Azula hangs in the colors, thinking.

For a long time, she is amazed that she actually can think. And not just form coherent thought—but think clearly. For indefinite days, or weeks, or months, the colors have been eating away at her sanity, taking her away from time and place and slamming her repeatedly into solid, continuous NOW,that for an agony filled eon she simply marvels at the beauty of the coherent thought process.

Then, she gets to work on his riddle.

I think I get it, she thinks to herself. Is this what he meant? Is the key to this prison really just answering why my fire is blue?

Slowly, gently, she begins to pull an old memory out from the back of her mind. It is precious to her, possibly the most precious memory she has. When she was back in the world, when Fire Lord Ozai ruled the land, she would often take this memory out and relive it daily, sometimes even hourly.

It is the memory of the ritual that had given her fire the color of a winter sky. The memory of doing something that no one else had the strength to do. Most importantly: it is the memory of the first time she thought pain felt good.

Wan Shi Tong stood at the feet of the pitiful creature and felt a change cascade through her body.

Impressive, he thought.

The girl was catching on much quicker than the others.

Azula stepped up to the doorway and stood still for one long moment, making certain that no one was around. The energy of a sleeping castle filled the hallways. No footsteps, no scraping of shoe against stone, no breaths being held. No one to stop her.

She stepped up to the door. Behind that door was a room she had never been inside. She'd been forbidden. Only one man had access to the room, and he'd granted her access to it for this one lone night.

There was a knot in her stomach. Her legs felt…weak. Like after ten hours of form practice. She felt very hot in her face, and very cold in her hands. She caught a mental image of herself turning around, heading back into her bedchambers. If she did that, then she would know the most likely path her life would take. She would still grow up to become the greatest Firebender the world had ever seen.

But Father would never have been her teacher.

That decided it. She did not knock, but pulled the door open silently and slipped in.

Fire Lord Ozai waited for her.

He did not say anything about the unannounced entry. Instead, her father's eyes flashed, and there was the incremental curving of his lips that Azula knew meant that he was secretly very pleased. She stepped forward, silent, and knelt in front of him. Beneath the evening robe, her stomach tightened.

She tried to control it, relax, herself, but that proved impossible. She couldn't speak, either. All she could do was wait, the anticipation building, her mind churning with the certain knowledge that she was going to walk out of that room a changed person.

"Azula."

His voice made every muscle in her back tense, and the breath caught in her lungs.

"Lines are going to be crossed tonight. Lines that no one else would dare to look at. What we are about to do breaks laws, and customs, and moralities held by every civilization past and present. Once we begin, there is no way to stop."

She looked up at him, remaining on one knee. Not saying anything. Letting her eyes reveal exactly how she felt. The Fire Lord stared back. Eyes dark, black in the candlelight. He was the most powerful man on the planet. Unstoppable.

Azula sipped in a tiny breath. "The last thing I want to do is stop."

He smiled, and the enjoyment seemed to darken his face.

"Rise."

She stood up straight. Very slowly, he untied the sash around her waistline. The silk moaned a whisper as he drew it away. She did not move an inch, and kept her head raised high, eyes locked with his, lips parted to allow small shallow breaths. The robe cascaded into a silken lake at her feet, making her start again, rising up on the balls of her feet for just an instant. One inch closer to him.

He took both of her hands, and the skin contact made her go dizzy. She trembled. Nothing to do with the outside temperature—truthfully, Azula felt feverishly hot. She stayed silent.

Just like her, he did not say a word. But he was completely different: he was right at home in the silence that filled his daughter with tension.

The candlelight made the black in his eyes dance. He simply looked at her, straight on, no possibility of breaking eye contact. She remembered her last birthday, when she turned thirteen, where everyone said that she was growing into a beautiful young woman. She had thought that they were idiotic words, the kissing of her ass from servants and advisors, but now she saw just how wrong everyone was, because she felt like a speck of dust on the hide of a mouse, standing there in front of a golden-eyed god.

She wanted to kiss his cheek. But didn't even attempt to try.

She wanted him to kiss her. He wouldn't. He merely looked her in the eye with all the patience of a predator waiting in the treetops. Never speaking. She broke eye contact first—so painfully beneath him, it had always been like that—instead she focused on his hands. Her body was already snarling with hunger for their touch. But she said nothing.

