Three Families Chapter 59: The Day of Black Sun, Part 2, an avatar: last airbender fanfic

"Another force," Zhao said darkly.

"Yes, my lord," the maimed Kurita said. "They've come straight out of the train-station to the west."

"That's inside our defensive lines," Kwon said, as he placed new markers, indicating forces of unknown size or measure inside the outer rim of Caldera City.

"The snow is parting, though?" Zhao said.

"The wind is still up, so it's blowing. Visibility on the ground is terrible," Kurita said.

"As long as visibility in the sky isn't," Zhao said. His good eye pulled into the glower that his burned one had perpetually. "Get the airships into the sky, this minute. The Eclipse is coming, and when it hits, I want every one of those peons on the ground to be diving for cover, not killing my soldiers."

"As you command, Fire Lord," Kawareta Kurita said, bowing in salute, before turning and departing back out of the war-room. He was not going to lose today. He knew that for a fact. But how he didn't lose today, that fell upon him. Azula's visions were from her perspective. She hadn't seen all of what went into the Avatar's defeat. That was the only way Zhao could reconcile the omissions in Azula's record. But what she had seen, that would be enough. Enough warning. Enough advantage.

It had to be.

The crack of wood striking wood was the only warning that Kori got, before he was cast hard into the wall beside him. The impact sent stars through his vision, and he was pretty sure that he dislocated his shoulder, but nothing seemed broken. So it would be a fix of seconds instead of hours. After he shook off the worst of the blow, he tried to see what had waylaid him. What he saw was a chaotic whorl of air and shimmering light, one that he in his haste hadn't noticed. "Noted," he said to himself, pulling water from his clothing to lay, glowing, to his shoulder. When the pain had dulled to numbness, he picked an opportune door-frame, slammed his shoulder into it, and popped his arm right.

It still hurt like hell.

After hissing and rotating the worst of the pain out to water which still glowed, he pressed the water into ice and kept going. The Royal Palace was about as dangerous as the shores of hell, it seemed. There were certainly enough people running through the halls as he passed them. Some of them looked as injured as he. Not all of them military. Part of him wanted to be impressed that Zhao hadn't immediately turned tail and fled into the bunker in the mountain, but it occurred to Kori that if the volcano had indeed erupted, then it was entirely possible that the bunker was currently full-to-the-ceiling with molten rock. Of course Zhao would stay. Leaving meant giving up. He was nothing if not persistent.

This was the second time that something blocked his way from the direction he'd wanted to go. The first had been a free-floating blaze that allowed no smoke, but couldn't be quenched by any amount of water that Kori threw into it. If he'd been a more suspicious person, he might have presumed that somebody was trying to delay him. He just knew that he was damned unlucky.

He'd taken his third preferred path toward the Children's barracks when he finally saw one of his kind. "Stop! Hideo!" Kori shouted. The Child with the shaven head and pale brown eyes stopped in his race, and turned back. Unlike Kori, he was wearing the full armor of his station, red and gold, segmented like a serpent.

"Kori?" Hideo asked.

"Yes, long time, no see, couldn't live without me," Kori said, waving away questions which weren't coming. "Where's Junyo?"

"Junyo?" Hideo asked. "Why do you need her?"

"Matter of life or death. About the Fire Lord," Kori said, a lovely lie of omission.

"Didn't know you were still one of us. Thought you'd run away when Zhao took over."

"Me?" Kori asked, with insulted tone. "Run away? Do you take me for some faithless harlot, who jumps into whatever warm bed will have me? I have some loyalties."

Hideo scoffed, and nodded. "Fair enough. She's not at the barracks. She's at the Periphery."

"The Periphery? The Children are already fighting at the Periphery?" Kori asked.

"Will be soon," Hideo said, motioning Kori to follow. When he did, Kori noted that they were following a line of grease-paint on the floor which snaked from time to time around hazards both obvious and not. "Bastards brought a new force from right off the trains. Zhao hadn't kept a reserve, they would have had a clear walk to the Upper City."

Pity. "I need to talk to Junyo as soon as possible. Take me to her."

"Didn't know you could pull rank," Hideo said, casting a glance over his shoulder.

"We both know the only rank within the Children is the ones we choose to follow, and above that, the Fire Lord. I haven't forgotten how the Children operate," Kori said testily. Hideo nodded at that. But he was mercifully silent. Hideo was a firebender, true, but more concerning was that Kori put him squarely on Zhao's side of the in-unit civil war that Kori was about to spark. He hoped he wouldn't need to kill Hideo. It was a bad war, when brother fought brother, even if they were brothers only through lies, deceit, and kidnapping.

Then again, this was definitely a bad war.

"What are you going to do when you find him?" Katara asked. Azula puffed out a breath, which steamed before her even inside the bottom room of the tower.

"I don't know," she said, finally releasing the sleeper-hold she'd clamped onto the only guard not currently frozen to a wall or unconscious from being battered about. "But that's not your problem. The guards aren't going to be able to stop your sister. You know that. So keep her away from me. If you can save her..." Azula trailed off. Then she took a fresh breath, letting it burn in her lungs, so the words would come out. "...good luck."

Katara seemed stunned by the words of encouragement. She ought, because they were hard enough for Azula to give. She turned away from the waterbender, her once bane, her once killer, and headed inward. They'd been sensible, and put their entire force at the choke point, to ward off whoever was invading. Sadly, choke-points only work when the force attempting to press through was larger than the choke could allow. Two master benders, of whom one was Azula, could stomp flat just about anything that the so-called Fire Lord would have spared for this place. It was a prison, and in any other day, a very secure one. Not today.

The stairs passed under Azula's feet in a sort of blur, the naked and uninteresting ascent disappearing into the focus toward what she would find before her. There was a chance, even a small one, that she might be able to rescue Father, and be away before Katara found her relative. There was equal possibility that the Tribesman could have come and gone and took Azula's father with her... but the continued presence of guards – until she and Katara had bludgeoned them into unconsciousness – made that highly unlikely. That alone gave Azula hope.

She knew she should be being more cautious, however, it was hard to be cautious when time was so short, and the stakes so high. Even to herself, she couldn't really rationalize why she needed to do this, with this man who was-and-was-not her father. Every right thought told her that she ought not even be here. That this was a fool's errand to its very core. Every right thought, instilled from birth and long life after it told her that it was safer, better, to cut that cord and move on without him. To aid the Avatar – bizarre as the whole situation was – in his bringing down the Fire Lord, instead of larking off here. But while her brain said one thing, her heart... it wasn't so easily persuaded.

Ozai was her father. And despite everything, she still loved him.

She reached the highest floor, the most secure one in this place. The air was freezing even without this unnatural weather – for this was the tallest volcano amidst its brethren by far – so most firebenders had very little heat, other than that inside their own bodies, to sustain them. Without heat, the trinity of flame guttered and failed. The only place safer would be... well, the North Pole, perhaps.

Here, there was only one door. Great, iron bound. Thick and heavy. There had to be a half dozen locks, all visibly different from one another, each requiring a different key. She clenched her fist, forcing the heat of her breath, the air from her lungs, and the power from her very soul into it. She pressed it tight, against the thinness of the air, against the hellish chill. When her hand opened, fingers crooked and begging for wroth, the flame was a blue so pale it seemed almost white. An extension of her will, that hellfire lashed out, a whip only a finger wide, hotter than lightning, perhaps. It slashed up the bars and beams, the deadbolts and latches of all of the locks in one great swipe, flashing the metal away in a flash of sublimated bronze and a hot dribble of molten iron. She stormed to the great handle that pulled the beast, and braced her feet against the wall, heaving with all of her considerable might. The door groaned, and shifted, grating open to a ping of a final lock, which had been superheated but not quite destroyed, giving way.

Which made the door swing wider, and Azula land on her side on the floor. She pushed up off of the frigid flagstones quickly, before striking off the hole forming at her pantleg where it'd landed in the molten iron. She'd have to be more careful about that in the future. Firebenders might be able to resist heat better than most, but molten metal was still molten metal.

"Father?" Azula asked, as she stepped forward into the room beyond. It was cavernous, with grates near the ceiling to let cold air circulate. It was fresh, true, but her breath puffed before her with each exhale. She flicked a blue flame into her palm, letting it swell a pool of light away from her. They left him in the dark. That bastard Zhao left her father alone, cold, and in the dark. If she hadn't felt justified in setting him on fire before, she certainly did now. "Father, are you here?"

Her answer was a groan, one that stopped her step for a moment. This was what she'd come here for, but... even now, she hesitated. She shouldn't hesitate. It was not like her to hesitate.

Then again, it also wasn't like Azula to be sentimental, and to want to save somebody who'd betrayed her. Today was an odd day. She swelled the flare in her hand, and when she did, she saw him, his face turning away as though she'd almost blinded him.

His arms were chained as spread as they could be, his legs locked in fetters. His face had a gaunt look, and he was long unshaven; the beard from his cheeks now warred with the strand from his chin which had been more or less his trademark. No, he didn't simply look gaunt, Azula realized. He was emaciated. Wasting away.

"Father, I'm here. It's over."

"Of course it is," Ozai rasped. "And every time you say that... it never comes."

Azula paused in her approach. She wasn't exactly sure what he meant by that. Perhaps the dangling had simply left him exhausted to the point of delirium. "Just stay there. You'll be free soon."

"Freedom. Hah!" Ozai laughed bitterly. "That's a new one. I'll grant you that."

"What are..." Azula shook her head. The important things came first. She forced her blue flame tighter again, and blazed it along the iron chains holding Ozai's arm away. After a second or so, after the iron swiftly went from black to white, it popped, the metal unable to withstand the change so rapidly. His arm dropped straight to his side, before he slowly turned to look at it. He clenched and unclenched his fist, as though in disbelief, even as Azula repeated the procedure on the other side. "I'm... I'm glad you're alive. That Zhao didn't kill you."

"Of course you are," Ozai said, now rubbing at his shoulder. Golden eyes turned up to her, glinting in the light that she gave him. "Because you weren't done with me, were you?"

"I don't... know what you mean," Azula said, backing away from cutting the fetters. There was wrath in Father's face, one that was boiling to the surface as surely as a volcano from out the bottom of the sea. "You're my father. I couldn't ever abandon you. Not to this."

"Of course not. Azula would never do that," Ozai said, sarcasm dripping from his tones. "What do you want from me? Or was this enough? Does this placate your sadism?"

Azula took a step back. There was something severely, severely wrong here. "Father... are you alright?"

He started laughing. No, there was laughter, exemplified by the likes of Aang or Toph... this was cackling. He held his sides with bony hands – one of them marked with a jagged red line, and missing fingers from Zuko's lightning bolt all those years ago, his chest heaving as it blasted forth. When he opened his eyes again, the cackling coming to a slow halt, those eyes were bloodshot, and there was a nihilistic look to them that Azula had only ever seen once before; on the face of Avatar Aang, before they killed each other in Republic City.

Her instincts told her to back away, and this time, she listened to them.

Because of that, when he slashed down with both hands, cutting away his own fetters to a rattling of chains and a popping of metal, it was fast enough to hurl herself out of the way when he tore his arms forward in a snapping arc, and sent forth a pair of lightning bolts at her heart. It took everything Azula had to twist herself of the way, and the arcs still tore a burnt tear across the cloth over her stomach, its edges smoldering and stinging against miraculously only slightly (and therefore painfully) burnt flesh.

"Oh, everything's alright, phantom. You can't lie to me anymore... I know what you are..."

Chapter 19

Day of Black Sun, part 2

The Eclipse

The snow was making advancement difficult, a lot harder than it needed to be. The Ghurkas that fought with them often cut paths through the snow with their firebending, something to make those behind them a bit swifter to reinforce, but it was – literally – buying inches after spending a mile. Aang had the easy part; between his natural airbender grace and the waterbending that Katara had worked so hard to teach him, he could move pretty much however he pleased.

Well, if there wasn't an army in his way. The two had the advance dragged down to a crawl. He knew that there was only so much time until the Eclipse hit. And if he wasn't in place when it happened, then its best use would be utterly wasted. He had to get past them all. He could fly, yes, but with the snow clearing for the moment, that would make him a hopelessly obvious target. And if Azula was right, Aang did not own the sky. And besides... maybe there was some good he could do here, with the soldiers. How was right in that. They were all connected. Even if he wasn't willing to take lives... he could still help.

"Hail, Avatar," a Ghurka that Aang had never met before said, as he fell in beside the teenager. "We're moving, but not quickly. Those buggers have locked the streets up. We can't move past them without giving them our ass to bite."

"There must be something we can do," Aang said.

"Burn the Ward," the Ghurka said with a shrug.

"No!" Aang said, horrified.

"Just a suggestion, lad, one that would work, but just a suggestion."

"Well... come up with a better suggestion," Aang counciled. The Far Westerner uttered a laugh, and moved forward, joining the Dividesmen and Omashuans that were following in the wake of their 'scouts'. The deeper they went into the city, the closer those hellish vortexes of chaos became. In a lot of ways, it was a lot like navigating the heart of Sentinel Rock, only worse, because there were more things trying to kill him.

