"There's earth under here," Toph said in astonishment as she walked with Zuko outside the city. While her lessons in water
bending took place inside the city, where spaces had been set aside for training in those arts, there was enough uncertainty about what she would manage to do
working with fire and air that Chief Arnook had very diplomatically asked that she practise outside the walls for now.
Thus far it hadn't been a concern. Learning from scrolls had certain obvious difficulties for Toph so progress on her air bending had
been very slow. In fact, Zuko suspect that he, Yue and possibly even Mai were further along in mastering the forms even if they couldn't actually air bend,
as a consequence of walking through the motions described on the scrolls for Toph to watch. "Really?" the fire bender asked, looking down at the ice.
"I thought that the whole pole was just ice over water."
"I guess it must be an island or something," speculated Toph. "It's fairly deep, not the sort of thing anyone would come
across unless they were looking for it." She smirked. "Or, of course, the world's greatest earth bender walked over it."
"Of course," Zuko agreed drily. "But we're here to work on your fire bending so let's get to that."
Toph pouted a little but obediently took up the stance that Zuko indicated and started moving through the forms with him. Although she had
the bedreock of her previous experience gathered at Omashu, she hadn't made much more progress with her fire bending than she had at air bending. The
extreme cold made it difficult to maintain any sort of heat and even without her previous handicap, she was producing only marginally stronger flames than she
had back in Omashu.
Then again, Zuko had to admit, his own fires were nothing to be proud of these days. Since he had fought Zhao he had found it harder to
produce the powerful flames needed in combat. He still wasn't sure what the problem was: despite the cold, he could still fire bend well enough to light
fires, lanterns or to warm himself - which was a useful accomplishment in the frigid city, but the driving anger that he had been taught to draw from, that had
pushed him to the levels of mastery he had shown during his campaign through the southern Earth Kingdom, now eluded him.
"This isn't going well," he admitted after working through the full sequence of forms that made up the core of the fire bending
art. "You've adapted well to the forms, but the bending itself..."
"Are you sure that you aren't forgetting anything?" Toph asked. "Knowing that you fire benders have to stay angry all the
time explains a lot, but that's not working for me."
Zuko frowned. "I don't think it's quite what you're thinking. I've seen you get frustrated or irritated, but what
firebending draws from is more like... well, rage I suppose. It's more passionate." He made a face. "Sometimes I wonder if Mai would have been a
firebender if she wasn't so controlled all the time."
"So you'd like it if Mai was more passionate?" Toph asked suspiciously and then snickered when Zuko blushed and stammered what
was probably intended to be a denial but was actuallycompletely incoherent. "Don't worry, I'm pretty sure that if there's one woman in all the
city who's immune to your charms, it would be Mai."
"Thanks, I think," Zuko grumbled once his breathing was back to something approximating normal. "Well, if you think I'm
missing something, why don't you ask another fire bender, if you can find one?"
Toph pulled one arm out of the sleeve of her new, better fitting parka and slipped it across her chest to scratch at an itch. "Sometimes
even you have good ideas, Broody," she concluded.
"I was being sarcastic," he pointed out. "There aren't any other firebenders around to ask."
"Of course there is," Toph told him patronizingly. "I'll just ask your great-grandfather."
"My great... you mean Avatar Roku?"
The earthbender grinned broadly. "Well I don't mean Sozin. Having all those old goats hanging around in the spirit world is a bit
annoying so they can make themselves useful for once." She took a few steps out across the ice, away from Zuko, then shifted her angle slightly and took a
few more. "I'm going to get some earth to meditate on," she explained. "You might want to stand back a little."
Zuko gave her a nervous look and backed up a few paces. Then he reconsidered, turned around and ran about a hundred yards closer to the city
before turning around to watch her. He just knew that she was laughing at him, but at the same time, he had a suspicion that watching Toph earthbend was
something done best from a safe distance.
At first, to be honest, he wasn't very impressed. Toph was moving almost painfully slowly through an earthbending form he didn't
recognise. Not that he was an expert, but he'd fought a few earthbenders since his first arrival in the conquered territories. If she was raising a boulder
through all the ice - no one seemed to have any idea how thick it was here - then she might be at it for a while. He turned around and looked at the city that
so far as he knew, no one in the Fire Nation even suspected existed.
Zuko's first warning that Toph might be thinking on a slightly larger scale than he had anticipated was when the ice began to crack
behind him. The noise drew his attention - it was hard to miss a crevasse longer than a fire navy cruiser forming almost instantly.
It was impossible to miss five such cracks forming in the ice.
"Toph!" he bellowed over the sound of shattering ice. "Whatever you're doing, stop!"
"Can't!" she called back, apparently unconcerned by the fact that boulders of ice larger than she was were being sent tumbling.
She added something else but Zuko couldn't make it out as the section of ice he was on began to shake threateningly.
With a shout of frustration he ran - towards her, not the presumed safety of the walls. Mai hadn't said that there would be consequences
if he returned from training without Toph. Then again, sometimes it was the things that Mai didn't say that mattered most.
If Toph hadn't been blind, he thought that she would have had her eyes screwed shut in concentration. As it was, her feet scraped on the
ice, never breaking contact as she focused on whatever she was doing, far beneath the ice... although presumably not so far below as before. Her hands seemed
to be working in opposition to each other, one moving upwards and the other downwards, then swapping roles.
