"Hama of the Southern Seas!" It's an odd form of address, but all that truly matters is what it means. She's been found out. Hama barely hears, let alone cares, what else the voice lurking behind her has to say. "You have wrought atrocities in my name! No more!"

Shock and an aging body keep her from reacting as quickly as she should, but she will not go back! She'll sooner die fighting than be put in a cage again!

Hama twists, four daggers of ice flying blindly from her fingertips in the direction of her unwanted interloper. The intruder is not what she had been expecting, from the second or so Hama had to build up images of soldiers and wardens in her mind. The teenager who's interrupted her doesn't look Fire Nation in the slightest. Hama doubts she's actually so much as human, glowing as she is in the darkened forest.

Human or not, the girl crosses her arms at the wrist in front of her chest. In the next instant, she throws her hands out to the sides and the ice daggers shred themselves into snow. From there, the Fire Nation's natural heat makes short work of the remains. The patter of a miniature rainstorm, there and gone again in but a moment, announces Hama's failure to kill her assailant.

Another waterbender? Here? In this forsaken land of heat and fire?

"More spirits!" cries that fool of a retired blacksmith. As much as she hates to give credence to anything Taro has to say, this time he may be correct. There is the sound of scrambling in the dirt but Hama doesn't dare look away to check on what Taro might be doing. The decrepit oaf is as harmless as he is useless, which is to say completely. There is a yelp followed by Taro yelling, "Ghosts!"

Hama's other prisoners begin to make a ruckus of their own. Pitiful, croaking cries for mercy echo through the open doorway to the abandoned mine. Usually, she revels in the sound of the Fire Nation suffering even a fraction of the injustice they have inflicted upon her, but tonight the futile pleas of the condemned are only an unwanted distraction.

A pair of burning eyes watching from behind the girl's shoulder shift, drawing Hama's attention to a previously unnoticed second interloper. In another moment, those torch-bright eyes are moving, stalking away from the glowing teen to skulk through the trees, form cloaked by forest shadows and untouched by the illuminating light of the full moon.

No matter. The eyes alone are enough of a target, and Hama isn't about to allow herself to be so easily flanked. She looses another cluster of ice daggers. These, likewise, never find their intended target.

Moonlight glints off the airborne ice and highlights the changing trajectory as all four daggers instead arc toward the first interloper. The girl all but dances around the ice, arms extended ahead of wickedly sharp points and hands twisting over each other to set the daggers spinning before releasing them with an upward flick. The ice falls into an orbit above the teenager's head like a crown.

"That one," the impossible stranger declares, "is under my protection." It should be a laughable claim from this little slip of a girl, but the proof of her abilities twinkles in the moonlight as ice circles serenely through the air, defying gravity and its own melting point alike, without so much as a hint of visible waterbending. "You will not touch him."

The eyes watching her from the dark narrow into a glare but say nothing. They pin her with an unbroken stare as again the -- spirit? man? creature? -- unknown figure slinks through the forest, if slower and with greater caution than before. The fact that the being, whatever its nature, would dare to continue at all is itself nothing short of a taunt.

Hama has had enough of these games.

"Who are you, then?" she snarls at the girl who has caught and stolen her ice twice now, "What do you want?" She cannot deny that this new waterbender is powerful, but Hama has long since learned that the powerful are also arrogant. A mistake will be made. It is only a matter of being ready to exploit it.

"Do you not recognize me, Hama of the Southern Seas?" the glowing teen asks, "Very well. I shall introduce myself."

The stranger raises a hand skyward and performs a tight twist with her wrist. Hama finds herself stumbling forward as her own body betrays her. All around, the forest groans and the very trees bow to the intruder, effortlessly bent to the will of a being wearing the guise of a child. For the first time since her early days in the Fire Nation prison, Hama's fear grows to be stronger than her rage.

"I am pull," the being says. The second hand swings up to mirror the first, dragging Hama up to her toes before she falls to her elbows and knees as those same hands descend with the power of a crashing wave during a monsoon storm. "I am the change of the tide." The figure approaches and no matter how Hama struggles to escape, the hold on her blood pins her to the ground. A pair of glowing feet reenter her field of vision as the girl says, "I am Tui."

"No," Hama denies in a rasp before growing more adamant as hysteria comes over her, "No, you can't be! The great spirits are gone!"

Her protestations are ignored.

"I am sister to Agni," the imposter claims, a deceptively gentle hand comes to rest under Hama's chin and tips her face up to meet the teenager's pale eyes, "reflector of his light."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Tui and La forsook us! You can't be --"

Anger flashes like lightning over the trickster's face before she spins in place. One moment a girl stands before Hama, but in the next instant a miniature moon hangs in the air. As suddenly as the transformation had happened, it reverts, and Hama is left to stare up into the silvery-blue eyes that glare back.

