Hey guys! I hope you enjoyed the 1st chapter. So i started this story on Fanfiction awhile ago, but this time I'm changing a few things...
First off, Sokka does have a love interest! I'll admit i wasn't going to do this originally, but after reading a series called Kaida the queen of ice... i realized Sokka having a pairing has some merit to it. You may think this is lazy or whatever but... he's with an Oc this time. If you've read my other stories you should know who it is.
Secondly, the story may be... better paced this time. Last time, i rushed the realtionship between Odyn and Azula, i will try and pace it more this time. Also... there are elements of Black clover mixed in this story... main with Magic/Elves and Devils/Demons. As you know already the characters in this story are older!
Here is an approximation of each character's age introdiced so far:
Odyn: 15 years old (start of this story)
Goku: 16 years old
Asura: 15 years old
Ty Lee: 14 years old (at the start of this story)
Future reference (characters that will be introduced):
Aang- 16 years old
Katara- 16 years old
Sokka- 17 years old
?- 17 years old (Sokka's love interest)
Toph- 15 years old
Azula: 15 years old (start of this story)
Anyways, that was just a quick note for now. Onto the story!
P.s: I don't own Avatar the Last Air bender, Dragon ball Super/Xenoverse, or Black Clover and their characters those belong to their respective creators. I only own the oc's who appear in this story.
Chapter Two: Help Save the World! New Allies?
Northern Water Tribe — The Great Fortress
The chains were, Odyn decided, a bit much.
He understood the instinct — three strangers approaching the walls of the last great Water Tribe stronghold in the middle of a war, two of them with animal tails, one of them radiating the particular energy signature of a Firebender. He understood. He might have done the same.
That didn't make the iron around his wrists any less cold, or the guards' hands on his shoulders any less rough, or the blood from his split lip any less copper-tasting on his tongue.
Goku and Asura walked behind him, bound in rope rather than chains. Apparently whoever had made that call had decided, on some intuitive level, that the dark-blue-haired teenager was the most dangerous of the three. Odyn couldn't decide whether to be flattered or exasperated. If they only knew what those two were capable of, he thought, glancing back at his brothers through his periphery.
He caught the look on their faces and immediately wished he hadn't.
Both of them were staring at the guards handling Odyn with expressions that could have melted steel. Goku's jaw was tight in a way it almost never was. Asura's gold eyes had gone flat and cold — the particular stillness that settled over him when he was deciding exactly how much trouble it would be worth to cause. Odyn gave the smallest shake of his head. Don't. Asura's tail lashed once. Goku exhaled through his nose. Neither of them moved.
Somewhere ahead, he could hear the sounds of a welcoming ceremony — voices, ceremony, the warmth of something celebratory. He was being dragged toward the sound while another group was apparently being welcomed into it properly, with dignity, with open hands.
Funny how that goes, Odyn thought.
The hall of Chief Arnook was wide and high-ceilinged, carved from the living ice of the fortress with an artistry that would have impressed him under any other circumstances. Right now he was more focused on not falling over, because the guard had just shoved him forward with considerably more force than was strictly necessary, and the chains had done nothing to help his balance.
He straightened. Spat the blood from his mouth quietly. Looked up.
The man on the raised platform looked back at him with the measured assessment of someone who had spent a lifetime making difficult decisions. Chief Arnook. Odyn had heard the name. He looked exactly as Odyn had imagined — calm, weathered, carrying his authority the way experienced men do, like it required no performance.
"Who are you, boy?"
"I'd be happy to tell you, sir," Odyn replied evenly, "as soon as you call off your guard dogs."
The guard to his left had very quick hands. The punch connected with his cheek before the last word had fully left his mouth, snapping his head to the side. Stars burst briefly across his vision. Around him, he was dimly aware of sounds — the sharp intake of breath from the younger group of teens gathered nearby, the low growl that Asura was barely suppressing.
Odyn touched his tongue to the inside of his cheek. Blinked once.
"Heh." A slow smile spread across his face. "That one actually stung a little."
The guard's hand was already drawing back for another blow when Arnook's voice cut through the room like a blade through ice.
"Enough."
The guard stopped. The room went very quiet.
Odyn straightened again, slower this time. He was bruised from his collar to his ribs — they had been thorough, back at the gate — and he was quite certain at least one of his knuckles was cracked, though he hadn't been given the chance to confirm that. He stood in the center of the room as if none of it particularly mattered and looked at the chief with clear, steady eyes.
