A/N: A journey of exile for Azula. She is broken out of the asylum by her supporters and like Kain in Final Fantasy IV, she decided to leave and find a new goal. There's nothing left for her in the world she knows. She embarks on an adventure and finds a passage to a different world. One where she won't be limited to firebending. She has found…an infinite world with different peoples and cultures, different forms of magic with different rules. Different gods, different heroes.

Starts with Fog Hill of the Five Elements because I want her to learn to fight as incredibly well as the choreography of the Guardian of Fire in this short anime and to be a starting point to the power creep of other worlds.

X

Chapter 1

Azula had been inside the asylum for six long months. Her brother Zuko, the new Firelord and Aang, the Avatar and last airbender, had visited her every few days, trying to reach her with their advice and guidance to recover her sanity. It had taken them four months to reach her and only then did she start recovering mentally from the trauma of being abandoned by everyone around her.

When she heard loud noises outside of her room – her cell –, she didn't move an inch. When the door opened, she didn't even look at it. When two strong people pulled her out of the room and lifted her through the corridors and out of the building, she didn't react. When they put her down and made her face their captain, she didn't move either.

"You seem to have lost a lot of your poise, Princess Azula," mocked the officer. "Where has your fire gone? Your control? Where is the girl who took Ba Sing Se without a fight when everyone else had failed? Where are your blue flames and lightning bolts?"

A moment passed. She wasn't cooperating.

"I see. Don't worry, I don't think we really need you for the rebellion. As long as we have you, your mere presence should be enough to gather your supporters and retake the capital. From there, we can use the fleet to take back every island of the Fire Nation and then go back to our conquest of the world. The Fire still burns, and the Fire Nation is the one people over all others!"

His eyes were glowing from his speech and his belief in what he'd just said. Azula was…unimpressed.

"So this is the kind of people who want me to rule and finish my father's doing? I pity you. You have learnt nothing. The Fire Nation is not the greatest. Just like me, it is the loneliest. One person cannot beat their illness and several other people at once. One faction of our people can't defeat the other while keeping the other two nations and the Avatar in check. You are just blindfolded extremists who ate the manipulative education fed to you at school and you do not think by yourselves. I do not want to lead a bunch of blinded madmen to another obvious defeat. Leave me alone."

"Hmph! If you refuse to cooperate, then we'll just have to make you come by using more persuasive ways! Men, capture her alive!"

The small squad put their guard up and shot fire at her. Azula turned on herself and shot back the projectiles like a waterbender would do with water attacks. They dodged them or nullified them, but in the meantime, she had prepared her lightning strikes. Both of her hands shot them in arcs and the men in front of her had no means to block or avoid lightning. They died on the spot.

"The weak minded do not deserve to call me their leader. I have not survived loneliness, abandonment and madness, I have not made all this progress to just be a tool for some stupid people to put me on a throne void of its' meaning and fight for a lost cause in my name without my consent. Death is a smooth fate for that kind of fools."

She hopped aboard the boat which only had the crew left, not good soldiers. They had seen the fight and didn't want to oppose her, fearing for their lives.

"What are you waiting for? We must leave this place before someone finds I have escaped! I do not accept incompetence!"

She felt angry again. Not good. She started her relaxing exercises, breathe in, breathe out, to calm down. Anger management was still a little hard, but she had made progress since the day she lost to Katara and Zuko and shot fire from her mouth without any control.

"Where are we heading for, Princess Azula?" asked a man.

"The ocean. Somewhere far from any populated area. I want to go to a remote place to find a new sense to my life. And find me a new captain, someone who is fit for the job."

"Yes, Pr…"

"Stop calling me Princess! I'm not a goddamn princess anymore! I'm just a girl who can kill you if you continue to remind me my failure!"

"Yes, Lady Azula…"

"Hmph! That's better!"

He had gotten her angry again. More breathing exercises. She didn't like to do breathing exercises. But she needed them to remain sane. Anger could lead her back into her mad state, and she didn't want to waste all the effort she had done for six months on a stupid man's minor error.

X

Azula woke up. Something felt weird. They had been sailing for one week and nothing like that had happened. She had been traveling on ship before and never had she felt so uncomfortable. It was as if something abnormal was going to happen, but she couldn't tell what.

The master firebender went onto the deck and witnessed a weird event. Two waves were converging and forming some sort of portal over the ocean. She could see the light of day through it although it was night around her.

"I want to know what that thing is! Sail towards the portal!"

"Sail towards the portal! If you don't, you'll be executed! At least on the other side we might stay alive!" shouted the new captain.

'He learned fast. I like it when my subordinates know how to listen and obey to my orders,' she thought.

The crew set the ship's destination to the other side of the water gate. When they traversed it, they felt the warmth of the sun over their heads. They were definitely in a different world. This was nowhere in the world they had traveled through.

They reached a shore and landed. Azula immediately jumped out of the ship. She hit the sand swiftly and walked into the woods past the beach. She slept in the woods and woke up when the sun rose. She followed a straight line and reached a small village by the time the sun set once more.

It was a small town with wooden fortifications from a clearly less advanced era than the one she had lived in. She noticed two travelers reaching the small wooden bridge when she was getting inside the civilized place. The guards had let her pass after she had smiled at them in a seducing way, but they were particularly wary of the two strangers.

