A/N: Updates now every Friday! Thanks for the reviews!
Inside a two-person apartment on Kyoshi Island, the air reeked with the smell of death.
Two corpses, their bodies still warm, their hearts recently stopped, lay by each other. Crimson still trickled from their throats.
Against a far wall, a goddess with snow-white skin lay face up, her head twitching every so often, her lips and tongue clacking against each other, trying to speak words that wouldn't come out.
The only person without injury was a woman sitting in a wheelchair. She was looking at a hand resting in her lap. It had pinkish-tan skin, and thick callouses decorated the palm. Slender fingers were wrapped around the grip of a tiny wooden crossbow.
One of her fingers was still pressed against the trigger.
What did I just do?
Did this weapon belong to her? It had to. She had just done something terrible with it—the crossbow was a pen, and she was the author of an atrocity, a terrible act that even now she could not stand to look at.
"What did I just do?"
Slowly, in her peripheral vision, Ty Lee noticed the white goddess slowly sit up from the ground. A shake of the head, to clear away dizziness. But Ty Lee couldn't look away from the weapon.
The weapon.
She remembered, a long time ago, someone had asked her to explain the difference in purpose between a knife and a sword. Both were used to cut, yes, and offered a certain degree of protection against assailants—the only true difference that Ty Lee could find between the two blades was the physical differences in their lengths, their range of attack, the limits imposed on them by size and dimension.
She'd been wrong, of course. Size was a factor of usage, not a difference in purpose. Her inquisitor had given her the true answer: a knife was a tool, whereas a sword was a weapon.
You could use a knife to kill, certainly. You could use anything to kill, be it a bedroom pillow or a hive of wasps. Knives were meant for cutting things, shaping them, separating them—knives had more use as a tool for dinner than a weapon to kill with.
A sword, on the other hand, was a weapon. And a weapon was meant to kill. It had no other purpose.
The crossbow in her hand, Ty Lee knew, was a weapon.
And she had just used it.
Effectively.
Azula's hand, warm and soft, laid itself on Ty Lee's, and gently pried the weapon away.
"You saved my life." She was quiet, and soothing, and understanding. "Thank you, Ty Lee. She would have killed me if you hadn't done what you did."
"They tried to murder you," Ty Lee found herself saying. "I thought they would've…I don't know, tried to arrest you , or something…that's what they always do…but you weren't even fighting back…"
"They were warriors. Makers of war. It's not their way to forgive, or forget, or believe that people can change for the better." She placed her hand on Ty Lee's shoulder, who found herself placing her own hand on top of hers, trying to feel more of the warmth, the comfort. "That's another reason why I told only you. You believe that people can change for the better."
Yes. Yes, of course she did.
"You didn't tell anyone else, did you?" The soft understanding in her voice developed a tinge of worry. "Anyone else who could spread my secret?"
"N-no!" She looked away from the weapon and up to Azula. "I only told Suki, and she must've told—" She tried to finish the sentence, but her breath hitched, and then she dissolved entirely into maddened crying. "What in the world is GOING ON?"
Azula said nothing. She merely knelt close and wrapped her arms around the woman's body, one arm on her back while the other slid underneath her waist, and she picked Ty Lee up bodily without strain or effort, holding her close while the woman sobbed uncontrollably. It would have appeared comical, being carried like an overgrown baby, though there was nothing at all humorous about the situation and no audience to see it.
Horror about what she had done shrank Ty Lee's voice down into a whisper, small and fragile and suddenly very young: "…I didn't mean to do it…I didn't want any of this to happen…not like this…"
"Stop, Ty Lee," Azula hushed. "Stop blaming yourself. You couldn't have controlled any of it."
"It's like—it's like—" Tears wouldn't stop coming. "It's like I don't even know who I am anymore…"
"You are the woman who only wants peace and love," she said, but Azula said it with her lips brushing Ty Lee's earlobe. "And I'm the only woman who can make that a reality. We just…have to do things my way, from now on."
"Azula…" Her name was an anguished moan. "…what will you do?"
Azula carried them both from the room where the fight had taken place and moved into the bedroom. There, she laid Ty Lee down on the nearest bed. She combed her fingers through Ty Lee's hair. "I'm going to find the Avatar. And I'm going to make him see that I deserve a second chance. It will take a long time for the rest of the world to really believe it, but all good things come with time."