"I am Odyn Albanar Chevalier."
Something shifted in the room. He wasn't sure what it was at first. Then he heard the intake of breath — sharp, specific, coming from his left — and turned.
An older man had gone very still. He was waterbender by posture alone — the particular economy of movement, the contained precision that long practice leaves in the body. His eyes were fixed on Odyn's face with an expression caught somewhere between recognition and something much older and much more complicated.
The man stepped forward.
"What did you say your name was, boy?"
Odyn looked at him. Something in the old man's face was familiar in a way that took him a moment to place — not from recent memory, but from the soft-edged images of childhood, the ones that survive the years by attaching themselves to feeling rather than detail.
"Odyn Albanar Chevalier," he repeated carefully. Then, because the recognition had finished forming: "...What's your name?"
"Pakku."
The word landed like a stone dropped into still water.
A long pause.
"Gra—" Odyn stopped. Tried again. "Grampa Pakku?"
The silence that fell over the hall had a very particular quality to it.
It was the silence of an entire room reconsidering everything it thought it knew about the last five minutes. Arnook's brow had climbed nearly to his hairline. The younger teens gathered along the wall — a group that included a bald boy with arrow tattoos, a dark-haired girl with bright blue eyes, and a broader boy with a warrior's wolf-tail — were staring with expressions ranging from confusion to open amazement.
Pakku crossed the distance between them in several deliberate steps and studied Odyn's face with the focused intensity of someone reading a document they couldn't quite believe was real.
"It really is you," he said quietly, to himself as much as anyone. Then, louder — "To think I'd find you like this." His gaze cut sharply to the guards who had done the damage, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop another several degrees. "You will be answering for that shortly," he told them, in a tone that suggested the conversation would be deeply unpleasant.
He turned back to Odyn, and something shifted in the old man's carefully maintained composure. "Tell me — how are Berethon and my daughter? How is Hyatan?"
The question hit like a quiet door swinging open onto a cold room.
Odyn's expression changed. Not much — he was practiced at keeping things contained — but enough.
"You mean nobody told you?"
"...Told me what?"
A breath. Then, simply and without softening it, because there was no way to soften it:
"Dad's dead, Grandpa. A corrupt Firebender killed him. Nine years ago."
Pakku was silent for a long moment.
Then he exhaled through his nose — a long, controlled breath — and closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he gave a short nod to the guards. The chains came off Odyn's wrists. At Odyn's quiet request, Arnook released Goku and Asura as well. The two of them immediately closed the distance to their brother's side, Goku's hand landing briefly on Odyn's shoulder, Asura's sharp eyes running a quick assessment of the damage before his expression settled back into something neutral.
Berethon. Pakku turned the name over in his memory. A kind young man. More than worthy of his adopted daughter — that had been his private assessment, offered to no one, because Pakku had not been a man who offered such things easily. A genuinely good man, gone to something as senseless and ugly as a corrupt bender's cruelty.
Unfortunate was a small word for it.
"Permission to speak, sir," Odyn said, addressing Arnook.
"Granted."
What followed was a full accounting — unhurried, clear-eyed, and precise. Odyn introduced himself properly, introduced Goku and Asura, and then laid out before the assembled gathering of the Northern Water Tribe everything they had seen and done since leaving the Fire Nation six months prior. The oppression they had witnessed. The orders they had refused. The lines in the sand they had drawn and the consequences that had followed.
The Fire Lord had not taken it quietly. There were warrants. There was a price on their heads. Three teenagers had been declared enemies of the Fire Nation for the crime of refusing to become instruments of someone else's cruelty.
"So in other words," said a voice from among the younger group — the blue-eyed girl, leaning forward with sharp focus, "the three of you have bounties on your heads for deserting?"
"Correct," Asura confirmed.
"What brings you all the way here?" The question came from a girl with white hair and an air of quiet grace that didn't quite fit her years. The gathered room seemed to naturally orient toward her when she spoke — she was someone people listened to, even if they couldn't have said exactly why.
Odyn stepped forward.
"We came looking for the Avatar. The one prophesied to end Ozai's reign — we've heard the rumors of his return, and we chose to believe them." He paused, then added with the particular conviction of someone who has thought this through completely: "We want to help. Whatever the cost."
"As well as offer our loyalty," Asura added. "Unconditionally."
