They were following her, and relief suffused her skin. At least Azula still had this from them, or maybe they followed her out of pity. Out of compassion. Out of a friendship they may once have had.

She felt their presence behind her.

She wondered what would happen when they found their way back to Koh's lair. She wondered if they would do what she needed them to do. If she should even ask them to do this thing—though what exactly was to be done, she did not know.

She only knew she could not do this alone, which was asking so much when she had been the one to push them from her. She shouldn't have done that, just like she shouldn't be bringing them with her now.

She had had a choice that day on the Boiling Rock, that day of the comet, when her father had left her behind, when she had raged and grieved for the loss of her friends, when she had realized that fear was just as unreliable a weapon as truth and love.

She had chosen wrong.

She had chosen to cheat.

It felt as if she was always making the wrong choice.

The truth had made Zuko stronger, and her lies had made her weaker, because Azula always lied. She had lied to get him home, and she had lied to keep him home, and she had lied to bring him to her knees.

She thought of the scar he bore from her, a shadow to the one from his father, a mirror to the one she had given the Avatar.

She lifted her hands, empty and still before her.

Her thoughts clouded heavily, and she shook her head, impatient and frustrated at the things she had lost.

What had she wanted them to know? That she was a great firebender? That she could hurt them without a second thought? That she had the power to do that and not to feel regret?

They had known. She had made sure they would not forget. She had lost her friends. Her brother looked at her with pity, her father with scorn. Her mother was a broken memory in a shattered mirror.

She tried to remember where it had started. Was it when she had first seen her father burn her mother? When she had been called a monster? It rang false now, like an excuse, and she could no longer follow the process her thoughts took as they burrowed their way deeper and deeper in her heart and mind, festering, until she could no longer remember how they came to be there.

She wondered if she could ever rip them out like she had torn the root from her open mouth.

If she even wanted to.

She put her hands to her face. The wood was hot as if baked under the sun. It was a fitting punishment that she had lost her face. She could barely bear to look at herself in the mirror, so afraid she was to see her mother over her shoulder, so afraid to see her father burning in her eyes.

She has too much of her father in her, they had said, as they gazed at her face.

Not anymore.

She was faceless, and it was right. But she could not leave her face in Koh's care. She needed it to return home. She would not stay here, trapped, forever.

As she walked, she could feel Koh's presence become closer, and she was reminded again of her selfishness in seeking out her friends. What could they do against the spirit? Now, she had only endangered them again.

It wasn't too late. They weren't there—yet.

Behind her, she felt that Mai and Ty Lee were speaking amongst themselves, though she could not hear them nor see them. There was a push and pull between them, something like reluctance or skepticism holding them back. That would be Mai, of course.

Azula knew Mai would wonder where she was leading them—was she be leading them in another trap? That would be something Azula would do. It would not be far from the truth either because Azula was indeed intending to set a trap—not for her friends, but for Koh.

He would be overconfident in his victory over her. He would fall into it neatly, just as she had fallen into the trap she had set for Zuko on the steps of the palace when she had cheated.

A warmth grew close beside her, and Azula thought it may be Ty Lee, who believed in her relentlessly. It was exhausting. It was failure waiting to happen. Eventually, Ty Lee's patience would run out. Eventually, Ty Lee would betray her completely, as she had on the Boiling Rock. Splitting them apart and leaving her behind, again.

Bitterness stung her, and Azula pushed it away. She couldn't afford to focus on the sting of it, as she had before. It had made her weak. It had clouded her thinking.

She needed her face back. That was the only thing that mattered.

Then escaping was the second thing that mattered.

The spirit world seemed to guide her footsteps. She wondered if Koh's lair was always so inviting, making sure the lost and wayward found their path to him, that they might lose the very last thing that remained to them.

It was clever, she thought, as her feet recognized the shifting patterns, the labyrinths of roots from the tree that guarded Koh's cave. Azula stopped so suddenly that Mai ran into her from behind.

Azula could not see the cave, though she remembered it clearly. Still, she could sense Koh, waiting in the shadows, his many shifting faces, his many legs, the way his voice wormed through her.

She could bring Mai and Ty Lee with her. They could try to kill him. It wouldn't be hard. She had killed the Avatar, hadn't she? And Mai and Ty Lee were fighters. But she knew they would be no match for him because Mai's joy in the fight was evident in the flash of her eyes, the gently uplift to her mouth. Ty Lee laughed outright as she flitted here and there.

