Chapter Text
Katara’s hands are slick with the blood of one Fire Lord Sozin.
Killing is an unavoidable part of the job. She doesn’t like doing it, avoids it when she can, but she thinks she’s okay with this one.
Many a Fire Lord she has ended—and, on occasion, befriended—across the strands, and yet she never bothered to keep count or think about any one of them beyond what her mission required. So really, it’s nothing personal.
Careful not to make a sound, she lays the body down on the floor in a heap, leaves the dagger as evidence. The blood oozes out from the tear in the Fire Lord’s neck, pooling around his head. She wipes her hands clean on his fine silken robes.
She shuffles into a hidden door, disappearing into a passageway before a servant can come in. She spent about a week studying the whole network of secret passages within the palace: mapping its branching paths, memorizing the patterns for access, cataloguing those who know of it. That last part was a little tricky. Only the Fire Lord and the commander of his elite security detail holds the map of this labyrinthine web. Each favored noble, each advisor, and every other person important enough to gain access, were given only scraps. For instance, the young Crown Prince Azulon can enter the Fire Lord’s study through the well-lit passage connecting his side of the residential wing to his father’s, while the ministers will have to seek out the concealed door located in the library and wind through a rancid smelling tunnel just so their meetings with the Fire Lord remain discreet.
Katara had her pick of the passages. She deliberately chose the one General Motoi knows and uses on a regular schedule. He was supposed to meet Fire Lord Sozin this evening to discuss whatever warmongers like to discuss—the merits of genocide, maybe—but a bit of sleep sap in his tea did the trick.
The effects of the sap will have worn off by the time Katara leaves this strand to climb back down the braid of time's threads, and General Motoi will be dragged out of his townhouse by palace guards. Tomorrow, he will stand trial and be promptly executed. He’s a rather charismatic military man—his admirers’ grief will turn to doubt, then curdles into outrage; the newly-crowned Fire Lord's life will be threatened, and this great nation will slowly devour itself.
There will be no raids to scourge the Southern tribe, no war to force the North to become isolationists. The water tribes will flourish. In a few eras or so, the ocean will rise and submerge the world for the better.
This is her purpose.
She and her fellow agents climb up and down the threads of time to gather streams and make rivers. Rivers that will pour downthread to the endless ocean that is Katara’s home, the future she helps guard.
Her steps skid to a halt.
One of the torches lining her path glows a menacing blue, a mocking glint, a sneer on a sharp face. Danger.
Her head swivels, her ears strain, nose sniffing for threats. She stretches her senses for any sign of life—the telltale flow of blood in one’s veins, the bellyful of gastric acids—and finds nothing but soulless concrete and silence. Nothing suspicious at all, except for the blue fire.
Katara, cursing under her breath, walks up to it. Orange bleeds into the blue-white glare and the torchfire becomes normal again. Harmless.
A scroll is tied to the torch. Katara snatches it without thinking.
The seal and ink are red, like the Fire Lord’s hot blood; the words written in stern strokes. She reads, disbelieving.
The scroll catches flame in her hands before she can even consider taking it with her.
I got your attention. Good.
Now allow me to explain to you the current state of affairs in this doomed strand—well, doomed for you, but still very much useful in my side’s case—so you’re aware of how I have rendered your efforts futile.
The current Head Sage is secretly in correspondence with the current chief of the Sun Warrior Tribe. They, among other sages and proverb spreaders and poets, have been slowly spreading the Sun’s wisdom to nobles and commoners alike. Inconspicuously, so as to avoid Sozin’s notice, which is probably why it flew past yours. The Head Sage is quite crafty. He managed to sow the seed in the boy prince’s mind. Perhaps you didn’t think to check what Prince Azulon reads at night. Here’s a hint: they’re not Sozin-approved.
Instead of waging a war, the Fire Nation in Strand 257 will reconnect with their roots and make amends with the people they thought were long gone, which wouldn’t be possible if Sozin were still around. You have my sincerest gratitude for that, by the way.
Still, you’re probably wondering: how would any of that help bring about the Burning we so yearn for?
It’s simple. Generations upthread, the great Sun City will be rebuilt and the Fire Nation will grow to become a confluence of their bloody past, their shining present, and our brilliant future. You know how it goes: whether an enlightened Emperor sacrifices their life and blood in a temple to ask the Sun to widen her all-seeing eye, or a much more assertive Emperor grows to lust for conquest, the outcome remains the same. The world burns, seas run dry, this strand links itself to our braid.
But enough gloating. I haven’t even greeted you properly, even though this is the closest thing to a letter that an agent of Water like yours would ever get from a Fire operative like me. I would introduce myself, but I believe you know who I am, the same way I know of you.
Your reputation precedes you, rival-of-mine.