The advance stopped not far ahead, at a din of lightning cracking that spanned from building to building. From the smoke and cut-through wood at its edges, it entered those buildings as well, with no care for structure or inhabitants. The Ghurka gave a look around, but could only shrug, and turn back, retreating down the path he'd cut.

"Wait," Aang said. The Westerner paused as Aang approached the lightning wall. He had pretty much no clue if this would work, but he had to try. He pressed his eyes closed, letting wind rip at his hair as it blew snow past him and into the lightning. He calmed his breath, his hands cupping before him. Slowly, almost gingerly, he reached a finger toward that wall, and thought to the lessons that Azula had taught him.

Lightning could be redirected. The bolt from the heavens could be cast aside, as long as you pull it down, before letting it go away. He'd never practiced, as even Azula wasn't willing to throw lightning at him to give him a practical test. He just had to open the path. Just as Malu had taught him in their meditations, the paths of power that she was so intimately familiar with; the paths which had led to her freedom. His past and – hopefully – his future, teaching him what he needed to know, for this very moment.

His finger touched the field.

In an instant, the unspeakable power of the rip in the fabric of reality raced into him, intent on blasting him to a cinder in the beat of a hummingbird's heart. But he didn't resist that power, didn't give it any jags to hook and claw at. He just let it flow. A push of force, his very life-essence, directing the force into his gut. It swelled him, in a metaphysical sense; he felt over-full, like he'd eaten eight times as much as he should have (Roughly twice as much as Sokka would be content with, in other words). It was a pressure that pushed outward at his skin, trying to detonate him like one of Nila's bombs. But then, he opened the path upward. The energy, unable to find its ground so easily, surged up, tracing a line to his fingertip.

Then, with a mighty crack, the bolt that seemed almost as thick as Aang snapped into the sky, as for a split-second, the entire city was illuminated as though by half a dozen suns. Unconscious airbending was all that saved he and those behind him from being utterly deafened by the thunderclap it produced. Windows shattered for a mile. When he stopped, he felt... hollowed, somewhat. But the wall of lightning was gone, and their path forward was secured.

"...by the lord of thunder..." the Ghurka said, his usual humorous dismissal nowhere in attendance.

"I had good teachers," Aang said, before shaking his head. "Come on! We have to go!"

"On the Avatar, lads!" he snapped, not loud enough to carry far, but enough to reach those who'd almost turned. They began to surge past Aang, who took a moment to catch his breath. The firebender clapped a hand on Aang's shoulder for a moment, his head shaking in something between humor and awe. Then, he headed forward with his men. After final purging breath – and a crackle of hair standing on end, he began forward as well. They started at a march, but the lightning wall had prevented snow-drifts, so they soon began to jog. Then run.

"Take the Mouth! We need that road!" one of the Earthbenders called.

Aand nodded, and prepared to bound forward. As he'd just cleared the ground, though, something impacted him from aside, and the two were carried into a snow-coated garden beside a tenement housing. Aang almost elbowed his assailant in the head with a flaming smack, but he stopped himself when the words reached him.

"Stop you fool!" Nila shouted at him.

"What?" Aang asked.

"LOOK!" Nila shouted, thrusting a tattooed hand down the street. The fastest, those who'd run hardest, were starting to collapse to the cobbles. Those behind, they stopped running, looking around for whatever had slain their fellows. Then, one by one, they too collapsed to the ground. Aang blinked at that. What was going on? Archers? He didn't see any arrows...

"What am I looking at?" Aang asked her. She pointed very nearby. The street-corner they'd almost reached.

Hanging across, corner to corner, was a shimmering silver spider-web, suspended just at neck-height. "Everybody stop!" Nila screamed. One soldier didn't stop soon enough, passing through that web as though it were immaterial. Those that stopped, looked to them in confusion and alarm. A few seconds later, the man in the center of the road, just past the web, got a stunned expression, then fell straight forward onto his face. "It is a Symbiont," she said. "Touch it, and your heart bursts in your chest."

"What... what do we do about it?" Aang asked, getting up as she rose from atop him.

"Avoid it at all costs," she said. "This is as much my battleground as yours, Avatar."

"You're right," Aang said. He looked around. "Where do we go from here?"

"That street is a death-trap," Nila declared. "If it were not, the Fire Nation would be there already. We must find another way."

All eyes turned to Aang. "I'd listen to what she says," there was silence in the street, but for the din of nearby battle, the wind, and the nervous shuffling of those who hadn't suddenly and to them inexplicably died. The silence stretched. "She's the Dragon's Daughter."

At that, there were a chorus of affirmatives, and they began to split, looking down each path not spanned by the web which was likely the first of many dangers. Nila looked mildly annoyed. "And of course only my mother's name forces them to see sense," she muttered.

"...where's Sokka?" Aang asked the obvious question, as the Tribesman was nowhere to be seen.

"As far as I know, he is back that way, somewhere," Nila said, waving roughly the way they came.

"I hope he's having better luck than we are," Aang said, as he picked a road at random, and began to scout a new way forward.

The Salamander lurched as he fumbled with the controls, but nevertheless, it clattered up the street, scattering the confused Fire Nation soldiers who found their technology suddenly turned against them.

"Son, why didn't you tell me you knew how to drive this thing?" Hakoda asked. Sokka flinched as he steered a little wide, and the spiked wheels cut through the corner of a building.

"Because I didn't know I could until two minutes ago?" he offered. Hakoda stared at him a moment, face impassive.

Then, he laughed. "That's my boy."

Katara flinched as a blast of flame erupted from the windows high above. The blast was bright and scarlet, the kind of flame that Azula only did when she was trying to hide herself. Katara was well aware that Azula would see no need to conceal her identity here. Which meant that somebody really powerful, really desperate, or really stupid was attacking her. She turned, to run from the heart of the inner bailey and into the tower, ignoring the little voice in her head telling her that she was running into mortal peril to save Azula, the girl who kept trying to kill her.

That little voice was little for a reason. The much bigger one demanded that she never turn her back on people who needed her.

She skidded to a stop before the doors, and heaved at them. The metal of the doors, a brass that was polished to a mirror shine, didn't hold any snow, but was heavy as a guilty conscience, and about as easy to shift. She'd got it barely open enough to squeeze through – and how did Azula both open and close it so easily, she wondered – but before she did, she caught a glimpse of something, just out of the corner of her eye. A reflection on shining bronze.

A whip of flame searing out toward her.

Katara whipped her hands out, tearing the snow from the steps into a flowing shield, one that coalesced just before the fiery impact struck her. It still knocked her back a yard, slamming her back into the other, closed door. A twist, and it was now a pair of fluid hammers, compressed and ready to blast outward as water compressed was wont to do. She almost lost control of them when she saw who'd tried to sucker-flame her.

The assailant pulled the flame back to herself, wrapping it 'round her like a fiery ribbon, one she kept shifting and twisting between her hands and around her body as though manipulating some sort of recalcitrant serpent. The clothing she wore was rag-tag, obviously put together from a number of outfits. Thick, and wrapping her from neck to ragged feet. But the face above that ragged, self-made parka was as dark as Katara's own. And looked a lot like it, as well.

"You," Hikaoh said at a hiss. "How could I have known you'd be here?"

"Hikaoh, you don't know what you're doing," Katara said, stepping away from the door, if only so she wouldn't be blasted through it. "You don't need to go through with this."

"I think I do, Tribesman," she answered, her words starting to slip into an accent. One that Katara, a novice in the language of Huo Jian, shared. "After all, I can see your assassins are trying to kill the Fire Lord."

"Azula is not going to hurt her father," Katara said. And wasn't that an odd thing to say, and mean?

"Azula?" Hikaoh's face twitched. "I should have known. The Avatar too, I would guess. It doesn't matter. I know my duty."

"It isn't your duty!" Katara said.

Hikaoh answered her by lashing forth a great wave of flame, rippling out from her control as would any water-whip of Katara's. She skirted aside, and then had to twist the water under her thrall to catch the back-slash that Hikaoh instantly transitioned to. The impact of flare and flowing snow erupted into a blast of steam, one that sent Katara rolling back. She caught her footing though, in a move that had been drilled into her head in Summavut. Never lose your feet on the ice. Always reach your feet. And never let the firebenders see your back. Hikaoh hurled a blast of fire, as though snapping it off and flicking it at Katara, before shifting toward the doorway that Katara had vacated. That, though, was easy enough to duck.

She reached up, grabbed the snow, and surged it forward. With a wave, she slammed up a barrier before the entrance to the tower. Hikaoh skidded to a halt, staring at the wall where once an entrance stood, before throwing angry blue eyes over her shoulder. She puffed out a snort that came with smoke. The fire which singed and seared at her sleeves continued to roil, as she put her back to the wall, and gave Katara her full attention. "I should have killed you in Omashu. It would have saved the Nation a lot of trouble."

"You didn't, though," Katara said. "A part of you has to know why you didn't. It has to remember who you used to be!"

"It doesn't matter who I used to be!" Hikaoh screamed, and spun into a great flash of flame, the ribbon expanding and lashing out as a knife the size of Appa. Katara didn't even bother trying to ward it. She just hurled herself out of the way, landing at a skate, twisting and sliding backward to a safer halt; the spot she'd been standing was now not only devoid of snow and filled with steam, but baked black as well. "Everything I am, I am because of the Fire Nation!" she continued. "They gave me everything! Food, shelter, a home. Your people threw me away!"

"You were stolen!" Katara shouted at her. "You were taken from Dad and Sokka and me, the same day Mom died. They killed her because she wouldn't stop fighting for you!"

"A likely story," Hikaoh snapped. Her arm spun around behind her, but this time, it didn't bear the ribbon of flame that still rippled along her, a dragon that followed her every command. No, when this spun, it spun with lightning. "And an obvious lie."

Hikaoh cast out her hand, and with it, came the thunder. Katara pulled all of the snow around her into a great shell, one that the lightning in its disparate strands struck, but didn't breach... though the force did cast Katara off her feet. She slid backward, before grabbing the shards of ice that flew past her with the blast, and ramping them behind her so that she was forced to her feet. Never lose your footing. Never show your back. "Why would I lie to you, Hikaoh?" Katara asked.

"You want to distract me while Azula kills the Fire Lord," Hikaoh said. Lightning in one hand, fire in the other.

"Why would she do that? She loves her father, for reasons I can't possibly understand," Katara snapped back.

"Stay out of may way, or I will kill you," Hikaoh promised.

"I don't think you will."

Hikaoh's eye twitched, and she answered Katara's fairly optimistic prediction with a blast of flames.

"How long?" Zhao asked.

"Eight minutes to the eclipse," Kwon said, as he read through short-hand reports at a fevered pace, despite looking as bored as a man waiting for his wife to finish shopping. "The airships are in position.

"Fire Lord!" A call came from the door to the side of the room. Zhao turned, his burned eye locking on the military runner. "We have a report from the forces in Teisehri Ward; the Avatar has been definitively seen with the forces of the Blue Turbans."

"Blue Turbans?" Zhao asked. He steepled his fingers, staring at the maps as though they would divulge new secrets to him with naught more than an angry staring. "Of course. He doubtless built that movement from start to finish. How else would it have taken Grand Ember City without his meddling?"

"Our reserve forces are engaging the forces to the West," Kwon continued. Fortunate that he'd had the presence of mind to keep a force held back; if he hadn't, then that sneak-attack would have had a clear run up Ashfall and into the Upper City. As it was, they had a hell of a fight on their hands.

"Have them pull back to the Periphery," Zhao ordered. "Let them fight their way to us, rather than make us fight to them."

"As you command, Fire Lord," the runner said, before dashing away once more. The forces would hold. He knew that. While they would lose a significant amount of their martial capacity for the eight minutes of the eclipse, they would not buckle. He knew that, because he had learned a lesson in fighting the Whalesh, those years ago; never overspecialize. Never fight in a single-unit force. Never leave a gap in your battle line, even one that doesn't look like a gap.

And when firebenders find themselves unable to firebend, don't leave the unit exclusively of firebenders. When the Avatar's forces tried to press the army back, in what they assumed would be a time of abject and one-sided slaughter, they would find the finest halberdiers, mortarmen, and pyroclasts awaiting them, and ready to push back even harder.

Kwon cleared his throat, and Zhao looked up once more. A new runner, on the other side of the room. "Fire Lord," the young woman in the thick coat and minimal armor said, bowing swiftly. "The force to the East has breached the Seawall."

Zhao nodded, and stared at the maps. He had every advantage, he could see that. He just needed to leverage them all, in the way most effective, for everything he's got. If there'd been one thing that Azula's prophecies had taught him, it was that nothing ever came easily. Even with complete foreknowledge, it was still an honest fight. At least, this time, when it was over, there would be no doubt as to who the true master of this land was.

Zhong slammed his fists into the stone, and ripped down and away, his bending rippling up the face and tearing it apart, sending it sliding down in a wave. The battlement crumbled at its head, but he didn't spare much time or thought for those poor souls up there. He had a task that needed doing. The air above was clearing, which had the unfortunate effect of giving those battlements a clearer shot on those who were pressing forward through the snow. Long Feng's forces were being hammered. It wasn't until they all moved to one side of the through-way, and brought down all the battlements able to fire on them, that they made an advance with a degree of peace.

