Fire is the element of power.
That she remembered very well. She remembered her fire too, the warmth of her hearth and the heat the molten glass pressed against her through the sheets of scorched paper. The calefaction that rolled off when she twisted her tongs, stretched and spun her artwork.
Fire is life.
Her creations had never gone out of control but sometimes, when she pulled and cut and blew, she could swear she was breathing life into the glowing sand, steadily melting it into becoming something more. Something light and fragile, beautiful and full of colors.
She didn't make things live. She didn't make them dance and laugh and sing. No, the creatures she made of fire would go on to exist in the menagerie inside the china cabinet. They would grace the side tables of the living room and watch over the house, bear witness to the dog wetting the carpet and the cat scratching the drapes and the children torturing them both. Her craft would sit in the middle of the table, on its own or filled with flowers or surrounded by Thanksgiving.
Until they shattered, as all glass must, Lien's creations would be in the lives of many, a passing stranger or familiar friend. Longed for and forgotten in turn.
Such is the fate of art.
She could make her art again, like this. It would be hard, of course. Sand had to be separated individually, which would be easier if she was a bender of the earth rather than the flame. Temperature would have to stay consistent. And just because she could manipulate fire didn't mean she couldn't get burned. Zuko's face was a testament to that fact.
There was also the material she would need. Tweezers, tongs, a blow pipe, not to mention frit and ground joint tools…
All she had was herself, a walking talking kiln, and even then that was only if she could somehow manage to regulate her fire continuously.
It had a been a week since she first found it and in that time the closest thing she'd done to fire bending was accidently lighting Shuya's hair up.
Lien was lucky her mother didn't mind. It did bring up a question she had never cared enough to ask before though.
For as long as she had been alive in this world all she had was a mother. It was doubtful that she was Jesus, so the only conclusion she could make was that he father was elsewhere. Dead, alive, she had no idea. She was curious now.
Curiosity did kill the cat.
She was already dead so what did it matter?
Lien interrupted their dinner some days later with a quiet, "Mowm?" She wasn't pronouncing it right. The words were still giving her trouble here, enough that while she heard some off handed accent everyone else heard a speech impediment.
That didn't mean she was necessarily quiet. It just meant she would kick the shit out of any punk that tried to make fun of her for it. Mostly, that was her cousin.
Ghashiun was a prissy little brat, prideful already and full of himself, and obsessed with proving himself as good of a bender as his father, and his mother. Lien didn't understand how a seven year old was so obsessed. Maybe it was because he was seven.
Children were horrible.
They ran away, got sticky, and broke things. Lots of thing. Everything.
"Yes, Little Lien?" Shuya had knelt down while she was thinking about one of her predicaments. She was good about that, getting onto her daughters level. It was irksome at times, a reminder than she was still so young Shuya had to get on a knee to be at level.
"Was my father from the Fire Nation?" she quizzed. It was flat out, and honest. After all, what was she going to do, hide her bending her entire life? The desert was not the kind of environment where someone could afford to hold back any advantage.
Fire definitely counted as that.
Shuya didn't look angry or hurt or anything else that would signal that her meeting my father was a regret or a bad memory for her. The woman only looked surprised at the newly posed question.
"Yes, he was. You father was a Lieutenant in their army," she said. It was interesting, she said it simply. Like there was nothing to hide. Lien tilted her head. She had no idea what year it was or if they were in the war already. Or if it had passed by and she was going to have a run in with Korra and Asami. Hell, for all she knew she was back in the time when Wan was the Avatar. Or Roku, or Ko-what's his face?
Well, maybe not Wan. She hadn't seen any spirits running around and her people's stories went back too far for bending to be so new.
So, she was at least in the future. And judging by the lack of radios it was before then end of 100 Year War. Which left a lot of time that it could be.
Not that it really mattered. She knew how things went, and while they got bad and people were hurt in the end everything was fine. The Avatar won, darkness was kept at bay. And the desert went untouched, as it always was. No one was interested in its vast sand save those who surfed its waves.
It had no Spirit Vines nor any trees to grow. It was no agriculturally able environment. It might be a good place to imprison a water bender, but that was about it. Everything else was only for those who called the desert home. The Gansu, Hami, Jiuquan, Hohhot, Lanzhou, and Long-Shou, connected through the sand. There were more, surely, but those six were the largest of the vast region of the Si Wong.
It was their home, and how it was hers.
Strange, the struggle for survival was daily, but she had no desire to leave. Even though she probably could, could pack up and take off as soon as she was in her teens, she found that she didn't want to. Looking out at the sand around them she wanted nothing more than to wander them forever at her mother's side.
"What was my father doing here?" she asked, that thought still in her mind. There was no need for him to be there. They were fine just the way they were, with just her and Shuya. She had no need for a father for she had a dozen of them in Sha-Mo and the other men in the tribe. They were together, a family.
Shuya hummed, oblivious to her daughter's thoughts.
"People look for many things in the desert, Little Lien. Some seek to disappear, some seek to find things that have been lost. You father was one of many who come here to look for the great library of Wan Shi Tong. "
Wan Shi Tong. The giant owl that hated humans, who's library harbored dangerous secrets.
"Did he ever find it?" she quizzed, wracking her brain for who had been able to find the library that the series touched down on.
Shuya made a sound in her throat, deep down, and twisted her head this way and that. A movement that made almost exclusively by her people. It meant a lack of certainty.