You exterminated a record number of my people in single combat—Strand 12, when a legion of our foot soldiers came to hunt you and failed. The survivors still whisper about you as though you were one of those dark sea spirits from distant strands, speaking about how this woman whisked water from the grassland, drained the life from the surrounding greenery, and rained down bullets of ice upon them.
But that is not why I'm here. I have no interest in avenging my comrades anytime soon. After dealing with your water trail that threatened to spoil this strand's potential, I decided to leave you this little message. I thought a worthy opponent such as yourself deserves at least some courtesy after I snatch your success right under your nose.
I also have one more cause for gratitude. You and I, we both know that this profession of ours isn’t nearly as exciting as everyone makes it out to be. So when you came and made one-and-done missions more complicated, made me watch my back even during routine trips upthread, you have effectively prevented this war from growing stale.
Make no mistake, I will defeat you. But what’s the point in winning if I don’t even get to entertain myself along the way?
Let me know if you agree.
Azula
*****
Her golden arm rings bounce sunlight as she swings her arm with practiced casualness, the other one hefting a jar of freshly harvested honey. She walks and blends in with the sunlit people that came in droves. Each individual she lays her eyes on are uniquely clothed and accessorized, too many different shades of gold and red flooding her vision, skin marked with patterns indicating their prowess in combat, in healing, in taking dragons as mounts. They vary but they’re all here for the same thing.
Well, except for Azula.
As the sun nears its peak, the wide road leading to the Sun City’s main temple swells with worshippers, bearing their tributes and implorations. She squints up at the temple-pyramid, at the shrine at its summit. Ceasing her internal drilling of her well-crafted plan, Azula drinks in the sight and commits it to her mind’s eye. She’s seen many Sun temples in her lifetime, but the perfected symmetry of its architecture, its towering presence claiming space and light, never fails to seize her breath.
She reaches the staircase and moves on.
Azula climbs the steps with ease but she makes certain to feign exhaustion, taking sporadic breaks to chug from her water canteen. She forces her facial muscles to reciprocate the smiles from strangers she meets eyes with, remembers to labor her breaths, to wipe nonexistent sweat from her face. It’s all by rote, this dance of blending in, and she maintains it even after she finally steps inside the temple’s entrance.
She scans diagonals and finds the mural she’s looking for. Instead of heading to it right away, she winds a random path around the sanctum, places her jar of honey alongside the pile of other offerings, prostrates herself in front of the jade-studded idol. She does all of this, then finally makes her way to the mural.
The story goes that right before the world’s rebirth, one Emperor of Sun and Flame had reached the zenith of illumined wisdom. With it came a vision: a world razed, a new civilization unfurling like a fire lily in the ashes, more prosperous than all that’s come before it.
This is what Azula was taught.
She can recall entire sections from ash archives verbatim. She’s here to look for an ancient codex with origins tracing back to the earliest Sun Warriors, to use her near-spotless memory of the ash archives she grew up inhaling to compose entire sections into it, to make her additions seem like ancient prophetic wisdom. Alterations to influence and compress time, to hasten a preferred future.
Tampering with an ancient Sun Warrior codex, as per her calculation, has a high probability of making this con work.
There’s a slightly faded point in the mural, right below its depiction of a rising sun. Her lips quirk a little before she takes a deep breath.
She points two fingers behind her back, concealed from view, aiming at four men who have the dreadful luck of standing on the four positions she pinned upon arrival for maximal chaos. She breeds sparks, lets it escape through her fingers to fly towards their targets in a blink.
The men fall, commotion ensues.
(Later, the people will see this as a sign of Agni’s displeasure, bidding them to lengthen their worship and extend their sacrificial tributes.)
The hallowed chamber splinters into pandemonium. She turns her back from the chaos and taps the faded spot in the mural in a pattern that only the Emperor himself is supposed to know. A portion of the wall shifts, groans, reveals the narrow entrance to the vault of wisdom.
Azula slips inside the secret entrance unnoticed. It closes itself behind her, shutting out the noise and the light. Smirking, she snaps her fingers to start a flicker of fire.
As lambent blue light fills the room, her smile melts off.
There’s a stone table at the center of the room, devoid of codices and other vessels of knowledge that should’ve been here.
All that’s left is a letter sealed in midnight blue.
She reads it and her blood boils, simmers with annoyance, amusement. She reads it twice over and by the second time, she finally lets herself laugh.
She folds the letter, cups it in her hand, and lets her fire spread and munch on the ink-stained paper.
Azula keeps the ashes.
Dear Azula,
As you can see, I do agree with you.
I admit, you surprised me with that letter you left for me after you ruined my last assignment. How thoughtful of you to commit a transgression just so you can rub it in. We’re not supposed to just leave notes for enemies you know, even when said letter was mostly just you being smug as fuck. I had to return the favor. You happy now?
I imagine not. Oh well, all is fair in war.