"What about…what about them…?" She waved a hand uselessly towards the other room, indicating the recently fallen.
"I'll…take care of them, Ty Lee. I can't bring them back to life—no one has that kind of power—but I can make it so that no one alive finds out what went on here tonight. Our secret, between us. Just leave it to me."
"You can…really do that?"
"It's not something I'll be proud about. But it will protect you. But before any of that can happen, I need you to tell me something."
"What?"
Azula leaned forward, and for just a moment Ty Lee thought she saw a glimpse of the old, familiar hunger that the Fire Princess displayed whenever she was on the hunt. "Tell me where I can find the Avatar."
Ty Lee didn't respond.
"Do you know where he is?" she pressed. "Do you know where I can find him?"
A wave of tingling started at the base of Ty Lee's skull, and crawled down her back until it disappeared at her waist. "I—I don't really—he'll think I betrayed my friends—"
"Friends?" Azula repeated, a hint of scorn in her voice. "Your friends? Tell me, Ty Lee, how many times have your friends come to visit your home? How many times outside of the Kyoshi camp have they talked with you, asked you to join them on an adventure, or a celebration, or a quiet afternoon together in pleasant company?"
Ty Lee could find no answer. Not an honest one.
"I have a feeling it's around the same number of times they visited me, when I was locked away on Grey Rock. Out of everyone I ever knew, you were the only one who cared enough to come visit me."
Still, she could not answer.
"I'm not here for vengeance, Ty Lee. I only want to have my name cleared. Otherwise…who knows who they'll send after me next?"
She bit her lip.
"The next one to try might be Mei. Or Zuko."
She could only close her eyes.
"And do you think that will be enough? Do you think that the disappearance of those two assassins out there will make anyone less suspicious of us? Do you think Team Avatar will ever stop until I'm dead? It's them or me, Ty Lee. Or perhaps I should put it more truthfully: it's them or us."
"It's just—it's not…easy, that's all. I've been part of them, part of the team, for so long…"
"You have my word on this. I will only talk to him. That's all. I will not lay a finger on anyone, and if they try to attack me, I will only retreat as fast as I can."
The crippled, bedridden woman opened her sad eyes and turned her gaze fully upon the bloody features of the Naked Lady. As she looked at her beaten face, she could see the torn lips and gaps from missing teeth. She could see the damage that Azula had taken, and yet not made one single complaint about. She could see that she was still strong, and young, and underneath it all was the same confidence that Ty Lee had always admired.
She weighed her two possible futures beside each other.
She could turn away from Azula, and be left alone forever. Certainly the deaths of the husband and wife in the other room would be placed around her neck.
Or she could help Azula, and be loved. Forgiven. Accepted.
It was no contest.
She said, "The North Pole."
Azula pressed her lips to her cheek. Then stood up.
"Suki told me…she said that he'd been closing down the Air Temples, and by now he should be on his way there. Maybe you can catch up with him in the air."
"I can only hope," Azula said. And meant it. She laid a pale hand on Ty Lee's brow, and slowly covered her eyes. "And now, my secret love, you must sleep. I will take care of everything, and when you wake up, the nightmare will be over. Everything is going to be all right. You'll see."
Power floated through that hand, and Ty Lee felt exhaustion closing down her brain until she couldn't tell if the darkness was from Azula's hand, or her own eyelids.
All she knew was that it had been such a long day. And the bed she was lying in was so soft… and Azula, bless her, was happy with her…and she was even smiling as she made her way towards the door.
Yes.
Everything was going to be all right.
Later—many years later, after decades had grown into centuries, and stories had aged into myth—it would be said that the peoples of the world rejoiced so loudly on the night of the Appearing Goddess that their voices cracked the world.
This is only metaphor, of course. Artistic license. Poetic exaggeration to highlight the significance of the event. Later it would come to be common cliché to describe anything loud and dramatic. Such as, during a particularly loud thunderstorm for example, someone would usually say words along the lines of "Well, the Goddess is Appearin' the hell out of us tonight".