In the brief silence that followed, movement from the corner of the room drew everyone's attention.
A boy stepped forward.
He was perhaps sixteen — older than Odyn had expected from some of the more breathless rumors — with a shaved head, skin marked by the flowing arrow tattoos of an Air Nomad master, and eyes that were old in a way his face hadn't quite caught up to yet. He held a glider staff in his right hand and wore the orange and cream of his people's tradition. He was not tall. But the way the room's energy shifted when he moved forward suggested that height had very little to do with the kind of space he occupied.
One hundred and sixteen years of living — twelve of them conscious, the rest spent in ice — looking back at Odyn with careful, genuine consideration.
The Avatar.
Odyn held that gaze for a moment. Then he went to one knee. On either side of him, without any need for discussion, Goku and Asura followed.
"Avatar Aang." Odyn kept his voice even, but there was weight beneath it — the weight of a decision made months ago and not once reconsidered. "We give you our word. Whatever comes — we stand by you and your friends. We offer what we have: our strength, our loyalty, and our willingness to fight for something worth fighting for." A beat. "Ozai's rule has to end. Use us however you need."
Aang looked at the three of them for a long moment.
His gaze moved to the base of Odyn's neck — where the collar of his shirt fell away slightly, just enough to reveal the edge of a golden flame emblem burned into the skin there like a birthmark. Something flickered in the Avatar's expression. Recognition, almost. The instinct of someone attuned to energies that most people had stopped believing in.
A Ki-bender, Aang thought. A real one.
He nodded.
"Stand up," he said. "All three of you." And when they did, he smiled — genuinely, openly, the kind of smile that had apparently survived a century in ice entirely intact. "Welcome."
The Waterbending Master's Bad Habits
Life at the North Pole settled into a rhythm.
Aang found himself at the feet of Master Pakku, learning waterbending with the focused intensity of someone who understood exactly what was at stake. Katara was welcomed by the healer Yugoda — welcomed, and quietly redirected, in the way that the Northern Tribe redirected its women: toward support, toward healing, away from the front line.
Katara said nothing about this. Not at first.
Odyn overheard the argument from across the courtyard.
"Why not?"
"It is the law of this tribe." Pakku's voice held the particular immovability of someone who had never once been asked to question something he had always simply accepted. "Women do not learn offensive waterbending. This has always been so."
"That's — that's not—" Aang's voice, tighter than usual.
"Fine. If you won't teach Katara, then you won't be teaching me either."
A pause. Then Pakku, with the magnificent and infuriating calm of a man who has long since stopped being surprised by anything: "Have fun teaching yourself, then."
"No — Aang, wait—" Katara's voice, lower, pained. "He's being a jerk but you still need him. Please."
A longer pause.
"...Alright," Aang said, with the sound of someone swallowing something difficult. "If that's what you think."
Footsteps, departing. Katara's retreating as well, in the other direction, toward the healers' wing.
Odyn waited until the sound had faded completely. Then he crossed his arms and stepped out from the pillared walkway he had been passing through, navigating quietly to where his grandfather stood alone.
He landed silently behind the old man. Pakku turned.
Odyn looked at him with an expression that communicated, with remarkable economy, exactly how unimpressed he was.
"Gramps."
"Odyn."
"You're doing it again."
Pakku had the decency to look slightly — only slightly — uncomfortable. "The laws of this tribe exist for a reason. If I make an exception for one—"
"Then make the exception for everyone." Odyn's voice was even, not unkind, but carrying the particular firmness of someone who has thought this through. "You're cutting an entire generation of benders off from their potential because of what they are rather than what they can do." He paused. "Mom would agree with me."
"Don't you bring my daughter into—"
"Grandpa." He waited until the older man had stopped sputtering. "You know I'm right. So what's actually stopping you?"
A silence.
Pakku was quiet for long enough that a lesser argument might have died in it. Then he exhaled, long and slow, and looked away.
"...If the girl can impress me," he said finally, with the grudging tone of a man conceding a chess match he has lost three moves ago, "then I will reconsider."
The corner of Odyn's mouth pulled up.
"That's all I can ask."
He walked away before his grandfather could find a reason to take it back.
The weeks that followed moved with the deceptive peace of a place that doesn't yet know what's coming.
Pakku taught. Aang learned, with the voracious attention of someone making up for a century of missed time. Katara attended her healing sessions with Yugoda and quietly absorbed everything she was given — and, when Aang showed her a few waterbending forms in the evenings, absorbed those just as hungrily.