"He asked our tribe to help him find it. We did try to help, but he was a very temperamental man. And we have little patience for people like him, who throw fits over the time it takes to sift through sand. He left after some time, fed up with our ways. When I last saw him he was taking a Camelephant into a sand storm."
That was a fine way to tell a little girl her father was dead.
Not that there was any other way to do it. The desert were harsh and shelter was scarce. The same was said about the people of the sand. Lien, who had died herself and lost the fear of it, nodded to show she understood.
"Alright. Will you ever find a husband?" she asked, switching topics. She wanted Shuya to be happy, but if she was being honest she liked the attention that the woman gave her. Very different from the lack luster attempts her first family had made at interaction. They were all too busy working or running around the city to pay her much mind.
She wasn't neglected by any means but it was a far cry from the close knit group that was her new home.
Shuya laughed softly, her low voice melodic. "Perhaps one day. Would that make you happy, Little Lien?"
"You make me happy," she said instead of answering, winding her arms around the woman's neck. Shuya pulled her close, and stood, bringing the girl up with her until her feet were dangling high from the ground.
She hoped that things wouldn't change too fast.
Learning to Fire Bend in the middle of a desert, surrounded by nothing but earth benders was… challenging, to say the least. It wasn't that she was without help. The Gansu did everything in their power to help her out, but there were some things that just couldn't translate from sand to fire.
For one thing, she generated her own element. There was no need to be connected to anything, as long as there was air so too was their fire to feed of that air. As long as there was air around her she would be able to generate her own flames. Which was a little weird, because there was nothing around to fuel the fire. Her energy, or chi, or whatever the hell it was must do it sufficiently or the fire would never ignite.
It was difficult to control, at first. Even with all of her knowledge on the subject there was difference between watching a cartoon and learning to control super powers.
She didn't bother with the leaf trick that Aang had started with. Lien knew herself and her body enough to know that she did not possess the patience and her body didn't have the ability to sit still for that long. Besides, she wasn't going to waste a leaf on something like this.
Instead, she used what they had in abundance.
Sand.
From the bottom up she worked, first with simple blasts and then with more power, and less, testing the extent of her abilities. The good thing about the desert was that there was nothing there to burn, so long as she stayed far enough away from camp to practice safely. The same guide lines were set up for the young sand bender too, so she didn't stick out too much in most regards.
Honestly, their lack of prejudice surprised her.
In stories like this there was always something. A dead parent, discrimination, childhood trauma, all of the above. There was only one thing like that in her life and she didn't even care about it. Sure Ghashiun was a little shit of a cousin but that was just a normal kid thing, and he didn't make fun of her for being a fire bender or a bastard the way he could have. He pulled her hair and pushed her down and mocked her pronunciation.
All because his mom liked to help her with her bending.
It was interesting, really. They could teach her everything but she was learning things in a way completely different from what she was sure she was supposed to. There was no doubt in her mind that she was going to be a very unique bender when she grew up.
After all, she wasn't flying around with kung fu of any sort. She was moving more like an air bender or a water bender than fire or earth. All of her people were. Because of the consistency of sand they had learned to adapt their bending to reflect its loose ways, and so she too learned to adapt, only she learned to adapt their moves into fire.
Which was easier said than done and easier done than expected.
Watching the show from her childhood Lien had never imagined that fire could be so flexible, so versatile. It moved with her, as long as she poured power and continuous energy behind it. Instead of short, powerful bursts the way of her people called for continued use and fluid movement, not harsh japs and spikes.
The way she was designing put in both.
She practiced for a days, weeks, months, and years, refining and learning, trial and error. Somethings were possible, some simply weren't, and she learned from her mistakes. Quickly. Nothing hurt quite like a burn in the desert.
Eventually, she even figured out how to control the fire enough she could get a Sailer moving. At first she thought she could create a small vortex the way everyone else did. It would have required very fine movements and hard fought sovereignty over the flames to keep them small enough not to burn the cloth but hot enough and moving just right to make a vacuum big enough it would push the glider along. Every time she tried the glider caught fire or it wouldn't move at all.
Which what when she switched to Plan B, and discovered that it was easier to brace herself on the back and send a jet off the aft. Like a rocket ship over the dunes.
Why she didn't try that before, who knew? Doing that though she found that she didn't even need to use the cloth for the sailer, and that she could go much faster than Ghashiun or any of his friends. At the same time, she could go for much shorter time, as well.
Everything had a balance, she supposed, and bending was no different.
Sailing was fun, but there was one thing that Lien loved more than anything else in the world.
Glass.
She found that she didn't need fire to make heat. She could do that individually, and if she focused it all into one finger she could draw designed of glass into the sand.
They weren't very pretty, to be perfectly honest. They were disasters. She was still a child, her fine muscle control was still lacking, and the glass she made was almost exclusively one color. She would have killed for something other than yellow by the time she was six.
When eight years in this world was up she finally figured out that it was possible to trade for what she needed. Not colored sand, in the Si Wong things were limited to shades of white and golds.
Which she could use, and her creations were good enough by then that she was able to sell them off again to traders and tourists at the Oasis' that her tribe frequented. The Beetle Headed Merchants especially liked her renditions of their name sakes.
It gave her the money to trade for long rods of colored glass from the cities and the south. Blues, red, green, and purples. Things that she could never find in the dunes. Thus, her business was started.
Life in the desert was hard, but she wouldn't trade it for anything.