It would also be said, among the more superstitious and fearful folk, that the Goddess' Appearance cracked not only the world, but the heavens above and all levels of hell below, and the roar that greeted her Appearance was not only one of celebration, but from the fear and despair of every living enemy of humanity.
Unlike the proverbial myths and legends, though, this was not only a metaphor. It was mostly true.
The night of the Appearing Goddess was, in fact, a night that filled the air with scores of voices. But it was not the combined voices of humanity—nowhere near that many. In reality, the only voices that were raised that night belonged to the inhabitants of a rather large island off the coast of the Earth Kingdom.
And their voices weren't raised in celebration. Or joy. Or happiness of any kind.
They were screaming.
The truth of the Appearing Goddess is that it is the climax of the Age of the Avatar.
Not the end—the Age of the Avatar will end some few hours from now—but the climax.
It is quite a beautiful climax, in the eyes of its author. Not the culmination of an epic struggle. Just the opposite, in fact: each Kyoshi warrior is trained to fight and die by her sisters. And die they do. Simply. Easily. Like wheat during harvest.
Battlefield training, formations, lines of impregnable armed fighters…they all mean nothing when death comes from the sky, moving as fast as the wind, raining down hailstones the shape of ice daggers, bursts of flame that ignite every patch of forest, forked tongues of lightning that strike every tent. Elemental carnage rips through the entire island.
Orders are shouted. War-challenges are cried. Screams are heard, and sobs, and death rattles. Some citizens—the non-combatants, the children and mothers and elders—try to make a run for it; they are cut down from on high. Some make it to small crafts on the water, only to have their wooden vessels ignite. Those who are desperate enough to swim are boiled alive. Messenger birds carrying emergency notes are shocked from the air, plummeting down to the earth alongside balls of fire and blades of ice.
The sky rains death, and heroes die.
All across the island. All at once.
Heroes die.
Fifteen hundred feet above the ocean, Vidia stretched back on her portion of the sky bison saddle and wondered, for the third or fourth hundredth time that day, if it was possible to die of boredom.
She decided, as she had all those other times, that if it were possible, then she would've shuffled off this mortal coil at least two days ago. If there was anything in the whole wide world that she hated more than sitting around on Appa's back with nothing to do except listen to adults make small talk, it had to be sitting on Appa's back with nothing to do but listen to her parents make small talk.
Seriously, how many times could they play "What Does This Cloud Look Like?"
Adults were so boring!
Well, okay, that wasn't true—Aunt Chief was pretty fun. And so were a bunch of her crazy friends, who thought that staying up all night fighting and drinking each other under the tables was the only proper way to approach bedtime. Those adults were pretty cool, but unfortunately they were the polar opposite of Mommy and Daddy.
Not that she didn't love her parents. They just had the annoying habit of being…what was it that Aunt Chief had called them in whisper one time? Oh yeah, MESFALs: Masters of Every Single Freakin' Aspect of Life. Vidia had known that the joke was just that, a joke—Mommy and Daddy didn't really think they knew everything, though sometimes they sure acted like it, and apparently Vidia herself was guilty of the same crime every now and then—but she was a kid, and kids were supposed to think they had everything figured out. Weren't they?
Well, maybe not. She didn't think she was that smart, and there were questions about the world that she still didn't know the answers to. Along with a few questions about herself (like why the heck she wasn't already bending air and water like an Avatar could). But when it came to Mommy and Daddy, oh, she had them all figured out…and maybe that's what brought on a bit of the boredom.
Which was why, when Mommy pointed out a fresh challenge in a cloud that looked all-too-obviously like a cabbage merchant getting attacked by sparrow hawks, it made Vidia's ears perk up when Daddy muttered in a voice filled with tension, "Katara, something's wrong with your brother."
Vidia immediately pretended to be asleep. Closing her eyes and keeping still helped with her hearing.
There was a slight worried pause as Mommy switched from Family Time Mom mode and into Protective Ma Grizzly-Wolf. "What?"
Daddy would be giving his little head shake now, one that Vidia knew only came out during really serious moments. It usually said I don't know how this works or what exactly is going on, but it's serious and I'll have to do something about it. "It's—a feeling. I think something's happening on Kyoshi island."
