WARNING: Rated mature for dark themes, strong language, graphic violence, drug abuse, and sexual content. This includes smut and non-con. Basically, this is going to be a really dark story, so read at your own discretion.
A/N: This chapter is completely revised.
Chapter 1 – Monotony
97 AG, Lakhnau
Two hulking, vermillion sentinels stand as the true arbiters of the gatekeeper's powers. Bended from blood sandstone towering one hundred feet above the Si Wong Desert by only the most precise and inspiring hands, the Great Gate looms over its blossoming orchids, the budding plants, and screeching insects that attempt to encroach on its domain – strong stone walls branching out from each pillar to encase the district in a cocoon. The width of space that separates the vermilion pillars offers an almost endearing, airy comfort, but the pillars themselves are so authoritarian in their constitution that even men – or the insects? – consider the Great Gate the elementally weathered god of the Red Desert. If the Great Gate is the god of the Red Desert, then, merely befitting her grandiose columns, arabesque inlays, and inner ring perch, the House of Sol is his consort – or rather, he is hers. The House of Sol surveys her district, musing from her sandy perch the merits of each flower – rose, lily, cherry blossom – and each insect, no matter how filthy or parasitic, and, seemingly, without prejudice – for what is a god if she is not impartial? Sometimes, however, she finds herself tolerating her consort's presence, dreaming in vivid red hues what a sight it would be to see that obstruction's decline into tiny, crisp vermillion pebbles crowding a gatekeeper's feet.
Katara, Lakhnau's silver-tongued enchantress, fosters these musings as she reclines on the window sill of her apartment. The House won't be receiving clients today, so she allows a bare leg beyond the sill – balancing a loosely bound leather book on her thigh. Her delicate wrist guides the ink as she transcribes antiquated lines of poetry given to her by her premier accompanist, Tansen, who described it as, "Something you might recall." Her mother tongue, Iñamaq, sung to her from its confines of dry, flaky ink – speaking of walls of iridescent ice and a lake where the primordial spirits danced in perpetuity. The words felt unfamiliar though, as if she might only recognize them in the wavering cadence of a child's voice or a mother's cries.
"Darya Jaan!" A loud voice beckons from the doorway, "the Begum wants you in the gardens." The handmaiden pushes at the airy fabric hanging from her mistress' doorframe, slipping into the quarters with an air of ownership.
"You're worse than a manager!" Katara shrieks, grasping onto the window ledge as the book plummets to the floor. "Next time, if you could lightly rap on the wall that'd be fantastic. And y'know, I really do prefer Katara."
The handmaiden shrugs her shoulders, motioning towards the gardens with a slight tip of her head. "The Begum is waiting for you, Darya Jaan," she bites, "And anytime you're late, she thinks I took too long to deliver the damn message. So, when you start arriving promptly, I'll start calling you Katara." Her expression is smug, with an upturned brow and bored, dark eyes. Lakhnau had not birthed the handmaiden, Song, onto her trembling cobblestones soaked through with blood, semen, and afterbirth. Song's life had it's inception in the rice stalks of her western farming village, where her father bucked and spilled his seed into a woman he'd come to call lover, wife, and mother. That is, until the day a Fire Nation soldier broke his jaw and forced him aboard a ship bound for the colonies.
"We're going to have to get rid of that country, backwoods mouth of yours. This is a house of refinement, my dear," Katara laughs, gathering her books into her arms and draping a saffron sari about her frame – its unblemished white him garnished with fine gold tracery. A frail smile twitches at the corner of Song's mouth, and she considers that this laughter (along with her vice) must be her medicine. Her mistress is brown and beautiful with a glare only the sun could match, but Song traces the black tips of her fingers and the mask of serenity on her face and knows that suns die as well.
Song had first met Katara outside the vermillion desert almost a month ago. She stood at the back of a manager, looming over a his shoulder as he processed Song's residential permit. He called her Darya Jaan in between laughter. Katara had referred to him as Abbas, and they spoke in amicable taunts and ridicules, a banter that Abbas had clearly relished – the tell-tale signs of a raised, crinkled brow and a curled lip on his pointed features had amused Song. Upon procuring Song's identification from her purveyor – a bushy-eyed man with a penchant for narcissism and irregular bathing – stamped the permit with the sigil of the Flower District. Naturally, the District had been named by a confederation of lecherous men, so prostitutes, philosophers, and like often referred to it as the Red Desert as a form of resistance. The sigil of the District was a red cherry blossom not by accident, with each blossom stylized as a three-pronged flame - the seal of the Red Empire.