Right, back to business: The codex. I threw it into the Ocean.
I’m joking. I moved it to another location, not that I’m going to tell you where it is. Rest assured that I did not desecrate it with seawater or whatever makes you sizzle. I simply committed something you would've done if I hadn't messed with your mission objective first.
I’m going to assume you’re not a hypocrite so don’t disappoint me and get pissed about that. All part of the job. You get it. I also assume you know what a Sea Serpent is. What kind of agent doesn’t know what a Sea Serpent is? A bad one who didn’t do their research. You’re the enemy side’s shining star though so I’m sure you picked up a bestiary more than once. Top marks in training and all that; it certainly shows. Anyway, did you know that sea serpents exist in this strand? No? Well, that's because they didn’t, but they do now. Or at least it says so in that codex you came here to doodle prophecies on. I hope my illustrations captured their fearsomeness.
When the Emperor, or one his staff, happens upon the codex again, Hama will have dispatched agents to perform a few conveniently scheduled and scripted miracles here and there. Before you know it, we have ourselves a strand with sea-worshipping Sun Warriors! Out of fear of being eaten by a godlike water beast, yes, but it will definitely stop them from getting in the way of the servants of Water while they do their thing. I also took care of the scrolls inside the Dragonbone Catacombs so, yeah—saved you the bother of having to go there.
By the way, I have to ask: am I really so popular that you guys have spirit tales about me?
I don’t think it matters, but I am sorry about that incident in Strand 12. Under different circumstances, I would’ve just swept the floor with a little manufactured flash flood and made a run for it, zero casualties if all those poor soldiers knew how to swim—do they cover that in Fire agent training?—but then the assholes ambushed me in a fucking empty field. Not even a stream nearby. They had it coming.
I’ve always thought your people were all light shows and burned threads. While we flow with the currents of time to influence its course, your Shift tries to block its path, dig riverbeds of your own more suited to your future. But not you. Are you a singular creature, or am I just wrong in thinking of the enemy as nothing but graceless pyromaniacs?
In any case, you’re a fun opponent to have.
Like I said at the beginning of the letter: I agree that we should at least squeeze a bit of fun out of this war. We’d go crazy if we don’t.
Catch you down the thread, hotshot.
Katara
PS. If you’re so confident about winning, why do you still watch your back?
*****
In this strand, like most, Tui has blessed a princess from the old tribes.
Princess Yue walks like a spirit among mortals: her pallid hair aglow, her words creating ripples and waves and edicts. In this strand, she will speak of Mother Ocean's embrace. She will sing songs that will inspire generations of elders and masters, crafting the frame which will feed their visions of a waterlogged world.
Katara only has to make sure the princess stays alive long enough.
As assignments go, this one isn't very complex. Boring, even, but Yue is interesting enough a character to look after. Katara keeps her distance—she's the palace healer in this strand—but remains ever watchful. The other side plays with fire, but flames cast shadows, too. All the assassins she's disposed of so far were hiding in dark alleys and underneath bridges. It’s like they want her to catch them.
Her letter gnaws at her. She can still remember what she wrote in haste, giddy from a successful con, and vaguely wants to permafreeze her whole body. What was she thinking?
She’d banish it from her thoughts if she can. But it’s there, clingy as smoke smell, sharpening a curiosity she shouldn’t nurse.
Days bleed. Her work drags.
She walks out of a healing hut, carrying with her weeks’ worth of supplies—complements to the healing arts. The chief is out on a hunting trip and she wants her workplace loaded up for the inevitable injuries and frostbites. Katara takes her implanted roles seriously—she doesn’t play-act, she inhabits.
She crosses an arch footbridge just as a gondola carrying a gaggle of youths passes beneath it. Street vendors pause from closing up their stalls to greet her by the name she’d chosen for this op; the bruising indigo sky waits for no one so she chooses not to dawdle for a chat. She’s not supposed to be out of the palace for too long.
Taking the service entrance, she winds her way through the hallways and towards the infirmary. It is as empty as she’d left it. Back home—which is to say, if she succeeds here, in the future—they have little need for infirmaries, or healing huts. The servants of Water evolved after the cleanse, adapted to a world with water spanning endless. Anyone with a drop of water tribe in their blood can bend and healing comes as easily as breathing. The spirits’ gifts—like the threads of time that had one day fell from the sky, of which they climb to ensure all destinations lead to theirs.
She’s lighting her stone lamp when she feels it: sunburst wrapped in skin, her rival’s familiar footsteps, a distant echo of a laugh comes a heartbeat later like thunder to lightning.
Her spine straightens in alarm, in anticipation.
Katara tries very hard to dampen the instinct to dash down the hallway. The hunter in her (Sokka would be so proud) rattles her ribs and roils her stomach. Move faster, it says. She reminds it that stealth is needed to pursue such a swift prey. (Not a prey, a predator in her own right.)