"What are you doing?" he shouted as he closed in.
"Earth bending!" Toph yelled back happily. "Isn't it wild!"
"You're insane!" Zuko told her. Calmly. Rationally. At the top of his voice. "At this rate you'll destroy the
city!"
"Don't be a worrywart. The hot rock is all over here, well away from the city."
Zuko's blood chilled. "'Hot rock'? What do you mean 'hot rock'?"
Toph grinned. "I found out working with Yue that it's easier to move water when it's water, not ice. And water's basically
hot ice. So I'm heating up the rock to make it easier move it up through the ice. It's kind of odd - I'm losing a lot of heat when it melts the
ice, but it's also rising almost all on its own now."
"When you say hot rock," asked Zuko, certain he wouldn't like the answer, "Do you mean hot enough that it flows like
water?"
"Well almost."
"Toph, there's a word for rock when it's that hot: lava."
"Lava?" Toph rolled the word around her mouth. "Never heard of it."
"Here's another new word for you: volcano. It's what you're creating right now, right underneath us. You
have to stop this right now!"
To Zuko's relief, Toph stopped bending before asking: "What's a volcano?" The ice lurched alarmingly and she started
bending a little. "Oh and that rising almost on its own? It's started rising entirely on its own. Lava's really enthusiastic."
"Do I want to know what's happening down there?"
"Ice turning into water. Water turning into steam. Lava rising and turning into... feels sort of like glass." She shrugged.
"It is slowing down but it'll break the surface."
"Can you move it further away?" Zuko asked hopefully, envisaging the ice melting away beneath their feet, dropping them through
boiling water and scalding steam onto molten lava... He grimaced.
Toph frowned and started making pushing gestures away from the city. "Alright already. It's not like it's going to be that hot
when it's done coming through the ice."
"Define hot," Zuko pointed out. "Rock has to be a lot hotter than ice does before it starts to melt."
"I figured that out myself," Toph agreed. "That's why I'm using ice to cool it. What do you think I am, stupid?"
"You were creating a volcano right underneath your own feet."
"And you keep saying that like it's a bad thing."
"Agni help us, no wonder the tradition is not to tell Avatars who they are before they're sixteen. I'm not sure if the world
will survive you passing through puberty." The ice cracked again and Zuko realised that the section that they were standing on was now floating freely.
"Did you do that?"
"No."
"This is bad."
Toph started waterbending. Zuko was of two minds about the results: on one hand, the ice floe was moving towards the city, through what was
rapidly turning into a small lake; on the other, it was tilting alarmingly as she created a wave beneath it. "You probably don't want me to tell you
how fast it's melting then."
Behind them, a black shape rose above the water. At first Zuko thought that it was simply a rolling of the dark water but then it rose higher
and he saw steam rising from it. Volcanic rock, cooled by the water but still hot enough to boil the water against it. He was relieved not to see rivulets of
lava coming from it. "Can we go any faster?"
"Water's not as easy as ice."
Zuko sighed and eyed the water and the distance to the nearest remaining solid ice, which was only a quarter of a mile or so from the edge of
the city. "I hope the water's warm enough for us to survive swimming in it. A thought struck him. "Can you even swim?"
Toph dug her boots into the ice. "I can float a bit."
"Just for the record, if Roku has any idea at all about where you might get another fire bending teacher, I'm going to quit. I
swear, you'd burn water if it was remotely possible."
.oOo.
"I never thought I'd see open water this far south," Bato observed from where he and Arnook stood on the wall of the
city.
The older chief shook his head in disbelief. "I don't remember Kanna being this destructive."
"She was older," pointed out Bato. "And she had her head filled with all that sexist nonsense your waterbenders
believe."
"Maybe," the northern chief agreed grudgingly. "I think there were some stories about Roku flooding half of... half a city
when he was learning waterbending."
They looked at each other. "She can't stay here," Bato voiced what they were both thinking.
Yue arrived - she had been on the other side of the city, consulting with her own teacher on what to instruct Toph on next - in time to hear
that. "Who can't stay?" she asked and then looked out over the wall. "Tui and La! I thought that the guards were exaggerating!"
The city could now add 'lakeside' to its description with water sprawling out in a more or less egg-shape to the south. Near the
centre of the wider end, the furthest from them, a loaf-shaped mass of black rock had risen, creating an island. Squinting, Yue could see slight threads of
red-gold running through it, steam rising from the water wherever the threads - which must be several yards across to be visible from here - reached the
lake.
"We were just thinking that it was time for the Avatar to move on," her father clarified.
"But she has so much to learn," protested Yue. She pointed out onto the water where Toph was propelling the shrinking ice raft
towards the shore. "She hasn't mastered waterbending yet, and she's barely begun airbending."
"And if her current lesson had been just a little closer to the city, we might have to rebuild it. I think that our people will consider
that possibility unwelcome, daughter." Arnook looked pained. "If she is an example then I do not believe that Earth Kingdom little girls are like
those of the Water Tribes. When you were that age, you used your waterbending to make your dolls dance. She..." He gestured helplessly at the
lake.
Dozens of the water tribe had gathered on the shores of the new lake, two waterbenders carefully reinforcing the ice to provide some measure
of safety. Slightly apart from the crowd, one woman stood alone. Despite the concealing blue furs of the Water Tribe, Yue recognised her immediately as
Mai.