"Love, I worry about them too, but—" and this was usually when Mommy put a comforting hand on his shoulder, or around his waist—"they can take care of themselves, you know? Sokka mastered swordplay in three days. You're probably just misinterpreting something …"
"It's not that." Daddy sounded certain, too sure of himself. "I think…I think there's something…wrong over there. Something bad."
"Something they can't handle?" Vidia thought she heard Mommy sound a bit hollow, even though she kept being hopeful. "I mean, we're talking about Kyoshi Island, here. How much trouble can they get into?"
"I—I don't know, love." The twist of uncertainty in his voice brought a similar twist into Vidia's heart. When Daddy crossed the line from nervousness to downright scared, things were about to get real. "If I knew what was going on, I wouldn't even have mentioned it, or else we'd probably be turning around already."
Okay, that was it. Pretending to have a backseat nap wasn't worth it anymore. Vidia opened both eyes and sat up, but kept quiet. Mommy glanced back at her, eyes worried, and Vidia gave her a return look that said I'm a little scared, but okay, it's all right if you're grownups now. Mommy nodded and went back to business.
"How far are we from the North Pole?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Too far. There aren't even any icebergs underneath us yet."
"Can you make it back to them on just your glider?"
"Bad idea. Even if I try it under perfect conditions, it'll take over a week to get there. And if I hit one storm along the way then the glider'll get shredded." His face hardened, and his brows drew together in an expression Vidia rarely ever saw on him: frustration over not being able to do anything. Daddy could always do something.
"What about the Spirit World?" Mommy asked. "Maybe Avatar Roku knows something."
"Not gonna happen," he muttered.
"Aang—"
He shook his head, sighing. "He…doesn't meet with me, anymore. It's been months since I've seen him. Like he's drifting away, or he's got nothing else to help me with." He paused, and his jaw clenched. "But, he told me once that if I find myself separated from the Avatar's Way, I better believe that it wasn't the Way that moved."
For the longest moment, Mommy didn't say anything. What could she say? Grownups had their own language, and Vidia sure as heck didn't know it, but apparently Mommy didn't have anything to say in any language until Daddy pulled himself out of his problems and dealt with the present.
It didn't take too long. Eventually he sighed, "Well, we can't cover that kind of distance in anything close to fast enough, and we're already more than halfway to the Pole. I'll get us there, drop you guys off, let Appa get some rest, and take off the next morning if I still have a bad feeling about it."
"Sounds like a plan," Mommy said. She moved closer to Daddy and rested her head on his shoulder, but they were still close enough for Vidia to hear her whispered, "You can't keep everyone safe all the time, love."
"No," he agreed. Then he flashed that familiar smile that was both sad and hopeful. "But since when has that stopped me from trying?"
"Daddy, you should relax." Seeing that their decisions were made and the Seriously Important Conversation had gone as far as it could go, Vidia broke her silence. "Remember when Uncle Sokka got drunk off that cactus juice I dared him to drink?"
Aang looked back at his daughter, his smile growing into one of pure happiness flavored with mock seriousness. "Indeed I do, missy. It took three of Suki's finest to get him under control."
"Exactly!" Vidia nodded, like that memory solved all their problems. "And if the Kysohi warriors can take care of Uncle Sokka when he's drunk, they can take care of anything! What's the worst that could happen?"
A bolt of lightning struck Appa directly on the back of his head.
For the longest stretch of time that Vidia had ever experienced in her nearly-nine years, the entire world went blank and silent. It was as if she had turned into a snowflake, so white and quiet…was she dreaming? Had she fallen asleep while pretending to be asleep, and was the whole conversation that had just taken place really part of a dream?
The whiteness began to clear, slowly. Some noise was in her ears as well.
And then both her eyes and ears were doing their jobs properly, and Vidia knew that she must be dreaming, because she could not make any sense at all of what was going on.
First of all, she was flying all by herself, heading straight for the blue ocean right below, and Appa was flying right next to her—but wait, no, he wasn't really flying…his eyes were shut. Squeezed tight. And his mouth was wide open.