That particular habit was what finally brought things to a head.
Pakku's reaction to catching Aang teaching Katara was, by most accounts, disproportionate. Katara's reaction to Pakku's disproportionate reaction was, by most accounts, entirely proportionate.
She challenged him. In front of everyone. Without hesitation.
The duel that followed was not a victory for Katara. But it was something more interesting than a victory — it was proof. Proof enough to make an old man go quiet at the end of it, studying the girl in front of him with new eyes and a different kind of silence. It was Katara's grandmother's necklace, held in Pakku's hands, that finished the work her bending had started — cracking something open in the old man's chest that had been sealed for a very long time.
He took her on as a student.
Odyn, watching from a respectful distance alongside Goku and Asura, allowed himself a small private satisfaction.
"Everything okay?" Goku asked.
"Yeah," Odyn said. "Everything's fine."
The Black Snow
It was Odyn who saw it first.
He had been mid-kata, working through a sequence that required the kind of sustained focus that had become, over years, one of the few things that reliably quieted his mind. Goku and Asura were nearby, running their own drills with the comfortable synergy of people who have trained together long enough to stop needing to coordinate.
Something drifted past his eye line.
He stopped. Caught it between two fingers.
Black. The flake was black. He turned it over, already knowing what it meant, feeling the shift in the air's energy that confirmed it before his mind had even consciously assembled the thought.
"You feel that?" Asura asked quietly, from across the training ground. He had stopped too, tail still.
"Yeah." Odyn scanned the horizon, reaching out with the particular extension of awareness that Ki-bending allowed — past the walls, past the water, past the visible distance. Something vast and organized was moving toward them through the dark. A lot of them. "There's a large number of Fire Nation forces heading this way."
"How many?" Goku asked.
"Enough."
The three of them exchanged a look. No further discussion was needed.
They ran.
The main hall doors burst open and three teenagers skidded to a stop on the ice floor, breathing hard, finding Arnook and Pakku in what had been, up until approximately four seconds ago, a perfectly peaceful meeting.
"Chief Arnook." Asura's voice was controlled but urgent. "The Fire Nation is coming."
"Now," Goku added, with his gift for clarifying the parts of a situation that most needed clarifying.
Arnook's expression moved through surprise and landed squarely on the particular resolve of someone who has prepared for a possibility their whole life and now finds it has arrived. Aang and Katara came running in behind, Pakku's students filing in after them.
"How many?" Arnook asked, looking to Odyn.
"I can't give you an exact count," Odyn admitted. "But it's enough that you need to move now. All of your warriors, every formation you have — they'll need to be in position before that fleet arrives."
Arnook looked at him for a moment — this young man who had arrived in chains less than a month ago, bloodied and shackled — and nodded with the trust of someone who has learned to read people correctly.
"Master Pakku." Arnook's voice carried across the room. "Ready our warriors. We defend this place."
Pakku nodded once, sharp and certain, already moving.
The North Pole prepared for war.
The Battle of the North
The attack came with fire.
It always did.
The Fire Nation fleet materialized from the darkness and the ash-black snow in a formation so large it seemed less like an invasion and more like a weather event — ships in every direction, flames arcing through the polar night in organized, relentless patterns. The water benders met them at the walls with a discipline that was breathtaking to watch, pillars of ice rising and crashing in choreographed waves, water drawn from the ocean itself to throw back against the hulls of the approaching ships.
Far out beyond the walls, two figures moved through the chaos with a speed and precision that should have been impossible given their ages.
Goku fought with the pure, unfiltered joy of someone doing exactly what he was built for — dancing through cannon blasts and fire streams, countering with the controlled Ki-strikes that he and Asura had refined over months of travel. Asura moved differently: quieter, more deliberate, methodical in the way he identified threats and eliminated them before they could compound. Between the two of them, they moved through Admiral Zhao's fleet the way water moves through rock — not all at once, but persistently, and without mercy.
Zhao didn't notice. He was already inside.
Within the walls, Odyn had become the rallying point that no one had planned for.
His golden flames were visible from across the fortress — not the orange-red of standard Firebending, but something purer and more luminous, like sunlight given direction and intention. Fire Nation soldiers came at him in groups and were sent backward in groups, the gold fire rolling off him in controlled arcs that disarmed without killing, disabled without destroying.
