The man was dressed in simple yet rich crimson robes, and was alone in his private chambers. In his hand was a letter from his assistant.

His hand shook as it gripped the paper- it was an old man's hand, he now noticed. The web of skin between the index finger and the thumb was saggy, wrinkled. Blue veins stood out like hills across the back of his hand. The fingers were bent and crooked with arthritis, and scarred from decades of Firebending. He could have sworn that just yesterday that his hand had been young, whole, and strong.

Sergeant Cho was dead: suicide, Xin had indicated. He had been found in his barracks hanging from the rafters, with a stool toppled over next to him. The old man in the crimson robes didn't know if Cho had been driven to it or if his comrades had given him some assistance. It scarcely mattered, as far as he could tell. It was the same cause and same result. He hoped that Private Chang was safe in his new duty of guarding a useless pile of rusty spare parts in a naval yard, thousands of miles away from the front line. The home militia were less savage then their counterparts.

Yuri Ichizami had failed. Firelord Ozai had personally overseen the trial. After hearing the prosecution and the defense, he had decided to award Admiral Jeong Jeong the Order of Agni Kuro, the highest honor a soldier or sailor can be given. When Ichizami had protested, the Firelord had informed him that if the Earth Kingdom was ever to be subdued, then drastic and brutal methods needed to be utilized. Firelord Ozai explicitly approved of the massacre of the civilians. Every word out of Ichizami's mouth had elevated the Admiral in his eyes. Placing royal favor on the atrocities would encourage other commanders to do the same.

Sergeant Cho and Private Chang had backed the wrong horse. One had paid with his life, the other with his career. Ichizami and Xin were unharmed because not even Firelord Ozai would interfere with the Fire Sages without a compelling reason. But a few private, whispered conversations from his fellow sages had convinced him that he would need to keep his head down in the future.

The old man in crimson robes was alone in his room. The world had just become a worse place in which to live, and he wasn't sure if it was his fault or not. He felt an absurd desire to crawl into bed and cover his head with the blanket until everything in the world that was terrible dissolved away.

The letter fluttered lightly to the scarlet carpet as the old man wept softly to himself.

Morning. Covers shoved down to his knees from a fit of bad dreams he couldn't recall. The sunlight spilled in from the wide window facing to east.

The old man picked himself out of bed and dressed swiftly and sullenly. He hadn't checked, but it was obvious that all the terrible things in the world were still around.

The old man didn't know what came over him. His was a well-ordered, logical life- he did not recall a single instance of spontaneity or whimsy in his life.

Nonetheless, once he left his quarters, he found his feet heading for the stables.

He tipped the kid who cared for the ostrich-horses generously. The little boy grinned wide as he bowed. His jet black bangs drooped down to hide the face, but were flipped back casually as he pocketed the silver.

The old man said, "You're Earth Kingdom, yes?"

The kid's smile vanished. He adopted an air of meekness and solemnity. "No, sir. I'm Fire Nation now, hey?"

If every Firebender in the world dropped dead tomorrow, the old man thought wearily, you and your family would throw a feast and invite your neighbors to celebrate. And with monsters like Zhao, Jeong Jeong, and Ozai running the show, who could blame them?

"Right," he said aloud. "I'll be gone for a while. Maybe a week. You batten down the hatches here while I'm gone, you hear?"

"I'll keep this place squared away, sir," the boy chirped. "When you come back, your ostrich will have a nice pile of warm straw to sleep on, hey? Nice oats and roots to eat. You rely on me, hey?" The kid rubbed his fingertips together with exaggerated avarice and laughed.

Private Shang stabbed a kid like you just a few months ago, the old man almost said. Now what would you say to that?

He mounted his steed and started travelling west, towards My Lai. He had sailed nearly 600 miles to reach the colony of New Sozin to conduct Jeong Jeong's court martial, he could afford to go another 60 to see the cause of it.

There. The charred bones had been policed up, but the square outline where the tavern had been torched remained, marked by grey ash. He could see where the padlock had been melted into the ground. The old man turned towards the mountains. He thought he could see the spur that Sergeant Cho had used as his observation point. 500, 600 meters away. It would have been an easy shot for the ballista crew.

He mounted his ostrich again and rode on.

The ground along each side of the road into the heart of My Lai was a bizarre, twisted tan. The old man had never seen such earth before. He had been under the impression that My Lai's economy was based on agriculture, why would they use this land for crops? Surely Earthbenders could have made the land fit for farming.

He jerked the reins as the answer occurred to him.

Of course they had used this land for crops. That's why it was all twisted up and dry. This area had once been rice paddies that were shin deep in water, before the Fire Nation had come.

The heart of My Lai. The drainage ditch carved into the earth was still stained dark brown. The reports had mentioned that the soldiers had rolled the bodies into a nearby ditch afterwards. The bodies were gone but their life blood remained.