Hold on—that roar that she thought was just the wind in her ears…was that the sound of Appa crying? And there was a long red streamer flying out from behind him, like he had a cape tied around his neck. It didn't make any sense at all. Appa had always been around for Vidia to play with and Mommy to pester, but they hadn't ever dressed him up with a blood-red cape like that before. How could he be falling right next to her, all six of his legs kicking, bloody cape spraying like a fountain of rubies from a charred hole in the back of his neck and head?
And why was lightning striking him from above, again and again and again?
It didn't make sense. It was wrong, just so wrong, it all was going wrong around her. And where were Mommy and Daddy? So many scary questions. So much wrong. Vidia had only one solution when things got to be this frightening.
She screamed. Closed her eyes, and screamed.
Her scream pounded into her own ringing ears, dulling the roar of the wind and the basso cry of Appa, her little voice sharper and more piercing and more terrifying than a rusted nail being driven into a coffin.
She screamed, and screamed, and knew that she would never stop screaming until she woke up and things made some kind of sense again.
A last-second windblast pushed his wife and daughter away from Appa's gigantic, lightning-conducting body, and Aang knew that in order to survive, in order for his family to survive, he would have to turn off the part of his brain that cared for his best friend.
That mental switch was thrown without a second thought.
Falling amidst a zero-gravity hailstorm of crates and luggage and droplets of sky bison blood hitting him in the face, Aang looked down to assess just how much time they had before hitting the hard-as-stone ocean surface, just in time to see Appa's body begin to tear apart under dozens of rapid lightning strikes.
Fifteen seconds or so before hitting the water.
Precisely one second later, Appa's body exploded into a starburst of gore and splintered bones.
He couldn't see Katara anywhere.
He could hear Vidia's high-pitched scream of terror. That meant she was below.
He could smell charred meat and burnt fur.
Free-falling, arms and legs spread, he did a quick spin to look upward and found the only thing that would ensure one of them would survive: tumbling above his head was the familiar straight line of hickory that was his staff. Aang reached his hand out, the air around himself compressing, slowing down his free fall while he forced the air directly below the staff to become impossibly thin, nearly void.
His staff plummeted down like an arrow freshly released from its bow, and smacked soundly into his palm.
Twelve seconds to impact.
Clutching the staff tightly to his side, Aang spun to plummet face-first towards the water, and a burst of air behind him shot the Avatar straight towards his daughter. His eyes, tearing as the wind scraped against them, nonetheless recognized a streamer of dark hair trailing behind a little girl wrapped in a fetal ball. Though she was tumbling, she was close to aerodynamically neutral, already plummeting at what appeared to be terminal velocity.
Aang shot down, catching up to her. Her eyes were shut tight. Her scream was unbelievable.
Seven seconds.
Where is my wife?
With his free hand, he grabbed ahold of Vidia's robes, pulling her close to his side. Her scream stopped the instant his hand touched her—his daughter knew her father's touch. Both eyes squinted open, and though the roaring wind in his ears made her next word impossible to hear, he could read her lips: "Daddy?"
"Hang on!" he yelled back. She didn't bother with nodding, and simply wrapped both arms around his waist with strength that would have impressed any Earth Rumble champion. Continuing to free-fall, still not opening his glider—the strain of their combined weight mixed with the arrest of their momentum would split the paper and wood into so much kindling—he scanned in all directions for any sign of his wife.
Katara immediately shot past them both in a bonelessly limp plummet.
The too-relaxed lines of her form, the way her arms and legs whipped widely in all directions, completely at the mercy of the wind—She isn't conscious, not even close. The thought was founded under instinct more than certain evidence, but nearly twenty years of being by her side had given Aang a profoundly deep, clear understanding of what his wife was capable of. And even with the ocean beneath her, any unconscious fall from a distance higher than most clouds would kill her the same as any non-Waterbender.
Irony. She'd perfected the art of insane-altitude-high-dives during their honeymoon.
Three seconds.
With his daughter still latched on tighter than Momo during a thunderstorm, Aang wrapped wind currents around their bodies like several layers of coats and began to slow their fall. He could stop them both immediately if he wanted, but to arrest their plummet so quickly would risk having Vidia slip off—or, more likely and worse, the gravitational strain could stress her spine and neck badly enough to possibly kill her.
He would have to time this perfectly.
