anyway. Even bad puns, on occasion, from a spirit that she sorely wanted to smack. She caught people in the corners of her vision that she knew were not there, that she knew had passed, even still.

Less so when her brother, her uncle, her cousin, was around, but they had not ceased. When she was alone – truly alone, it was worse. Reflections changed, figures and creatures crept out from the seams in her world.

Azula knew she was at least a little mad. She had known that for years, now. But to know that the bells, at the very least, were not something from her own mind… it was both deeply reassuring and almost heart-rending.

The voice that had been telling her how to be better, guiding her, especially after her mother’s passing, was not one that was inherent to herself. It was not some sign of inner goodness, as she had hoped, some kernel of selflessness that drove her to be better. Rather, it was the voice of a god, something extrinsic, over which she had no control.

Agni’s grin faltered, His brows coming together, and He looked rather like He was on the verge of tears. Oh, La’s deepest pits, could He hear her thoughts?

“Yes, My child,” he said, sorrow in every syllable he uttered. “Azula, you must know – I have never compelled you to anything. My suggestions have never been anything more than that, suggestions; as a parent might guide their child to grow and learn. Your choices are still your own. Your growth is your own, and nothing can take that away from you.” He paused and thought for a moment, looking at her with furrowed brows. “La has taught you much of how warriors are treated in her water tribes. She has helped you to know your own mind and the world around you through her stories and guidance. Would you say that your growth is only due to her influence, or is it due to your being receptive and willing to grow? La has only spoken with you in person, whereas I have been limited to mere whispers.”

Azula was still reeling. While what He said made sense, she couldn’t understand it – Agni was one of the most powerful spirits in the world, why would He be limited? Why would He not be able to appear to her as La had, on many occasions? When she had prayed to Him every day?

“Ah,” He murmured. “And so we come to the crux of it.” He sighed, and looked away for but a moment, and between blinks, Azula found they were in a new place. This one, a desert, stretching as far as her eyes could see – with a spire interrupting the sands – but when she squinted, she could see great, towering trees and hanging vines, the spires hung from their boughs. The double vision was disorienting, as had been the sudden transposition in time, but – well, it was the Spirit World. She supposed very little had to make sense at all.

“The Fire Lord fights in My name, for My glory,” Agni continued. “But the actions that the Fire Nation has taken since the comet passed and the Air Nomads were massacred have been but to the detriment to the balance of the world and the elements. As the power of the Fire Nation grew on the mortal plane, and as fewer of My people truly believed in me as more than just a glowing orb in the sky, the smaller my powers grew. Tui and La are worshipped wholeheartedly, with their origins and desires and goals repeated daily, from mothers to children. Their rituals are followed, unadulterated. But many of the rituals and devotions that once came to Me have been… diverted,” He said. “Many soldiers may send desperate prayers to Me, but they thank their leadership when they survive. They worship the Fire Lord’s word as if it were Mine, and so devotions that may have once come to Me are now placed at the feet of a mortal man who has no more power over their bending and souls as I have power over earthbenders.”

“But – wait. But you said it had… something to do with balance?” Azula finally managed to find her voice, and this was what came out?! Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“The death and destruction of the Air Nomads meant that the power of the Great Spirit of Air – Vāyu – crumbled. This was a break in the balance of the elements, you see – and as the patron spirit of those who had led the genocide, it was My duty to cleave Myself of a portion of my power so that they might persist, waiting for the day that airbending would return. If I had not – I fear that airbending would have left this world entirely, and that we never would have known balance as we once did.”

Sacrifice. It all came back to sacrifice, over and over again. Her mother’s death for her life. Her pride for the protection of those she loved. A legion of young soldiers for some ill-conceived quest for glory and fame. A nation’s people, for domination over others.

The scales were unbalanced. She sought a way to restore equilibrium.

Agni’s smile returned, though gentler than before. “Yes, young one,” He said. “And you have done well. But I must advise you, directly – which is why I have called you here today.”

Another blink, and they were staring over a vast lake, purple and gold. “The Fire Nation is rapidly coming to the first of several crossroads that I see in your future. These will decide the fate of the rest of the world, and, by extension – the elements. Once these crossroads have been passed, there will be no returning. And I will not leave you to face them unprepared.”

A sudden gust of wind led Azula close her eyes to shield them. When she opened them, Agni was not alone – He had been joined by an ancient, wizened being, who was nonetheless grinning as broadly as a young child might, unburdened by the realities and weights of the world. The being had no hair on their head, and a blue star in the center of their forehead. As Azula watched, the face of the being changed, into that of a young adult with a half-shaven head, to that of a child, and back. Their form fluctuated, the only consistent thing being their smile, their grey eyes, and the blue star which remained immutable.

Azula paused, glancing at Agni, and, hoping desperately that this was the correct manner with which to proceed, pressed her fists together, fingers facing her torso and knuckles touching, bowing quietly to the spirit which could only be that of Air. Vāyu, Agni had said. A name which had been lost to time.

Azula had always wondered how their name had been lost. She had surmised that it was one of those things that was so common knowledge that no one bothered to write it down – and besides, the Air Nomads, much like the Earth Kingdom, had never been known to pray directly by name to their Great Spirits as the Fire Nation and Water Tribes did. A name, she thought, one that she could write down upon her return to the Fire Nation. One that she could ensure persisted beyond her ken. A feeble thing, but – perhaps – somewhere to start.

The laugh that burbled up from Vāyu was infectious and held the tones of ten thousand breaths of wind. Like Agni, Vāyu reached out to touch her face, placing a leathery hand under her chin and encouraging her to stand straight. They smiled reassuringly and leaned up on young feet to press a gentle kiss to the center of her forehead. Taking half a step away, they caressed her cheek with a hand that was soft and large enough to hold nearly her entire face, as they went from a youth to the middle-aged form that they could hold.

The touch reminded her of her mother’s, and Azula found herself on the verge of tears. She broke eye contact with Vāyu and looked desperately to Agni. “What do they want from me?” she choked out, her throat tight and itchy in the way that it often was before tears.

“Nothing more than you are capable of giving, Azula. They want balance, and they know that you are one of our best vassals for such a cause. Besides,” Agni said, his voice filled with sorrow, “you are one of the few left in the world that still pray to them, that knows their rituals and attempts to carry them forth. Even in secret, the wind knows.”

Vāyu’s hand slipped from her face into hers, and she was holding the hand of a youth.