"Well, at least with some open water here I can give her a few lessons before she leaves," Yue said, trying to find at least some
good in the situation. "You aren't sending her away immediately?"
"A few days won't hurt," Bato assured her. "And she can stay in one of my people's villages for a while, as well,
although that has it's risks. The Fire Nation Navy is growing frisky."
"And then?" Yue asked. "Where can she go then? Where will be safe for her to hide and to study her bending?"
The two men looked at each other. There really was no answer and to avoid an awkward silence Bato turned it into a joke. "Safe for her
or safe for those around her?"
.oOo.
Almost a week later, Toph lay on the stones she had so dramatically raised out of the ice and meditated. In her usual disregard for
convention, she had scorned the traditional lotus position and was instead resting with her back against the ground, knees bent to place her bare feet likewise
upon the stones, arms spread wide and her head pillowed only by her parka.
It should have been foolish to the point of suicide for her to lie out on the ground so far to the south. However, while the waters of the
new lake had ceased to bubble they had not frozen over. Zuko had speculated that the rocks below were still warm, that the lava continued to flow to some
degree. Toph's earthsense told her that he was right, that there was flow of warm lava rising that was balanced by cooling lava sinking and that the two
had reached an equilibrium that maintain a temperature on and around the island that was merely uncomfortably cold, not lethal.
And, so, with the earth that she had raised up to meditate upon available and even - bliss! - in skin contact with her, she closed her eyes
slept.
Or meditated. It was a blurry line, even for her.
At some point she grew aware of another presence on the island. Her earthsense revealed nothing, but her ears were as good as ever and she
had heard that particular breathing before. "Kanna?"
"Are you sure that you can't see when you're here?" the retired Avatar asked mildly.
"Would you believe me if I said no?"
She heard Kanna's braid swish from side to side as she shook her head. "You are so sharp that you will cut yourself," she said,
almost proudly, and then sat down at Toph's head, somehow replacing the parka with her lap so smoothly that Toph barely noticed the transition. "I
admire your island, dear."
"It'll do," Toph replied dismissively. "Not sending one of your minions to fetch me this time?"
Kanna chuckled. "No. That was something of a formal occasion. I'm a little surprised though: I expected you to have questions about
air bending, not fire bending."
"And I expected you to have Roku wrapped around your little finger by now," Toph sniped back. "Are you losing your touch,
woman?"
"What makes you think I haven't?" Kanna asked archly. "But aren't you changing the subject?"
"Sifu's strength are the basics," explained Toph straightforwardly. "The forms, he can teach me. The heart of firebending,
that's something he's not so good at teaching. I want to go back to the roots. Of course, the dragons are dead."
Kanna ran her fingers through her successors raven dark hair. "The first fire benders were an ancient people in the islands that became
the Fire Nation," she told the girl. "Ask your Sifu about the Sunwarriors."
Toph filed that thought away. "Any suggestions on airbending? Some of the older water benders seem to think I can't possibly master
water bending until I have a good grip on airbending, but it's slow."
"Normally, yes. Traditionally that would be the correct order to learn them," the old woman agreed. "But sometimes a tradition
is just a tradtion. Air bending will be the hardest of disciplines for you to learn, for its precepts are counter to your instincts, just as fire bending came
hard to me. Air benders, after all, preferred to avoid fights."
"Boring," Toph said dismissively.
"It may take some time for you to learn it," Kanna confirmed.
"Well, learning not to fight isn't exactly a priority, I've got a Fire Lord to deal with," said Toph dismissively.
"Maybe I'll just have to get along without it."
"I don't recommend that," advised her predecessor. "I found it very useful fighting the Fire Lord of my day. It kept me
alive more than once."
"Running away often does."
"That's the point, child. She who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day."
Toph crossed her arms across her chest. "The number of days before Sozin's Comet returns isn't all that large."
.oOo.
"Sunwarriors?" Zuko asked in surprise. "Yes, I've heard of them. They raised an empire that covered almost half of the
modern Fire Nation, but it collapsed after the secrets of fire bending became more widely known. They've been dead for centuries."
Toph waited for a beat. Then: "Is that all you know?"
"There was a city - it'll be all jungle by now," Zuko sighed. "Let me guess, we're going there now."
"In that form of we that excludes you," Toph told him. "Can't go taking you back to the Fire Nation, can
we?"
"What?" asked Zuko, his voice sounding quite hurt. "I thought that you trusted me!"
Mai rolled her eyes. "You have a recognisable face, your highness. The minute you set foot on the Fire Nation some sappy little girl
with a crush on you will see you, tell her friends and the local garrison will know within the hour. Besides, don't you have things to do over here?
Persuading Arnook to accept you courting his daughter?"
Yue and Zuko's cheeks pinked, instantly. "Little pitchers have big ears," Yue guessed after looking between the two
sisters.
"Just think of me as your chaperone," Toph said airly. "All those long, private, moonlit walks. I can testify, hand on heart,
that my Sifu's are being perfectly proper. After all, if you wanted to be secret from me, you'd have found somewhere to go where I couldn't feel
the vibrations of you walking. Kuku's back perhaps."