Soundless, she creeps; follows the murmurs, the heat. She recognizes another voice—the princess—and her steps quicken as her pulse races, as she uncorks the skin of water attached to her hip.
She turns a corner and automatically relaxes herself.
Princess Yue stands alone and startles when she notices her.
Her enemy has fled, leaving a bloodless scene and an unharmed target. The princess greets her and makes idle talk, cut short when she suddenly trails off mid-sentence, smiles, a dash of warmth dusting her cheeks like the ocean at sunrise. Oh boy.
There’s something else. The healer in Katara sees the infection, analyzes the symptoms she managed to catch when she takes her leave with a perfunctory bow. It's not the virulent kind, she concludes, but rather an intrusion in the water basin of one's mind. Ideas like slow-acting toxins that disrupt even the firmest of beliefs. Her enemy’s mark is all over it.
Well, there goes their prophet.
A folded letter is tucked underneath a stone lamp inside the infirmary when she gets back. She thinks nothing of chasing after the person who left it, pursuit being pointless now, and instead sits herself comfortably in her chair to read it before it combusts.
Dear Katara,
I am not “pissed” you took the codex and vandalized it; I was vexed you thwarted me. Bitter is the medicine of failure, but sweet is the nectar of payback, sweeter still when I get to charm some princess while executing the perfect retaliation.
Such base tactics are not my usual style, but my window was too narrow for something less heavy-handed with you hovering around the princess like a mother caribou. Besides, killing her is far too crude; too predictable and careless. You’d sense my murderous intent the moment I stepped foot on the palace. I didn’t want you on my tail, so I chose a more surgical approach. (I hope you appreciate the medical metaphor, oh great healer of ills.) I’m certain the princess will cease spewing auguries that benefit your side.
I’d pay her a visit—I’m interested in seeing for myself how her philosophy about the elements evolves after our conversation—but it would be for the best not to keep her hopes up. But please do send her my regards before you abandon that strand.
I regret not being able to stay a little longer to go sight-seeing. Agna Qel’a is always so pristine in any strand. I hate how much I like the place, but one cannot deny its beauty. Your ancestors’ city speaks of rigid walls and fluid order, of icy edifices and palatial infrastructures as imposing as the surrounding tundra, but unlike the segmented Ba Sing Se it breathes like one vast organism. The canal system is cutting-edge, elegant, interlinked like veins with the sea as the hydraulic pump that keeps everything flowing. Nature and civilization in perfect harmony, much like our sun cities: you with water, us with sunlight.
I know comparing our shining beacons with yours borders on treason, but this is also the second time I’m writing a letter to you. You can’t burrow your own grave when it’s already been dug—but I know you won’t tattle.
I won't tell on you and you won't tell on me. It’s not trust, you must understand this. I would say it’s much closer an unofficial treaty of our own: a mutual agreement that ultimately benefits us both.
What exactly happened to Agna Qel’a after the Drowning? Was it spared from the tides’ rise? I know some mountain peaks did, and that the Air Nomads survived and settled there. Did you have to freeze part of the ocean to build another city over it?
We do have water survival training. Commandant is no fool; he knows the hazards of having waterbenders as foes. First stage takes the new recruits to one of those strands we use as outposts. They throw us in a fast-running river and the cadets who couldn’t last at least a minute without squealing for help are sent home with their tails between their legs. Proper swimming lessons come next. The final assessment takes us back to our home downthread where the lakes are scalding like lava purified to its most liquid state. It doesn’t burn us, the same way the sun’s widened glare doesn’t peel open our skin, but it’s still unpleasant. I was the top of my class, but that was a forgone conclusion.
You called us Flamesters. I don’t know if I should laugh or be insulted. Or both.
But a “singular creature”? That, I like.
When you’re weaned on praises, you develop a perspicacious sense for empty flattery, for underhanded manipulations fashioned as compliments. Even genuine ones turn common when you’re accustomed to them. I found your begrudging praise delectable. It wasn’t even intended to be taken as one, just a Water agent’s unhealthy interest, but it delighted me. Also, it’s true. There’s no one like me in our ranks.
I laughed at your blatant stereotyping. We unfortunately do have a lot of those “graceless pyromaniac” types.
We’re still better than you, though.
Best,
Azula
PS. Why, I do so in the hopes of catching a glimpse of you.
*****
A boy named Jie—or is it Jian?—sings a bawdy song off-key, astride a badgermole with two other badgermoles lumbering behind him, as he enters the tunnel they’d carved at the foot of this mountain, his voice fading the deeper they go. The distant grinding of earth follows, signals to Azula that they’ve set to work.
The other earthbenders under her employ file inside the mouth of the tunnel, villagers she’d lured out of their crop fields with Fire Nation gold. Azula herself stays behind.
