Prologue

The arrow shot by the archer may or may not kill a single person. But stratagems devised by a wise person can kill even babies in the womb.

–Kautilya, Indian Philosopher

She was a goddess, and she was good at it.

She went hither and non over the earth, walked up and down and through it, and wherever she went there was good fortune, the sprouting of harvests, the blooming of flowers. Wherever she spread her hand, the winter didn't seem so cold, nor the summers so dry. The only wildfires that lasted longer than a day were the wildfires of her rumors—rumors that were swiftly becoming the foundation of legend.

It was said she was made up of the moon, so pearlescent and smooth was her skin, so white her hair. Some told stories that she was a ghost. Perhaps she was another Avatar? A new Spirit who broke the old laws and actually helped humans? Or no, it was the Avatar himself, concealed as a woman to stir up come drama, get the people talking.

As is often common with such rumors, all were true, and yet false—and all to the same degree.

The new goddess could not be summoned by any prayer, nor bribed by any sacrifice. The new goddess had neither temple nor religion nor teachings to give anyone, yet she was developing followers. She walked wherever she wished. And no one of any trustworthy repute had ever reported hearing her speak.

But she was far from mute.

It was simply that the only ones whom the goddess spoke to were all, instinctively, deemed untrustworthy: children.

There was a special place in the goddess's heart, apparently, when it came to children. The only prayer that might catch her attention came from the sob of a child—and this, only because the human part of her remembered what it was to cry. Be it from the pain of a recently broken limb, the loneliness from having no one to play with, or the ache of a starving belly, the children would all eventually tell the same things to whoever would listen:

The goddess was the most beautiful lady in the world. She wore no clothes. And she always took away the pain, gave the child a kiss, whispered that she loved them forever, and then disappeared.

Many would dismiss such claims from a son or daughter as the wild, imaginative pranks that children often pull. But there was always one single thing that rendered any negative criticism moot: the children, who had always been sick or hurt, were now perfectly cured. The deaf began to hear. The mute began to speak. And the rumors spread even faster.

This was probably, in the end, the real reason why the goddess was able to kill the Avatar and put an end to his reign.

Ty Lee shivered beneath her tangled, sweat-soaked sheets, and prayed that she hadn't shit herself again.

A comforting, worried voice met her ears though the dark. "Ty, relax," Teo said softly from close by. His voice was like a warm hand on her shoulder. "You were dreaming. Just a bad dream, that's it."

She caught herself and tried to slow down her heart, then bit her lip until the pain brought her consciousness fully out of the dream. Teo was sitting at the edge of his bed, poised to leap into his own chair, his eyes wide and worried, his aura a blaze of red tinged with green—concern, spiced with a tiny bit of fear.

"Did I—?" she started, then stopped. It was so humiliating, so wrong, that she had to ask this. But she couldn't bring herself to look down at the sheets. "Is there a mess again?"

"I don't know. I can't smell anything, though. Do you want me to look?" His voice was gentle, yet cautious. She hated that tone; it made her stomach knot up. Like he was afraid she was so weak that she'd break into a million different pieces.

"You'd…you'd better. Please." Her own tone had loathing and disgust lurking just beneath the calm I'll be all right surface.

The nightmares were getting more and more frequent, as the months went on. Before, the physical strain of adjusting to life in her own chair had been so demanding that her nights had been blissfully absent of anything but exhausted sleep. Now, though, her body had adapted and acclimatized to its new reality, and the days weren't so stressful.

Well. The stress wasn't anything new, anyway.

And if there wasn't enough for her to do during the day that could bring her to the brink of exhaustion, that was when the bad dreams came. It was usually on these nights that she woke up in a puddle of her own piss and shit—a puddle that she couldn't feel, and, if she'd been lying in it long enough, couldn't even smell.

This was one of the reasons why Teo no longer slept in her bed.

One of the reasons.

"It's almost sunrise," he said. He used a long-handled stick to draw back the curtains from the window above his bed. The blue-grey light just preceding the twilight hour gave the room barely enough light to see by. Using the same stick, along with a nurselike detachment in his actions, Teo peeled back the sheets on Ty Lee's bed. She forced herself to look.

The sheets were only soaked with the sweat that made her nightclothes cling to her skin.

She gave a sigh of relief that threatened to become a full-blown case of the shakes. The nightmare hadn't been too bad. Maybe she could make it to the bathroom before bad luck caught up with her.

The rehabilitation therapy that she'd been going through, with Teo as her self-appointed live-in nurse, had given her some urinary and sphincter control, along with limited sensation down there. But even those partial gains were overshadowed by the ever-present feeling of lack. She couldn't move her legs, couldn't feel them or anything else below her waist. Underneath her navel she was as dead as Fire Lord Ozai.

She couldn't quite make herself meet Teo's eyes. "I, uh…I better go freshen up, anyways."

Teo was already in his own chair—so damn fast, that guy—and rolled to her bed with a single push of his arms. While Ty Lee struggled to clear her legs over the side to where her own chair waited patiently, Teo reached her and slid a hand beneath one arm to help. She lowered her head and tried not to grit her teeth. "I can do it," she said.

"Oh, Ty…" he sounded so tired, so inexpressively sad, as though one breath of her name could encompass all of her petty failings, and his never-ending charity. "I wish you'd just let me help," he muttered, and for a moment the knots in her gut eased up, just a little bit.

"You do help, Teo. Every day." She placed her own hand on top of his. "But you have to let me handle what I can handle, okay?"