"How much do you want for the girl, sayyd?" Katara had piped up, plucking Song's permit from the purveyor's fingers. Confused by Katara's apparent disregard for social order, regarded Katara briefly before inquiring from Abbas where he could find a jaan of the House of Sol. I must sell this plain sow, he said with a rough air and a quiver of chin whiskers. Katara grinned. She said, "You are looking for a jaan, hm? Look no further. How much do you want for this plain sow?" The final word sprouted from her lips with the unhurried nature of molasses and the purveyor looked at her with unmasked reproach.
He sputtered, "Two-hundred silver pieces, jaan! I will take no less." The gray tufts of chin hair Katara was certain he'd call a beard trembled.
Katara clucked her tongue, "No, no, no! I pay no more than one-hundred silver pieces for a sow, sayyd." She arose from behind Abbas and strewn ninety silver pieces across the table, lifting a perfect brow in challenge. Song heard the enchantress' jest, the jingle of the coins – or was it her ghungroos? – and raised her gaze to the brush of her bangs. Katara's elegant hand was perched on her hip, the tip of her thumb brushing against the skin of her bare midriff. Her body leaned with the regality of queens, the eroticy of whores, and of women drawing water from wells. Hers was the everywoman of the three remaining nations, and the enchantress' sooty fingertips sang of their pain.
"You said one-hundred silver pieces, jaan…" His shrouded eyes counted the coins as two unruly gray bushels conjoined at the knot in his forehead, "This is only ninety – you must have miscounted." It was more of an assertion than an acknowledgment of a mistake.
"I didn't miscount, sayyd," Katara said, "I thought better of it."
By Lakhnau standards, Song was little more than a country bumpkin – straw hat and ruddy complexion in tow – and the plainness of her prior life was unacquainted with this brand of rapport. She had been used to paddy fields and pungent salves; to a plain man whose words held no edge and whose hands were worn to the crease with iron and life, and a woman whose skin hung from her bones with age and maternity. As Song stood listening to the mocking intonations of her new master and the light jingle of bartering, plainness appeared a novelty. Only the naked meanness of her purveyor snarled with familiarity. "Here! Take your sow!" he barked as he wrenched Song forward by her wrist before clawing the coin into a cupped hand. He mumbled something incoherent about Lakhnau and thieves, and then trudged off in a huff of quivering gray whiskers. "May her milk be sour, jaan!" he roared.
"Lovely parting gift," Katara waved to the purveyor's back, but her new charge had interests so separate from the fat man swaddled in blue she didn't bother to bid him goodbye. Song's interests laid with the blue-eyed enchantress who paid for her as one might a cow, yet treated her more human than anyone had since that red morning in Taebaek. "Come along," Katara called to Song, "We live at the House of Sol, where you'll develop a distaste for men and an addiction to opium. Actually, the opium will come later, but the point remains. Abbas, hassalal-a."
Song, fumbling with her belongings in the heat of pursuit, silently condemned Abbas' robust laughter as the vermillion gate receded into the distance. His affection for her master was unconcealed, and she found his candor impolite and, much to her hilarity, pitiful. "Darya Jaan, that Abbas man is too forward, don't you think?" she inquired.
"Abbas isn't a shy man, but he respects my profession and my discretion. He'll grow on you. Just wait 'till he extends your permit by a couple of hours – then, you might even love the man." She smiled. "You have other questions though. Am I right?"
Song made no remark. She cast her eyes to the ground and studied the flecks of dust splattering her bare feet, thinking of Taebaek. "The House of Sol," Katara began, "is, what I like to refer to as a finishing school for whores. We recite poetry and dance for patrons, fuck patrons, and cultivate an intellect to ensnare and unwit our patrons. But don't worry. We fuck less than we sing, and we sing often." She beckoned Song to walk beside her, placing a hand in the small of Song's back. "I apologize for being crass. I don't really have a head for pleasantries in the daylight hours – with having to be so pleasant in the dark."