She’s a disgraced Fire Nation noblewoman this time, living as a fabulously rich expatriate in the Earth Kingdom, paying fabulous wages to local earthbenders to hollow out a mountain until a city could fit inside it.
Her objective is simple: dig an immense cavern within the belly of a mountain and retreat as soon the work is done.
Not the usual type of mission she gets placed into, but Beifong is unavailable as she’s currently holding off enemy incursions in one of their command posts. Commandant Ozai's distaste for earthbenders doesn't do him any favors in situations like this. There is currently only a couple hundred earthbenders under the division she is in, and among them only Beifong and Yun underwent extensive special operations and deep cover training.
The sun brims above the mountain, spilling light into the valley. She sits without any shade, leisurely sipping her tea and heating it when it threatens to grow cold, watching workers slip in and out of the tunnel. She sends out instructions only when she has to. The earth is their domain, not hers; she’s only here to make sure the outcome is up to her standards and specifications.
It almost feels like an indulgence, this mission, as straightforward missions always seem to be to her. She knows the value of patience, but keeping stationary while on assignment without the constant critical calculation, the perpetual threat assessment and reshuffling of tactics, diverges from her norm. She knows she’s doing valuable, productive work—this cavern will serve as shelter from the Sun’s glare many ages later, housing Earthbenders who will help build the foundations of the post-Burning world—yet the knowing doesn’t sate her, not like how twisting a rival’s maneuvers to her favor would sate and sharpen her appetite. Wearing an implanted person’s life is wasted on all this sitting and waiting without the electric anticipation. Assessing the progress of her diggers' work every end of the day pales to the succulence of a triumph well-earned.
Mere productive work, however valuable, is not what she strives for.
A runner comes bounding up to her. She tells her that the diggers found something— something the runner has no words for.
Azula walks into the tunnel, the fire in her palm regulated to a pale orange (disgraced Fire Nation noblewomen don’t bend pure-hued flames), and finds where her diggers have gathered around. They make space for her as she walks to the center of their circle.
There’s a wooden box, blue paint barely visible under the layer of dirt, earth-crusted. It looks like it had been dug out from the ground. It's opened to reveal what seems to be a large animal skull. Azula hesitates for half a moment before reaching to lift it out of the box, grabbing the skull by its two elongated tusks protruding downwards from the bone. A walrus skull.
She feels the beginnings of a smile and stifles it.
The letter lies folded at the bottom of the box.
She takes that too, and makes a gesture that disperses the gathered diggers, each of them returning to their work. She doesn’t read it until she’s back outside, Walrus skull resting on her lap, cup of tea abandoned. Once she’d read the words thoroughly enough to be certain she hasn’t missed anything—a double meaning, a hint of an ulterior motive—she burns it and places the ashes in a small bottle.
Dear Azula,
Relax, I’m not here to crash your party. Just thought I’d drop by to say hi. I was sent off to a strand only a jump away from this one. Hama won’t even know I made a short detour.
The skull is from a prior assignment. I wanted something that would catch your eyes and scream “this is from Katara”. Obviously, it worked, since you’re reading this now.
Kind of you to leave a note again last time. I liked reading it. I get the need to destroy compromising paper trails, but it’s kind of annoying to receive a letter that self-incinerates after I read it. I shouldn’t complain though when you're flames—well, let's just say I'm morbidly partial to your uniquely-colored fire.
Anyway, what I truly want to ask is: Why did you write to me again?
The surface answer I knew from the outset. And like you said, we’ve been at this for a while, and I never once thought of you as someone who played safe. Start a correspondence with the enemy? Sure, no problem, just a normal day at work for you.
But is there more to this? What made you write the second time other than to rub salt on my defeat? I would be really disappointed if this is some long-running, elaborate trap. How unoriginal. I won’t be surprised though.
You’re right about my unhealthy interest. It’s what’s pushing me to finish this letter and leave it where I’m certain you’d find it. But it’s also because you intrigue me. You described Agna Qel’a with a decadence I wouldn’t have expected from a Flamester. (Hah, not gonna stop using it.) You wrote about one aspect of your Shift’s agent recruit training process casually, handing out useful intel like it was nothing. (I haven’t forwarded the information to my superiors, for obvious reasons.)
So that's why I'm writing to you again. I’ll regret saying all of this later, but I do mean it.
As for the fate of Agna Qel’a, your second guess was correct. The city of Sedna floats just above it, better than its predecessor in every sense. We also have other ice settlements scattered around, glittering points in the ocean’s expanse like the stars to Sedna's moon. And of course, the Air Nomad islands, which I sometimes visit in the interim between missions.
What you feel about praises is what I feel about friends.