Now that she looked at them, they looked…inhuman. They were humanoid, but there was something weird, they had weird eyes and the little she could see of their skin looked like spiky scales of a light blue shade, tainted purplish with the sunset.

They looked clearly aggressive towards the guards and soon the men halted them, denying them passage. The creatures didn't seem to take it well and uncovered their claws before jumping them. Azula entered the village quickly and shouted to close the doors, even though the guards were speaking a different language. They should understand from the context.

She climbed a high point to witness the battle. She liked what she saw. The men seemed to be good martial artists. They were fighting like trained spear fighters. When they couldn't fight on equal footing with their non-human opponents, the archers started firing arrows at them. Some were set on fire and some even had an explosive head. The creatures waved them away like they were nothing. They soon overpowered the human defenders, but a confident man stepped in. He faced them and challenged them. Both of them attacked in tandem. The man was fighting with impressive skill. He could easily beat Zuko in a weapon duel with his soft lance. He was using the softness of the weapon to attack in strange angles, to make whip-like moves and his footwork was also great.

But the creatures were just much more powerful than him and they were two. The man's brother, an old man, joined him. For a moment, they looked like they could survive this, but their opponents were too much for them and they couldn't even damage them in return, their scales as hard as diamond. The non-humans defeated the brothers and killed the young one – who must have been near his forties.

After a short moment during which the creatures wiped out the defenders, someone jumped onto the damaged wooden bridge. A man challenged the things.

Azula couldn't understand what he told them. All she knew is that they took the bait. The man quickly showed that he wasn't challenging them just for show. After an initial losing fight, he started using firebending – or something that looked like high level firebending combined with very high level martial arts. He killed one of the two beings and the other one looked defeated for a short instant, but it changed form, revealing to be a bird-like demon.

Their fight became even more acrobatic. The bridge exploded when they opposed the man's fireball with the demon's power over water that didn't look like waterbending at all. They continued into the river, where the man seemed to drown for a moment, but he managed to get out and they fought in the air, flame jets propelling the man towards his flying opponent. Their fight was fast-paced, with high power and some collateral damage with the rain of debris. Azula was really impressed. She wanted this man to teach her how to fight like that. He was the quintessence of Zuko's fighting style and she wanted to beat her brother at his own game.

Then, the man took a deep wound and fell back onto the remains of the bridge. The bird demon shot towards the village and she jumped out of the way, out of the village. She was right. The bird spread some kind of curse among them and they started to attack each other. The son killed the father, the mother killed the child. It was disgusting. Then the demon landed in the middle of the village and seemed to gather the souls of the cursed people. He transformed into something else…something more human-like.

In his new form, his behaviour changed. He looked calmer, more in control. The fire master had recovered from his injury – already? – and they exchanged a few words, the man seeming as disgusted at the scene as she had been. Then they fought again. This time, she could barely see them. They hit each other so hard that they were sent flying into the hill and left their imprint into the rock multiple times. They continued their fight while flying to higher levels of the village on the hill and their martial arts were incredible.

After a long fight, the fire master finally defeated the demon. They talked a little and then the demon succumbed. The man entered a cave and soon got out with a small creature that wasn't looking very healthy.

Azula jumped several times to climb up there and landed in front of the man.

"I know we don't speak the same language, but I want to learn how to fight like you," she told him. She saluted him like a master firebender and showed him some firebending.

She had miscalculated though. He was not pleasantly surprised by her talents. It seemed like fire manipulation wasn't something common, because he looked like he was angry at her being another person with fire powers. On top of that, it seemed like the demon he had freed from the cave had been the reason for the demons to attack the humans. He was currently not very pleased with the human species, it seemed. He pushed her back and she fell backwards, but she rolled back and into a fighting stance. Then she knelt before him and put her head low, nearly touching the ground.

"Please teach me!"

He left the village, leaving her extremely exasperated. He had just ignored her! That man didn't even acknowledge her! She was not even worth his time!

'Hmph! If you don't want to teach me, I'll learn by myself! It's always been working so far, I accept this challenge!'

That's how Azula decided to train and become stronger than the Guardian of Fire of this world.

X

I'm gonna skip the training arc. Basically instead of going back to her old self, she will evolve her style and surpass Zuko, herself and copy and appropriate the Guardian of Fire's style. As usual, Azula the prodigy will find a way to come out better out of this! She will have to combine common firebending that she managed to master through control but that is very limited in power with brute force firebending, which she got out of despair and madness, that had no limitations but had required to lose her sanity to even access to. She will have to find the balance between her control and madness to master her firebending and eventually not require to endanger her mental state to be able to use powerful firebending.

Some power and character growth soon! Then we will go to another setting. Azula will also change her clothes at some point. I want her to dress in a Chinese-style brigandine armor for women (slimmer and more dress-like than men's brigandine armors). Brigandine is like a more advanced coat of plate. An armor made of small pieces of metal pieced together under or over a piece of thick cloth or leather, I prefer cloth for the looks. Chinese brigandine looks like samurai armor but with some small differences in style and much more flexible, which allows for better freedom of movement. It's also longer than samurai armor, falling somewhere near the ankles (like a European long hauberk).

Write you next time! Sorry for the short chapter, I'm only starting this story and it was already pretty eventful!