The number of crippled Salamanders left in their wake was honestly somewhat staggering.

"We need through the gates!" the call came over the wind. Dai Li were moving forward, trudging through the snow with none of their usual, skating grace. This was a place which suited none of the people involved in this fight. Too cold for the firebenders. To snowy for the earthbenders. A waterbender here would be in hog-heaven, but alas, they had none of the sort.

Zhong looked up the mount, which was slowly becoming visible as the drifts died down, as the storm moved from snowing and wind, to simply wind. When he did, a great shape appeared briefly, almost invisible against the clouds above. If he hadn't been looking for it, he might have missed it. But he saw it. And he had a pretty good idea what that meant.

He ran, letting his feet dig into the wall and race along that, rather than try to go up the middle as so many other Dai Li were doing. His pace was easily four times theirs; he bounded off the corner and continued onward, until he reached the ramp where the Millipedes had halted. The gate before them was a great, iron portcullis, a mass of metal and concrete that would have stopped any Western threat in its tracks. Sadly, that wasn't what faced them today. Another Dai Li, snow caked up to his hips, reached a spot aside him, and the two shared a look. The agent still under his conical hat gave Zhong a nod, then began to run, straight up the face of the wall.

Zhong followed suit. After all, he didn't want to be seen being upstaged. His earthbending created jumping points, and he bounded up with much the same speed of the other, although not as much of the grace. When they reached the top the two perched, only for a moment, on the edge of that great blockage. Then, with a single breath to calm his nerves and harden his heart, Zhong took a step forward, spinning to face the wall as he did. He dragged his hand down, slowing him slightly, but cutting a great and deep furrow through the stone; the stone, shifted such, ripped the metal that was there to hold it in place apart. Two earthbenders carved gaping wounds in the gate, and when both reached the base, the other earthbenders that awaited them moved as one, a great and bodily shove. There was a groan, and then a cracking as the entire gate, and the walls surrounding it, tipped and fell back. The crash of it rumbled back to all who would listen. Then, the Millipedes continued their advance. Zhong put his hand above his eyes, and looked to the Periphery, the last line of defense before entering the Upper City. There would be Long Feng's greatest resistance. And as with so many others, pushing in against retreating firebenders, they moved toward the switchback road, through the streets, and into the Lower City.

Waves of scarlet flames lashed out at Azula as she hurled herself through the doorway. A part of her brain that was strictly calculating chided the rest of her, citing that there was no realistic reason for her to believe that her father would hold any love for her. Of course, that part was promptly backhanded by the rest of her, the part of her which had been long suppressed. The part of her which, in the Avatar's company, had developed into a full-fledged aspect of her personality.

Even as she skidded to a halt, some smoke still wafting away from the singed parts of her clothing, she was torn between not wanting to die, and not wanting to hurt her father.

"You don't know anything about me!" Ozai roared from inside that room. "You are the one who stole everything from me! I could have lead the Fire Nation into glory! An eternal age of advancement and culture!"

He rounded the corner, fires burning the very sleeves from his arms. It was then that she noted that, despite his gaunt face, he still had a great deal of ropey muscle still about him. He lashed out, both fists casting a pillar of flames toward her. She twisted a shield of azure fire, one that forced the flames down, and by reaction, forced her upward. She used the momentum to spin to her feet, before twisting that barricade so that the assault slid past her, blowing a hole through one of the walls. Father had always been a spectacular firebender. She'd only faced him once before, and that had been less of a fight and more a father spanking a disobedient four-year-old.

Maybe because, even then, she didn't want to hurt her father. That even then, she wouldn't fight to her utmost against him.

"I didn't choose this!" Ozai screamed as his flames snapped away, flowing out the wound in the tower that he'd made.

"Father, stop!"

"No, I can't stop," he roared, and lashed out with a kick that sent a blade of flames toward her. She rooted her footing, her stance as wide and low as an earthbenders. Her hands, crossed before her chest, held forth 'blades' of blue flame, jets that curved down with her arms. When one blade struck the others, there were no sparks, as were in the passion-plays where warriors clashed with shining steel. Instead, a blast of black-smoke, a thud of force, and Azula knocked back a step. "Everything I've done, I did for the Fire Nation! You are lying!"

"You think I don't know that?" Azula shouted back. "You think I don't know that you – oh hell!"

She was cut off by bolts racing toward her, lightning pulled from nothing in a fraction of a second. It was a form that had taken Azula a lifetime to master; admittedly, one seldom spent on learning firebending forms. The lightning crackled and boomed, her hair trying to stand on end even as she landed at a roll. Fresh stones crumbled down where the lightning had made a fresh wound in the walls.

There was something going on that she didn't quite understand. The obvious sign was that he was referring to conversations that she and he had never had. But what was the nature of those words that had so incensed him? If she could figure that out, then there might be some way to end this... without bloodshed.

She had less than a second's respite before the whoosh of flames sounded once more. Racing directly toward her, his feet and back-cast hands spewing rockets of flame, came the once-Fire Lord, skating into a tackle upon a cushion of propulsive force. She had no time to move, from her awkward, recovering stance, when the man caught her with iron-like arms across the midriff and the burn thereupon, and cast her and he both out the hole in the wall, to a great and terrible plummet. She slammed her hand against his head, pushing away just enough that she could hook her feet up and into his now descending chest. A blast of blue fire, directly into him, sent him rocketing away from her, and back into the tower, if two levels lower then they'd left. Her aim wasn't precise – understandable given the circumstances – so he deflected slightly off of the window as he landed. That had to hurt.

It was a much more graceful twist that she managed next, bringing her own fists and feet downward. She paid no attention to the fight below her, the water and the flame clashing, ice and snapping lightning attempting their respective non-lethal and lethal coups de grace. Her own task demanded enough of her already. A blast of flames, of force, and she was rocketing toward that same tower. She had a touch more control, though. She ripped the pin holding her hair in place, and slammed it into the rock when she impacted. It was a rough grab, but her impromptu piton held her long enough that she could swing into the next window.

She looked around. The room was vacant, seemingly long disused. The fact that there was a small drift of snow on the floor next to the window told that story well. For the moment, she could catch her breath. Considering the force that Father had struck her diaphragm, she needed it. "Your intention was never in doubt, Father, least of all by me," she attempted. She had an intuition, one she could nary explain nor disregard, that she could talk him down from this lunacy. "But..."

She let the word trail off. Please, she thought, let this work.

"But everything went wrong," Father's voice came, a whisper through the wall. "The Water Tribe was a disaster. So much... blood on my hands. I can't ever be clean of it. I thought..." a long pause. "No. No, I know what you're doing. You can't kill me with your tongue, you little witch!"

Azula had barely enough time to think 'well, damn' before a fresh blast sent the wall blossoming toward her. Being struck about the chest and face with stones wasn't her idea of a useful conversation, but it wasn't like she had much choice in the matter. She spent a moment on the ground, under the debris, trying to shake the stars from her vision.

"And you weren't even there. Of course not," Father continued. "I did what needed to be done! If he'd taken the throne, I can't even imagine the destruction! We would have collapsed into a civil war!"

Azula slowly pushed the bricks and wood off of her, attempting to be as silent as she could. She could hear him, walking past the wall next to her, the one to the hall beyond. This one, that he hadn't yet destroyed. She spat a bloody gobbet to the floor, then moved to the door that he'd walked past, or else through. "And how does that differ from what you face now?" Azula asked, trying to keep the pain from making flubs of her words. Ozai spun to her, his beard waving, his eyes burning as surely as his fists.

"It... I... You don't have any concept of what I've had to do!" he shouted, casting a hand aside, and baking the wall with a wave of flames. "The sacrifices that I've made! Personal sacrifices! Things I will never have again!"

"And why not?" Azula asked. "Why sacrifice me?"

"I had to!" he shouted. Almost begged. "It was the only way! I needed a strong heir, and without you... I had so much invested in you. I knew that you would be the stronger but... but you just had to..." his face bunched up into a rictus, and he lashed out again, a pair of fiery blasts, twining together like rope and burning what wood stood anywhere nearby. Azula had to flinch back, and carve that rope back into its blazing twine, allowing it to flow past her, to wash over rocks and plaster.

"What? Become ill? It was my fault?" Azula shouted back, heat rising in her voice.

"Yes!" he screamed, as the flames died down. Then, he paused. "N...no..."

"Father, you didn't have to..."

"No. You're trying to confuse me again," he snapped, his head shaking briskly.

"Why? What have I to gain?" Azula asked. Ozai just stared at her.

"You're bleeding," he said. His head tipped down, his posture less a regal firebending master, and more a rabid beast surveying a potential meal. "That means I can kill you."

If Azula'd had the time, she would have sighed. But Ozai, he wasn't one for letting his enemies have a chance to breathe.

"Alright, so you've got something to tell me, do you?" the de-facto leader of the Children demanded, as Kori rubbed his shoulder from where he'd been given a rude shove. "Out with it. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're in the middle of being invaded right now!"

"I'm not an idiot, Junyo, despite what you'd like to believe," Kori said. "I said a word in private."

"We don't have time for privacy," she said, turning once more to her earthbending ilk amongst those who fought for the Fire Nation. Directing them in their work. Preparing for the next step. Kori had a fair notion what it was.

"Junyo, please," Kori said.

"Here, or nowhere," the rotund young woman demanded.

"Fine," Kori bit out. "If you continue to abet Fire Lord Zhao, the Avatar is going to kill you all."

A number of heads turned toward him, the work in the stone falling still. "...what did you just say?" Junyo asked.

"You've got to see the folly of this," he said, waving his hand toward the Periphery, where so many Fire Nation soldiers were readying to fight to the death against the invaders. "He's outnumbered, surrounded, and his enemy is an Agni-damned demigod. A demigod who'd not afraid to kill who will get in his way," Kori lied. He was pretty sure that Aang would go to ridiculous lengths to not kill somebody. But still, once the death of one was on one's hands, the death of another fell far easier, airbender or not.

"This is treason, Kori. High Treason," Junyo said.

"No. It isn't," Kori said. "This isn't an invasion, it's a succession crisis. It's one that's been going on ever since Zhao's unlawful coup. Don't pretend that you approve of what he's done to hundreds of years of tradition. That man should not be Fire Lord."

"And the Avatar is better?" Ishi, another of the earthbenders, asked.

"Not the Avatar. Princess Azula," Kori said. "Daughter of the deposed Fire Lord. And, from the looks of them," Kori motioned to the south, where the Blue Turbans were now mired in a street-to-street battle, "she's got a lot more support than Zhao does. I'm not asking you to spit on the people who raised us, gave us a home and a name and a purpose. I'm asking you to save it from him!"

There was a look in Junyo's dark eye, one that Kori couldn't place. He thought it was a woman deciding to kill him. She'd seen that look plenty of times in his life. Surprisingly few of them were from Maya Azul, if he looked at it as a ratio. She looked to the other Children, who now all looked down on the pair of them. Zhao, or Azula. Invasion, or rightful heir. There was indecision on a few faces, those close enough for Kori to make them out. On others... outrage.

Outrage for who, though?

"Restrain him," Junyo said, turning away.

"Wait, I..." Kori began, but was smashed in the gut by a brick. The words came out as a wheeze, and his hands, on the ground to keep him from landing flat on his belly, were quickly mounded by stones, which shifted together and clacked into stone manacles. His feet were given fetters. With a motion, the pair pulled Kori toward her, halting him with his arms stretched uncomfortably over his head. She leaned in close, her nearly-black eyes locked on his.

Then, she whispered to him. "Right idea. Wrong time."

"You don't need to..." Kori started, but with a back-hand, she slammed a gag of stone over his mouth. Had to keep up appearances, apparently. Kori took that opportunity – however involuntarily – to take some much needed sleep, as Junyo had not been gentle, and the backhand was delivered at a full swing with a powerful arm.

The world grew dark, as the Avatar followed in the wake of the Si Wongi guide. He looked to the clouds overhead, and the grey monsters contained within it. They quickly vanished against the clouds as they grew ever darker, and he turned to Nila. "We've got to go faster," Aang said. "The Eclipse is starting!"

He'd no sooner gotten the words out of his mouth, then what seemed red grains of rice began to rain down from those airships, a bombardment of explosives that rained down onto the switchbacking road that lead to the Lower City. Aang couldn't see the detonations, not even close, from where he stood. Still, he gave them a wince, and a prayer that the forces toiling unwittingly under Long Feng suffered little at worst, or escaped the destruction at best. Nila let out a scoff at the sight.

"Clever bastard. He knows his weakness, so drives us back so we can't exploit it," she muttered. Bombs fell too on the road ahead, the one leading straight up to the Periphery. Wasted munitions in that case; all of the sneak-attack force was currently filtering in trickles toward the edge of the western fringes. The ascent would be cruel, and under that bombardment, impossible in the time given.

"We've got to find some way to..."

"Need a way into a mountain without getting blown up?" Toph chimed in, shoving Aang aside with her metal baton; Nila had fashioned a more substantial aid for the metalbender when she'd had an opportunity to, apparently. "Step back, Twinkletoes. Let the boys of the East deal with this one."