Here was the shrine, blasted to ruins. It had been located on the only hill in the area. It was simplistic in design- just a stout pillar with the faces of the local spirits engraved on it.

The old man studied the smoke stained rock for awhile, wondering what it had looked like before fire blasts had shattered it. When he was through examining it, he turned to take in the sight of the whole of My Lai.

Nothing was there. A few buildings stood, and the roads were still recognizable, and blackened areas showed where the outlying houses had been. But nothing was there.

He suspected that no one would ever come back to live here.

Movement caught his eye. A lone rider, coming in from the north. The old man tracked the rider's progress as he came into the heart of My Lai and dismounted. The old man couldn't see any details, but could tell that the rider was standing still, unmoving. The old man damned his eyes for being old and strained to see who it was that would come here.

The stranger sat down, leaving his ostrich-horse to wander off. He didn't move beyond that, from what the old man could see.

Enough guessing. The old man mounted up and road down to meet him.

"We train young men to burn people alive, but their commanders will not let them scribe the word 'fuck' on their helmets because it is obscene."

The old man said nothing. No response was required from him, and he was scared that Jeong Jeong had lost his mind. The Admiral had chopped off his top-knot, leaving his white hair ruffling in the breeze. The old man didn't understand why, and was wondering of he would live to see sunset.

"I couldn't stand it. The lies. The idiocy. The blatant refusal to acknowledge our own will. Nobody who was in charge understood the war we were fighting."

And his eyes. His eyes were dead, almost glazed over. When they had turned on the old man he thought his heart had stopped beating.

"Horror has a face... and you must make make a friend of horror. Horror... and mortal terror are your friends. If not, they are enemies to be feared. I remember when I was with the Jumpers in the Moki Lang... seems like a thousand centuries ago. We were behind enemy lines looking for targets to destroy before the invasion. We called for fire..."

And the voice. His voice was dull, the words slurred. He could have been discussing the weather for all the emotion he showed.

"We misidentified a target. We thought it was an enemy HQ. It was not. We burned a camp of the soldiers' families to the ground. The children... they screamed and burned and the sounds they made were not human. And I... I... cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to remember it. I never want to forget. For a moment... for one clear, shining moment... I was an Earthbender, and those were my babies out there on fire. And I felt like screaming because the world was too fragile and too... too horrific to live in for one more second. But the world wasn't letting me go, and I was trapped in it. It was like my own belly was eating my alive from the inside. And it struck me then- like a sword. Like a sword made from diamond. Like somebody split my skull with a crystal sword. My God. The genius of it. The will to do that to somebody! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. I realized that we had to become stronger men, because we are not monsters. We needed men who would fight from the heart, men who had families, who had children of their own, men who knew love... but who had the strength... the strength to do that. We would need men who were moral- but at the same time were able to delve deep into their inner fires and unleash their most primordial instincts. Men who could shelve their self-control in the backs of their minds and scorch the world without any judgement... it was judgement that was the real enemy. Not horror. It is judgement that defeats us."

And the hands. His hands would shake violently, and then calm down. Every few seconds he would shake again. The patterns that the fingers would shiver in resembled advanced Firebending techniques. The old man realized with a deepening sense of unease that Jeong Jeong was trying desperately not to unleash his power.

"I have seen horrors. Horrors you've never seen. But I knew that you had no right to call me a monster. That you might have the moral right to slay me, but not to judge me. Until you've stood there and watched horror at work, you had no right to judge."

He giggled. The old man jumped as the skin at the back of his neck crawled.

"And you didn't. Despite your best efforts, Ichizami, the Fire Nation did not judge me. They gave me a medal for it."

His giggles erupted into a fit of breathless laughter. After a while, the laughter slipped into sobs, and then quieted down into silence. Soon enough, Jeong Jeong spoke again in his lifeless voice.

"I once saw a snail crawl along the edge of a razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving. Perfect balance. Unceasing self-control."

Jeong Jeong reached into his robe and drew out a scroll. He tossed it gently at the old man's feet.

"I know that you are no messenger boy, Ichizami. I had meant to drop it off at Zhao's desk when I returned, but I have decided that this is more fitting. I want you to be my herald. You alone tried to judge me. I want you to tell them what I told you here."

The old man stooped down to grab the scroll. "Who do I give it to?"

"As long as the Firelord reads it, I don't care."

"What is it?"

Jeong Jeong shrugged.

The old man was alone now. Jeong Jeong had departed, turned his back and left like the old man wasn't even there.

He unrolled the scroll meant for Firelord Ozai and read.

He rerolled it and tied it shut with a crimson ribbon.

He stood there in the heart of a blackened, ash covered village and thought for a while.

He mounted his ostrich-horse and rode back home.