Ozai barked out an unamused laugh, ignoring the monstrosity's instruction to not emote. How could he not? What the thing proposed was preposterous.
"My bending?" he sneered, incredulous. "It's gone, you grotesque fuck. The Avatar wrenched it out of me like a knife from a wound. That's not something a healer can just restore!"
The act of taking his bending, of twisting his energy and wrestling it into submission, should not have been possible, either. It was a perversion of nature, an abominable power, and had been a violation unlike anything Ozai had ever known – up to and including the earlier invasion of his mouth. That it had been perpetrated by a boy, a mere child, had not been any comfort in the slightest.
That the boy had thought it merciful, had deemed it less heavy on his conscience, that had sparked Ozai's mind with horrified wonder. What would this lost-then-found-again Avatar be capable of as a man, with tutelage not harried by war? What other monstrous power lurked beneath that monkish frame?
Of course, he hadn't been able to fully process the experience until some days later, when the shock and exhaustion and the residual thrum of the comet in his veins had run their course. Then it had been excruciating. Terrifying.
Powerlessness was not something Ozai had ever been acquainted with, and it had suited him poorly.
To be offered that power back, to be made to feel that such a thing was within the realm of possibility – as though the process of losing it were a mere mistake, something easily undone – somehow only served to spark his rage. It was insulting.
Ozai felt his hands clench into fists as the creature skittered in serpentine circles, wrapping around him and leering its head upside down.
"You misunderstand, Fire Lord," the red oni eyes glowed softly in displeasure, "I do not speak of a simple healer."
"Oh? What, then?" he scoffed through gritted teeth.
The thing blinked, the blue-skinned oni replaced by a woman's face, dark hair curtaining pale skin in defiance of gravity, as though underwater. The voice remained the same, discordantly masculine as it crooned from plump, inarguably kissable lips.
"This is the Spirit World, you fool. The Avatar might be a bridge between this place and your own, but he is certainly not the only source of power." The thing – spirit, Ozai realized – knotted itself around him, lifting him off the ground by the waist.
Despite himself, Ozai brought his hands down to brace himself against the spirit's body, shuddering at the altogether too smooth, too cool surface of its exoskeleton. It was a struggle to not kick his legs, but he knew his feet would find only air.
From this elevated point, awkward and awful as it was, he could take stock his surroundings. It wasn't so much a craggy plain as another caldera, a disc of land encircled by snares of sharp stone. He thought of the lamprey whales of the south sea, the intricate puncture rings they left on the armored hulls of Fire Nation ships. That was what he was being carted off towards – just another gaping maw with too many teeth.
And at the centre of it, a tree.
Even from a distance, Ozai could tell that it was an ancient thing, gnarled and twisted, hard almost to the point of petrification. The tangle of branches reaching skyward brought to mind his father's rheumatic knuckles, misshapen by age and frozen in permanent spasm thanks to his wife's poison.
Ozai blinked, tried to clear his mind of such thoughts. They were unwelcome at the best of times, but here? Unwelcome and – some quiet voice deep in his skull told him – utterly unwise.
"There are spirits here older than memory," the many-faced spirit continued, scuttling towards the lifeless tree at an unnatural pace. "Spirits forever linked to the elements and aspects of your world, and oldest among them are Vaatu and Raava. Like Tui and La, they are push and pull, light and dark, chaos and peace, eternally linked."
It deposited him on the ground unceremoniously, and then continued its twining motions through the tree's roots, up the trunk, wringing itself through the bony branches.
"Raava is aligned with your Avatar, but you, you and your forefathers are an embodiment of Vaatu unlike any other. Your war, all the change that you've introduced through industrial advancement, the fear and destruction that your nation spread in the last century… There isn't a corner of the mortal plane untouched by Sozin's line."
And rightly so, he wanted to mutter in response, the whole point of the last hundred years had been to share the Fire Nation's superiority with the rest of the world. To mould it, shape it into a better version of itself. To unshackle it from the past. A part of Ozai – the preening, prideful part he never could quite quell – wanted to swell with the spirit's recognition of his personal impact and the longer legacy of his family, but the rest of him reigned in the temptation. There was nothing to gloat over. While necessary to reshaping the world, fear and destruction had only been meant as means to an end. They were never supposed to be the ultimate goal, nor had he even been able to achieve it.
The world had not crumbled into ash, and he had not reached through the wreckage to raise it up into something new and glorious.
For all the spirit's praise, the deposed lord knew, intimately, how history was reshaped by those with power, and he knew just as assuredly that his own place in the pages would be woefully short.
"You flatter like a courtesan," he shouted derisively, "But I fail to see how any of that has anything to do with restoring my bending."