I was born in one of the Southern settlements but I grew up in the more heavily populated part of Sedna, near one of the ports where people gather and trade, where no one could ever truly be by themselves because there’s always someone nearby—a neighbor, a sailor on shore leave, a sibling. I collected friends until they overflow, until they lapped at my days and routines with the constancy of waves. But then I lost my mom.
Shit, sorry for the sad turn. Long story short: My mother died in an assignment gone awry (she was a strand operations analyst; a freak storm devastated their encampment) and my myriad friendships turned sour and hollow. None of them ever knew me, it turned out. Or maybe I changed. It got worse when I enlisted. All my childhood friends hardly know what to say to me these days.
Anyway, I get to word-vomit to you instead. Who better to annoy to death with rambling letters than the enemy?
Regards,
Katara
PS. You’ll be pleased to know that Princess Yue from last time decided to embark on a journey of spiritual and elemental discovery. Seriously, how much coexistence philosophy did you manage to cram into that one conversation?
*****
The massive ice shelf in the horizon floats unmovingly along the coast, stretches into mighty sheets of ice that don’t seem to end. The crew is convinced that the great spirits themselves blanketed this peninsula with glaciers and perpetual winter.
She climbs down the ratlines in a rush, shoves the spyglass to the nearest crewmate below her rank, and hurries through the deck to join the scouting party as they prepare the rowboats.
Katara knows what she saw.
The men no longer blink or jeer whenever she volunteers on tasks instead of being sequestered below the deck along with the rest of the women. To her chagrin, Katara had to earn this respect, had to fight tooth and nail to prove her mettle and skill until it was no longer deniable that they would need skilled navigators like her if they wish to cross the ocean. That was back when they were still in Agna Qel’a. On top of all that, she also had to nudge fate by sowing ideas and causing ripples in the sidelines, ideas that would eventually beckon seafarers thirsty for adventure to explore Mother Ocean's vastness.
Lo and behold, the South Pole, discovered by Northern Tribe sailors several eras earlier than usual.
The scouting party is made up of about twenty crewmates, including Katara, along with the captain himself. The bite of the cold breeze, like a kiss to her exposed cheeks, fails to make any of them shiver. Those who aren’t rowing set to the task of clearing the path by bending the ice floes away.
When they set foot on the coast, it feels momentous, even to her. But her focus is elsewhere. Katara breaks off from the group as soon as she can, making up some excuse about surveying the western part of the coast, where a protruding ice stands like a glacial hill.
She crests the rising terrain, bending the snow under her feet to compress and lightly clutch her soles with each step so she doesn’t slip. On the small stretch of flat surface at the top is the dark smudge of an abandoned campfire, in striking contrast against the pure white ice.
Lying on top of the dead embers is a scroll case, red as blood, with a gilded dragon coiling its body around it with tiny eyes made of rubies. She picks it up; it even feels expensive.
The intent is clear to her right away: you think I’m going to let you outdo me?
She takes out the letter from the tube and sits cross-legged on the ice. This time, she gets to read it four times before the ocean-colored flames creep and turn it to ash.
Dear Katara,
The sun greets this cold, desolate place like a mother—stern and disapproving—as I write this. I make a sheet of parchment bleed on top of a slab of ice. My red-tipped pen moves not in haste but in careful leisure. You’re far, but there’s a chance you can spot me. On the horizon I see your ships as small pinpricks. By the time you reach this glacier, I will have fled downthread.
Your skills at navigation and seamanship deserve praise, but I'm no expert. I posed as both crewmate and captain in past missions, spent time at sea in Fire Navy warships and royal sloops from different eras in different strands. Those steam-fueled masses of steel are hardly the same as your cutter ships; the nuances of sailing are lost on me.
As a reprisal to your goodwill, this letter will not accompany a counter maneuver to your current long project. You're enmeshed. I sensed how deep into the strand you are this time. I can feel them now, your ripples, even as I sit here and write.
My main agenda:
(1) to borrow your words: say hi
(2) address your question
You ask why I keep writing to you. Not a soul but you will read this, after which it will burn and my words with it. It’s like composing letters to the dead, only that you’re very much alive, and you respond in turn. These letters are not like mission reports, or official missives, or intel scrolls on messenger hawks—they lack a prescribed structure, formality, ciphers. But I somehow find it safer to “word vomit” here than anywhere else. (The irony is not lost on me.)
We’ve been rivals for too long with not a single word exchanged between us. I wanted to remedy that when I first wrote to you, as one would want to poke at a bear. Much like most compulsive actions, it has snowballed, scaffolding into double, triple, quadruple interacts.
You say you like my flames. Does this admiration repulse you? Secret correspondence or no, I am still your enemy.
Sincerely,
Azula
PS. By all means, regurgitate your musings in your letters. I burn them after reading.