"I'm feeling a whole lot more comfortable with not accompanying you to the Fire Nation, you little voyeur," Zuko said, face
red, although Yue seemed rather interested in the suggested discreet place to do more than simply walk together.
"It's not voyeurism unless you were doing something naughty," Toph said piously. "I was kind of hoping you'd get to
the good stuff actually. A girl's got to learn somewhere."
Yue scowled uselessly at Toph, unsure if the young girl would even be aware of the expression, and then gave up and laughed. "Why
don't I fetch a map for you, Zuko? I presume that it will be rather a long flight for Kuku."
"The island I'm thinking of is tropical," Zuko told her. "And practically on the far side of the Fire Nation. Even on
Kuku, it will take weeks - you'll have to stop for food and forage."
"Are you sure that you want to go?" asked Toph seriously. "We're talking about more than a month away from Zuko - more if
we need a lift elsewhere. Do you want to leave him alone and unprotected among all these war widows?"
"They are all war widows," Yue pointed out. "And if our relationship, such as it is, can't survive a little competition
then it has no future anyway." She gave Zuko a pointed look and he wisely met her gaze evenly and silently.
Mai raised an eyebrow. "Well at least he can be trained," she said disdainfully. "Toph is correct for another reason however:
in all honesty, Yue, you're almost as eye-catching as Zuko, if for different reasons. A sky bison being seen in the sky will cause concern: a woman so
obviously of the Water Tribes will become the focus of suspicion almost immediately. Toph and I can pass for fire maidens easily enough, but any halfwit who
sees your hair or eyes will know you aren't from the Fire Nation."
"You seem to have an endless stream of arguements to have the two of you travelling alone," noted Yui. "I don't recall
either of you being gifted in the handling of animals - particularly you, Toph. Do you think you can persuade a sky bison to accompany you. They're not
fools you know - even if they can't speak, they're as smart as we are in their way."
"In which case I am sure that they will respond to reason," proposed Mai confidently. "I have spent some time in the stables
you know, and I've handled enough stupid riding beasts over the years - mongoose dragons and komodo rhinos to name two - that an intelligent creature such
as Kuku provides novelty."
Zuko looked between them. "Why don't you fetch that map, Yue," he requested. "And maybe we should ask Bato if there is a
discreet village for Toph to have a few more waterbending lessons while Mai courts herself a sky bison."
.oOo.
"So what will you name him?" Yue asked as Mai and Toph loaded their belongings onto the saddle of Mai's new steed. She had
flown the two girls north to one of the islands around the Southern Air Temple, where most of the sky bison herd foraged when possible. While Toph had wrestled
with the still difficult concepts of bending liquid water, Mai had assisted the bison herders, an activity that seemed to mostly consist of brushing the huge
beast's fur and ensuring that their... waste... was suitably disposed of. Of course, the latter meant dried out somewhere discreet for eventual transport
back to the South Pole to use as fuel for fires.
The fire maiden had finally 'befriended' the animal that the herders assured her was the most ornery and unpleasent of all the
herd's bulls - given the tenuous survival of the species, risking a cow was simply not done - a comparatively darkly furred beast whose arrow markings
almost blurred into the rest of his hair. According to the herders, the sky bison had never mated that they were aware off and had taken what they considered
to be regrettable delight in dumping riders off his head from barely survivable heights on at least three occasions.
Mai had her own ideas about how to handle bad tempered creatures, notions quite at odds with the almost reverential methods of the Water
Tribe. While the younger herders had seemed shocked at her use of an improvised riding crop to establish dominance over the sky bison, a substantial number of
their elders - most probably those with personal experience of the 'swarthy' sky bison - had watched with undisguised glee.
"Bison," she replied pragmatically. "It's what he is."
"You can't just call him Bison," Yue said in a shocked tone. "It'll confuse all the other Bisons. They can understand
everything we say to them, you know."
"Mai's Bison," suggested Toph from the saddle, where she was tucking the modest bundles that they would carry with them away
where even she could find them easily. "Except for Mai it would be 'My Bison'."
Yue shook her head disapprovingly. "He's not a thing, you know. He's a person."
Mai sighed and walked round to the bison's head, staring it down when it mooed at her. "From now on, your name is M Bison," she
told it firmly. Yue slapped her forehead. "Can we go now?" Mai asked her.
"As long as you've got everything important," Yue told her. "I'm sorry we can't provide you with more money, but
Fire Nation coins aren't all that common here at the South Pole."
"We'll manage," Mai said confidently. "You've equipped us fairly well otherwise and we still have some Earth Kingdom
coin left that we'll be able to exchange - enough to get us started at any rate. We'll make some stops before we reach our destination, so we can
obtain money and clothes there if it looks as if we'll need to disguise ourselves to fit in."
"I don't want to know how you'll get them, do I?" Yue asked. Life on the harsh ice cap demanded that a community hold
together. Theft, which undermined that trust and might deprive someone of of a vital resource, while not unheard of, was rare and frowned upon. For the two
girls intending to covertly cross the Fire Nation, larceny seemed to be the logical option for them to employ.
"It's almost certainly not as bad as you think," Toph laughed. "Casual labour, gambling, maybe luring someone into trying
to mug the 'helpless blind girl'. We'll be trying not to draw attention to us, remember?"
"That means no creating volcanos, you understand?"
"No, it means not getting caught getting creating volcanos," disagreed Toph.
