Ivy - "Ocean City Girl"
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After
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The battle is over, and tonight Zuko's reign begins. Propelled by curiosity and that particular energy born from exhaustion, Katara walks the house of Sozen, Azulon, and Ozai. Tapestries of great battles and worse massacres hang in the every corridor, bleeding between the threads. They drape from the ceilings and across the walls, as if to blanket the palace inhabitants in a world of glory and war.
She tries to imagine Prince Zuko living here, and the Zuko that answers her thoughts is the not the young man Katara fought and bled beside, but the raging child she met so long ago. Unifying those two images gets easier the more she sees of his homeland, and that thought turns her stomach in a way decorations never could.
The throne room, when she finds it, is as vast as the Northern Tribe's but with less than half the light. Columns guide supplicants to a pool that stretches like a moat before the Fire Lord's gilded seat. Katara assumes it must be water until the smell hits, and then she remembers the prince's campfire stories. On nearby flags she sees evidence of oil drops, staining them an ever more vivid red.
Though the sun has baked through the roof and she stands surrounded by crimson, bronze, and amber, Katara finds the whole place cold.