He nodded, silently, then turned and wheeled himself over to the bed on his side of the room. Before, he might've kissed her on the cheek and tried to get her to smile. Those days were freshly over.

She'd made sure that bridge was burnt to cinders.

It took both hands to lever each dead leg into the straps of the chair, one at a time, until the numb feet were properly in place on the footrests. She sat there for a long time, staring at her hands. Once upon a time, she'd made those fingers into weapons. In years long gone, she had been widely considered as the finest female hand-to-hand combatant of all time. Her sole reminder of those days, the permanently calloused fingertips, were now being overshadowed by the fresh callouses on her palms, courtesy of pushing her chair everywhere.

She'd thought she was strong, back then. Only later did she find out how strong she really was. Teo had found her sobbing on her bed, sitting on the mattress with shit all over her futile hands, splattering it like a child across her dead thighs as she tried to pound some feeling, some use back into them. That was the precise moment that she knew.

She'd never been anywhere close to strong.

The smell…

More than anything else, that's what she feared the most at night. The smell closing down her lungs, stinging her eyes, choking her throat. It was the smell of the where her grandparents had lived, before she'd run away: the chemical reek of people who were irreparably sick, physically useless, mentally incontinent. Old, decrepit, dying. The smell of mental breakdowns, and downward spirals.

It smelled, sometimes, like Grey Rock.

Ty Lee's chair was the first of its kind, a four-wheeled contraption specially designed to her paralysis, and even if the worst should happen she wouldn't make much of a mess: there was a toilet lid under the seat cushion, along with a bedpan for emergencies—but Ty Lee privately thought that if she ever allowed herself to get into the habit of using them, she'd kill herself.

What Teo had tried to explain away as a convenience in the face of embarrassing emergency, she saw it entirely as a threat. If she ever let herself fall that far into the paralysis, if she surrendered to it the way Aang and Suki and Uncle told her, if she accepted the hardship of life instead of fighting a useless battle…then the smell of it would stick to her forever. Clinging to her skin. A noxious cloud that followed wherever she went.

She was afraid that someday, she might even get used to it.

She wheeled across the hardwood floor and entered the small bathroom. The chair's arms folded down, and she was able to swing herself onto the toilet using wall-mounted rails. As she sat down and tried to relax enough for her bowels and bladder to empty themselves, Ty Lee—who had once been the living embodiment of happiness and life—squeezed her eyes shut against the familiar tears of her private humiliation.

Why can't I wake up? Please, something—whoever might be listening. That's it. That's all I want.

Please, just let me wake up.

The new goddess heard the prayer.

She smiled, and chose to ignore it. For now.

Silence enfolded her, wrapped around her body, soaked through her heart. Silence so deep that it was deafening with imaginary echoes of the past. For the girl she had been, this silence could probably have been painful; now it just was.

Silence was the fertile ground from which saplings of possibility budded from her intelligent mind. These saplings grew into tall imaginary trees of life-paths; some blossomed, some died, some were reborn again for use in the future. Like a gardener, she sought ways to guide this growth with gentle efficiency.

Like a gardener, she would use the course of nature to her advantage.

Like this, the thought, finding a branch upon which the weight of her finger could curve the entire tree to her desire; and then this, another spot where her lips upon its bark would color the blooms of this new branch; resulting with this.

And the tree of the future was the plan of her dream.

The people already within her mind clamored for her attention, so she opened the gates of her memories to release and hear them, standing before them as a titan, regarding them as a queen regards peasants. First among them was the fading remnant of what she once had been: Fire Princess Azula.

The liar, the sadist, the lonely child. Azula now implored for speed and immediate action, cringing against the imagined humiliation of letting a single moment keep her from her revenge. For every moment that passed without a battle won, Azula saw it as inching closer towards failure.

To the Fire Princess, the new goddess said: I am much more than you were. Failure is impossible.

At the girl's side stood a more recent tenant of the goddess's mind: her mother, Ursa—whose existence had been forgotten during the moments of daylight and company, and only resurfaced sparingly when she was alone at night—whispered surrender. She reminded her daughter that life was impossibly random, and it was better to not only survive in safety, but help remained of her family thrive as well. With the power of the new goddess helping her brother, she could truly bless the Fire Nation and perhaps even the world. Such a course of action would have a higher chance of success and happiness than to walk the path of more pain and risk futile sacrifice.

To Ursa, the new goddess said: Success and happiness are attained only THROUGH pain and sacrifice. I am much more than you were.

Behind the mother and daughter stood the spiritual essences of the children she'd encountered recently. Faceless, nearly shapeless shades, lives too small to remain distinctive even inside her mind. Their voices blended together in an oceanic murmur, begging that she remember them, that she love them, that she care for them.

To the children she said: Fear not. For I am with you.

She gathered her strength and pushed them back behind the adamantine doors of her mind, and locked them there. One figure alone remained to face her.

Fire Lord Ozai.

Towering in his strength, his body chiseled from marble, his beard long and straight, his hair a cascade down his shoulders, his eyes black onyx.

To her father she said: I am coming. You will live again.

And the silent god within her mind nodded his head with approval.

Azula swam back up and broke the surface of her consciousness, to regard her home world with fresh eyes. Then, with footsteps that fell with a measured cadence ordinarily reserved for an executioner's death march, she began to walk towards the city of Ba Sing Se.

Soon now, she told the god within. Soon.