Mai nodded agreement, although she didn't specify who with.
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
bending took place inside the city, where spaces had been set aside for training in those arts, there was enough uncertainty about what she would manage to do
working with fire and air that Chief Arnook had very diplomatically asked that she practise outside the walls for now.
Thus far it hadn't been a concern. Learning from scrolls had certain obvious difficulties for Toph so progress on her air bending had
been very slow. In fact, Zuko suspect that he, Yue and possibly even Mai were further along in mastering the forms even if they couldn't actually air bend,
as a consequence of walking through the motions described on the scrolls for Toph to watch. "Really?" the fire bender asked, looking down at the ice.
"I thought that the whole pole was just ice over water."
"I guess it must be an island or something," speculated Toph. "It's fairly deep, not the sort of thing anyone would come
across unless they were looking for it." She smirked. "Or, of course, the world's greatest earth bender walked over it."
"Of course," Zuko agreed drily. "But we're here to work on your fire bending so let's get to that."
Toph pouted a little but obediently took up the stance that Zuko indicated and started moving through the forms with him. Although she had
the bedreock of her previous experience gathered at Omashu, she hadn't made much more progress with her fire bending than she had at air bending. The
extreme cold made it difficult to maintain any sort of heat and even without her previous handicap, she was producing only marginally stronger flames than she
had back in Omashu.
Then again, Zuko had to admit, his own fires were nothing to be proud of these days. Since he had fought Zhao he had found it harder to
produce the powerful flames needed in combat. He still wasn't sure what the problem was: despite the cold, he could still fire bend well enough to light
fires, lanterns or to warm himself - which was a useful accomplishment in the frigid city, but the driving anger that he had been taught to draw from, that had
pushed him to the levels of mastery he had shown during his campaign through the southern Earth Kingdom, now eluded him.
"This isn't going well," he admitted after working through the full sequence of forms that made up the core of the fire bending
art. "You've adapted well to the forms, but the bending itself..."
"Are you sure that you aren't forgetting anything?" Toph asked. "Knowing that you fire benders have to stay angry all the
time explains a lot, but that's not working for me."
Zuko frowned. "I don't think it's quite what you're thinking. I've seen you get frustrated or irritated, but what
firebending draws from is more like... well, rage I suppose. It's more passionate." He made a face. "Sometimes I wonder if Mai would have been a
firebender if she wasn't so controlled all the time."
"So you'd like it if Mai was more passionate?" Toph asked suspiciously and then snickered when Zuko blushed and stammered what
was probably intended to be a denial but was actuallycompletely incoherent. "Don't worry, I'm pretty sure that if there's one woman in all the
city who's immune to your charms, it would be Mai."
"Thanks, I think," Zuko grumbled once his breathing was back to something approximating normal. "Well, if you think I'm
missing something, why don't you ask another fire bender, if you can find one?"
Toph pulled one arm out of the sleeve of her new, better fitting parka and slipped it across her chest to scratch at an itch. "Sometimes
even you have good ideas, Broody," she concluded.
"I was being sarcastic," he pointed out. "There aren't any other firebenders around to ask."
"Of course there is," Toph told him patronizingly. "I'll just ask your great-grandfather."
"My great... you mean Avatar Roku?"
The earthbender grinned broadly. "Well I don't mean Sozin. Having all those old goats hanging around in the spirit world is a bit
annoying so they can make themselves useful for once." She took a few steps out across the ice, away from Zuko, then shifted her angle slightly and took a
few more. "I'm going to get some earth to meditate on," she explained. "You might want to stand back a little."
Zuko gave her a nervous look and backed up a few paces. Then he reconsidered, turned around and ran about a hundred yards closer to the city
before turning around to watch her. He just knew that she was laughing at him, but at the same time, he had a suspicion that watching Toph earthbend was
something done best from a safe distance.
At first, to be honest, he wasn't very impressed. Toph was moving almost painfully slowly through an earthbending form he didn't
recognise. Not that he was an expert, but he'd fought a few earthbenders since his first arrival in the conquered territories. If she was raising a boulder
through all the ice - no one seemed to have any idea how thick it was here - then she might be at it for a while. He turned around and looked at the city that
so far as he knew, no one in the Fire Nation even suspected existed.
Zuko's first warning that Toph might be thinking on a slightly larger scale than he had anticipated was when the ice began to crack
behind him. The noise drew his attention - it was hard to miss a crevasse longer than a fire navy cruiser forming almost instantly.
It was impossible to miss five such cracks forming in the ice.
"Toph!" he bellowed over the sound of shattering ice. "Whatever you're doing, stop!"
"Can't!" she called back, apparently unconcerned by the fact that boulders of ice larger than she was were being sent tumbling.
She added something else but Zuko couldn't make it out as the section of ice he was on began to shake threateningly.
With a shout of frustration he ran - towards her, not the presumed safety of the walls. Mai hadn't said that there would be consequences
if he returned from training without Toph. Then again, sometimes it was the things that Mai didn't say that mattered most.
If Toph hadn't been blind, he thought that she would have had her eyes screwed shut in concentration. As it was, her feet scraped on the
ice, never breaking contact as she focused on whatever she was doing, far beneath the ice... although presumably not so far below as before. Her hands seemed
to be working in opposition to each other, one moving upwards and the other downwards, then swapping roles.