And that was what Koh sought, wasn't it? Just as he had taken her face when she had cried over her mother, he would take their faces when they fought him. She knew this now. This was the knowledge that she had known before.

She could chance that they would be able to school their emotions. She could tell them and they would take the risk because what other choice did they have.

Mai shoved at her shoulder. Azula recognized her agitation: the constant need to move, the constant need to be doing something instead of nothing.

Or Azula could lie. Lie to her friends. Lie to Koh.

Azula always lies.

The accusation rang in her ears as she knelt in the long grass and pulled it up by its roots so that she might have a place to write.

Stay, she traced in the dirt. I will face him alone. If I'm not back in half an hour, leave this place. The Avatar will find you.

She couldn't hear them. She couldn't see them. She didn't know if they would obey her. As she rose, she felt the dust and small rocks buried in the soil splash against her legs, and she imagined that someone had kicked her words from the earth.

She imagined it would be Ty Lee. Of course she would be angry. Of course she wouldn't understand.

Azula shook her head. She stood tall, like she had done before when she had still been a princess instead of this outcast, desperate thing. She remembered the feeling when she could bend and, for a moment, she pretended she could.

They would remember. They would remember that they feared her, that they would obey her. In that moment, they would see the princess they had both betrayed on the Boiling Rock, and they would remember why.

Reaching behind her, she untied the ribbons from around her head, and the mask dropped beside her feet. She stepped over it, and followed the path the spirit world made for her, and went back into the cave.

Azula would have been afraid, but Koh already had her face. He couldn't hurt her anymore. Koh's shadows settled along her skin like a heavy robe, and she steeled herself, hands clenching into fists. Her heart heard the faint echo of her voice, a half-remembered come-and-get-it bravado that rang false in her memory.

She waited in the center of the pit, waited until she felt Koh rustle around her, felt the familiar pressure of his presence and his thoughts against her.

"So you come again, Fire Nation Princess. Only a spoiled brat would not abide by the rules." Koh's voice whispered in the chills that went down her spine. "The last person who came back to retrieve a face I stole did not succeed." Azula felt the cool coils of himself loop around her feet. She wondered if he wore her face or that of another unfortunate.

"If they always fail, then you have nothing to fear," she said with something that was not her mouth or her tongue but that was hers anyway.

"You imagine right," Koh said, laughing, as he scuttled up the rocky ceiling. "Have you come with a plan in mind? I sense others, waiting for you. Perhaps you thought to bring them to me in exchange, hm? Or perhaps you wish to exchange that box of scrolls. I'm not like the owl!"

Azula would have smiled, but she couldn't. "The scrolls aren't for you." She forced herself to relax, to inspect her nails as if she didn't have a care in the world. But her thoughts turned back towards Mai and Ty Lee, and she feared that they would not obey her. That they would come after her, and that would be the worst thing in the world. It would ruin everything. It would ruin them.

She hung her head. It was a stupid dream, a silly imagination. Of course they would not come for her. They were not friends. She had made sure they would not want to come for her when she had come down here, alone. Why would she even think about them disobeying her, defying her?

Her hands clammed with sweat, and she hid them behind her back to hide the way she trembled. She was losing focus. She was thinking about the way things might be instead of the way things were. She was slipping.

"You're ashamed of even considering offering me your friends," Koh said. "But it is your nature, isn't it? Why be ashamed of that? Do you see me ashamed of stealing your face?"

Azula rallied herself. She steeled her voice so that it would not rise. "You're boring me, Koh. Did you think I'd beg? What princess ever begs? But I do have a proposition that won't waste our time: let's play a game." Azula paused and the air prickled as Koh stopped his roving. He was listening. "If I'm able to choose my face out of the many you have stolen, if I am able to recognize it as my own, then you will return it to me." It was a gamble. All faces were the same with their eyes and noses and mouths. The last time she had looked at herself in a glass, she had smashed it to pieces with a hair brush. She could not even imagine how their journey on the seas and over the land had changed her.

Koh resumed scuttling around her. "Did you know that I had another visitor after you? Yes, I seem to be quite popular. It was someone you know."

He paused, as if he wanted her to guess, but this was not the game she wanted to play.

