Welcome, everyone. Feeling that it is time I did a good successor to "Reign Predictions" I have decided to write this story, keeping the family of the Pretender to the Fire Nation Throne as the central characters. Just as RP centered around predictions from the Pretender to the Throne of how long a Fire Lord's reign will be, this will center around pretenders who were would-be usurpers. Enjoy and review.
Sozin
The House of Mongkut was a noble military family but they had not always been so. Indeed they had not always been from the Fire Nation having originally been from the Earth Kingdom and had come to the Fire Nation during the time of Chin the Conqueror. With red hair the family looked very different and was sometimes considered outsiders amongst the Fire Nation nobility. Members often had a Fire Nation name and a name that marked them as a member of their tribe.
Khabul was the son of Mongkut, first Pretender to the Fire Nation Throne and known also by the Tribe Name of "Khabul." He was one of the few members of his family to forego a Fire Nation Name. He was sixty-two years old, twenty years younger than Sozin and while the two were practically the same person there was one thing that the two disagreed upon: war.
Khabul had little reason to like war. He may have come from a noble military family but that did not mean he liked it and had a preference for preventing it. As for the expansionist aim of the war, Khabul could only see a future where if the war was a success that the Fire Nation would eventually become so big that it would be divided by two and plunged into civil war. Although he would be unfairly remembered as "the Usurper" by the court chroniclers, his challenging of Sozin for the throne was based on one objective: to prevent war.
Sozin and Khabul had a mutual respect for one another, something that the court chroniclers would omit. When the time for their Agni Kai came, the two swore that should the other die they would erect a great statue in honor of them.
Fire Lord Khabul. It would have been an interesting thought. It would have been interesting to know how history would have changed then: the Air Nomads never would have been wiped out, the waterbenders of the Southern Water Tribe never would have been reduced to one, the Siege of Ba Sing Se never would have happened. If only.
Sozin spared Khabul and he resigned from his position as Pretender to the Throne. For the remainder of his life Khaus wrote chronicles of the war during his lifetime and with every one he wrote he condemned it.
Note
When I made a decision for the family to be redheaded I had cited Genghis Khan having been a redhead. At the time it meant little other than a justification for redheads in a fantasy world based primarily on Asian cultures. I know the Water Tribes are the exclusion but I didn't want to use that as a justification to have these people that are basically Irish, Danish, whatever redheaded European people you can name. Thus I ultimately looked to Ramses II who comes from Egypt, which is a part of both Africa and Asia. Ramses was a redhead and is believed to have come from a prominent family of redheads and recent scholarship believes his family to have been descended from immigrants, Egypt having been a crossroads and melting pit since time immemorial, so I used that idea for the House of Mongkut and with the me having cited Genghis Khan as a redhead I decided that the people the House of Mongkut is derived from should be Mongolian based. In the Earth Kingdom a majority of it is Chinese based but then we have Kyoshi Island and that is Japanese based location so I feel the Mongol inspired people for the House of Mongkut works. I am aware there are Mongolian influences in the Avatar universe but I am taking some liberty here and I am uncertain how to relate the House of Mongkut to Mongke who is named after the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, I might make him a disowned member of the family to acknowledge both Mongke and the "Tribe Names" being Mongolian in origin or I might not.