Just savor the moment.

It almost came as a shock, the realization. I'm savoring this. The anticipation. The waiting. The not knowing. This was the first time that she was living out her fantasies with him, but he was not the same man that she'd seen every day, he was something else. Something more powerful, more in control, more skilled than the Fire Lord that all knew. She had come here tonight expecting a powerful experience, not fully understanding just how powerful such an experience might be.

He used both hands and with feather-light control he steered her further into the bedroom. Her mouth was dry. He reached out one hand for the back of her neck. She thought, for a second, that he was going to pull her close, going to take her in his arms, but he didn't. He just threaded his fingers through the strands of hair at her nape.

Her heart was pounding. She sucked in air. Lowered both eyes. Listened to the silence. A heavy, penetrating, all-pervasive silence, the kind that made her feel like she was not only alone, but helpless against any threat.

And here she was. A virgin sacrifice at the mercy of a dragon.

He took a step back, removing his hand from her hair, and Azula had to choke back a protest. I want him to touch me. I want him. I'm his. From now on, forever, I'm his and no one else's. Her body screamed for the tips of those fingers that left fire wherever they trailed. She could even feel his eyes on her, focused between her thighs, cutting through her clothing like an incision.

She savored those burning eyes.

"Azula."

A jump.

The sound of his voice was like a lightning strike to her brain, and she was immediately alert and ready. Ready to do anything. He stared at her for a while, not at her eyes but down there, then at last he walked up to her and reached out a single hand. It stayed low, reaching underneath the hem of her nightgown and she felt him—blind and slow and accurate—touch the thin curls of teenage pubis over her swelling cunt.

His fingers were very, very precise.

"Pay attention."

His words turn into her air. She wanted him to kiss her so badly. She wanted his fingers on her skin, on her pussy, but they stayed just above it and it made her want to scream.

She looked at him.

"You're mine, Azula. You'll stay mine. And I want to be proud of you."

I'll do anything to make you proud. Anything.

The ghosts that were those fingertips slid downward. "What you experience with me tonight, you will never be able to experience from anyone else. No one. The line that you cross tonight will prove to me that you aren't like everyone else. And you will be worthy of my guidance."

Truer words had never been spoken.

"Tonight, you will want to scream. You may. No one can hear you through these walls."

Her voice was mute, yet that hadn't stopped her body language from crying out.

"You'll want to watch what I do. But you'll be blinded by tears."

She could barely hold them back.

"You'll want to please me. And the only way you can do that is to submit to my will."

"I will do whatever you say."

A slight curve of the lips, and the Fire Lord raised one eyebrow. "Yes?"

"Yes." With a boldness that surprised even herself, she unbuttoned the top clasp of her nightgown, allowing it to slide off of her body. The chill night air hardened her nipples into taunt nubs.

And the Fire Princess took one step forward, placed both hands onto the Fire Lord's chest, raised herself onto her tiptoes, and whispered softly into his ear, her voice shaking, and young, but certain.

"Do anything you want to me, Father."

The caterfly story may have been just that—a story, a way to manipulate her mind—but Azula can decipher the hidden meaning behind Wan Shi Tong's words until his lesson is revealed: Pain is vital.

The terror of being trapped in a cocoon, fighting for its life, was the only thing that could have given that caterfly its life in the first place. Those that don't fight hard enough to break free of the cocoon are not strong enough to live, and therefore die. Suffocating.

But that was not all that pain was, she realizes. Pain is also a survival mechanism: If going too close to a fire hurts, even a bug will stay away, and the moths that fly too close to the flame are burnt without mercy. Why? To further survival—and enhance education.

Because pain is also a teacher. How many times had she been burned in the past by her Firebending tutors? How many hours had she spent, lost in repetition after repetition of her form katas, punching the air and slicing with her legs, until her muscles quivered from exhaustion? True, her aim had been to deflect those embers shot at her, to build her strength and endurance for battle, so as to avoid the pain of losing in the future; but the best way to avoid pain would have been to forsake the training altogether.

Even father had said it, standing over her while she sweated, gritting her teeth: If it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right.