Airbending while Waterbending—whilst keeping free of the Avatar State to boot—was only difficult, not impossible. While one half of his brain devoted itself to slowing them both down, the rest of him reached down into the ocean below and understood it, knew it, as if the water was his daughter and wife and mother and self all mixed into one. For a quarter-mile in all directions the waves shrank down into nothing, the currents went still, and the surface of the water transformed from roiling chaos to calm as a morning pond during winter.
At the perimeter of his decided landing zone, Aang reached his awareness out and began crystalizing the surface of the calm water with nothing but the ice of his will. Many non-Waterbenders thought that the ability to turn water into ice was just part and parcel of the whole Water Tribe culture; that their fluidity and emotional calm was what convinced water to harden itself into solid mass.
That was a common misconception. In the same way that a Firebender could transform flame into electricity, a Waterbender could turn water into ice by utilizing a very secret, very frowned-upon-in-certain-happy-societies portion of their personalities. In a word, coldness.
The only person on the planet that knew just how cold the Avatar's heart could be was the Avatar.
Aang poured it on, reaching deep within himself to the source of cold power inside his heart, sending it out to the ocean surface below. As the power flowed out of him, the water did what it now always did—obeyed his will. Ice formed along the circle's outer perimeter and began crawling inward, becoming the flattest iceberg south of the Arctic circle.
Now for the difficult part.
He didn't make the iceberg completely solid all along the surface. He kept the center wide open, a bulls-eye target for his wife to fall into, and exactly one second before Katara hit the water's surface Aang shot approximately sixty billion tiny bubbles of air into her landing zone. When Katara passed through the meter-wide opening of the ice, the first fifty feet or so of ocean water would be about as hard as a mountain of pillow feathers. The next fifty feet, perhaps mattress quality.
But Aang didn't have time to see how the next fifty feet of her dive after that would go—he and Vidia had less than fifty feet of air to pass through before turning into a bloody smear on the salty ice.
"Glide time!" he yelled, and Vidia, with a practiced motion that spoke of nearly a decade's worth of experience, automatically went from hugging him tightly to letting go, spinning one hundred and eighty degrees in midair, and latching both arms and legs behind onto her father's frame, just in time for Aang to spring the glider's fans open. Their subsonic fall was immediately arrested into a stomach-churning dive that Aang pulled upwards out of.
Vidia's stomach just barely scraped the frosting on the ice.
"You good?" he yelled.
"Good!" she called back. "Where's Mommy?"
"She made it to the water. She'll be coming back up soon—" Please, please, in the name of all divine spirits, let her come back up—"so let's get ready to meet her, huh?"
Vidia said nothing, but Aang could feel her nod. She was trembling. Shaken and scared.
"Dad," she said, and her voice shook just as much as her body. "What—where's Appa? Is he all right?"
And just like that, the mental switch that Avatar Aang had thrown in order to help his family survive the next ten seconds…simply turned back on.
And he remembered…
He remembered Appa's wrenching twist in midair, his sudden deceleration of speed, the shock of impact as blue-white electricity clawed its way into his enormous head…electricity that had originally been heading directly for Aang's head…multiple lightning strikes that had blasted the sky bison again and again…
Using his massive body as a shield.
Appa had known, somehow.
And without hesitation, he'd given his life.
The grief hit him, punched into his chest, tore at his heart and, for a blind eternity, Aang lost all semblance of control and felt the Avatar State threatening to rise up and take over, something that hadn't happen since Sozin's Comet. The glider immediately stalled in the air, ten feet over the ice, and Aang was so lost that he didn't have the strength or sanity to continue Airbending.
It was only his daughter's startled scream—as she once again plummeted downwards—that brought him a hair's breadth back into sanity.
When the barest tendrils of coherent thought leaked back into his numbed brain, Aang could hear his daughter's voice whispering, "Daddy…your eyes…"
He couldn't see. He knew that. It wasn't because he was crying. It was because the State was taking over, and the divine white light was too much for his flesh-and-blood eyes to take…it always happened like this…but he couldn't let it happen now…
The Avatar State was the world incarnate. And the world didn't give a damn about the little girl right next to him, or the woman he loved underneath the ice. If the State took over now, there was no telling what it would do—and the possibility of losing the two people Aang loved more than the entire world would be nothing but potential collateral damage to the State.