"What are you doing?" he shouted as he closed in.
"Earth bending!" Toph yelled back happily. "Isn't it wild!"
"You're insane!" Zuko told her. Calmly. Rationally. At the top of his voice. "At this rate you'll destroy the
city!"
"Don't be a worrywart. The hot rock is all over here, well away from the city."
Zuko's blood chilled. "'Hot rock'? What do you mean 'hot rock'?"
Toph grinned. "I found out working with Yue that it's easier to move water when it's water, not ice. And water's basically
hot ice. So I'm heating up the rock to make it easier move it up through the ice. It's kind of odd - I'm losing a lot of heat when it melts the
ice, but it's also rising almost all on its own now."
"When you say hot rock," asked Zuko, certain he wouldn't like the answer, "Do you mean hot enough that it flows like
water?"
"Well almost."
"Toph, there's a word for rock when it's that hot: lava."
"Lava?" Toph rolled the word around her mouth. "Never heard of it."
"Here's another new word for you: volcano. It's what you're creating right now, right underneath us. You
have to stop this right now!"
To Zuko's relief, Toph stopped bending before asking: "What's a volcano?" The ice lurched alarmingly and she started
bending a little. "Oh and that rising almost on its own? It's started rising entirely on its own. Lava's really enthusiastic."
"Do I want to know what's happening down there?"
"Ice turning into water. Water turning into steam. Lava rising and turning into... feels sort of like glass." She shrugged.
"It is slowing down but it'll break the surface."
"Can you move it further away?" Zuko asked hopefully, envisaging the ice melting away beneath their feet, dropping them through
boiling water and scalding steam onto molten lava... He grimaced.
Toph frowned and started making pushing gestures away from the city. "Alright already. It's not like it's going to be that hot
when it's done coming through the ice."
"Define hot," Zuko pointed out. "Rock has to be a lot hotter than ice does before it starts to melt."
"I figured that out myself," Toph agreed. "That's why I'm using ice to cool it. What do you think I am, stupid?"
"You were creating a volcano right underneath your own feet."
"And you keep saying that like it's a bad thing."
"Agni help us, no wonder the tradition is not to tell Avatars who they are before they're sixteen. I'm not sure if the world
will survive you passing through puberty." The ice cracked again and Zuko realised that the section that they were standing on was now floating freely.
"Did you do that?"
"No."
"This is bad."
Toph started waterbending. Zuko was of two minds about the results: on one hand, the ice floe was moving towards the city, through what was
rapidly turning into a small lake; on the other, it was tilting alarmingly as she created a wave beneath it. "You probably don't want me to tell you
how fast it's melting then."
Behind them, a black shape rose above the water. At first Zuko thought that it was simply a rolling of the dark water but then it rose higher
and he saw steam rising from it. Volcanic rock, cooled by the water but still hot enough to boil the water against it. He was relieved not to see rivulets of
lava coming from it. "Can we go any faster?"
"Water's not as easy as ice."
Zuko sighed and eyed the water and the distance to the nearest remaining solid ice, which was only a quarter of a mile or so from the edge of
the city. "I hope the water's warm enough for us to survive swimming in it. A thought struck him. "Can you even swim?"
Toph dug her boots into the ice. "I can float a bit."
"Just for the record, if Roku has any idea at all about where you might get another fire bending teacher, I'm going to quit. I
swear, you'd burn water if it was remotely possible."
.oOo.
"I never thought I'd see open water this far south," Bato observed from where he and Arnook stood on the wall of the
city.
The older chief shook his head in disbelief. "I don't remember Kanna being this destructive."
"She was older," pointed out Bato. "And she had her head filled with all that sexist nonsense your waterbenders
believe."
"Maybe," the northern chief agreed grudgingly. "I think there were some stories about Roku flooding half of... half a city
when he was learning waterbending."
They looked at each other. "She can't stay here," Bato voiced what they were both thinking.
Yue arrived - she had been on the other side of the city, consulting with her own teacher on what to instruct Toph on next - in time to hear
that. "Who can't stay?" she asked and then looked out over the wall. "Tui and La! I thought that the guards were exaggerating!"
The city could now add 'lakeside' to its description with water sprawling out in a more or less egg-shape to the south. Near the
centre of the wider end, the furthest from them, a loaf-shaped mass of black rock had risen, creating an island. Squinting, Yue could see slight threads of
red-gold running through it, steam rising from the water wherever the threads - which must be several yards across to be visible from here - reached the
lake.
"We were just thinking that it was time for the Avatar to move on," her father clarified.
"But she has so much to learn," protested Yue. She pointed out onto the water where Toph was propelling the shrinking ice raft
towards the shore. "She hasn't mastered waterbending yet, and she's barely begun airbending."
"And if her current lesson had been just a little closer to the city, we might have to rebuild it. I think that our people will consider
that possibility unwelcome, daughter." Arnook looked pained. "If she is an example then I do not believe that Earth Kingdom little girls are like
those of the Water Tribes. When you were that age, you used your waterbending to make your dolls dance. She..." He gestured helplessly at the
lake.
Dozens of the water tribe had gathered on the shores of the new lake, two waterbenders carefully reinforcing the ice to provide some measure
of safety. Slightly apart from the crowd, one woman stood alone. Despite the concealing blue furs of the Water Tribe, Yue recognised her immediately as
Mai.