To Ozai's credit, few actually would. The story of Raava and Vaatu had long since been lost to even the most obscure of historians and sages – even Avatar Aang knew nothing of the spirit that resided within him, incarnate – and as all but the most provincial villages in the Fire Nation had eschewed any spiritual connections beyond Agni, it was no wonder that Azulon's second son had little knowledge of what lay beyond the material world.
Iroh, naturally, had been the exception to that rule. At first Ozai's elder brother's interest in the Spirit World had been of a similar nature as Zhao's – mere curiosity, a question of academic aptitude before becoming a matter of information to be weaponized. For all his impulsiveness and short-temper, Zhao had been surprisingly at home among a stack of books and parchment. But where the admiral's research always remained a point of martial advantage – as had been the case regarding the ocean and moon spirits – Iroh's eventually became something else. Spirits, his brother had once claimed, were as essential to the human world as to their own. They contributed to the balance of things. They were to be respected.
Ozai had laughed in his brother's face for that particular comment.
He wasn't laughing now.
From within the tree, something large and dark stirred. A new voice, deeper and harsher, boomed out across the scattered stones.
"What Koh is saying is that you are, and have always been, antithetical to the Avatar. That is a quality we share."
As it had before, that simultaneously ancient and yet unfamiliar part of himself, seemingly abandoned by the Avatar, squirmed anxiously deep in Ozai's gut. He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, but took several steps forward. Within a massive hollow in the tree's trunk he could see a large shadow shift and churn, but found that his eyes stung if he tried to focus on it beyond that. It was reminiscent of how some stars could only be seen clearly in the periphery, as though the spirit within the tree was intangible enough that to be stared at directly would cause it to fade away.
That, or it was so incredibly powerful that Ozai's mortal vision was incapable of truly comprehending what was before him.
The spirit in the tree – Vaatu, he surmised – continued.
"The Avatar tampered with your chi, but did not destroy it. Your energy remains, and because of your nature, you should be receptive to my power."
"Should?" Ozai countered, disliking the element of doubt, and disliking even more the sense that he had no say in the matter whatsoever. "And what happens if my energy is incompatible?" Agni, he hated how the words sounded on his tongue, the sheer foolishness of them. It was like bandying hypotheticals in a children's story.
Still twining through the branches of the tree, the spirit named Koh blinked, the previous woman's face replaced with the garishly pigmented visage of a mandrill. It bared its fangs, eyes sharp pinpricks of black against the bursts of red and blue.
"You'll die," the mandrill's mouth moved over the words, lips pulling in ways nature had not intended. "Most humans can only survive a few minutes of being fused with a spirit, and those that do are generally never the same. Their bodies are altered, sometimes beyond recognition or function."
Ozai made a reckless, scathing noise and wrinkled his nose.
"Then you've brought me here only to offer oblivion?"
"What we offer," Vaatu boomed out, the motions of the spirit's shadowy form agitated and sharp, "is no less than what you intended for the world."
Koh unwound itself from the tree, slunk down to weave in a lazy circumference around Ozai. With each pass it seemed to change faces – a woman with a scar across her mouth, a fish, an ancient warrior, an Earth Kingdom scholar, a Water Tribeswoman, a fat-cheeked child.
"And your circumstances are not the same as the others," the spirit crooned, voice velvety. "This will be an entirely new process. Something that has never been done before."
Ozai arched a brow at that, glaring. He'd had more than enough of lending himself out in the name of experimentation. That was ultimately what his marriage to Ursa had been, in his father's eyes. Azulon's calculated trial of combining two bloodlines, little more than partnering a stud and bitch in heat to see what the union produced.
At least when he fucked his wife there hadn't been much likelihood of dying.
The thought of Ursa sent something hot and violent shivering down his spine. Broken glimpses of her flashed through his mind – the way her hair had fanned out across the bed the night of their wedding, the bright glint in her eyes as the curtains rose from the theatre stage on Ember Island, the look of utter devastation on her face when he had lied and told her he'd had her old lover killed.
Ozai's hands balled and unclenched, the tips of his fingers aching with the absence of heat that used to course through him. Sparks ought to have rolled off him in that moment of rage and misery, a smoky haze rising from his shoulders, but nothing came.
He felt blindingly empty. Hollow. Little more than a scrap of charcoal.
"How?" he rasped at the spirits. "How will this be different?"
"Is there a solstice happening?" Koh asked, voice bordering on snide. "Is your body in a spiritually powerful place? Did you meditate your way to us?"