He had to push it down.
He had to keep his family alive.
He had…to find whoever had cast those lightning bolts.
Grief transformed into anger, fury, blood fever.
Whack.
A sharp sting from his right hand—Aang stared numbly at it, noticing that it had become a fist, and a thin line of blood was trickling from his knuckles, and only then did he realize that he had just punched the ice beneath him. Pain blossomed like springtime flowers into his brain, brought him back to the world, away from the State.
Whack.
He did it again.
"Daddy!"
His bone density was pretty good; one did not become a master of Earthbending without a couple thousand punches delivered into the sides of oncoming boulders. His knuckles did not break. The flesh peeled back over them, exposing red-streaked ivory like bones hidden inside raw meat.
"What are you doing?" Vidia asked him. She sounded very far away. "Why are you doing that?"
Above, the heavens thundered.
He turned his eyes towards the noise, up towards the clouds. Up to where the attack had come from. Up to where the attacker still waited.
Waited for him.
A pale, nude female form. Silver hair fluttering in the wind like a silken cape. Her skin glowed an otherworldly blue, as if her body were charged with the lightning that spat and crackled from her blazing eyes. Eyes that refused to blink as they stared back at him.
He remembered those eyes. They were different, now—but they still held the same exact malice as before.
"Vidia," he hissed through a clenched jaw. "Vidia…stay down. Keep as small as possible."
"What are you talking about?" she asked. "What is that? Is Mommy okay? How did—"
He silenced her with an open palm. Both eyes stayed locked upwards, never deviating so much as a millimeter away from his enemy. He wanted to comfort his daughter, and crack open the ice below to search for his wife—why hadn't Katara resurfaced yet?—but all he could do was watch and wait for her to make the next move.
And pray that he could survive it.
There was a very old, very bad joke about two young Air Nomads who were just learning how to fly their gliders. One of them looked to the other one and said, "Wow, those people down there are so far away, they look just like ants." Whereupon the other would look at the first and say, "Wow, you're pretty stupid—those are ants. You haven't even left the ground yet."
Azula had never been much for comedy (in this life or any other) but she found herself reminiscing about that old joke as she gazed down at the Avatar and his whelp. Such…insects they were. Even the mighty Avatar was nothing much more than a middle-aged man approaching his autumn years, tiny and leaning on his staff like a walking cane.
But of course, his physical presence was an illusion—the body was only a vessel. The truth of him could be seen in his aura: Avatar Aang was a fountain of multi-colored light so intense that it brought back memories of her time in the cave with Wan Shi Tong and his rainbow hell.
"I have to say," she called down to him, her voice smug and satisfied at their current appropriate positions, "that a man like you could've done so much better than marrying her. You know, as a widower, you'll be single again and free to chase a lot of tail."
The Avatar said nothing. His little girl followed his lead, though hers was a decision founded more upon fear than stoic heroism. Hmm. Fear was good. It was the foundation of real respect.
Fire Lord Ozai had taught her that.
"And just think," she continued. "With the missus out of the way you can start repopulating the world with Air Nomads the old fashioned way, by having lots and lots of little bastards running around."
"You can't get rid of her that easily," he said. "Trust me. Plenty of others have tried."
"Or you, apparently. But I have a feeling that's about to change." She floated down until her feet touched the icy surface. "And don't worry about the child. I won't kill her. She'll live not-so-happily ever after with me, when all this is said and done. I'll keep her like a souvenir. Something to remember you both by."
Avatar Aang stood up as straight and centered as the oldest mountains. He said nothing. His eyes glowed white. His arms raised themselves up in a balanced, steady defensive posture.
Azula responded by spreading her arms out wide, her fingers aimed towards him, the smile on her full red lips cruel and malicious.
Lightning speared forth, and when the electric currents reached the Avatar, it was more than just Aang against Azula. More than the Last Airbender against the Naked Lady. They knew that this was bigger than Avatar versus Anti-Avatar, or tyrant against ruler—this was an expression of the fundamental conflict found in every living thing in the universe.
This was light against dark.
And it was winner take all.