Toph,
.
.
.
.
o:o:o
"What do you mean it's blank?" Toph pinched the thin roll of parchment between her fingers and held it centimeters from her face, as if she could make words appear through sheer force of will. Something twanged in her chest, sharp and surprising like a bowstring snapping against bare skin. Disappointment, she told herself. She looked forward to Zuko's notes, which had become rarer in the past few months. This was the first private message he had sent in two weeks and it was blank.
She drew in a deep breath but her nose, as sensitive as it was, could not detect anything out of place. "Have you tested it for—I don't know, some sort of invisible ink?"
"All your messages are tested for chemical substances before they reach you, your majesty," Lien replied calmly. "The process includes heat exposure, which would have revealed the hidden text."
"Or destroyed it."
"Possible," she acknowledged, "But only slightly. There's a higher chance that the scroll was tampered with."
"Then they would have seized the message and killed the hawk, or they would have changed it. Why would someone send a piece of paper that says nothing but my name?" Toph scowled and kicked at the table, pushing her chair back so that she could stand. "I think he must have gotten his scrolls mixed up."
"The firelord has many reasons to be distracted," Lien replied soothingly, her tone that of someone speaking to a child in the midst of a temper tantrum.
Toph grumbled, but her annoyance had abated somewhat. "And the fact that he's an idiot probably doesn't help things very much."