Ozai glowered at the spirit, refused to dignify its questions with any response. The answers, of course, were obvious – no, it was neither solstice nor equinox, his body was in a soldier's home somewhere along the ridge of the caldera and far from the nearest shrine or temple, and he had not made his way into the Spirit World willingly. Even if he had tried, his presence there should have been an impossibility – he was not a spiritually sensitive man, and only the most enlightened mortals were supposedly able to make contact with the spirits. That much he had gleaned from Iroh.
The silhouette of a thought formed in Ozai's mind, and seeing his amber eyes glint with comprehension, Koh continued.
"When the Avatar entered you — " Ozai cringed at the words, "— your energies competed for dominance. By exerting his will upon you, the Avatar unknowingly left a part of himself behind. That is the nature of balance. Nothing taken without something given. You would not be able to enter the Spirit World without it. That sliver of spirit connects you to us in a way that was only possible for Avatars before."
There was something in Koh's tone that suggested the spirit was just as aware of the irony as Ozai.
"You've also absorbed the power of a comet," it intoned, continuing its sinewy dance, "which is not to be discounted. Its effect on your grandfather was profound – longevity and strength beyond the usual span of years, virility included – and it will help your body resist the consequences of spiritual fusion."
Ozai flickered his eyes from Koh to the shadowy figure of Vaatu, shifting back and forth restlessly in the tree. He jutted his chin in the spirit's direction.
"All of which is speculation," he huffed, "and less than meaningless if I am to be… joined… with something that cannot leave the confines of this tree."
Vaatu stilled, and then a horrible sound filled the craggy expanse. Laughter.
"You misunderstand," the spirit intoned, voice thunderous with authority. "Even with the full power of your grandfather's comet and whatever the Avatar has unknowingly bestowed, I would destroy you. This is another way in which our arrangement shall differentiate from others. When Raava and I do battle, we lose parts of ourselves to the exchange – a little order and a little chaos dispersed with every blow. Instead of a full spirit, you shall be merged with a remnant of myself. Something more malleable, but which still carries my influence, my power."
Ozai found himself standing rigidly straight, his hands behind his back, his face ferociously devoid of expression. Even a sliver of a spirit's power was more than what he currently had.
His mind raced with the possibility. There were plenty of people – civilians, sages, high-ranking military officers – who remained loyal to him even without his bending. That number would only increase if his inner fire were to return, and it might even be possible to reclaim the throne from his son.
He could return to being Fire Lord. He could seek out vengeance.
"And my bending?" he asked, "How does that factor into this madness?"
"It won't be quite as it was," Koh answered, now wearing the guise of a theatrical dragon mask. "After all, it will be a product of the Spirit World, and therefore a sort of mirror or inversion. But it will flow with your chi as before."
"And aside from the still considerable chance that this…union… will kill me, what is the cost?" Amber eyes pierced unflinchingly through the vacant holes of the dragon mask. "You've said it yourself. Nothing is given without something being taken in exchange."
He took a threatening step towards the undulating spirit.
"What will I be giving you in all this?"
It was Vaatu who replied.
"Your afterlife, if you believe in such things," the spirit said bluntly. "Though you will be merged with more spiritual energy than most mortals, it will be like a contaminant. The Spirit World will not accept you wholly, but will be unable to reject you so long as I exist."
Ozai licked his lips, frowning. He had faced down dozens of assassination attempts, had fought more Agni Kais than he could count, any one of which might have spelled out his demise. Yet death – his own, at least – was a reality he had rarely contended with. He had planned for Azula to outlive him, tried to groom her for that inevitability, but had spared little thought for waited on the other side of the veil.
Such considerations had always been Iroh's, and so naturally, he avoided them.
"There will be changes, too," Vaatu continued, "but these will be more of your own making. Your grandfather's comet amplified your bending, my power will also amplify all that it recognizes within you. Anything that kindles chaos, disorder. Some of this you may have a measure of control over, some of it you will simply have to allow if you want to access all that will be made available."
So then, he would be surrendering not only his spirit in this exchange, but it seemed a portion of his autonomy, perhaps even his sanity. It was an increasingly raw deal.
"I should refuse," he said, as much to himself as to the spirits.
Above him, the strangely coloured sky darkened, clouds twisting and roiling in the angry semblance of entrails. Beneath him, the rough ground trembled as though shot through with thunder. Whatever force that bound Vaatu to the tree practically glowed with the strain of keeping the spirit contained.
Ozai's feet took him back a step without his mind commanding it.
"You could," Vaatu's voice boomed, seeming to ricochet between the various peaks of rock in the distance, "but to do so would mean losing any chance you have of altering your destiny. What waits for you in the mortal world if you return empty-handed? Shackles and the slow, shameful death of the defeated? You don't even have the warmth of another to go crawling back to."
Unbidden, Ozai thought of broad-palmed hands combing through his hair. His dispelled it with the same ease he might once have flicked soot from his fingertips.