"What about the volcano? All that magma?" Aang prompted, the flame that illuminated those close by fluttering in his hand as an errant gust took it.

"What do you think I am? An idiot? I'm not going that deep," Toph said. She turned to the others. "Hey! You guys, following the Avatar! Everybody follow me!"

"Really?" a Ghorkalai asked Aang. Toph looked outright insulted.

"Just for that, you're not allowed to come," she said, thrusting that rod toward him.

"Do what she says. We can't get trapped in this part of the city. Not with so little time," Aang said. Toph nodded agreement, then thrust her hands down and forward. The stone rumbled and cracked, a shallow decline to the point where the stone above them would hide them, and then, an ascent as swift as they dared. When that first tunnel was formed, she turned to the others, toward the back. "Keep this thing clear, and point anybody who isn't trying to kill us into it. Got it?" she ordered. The two men, with their strange contraptions lashed to their backs, gave solemn nods. Toph turned, her baton striking with a crack into the stones once more, a downright dramatic pose to her, and raised a brow in Aang's general direction. "Well? Are we just going to stand around here waiting, or are we going to knock an idiot on his head?"

"Have I ever mentioned how pleased I was to find her a part of this motley crew?" Nila opined as she turned to follow Toph into the pitch-black tunnel that she'd created. "At least somebody has a working mind."

"Why thank you, Nila!" Toph said back. Aang just shook his head, and with the flame in his palm stoked a bit brighter, descended under the earth, to dodge the bombers.

"The Eclipse has begun!" came the call from Zhong's rear. The Switchback was still mostly ahead of them, but the forces of the Fire Lord had retreated ahead of the advancing soldiers of Ba Sing Se in good order, lashing them with flames as they went. There was no glorious rout, as the generals in charge of this action had estimated. Instead, calm, controlled withdrawal. One which was put to the test, when a rank of Ostrich Horses, clad in barding and carried with such care and secrecy all the way from the Orient whence they came, broke ahead of the Millipedes which had survived the bombardment. They charged in the darkness, heedless of the terrain which might well break their legs, and readied to slam into the ranks of the firebenders who were bereft of their craft, and their only defense.

In theory, it would have cracked the line completely, and brought the firebenders down one and all.

In practice, the firebenders took a step back, and the rank behind them, who'd never so much as lit a spark, lowered and braced their halberds. While there was a crash of armored bird into line, it was immediately set to the song of dying animal and panicking man. Zhong gave a slow nod. "Combined unit tactics. Zhao's trademark," he said to those near him. He turned to those soldiers. "This will be a tougher nut to crack than I thought. Press, and don't waste any more birds; they'll just get themselves–"

Zhong went into a full body flinch as a blast of fire and force erupted about ten yards away. It staggered him, and leveled the soldiers near it. For the first time, honest panic set into the earthbender, who looked in all directions for that assault. The mortars wouldn't be able to launch something that massive, something that punched the air from his lungs even from so far away. Then, as earthbenders so seldom did, he looked up.

Airships. Almost a dozen of them. And they were raining bombs.

"Keep advancing!" Zhong ordered those whom he had no legitimate rank over, however was given something of an honorary title given his 'experience' with fighting the Fire Nation. "The only way to live is to reach the top!"

"Aye, commander!" one of the soldiers nearby said. He couldn't have been more than a corporal. And he was likely the highest ranked soldier within easy eyeshot.

"I'll deal with the mortars," Zhong offered, and began to turn directly to the wall before him. He twisted, bearing the stones under him, creating something of a wave of roiling rock that bore him straight up the face of the Switchback. He vaulted over the road which faced bombing from above. His neck was craned back constantly, and his course had to juke and dive to avoid the falling explosives, which landed with neither care nor descrimination. They only pounded down the center of the Switchback, leaving the corners, the edges, as safe havens for the Fire Lord's soldiers to regroup and dig in. Wise precaution. Millipedes, properly manned, could move up just as Zhong did up this comparatively shallow middle.

The darkness became almost blinding, as he raced toward the Periphery, the great lip of the volcano which separated the nobility from the common man. Also, one of the more well defended points of this city-stronghold.

Upward he raced, through the darkness and the explosions, the thunder of bombs and the screams of soldier and beast and tortured machine. He raced upward, past other earthbenders, oddly enough, who were just below the edge of the Periphery. Those earthbenders, Children all, noted his ascent for a stunned moment, before they broke off of their kneading of the stone and earth, and raced up after him. They hadn't his speed.

He burst up over the edge of the Periphery with such force as to fly into the air, landing at a roll on the platform of concrete which nearly ringed the entire fortification. When he did, he landed amongst dozens of young men and women, clad in armor red and gold, all of whom took in his green and brown hanbok with a moment of stunned surprise. Then, the earthbenders from below mounted that precipice themselves, and as one, sent a flight of bricks directly toward the back of his head. With a stomp, Zhong brought up a protective wall behind him, and the bricks burst against it. The others, the closest two, firebenders both, moved in unison, leaping forward with shouts of angry effort and blasting streams of flame into his left and right. A thrusting upward of his hands brought up even more stone walls, these ones rising at angles, forming a 'hut' over him, and deflecting the flames away and above him. He stepped out of that hut just in time for another firebender to try to send a flaming fist into his face. With a look of disappointment at the incapabability of this lad, Zhong leaned aside, and kicked the knee out from under him.

"Yoji? Where the hell are you?" Zhong shouted, unbuttoning his hanbok, as the Children began to swarm around him. "Yoji? Hell, Junyo? What about you?"

"Stand down or die where you stand," one of the firebenders, Oshi by name, shouted at him. Zhong, as he'd been calling himself, looked contemptuously toward him.

"You really are half-blind, aren't you, Oshi?" he asked, taking off the clothes of the men of the east, leaving him bare chested to the cold. In his side, there was an uneven star of scar-tissue, the bullet that had almost taken his life a season before. "Junyo? Come on, I know you're here."

"Well... I'll be damned," Junyo said, pushing aside the Children in her way. She looked him up and down. "They said you were dead."

"Reports of my demise were vastly premature," Zhong – or rather, Omo – answered her with a smirk. "Would you mind getting me some real clothing to wear? I don't feel like getting killed by my own troops."

"You were fighting with Long Feng's troops, Omo. You can't deny that," Hori, another firebender and about the most handsome of young men available in the West. Fortunate indeed that Yoji favored aptitude over appearance.

"Of course. I had to get out of there somehow," he said, motioning vaguely behind him. "By all means, kill them."

Junyo gave a nod. "Well? Are you just going to stand there like lumps, or are you going to keep these invaders from conquering our home?"

The Children, who'd been distracted by Omo, gave nods or bows toward Junyo, before dispersing once more. Junyo pulled a heavy coat from the body of a dead man, dragged here for triage and then abandoned, and tossed it to Omo, who slid it on without complaint. "Is what I've heard true? Ozai is deposed?"

"We're fighting for the glory of Fire Lord Zhao," Junyo said sarcastically, walking toward the edge of the periphery. The bombing continued, however it started to slow. There were lines of earthbenders below, though. Earthbenders in the gold and scarlet armor of the Children. And they were calling up a very particular kind of rock. "You're not the first one to point out the irony. Kori's over there, somewhere. I think I knocked him senseless."

"He probably deserves it," Omo said with a shrug. "And what of Yoji? I thought she'd be the one directing this?"

"Yoji... that's a long, and unpleasant story," Junyo said darkly. She leaned forward. And then, with a deep breath, bellowed down to those who waited below. "Alright! Wake the dragon!"

Landslides were common defensive features on raised fortresses. Gravity was a harsh mistress, and a little bit of weight released from a high place could kill a lot of people before it stopped rolling. This principle fell utterly flat when it came to earthbenders, though; they could simply shove the incoming attack aside. But earthbenders were all very used to one kind of stone. Very concrete. Very solid. Hard, brittle, sharp, even grainy, but there was one form that (almost) no bender in the East practiced with.

With a great heave, and a shout of battle from the earthbenders below, they began to bear up bright red magma from the mountain upon which they stood, and hurled it forth, still as hot as the heart of the earth, toward the Switchback. Omo didn't bother watching its effect on the earthbenders. They invaded his homeland. They were getting what they deserved. He looked Junyo in the eye. "So, what do we do about Zhao?"

She looked at him, and sighed, speaking quietly enough that her words were almost lost in the wind. "I haven't decided yet."

"Get out of my way, barbarian," Hikaoh shouted at Katara, who even now kept herself between the icy backdrop of the clogged door and the firebender Tribesman who tried to press past her. "I know my duty."

"Hikaoh, you don't need to go through with this," Katara pleaded. "Some part of you knows that this is the wrong thing to do. Some part of you knows that you're still a Tribesman!"

"The Tribes are nothing to me!" she screamed, whipping forward that strand of fire, that illuminated the land even as the Eclipse blackened the sky overhead. Everything Katara knew about firebending said that this should be impossible; if it wasn't, then Aang's invasion was doomed. And if it wasn't normal firebending... then it was something that lived at the ragged edge of the real. Something that could only be, in an age such as this. It was strange, the way she fought now compared to the way that the two had clashed last they'd met. It was easier to dodge, but harder to ward. As though she'd developed a style specifically to stymie Katara herself. The flames that licked in a savage rope around Hikaoh seared and singed at her clothing as they drew too close, as though she'd forgotten about their proximity, and only ever let them snuff by the cold and the wind. But unlike the undisciplined blasts, the cones and waves of flame, this struck with the lightning speed and surety of a viper, and Katara's only defense was to not be there when it struck, because when it landed, it did so with authority.

"That's a lie! You have a family, Hikaoh! We still want you back," Katara said.

Hikaoh stared at her, blue eyes locked onto blue. Then, with a twist that was more waterbender than firebender, she lashed out with that streak of flame, sending it straight into where Katara's chest would be, if she were so much of an idiot as to not get out of the way. Instead, the bolt slammed through the barricade that she'd created, and when it pulled back through, it shattered away a great chunk of it. She then pressed forward, intent on simply sidestepping Katara and doing what the madness pressed into her mind demanded. Katara tried to trap her sister's feet in the ice that she yet commanded, but Hikaoh simply leapt above it as it slid from liquid to solid, and rolled through the aperture that she'd created.

"Hikaoh, stop!" Katara shouted, shoving the entire mass aside as she bombed through after her. She immediately had to drag that water down in front of her, where a great deal of it flashed into steam as the flick of flames tried to take her head off. She ducked low, and slashed out with her ice, softening it only slightly, away from jagged shards, and into a slushy mess. That, with only so much flame, was not so easy to ward. The instant that some of it lapped at Hikaoh's ankles, she started freezing it. Hikaoh answered by slashing that foot with the flame, no doubt burning her own limb painfully, but it was enough to bound out, stumbling backward, with that whip of bright flames, liquidly flailing around her, before she sent it streaking at Katara once more. This time, Katara didn't bother warding. She just rolled aside, and sent her own slush forward again. This time, as there was no second flame to stop Hikaoh's assault, the slush flattened her to a wall. Even as Katara froze it there, she twisted the closer of the slush up and into the bolt of flame. With a twist, she sent that water down the entire length of it, snuffing it to its utmost. The fire was gone. And Hikaoh was going to be alright.

Katara pushed herself to her feet, and took a careful step toward her sister. "Hikaoh, I don't want to hurt you."

"Stop... calling... me... Hikaoh," she spat, the water starting to run in rivulets away from her skin.

"No. I am not going to let my sister – you! – die. Even if you don't believe it, I do. If I have to, I'll believe it enough for the both of us," Katara swore. "Please... stop this. Come home with us. Let us be a family again..."

"I had a family. Your assassin killed him," Hikaoh snapped.

Katara blinked for a moment, then understood. The man Nila shot in Ba Sing Se... he must have been Hikaoh's lover, or something. Maybe even husband. "That..." she didn't really have a good answer for that.

"You claim that you want me to 'come home', but I already had one. All you ever did was try to destroy it. I see no reason to believe a word you say," Hikaoh spat.

"Well, there is definitely something in you that wants to come back to us, to return to the Water Tribes," Katara said, fist on hip and confidence in tone.

"You're deluded if you think that."

"I know it for a fact," Katara answered.

"Then what would that fact be?" Hikaoh asked, obviously not going to believe a word of it when said.

"What language are you speaking right now?" Katara asked.

Hikaoh's mouth opened, then became almost rock-still. Slowly, her eyes widened, and her face went a little gray. She hadn't even noticed, Katara figured, that she'd spoken not a single word but Yqanuac since she appeared in that courtyard. But now? Now she noticed.

"This is a trick," she said. Still in Yqanuac.

"Hikaoh, I never wanted to hurt you. I just want my family to be whole again. And you're a part of that, whether you want to believe it or not," Katara said. "Ozai used you. He used all of you! He doesn't deserve your loyalty!"

"And what have you ever done to deserve mine?"

Katara sighed, and nodded. And with a hand, she waved downward. The ice which pinned Hikaoh to the wall dropped away, pooling on the floor. "I'm trusting that you're my sister," she said.