"Well, at least with some open water here I can give her a few lessons before she leaves," Yue said, trying to find at least some
good in the situation. "You aren't sending her away immediately?"
"A few days won't hurt," Bato assured her. "And she can stay in one of my people's villages for a while, as well,
although that has it's risks. The Fire Nation Navy is growing frisky."
"And then?" Yue asked. "Where can she go then? Where will be safe for her to hide and to study her bending?"
The two men looked at each other. There really was no answer and to avoid an awkward silence Bato turned it into a joke. "Safe for her
or safe for those around her?"
.oOo.
Almost a week later, Toph lay on the stones she had so dramatically raised out of the ice and meditated. In her usual disregard for
convention, she had scorned the traditional lotus position and was instead resting with her back against the ground, knees bent to place her bare feet likewise
upon the stones, arms spread wide and her head pillowed only by her parka.
It should have been foolish to the point of suicide for her to lie out on the ground so far to the south. However, while the waters of the
new lake had ceased to bubble they had not frozen over. Zuko had speculated that the rocks below were still warm, that the lava continued to flow to some
degree. Toph's earthsense told her that he was right, that there was flow of warm lava rising that was balanced by cooling lava sinking and that the two
had reached an equilibrium that maintain a temperature on and around the island that was merely uncomfortably cold, not lethal.
And, so, with the earth that she had raised up to meditate upon available and even - bliss! - in skin contact with her, she closed her eyes
slept.
Or meditated. It was a blurry line, even for her.
At some point she grew aware of another presence on the island. Her earthsense revealed nothing, but her ears were as good as ever and she
had heard that particular breathing before. "Kanna?"
"Are you sure that you can't see when you're here?" the retired Avatar asked mildly.
"Would you believe me if I said no?"
She heard Kanna's braid swish from side to side as she shook her head. "You are so sharp that you will cut yourself," she said,
almost proudly, and then sat down at Toph's head, somehow replacing the parka with her lap so smoothly that Toph barely noticed the transition. "I
admire your island, dear."
"It'll do," Toph replied dismissively. "Not sending one of your minions to fetch me this time?"
Kanna chuckled. "No. That was something of a formal occasion. I'm a little surprised though: I expected you to have questions about
air bending, not fire bending."
"And I expected you to have Roku wrapped around your little finger by now," Toph sniped back. "Are you losing your touch,
woman?"
"What makes you think I haven't?" Kanna asked archly. "But aren't you changing the subject?"
"Sifu's strength are the basics," explained Toph straightforwardly. "The forms, he can teach me. The heart of firebending,
that's something he's not so good at teaching. I want to go back to the roots. Of course, the dragons are dead."
Kanna ran her fingers through her successors raven dark hair. "The first fire benders were an ancient people in the islands that became
the Fire Nation," she told the girl. "Ask your Sifu about the Sunwarriors."
Toph filed that thought away. "Any suggestions on airbending? Some of the older water benders seem to think I can't possibly master
water bending until I have a good grip on airbending, but it's slow."
"Normally, yes. Traditionally that would be the correct order to learn them," the old woman agreed. "But sometimes a tradition
is just a tradtion. Air bending will be the hardest of disciplines for you to learn, for its precepts are counter to your instincts, just as fire bending came
hard to me. Air benders, after all, preferred to avoid fights."
"Boring," Toph said dismissively.
"It may take some time for you to learn it," Kanna confirmed.
"Well, learning not to fight isn't exactly a priority, I've got a Fire Lord to deal with," said Toph dismissively.
"Maybe I'll just have to get along without it."
"I don't recommend that," advised her predecessor. "I found it very useful fighting the Fire Lord of my day. It kept me
alive more than once."
"Running away often does."
"That's the point, child. She who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day."
Toph crossed her arms across her chest. "The number of days before Sozin's Comet returns isn't all that large."
.oOo.
"Sunwarriors?" Zuko asked in surprise. "Yes, I've heard of them. They raised an empire that covered almost half of the
modern Fire Nation, but it collapsed after the secrets of fire bending became more widely known. They've been dead for centuries."
Toph waited for a beat. Then: "Is that all you know?"
"There was a city - it'll be all jungle by now," Zuko sighed. "Let me guess, we're going there now."
"In that form of we that excludes you," Toph told him. "Can't go taking you back to the Fire Nation, can
we?"
"What?" asked Zuko, his voice sounding quite hurt. "I thought that you trusted me!"
Mai rolled her eyes. "You have a recognisable face, your highness. The minute you set foot on the Fire Nation some sappy little girl
with a crush on you will see you, tell her friends and the local garrison will know within the hour. Besides, don't you have things to do over here?
Persuading Arnook to accept you courting his daughter?"
Yue and Zuko's cheeks pinked, instantly. "Little pitchers have big ears," Yue guessed after looking between the two
sisters.
"Just think of me as your chaperone," Toph said airly. "All those long, private, moonlit walks. I can testify, hand on heart,
that my Sifu's are being perfectly proper. After all, if you wanted to be secret from me, you'd have found somewhere to go where I couldn't feel
the vibrations of you walking. Kuku's back perhaps."
"I'm feeling a whole lot more comfortable with not accompanying you to the Fire Nation, you little voyeur," Zuko said, face
red, although Yue seemed rather interested in the suggested discreet place to do more than simply walk together.