PPS. I do recognize your trouble with friendships, but I find this sort of isolation suited to me. Word of advice? Learn to carve up your own place in the collective as a singular creature. I’m beginning to echo your words.
PPPS. The scroll tube used to be Fire Lord Yosor’s in Strand 623. I assure you its value exceeds that of your walrus skull souvenir.
*****
The view from her loft apartment is dreary and bustling; it’s never just one without the other in this city. Not even the sun can remedy the absolute drabness and disorder of this so-called metropolitan center of the world. Her people did not bother designing cities like this after the Burning, and Azula thinks, as she looks out into the cityscape through her window, that they likely had good reason for doing away with a place like this.
But if there's one reliable thing about Republic City, it's that it makes being invisible easy.
It makes it easier to operate in the shadows and be no one. Not in the same sense as a peasant or a commoner becomes no one as their personhood is renumerated less in other capitals. In this city, people can stand out while also keeping some element of mystique about them, which works perfectly for what she’s been cooking up in this strand.
Her interventions are causing quite a stir among the masses. The triads are no longer cannibalizing each other, and intergroup boundaries are thinning in favor of shared causes and a common enemy. She found this city relatively stable upon arrival, and in less than a month she managed to tip the scales so stupendously that it's on the brink of collapse. All without making herself known.
Commandant will be most pleased.
He calls it unconventional warfare; she sees it plainly as sabotage, a one-woman team taking down an entire Republic whose existence is detrimental to her Shift’s cause with her hands clean. Incisions instead of excisions.
In the end, it’s all just valuable, productive work.
Leaning back against her chair, she sets aside her tea and grabs her stack of mail, flipping through them absently.
A wax sealed envelope, smaller than the others, gives her pause.
The seal bears the midnight blue of the Water Army and their symbol, stylized after their ancestral tribes’ emblem. She opens the envelope without tearing it, reads the letter inside, burns and gathers its remains.
Dear Azula,
Republic City’s a mess, isn’t it? You either hate it there or you absolutely love it. I'm going to take a guess and say it's the former for you.
There's a lot I want to say.
I should answer your question first. Liking your blue fire doesn’t repulse me. At least not in the way you think. It’s…complicated.
I've always been fascinated by fire to the point of indecency. I was the sort of kid (not that I think there are others like me back home) who huddled near the hearth even when there’s no storm, who poked at live embers to make sparks, who felt satisfaction over feeding dried seaweed to the fire despite the stench.
One time, when I leaned too close to the fireplace that I ended up inhaling ash, I got thrown into some wakeful dream, a hallucination of some kind. And in it, I was buoyant, bobbing along the ebb and flow of waves.
We used driftwood as kindling that day.
Only my mom knew about it. I was just a kid then, scared that my mom would get mad, but too confused not to tell anyone. I remember her looking at me sadly before giving me the tightest hug, the kind that could melt ice sheets and stop snowstorms. Fierce and warm. But that sad look on her face stuck with me.
The only other time something like that happened to me was during the Battle of Strand 411, Ri Wu Era. Before Hama recruited me. You were there, I think—the barracks traded stories about seeing blue flames for days after. The rest of the details and specifics blur now but I remember the battlefield, the flames and ice, blood and soot. It was the first time I saw fire purely as the enemy, as destruction without warmth or security and pretty sparks.
The hallucination was short—it came in the aftermath, while we sifted through the ruins—but it left an indelible mark in my mind. As if that wasn’t strange enough, I think it was someone else’s memory too. A dying man’s final thoughts. He was one of yours.
Sorry for unloading all of this to you. I haven’t spoken a word of this to anyone, kept it under lock and key for years. You understand, I think, how important it is to keep people back home from knowing. But you told me this letter will burn, so I have nothing to worry about.
I hope you don’t hate Republic City too much. I’ve enclosed a list of the best seaweed noodle places in this strand. Please do yourself a favor and go to at least one of them? You won’t regret it.
Yours,
Katara
*****
Katara is carrying a child on her hip, her free hand rolling a lick of flame across her knuckles. The child’s giggles bolster her, so she does the trick again and again to keep the child amused. The gentle sound of it fades, the world undulates and changes, clears out the pleasant haze of a cherished memory. Now she stands in a battlefield, splintered ice dripping with blood poking its tip out of her chest. She falls to her knees, staring down at her death, doesn’t dare pluck it out. With the final dregs of her strength, she bends heat from her very core until she feels it sear her from the inside, until she screams so loud only to be cut off when her throat melts.
The dream ends and she jolts awake.
It is common knowledge among soldiers in the Water Army that many of their enemies would burn themselves into cinder when fatally wounded in a fight. Though only those who, like Katara, had climbed far enough upthread to mingle with the enemy's ancestors in missions know about their mortuary customs.
Katara doesn’t like to think about it.