Hikaoh stared at Katara, barely three feet from each other. Her fires were gone, her singed, soaked clothes the only signal that they'd ever been. The firebender, Katara's sister, looked to the water around her, to her own hands, as dark as Katara's own. Then, she looked up. There was a look in those eyes that Katara couldn't begin to describe, because there was so much in it. Confusion, anger, doubt, fear... Hikaoh took a step forward. Katara opened her arms.

"You can always come home with us," Katara promised.

"I can?" Hikaoh asked.

She nodded. Hikaoh stepped closer.

"I know who you are," Katara said. At that, the look in Hikaoh's eye shifted a bit. And at about that point, Katara felt a sharp pain between her ribs. She looked down, and saw a shard of ice there, embedded in her chest, her sister's hand on its makeshift handle. Katara looked up at Hikaoh, and Hikaoh looked back at her. It wasn't hatred. There was too much else there. Katara staggered back, and as she did, the blade in Hikaoh's hand slid free, and slid crimson. Katara's hand clapped over the wound, her eyes as wide as they could be... "W...why?" she asked.

"...how did I do that?" Hikaoh asked. "I'm... I'm a firebender."

At that point, Katara fell to one knee, as nausea began to spread through her, and the pain of the cut began to spread. Her eyes pressed shut, after the last thing they saw, was Hikaoh staring at the blade in her hand as though she were terrified of it.

Aang darted back, as the wash of flames bellowing out at him. He gave a glance to the sky, and confirmed that yes, the Eclipse was still in effect. And somehow, they still belched fire at the invaders who had barely reached the inside of the Upper City.

"Watch yourself! Those are chemical flames!" came the call of one of the soldiers near him, as he had to move out of the way of the sticky, long-burning fires. He could see what had created them; they stood clear of others, tanks on their backs and hoses in their hands. For a moment, they looked like Sato's device, given to Aang's army, but they obviously differed greatly. For one thing, Sato's device couldn't kill you.

The pyroclast, as Aang would eventually learn their name, advanced on them, and let out another belch of fire. Aang twisted water up into a barrier between he and the soldiers directly behind him. The flames that struck the barrier didn't wash away into smoke and steam. Instead, they stuck to the ice, and continued to burn. Even when Aang toppled the wall, the fires burned under it, trapped between stone and ice, with no air to sustain them.

"Angle on!" came a call from behind Aang. He glanced back, and saw Sato's device being pointed toward the pyroclast. There was a wet thud, and a blob of something white and gluey was launched from the far-wider mouth of the non-lethal weapon. The blob landed near the mouth of the pyroclast's hose, causing it to drop to the ground. He tried to pull it back up, to fire a fresh burst, but the gun was already stuck fast. The substance Sato created – and built a device to fire – hardened very, very quickly when exposed to the air. "Press!"

He gave a glance to the sky, to the ships that floated even now overhead. Would they bomb their own city, to stop this invasion? Aang really hoped not. There was a bright flash in the sky, as lightning blossomed out of the bow of one of the airships. At first, Aang thought it some devastating weapon of the Fire Nation... until it began to rip the ship at its source apart. Nila, who had been preparing bombs to hurl, took a look up beside him, and nodded grimly.

"The anomolies? They are not exclusively on the ground," she said.

"Yeah. I know that," Aang said, watching as the airship, now hopelessly in flames, began to crash down into the volcanic landscape nearby.

"Go," Nila said. "You can bypass this obstacle, and the Fire Lord is at this moment helpless against you."

"But he'll be surrounded by guards..." Aang began.

"Then sneak up behind him! You," she said, giving his shaggy hair a yank, "don't look very much like an airbender right now! Leverage that!"

"But... are you sure you'll be alright on your own?"

Aang was cut off by the rattle of a Salamander tank rumbling up behind them. The soldiers immediately turned, and began to hurl rocks at its armored plating, until the top hatch popped open, and Sokka waved down at them from it.

"I'll be fine," Nila said with a smirk.

Sokka's eyes went wide, and he ducked back into the tank, as it started to veer off and then drove itself straight into somebody's house. Aang had to wince at that, as well.

He looked at the Royal Palace, which stood taller than any other building in the Upper City. It was the heart and center of this city, the house of the Fire Lord. It was right there. There was just an army in the way.

And he was the Avatar.

He took a breath, and opened himself to the balance, the center of all things. The point between anger and peace. The point between fear and joy. The point between love and apathy. He held that sensation, not quite opening the doors which would spill forth the entire soul of the Avatar State into him; if he did so, there was every possibility that Zhao would have a countermeasure in place, some trick to knock him out of it. After all, Aang had almost died from a simple, wooden, iron-tipped arrow while in the maelstrom at the end of this very spring. Or rather, did die, and came back. He held onto the Avatar State, he held it at arm's length. Not out of fear of entering it, not out of fear of what he might do with it... but instead, with the confidence that he would do what was needed, when the need became clear.

His eyes weren't glowing that blazing light, when he opened them once more, but the eddies of spirit corpus shuddered as he began to move, flying away as they felt the weight of all that was behind him when he moved. Stone shifted out of his path as he ran, not by earthbending, but simply the spirits not wishing to impede the Avatar. Because they were desperate. He could feel their pleas, even as he dove through somebody's yard, to round the formations that clogged the streets. Save us, they implored. Save us.

And he would.

The blast of flames ended abruptly, as the world grew darker yet, leaving Azula tipping forward from her attempt to hold Father's blaze at bay, suddenly 'succeeding', but only because the Eclipse ended things absolutely and abruptly for all involved. Azula took a moment to pat out the edges of her clothes, those that were starting to catch aflame from the wash that Ozai had sent forth. It was an act of a few seconds to strike herself out.

Moments that Father spent thrusting his fists toward her, his eyes growing ever wider, ever more panicked. He twisted his arms into a familiar kata, his split-second lightning bolt. Nothing happened. He looked up at her, his face gone gray. "What... what did you do to me?" he asked.

"Nothing. I..." Azula began.

She was cut off when he charged her. She backpeddled, a dozen fighting moves flashing into her head as she did. Some of them would have killed him. Others, broken bones, or given him a potentially fatal concussion. She knew dozens of ways to put him down... but she didn't know one way to stop him without hurting him.

He slammed into her middle, bearing her across the hallway and slamming her into the wall there. He slammed his fist into her face in the second he had before she regathered her wits. The next punch was warded away, so that he punched the wall instead, but she still had a sensation that he'd loosened a tooth or two.

"You can't take this from me!" Ozai shouted. "You can't take my fire! It's all I have left!"

"I didn't take y–" Azula began, but was cut off when he pressured his hands through her attempts to push him off, and got first one hand... then both... into a strangle-hold 'round her neck. She grabbed his wrists, pulling them, trying to keep him from crushing her windpipe completely. As it was, he seemed to have a lunatic strength, as even she, with all of her might, couldn't loosen his grip.

"You have to give it back! I won't lose that, too!" he shouted. There was a desperation in his eyes. Something chilling to Azula's heart. "Please!"

"Egh..." Azula managed, in the seconds between her strongest tear, and his resuming the choke. A breath, a precious breath, that she would have to make due on for a while.

"This... this is all punishment, isn't it? ISN'T IT?" Ozai screamed in her face. "For what I've done!"

"A..ahg..." Azula tried to get a word out, even one, but his fingers pulled tighter, and her breath grew harder and harder to pull. They crushed, a fraction as fast as they would have if she offered no resistance at all, but still, with a terrible inevitability.

"Is that what you want, Specter? Do you want me to beg for forgiveness?" he asked.

"I..." Azula gasped, before the hands clenched all the tighter. Her vision was growing dark, and her hands, weak. Soon, she wouldn't be able to resist him at all. But until then... she had to keep trying. A dozen ways to kill her father. No way to save him.

Why was she even worth saving, herself?

"I'm sorry!" he screamed, his eyes beginning to moisten. Then, with a racking sob, he started to outright weep. "I'm sorry, Azula... I killed you... My own daughter... I killed my own daughter!"

His weeping grew, as his grasp slowly became less. Finally, as he dipped his brow against hers, his hands slid loose enough that she could pull a desperate gasp of breath. "F...father..." she croaked.

"I... I don't deserve to be called that," Ozai said, his voice barely able to cut through the sobs. "I've never been a father... Never to you. Azula... I should have had... faith in you. I should have seen your strength... you survived. You recovered... and I threw you away..."

"Father, it's..."

"What is wrong with me?" Father asked, as he turned away from her, his hands pooling in his lap as he fell to the floor at an awkward sit, his unkempt hair hiding his face. He stared at his palms, which twitched and spasmed, as though he were trying even now to pull flame into them. But for the next four minutes, they were as empty as the rest of this tower. "Zuko... Azula... Ursa... please... forgive me."

What could anybody say to that? What could a daughter, condemned to death, and within this same very hour almost strangled, say to that?

"I forgive you," Azula said. It was the only thing she could.

"The real Azula never would," Ozai whispered, his shoulders still quaking. "She would hate me... as I deserve..."

She took a moment to breathe, getting the tingling numbness out of her fingers and toes, before she moved to the face of her father, and knelt down before him. "Father... I forgive you," she said, pulling his hair away from his eyes. But those eyes remained locked on his hands. Azula felt her own eyes beginning to dampen as well. "Father?" she asked. "Father, can you hear me?"

He remained silent and still, barely breathing, staring at his hands.

"Father..." she whispered to him, as she tried to pull him into an embrace, that he was too oblivious to even notice at this point. "...I forgive you."

The Royal Palace was much as Aang had expected it would be. It was a layer-upon-layer defensive holding that bristled with firebenders – now hanging back and looking absolutely miserable between the snow on the ground and their bodily inability to do anything about it – and the various soldiers with them. Even now, enemy Gurkhas were sending out remarkably precise mortar-fire, making the streets of the Upper City a place of extreme hazard for anybody trying to move in formation through them. The 'Pyroclasts' moved up and down the lines, trying to be in many places at once. It was obvious that there weren't as many as the soldiers would have liked of those horrific weapons. And those that wore them, didn't do so comfortably.

So many things, so many layers of defense that corralled and hampered the armies attacking. Honestly, Aang pondered, if they hadn't done so much to tip the scales in their favor, Zhao would be winning.

He didn't let that shake him, though. He knew what was needed of him. He knew how much time he had to cross that battle line, and reach the heart of it all. And if he needed to, he would do what he must to make sure that he, even alone, brought this war to a close, today. There was white limning his vision even as he broke out into a sprint, bearing toward one of the thinner portions of the Palace's battle line. That portion coincided with the proximity of a Pyroclast. She turned, eyes widening at the sight of a black-haired young man racing toward her, eyes almost sparking and pulsing with light. Not enough for his identity to be obvious, but enough to be very, very concerning. She turned that nozzle toward him, and with the howl of a juvenile dragon's anger, the blast of sticking flames raced toward him. He slammed his feet into the ground, dragging him to a halt, and then thrust forward. A great wave of stone ruptured forward, before a huge chunk of the courtyard rose up in a slab, catching that flame and splattering it along its surface, before continuing to tip forward, toward the source of that flame.

The Pyroclast broke off her attack, even hurling herself away from the collapsing stone – which he'd directed so that it would fall at worst just short of her, and landing on her belly amongst the other soldiers. The weight of the tanks of flammable fluids on her back pinned her there, without the leverage to right herself. Aang continued running. If he summoned a scooter, he'd cross the line in a heartbeat. If he did that, then the entire army would land on him. He needed to be an annoyance, not an existential threat.

He tipped his feet forward, then thrust upward with his arms, causing a pillar of stone to hurl him into the air, over the heads of the soldiers who had gathered below. Even as he lazily flipped over them, he could see a lot of stunned, surprised, or angry faces tracking him, preparing to rush him where he landed. So when he landed, he did so, fist first. The slam of his body into the ground sent out a ripple of rock that bounded away as would the waves crashing away from a stone dropped into a still pond. Snow, which hadn't been completely cleared away, or else blew in during the interim, was thrown into the air, creating a grey and opaque wall around him, even as dozens or hundreds of soldiers were thrown from their feet.

"Stop him!"

"Ang-Rama squad! Chase that runner down! Don't break rank!"

Even as his eyes tried to pulse with brilliant light, a smirk came to his face. They were doing exactly as he wanted. Just enough attention to make him seem a pest, not so much as to utterly inundate him when the time came. That smirk, the one on his face? It would have done just as well on the visage of either of the children who'd been born and raised in this very place. He gave a fresh stomp to the ground, after traversing another three dozen strides, and with it, he bade the earth thrust him upward, casting him up and through one of the windows at the second story of the massive palace. The snow once again rippled out below him, but he was passing through the aperture as easily as a seamstress threading a needle.

He rolled to a halt in the room that overlooked the courtyard below. He could still hear shouts from the soldiers behind him, but he had faith that they'd be a bit delayed in following him. After all, he could, even without obvious airbending, move about with utter immunity, where they were slaves to gravity. "...heh, gravity," he chuckled to himself.

He quickly peeked out of the door, into the hallway that passed beyond this chamber. There were people moving about, but they all had the rushing look of people in desperate action. A sad part of Aang knew it was because they honestly believed that if they failed in what they were doing, that a fate no better than death would await them. If only they knew the truth; if only they knew that they were even now, completely safe from reprisal or harm? A year ago, he would have tried to sooth them, even despite his task. Now? Now he understood the importance of priority.