Pain was also the missing link to gaining power and strength. For the past three years she had wondered how the Fire Nation—a land of soldiers, warriors, students of battle, worshipers of the warzone—could possibly lose a war against a nation of Earthbending hermits, a collection of old men, and a twelve-year-old boy, in a single day. She had wondered how she could lose a duel against her brother, the runaway outcast, while she had been at the height of her own power. And how, of all things, could a Waterbender girl outsmart her into being captured.

Maybe, she thinks, it was because they all had suffered.

The biographic tales published after the War had gone into each of their troubles and strifes throughout their years. Zuko had been driven by near-mythological levels of mental agony, simply in order to regain his honor. The Waterbender girl had seen her mother killed by a Firebender, and had secretly—perhaps even without her own conscious knowledge—trained hard to master her element, in the hopes that one day she would find the raider who had taken her childhood away and make him pay.

And the Earthbenders? Wan Shi Tong had said it himself. They had suffered for a century. One hundred years. Those that hadn't been killed were able to crawl out of their war-cocoons, stronger and better than ever before.

They had all found power. All grown stronger. Smarter. Craftier. Better than they would have been, had they all stayed home and been in comfort. Because their homes had been taken away. By the Fire Nation.

We were our own downfall, she realizes. Because we made them hurt so bad with our fire, our technology, our weapons of war…and all we were doing was poking a sleeping dragon in the eye.

It all came back to the pain.

Pain was a teacher. And a bridge. And a source of power. It could be the power that breaks a person. Or it could be the power that made them unbreakable. It was all these things.

At once.

It just depends on who you are.

Azula, for the first time in her life, feels frightened by a discovery. She knows that Zuko had only become stronger because he accepted his pain as the price for strength. And the Avatar had known that his training would be bitter, but he did it anyway. Everyone that had ever done anything of meaning in the world—they all had to embrace the pain of their experiences. Because of who they were.

But who am I? she wonders. Am I made of the same quality they were?

There is only one way to find out.

For incalculable eons, the colors have been something she has suffered through, fought against, tried to escape. She has been trying to find a way out of them.

Now, she accepts it as a price, and lets them spend her until there is nothing left.

Thousands of years passed before Azula could open her eyes.

She spent those thousands of years in one endless claustrophobic nightmare: she was held, bound, cocooned, unable to move, unable to scream. She couldn't see—her eyes wouldn't open. She couldn't breathe, because she had no lungs.

For a life age of the earth, she smothered.

Then, she felt a muscle twitch in the center of her back. It took a century, but she found that muscle, and made it contract. As decades grew into another century, shw found that she could work the other muscles in her back as well. Then she could clench her hips, her thighs, and bunch up the muscles in her upper arms—and the nightmare was now a dream, filled with possibility rather than dread.

And throughout the dream she knew that somehow, her chrysalis would crack open. And it did. And she crawled out of it, and she spread her new wings—such beautiful, beautiful wings—and she heard her voice sing out in laughter, a giggle that blossomed into the uncontrollable expression of joy that she once had as a little girl. And she soared high and away, into the sky, never to be seen again by anyone…

When she finally opened her eyes, and realized that this had only been a dream, a tremendous wave of relief flooded through her. She thought, for a moment, that it all had been a dream; the colors, the cave, Wan Shi Tong, the mental facility, Father…

Either it had all been a dream, or was still a dream, because she didn't hurt anymore.

It was pitch dark. She lay on something soft, padded, warm. Insanely comfortable. Like a palace couch that was covered in clouds. There was something pressing down on her body, and she realized that it was warm and comfortable too, and it covered her entirely, and it was somehow familiar…

A blanket, she thought. This is a blanket.

She moved her arm and sat up, and the blanket fell away, and for a moment she thought she was back in the colors: her joints screamed, and the world exploded into bright whiteness—but it was over as quickly as it had come, and she realized that the pain had come from a healing body, not a tortured one, and the brightness came from the sunlight pouring in through a window and onto her prone form.

She held her eyes shut for a long time. Then cracked them open, and slowly, oh so slowly, the world came into focus around her.

She was in some kind of room. The walls and floor and ceiling, all of it, were made of stone. But not constructed by Earthbenders; there was none of the smooth lines and flat, flawless design that their kind were known for. These walls and floors were constructed by hand, gray rocks collected and mortared together.

Azula stood up. The joints in her hips and shoulders felt like they were packed with sand, and they screamed in protest once more—but this was only pain. It wasn't really that scary anymore, and she still had to find out where she was.