She shouldn’t have unlocked that memory in the first place, shouldn’t have written a word of it in that letter. But she had felt so light, so unburdened, when she poured it into words, let it spill after sealing it close within her for so long.
She’s on a break of sorts. Her last assignment dragged, which isn’t unusual, but Hama was feeling a bit generous after she brought her results that exceeded expectations. She thought a little holiday for one of her best agents was in order.
She tried to enjoy it, she really did, but she’d rather eat salt than spend more than an hour around her childhood friends. The Air Nomad islands are also closed off for the time being as they are currently having one of their prayer festivals.
And her home is always empty these days. Her dad spends more time at sea than at their house ever since Katara enlisted in the Water Army. Sokka’s the same, and she thinks it’s only a matter of time until he follows their dad out in the water and never look back; perhaps he’d even find a nice village in one of the ice settlements, meet someone there and marry them. For now, her brother makes do with long hunts.
She can’t really blame them. Katara, in her own way, hunts and sails to escape the gaping hole her mother left. Time is her endless sea, the threads her currents, their enemies her prey.
So, a week into her break, Katara volunteered for the first assignment she could get her hands on. She didn’t even check where and for how long—she read “routine check” and signed herself up. She’s too high ranked for something as menial as monitoring a strand they had secured, but anything to get her back in the field and her mind off things she’d rather not think about.
It was only later, after she’d been assigned a strand analyst unit to lead and scheduled their climb, that she checked exactly where she was heading.
And now she’s here in Strand 12, panting in her quarters after an awfully vivid dream.
(You exterminated a record number of my people in single combat.)
She gets out of bed and wanders outside.
They’ve stationed themselves near Full Moon Bay. After Katara is done with her thorough check and the analysts gather enough data, they will move on to the Fire Nation, the South Pole, and finally the North. Then down the braid they go.
She reaches the bay’s battlements, climbs it swiftly, quiet as any competent agent of war. She sits on the parapets to stare at the calm, dark water, breathing in the cool air in large lungfuls. There are thousands of this same sight, this same cove, viewed through another person's eyes. She thinks about her mom and wonders, not for the first time since she became an agent, whether she's ever gone to one of the places her mom had been. Like here, in Full Moon Bay, with her own team of analysts, led by their own Change agent.
She wonders what her mom thought about her job. Did she find purpose? Fulfillment? Did she truly think it war was worth dying for?
She points those same questions to herself sometimes. And whenever she does, she feels like she's in free fall, unsure whether she was pushed or she chose to jump, unsure of what’s waiting for her at the bottom.
An arrow shoots out of nowhere and lands mere inches away from her thigh.
She spots the scroll attached to its shaft and relaxes. For a long moment she just stares at it, groping for a reason to explain why all she can feel is immense relief. She doesn’t look around her to seek the sender, knows she left the moment the arrow was fired.
Eventually, she unlatches the scroll.
She reads the letter and thinks of mirrors and parallels.
Dear Katara,
What you described, these hallucinations you spoke about, perplexed me. I’ve been turning it over in my head since I read your last letter. It shouldn’t even be possible. See, information or memory recovery through ash inhalation is something of my people, of firebenders, which you are decidedly not. There was a period of confusion during the direct aftermath of the Burning. Histories, records, wisdom on ink and paper—most were not spared from the glare. The spirits saw our plight and gave us the ability to recover lost knowledge by breathing the ashes. My forefathers used it to build our world anew.
I don’t know how you were able to do the same. You said that as a child you were prone to drawing close to the hearth. This is not a robust guess, but I suspect that habit had caused your condition.
It annoys me that I don’t have the answers.
I remember that battle vividly. It was my first deployment during my brief stint as an infantry soldier. (Commandant had wanted me to get a taste of actual combat before I joined his division.) I couldn’t recall seeing you; there was too much going on that day. It was also hard to pick waterbenders apart when at times it felt like battling one single tidal wave. We may have lost that fight, but I learned a great deal about your strategy after that experience, which then helped me bring many victories for our Shift as my career progressed.
I will reciprocate your secret with a confession: I don’t very much care about our Shift’s cause anymore.
A shocking revelation. I’m aware how absurd it sounds coming from me.
I strive to win—you are aware of this—but not for the sake of the greater future or whatever such nonsense. Perhaps when I was younger, a fresh soldier not yet weaned off blind zeal and ambition, those larger goals mattered. But I’ve seen things, Katara, and I’ve lived hundreds of implanted lives across the strands. Upthread and downthread, eras braided and came undone under my deft hands; I felled unhelpful empires like weeds, murdered and nurtured, pushed and pulled at time.
But I care about winning, and earning my wins. I chase and I fight and I take risks. I leave letters and poke at the enemy to elicit reactions that turn into a game that mutually engages, invigorates, distracts.
And I have you to keep things interesting, as you have done so for some time now.
Yours,
Azula