He raised a hand to his headband, trying to adjust it, but meeting only sweaty flesh. His eyes widened, causing a faint pool of light against the adjacent doorframe. He'd lost his headband! If anybody saw him, they'd know who he was in a heartbeat!

But he had a job to do.

He ducked out of the hall, and moved, his eyes down and head bowed, as though trying to keep pace despite being dreadfully distracted. Azula had told him where the Burning Throne lay, and besides that, the three or four other places that Zhao might be found. He saw no reason to avoid the most obvious first, but... He stepped out into a stairwell chamber, and immediately ducked back, as the landings, up and down, were lined with soldiers who looked around with the dreadful suspicion of a man desperate to not die. There was no way Aang was getting past all of them. What was he supposed to do? The walls were made of wood, not stone, so he couldn't just bypass them as he could in, say, Ba Sing Se.

He was rubbing his brow with his black-gloved fingers when he suddenly heard footsteps immediately beside him. Then, an indignant clearing of the throat. Slowly, Aang looked up, hand still on his brow.

"What do you think you're doing, just standing around, boy?" the stoop-shouldered Sage asked, leaning forward with his hood almost hiding his eyes from view. Aang looked him up and down. The old man wasn't much bigger than Aang himself. And the hood... "I should drag you into the brig for being so lazy at a time like this. Don't you realize there's a war for our very lives going on?"

"Yes, I do, sir, but..." Aang said. Then, he got an idea.

"But me no buts!" he said, grabbing Aang's wrist. "Get back to work, unless you want those invaders to..."

He trailed off, when he finally tore Aang's hand away from the blue arrow of his brow. Old skin grew ever greyer, as Aang's other hand flexed and pulled. And with a great wash, a surge of snow-turned-to-water raced out of the room behind him, caught the old man, and then surged him into the room immediately at Aang's left.

Aang continued to surge the water, until he pressed the old man up on the wall, freezing it around his hands and feet.

"Look, I'm really sorry about this, but..."

"He's here! The Av-agh..." the Sage began, but was cut off when Aang put a gag of ice in his mouth.

"Like I said, I'm really sorry, but I kind of need this."

And thus, about three minutes later, a stooped figure in the red, hooded robes of a Fire Sage exited the rooms, grumbling darkly to himself as he turned toward the landings and the soldiers thereupon. The soldiers, who'd been briefed to prevent aerial invasion by a shaven-headed boy in an orange kavi robe, gave no more than a passing glance to the angry old Sage that passed them by, grumbling about 'unreliable children' the whole way he went.

Aang gave a look down the hallway, stepping aside and snapping a creaky-voiced rejoinder at the soldiers who charged past him, racing up the stairs toward where the earthbender infiltrator had last been seen. He knew that his disguise would be discovered in a matter of minutes. And like Azula said, minutes could mean the difference between victory, and death. Minutes, he could use.

He continued to shuffle, perhaps a bit faster than a man of his apparent age should have been able to, but on a bee-line toward the chamber with the largest doors. The soldiers, proceeding out in a veritable staircase of ranks toward the main entrance, told him that the main door was out of the question. But he rubbed at his chin for a moment, continuing his grumbling, and thought back to Zuko's advice. That there were ways through the Royal Palace that no soldier ever thought to defend. Places that existed purely for the expediency of day-to-day living in the Palace. The Servants' Ways.

And Zuko told him of one in particular that he was pretty sure he was close to.

Aang was already shuffling through the arch at the far side of the hallway, giving not a glance toward the great doors to the chamber of the Burning Throne, when a call sounded behind him. "There's an infiltrator in the Palace! Find the earthbender!"

A rank of soldiers peeled away, moving to secure the hallway from other directions, including the one that Aang had just passed. There was preparation, and then there was blind luck. Aang offered them a geriatric 'bah!' and a dismissive wave of his hand, at the soldiers who were now forming a checkpoint behind him, as he shuffled onward. He turned the next corner, heading into the much-less ornamented rooms of the pages, the staff, and gave a glance around him. No soldiers, here. Considering how close he was to the spine of the Palace, it was understandable how there wouldn't be.

His shuffling abandoned, he continued forward at a more break-neck pace, to the linen-closet across from a junction in the halls. The door was clear enough, and even unlocked. He was about to test the door when it swung open, hitting him in the face and knocking him back a step. "Agni's blood! I'm sorry, I was..." the runner began, after finishing his understandable flinch. Aang turned to him, and noted how he trailed off, his eyes widening, as he beheld Aang. Notably, how Aang's hood had flopped back when he took his stunned backstep.

"Our little secret?"

"The Avata–" the young soldier began to scream, but Aang cut him off with a blast of air that sent him back into the room. He raced in, slamming the door behind him, on the toes of the soldier who'd almost 'made' him, even as the lad cracked his head on a shelf, and stumbled, slightly dazed. No water, the floors were blade-like obsidian, so they weren't useful, and air wouldn't stop him long...

But there were also a lot of blankets... and Sokka had taught him a few things about tying up pests.

Mostly Momo, Sokka had claimed.

But the lessons crossed species very easily. It was almost a game, how Aang stripped blankets and ripped them, slipping around the rapidly turning soldier, catching first one arm, then the others, and catching them with rapid-fire knots. He was about to scream again when Aang hip-checked him face-first into a shelf-full of pillows, drowning his call. Then, he continued his odd circle-walk, with a fresh blanket, fettering the kid's feet. The last one hooked the soldier's mouth, gagging him with a knot behind the head, in emulation of what had happened to Katara about a half-dozen times in Aang's estimation.

With a thud, the soldier tipped and fell, hog-tied, to the floor.

Sokka would have been proud.

"You just stay quiet for a bit, alright?" Aang said, as he dropped a bunch of lose linens over him. "Everything's going to be alright, I swear."

The soldier didn't seem to particularly believe that. Well, unpleasant as it was, that was just too bad. Aang had to finish what he started. For everybody's sake.

The path through the guts of the building immediately exposed Aang to flowing water, dribbling down from upper floors. Aang didn't know of the earthquake that he'd made, or how it had warped the frame of the palace enough to make it leak furiously. Instead, he just took the opportunity to arm himself with a blob of ice up his sleeves. He did pause, though, and look up, listening to the distant whistle of wind past a ruptured roof, reaching all the way down to the heart of the palace. He might not have understood the why, but he definitely heard it as he should, as a sign of a mistake that he was going to have to fix, sooner or later.

The door on the far side of the path was less a door and more a small alcove that appeared behind a tapestry, woven in the likeness of Fire Lord Kalroh, the sunken-eyed, world weary lord and master who had succeeded a fallen father in a time of existential war. Much like today. Fire Nation versus airbenders, only this time, the Fire Nation were the aggressors rather than the defenders. Aang stared up at the face that he knew from his vision of Avatar Vajrapata; he knew, from the whispers he heard when he slipped through the Avatar State, of how much history had been deleted. How he and his past incarnation had been husband and wife, how stopping one war started so many others...

"I've got to do this right," Aang whispered to the exhausted looking, so-long-ago friend (and, despite Aang's fairly solid heterosexuality, lover). "The Fire Nation will still stand tomorrow. I promise."

He slipped around the edge of the tapestry, and beheld the chamber of the Burning Throne. Exactly as the siblings had described it, a dais that was set with a trough of flame, a cushioned throne that left who sat upon it a specter of the flames that would block easy view from those at his feet to the man in command. Only that seat wasn't occupied at the moment. Instead, there were about a dozen military looking men and women huddled around a set of tables, each one spread with a map, near the center of the chamber. The only person who didn't wear armor in the room who wasn't obviously a servant was a woman in resplendent robes, who stayed off to the side of the group, her own gaze taking in all things around her. Aang's own gaze swept the inhabitants, before he saw what he needed to see.

The golden, five-point flame. Aang took a step toward him.

"...minutes. That's a long time in a battle," one of the military men said to Zhao, who turned to give him a look with that red, raw eye.

"Four minutes is a trifle. As long as we deny the Avatar any landing within the Periphery, then we can run out this Eclipse and render his advantage, fleeting though it is, useless," Zhao pointed out. They still thought he was outside! He took another, careful step forward. He had to come up with a plan on how to handle this. After all, Zhao was right. In a few minutes, the Eclipse would be over...

And then, before any useful plan had come to his mind, Aang had to hinge himself to one side to avoid a knife that was flying at his face. He twisted into a sweeping motion that ended with him releasing a blast of air which sent the woman, who was now preparing to cast a second wicked looking blade at him even now, bowling across the floor to the edge of the tables. Aang winced slightly. "Oooh. Sorry," he said.

"What is the meaning of..." Zhao began, flicking a hand which noticeably didn't light with flames, given the astronomical event transpiring at this instant. "How dare you assault the Consort's person, Sage?"

"Yeah... the thing about that..." Aang said, then he pulled back his hood. There was a gasp from the soldiers, and a ringing of blades being drawn from scabbards.

"GUARDS! KILL HIM!" Zhao roared.

"That's not going to be very easy," Aang pointed out, sloughing the robes, letting them pool a step behind him. Even though he still had hair that hung down, obscuring so many of the signets of his ancestry, his people, his purpose, it was obviously clear enough who he was. "Zhao, this doesn't have to end in bloodshed. There's still a chance that you can end this day without any more death."

"You sneak into my home. You kill my servants, bring an army of aggression to my borders, and you speak to me of peace? Of ending bloodshed? Hypocrite!" Zhao shouted.

"I don't want to hurt anybody. I never did," Aang said, with a remarkable calm in him. Now that there weren't knives flying at him – the woman had retaken her feet, but her grace was now the slow, sinuous danger of a viper that'd crawled onto the edge of one's bed – the white limning of the Avatar State had returned, and with it, the calm. There were a thousand generations of man and woman giving weight to his words. He didn't need to convince them. They would either believe him or they wouldn't. Yes, it'd be so much better if they did, but that was for they, and they alone, to decide. "All I ever wanted was to live in peace. I didn't ask to be Avatar, but I am. I didn't ask to stop this war, but I must. And I will."

The rattle of men in armor approaching reached Aang's ear, and he put it aside. He noted, but didn't concern himself with the soldiers filing in, surrounding him, raising halberds toward his neck in ranks and rows. It was only a matter of seconds, before Aang could have shaven himself with a sneeze, had he any need of shaving. And calmly, he looked in the eye of the Fire Lord. The burned eye, and the regular eye, of Zhao. "I think you're bluffing, Avatar," Zhao said, limbering his shoulders, and pulling the robes off of them. Under them, lay a suit of armor much like so many of the other soldiers around him. Most of them were solidly behind their master, awaiting his word. Most of them, nevertheless, looked very nervous. "I think you're only here because you think you can trick them into surrendering out of fear, when they feel the most vulnerable. I think you still don't have the first whit of the power you claim to," a dire smirk came to Zhao's face. "I think you don't have the first clue how to get into your 'Avatar State'."

"End this war, Zhao," Aang said. "This is the last chance that I can offer you. I'm sorry, but this is the final offer anybody is ever going to give you. Please; for your own sake, stop this madness now."

Zhao took a step toward him, toward that rank of soldiers who had ringed him in. He looked at Aang, his eyes cruel, yes, cold, yes, but still human. There was more behind that amber gaze than there had been in the black pit of Montoya Azul. And far, far more than in the red, virulent eye of the Shards. He might have been a bad man, Zhao... but he was still a man.

"No," he said, simply. "Bring him down."

Aang closed his eyes.

When he opened them, they blasted white.

He cast his hands out, and the first rank of soldiers was blasted into the second, propelled by a torus of air, projected out with a single motion, not even a spin. The second rank fell, and the net of blades holding Aang in place collapsed completely.

"I'm sorry," Avatar Aang said, his voice the legion. "I didn't want this."

He held out his hand, and he felt for the heavens above. He felt the moon, moving. Sliding past. And when his wave completed, there was the slightest whisper of sun, slipping past the edge of that celestial barrier.

His gesture, lit with flames, and those flames blasted outward to those who defied him, before the Burning Throne.

Katara pushed herself away, leaking red as she did, while her sister stared at the blade in her hand, one formed by waterbending will. "This doesn't make sense," her sister said. "Why would you give me a knife?"

"I didn't... ahhh," Katara hissed in pain. Hikaoh looked up at her, blue eyes wide. Afraid.

"No. You had to. It was you. You made the knife. You... you tried to stab me and failed, and... I took it, and I... But you didn't have a knife..." she said, staring at her. "How did you do this?"

Katara tried to pull snow into a glove, glowing it whitely, to seal the wound in her side that made every breath an agony.

"No! No more of that!" Hikaoh shrieked, and clawed toward Katara. With a tug, Katara felt the glove of glowing light being stripped off of her grasp, being cast to the ground. "Why! What are you trying to prove? I...!"

"I... didn't make th... the knife..." Katara said. Hikaoh stormed up to her, eyes growing damp. Desperate.

"You had to! I'm not a waterbender! I'm a firebender! I couldn't make the knife! WHY DID YOU MAKE THE KNIFE?" she shrieked, holding that blade now to Katara's throat, its point at the base of another hard, white scar that extended all the way to her ear.