"You have the opportunity to do what no one before you has done, several times over! Why squander your only hope of avenging yourself against the Avatar?" Vaatu persisted. "I remain bound to this prison for several decades, yet. The Avatar will have entered another incarnation by the time Harmonic Convergence arrives, when Raava and I will once again wrestle for supremacy. But, if you are able to kill this Avatar while he is most connected to Raava – while he is in the Avatar state – then the cycle will be broken completely. You will be rid of an enemy, as will I. Permanently."
Ozai drew in a deep, thoughtful breath. Despite his misgivings, the spirit spoke truth. There was nothing good waiting for him back in the waking world – as the soldier herself had said, his unusual transference from the prison was temporary. He would be rotting behind bars soon enough, while his son sat on a throne he had not rightfully earned and the Avatar flitted about, perhaps pulling the bending from any who opposed him.
The thought made Ozai bristle in a way he found difficult to name. His indignation at being stripped of his bending was, naturally, at the forefront, but there was something else. A vague sense of injustice that any one person could wield so much power, could so utterly decimate those who stood in defiance.
It was not the same as what he and his forefathers had done the world over, he told himself. It couldn't be. Theirs had been brutal, bloody work at times, yes, but they had not resorting to spiritual maiming. Death was an inescapable companion to conquest, but it was also natural. Whether one died in battle or in old age was simply a matter of circumstance. To be separated from one's bending, however – a part of oneself as intimate as breathing or as sex – was more than just cruel, it was unnatural to the point of perversion.
What did the Avatar know of the world, Ozai found himself wondering. He had emerged a century late, an antiquated relic of culture and philosophy no longer relevant. His beliefs were, by definition, stuck in the past. If he had a mind to, he could impede progress in an untold number of ways, force nations back from the peak of prosperity. The boy was heralded as a bringer of balance, but what he really would impose was a period of stasis. The realization washed over Ozai like a wave breaking on the shore.
He had not made it through his nearly fifty years without regrets by making poorly considered decisions – not as a ruler, nor simply as a man. There had been some mistakes, and grave ones, as his encounter with the Avatar had proven, but what Vaatu offered had the potential to rectify that and so much more. It seemed clear now that his defeat had been destined so that he might rise from it, imbued with an even greater power than before – well and truly phoenix-like. Not simply as a means to avenge himself, but to keep a foe from undoing all that he and his family had striven for.
It was no longer simply an opportunity to complete a task he had already devoted himself to. It was a duty.
Vaatu shifted restlessly in the prison-hollow of the tree, and Ozai raised his head to stare, intently, at where he assumed the spirit's eyes would be if it had any.
"Very well then. How do we proceed?"
The spirit Koh wove itself towards Ozai, leering through yet another stolen face.
"You'll want to hold very still for this, Fire Lord."
Ozai squared his shoulders, tried to relax his face into an expression of disinterest. It was disquieting, to know that his own pulse should be thundering in his ears at that moment, but to hear nothing. He did not like to be so separated from his organs, his skin, himself. He merely mimicked breathing, his spirit clinging to its mortal container.
Koh blinked, but no new visage was forthcoming. Instead, Ozai found himself staring into the impossibly dark gash, like a hollowed-out eye socket.
"The spirit that birthed Koh, the Mother of Faces, has the power to take and alter memory," Vaatu spoke from the tree, its voice level and smooth, almost as though trying to calm Ozai with a story. "With that comes the ability to give new faces, whole new identities. It is a transformative process, not unlike what happens when a spirit passes through the flesh of a mortal, but mediated."
"I possess the same power," Koh continued, smugly, "though I much prefer the act of taking faces, rather than giving them."
Ozai curled his lip.
"I did not agree to losing my face."
"Nor shall you," Vaatu assured him, twisting within the tree. "Koh is simply a vessel for my remnant, a way to ensure that bestowing you with my power won't have unintended consequences."
"How kind of you to volunteer," Ozai drawled before he could stop himself. From the corner of his eye, he could see something small and dark slither out from beneath Vaatu's tree.
The shadow slunk towards Koh, wound itself up the spirit's elongated body, and then squirmed into the gaping cavity of its empty face. The spirit shuddered visibly, thrashing, then several of its horrible legs struck out and held Ozai in place. With another mighty convulsion, Koh thrust its head down, nearly enveloping all of Ozai's own.
Something like smoke – but altogether too wet – prodded at his nostrils, his mouth, the corners of his eyes. Ozai shivered, suppressing the instinct the recoil.
Pretend it's a kiss, a voice suggested – whether his own, or Koh's, or something else entirely he did not know. Reluctantly, he parted his lips, and then spirit-remnant wormed inside of him.