"It's not voyeurism unless you were doing something naughty," Toph said piously. "I was kind of hoping you'd get to
the good stuff actually. A girl's got to learn somewhere."
Yue scowled uselessly at Toph, unsure if the young girl would even be aware of the expression, and then gave up and laughed. "Why
don't I fetch a map for you, Zuko? I presume that it will be rather a long flight for Kuku."
"The island I'm thinking of is tropical," Zuko told her. "And practically on the far side of the Fire Nation. Even on
Kuku, it will take weeks - you'll have to stop for food and forage."
"Are you sure that you want to go?" asked Toph seriously. "We're talking about more than a month away from Zuko - more if
we need a lift elsewhere. Do you want to leave him alone and unprotected among all these war widows?"
"They are all war widows," Yue pointed out. "And if our relationship, such as it is, can't survive a little competition
then it has no future anyway." She gave Zuko a pointed look and he wisely met her gaze evenly and silently.
Mai raised an eyebrow. "Well at least he can be trained," she said disdainfully. "Toph is correct for another reason however:
in all honesty, Yue, you're almost as eye-catching as Zuko, if for different reasons. A sky bison being seen in the sky will cause concern: a woman so
obviously of the Water Tribes will become the focus of suspicion almost immediately. Toph and I can pass for fire maidens easily enough, but any halfwit who
sees your hair or eyes will know you aren't from the Fire Nation."
"You seem to have an endless stream of arguements to have the two of you travelling alone," noted Yui. "I don't recall
either of you being gifted in the handling of animals - particularly you, Toph. Do you think you can persuade a sky bison to accompany you. They're not
fools you know - even if they can't speak, they're as smart as we are in their way."
"In which case I am sure that they will respond to reason," proposed Mai confidently. "I have spent some time in the stables
you know, and I've handled enough stupid riding beasts over the years - mongoose dragons and komodo rhinos to name two - that an intelligent creature such
as Kuku provides novelty."
Zuko looked between them. "Why don't you fetch that map, Yue," he requested. "And maybe we should ask Bato if there is a
discreet village for Toph to have a few more waterbending lessons while Mai courts herself a sky bison."
.oOo.
"So what will you name him?" Yue asked as Mai and Toph loaded their belongings onto the saddle of Mai's new steed. She had
flown the two girls north to one of the islands around the Southern Air Temple, where most of the sky bison herd foraged when possible. While Toph had wrestled
with the still difficult concepts of bending liquid water, Mai had assisted the bison herders, an activity that seemed to mostly consist of brushing the huge
beast's fur and ensuring that their... waste... was suitably disposed of. Of course, the latter meant dried out somewhere discreet for eventual transport
back to the South Pole to use as fuel for fires.
The fire maiden had finally 'befriended' the animal that the herders assured her was the most ornery and unpleasent of all the
herd's bulls - given the tenuous survival of the species, risking a cow was simply not done - a comparatively darkly furred beast whose arrow markings
almost blurred into the rest of his hair. According to the herders, the sky bison had never mated that they were aware off and had taken what they considered
to be regrettable delight in dumping riders off his head from barely survivable heights on at least three occasions.
Mai had her own ideas about how to handle bad tempered creatures, notions quite at odds with the almost reverential methods of the Water
Tribe. While the younger herders had seemed shocked at her use of an improvised riding crop to establish dominance over the sky bison, a substantial number of
their elders - most probably those with personal experience of the 'swarthy' sky bison - had watched with undisguised glee.
"Bison," she replied pragmatically. "It's what he is."
"You can't just call him Bison," Yue said in a shocked tone. "It'll confuse all the other Bisons. They can understand
everything we say to them, you know."
"Mai's Bison," suggested Toph from the saddle, where she was tucking the modest bundles that they would carry with them away
where even she could find them easily. "Except for Mai it would be 'My Bison'."
Yue shook her head disapprovingly. "He's not a thing, you know. He's a person."
Mai sighed and walked round to the bison's head, staring it down when it mooed at her. "From now on, your name is M Bison," she
told it firmly. Yue slapped her forehead. "Can we go now?" Mai asked her.
"As long as you've got everything important," Yue told her. "I'm sorry we can't provide you with more money, but
Fire Nation coins aren't all that common here at the South Pole."
"We'll manage," Mai said confidently. "You've equipped us fairly well otherwise and we still have some Earth Kingdom
coin left that we'll be able to exchange - enough to get us started at any rate. We'll make some stops before we reach our destination, so we can
obtain money and clothes there if it looks as if we'll need to disguise ourselves to fit in."
"I don't want to know how you'll get them, do I?" Yue asked. Life on the harsh ice cap demanded that a community hold
together. Theft, which undermined that trust and might deprive someone of of a vital resource, while not unheard of, was rare and frowned upon. For the two
girls intending to covertly cross the Fire Nation, larceny seemed to be the logical option for them to employ.
"It's almost certainly not as bad as you think," Toph laughed. "Casual labour, gambling, maybe luring someone into trying
to mug the 'helpless blind girl'. We'll be trying not to draw attention to us, remember?"
"That means no creating volcanos, you understand?"
"No, it means not getting caught getting creating volcanos," disagreed Toph.
Mai nodded agreement, although she didn't specify who with.
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.