"Hikaoh... I didn't make the knife," she wheezed. "And I didn't drop the water..."

"No. You're lying. You're tricking me, somehow!" Hikaoh said. Screamed. "I'm not a waterbender!"

"You... you... made the knife..." Katara said, her teeth grit even as she felt the prick of that tip against the scarred skin of her neck.

"I should... Why won't you stop lying to me? Tell me the truth! Why did you make the knife?" she asked.

"Hikaoh, it was you," Katara whispered, into the wind, and the ragged breathing of the sister who was nevertheless the much less injured of the two. "I'm a waterbender. You're my sister. So you're a w..."

"Stop saying that!" she shrieked in Katara's face. "All my life, the only good I've ever been was... The only people who've ever cared for me were the Fire Nation! I'm a firebender! I've always been a firebender!"

"Were you?" Katara asked. Two words. Two words, whispered in pained desperation. And two words, which loosened the grasp of Hikaoh's fist in Katara's hair, which pulled the red slicked ice away from her neck. Hikaoh's jaw worked, as though there were too many words for it to form, and not enough time to say them all.

Hikaoh stopped, and looked down, at the knife in her hand. With the handle, formed perfectly for her palm. Its dimensions, exactly what she would have specified. She dropped it, and it broke in half as it hit the stone of the courtyard. She stared at it, as though afraid. As though she didn't want to try what she was about to try.

She held her hand over the blade.

Then, with a tug, she lifted it.

The ice turned to water, and drifted upward, toward her grasp.

"No... NO!" Hikaoh screamed. "I can't be! I'm not a waterbender! I'M NOT A WATERBE–"

Katara's elder sister was cut off when a fist slammed into her jaw, and dropped her as a bag of oats to the stones. Azula, looking battered, exhausted, and a little bit strangled, shook her hand from the haymaker she'd delivered, and looked down at where Hikaoh lay, unconscious.

"Yes, you are a waterbender. Shut up," Azula said darkly. She then turned to Katara. To the line of red that was even now starting to catch snow, and vanish under it. She opened her hand, and a pale flame opened into it. "The universe is a great lover of irony," she muttered. Then, the flame vanished, leaving a strange sort of suffusive glow hovering just past Azula's palm. She pulled Katara to a sit, and pressed that palm into the bloody wound. Katara let out a long groan of pain, as it felt like she was being set on fire from the inside out.

It could have been hours. More likely, it was a matter of seconds.

Then, Azula was pulling her yet higher, to an awkward, uneven stand, one that left Katara unsteady on her feet, lightheaded for the blood that she'd lost. She held fingers to her side... but she found that, but for the remnants clinging to her clothes, her wound wasn't simply dry, but almost impossible to find. "What...did you do?" Katara asked.

"When my daughter was young, she broke her leg. I didn't want her to suffer. You're welcome," she said darkly.

"...Your father?" Katara asked. The look on Azula's face was... bleak.

"...dead. And he'd been like that for a... a long time," she said, her voice wavering a little.

"Azula... I'm sorry," Katara managed, with a surprising amount of honesty. Not for the man, but for what the gaping hole his absence was in the woman before her.

"No, you're not," Azula said sharply. Tui La, it was hard to be civil to her. "You hated him. And... You had rights to, but..."

She took a shuddering breath, and looked up at the tower.

"Get your sister," Azula said quietly. Hopelessly. "I've had enough of this place."

"Don't just stand there! Kill him!" Zhao shouted. And with the moon sliding away from the sun, the flames returned to all who sought them. More than a dozen firebenders moved as an almost unified machine, giving nearly identical grunts of angry effort as they cast forward their fires. The Avatar didn't even move a muscle, but those flames parted and swirled around him, creating a sphere of blazing glory. As hot and as bright as those flames ever got, they never drowned out the brilliant white of the light blazing from his eyes.

He raised a hand, and the flame gathered from the orbit 'round him into the palm of his hand, compressing down into something that at first seemed liquid, then a solidified flame. With that, he took a step forward, causing all who had launched that unified attack at him to step back. He casually held that nugget of pure and undiluted fire out and to the side, then dropped it. It melted its way through the obsidian of the floor, and continued down through the earth until it joined the magma, burning down even hotter than that, continuing down until it fell into the mantel of the earth, where it finally found something hotter than itself.

He stepped past the grey jet of superheated gasses that now leapt into the chamber of the Burning Throne, and the soldiers began to hurl flames at him once more. The Avatar all but ignored them; they licked close to his clothes, to his flesh, but were pulled away by the block of swirling winds that obeyed no more than a thought as he advanced. Burning white eyes were locked on Zhao, ignoring the lesser, the unimportant beings that supported him. Aang tried to rein in such thinking, but in the grasp of the Avatar State, even policing one's own thoughts was a difficult task.

He raised a hand, and the floor bucked upward, casting aside all of the notes and maps of the invasion, the Burning Throne's floor rising in a mound of snapping, sharp obsidian. The instincts that whispered into his ear told him to give them a little pressure, then cast them out in a fan. It would be a wave that would cut down all who dared stand before him.

Aang rejected that idea, hard. Too many had died today already.

Instead, he pulsed it out, and created a wave, one that bucked its sharp edges down as it hit them, knocking them through the door, and out into the hallway beyond it. He drifted forward, his feet lifting off of the ground, giving only a gesture to ward another wicked, poisoned knife from striking him in the back of the neck. The Avatar's chorus demanded that he strike the woman down, for daring to attempt on his life. Aang rejected it. The bolt of wind that embedded the knife to its handle in the stone pillar holding up the roof twisted down and out, bowling the woman away. She would be a problem again, he believed. And he was alright with that.

Aang drifted out of the hall, and when he did, it was to the snapping of lightning tearing toward him. He knew that all he had to do was extend his hand, pull it in, then cast it back, and Zhao, the source of it, would be no more. That, too, Aang rejected.

And more to the point, the rejection was rendered moot, because with a flash of spectral blue light, a different hand caught that bolt of lightning, and cast it into the ceiling, which cracked and fractured, decorative stone drizzling down from the room that stood above this oppressively tall chamber. Aang tilted his head slightly, mild bafflement cutting through the oncoming storm which was the Avatar State, as he beheld...

Avatar Korra, her own eyes blazing white.

"And Korra with the save!" she shouted, the legion in her own voice as well. Aang could hear himself in there, with every bit the bombasm and pugilistic joy that Korra was an embodiment of. She glanced back to Aang. "Hey, Aang. Remember how what's-his-scar said that I'm not supposed to be able to bend here in the real world?"

"There's two of them!" one of the firebenders who were arrayed in an army before the two of them shouted in panic.

"It's a trick! Stand your ground or be cut down where you run!" Zhao roared at the man who was, obviously, wetting himself a little.

"Well, apparently, everything going to hell in a handbasket means that – whoa that's a problem," Korra cut herself off, and worked with Aang to carve through the wave of flames, from three dozen sources, mixing and mounting on itself into a blaze that would melt granite. The two Avatars, each full and in the Avatar State, itself a clear violation of What Must Be, made such an easy job of not simply holding back those flames, but instead snuffing them out before they even approached, that there was no way that even a threat of inevitable death would hold the morale of the firebenders in the hall. Almost a third sprinted away in desperate haste, not listening to the Fire Lord screaming dark promises after them. He himself? He started to retreat, in good order, with the rest of his firebenders.

"We must stop this," Aang said to his next incarnation, as the two of them advanced, their toes drifting an inch above the floor, held aloft by airbending as they came, the very vision of an unstoppable god. Korra nodded, grinned. Aang didn't smile. The chorus of the Avatar spoke of a dozen ways to blast Zhao to oblivion right as he stood. And he rejected them all. He would find another way.

So, with a synchronized thrust of two right hands by two different Avatars, the air of the entire chamber was blown out, dragging all those before it, into the blowing snow in the Palace courtyard.

"What is that?" Omo demanded, looking through a spyglass, not down the mountain, but toward the palace. He could feel his blood running cold, as the crash of the doors being blasted off of their hinges died down, and the ethereal glow began to mount in that unseen aperture. He turned to Junyo. "We're being tricked."

The rotund earthbender turned a suspicious look to him. "Tricked in what?"

"The Avatar isn't over there," he said, pointing to the south, where a streak of orange was indeed approaching, high above where the Periphery could hold him/her/it back. "He's over there!"

"In the Palace?" Junyo asked, shock overcoming suspicion for a moment. Then, she clapped her hand to her forehead. She was struck with shock only a moment, before taking a stride toward the rest of the Children. "CHILDREN! The Avatar is at the Royal Palace! Bring him down!"

Toph landed fists first, driving the stone up and at an angle, a slant of stone smashing two of the Fire Lord's troops away and sending them crashing into the snow, if not unconscious, then damned close to it. She could feel the others, recoiling away from her, as the rumble of the Salamander tank followed her. She continued forward, pulling her baton from where she'd tucked it, and tapped the ground as she walked, with Sokka and Boomstick driving a tank into their lines. The smirk on Toph's face was a clear invitation for them to try firebending at her. They didn't.

"Bunch of pansies," she said. She slammed that baton down, and used the strike to pop the ground up under a mortar, sending the artillery piece flipping through the air. It landed, and then detonated the round inside of it, causing those around it to either scatter or be blasted to bits. Due to her 'unique' vision, she didn't need to glance aside to notice halbardiers lashing out at men who were armed with blunt wooden rods, only to immediately scream in pain and drop to the floor, electrified by another of Sato's 'less lethal' weapons. She was about to take a step forward, to continue pummeling these fools, when she felt something hit her like a punch in the gut. Earthbending of such undiluted force that it stole her breath. She'd only ever felt that kind of earthbending a few times before. Like, say, when a certain twinkletoed airbender punched a volcano in half.

Toph's smirk grew into a grin. "Well, this is going to get awesome," she declared. She reached back, tapping on the hull of the Salamander which ghosted her every step. "Hey! Captain Boomerang! You're going to want to find something nice and fragile to run over in that direction!"

"Why?" Sokka's very muffled voice came through the plates of metal.

"Because Twinkletoes is a bit pissed off," she said brightly.

She cracked her knuckles, and rolled her shoulders, as the doors to the palace were blasted off of their hinges, and not by earthbending. This was gonna be good.

The Avatars drifted into the heart of the Fire Lord's army, even as the man himself kipped to his feet, long before his soldiers could do likewise. That burned, raw eye glared up at him, as he twisted a fresh lightning bolt, one to either hand, before casting both forth, intent on blasting Korra and Aang both. Not a good idea, as both of them had the secret of redirection. And even less a good idea, because Korra wasn't exactly 'able to be killed'. Two hands caught two lightning bolts. Two bodies dragged the power through them, and then cast it aside. Aang's bolt struck a pocket of lightning that hovered in the air, bathing the area around it with brilliant light as it exploded, dropping a glowing white leaf in its wake.

"Don't just stand there! Shoot him with the mortars! Hit him with the pyroclasts! KILL THEM!" Zhao roared.

Aang drifted forward, and lifted the snow from the ground, and with a single motion, swept a quarter of the soldiers before him aside. Korra mimicked him a moment later, and a second quarter were likewise being hurled away by a hydrolic ram, in the hands of an unstoppable juggernaut. They'd rise, but the alternative was not acceptable to Aang, and at the moment, the Avatar heeded him, not the other way around. He rose his hands, preparing a fresh wave of stone, but the stone was already in the grasp of another when he grasped it. Blazing white eyes looked with only a note of surprise when a blind earthbender hurled herself into the center of the conflagration, ripping up a whole ribbon of stone, then striking one end of it with her baton, causing the whole thing to explode in a percussive blast of rocks, one that knocked dozens of men from their feet in a heartbeat. She continued running, slamming her fist into a mortar and pulling; the bronze of the artillery piece streamed out behind her, and she slapped it around a trio of soldiers, locking them down with their own weapon, knotting them in an unbreakable bronze manacle.

The flames leapt up at Aang once more. He warded the fire, but somehow, it went through, slathering his arms, his chest, and reigniting when it got there. Korra spun into action, flowing into its way, offering her own back to the Pyroclast's unholy fires, even as her hands glowed white as the Avatar State itself, and she pressed a hand onto burning tissue. It healed faster than it burned, until the sticking flames dropped away, leaving Aang shirtless, but as intact as he had been before. Korra turned to thrust her fist forward, and a burst of rocks struck the Pyroclasts and sent them reeling. At least one of them had their rig burst, and fell into a pool of their own fire.

Aang felt sorrow, for a life lost in the most horrible of ways.

But he had to stop this war, and saving one... sometimes wasn't enough.

Korra's back was brutally burned, but her corpus healed on its own, unlike Aang's still-mortal flesh. It was a lesson, that; there were always tricks, always things that bypassed his understanding of the Elements and what they were capable of. He drifted forward, and spoke to them. "Surrender, please. This does not have to end in death. There has been enough death!"

A lot of the people on the ground looked like they were giving serious consideration to the Avatar's offer. He truly wished that they'd take it.

That spell of hope was crushed when the shelling began.