“They have lost their voice, after their people were taken from this world,” Agni went on. “The Great Spirits can understand them, but they are largely unable to communicate with mortals. I am no soothsayer – that was always Vāyu’s domain. Luckily, they have been circ*mspect enough to share with us what they have seen.

“Princess Azula of the Fire Nation, the Agni Kai that your brother has been challenged to is a fixed point in time since his birth. It was never going to change, and it was always going to happen. He was always going to speak against such injustices as this, and no amount of political training would have stopped that. No amount of spirit meddling could have changed the scheming minds in that war room today. No, this was as written in the tapestry of time as the beginning and end of all things. Do not feel guilt for being unable to prevent it.

What comes next is the first crossroads Vāyu has seen. The general who challenged your brother did not originate that plan. It came from your father Ozai. Your grandfather will compel Zuko to accept the challenge.”

“He can beat Bujing,” Azula said without thinking, before processing Agni’s meaning.

Oh. Oh no.

“Yes, little one,”Agni said quietly. “Your brother will have to choose between honoring his father and his own safety. You know which he will choose.

“Your duty, now, is to prevent your grandfather from allowing such cruelty to take place. You must stand by his side on the day of the Agni Kai and persuade him to accept surrender, and to devise a suitable punishment that will not irreparably harm your brother.”

“But – what if I can’t? What if it doesn’t work? What if he doesn’t listen?”

The tiny hand in hers squeezed once, and she met the grey eyes of a deity that were filled with tears – reflecting her own, she realized, feeling the wetness upon her cheeks.

“He won’t listen, Agni. He’s become obsessed with his legacy, with preventing weakness. He will only see a surrender as more cause to rid himself of such tarnished goods.”

Agni hummed, looking pensive. “So you believe Zuko coming to harm in the Agni Kai is yet another fixed point.” He glanced at Vāyu, whose head rocked from side to side in an expression which Azula recognized as vacillation. It could be, or it couldn’t be. But how could it not be?

Uncle, she thought suddenly. She was but a child – but if Uncle Iroh stayed, the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, first at his father’s ear, he might just listen. His mercy would be far from merciful, but it would be better than the punishment that Ozai would deal to her brother if left unchecked. Vāyu smiled up at her once again – she had found a possible solution, she realized, and she had come to it on her own, one that had not been presented by Agni.

“Yes, that may just work,” Agni said, “But first, you will have to convince your Uncle to remain in Caldera while his son is being held captive in a hostile nation. This will be the first of many challenges you will face in the coming years.” Azula realized that the spirit world was becoming hazy around them, losing its definition and contrast.

“What else do I need to know?!” she asked desperately. “You said there were many crossroads!”

“This is all of the guidance I have the power to give you at this juncture in time,” Agni lamented. “The rest will become clear as they show themselves. Trust in Me, and forget not that love and devotion are a source of power, not weakness, as your father and grandfather would have you believe. You are blessed by My grace, and the freedom of Vāyu, and the strength of La. You are favored and stronger than you think you are.

“Do what you must. Restore the balance. Find…”

Agni’s voice faded into bells, nonsensical and vague, and Azula found her eyelids fluttering open on the other side of the veil.

Chapter 26

Chapter Text

Iroh sat in a daze at his niece’s bedside. Too much had occurred within too short a time – he had arrived home, expecting to successfully convince his father that their pursuit of Ba Sing Se was nothing more than vanity and a cruel use of their military that was resulting in more death than actual results, only to have discovered that his son had been abducted. The war council had spiraled out of his control – not that he had been controlling much, honestly.

No, he’d been letting the words wash past him, tangled in his own thoughts, not paying attention to his nephew’s rising consternation. He had not spoken up when Bujing had proposed a suicide plan for children. He had not fought his father when he had hissed out that Zuko needed to learn respect.

But despite knowing that all of this was wrong, that in that room, he alone had the power to stop the disaster hurtling towards them – he had not been able to wrench himself from his despair over his son. He wanted to leave, immediately, to bring his son back. He would tear Ba Sing Se apart, stone by stone, if that’s what it took. He would have given the Earth King anything he asked for in exchange for the return of his son, intact and alive.

Yet Iroh was not the Firelord. He was not the one allowed to make these decisions. He stood under his father, ever the servile son, supporting him as his father demanded. And never once did his father allow Iroh’s suggestions to overtake what he, the Firelord, chosen herald of Agni, thought was right.

Despair. Iroh was caught in a mire, too deep to feel the bottom and sinking deeper every moment. At what point would he feel that he was below the waterline? At what point would this kill him?

He roused as Azula blinked, her bright gold eyes shining up at him. When she called her older brother a baby, Iroh’s first instinct was to scold – though he found his lips frozen as Zuko’s troubled mien transformed into a smile.

Ah. Yes. This is how siblings were supposed to be, he thought, spiraling into a new tangent. How had he and Ozai gone so wrong? They were supposed to support each other, love each other – yes, compete with each other, but only to achieve new heights, never for the intention of outdoing one another. When had that competition transformed into hatred? Into underhanded comments that implied disdain and cruelty? When was the last time he had given his brother a smile like the one that Zuko was given Azula, full of kindness and reassurance that Iroh had no doubt Zuko himself was sorely missing – never?

Distantly, he could hear a bell ring, its clean tones soothing him enough to have the mental fortitude to smile and reach forward to smooth Azula’s bangs away from her face.

“Little dragon,” he rumbled, voice hoarser than usual, “you scared your brother and I with your fainting spell.”

Azula rolled her eyes at him, and Iroh’s smile felt a little less pasted-on – it was good to know that some things would never change, like Azula’s annoyance at people being worried for her. Even as the names that he left out hung in the air above them – Ozai, Azulon – and the spaces where Lu Ten and Ursa would have fit perfectly aching like a missing tooth, their little family was still there for each other.

Iroh’s fury and fear and haste popped like a soap bubble, suddenly and completely. Leaving these children… how could he do that to them? And at what a time. Zuko was to face a General in an Agni Kai imminently, and he was in no way prepared for it. His niece had just fainted for seemingly no reason, and Iroh was unsure if this was only the latest of several or simply the first of many. There was so much that he had missed, being on the warfront, and so much that these children – his wards – lacked.

But to leave Lu Ten in the grasp of the Earth King would be tantamount to failure as a father. He was torn and saw no path forward in which he could protect both his nephew and his son.