"I know a lot of people."

Koh seemed to sigh as he slithered in the darkness. "It was the young Avatar."

Azula wondered what the boy had said, wondered what had coaxed him to come back to his place when he had escaped it with his face before.

"I showed him your face, hoping to encourage some sort of reaction. You did try to kill him, after all! But he only bowed and thanked me before continuing on his way."

"Is he still here?" Azula asked. If the Avatar was here, perhaps not all was lost. Perhaps, Aang would be able to guide them out—or, at least, Mai and Ty Lee. She could find her own way out if the Avatar thought being stuck here in the spirit world to rot was a fitting punishment.

"I don't keep my many eyes on insignificant Avatars—you've seen one, you've seen them all. I'm sure he'll be back once he figures out a way to return your face. Apparently, he hadn't anticipated your return. Not that I blame him. Most can't bare to face me a second time." Koh laughed briefly, then sighed. "And yet, in the same day, the both of you have returned. Perhaps, you and the young avatar have more in common than I thought."

Azula reeled backwards. The idea that she and the Avatar had something in common was absurd. Still—if he were here, perhaps she should abandon this gamble and pursue his help instead. But that was foolishness. Of course Avatar Aang would not help her. She had tried to kill him. She had tried to kill two of his friends. She could not risk asking for his help because who would help someone who had done all those things?

"Do you want to play my game or not?" she asked.

"I would, if I knew what was in it for me."

Azula nodded, briefly. "If I lose, I will keep you company in your long solitude and lure more lost ones to your lair. I can be very convincing. In addition to that, you will have a chance to steal the faces of my two friends. They have been instructed to look for me if I do not return within the hour. They do not know it was you who took my face. They think you're the only one who can help me." By the time Koh realized her deception, it would be too late. Ty Lee and Mai would be safe from him.

He did not take long to consider. "Very well, Princess. I cannot turn aside a chance to add two new faces to my collection. I hope you are prepared to recognize yourself—it is not something many are willing or able to do. Let us begin."

Azula reached out her hands to touch the face that Koh presented her. It was a round face, not like her sharp, angular one, so she shook her head, and another face morphed beneath her palms. Long hair, stiff with salt, tangled between her fingers, and her heart jumped against her rib cage. But then she felt that the lip was marred by a scar, and she wondered where they had got it, if someone had given it to them, if it had been someone like her.

Her hands faltered for a moment, and Koh asked, "Are you giving up so soon, Princess?"

She shook her head, holding out her hands once more to touch Koh's ever changing faces. She felt powdery white paint shimmer against her skin. She traced the jutting chin of a warrior. The golden circlet of a crown was hard between her fingers. They were the faces of adults, men and women who were long lost.

Not her face.

Not the face of a child.

Once, when she had been very young, she had touched Zuko's face. This was before Ozai had burned him, when she and Zuko had been nearly friends. He had shoved her off, he had laughed at her.

But she remembered the curve of his cheek. The way his hair brushed her finger tips.

Would she be able to recognize her face not by trying to find just herself in it, but him too? They might be separate but they were still connected because they were their father's children, weren't they?

Then she realized that she should look for not just Zuko, but for her father too, and even her mother. Everybody had always said she looked just like her father, but she must have a little of Ursa in her too, for was she not her mother?

There was something familiar, and Koh waited because she wished for him to wait. She caressed the high rises of that face with her thumbs, brushed her fingers over the eyes, wide set and burning like her father's. She covered the left side of that face as she had once done before when she asked the Avatar if he didn't see the family resemblance. She reached downwards, her fingers stroking the lips that were curved and cruel and cold, a mouth carved in her father's image.

She reached upwards again, looking for the hair she had combed diligently every day. The strands were smooth, and fell through her fingers like water. She bowed her head as touched the face's cheeks, and she felt the tears seeping from its eyes. Crying as Zuko had wept before his father, crying as she had wept chained to the grate, crying as surely as her mother had wept as she left in exile.

And then, as she became more sure that this was the face she sought, she realized, slowly and dimly, that she saw differently, because when she lifted her head, she saw the vast length of Koh coiled deep in the depths of the tree, and she saw that he wore her face. "This is mine," she said, pressing her palm against her brow.