The bed that she lay on was really a mat of thick, heavy furs, dark black and deliciously warm. Against the far wall were a pile of rolled up furs just like the ones she lay on, stacked on a shelf in a neat, orderly line. There was one window, but it was too high up for her to see out of—all that was visible was an ocean-blue sky.

Where in all fabled hells am I?

The temperature was cool, approaching cold. There was no sound anywhere. She had to find out more.

There was an opening with no door, and Azula walked through it and out into a stone hallway. No one around. She followed the hallway until it came to an enormous, heavy wooden door. She pushed against it; there was a heavy grinding sound, a groan of hinges, and the door scraped open.

Inside was a huge, vaulted hall lit by torches set into iron brackets on the stone floor, forming halos of flickering firelight that didn't quite penetrate the shadows in the corners. There were thick supporting stone pillars every few yards.

Behind her, the door creaked and thudded shut.

She squinted, again adjusting her eyes, this time to the semi-darkness. At the far end of the room, at least the length of a Fire Nation battleship, there was a raised platform. Standing atop it was Wan Shi Tong.

Despite the warmth of the torches, Azula felt the air around her dip toward freezing. For a long time, both stood staring at each other. She knew that she was just as lost, just as helpless as she had been in that cave, and he was in total control. But a lack of control had never meant she couldn't fight to get it back.

"Because I willingly had sex with my father," she stated.

Wan Shi Tong said nothing. He only cocked his head to one side, quizzically.

Azula walked closer, her footfalls quiet and steady, her back straight, her chin held level, her eye contact unwavering. "When I had my first period, father invited me into his room. I went. I had sex with him."

She reached his platform. He still did nothing.

Azula waited. She tried not to shiver in the cold.

Eventually, Wan Shi Tong blinked and asked, "Why do you say this?"

"It's an answer. To that question you asked. You wanted to know why my fire was blue." She gestured with one hand at herself and shrugged. "The morning after I lost my virginity, my fire burned blue. I knew it was because I was different inside; I could do what others saw as disgusting or wrong, and I could do it simply because I wanted to. My mind was cold. I'm still not certain as to the mechanics of how fire can burn that color, but I know that my fire comes from me—came from me—and it was just as cold and clear as my mind."

Wan Shi Tong nodded. "Thank you. I was most curious."

"So," she said, "what is this place? I have a feeling that it's not your Library. Is it some kind of prison?"

"Many would think so. Others would call it a school."

"What do you call it?"

"Does every location truly need a name?"

Azula was silent. She did not break eye contact.

Wan Shi Tong blinked and said, "I call it a playground."

Now it was her turn to blink. "A playground?"

"Indeed. Is a playground not where all children learn the boundaries of behavior, the realities of life? One learns self-defense in playground scuffles, politics in playground groups, and the peer pressure that comes from being surrounded by a mob of others, and the reality of the never-ending, inarguable unfairness of life—that some are smarter, or stronger, or faster, and no amount of talent can make one better than practice."

"And why do you think I should be here?"

Wan Shi Tong said nothing.

"I've already gone to schools. I've already been on the playground. I'm an adult now, Wan Shi Tong, and I'm your student." She was amazed by the discovery that she was asking for help. "Teach me already. Let me be your disciple."

He shook his feathered head, pityingly. "Do you think that a process so complex as choosing my disciple can be entrusted to a test like the cave? Oh, no, no, no, child. There is learning that must be done. Education. Trial, and error—more error than not I'm afraid. And practice. Practice, practice, practice."

"What are you talking about?" Despair settled like a weight in her lungs. "I've done what you needed me to do. If I could get out of that cave, I can do anything! I passed your test, already!"

"Passed the test?" Wan Shi Tong continued shaking his head. "Child. You haven't even begun preparing for it."

"Don't call me that!"

"That is what you are."

"I'm an adult! I've fought in wars, you gigantic bird! I've commanded armies! I've done more than you think!"

"And you think less than you've done." He spread his wings, flapped once, and landed on the ground beside her. "Your education in the cave? The colors were not your rite of passage. They were your birth. Just like all the others."

The words stopped her breath. "Others?"

"You did not honestly believe that you were the only one who sought out my Library?" He began walking towards the door that she had entered through. "Come. It is time for you to meet your classmates."