Azula’s golden eyes stared at him as he was lost in thought. Zuko had dashed off somewhere – ostensibly to get her a glass of water, but Iroh suspected that it was more to have a private moment of relief and emotion, as there was a fine porcelain pitcher and cup on the table beside Azula’s sickbed. Azula reached out and tapped his knee, and he shook off his haze once again and focused on the precocious eleven-year-old lying prone before him.

“You have to stay for the Agni Kai,” she said simply. “You have to convince him to accept surrender. That’s the only way for Zuko to live.”

Iroh’s heart stuttered in his chest. “Child, what makes you say this? General Bujing is an honorable man, and he…” But Bujing wasn’t an honorable man, was he? If he were, he never would have suggested the sacrifice of the 41st. If he were, he wouldn’t have challenged a thirteen-year-old boy to a ritualistic duel, the implications of which Zuko were too young to understand.

Decades of politicking spun in Iroh’s mind as he parsed the options. His father hadn’t stopped the challenge after Azula’s faint, hadn’t told Bujing that he was out of line. Even if Iroh spoke to him, he doubted that Azulon would let Zuko avoid the challenge. Before today, though Iroh had thought Bujing to be an oily snake of a man who only cared for himself and his own advancement, he would have thought that he had honor; now that he knew he had none, he worried that the fight would be even more unfair or… yes, Azula had a point. He may not accept a surrender from his opponent, which was an honorable loss according to their laws, and may further press his advantage and injure the boy, surrender notwithstanding. But would Azulon intervene and accept the surrender for Bujing?

Azula was right. He would have to convince his father to stop Bujing’s cruelty.

Resolute, he sat up straighter. Nothing would happen to his son in the time that it took for the Agni Kai to take place – he told himself this, repeated it with a little more faith than the first time – but Zuko could face a fate that no child should have to bear if not for his uncle’s intervention.

(You could intervene for both of them if you were Firelord, a snakelike whisper said in his mind. You could make all of the decisions you needed to in order to keep your loved ones safe.)

(Thoughts like that were treasonous, a logical part of him cried. The less logical part of him had more difficulty casting the suggestion aside.)

“I will stay,” he said after a long time, meeting Azula’s piercing gaze. “But you must help your brother into the mantles required for the Agni Kai as I stay by the Firelord’s side.”

The relief on Azula’s face was like a wave crashing over troubled sand, and Iroh felt all the more guilty for the fact that she had expected him to deny her, to leave and let her brother fall to the wolf-tigers. As she pressed herself up into a sitting position, and then bowed slightly at the waist, the guilt rose further – oh, this child should not be prostrating herself for a kindness that any adult should show her. The imperial palace was not the place for children to raise themselves, he knew, and that was exactly what his niece had been doing, especially during the times her brother spent away, training with Piandao. He had been sent away to the war by the Firelord, so he had no say – but could he truly say that he was as attendant to her needs as he could have been?

As he took her hands in his once again – marveling anew at the callouses that had thickened and the scars that had lightened in his absence – he thought about how things would have to change. How Ba Sing Se would never again be his priority, but rather, these children - his children, would have to be.

For it was obvious that Azula, Zuko – and even Lu Ten, had not been the priority of any member of the royal family in years.

--

The day of the Agni Kai rose with a sun that felt harsher than usual, Zuko thought as he stared up at it. He hadn’t been able to sleep well, so he’d crept into Azula’s room, only to find her praying in front of her (still a little weird, but whatever, it was Azula, she was a little weird) shrine as fervently as the day he had first discovered it.

He’d slid onto the cushion beside her without a word and they’d prayed until he’d collapsed in exhaustion into her side. From the looks of it, he thought, Azula hadn’t slept at all. The candles had barely dripped any wax at all, and the carousel she’d unceremoniously placed above them to catch their rising heat turned steadily and inexorably as she took deep breaths in and out.

Inexorable was one way to put it, he thought as they readied themselves for the Agni Kai. He brushed her hair, and put it into a traditional topknot – a style that she hadn’t worn since before their mother had passed, but she had asked him to tie it for her, and who was he to deny her this on what could very well be his last chance to-

No. He wouldn’t think about that. He was well trained and Azula seemed to think that he’d make it out, alive at least.

He hadn’t asked her what she thought of his chances of winning. He thought that if it were her fighting, she might stand a better chance against Bujing that he would, but even if she had been the one to speak up, she couldn’t have been in his position – after all, thirteen was old enough to fight in an Agni Kai, but Azula wasn’t yet thirteen. She could have spoken without impunity – well, not that she ever would have been so foolish as to directly challenge a general in a war council.

Regrets suffused him as Azula tied his hair into a phoenix tail, sailing high above his shoulders as a sign of his honor and integrity. The balm she wove into it smelled of their mother – Zuko wasn’t sure which servant had supplied it, but he felt immensely grateful as the scent of it settled around him like a blanket. He wished he could hug her, feel her gentle hands grasping his, but as Azula’s roughened and smaller hand settled into his, he decided that he had a pretty good alternative right in front of him.

“Azula, you know that I love you, right?”

He said these words without the hesitation that might have plagued him in another world, in which he had never fallen from the roof. His eyes shone with sincerity as his little sister looked up at him with both disbelief and fond amusem*nt.

“Of course I do, Dum-Dum. And I love you, if it wasn’t obvious from the way that I’m helping you get ready instead of sitting in the imperial box next to grandfather,” she snarked back at him. Zuko smiled. Nothing quite like sheer, bone-deep sincerity to make Azula uncomfortable. She flashed him a quick smile, and then schooled her expression into one of neutrality. “Come on. It’s time,” she said, seconds before the first gong signifying to the court that it was time for the Agni Kai rang out.

As she helped him slip on the armbands, heavy and cold, and lay the drape over his shoulders, she grasped his shoulder briefly in a searing touch. “Don’t give up. Don’t let what happens in there change who you are. You are brave, and honorable, and worth ten of any of the generals in that war council who didn’t speak up against that cruelty being perpetuated in Agni’s name.” She paused and wouldn’t meet Zuko’s eyes as she swallowed hard. “I’ll always be here for you. I’ll see you on the other side,” she finished, and bowed deeply to him.

Zuko bowed back and watched silently as Azula retreated out of the preparation area and into the stands, the faint jingling of the bells she’d pinned into her hair around the topknot unfading despite their increased distance.

From now on, he was on his own.

--

Iroh paced wolfishly in the imperial box. His father had yet to arrive, and despite his best efforts, Iroh had been unable to persuade him into stopping this farce of a ritualistic duel. But Iroh still held hope that he could keep his nephew from being seriously injured in the face of an older, more experienced opponent, if only Azulon would listen.