Koh howled and his home shook with his rage. "You see well," he said, once he had calmed himself. "You have learned much since we first met. But be gone from here. Once your face is restored you have no business here, and I will not be inclined to speak to you again."

Koh disappeared in the shadows, and Azula could see both with the strange sight that had allowed her to recognize her face, and again with the sight that was more familiar to her, something earthly and fleshly and mortal. She put her hands to her face, and felt her nose, her mouth, her teeth, her eyes stinging from the dirt on her fingers. Closing her eyes, she wiped the trace of tears away with the tattered cuff of her sleeve.

Then she dashed up the stairs to see if Mai and Ty Lee had waited for her, or if they had left as she had told them to.

They were there, and Ty Lee, holding the mask Azula had dropped, threw herself into her arms. Mai hung back as she always did, wondering if they were going to actually try to get out of the spirit world, or if they were just going to stand around talking about it.

"Thank you for holding this for me," Azula said, as she took the mask from Ty Lee. She considered it silently. It was the mask of the Blue Spirit, the one who had become an enemy of the Fire Nation, the one who had rescued the Avatar from Zhau. The one who had worn this mask was a traitor to the Fire Nation, to the once Firelord, her father. His wanted poster had hung beside the Avatar's, her brother's, her uncle's. Her hands trembled as she held it.

Ty Lee stood on tip toes and flicked at a spot on Azula's forehead. "You've got something on you."

Azula pushed her hands away as she tied the mask back over her face. "Leave it be."

"Why are you covering your face?" Ty Lee asked. "It's awful."

Azula shrugged. "It feels like mine now, I suppose. And also, I don't want the spirits here to recognize our faces. I want them to think twice before looking at us." She knew that a mask was nothing to them, but it was something to her. Her body had betrayed her too many times, and it was her face that had betrayed her to Koh. She could not risk another betrayal, she could not risk for the beings here to see anybody but the person she wanted them to see. And besides, it was fitting for her to wear this. After all, now she was just as much a traitor as her brother, and whoever it was who had worn this mask. She had listened to the words her Uncle whispered about her father, how he had felt for her. She had not even fought when they had traded her for him in Ba Sing Se. She was obeying her brother's wishes. Another failure to add to her long list of failures.

They wandered aimlessly for a long time. They wandered until their feet hurt. They wandered until they wondered if the spirits had gone and they were actually elsewhere, caught in between lands.

"We still haven't found Suki," Ty Lee said.

Azula walked steadily onwards. "I don't think she's here."

"Or do you just not want to look for her?" Mai said.

"I think she would have found us by now if she were here," Azula said. She had not told them about the other sight that she had found in Koh's cave. Pausing, she willed the sight to come to her, and it did. She looked for Suki, but she was nowhere to be found. The spirits had dragged them here because they were Fire Nation, taking them as they had taken the water benders. She thought, distantly, of Hama. She would be pleased. She would cackle just as she had on the ship. Azula laughed thinking of it while Ty Lee looked at her strangely.

"I'm glad you're amused," Mai said, her hands folded across her chest.

"If she's not here," Ty Lee said, "then she must have called for help."

Azula remembered what Koh had told her in the cave. "The Avatar was here. He came to Koh. I think he was looking for us. Maybe she sent a hawk."

"We're not going to actually wait for him to come find us, are we?" Mai asked.

Azula shook her head. "We're not."

They walked in more silence. Azula let her fingers ripple through the grass and against the strange flowers that bloomed here. They walked until they came to a valley filled with fog and spirits. They crawled on their hands and knees to the very edge, the dirt crumbling underneath their palms, and peered down.

Azula could not see through the murk, and she found herself leaning farther in to get a closer look. She had thought at first it was spirits in the valley, but now she saw that she was wrong.

They were people, like them.

"Maybe they can help us," Ty Lee said.

Azula rolled her eyes. "If they could help us, don't you think they would have helped themselves? They're just as stuck as we are."

"It was just an idea," Ty Lee said, her fists resting against the spurs of her hips.

Mai looked down at the fog and the people. "It was a bad one."

"Well, we're in a bad place." Ty Lee twisted her braid through her fingers. "We could go around?"

Azula shielded her eyes from the yellow light of the spirit world—something that could have been a sun if it set or rose. But there was nothing but the expanse of fog and souls, so she climbed a nearby straggling tree, her toes finding the nooks and crannies that could carry her weight, her legs wrapping themselves around the topmost limbs, her eyes squinting as she looked and saw it stretch out farther and farther away.