When they tried to surround him, he crossed his arms, set his jaw, and exhaled — and the resulting force of compressed Ki-enhanced air sent a full ring of soldiers hurtling backward into the snow, landing in dazed piles at safe distances.
For a moment, the attackers faltered.
Then someone figured out that anger was the solution. Six soldiers rushed him simultaneously, bending with the uncontrolled heat of fury.
Odyn sidestepped the first blast. Redirected the second into the third. Let the fourth and fifth cancel each other out through a half-step that left them bending at empty air. Caught the sixth by the wrist — gently, with a patience that was somehow more insulting than hostility — and looked at the young soldier attached to it with calm, unimpressed eyes.
The soldier went very still.
"Here's your problem," Odyn said, releasing the wrist and stepping back. "You're giving me everything you've got right when you're at your angriest. That's also when you're at your least precise. Your anger is your greatest strength and your worst vulnerability, and I can see both at the same time." He tilted his head. "Would you like a demonstration of how that looks from the outside?"
The demonstration was not requested. He gave it anyway.
What followed was, depending on one's perspective, either a decisive tactical engagement or a masterclass in exactly what not to do as a Firebender when facing a significantly more experienced opponent. The waterbending defenders watching from nearby were taking notes. Actually taking notes — or the closest equivalent available to people in the middle of a siege.
Odyn called it Basic Firebender Strategy 101. He explained the points as he worked. He made it clear he was explaining them. The fire nation soldiers found this deeply humiliating, and their fury increased accordingly, which was precisely the problem he was using them to illustrate.
He didn't see Zuko until it was too late.
He had been elsewhere — golden flames holding a corridor clear — when the unconscious prince, frozen to a wall by Katara and then somehow not unconscious anymore, delivered the cheap shot that landed Katara hard on the ice and gave him the opening to take Aang. By the time Odyn felt the sudden sharp absence in the oasis area and understood what it meant, the prince and the Avatar were already gone.
Night fell over the North Pole.
And then something went wrong in a way that had no precedent.
The moon turned red.
Not gradually, not subtly — red, the violent red of something wounded, something crying out, and then slowly, terribly, gone. The light of it vanished from the sky in a way that felt less like an eclipse and more like an execution. The waterbenders around him all staggered simultaneously, their bending simply ceasing mid-movement, cutting off like a candle snuffed by a fist.
Odyn looked up at the absent moon and felt, in the Ki that ran through him like a river's current, exactly how catastrophic this was.
He closed his eyes. Reached. Found the distant shape of Aang's spirit, returning from wherever it had been.
Come back, he thought — not as words, but as something more fundamental. We need you.
The Blazing Arkynorean
Admiral Zhao was still speaking when Odyn landed.
The man was genuinely monologuing — chest out, voice projected to the middle distance, apparently unaware that the person most likely to be impressed by this speech was himself. Odyn touched down on the ice behind him with a soft sound, arms at his sides, and waited for the man to finish.
Zhao turned, eyes finding Odyn's face.
And smiled.
It was the smile of a man who has just remembered something he finds amusing. Odyn didn't like that smile. He catalogued it and said nothing, waiting.
"Ah," Zhao said. "You. I remember you — from when you were small. You were there, weren't you? When I—"
"When you killed my father," Odyn said. His voice was flat. Contained. Very quiet.
"Was that his name? Berethon?" Zhao turned the name over like a thing of no particular weight. "He got in the way of something that didn't concern him. A beautiful woman, as I recall. Your mother, presumably." A beat, almost thoughtful. "You have her eyes. I suppose good things do come in—"
The sound that came from Odyn's chest was not a word.
It was something older than words.
Something that had been building for nine years against the interior walls of a boy who was kind by nature and had been trying, very hard, for a very long time, not to let it out.
The air around him changed. The temperature spiked. The ground began to tremble — not violently, but steadily, with the particular resonance of something extremely large moving somewhere very deep. Silver light began to trace lines across Odyn's skin: not painted, not projected, but erupting from within, following the paths of veins and muscle and bone in geometric patterns that had no name in any language currently spoken in the mortal world.
His hair was lifting. The dark blue strands rising and spreading, draining of color — midnight at first, then deep violet, then the particular shade of lavender that exists in the sky in the last moment before the light is entirely gone. Two bangs fell to frame his face. The rest spiked outward and upward as if held in an invisible current.