“Father,” he finally said as Azulon walked into the box. The old man was stooped and slower than usual – had the last few days proven to be too much stress for him? But that did not bear contemplation, not when the potential ruination – or worse – of his nephew sat before them. “I know that Prince Zuko must face this challenge. He must face consequences for his thoughtless speech. This is an Agni Kai – a battle for honor and dignity.” When his father nodded, he trundled on. “But please, my Lord, do not allow General Bujing to take this most honored tradition and turn it into a farce. If Zuko wins, let it be done fairly; if he loses, let him be graceful in his defeat. Do not push this into a lesson which he shall never recover from.”

Azulon tilted his head, still silent. Iroh swallowed and went for the jugular. “If we are never – never able to retrieve my son, Zuko is the first in line for the throne. It would not do to have a Firelord who has been so maliciously marked by a betrayal of the sacred concepts of Agni to sit on the throne.”

Azulon looked at Iroh then, his eyes as sharp as ever. “You may be right,” he finally said. “Now, we shall see if Zuko is as adept at putting out fires as he is at igniting them.”

When Iroh turned to the ring where the Agni Kai was to take place, as the chatter of the crowd settled into a silent pallor, he could not find General Bujing. He looked and looked, but the man’s distinctive posture was not present. When he looked at his father, Azulon’s gaze was locked onto the far entry, opposite of Zuko’s knelt form directly in front of them. He followed his gaze – and then took a frantic double take as he realized something terrible.

Ozai was not with them.

As the doors opened, and his brother stepped into the ring, kneeling silently across from Zuko, back turned, Iroh felt his heart jump into his throat and sink into the floor all at once. And as Azula’s fast footsteps and jingling bells reached his ears, he reached for her, to embrace her – to hold their tiny family together as it fractured beyond repair in front of his very eyes.

Chapter 27

Chapter Text

Azula’s heart was beating frantically, like a rabbit-snake about to pounce. She had known this moment was coming since Vāyu’s sad grey eyes had stared down at her in the moment of her revelation - had likely known that the moment when their father would attempt to rid himself of damaged goods was approaching on silent but swift wings since the day that she watched her mother die.

As her father knelt behind Zuko’s unwitting back, she felt a deep pang of regret that she hadn’t warned him of exactly what was to come. But how could she have? If she’d told him, he’d only have overthought the situation. His best chance to – f*ck, his best chance to live was to fight back against their sire. She could only hope that he would take her words of not giving up literally and do his damndest not to let their father win.

Her uncle’s arms tightened around her as she remained in his embrace. It was unlike her at the worst of times to seek comfort in physical touch, but this… she needed someone to ground her. She could feel his anger and fear in the almost unnoticeable tremor of his hands, and only hoped that her anxieties weren’t visible on her face. The sharp gaze of her grandfather rested upon Zuko, but she had no doubt that Azulon was watching her and her uncle just as carefully.

But did he watch for disloyalty, she wondered, or did he watch for signs of weakness? And which was the right emotion to show him? In her mind’s eye, a persistent flame on a single candle guttered as she pressed it down, and Azulon’s face tightened behind it, displeasure clear. She had never forgotten the lessons she’d learned there – that her grandfather was harder to please than anyone she’d ever known, and that what she expected to please him rarely did.

She didn’t know – couldn’t know – but she had to do something.

She pulled away just slightly from Iroh, turning to face her grandfather. “Firelord Azulon, before this Agni Kai begins, I have but one question. Is this Agni Kai is following traditional rules, as you have returned to after Firelord Sozin’s rule?” When he cast a gimlet eye on her, she swallowed convulsively and continued. “Is it that the first burn declares the victor?”

Her grandfather hummed, tilting his head consideringly. Iroh cleared his throat, seeming to remember his promise to Azula to do what he could. “Your reign has been marked by military might and supreme kindness to the people to whom you are bringing the light of Agni. Let this not be a moment where that light dims.”

The sun reached the point at which it brushed the rim of the arena, and a low bell rang out. It was time, finally, for this farce of an honor duel to begin.

With a look, the Firelord silenced the whispers in the arena. With the minimal amount of ceremony that was acceptable, he announced that the Agni Kai would be fought ‘with the rules of the ancients: to the first burn.’ Azula felt a bubble of fear pop within her, until she saw the tightening of her father’s shoulders. Ah.

A fixed point, Agni had called it. It seemed that her father would not be willing to accept only to the first burn – and would her grandfather declare him in the wrong if that first burn was one of disfiguring intent, or worse?

A gong, ominous in tone, and as one, the opponents rose. Zuko’s ceremonial drape slid from his shoulders in a sinuous wave, the silk pooling on the ground as Agni cast his final rays over the rim of the caldera.

They turned to face one another, hands raised in the traditional beginning stance, and Azula could pinpoint the exact moment at which her brother realized he was to face off against an enemy he could not hope to beat. She had a flash of intuition, of small thankfulness, that this was a world in which she and Zuko knew that their father had never had their best interests at heart, only his own; that Zuko would even be willing to consider fighting Ozai in this arena.

Ozai began to step forward, and Zuko’s stance faltered. One could almost see the gears turning in his head – should he begin fighting, or should he attempt to honor his father and refuse to fight?

“I cannot fight this battle while retaining my honor,” he began, and Azula felt her lips twist. This was not the route she would have picked to victory, but… he was, as always, her brother, loyal to a fault and a traditionalist in the most honest sense of the word. “The tenants of our great nation instruct us to honor our parents and grandparents, and that we never raise our hands or voices against them. To fight my own father would be tantamount to betrayal.” He took a deep breath. “When I spoke against General Bujing, I spoke not against my own father, but what I understood was a General. While I understand that I spoke out of turn, I did not betray Agni’s directive then, and I will not do so now.” He knelt in seiza and then forward into a kowtow – facing Azulon, leaving Ozai – looking more enraged than ever – facing his left side. “I ask for this honorable victory to go to my father, or for the opportunity to fight this Agni Kai against the one who gave the challenge.”

“I do not accept,” Ozai called out, and Azula felt the snap of electricity in the air around her. She could reach out and direct it exactly where it needed to go, she knew in that moment, but – well, patricide never was the easy path to the throne, was it? The last thing she wanted to do was to start a civil war.

(After all, armies didn’t willingly follow preteens.)