The Avatars, present and future simply looked on, as the wind that whipped 'round them grasped those shells that tore in from those that still tried to fight with their mortars, cast by the wind to land at random. Some even burst in the facade of the Royal Palace itself. Korra spared Aang half a glance, before her spectral blue hands began to thrust outward, in discrete, but overwhelming bursts of flame that glowed as azure as her spirit-flesh. Each bolt struck a mortar. Each strike melted a mortar.

Avatar Aang, though, drifted forward, ignoring their newest ineffective tactic. Whenever a Pyroclast tried to make a meaningful assault on him, a backhand, a blast of wind sent them flying, rolling away, often times bowling over many. Sometimes rupturing tanks. Those ones, unlike that unfortunate first, had the luck to not land in the sticky flames. He drifted toward Zhao, who retreated, lashing out with fire as he went. It was strange. Even though they knew what they faced, the whole and unstoppered might of the Avatar, they didn't break or flee.

Yet.

"You cannot win, Zhao," Avatar Aang declared, with a thousand generations agreeing with him. "End this."

He was interrupted from his drive into their lines, slow but inexorable, by a rock, half the size of his own fist, slamming into his ribs. He deflected, but only slightly. The crashing waves of the untold generations inured Aang from the pain. But he still looked to what had struck the blow. Gold and scarlet armor. There were more than a few of them. It was with a half-thought that Avatar Aang warded aside another bolt of lightning from Zhao. The Avatar was more concerned at how one of them had breached the wind-wall. He then looked past that first and foremost of the Fire Nation's earthbenders, and saw others. Dozens.

They swept forward, perhaps three dozen in total. The earthbenders driving their collective might behind tiny projectiles, instead of trying with massive weight. Instead, unstoppable momentum. A fresh brick streaked toward the Avatar. Avatar Aang, taking a page from the blind earthbender who was now retreating somewhat, as the forces of the sneak-attack force converged on the courtyard, and lashed forward with his head as it breached the wind. The blazing white arrow in the center of the Avatar's forehead connected with that stone.

The stone gave way.

The Avatars paused, in that moment. Blazing eyes turned south, to the Periphery in the distance. Saw, how a blue banner rose above that barricade, flailing in the wind. He looked up, to the airships, now neutered with their bays empty of bombs. An empty menace. A hollow threat. He could bring them all down with a wave of his hand. He could erase the last sins of the Storm Kings with a thought.

And Aang refused.

Instead, Avatar Aang pulled his fists upward, and the stone began to stream upward, forming in a great band before him, one that cast aside the flames that were being pelted at him even more than had his sphere of winds. At his back, Korra tore her arms inward, and every flake of snow in the entire courtyard, from every rooftop in sight, began to speed toward them. In a great and dark mass, it pressed into a fresh band, one that shone with a strange and off-blue light. Together, the held out a hand, and let a flame complete the ring that circled both.

Theirs was a fortress of the elements, unbreachable, impossible, but unyielding. With this, they could level mountains. With this, they could challenge the gods. Avatars had before. They might again in times yet unseen. But today? Today, the enemy was a man.

And Avatar Aang was tired of fighting.

He seared down, that great tetrad of elements breaching itself in half, with the other circling Korra still, as she continued to bring down all who tried to strike at him. Zhao, that one burned eye in a glower even as the other grew wide, could only take a single step back, before Aang was upon him. Driving him down, into the ground with the wall of wind that supported him. He blasted flames from both fists, a great sear that would have in most cases boiled flesh from bone. But not on the Avatar. Avatar Aang pressed harder, moving closer, as those around the two were thrown away. Closer, as those flames became hotter, more desperate.

Then, Avatar Aang reached out his hand, and laid it upon Zhao's face. His thumb pressed into the voice-box, his fingers muting his mouth. Blazing white eyes closed.

Ambition.

Glory.

Impulsiveness.

Harsh lessons.

The parts that made Zhao began to waft into the Avatar's crashing tide, slipping past him. He knew that they were not his to play with. They were only his to see. To see, and understand. It was like seeing Form, but in a different way; Form was to spirits, what Aang was doing to man.

Caution, hard learned.

Ambition, rekindled.

Fighting destiny.

Glowing eyes opened, and looked upon the man, who was now pinned flat to the ground, a dome of roiling stone, boiling flame, and lashing water separating the two of them from the army around him. Aang continued to float, only a little bit, just above Zhao. A nod, and stone enveloped the Fire Lord's hands and feet. A glance aside, and a final lock landed across his chest. "It is over, Zhao. It is finally over."

"No. NO!" Zhao roared from where the Avatar had him trapped. Aang lifted the stone, and dropped himself to his feet. The forces still loyal to Zhao, for reasons that Aang only now understood, were battered and beset on all sides. They saw what was coming.

"Stand down," the Avatar ordered those surrounding.

"We can still win this! Fight him!" Zhao screamed from his prison upon the freezing ground of the courtyard.

There was a young woman, in the gold and scarlet armor, her fists toward the Avatar in an earthbending pose. Portly. Not attractive, but powerful. She looked, between the other Children, as Aang now recognized them, and to her once more.

Blazing white eyes looked to the edge of the soldiers, huddling and afraid. A familiar dark face, looking bruised and a bit bleary-eyed. The Avatar had no notion that the Tribesman who was both Ked and Kori should have been imprisoned now, that his presence shouldn't have been possible. He just accepted it. He looked to Sokka, who now popped his head out of the stolen tank that he drove. With a wiffle of air nearby, he felt Malu land, her head glistening with sweat even in the cold, her kavi singed from almost-hits by the soldiers below her. Momo poked his long-eared head out of her robes when her feet met solid ground. Malu? Her grey eyes looked into his blazing white, and they asked a single question.

What are you going to do?

"Please," Avatar Aang said.

"...do as he says," the earthbender Child said, her tones loud, but exhausted. "We're finished."

"What?" Zhao shrieked from the ground.

"You heard the much-more-forgiving Avatar," Korra roared over the assembled soldiers, a hand casting out with a flash of flames. "Stand down, now, or face my wrath!"

And with that, with their forces completely encircled, with their airships spent, with the Children withdrawn, with the forces of Long Feng broken and the Blue Turbans advancing into their backs... the soldiers of the Fire Nation – no, the soldiers of the Fire Lord – began to lay down their arms. Avatar Aang turned, and pushed aside a 'Fruit Punch' that he would have otherwise stepped in, even as the glow absconded from his eyes. The crash of so many generations drifted away, and left him not exhausted, but almost hyper-aware. He could feel the chill of the wind against his skin. The flakes of blowing snow, now freed from his grasp and floating in Korras – she who remained still in her Avatar State. His feet felt the tremble of a thousand spears falling, dozens of mortars falling silent. Dozens of fire-throwing apparatus slipping off of vulnerable backs. He walked away, as Zhao railed and screamed behind him. He walked away, as Zhao's roars lit with flames.

A few hundred yards away, another once more took the surface, ignoring cold that ripped at him even as he walked. The scar upon his brow was blazing now, almost as bright as the Avatar's Bequest. "I understand," Sharif whispered, to the flock of spirits that circled him. "I now know what must be done."

The thunk of a pommel into the side of a man's head was the last real sound to echo through the halls, which stood almost empty. No great surprise why; every twenty steps or so, some part of reality tried to kill them. Zuko let the Dai Li agent drop to the floor where he'd stood, joining the five... no, six others who'd tried this final ambush. But between the fact that they fought the Dragon of the West, and the young man he'd personally trained in firebending, they didn't have a chance even before one factored in the other faces that tagged along for this adventure. The laconic archer, pulling arrows out of the knees of the unconscious. The sullen waterbender who looked like he very much wanted to kill Zuko while he was here. He might well have a chance, if this kept up. To the Mountain King, who looked the least tired of all of them.

"We're not far, now," Zuko said, as he moved toward the intersection ahead of him. He turned the corner, and ahead of him, in the distance... he saw his Uncle, and Qujeck, and Longshot. He looked back, and saw them there, too. Then, he blinked and looked the way he was going. Yup. He could still see them there. He picked up one of the fallen Dai Li's hats, and threw it down that hallway. It landed behind him."You've got to be kidding me," he muttered.

"What do you see?" Uncle asked, before reaching the point where he could look 'round the corner as well. His mobile face flashed from one of martial concentration into one of absent-minded befuddlement for a moment, as he tugged at his beard. He, too, did the looking forward and back. Then, he made a noise of discovery.

"What is it, Uncle?" Zuko asked. The shorter, older man turned around, and began to walk backward down the hall. Zuko watched him, confused, then turned to give a confused shrug to the others, behind him. When he looked forward again, Uncle was gone.

"It is an illusion, Prince Zuko," Iroh's voice came from directly ahead of him.

"How did you..."

"Must an old man reveal all of his secrets? Simply walk backwards into the path!" Iroh said testily. Zuko puffed out a breath, as he slid his blades home to their scabbard, and did as Uncle instructed. Zha Yu chuckled at that.

"One of these days, old man, I'm going to put one over on you..." he said, and followed suit. The other two had the choice of doing likewise, or being left behind. The path that Zuko walked didn't look any different. He kept walking backward, seeing the others, only now starting to follow, recede, until he bumped into something behind him. He turned, only to find Iroh there once more. He looked beyond him, to find a dividing wall two intersections away, where once there was unending halls. Zha Yu turned right at the point where he reached Iroh and Zuko, and then clapped his hand on the wall. "This ought to be the spot."

He made a gesture, and the stone slid apart...

And he saw her.

Mother was sitting at a table, looking quite worried, which wasn't unexpected, given that the far wall of her room was made entirely out of fire. Only, the fire didn't burn properly. It was like it was burning in slow motion, lazily flicking its glowing tongues. Never advancing, but spookily unnatural. She turned, at the sound of grating stone, and saw them there. The Mountain King. Iroh. Zuko. Zha Yu only gave a nod, them kept walking. The others...

"...Mom?" Zuko asked.

"Zuko?" she likewise asked. She took a step forward, then paused, moving around a featureless spot on the floor, before advancing closer. "Is that really you?"

"I was about to ask the same thing about you," Zuko said.

"...That... doesn't sound like you..." Ursa said.

"I've changed a lot in the last few years," Zuko said. "I've had to."

He reached out a hand. She seemed hesitant to take it. But take it, she did. It was strange, to feel that soft skin once again, to see that face, those eyes looking at him. "You're real?"

"Nope," Zuko said blithely, in half a sing-song, before rolling his eyes. Man, he really was picking up bad habits from his sister. "Yes, Mother. I'm here. And I'm here to get you out of this..."

"What happened to you? What happened to Azula?" Ursa asked.

"That's a long story," Zuko said, as Zha Yu exited a second room, with a coppery-haired, middle-aged man a pace behind him. "And it's one I'd rather not have to tell here."

"You're really here," she said.

Zuko nodded. "You're really safe," he answered her.

Then, the tension, the worry broken, mother and son finally pulled into the embrace that was coming for too many years as it was.

"So you reign victorious, and all the world lays at your feet," Sharif's voice came to Aang, as he turned away from the disarming soldiers. "Look upon his works, you who call yourself mighty, and despair!"

"Sharif!" Aang said.

"Brother!" Nila cut in, bounding out of Sokka's tank – and wasn't that a weird thing to ascribe possession to – to approach. "Sharif! You had me terrified for..."

"Sister, please, this is a matter of grave importance and time is most certainly of the essence," he cut off his sister. "I've read what I've needed to. Wan Shi Tong's library is actually missing some very vital facts. Which is a testament to how degraded his genius loci has become, truly..."

"Sharif, what have you found?" Nila narrowed him.

"Ah, thank you. My mind? Even in the best of times, it sometimes wanders," he said, with a dismissive gesture. "I have discovered what it will take to defeat Imbalance. Or rather, by virtue of elimination, cast aside all of the methods which can not defeat It."

"We have a plan?" Aang said, hope reaching into his voice. But the way that Sharif nodded... it made that hope curdle. "What's wrong?"

"Your words with Koh, when he said that the price of victory would be sacrifice... I have only now learned the scale of the required sacrifice," the Si Wongi shaman said, his eyes bleak and cold, even with that wafting white light oozing out of them.

"...what needs to be given?" Aang asked, thinking he had a pretty good idea of the answer.

The Avatar. That was what needed to be sacrificed.

But Sharif's words, which came next, they didn't heed Aang's expectation.

"Almost everything," he said.

"...what do you mean, Sharif?" Nila asked.

His jaw set, and he turned to each of them in turn, before glancing beyond, to where the Blue Turban army was now advancing toward the defeated Fire Lord Loyalists. He closed his eyes, and told them.

"In order for there to be even a chance to end this madness, we must spend what I reckon to be ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine percent, of everything that exists, in all of reality," he said with a stunning gravitas.

"...but..."

"And even then," Sharif continued, gravely, "I would rate our odds as poor at best."

"...There must be some other..." Aang attempted.

"And!" he raised his finger, warding all other words, "if even this paltry chance is to come... it must be struck very, very soon."

Aang stared at the shaman, mouth agape.

Had he just won a war for nothing? He fell back onto his seat on the ground, cradling his face in his hands, too tired, too spent to even weep.