A sound was building in him that had no upper limit.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH—"
Pakku, standing fifty feet away, watched lightning strike the ice in a perfect circle around his grandson. He watched pillars of pale light erupt from the frozen water, from the snow-packed ground, bending toward the boy at their centers. He watched every waterbender in the vicinity stagger backward from the shockwave of pure Ki that rolled outward from that single trembling teenager.
He knew what this was.
He had heard it described only in the oldest accounts. The oldest stories of the Arkynorean bloodline — passed down not as history but as warning, and as promise. He had dismissed it, once, as legend.
"Look," he said, to Arnook, to the gathered warriors around him, to anyone who was still capable of listening. His voice was low. Reverent. "What you see before you is the warrior out of legend. The one awakened by grief and righteous fury. The one the old stories say will stand beside the Avatar when the world most needs it."
He exhaled.
"The Blazing Arkynorean."
The words moved through the assembled waterbenders like a wave.
Arnook stared. "Pakku — you're saying your grandson has actually—"
"Look at him." Pakku's voice brooked no argument. "And then tell me what else it could be."
The form settled.
The screaming stopped — not gradually, but all at once, cut off like a switch thrown in a darkened room. What remained was silence, and in the silence, Odyn.
He stood with his arms slightly away from his body, the purple-white aura surrounding him with the low, steady luminosity of something that had given up trying to hide what it was. The tattoo-like silver markings traced every line of him. His eyes had changed — pale as moonlight now, and burning with something colder and more focused than rage. He was not shaking. He was entirely still, in the way that only very powerful things can be entirely still.
He looked at Zhao.
Zhao took a step backward.
Odyn crossed the distance between them in a timeframe that the eye could not parse — not as speed, exactly, but as an absence of the intervening space — and buried his fist in the admiral's stomach.
The sound of it was enormous.
Zhao left the ground. He came down twelve feet away, arms and legs moving in the involuntary way of a body that has had its organizational principle briefly disrupted. He tried to sit up. He tried to throw fire. Both of these attempts failed.
"Why—" Zhao scrambled upright, breathing hard, fury and disbelief fighting for dominance over his expression. He bent — a massive stream, enough to level a building — and watched it part around Odyn like water around a stone, redirected, gathered, and sent back at three times the amplitude. The backlash blew Zhao backward into a snowbank. "Why can I not hit you—"
Odyn walked toward him with the unhurried patience of someone who no longer has anywhere else to be.
"Because you're angry," he said. "And anger makes you imprecise."
Basic Firebender Strategy 101.
What followed was not elegant. It was not meant to be. Nine years of grief and loss and the image of a kind man's face in the last moment before the fire came — all of it, given form and direction and a very specific target. Odyn moved through Zhao's desperate counters without slowing, striking at the points that would hurt without killing, because killing was not the point.
The point was for Zhao to understand, clearly and concretely, that he had made a mistake.
He brought it to a close the way one ends a lesson — decisively, without theatrics. One strike to the jaw, precisely calibrated. One double strike to the midsection, precisely placed. Zhao dropped into the crater his own impacts had made and lay there, looking up at the sky, not especially capable of additional movement.
Odyn descended from the air and stood over him.
He looked at the man who had killed his father. He looked at him for a long moment — this small, damaged, self-important man — and felt the rage in his chest shift into something cooler. Something that was not forgiveness, but was at least not a fire anymore.
He raised one hand. Extended two fingers. Aligned them with Zhao's chest.
Snapped.
The compressed force of the Ki-snap hit like a cannon shot and sent Zhao skimming across the ice, off the edge, and into the dark water beyond — where the impact churned through what remained of the fire nation fleet, cracking hulls, scattering the formation, sending wreckage in every direction.
Behind Odyn, twenty waterbenders stood in collective silence with their jaws at approximately ankle height.
With Aang—
The ocean spirit moved through the northern waters like a god reclaiming its territory, sweeping the fire nation fleet aside with the accumulated force of every tide since the world began. Aang burned in its grip, the Avatar State pouring through him in waves that Odyn, even from a distance, could feel like sunlight through closed eyes.
Princess Yué made her choice with the quiet certainty of someone who has always known, in the deepest part of herself, what she was for. She pressed her lips to Sokka's — a goodbye made tender by its brevity — and gave back what had always been on loan.
The moon returned to the sky.
White light fell across the snow and the water and the shattered remnants of the invasion.