All eyes in the arena turned to the Firelord, save for Azula’s – she could not tear hers away from the incandescent anger on Ozai’s face.

Azulon stayed silent for a moment, letting the moment – and the tension – stretch into something almost unbearable. Finally, he spoke. “Prince Zuko, I will give you leave to engage in this Agni Kai, not as a son against his father, but as two equals in the war room. After all, that is how this challenge came about.”

Azula’s brain tripped over his wording – as equals, Zuko would not be expected to allow his father to cause him undue harm, but as equals, any mercy that their father should have shown to his son was banished. She was not sure if it was a kindness or a cruelty on Azulon’s part that he had phrased it so.

Zuko’s shoulders tensed, and he rose from his kneel, resuming his stance after bowing to the Firelord.

And with that, the battle began.

**************

Ozai struck first, sending jabs of flame directly at Zuko’s feet. He was trying to break Zuko’s root, that much was obvious.

Azula was gratified to see Zuko effortlessly transition into a more fluid form – one that they had been working on since she’d first discovered the waterbending scrolls and started to adapt their forms into her own bending. And this, she thought with a vicious smirk, was not a form that either of them had shown to any of their tutors, let alone their father – leaving him unprepared for when Zuko redirected the next long stream of fire into a boomerang-like motion, arcing around his body and behind to be thrown back at Ozai in one fluid motion.

Azula and Zuko could not hope to produce flame as strong or as steady as a true master such as Ozai, but sometimes, all you had to do was take advantage of the tools that your enemy handed you. The return throw was weaker than it had been when Ozai had produced it, but Zuko’s breath control was steady enough to maintain a still-blistering heat into Ozai’s face. It was obvious – to Azula, anyway – that Ozai’s refusal of Zuko’s surrender, of their father’s desecration of what was supposed to be an honor duel, a holy thing, had broken Zuko in some way that she feared could not be repaired. He was angry, in a way she rarely remembered seeing him angry, but it was making him more focused rather than the scattered it had in their youth.

Must be something Master Piandao taught him, she mused. After all, I don’t get angry. A whiffle of breeze threw her bangs away from her face – she took it as the minor reprimand that it was likely intended to be and redoubled her observations onto the scene before her.

She wondered if Zuko would forgive their grandfather for the role he had played in this Agni Kai, as horrific as something out of a tragedy play srcoll that they’d stolen from their mother’s room as children. She thought that might have to do with Zuko’s rage – after all, neither of them had held much lost love for their absentee father after his disrespect to Ursa’s memory, so this final betrayal shouldn’t have been as much of a tipping point as it seemed to be.

As she pondered this, she absorbed the match, watching unblinkingly and leaning forward over the railing of the royal box as Ozai sliced through the whip of flames his son had sent his way. While he was pressing the flames away from his face – Good aim, Zuko, she thought fervently – Zuko was already leaping into the air and sending two sequential blasts of fire towards his father’s feet. A nontraditional firebending method, of course, but royal firebenders were supposed to be innovative, were they not?

Iroh’s knuckles were white on the edge of the box next to hers, she noticed idly as Ozai sidestepped the fireballs. As Ozai returned the volley with several daggers of flame – aimed at vital points, she saw – she felt Iroh’s grip creak even tighter. Blindly, she grasped his hand, and felt some of the tension leak from his joints as he loosened his hold on the wall and held his hand over hers.

Protection, she thought. Protection was something Zuko critically needed, but something that neither of them had received since Iroh and Lu Ten had left, except through their own designs. She knew that she could provide protection against the ultimate offense, one that she would not allow to happen – the death of her brother. But that protection would mean killing their father, and the consequences that would follow – well, she would be lucky to escape with her own head.

(If anyone were to have asked Lady Ty Lee what she saw on that day at the Agni Kai, they wouldn’t have believed her. A rainbow crown of light had suffused Azula, and Zuko’s aura flashed between his regular, sedate gold and a black, cracked with pulsing veins of red, mirrored in Azula’s twin gold aura pierced through with veins of blue. And if those flashes of blue were in time with all of Azula’s – and Iroh’s, Ty Lee thought, but it was hard to tell – hair standing on end, well. Who would ask someone as inconsequential as one of the seven daughters of Lady Ty?)

(Ty Lee was half-convinced she saw a figure with its hand on Azula’s shoulder with a blue star on its forehead, but it was so mutable and – no, that just had to be a figment of her imagination.)

Zuko hit the ground in a manner that was in no way becoming to a prince but recovered valiantly after the daggers passed without harm over his head. As he launched himself out of his pronated position, Ozai advanced to closer range – close enough that when he began punching gales of fire towards Zuko’s head, all that Zuko could possibly do was split it down the sides and throw it to the ground. His temperature control was astounding, she thought, as the flames nearest to his body lost their deadly white glow and tempered to orange, but no one could stand under such an onslaught forever. After four such attacks, Zuko stumbled, and this was enough for Ozai to take advantage.

Ozai pressed forward, throwing a torrent of flame to Zuko’s feet, taking advantage of his lack of balance. Zuko fell then, and Azula felt her heart catch in her throat. If Ozai were to attack Zuko while he was down, it could be easy for a first burn to be the last one that Zuko would ever face. A small space, high heat – why, Ozai could claim it was an accident. Iroh’s hand flexed atop hers, then relaxed – trying not to hurt her, she wondered. If only the same could be said for their father.

Zuko stared up at their father as Ozai grinned, an unhinged thing, and pushed another torrent towards his son’s chest. Mistake, she thought, as Zuko pulled off a move that she thought he must have learned under Ty Lee’s tutelage – he turned his back to their father, pushing up on his hands and spinning his legs, whipping the flame to nothing as he made a full rotation and slid into a split, using his forward leg to knock their father’s foot from under him. As Ozai fell backwards, his root entirely broken, Zuko drew himself up and immediately began an onslaught the likes of which any soldier could be proud.

Flames erupted from Zuko’s feet as he slid towards their father, each hastily dispelled or barely avoided. Azula saw that Zuko was aiming for the feet – while their father was a traditionalist in terms of how he bent, preferring the hands and occasionally mouth for wielding fire, Zuko was more of a free spirit. He yanked flame into existence using nothing more than sheer spite and force of will as he tossed a sidelong fireball at Ozai at the same time that he swept another arc of flame from his foot, Ozai trying to avoid both and –

Oh, Agni. While Ozai had dodged both of the first two attacks, he had not anticipated Zuko’s last, desperate ploy – drawing back the flame that was at Ozai’s feet and whirling it around, turning a large swath of flames into a concentrated stream aimed directly at Ozai’s inner thigh.