Song nodded, having listened more to Katara's voice than her words. The Enchantress spoke Irfali, the mother tongue of Lakhnau, with ease, but another language with a musical cadence and a contemplative, soft tone lied beneath her words. "I'm Song," Song whispered and, then louder, "In Taebaek, I worked with my family in the rice fields and at the local apothecary – my mother took to medicine after my father was taken by the soldiers. I make – made medicinal salves. I am, of course, willing to assist you in any way I know how."
"You choose your words very carefully," Katara said, "but, do you think you could be like me?" Katara secures her sari with a flick of her dark fingertips, stained from mehndi and habitual opium use. Song's grandmother had hands like hers, slender and stained, from when she would retreat to her room in those quiet hours and take up her pipe. The old woman would emerge with a cloudy stare and a drunken smile, floating through the house before settling into the position she'd assume for the next hour or so.
"Darya Jaan, I would never imagine to be anyone other than myself. The only service I'm in the habit of providing is of the medicinal sort."
A smile tugged at the corners of Katara's mouth and her ears stung with envy. If only she had been so bold at sixteen; she might have gutted the Admiral with the same jagged knife she nightly uses to dispose of men in her dreams. But no, impossible, she considers. She was crystalline, a shell of a girl with the body and the legacy of a million women. Song is flesh, bones, and blood, and the toughness of her speech sings of her strength. "Then," she began, "I will convince the Begum your talents lie elsewhere. But a word of caution, Song: hold your tongue around the Begum– she sneers at young, cheeky girls like you." Envy hangs off her final word as the vermillion gate recedes into the golden blur of the Red Desert.
Where, as though sanity were dependent on life's monotony, whores kicked up their feet in sandy streets and quick fucks passed like coins between hands. They threw water across their doorsteps, nuzzled their young, and ground their meat with loud and brilliant spices until the smell permeated their hair, skin, and clothes. The sun sunk below the horizon, and the whores coaxed the hungry mouths of new, ill-begotten infants from their teats and into the soft, fleshy arms of an old prostitute. Smelling of lavender or jasmine or cassia, they lit red lanterns outside homes or brothels and caressed the endeavors of idle men through the long night.
But two men didn't cross the threshold of the Great Gate that night. One leaned against the vermillion post with the swagger of a thief, chewing on tobacco and undressing women with his eyes. The black-haired man stood erect, restless and agitated. His face was marred in angry pink and red scar tissue on the left, and his fair skin had a golden sheen from six years of maritime travel. He screwed his eyebrows together and groaned, turning to his companion. "For fucks sake, Jet, where is she?!" he cried.
"Do I look like a fucking fortune teller?" asked the shaggy-haired man. "If you really want to see her, maybe you should walk through the gate instead of loitering outside it like a fucking creep." The black-haired man considered it, briefly, before dismissing it as deranged and likely to incur a head injury. Six years had passed since he boarded the Miko, where he employed sellswords and a handful of Red Empire soldiers to assist in his – or his father's? – colonial exploits. She had cursed him – not with words, but with her accusing blue gaze that, for once, looked icy. She had done or said nothing unkind to Jet – they parted with a hug. Instead, she reserved her hatefulness for the spoiled ex-Prince whose only loyalty was to his mad family. At whatever cost, that loathly prefix and word – banished – was stricken from his title when his father reentered him into the line of succession. He was heir apparent to the Red Empire, but he didn't have the courage to talk to a woman.
"I can't do it. I won't. She can die in this shithole for all I care," the Prince said.
"Okay, look 'ere. I can't take much more of your bitchin' and moanin' anymore. Either we go to the House of Sol to see Katara or I'm fucking that whore, right there," Jet explained, pointing to a woman with large breasts, wide hips, and a profound air of superiority. She raised her nose at him. "And you can go home and suffocate your regrets with some ganja. You hear me?"
Zuko refused to look at him. "Yeah, yeah. I hear you. If you see Katara give her my regards." He turned his back on the Red Desert, his hands itching to hold Lakhnau's glorious enchantress.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I think that goes without saying. Why am I writing this?
A/N: As you can probably tell, I've changed several things in the Avatar World - including location names and the ethnic makeup. I was actually inspired by pugletto's worldbending art series, so if you haven't seen them I encourage you to check them out. Initially, I was using natural human languages in this story, but there is far too much potential for that to go awry, so I just made up my own. Anyway, I hope you liked it! If you do, please review or favorite!