They could walk around it, but it would take a long time.

She swung down, hanging from her knees for an instant before she flipped, landing lightly on her feet, her body poised to bend, as if she could still do it, as if it wasn't gone from her. She rose, stiffly, her eyes shifting from Ty Lee and then to Mai. "I will go through." She plucked at her worn garments, unraveling a single thread. She reached for Ty Lee's hand, then stopped herself. "May I?" she asked instead.

Ty Lee stared at her for a moment before holding out her hand, and Azula tied the end of the thread around her finger.

"Once I find the other side, just follow this, and you'll find it too." She stepped away from them as Ty Lee stared at the thread tied loosely around her finger. Mai glowered at the fog and then to Azula. "There's nothing to worry about, of course. I'm not afraid," Azula said.

"Nobody said you were," Mai said.

"I could see it in your faces," Azula said, her voice sullen as she slid down the steep incline into the deep valley that held the seeping fog. She looked up when she reached the bottom, but the fog was too thick to see Mai's or Ty Lee's faces. She took a deep, steadying breath, like the kind she used to take before firebending, and turned to face what she thought was forward. She raised her arms out like Ty Lee did when she danced across the tightrope. It would be hard to walk in a straight line, but Azula could do it. She knew she could.

They would not be lost.

It was hard to see, but beyond that, the fog was not frightening.

Her arms trembled with the effort of keeping them raised. Her eyes burned with the effort of keeping them focused on their aim instead of being distracted by the shifting souls and the way the fog circled around her, as if it was conscious of her every movement.

It was then that she bumped into a familiar face: Admiral Zhao.

She remembered the stories of the few men who had survived the assault on the Northern Water Tribe. She remembered that her brother had tried to save the Admiral.

That dum-dum. Saving people who would only stab him in the back later. That was not how you survived. That was not how you won.

Or maybe it was, since Zhao was stuck here and her brother was the Firelord.

Zhao gripped her shoulders, and her concentration waivered, her gaze forced from what she thought was the other side. His face was pale and desperate. His hair was unkempt, coming out of its loose top-knot.

She tried to step back, but he wouldn't let her go, his fingers curling through his clothes, gripping her skin tight enough to bruise. She struggled with him, and he only held her tighter. "Spirit! Have you seen the Avatar?" His breath was a cold vapor against her face. "Have you seen him?"

Without thinking, she clenched her hand into a fist, and slammed it against his cheek. He reeled back, and she pushed her foot against the hollow of his belly, completely knocking him off balance as she neatly slipped out of his grasp. "If I had, I wouldn't tell you." She tried to find the spot her eyes had lost, but it was gone, and she tried to look back at her footprints to see if she could rediscover the path she had walked, but they were gone as if she had never been. "Besides, don't waste your time, Zhao. Either you'll lose, or you'll just become his friend."

But Zhao was already gone, and she was utterly alone. She went to unravel more of her thread, but it was broken, and she only held a scant length of it between her fingers.

She forgot to breathe as she fell to her knees, her fingers scrabbling in the dirt for the other end that she might knot them together, so that Mai and Ty Lee would not remain lost and waiting on the brink, waiting and waiting for her to tug the thread to let them know it was alright for them to cross in her footsteps.

It was gone.

Her hands shook in her lap as she raised her head, her neck craned back. She willed herself to see with the sight that had let her see her face so that she might see the faces of her friends once more.

Nothing. Nothing but the swirling clouds of fog drifting around her, blinding her vision, weakening her will. She looked towards her right where she thought the other side was, and then back to where she thought she had come.

She chewed the meaty insides of her lips until she tasted blood.

She could leave them. She could continue her way forwards, find the way out. Maybe even come back with the Avatar to fetch them.

She imagined them waiting for her. She imagined them giving up on her and plunging forward into the fog.

She imagined them making it through, passing her in the dark, and climbing out the other end themselves.

She imagined making it out herself, and coming back with Avatar Aang only to find them gone, lost in the spirit world.

She clutched her belly, rocked back and forth on her knees, hot tears streaking down her cheeks, even as a voice that sounded like hers whispered in her ear, "I thought you didn't have sob stories like the rest of them?"