She heard their father cry out, and her heart stopped. She and Iroh whirled to look at the Fire Lord, eyes wild and desperate. She knew better than to say anything, but begged Agni to help her grandfather see that the fight was over, according to the rules he himself had set.

As her grandfather’s eyes narrowed and he opened his mouth, Ozai roared and reached for Zuko, who, too, was looking to the Fire Lord.

The fight was over, she thought, realizing in that moment that this particular battle was anything but over. Her father’s hands erupted into flame as his left grasped Zuko’s upper arm and his right tore at Zuko’s face. Zuko screamed and tried to dodge, but only succeeded in having the flames raze the left side of his face, saving the right from the same fate.

**************

For once, the only thing that Azula could hear in her head was her own voice. Screaming, endlessly, wordlessly, full of the rage and anger that she had thought she’d buried long ago, before those emotions slipped away and instinct took over. The sparks in the air multiplied, and frissons of energy danced between her fingers. She was sliding to take the position she knew would kill her father before she understood what was happening, and was only stopped by Iroh’s hand on hers, suddenly grasping not to reassure but to restrain.

(Iroh could feel the shift in the air around Azula and felt her slide. The Fire Lord’s eyes were on the gory scene before them, more fitting for a battlefield than an honor duel, but patricide… that would attract his full attention, and that would spell Azula’s doom.)

(His nephew was already possibly facing the same fate. He would not allow his niece to accompany him to the Spirit World. Not yet. Not before him.)

“Stop!” Azulon bellowed, his voice piercing through the screams and hubbub that had filled the stadium at the heretofore unseen-in-Caldera display of cruelty. He inhaled suddenly and Ozai’s flames went out with a sputter, Zuko’s sobs inhuman and pained. Ozai dropped Zuko to the ground, where he remained huddled, unmoving save for tremors that ran through his body, and turned to face his father.

The gash in Ozai’s thigh was a small thing, but clearly-defined, a bubbling wound that Azula coldly hoped would fester and ooze for the rest of his life. It was clear to all who had watched that the first burn had gone to Zuko, not Ozai – but he had not respected the rules of one of their most ancient traditions.

“This Agni Kai is over!” Azulon declared, and the stadium held its breath as one. “The victor is clearly Prince Zuko, for obtaining the first burn!”

At his words, medics swept onto the floor of the stadium towards their young prince. They took him, swiftly, into the bowels of the stadium, to the infirmary, Azula was sure. But she could not leave the royal box yet to find her brother – no, she had to see what the Fire Lord would do.

Fire Lord Azulon was emitting waves of heat that made the air around him shimmer in a haze. With every breath from his nose, a gust of flame billowed forth. “You have broken Agni’s mandate, Prince Ozai! You have flagrantly ignored the rules put forth of the Agni Kai in favor of retaliation and have dishonored yourself and your role as prince!”

Ozai looked to be the most unsettling cross between enraged and bored, setting Azula’s teeth on edge. He raised an eyebrow at Azulon, and replied, “I must admit, I didn’t even feel any burns until after I’d laid hands on him, as utterly weak as they were. And Fire Lord Azulon, is it not your duty to call the victor after the burn lands? If you saw the burn when I did not feel it, why did you not immediately call for the Agni Kai’s end? Did you, in fact, want said weakness to be burned out of succession?”

Azulon’s eyes went wide with rage, and he stepped forward, leaning towards his youngest son. “You have disgraced the royal line with your insubordination, Prince Ozai. You will learn penance and humility as the leader of the 42nd Infantry Division, leading them into battle – not from behind the lines, but in front of them. You shall recall how even the weakest of flames can begin an inferno that rages out of the control of even the most apt of firebenders, as how my anger for you now builds to a crescendo. You will be ensconced until the morning, and you will leave at first light.” The Fire Lord paused and looked away from his son, who now seethed with barely contained venom. “This Agni Kai is over! Take word to those who have not witnessed it that Prince Zuko was the victor of this duel, and that Prince Ozai goes to lead the battle against the savage Earth King, who stole your Crown Prince away! Begone!”

With that, he swept away from the royal box, Iroh tugging Azula in his wake. She craned her neck to see several firebending guards usher Ozai into a cloister.

Iroh called forward to his father. “Fire Lord Azulon, do you believe that Prince Ozai will go willingly to his banishment?”

“His will has nothing to do with it – it is my will that governs, him and this country, this empire that we have built, this dynasty, that he apparently seeks to destroy! He shall be kept in irons and a muzzle if need be, all the way to the front of the battle, if he does not go willingly, or even blocked – if I must seek out Lady Ty’s students to keep him blocked, I will.” Every few words, a tongue of fire would leave Azulon’s mouth, and Azula watched in fascination as those flames burned bluer with every lick. “He has abandoned all duty he had to his children and to his nation after such a shameful display as that. Agni would not forgive me if I were not to punish him for his flouting of His rules.”

(At the Fire Lord’s words and nod to an advisor, Lady Ty was retrieved and sent to Ozai, who already was restrained in a rudimentarily hammered muzzle and set of hand irons. Several guards nursed small burns as she clinically blocked all chi pathways in Prince Ozai’s body – and delivered one extra-hard block to the solar plexus, for good measure.)

Azulon glanced over his shoulder to make eye contact with his son and paused, realizing that Azula – wordless, face drained of blood and eyes that had seen too much for such a young age – was standing with her small hand clasped in Iroh’s. Her hair had lost its usual gloss and was frizzy, and her pupils engulfed all but the thinnest ring of gold in her irises. The Fire Lord took a deep breath and almost seemed to deflate before their eyes, as if all of his years had suddenly settled onto his shoulders at once. “Come,” he beckoned Azula, kneeling.

Azula glanced up at Iroh, who looked into her eyes and squeezed her hand before releasing it, his face revealing nothing. She stepped forward, her hands worrying at each other and not breaking eye contact with her grandfather. As his hands reached to separate hers, she flinched – a small, involuntary movement, but one that did not go unnoticed by Azulon’s still-flinty eyes.

His long moustache twitched as the edges of his mouth tipped down.

(So this is what my son’s insubordination has cost us, Azulon thought. Our family is more broken now than ever before, and the best hope our nation has for legacy is afraid of kindness for the poison that may lie underneath.)