Sokka stood at the edge of the oasis and looked up, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
Zhao had one moment, in the water, to decide.
Zuko's hand reached toward him — not a weapon, not a trick. An offer. Genuine, with all the complicated history of someone who has learned, the hard way, that survival is not the same thing as victory but is at least a prerequisite for it.
Zhao looked at the hand.
He looked at the sky, where the moon had returned.
He looked at the boy on the ice above — the dark-blue-haired teenager whose eyes were pale and whose voice, when it carried down to him, was completely steady.
"Leave," Odyn said. "Take what you can salvage and go. And Zhao—" The pale eyes found him precisely, across the distance and the water. "The next time we meet, I won't be this patient."
Zhao took Zuko's hand.
He had too much left to do to die here. The boy would keep.
The aura faded. The silver markings retreated beneath his skin like tide going out. His hair returned — dark blue, familiar, simply itself again — and Odyn stood on the ice of the North Pole in the returning moonlight and breathed.
His friends reached him before he'd fully exhaled.
Goku landed beside him first, Asura a step behind, both of them reading him with the particular attentiveness of people who know someone well enough to catch the small things. Katara arrived moments later, something in her expression caught between relief and a lingering distress she hadn't quite finished feeling yet.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"Yeah." He considered the word. Found it sufficient. "Yeah, I am."
"I had no idea," he said, mostly to himself. "That I had that much inside me."
No one had a response to that. But no one moved away either.
The Princess and the Prophecy
The Fire Nation
The report reached the Fire Lord in the quiet hours before dawn, when bad news travels fastest.
Ozai read it once. Set it down. Read it again.
Zhao — fool, spectacular fool — had thrown an invasion and come home with nothing but wreckage. The northern water tribe still stood. The Avatar still breathed. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a boy with dark blue hair and golden flames had transformed in front of half the fire nation's military and done things that the surviving commanders were struggling to find language for.
Odyn A. Chevalier.
Ozai looked at the name for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved in something that was not a smile but occupied a similar geography.
Now they were both on the board.
The door shifted. He had sensed her approach before he saw it — the particular quality of his daughter's Ki, sharp and controlled and blue as a gas flame.
"Enter, Azula."
She came in with the economy of someone who has never once stumbled over a threshold in her life. Black hair, amber eyes, red and black armor with the small fire nation tiara sitting in her hair as if it had been born there. The crown princess of the Fire Nation knelt before him with practiced grace.
"You called, Father?"
"I did." He set the report aside. "Zhao has proven comprehensively useless. Your uncle remains a disappointment. Your brother—" A slight pause, more considered than dismissive. "—is a conversation for another time. I need you to bring me Zhao. You are to pursue the Avatar." A beat. "But there is one other matter. Someone I want returned to this nation. Unharmed."
Azula's expression remained composed, but her attention sharpened in the way it always did when something genuinely interesting had been introduced.
"And this person is?"
"Odyn A. Chevalier." Ozai looked at his daughter directly. "I know how that sounds. But the boy wields the golden flames, Azula. He is the incarnation of the Golden Dragon." A pause that carried the particular weight of things being said plainly that are usually left unspoken. "And according to the prophecy — he is the one you are destined to stand beside."
The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took Azula to process the statement without letting any part of that processing show on her face.
Her soulmate was traveling with the Avatar.
She filed this information in the part of her mind reserved for tactical complications and lifted her chin with the composure of someone who does not find anything particularly surprising.
"Understood, Father. I'll bring them both."
She left the palace before dawn and boarded her ship as the first light turned the ocean to hammered copper. The ship's captain waited at attention.
"Your highness. Where to?"
Azula looked out at the horizon. The Earth Kingdom was out there — vast, complicated, full of people who were about to find their assumptions significantly challenged.
And somewhere within it, traveling with the Avatar and his companions: a Ki-bender with golden flames and a golden emblem at the base of his neck. A warrior, by the reports of her father's surviving soldiers. Described as fast, precise, powerful in a way that the fire nation's officers clearly hadn't had language ready for.
She found herself — against her better judgment — the smallest amount curious.
If you're a warrior, she thought, watching the water recede behind them, then you'd better be ready.
"Set course for the Earth Kingdom," she said. "Our targets are already moving."
The ship turned. The princess watched the fire nation shoreline disappear.
The Azure Dragon moves to meet the Golden.
To be continued...
Next: Chapter Three — Two Bound by Fate: The Exile and the Princess