“We shall see to it that Prince Zuko is given the best of care, and that Prince Ozai is not able to continue on whatever ill begotten path he has decided upon. Ozai shall not return to Caldera until he has seen the error of his ways and has truly repented. On this, you have my word.”

Azula stared at her grandfather, the words of Agni rushing through her head. “Why did you hesitate to end the Agni Kai?” she asked, the words tumbling forth from her mouth before she could stop them. After they entered the air, she froze, not even drawing breath.

Azulon shut his eyes, then, but not before she saw the pain within. “For I am an old fool,” he finally said after a lengthy pause. “I found your brother’s surrender to be weak and thought, for just a moment, that the loss of this Agni Kai would allow a valuable lesson to be taught. Compromise, surrender, capitulation; all of these things seem easy and painless in textbooks and theory, but sometimes, overwhelming force is the only way for victory to be had.” He opened his eyes, and looked down, away from Azula’s face, hands tightening almost imperceptibly on hers. “Not ending the Agni Kai then was disgraceful to Agni in its own way. I did not abide by the rules He has set forward to us in favor of my own mechanisms, and my son twisted my moment of weakness to suit his own purposes. I suspect I shall spend the rest of my life paying penance to Agni for this same weakness.”

Azula let her grandfather hold her hands for a moment longer, before pulling back and taking a step away. He sighed, the lines on his face showing every worry and pain he’d ever held, as he studied her neutral expression – studied and perfect, just as he’d always wanted her to be. “Iroh, please take Azula to her chambers. The medics will be seeing to Zuko’s wounds, and he won’t be sensible enough for a visit – and what they will be doing is not something that a child should see.”

Azula thought back to all of the things that children should not see that she had seen, and wondered who made those decisions. She would be seeing her brother that day, she thought, bowing to the Fire Lord as he stood in tandem with her uncle, no matter what she was told. She would be there when he woke up – as he had been for her.

Chapter 28

Chapter Text

Iroh had taken Azula to her chambers without a word of protest. Iroh had, coincidentally, absolutely not posted a guard outside of Azula’s chambers, as his father doubtlessly intended, and he did not, either by a chance of fate or purposeful ignorance, notice when his niece snuck past his balcony, tracing the seams of stones that were too shallow to support the weight of anyone heavier than a skinny teenager.

She never was as good as her brother was at stealth. Her muttered curses as her foot slipped almost made Iroh wish he could help her inside, his heart jumping into his throat as he heard her stab something metallic into the soft seam of grout between metamorphic stone.

Or at least give her better shoes than the silk slippers that were all too common in the pampered reaches of Caldera. She’d asked for some the last time he’d sent them gifts, but he’d been too busy in the time since to have some made.

The regrets of an old fool, he thought, listening intently as his niece continued to make her way down the wall, doggedly moving towards her brother’s sickbed.

--

Ozai was infuriated. The old bastard had managed to turn what should have been his victory into something meant to shame him. And he hadn’t even had the nerve to tell Ozai the specifics of his punishment himself, rather leaving that duty one of his more physically intimidating war advisors, standing directly in front of Prince Ozai – first of his name, second in line to the Fire Throne, herald of a new era of glory for Agni – as he stewed, trapped with no chi flow to broil the man’s skin from his bones.

He was to be banished, his father had decreed, for his disgrace against Agni, and his chi was to remain blocked until he reached the warfront. From there, he would be closely monitored, and was not to be allowed to shirk his duties – he would lead the troops in battle in every fight, until Ba Sing Se was taken.

Ozai knew that he could easily escape once there, but to what end? While he had been gathering support from the younger, more power-hungry nobles, clawing desperately at the teat of power and honeyed words he dripped into their mouths, he didn’t have nearly enough to lead a coup that had the slightest hope of success. His brother was still the Crown Prince, with a son of his own - for now, he thought viciously, smiling with a wolf-bat’s teeth behind his muzzle. Even if their father was to pass, he would have to beat a war hero with the support of the nation.

While Ozai had no particular attachment to the fools that wouldn’t support his claim over his brother, and would welcome their deaths with welcoming, gleeful arms, he also understood that the decimation of one’s populace following a civil war when one was not the preferred candidate of the people one would rule would inevitably lead to revolution, and, at worst, his death. At best, it would mean that he would never be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors. So he would bide his time.

Yes, that was it. He would stoke insurrection from the warfront, the words trickling back and seeping upwards poisoning the minds of those who would be loyal to Iroh. By the time he would return – triumphant over Ba Sing Se, his victory complete, honor restored and a war hero of his own right – the people would be clamoring for his ascension to the throne. Iroh and Azulon would be nothing more than fat, lazy overlords, pressing forward for their own sake and riches.

He could make this work. His son would have to come with him, of course – not Zuko, the Agni Kai had shown Ozai that he had not been strict enough with the boy, had left him to be coddled – and he would not make the same mistake twice. Sozurai would be separated from his mother, who would only visit to the front for… conjugal visits. After all, Ozai would still need to secure his line. Who was to say what kind of horrible, tragic accidents would happen to those before Sozurai? It was just another contingency plan, surely.

As Ozai glared at the advisor’s retreating back, and as another faceless chi blocker ensured that the steam coming from his muzzle regressed to nothing more than impotent rage, his plan bubbled along, stewing, coming together into something… transcendent.

--

Mai was going to kill Azula for dulling the small kunai that Azula had ‘borrowed’ (she was going to give them back, eventually, probably) by using them to clamber across the outside face of the palace. Well, that is, if she didn’t kill Azula for letting Zuko get burned in the first place.

If Azula didn’t beat Mai to it, anyway.

Azula took only a moment to mourn the previously-well-honed edges of the blades, now chipped and dull, before slipping them into the specifically-sewn pockets within her sash and smoothing her hair down, hand flitting from her bangs to the topknot and back of her head in a pattern that Zuko would have recognized as his own.

(Nervous tic, a voice that sounded suspiciously like her father’s whispered in her head. A sign of weakness.)

(Shut up.)

While she had been perched on the threshold of the window to the infirmary for several minutes now, she had yet to look in the direction of the only occupied bed. She knew what she would find – her brother, burned by their father– but she couldn’t bring herself to see how deeply she’d failed.

She had let her brother down. All of the training in the world would have come to nothing in the face of an opponent who was anything but honorable, when her brother lived by an unbreakable sense that had never once wavered.

Ozai always would have found a way to impart whatever punishment he deemed fit to his children.

Vāyu had said that it was a possibility, that it wasn’t certain. But Azula wasn’t sure if there could have been anything she could do to stop it before it happened.

Well. She could have hit Ozai with a bolt of lightning and ended it there. But how would she carry out Agni’s bidding – restoring balance to the world – without her head?

No. If there had been a path, the time to take it was past, and she had been too young and too stupid to see it.

(A gentle breeze lifted her bangs briefly, like her mother’s touch smoothing her hair away from her forehead.)

(Stop it, she thought viciously, not wanting to be soothed, Great Spirits or not.)

Finally, her eyes darted to Zuko’s still form, taking in the cup of elixir on the table beside him, tinged purple – sleeping draught, with an analgesic mixed in. Good, she thought, he deserved some peace… the next few months were certain to be anything but.

The healers had covered Zuko’s right arm in thick bandaging and slightly elevated, and the smell of medicinal salve stung Azula’s nostrils, barely stronger than the smell of charred flesh that lingered despite the initial debridement protocol would have dictated they conducted. Her eyes traced the place where the golden cuff would have rested above the bicep, where she was sure it had continued to conduct heat long after Ozai had dropped her brother unceremoniously to the arena floor.

She could sense it, she realized, the pulsing heat emanating from Zuko’s arm. It was persistent, and more deeply-rooted than most heats she felt – and the heat was spreading across his arm, injuring yet more flesh as she hovered, torn in indecision.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at his face. The image of her father’s blazing hand reaching for the center of his son’s face – trying to murder him, in cold blood, with no sense of honor, as a revenge for besting him in ceremonial combat – haunted her, and she dreaded what she might find on her brother’s face. The result of Ozai’s cruelty, branded on a boy no more deserving of it than the Air Nomads had been of genocide at the hands of those they had trusted and called friends. A mark that would last forever.

Steeling herself, she turned her gaze to Zuko’s face and stifled a horrified gasp. Despite the quick work the healers had made of Zuko’s arm, it was obvious that they were at a loss as to how to approach the burn that now covered the left side of her brother’s face. Though Zuko had dodged his father, Ozai’s grip had been unrelenting once it had found purchase on his eldest’s face, and the heat from his palm had rendered the skin alternately white and waxy and blackened.

When she hovered her palm above his face (don’t think about how their father held Zuko’s face in a death grip, don’t think about it, don’t think–), she could feel that the white, waxy skin was cool – far cooler than it should be, she thought; like the blood had been evaporated away from the site.

Not for the first time in her life, she desperately wished she had been born with the powers of a waterbender, if only to be able to heal the grievous wounds that her father inflicted upon the people that she loved. Agni knows she’d give anything to have a healer that could actually do something for a burn this horrible, instead of just pasting poultice after poultice over it.

She’d suffered enough burns in her life to know how horrible the healing process could be.

Katah would be able to fix this, a tiny voice murmured in her head. Maybe not yet, but eventually. With training.

Training she doesn’t have, Azula thought bitterly. Though the raids on the Southern Water Tribe had been discontinued for almost a decade, this was because there had been no murmurs of waterbenders in the Southern Water Tribe. No traders returned with tales of fantastical ice sculptures, or floes of ice moving against the apparent currents, or outlandishly large takes of fish or furs or feathers from the fauna of the Pole. All seemed quiet, but Azula knew – at least one waterbender remained in the South Pole, and she suspected there were more, only as secreted away as Katah was. The tribes at the Poles were bound by blood and tears, and she imagined they guarded the secrets of those most vulnerable most jealously.

Katah’s chances of becoming a good waterbender remained small at the South Pole, with no instructional scrolls (burned, stolen, lost) and no mentors to call her own; to achieve the mastery required of the Avatar – well.

A rush of cool air pressed though the room. Azula glanced back towards the window, expecting to see the transient figure of Vāyu, and was surprised when they weren’t there.

A burble drew her eyes to the figure at the head of her brother’s sickbed. Little Dragon, La said, her dark, turtle seal eyes shining with more sadness than Azula had thought she was capable of. You know I cannot repair him, as I could not heal your mother.

“I didn’t ask you to,” Azula hissed, unable to keep the anger from her voice. “I know your limitations now. I’m not a damned child anymore.”

(Not as much of a fool as you once were, said her father’s voice in her head.)

I know, La sighed. Your prayers were once as hot as the boiling seas, warmed by lava and Agni’s light, but lately, they have been… dimmed.

“Is that all your care about? The strength of my devotion to you? I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me. I’ve kept the raiders away from the Avatar, I’ve diverted and delayed as much as I can. I’ve gone on spirit journeys, for Agni’s sake. I didn’t even know that was possible without reaching enlightenment! I’ve done the impossible!”

No, Azula, La said. Despite it all, I’ve come to care for you, over your small mortal lifetime. And, because of your love for him, your silly, honor-bound brother.

This brought Azula up short. Care was more… human than Azula had known La could be. Her face must have conveyed this, as La sniffed, not without a bit of petulance, I do nurture and care for that which is under my protection when the situation calls for it, Little Dragon.

A small flick of water hit Azula’s cheek, and she felt much of her anger at the spirit drain away.

I cannot heal him, La said again, but I can give you a boon.

A boon was an uncommon gift for any great spirit to bestow, even upon their own people. For La to grant her, a firebender, such a thing… it was unheard of.

(Azula would know. She’d read every bit of lore she could get her hands on about La after her mother had died.)

La looked down at Zuko, terrifyingly still and already beginning to burn with fever. In two days, the new moon will leave the shore dark. Go to the sea to the east of the caldera and go alone. There, will you find the sea beating the shore, and a jetty covered in seafoam. At the end of the jetty, there will be a shell – take this, and fill it with the foam around you. Do this until it overflows, and then place a single piece of kelp within the shell’s mouth. Return then and use this as a salve for your brother. It will reduce fever and its effects upon his healing, though it will not rid him of the consequences of your father’s actions entirely.

The power of prophecy was a strong one in La’s susurrant tones, and the smell of brine was strong in Azula’s nose. She met La’s dark, ocean-deep eyes, and fought not to be swept away with her power. If I had a healer to send to you, I would, she said, but it is not safe to call any of my people to your side. Your grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s edicts dictate that they would die if they were to reveal themselves. So they shall stay safe, for now. One day, I hope that they will be able to return to dance under the light of the moon without fear, outside of the farthest ends of the world.

And then, between one blink and the next, La was gone.