"Do not presume to know me, Hama of the Southern Seas!" Tui warns, "You have thought of me only insofar as the power I have granted you. And you have abused it." Tears slip down the ancient spirit's youthful face. "Never before have my brother's children reviled me. You shroud yourself in my strength and obscure your actions with my presence. You have sullied my name amongst my brother's people! They speak of me with fear and contempt!"

The great Moon Spirit would visit her after the tribes have suffered untold generations of silence, only to weep over the enemies of those that have dedicated themselves to Tui and La?

Hama's pulse pounds beneath her skin and bile coats the back of her throat.

"What should the slurs and insults of these small-minded magots matter to you? After what they've done, they should know the full fury of the moon and ocean! They should have learned to fear you long ago!" Hama rages, "Tui and La are our patrons, our source! These ashmakers invaded our lands, attacked our tribes, and imprisoned our people! Why should such barbarians receive your protection when we did not?"

"It is humanity's nature to wage war against itself," Tui says, "You should have sought your vengeance with your own name, rather than attempt to steal mine."

"You abandoned us!" Hama spits, "You abandoned the world! Centuries of silence and not a trace of you to be found during even our most desperate moments of need! Where were you? When our people died, when our land was taken, when our tribes began to disappear, where were you? Why should a dead spirit's name be held sacred?"

Tui scowls down at her but offers no answers.

"Hama of the Southern Seas," the spirit intones, pressing her fingers to Hama's forehead, "my blessing will be with you no longer."

The spirit withdraws her hand and suddenly the whole world seems to warp and twist before everything fades away into darkness.

----------------------------------------

The bloodbender's second set of ice projectiles shine as moonlight reflects off their facets and Ozai fails to produce so much as a spark in his own defense, let alone the protective wall of flame he intends to create.

Before the Fire Lord even has time to panic, the sharpened ice swerves off to the right.

His heart pounds in his chest from the near miss and it is only due to long practice that he keeps his breaths steady.

"That one is under my protection," the Moon Spirit proclaims, "You will not touch him."

Tui has saved him where his bending has faltered. But why had it faltered?

Heat does not bloom at his back, no steadying hands rest on his shoulders, and his eyes remain open, but for all of that, Agni's voice is clear in his ear as he answers, "The waterbender is not your concern. Tui alone will judge her fate."

"I wasn't going to attack her!" Ozai hisses under his breath to the Sun Spirit, but he makes sure to keep his eyes locked on the old woman in front of him. The last thing he needs is to be taken unaware by any incoming attacks while his bending is compromised. He tries not to think too deeply about the revelation that Agni can apparently just switch his bending off at a moment's notice. He can still feel the warm chi pooled in his belly, so he doubts the inability to firebend will be permanent, but the realization is disturbing nonetheless. "I could have died!"

"Tui would not allow that," Agni dismisses, "If necessary, there are healers in both the Lunar and Solar Courts." As an afterthought, the spirit adds, "Though Lady Jang Hui is needed elsewhere for a time."

Why does it sound like Agni has started planning for an inevitability when the easiest way to prevent it would be to leave his bending unhindered?

Ozai scowls. He feels a headache growing. The Fire Lord crouches lower and continues to make his way to the open doorway still leaking sounds of misery. "I don't know if it would be better or worse if you understood how not reassuring that is," he grumbles.

He feels ever so slightly better when the bloodbender turns her focus back on Tui.

"Who are you, then? What do you want?" the woman yells.

Tui's response rings clearly through the night, "Do you not recognize me, Hama of the Southern Seas? Very well. I shall introduce myself."

Ozai nearly runs face first into a tree branch that suddenly sways into his path and the metal door produces a grating squeal as it swings on its hinges. The Fire Lord frowns but quickly decides that whatever Tui is doing, it isn't his place to question or interfere any more than it was a second ago. He alters his course to account for newly bowed trees and reaching shrubs, but otherwise he remains focussed on his goal. There are people that need him.

Agni sighs. "It has been a long time since I have dealt with man, child mine. I am out of practice," the spirit admits.

"Why are you even here right now?" Ozai asks. He's almost within reach of the door. Nearly there. "You've set for the day. You can't have seen from the sky."

"Once-Prince Iroh of Second Fire prays during a peculiar time, at a peculiar place, and several others with him. It caught my attention," Agni says, "The choice of ceremony was enough to prompt me to seek answers directly from Tui." Softer, the Sun Spirit adds, "It is good to see my sibling feeling well enough to take on such duties again. You both have your tasks in hand. I will leave you to complete them."

Ozai's fingertips curl over the edge of the door but something about what Agni has said nags at him and his feet still. It is an odd time to pray to the Sun Spirit. Why would a whole group of people be praying to Agni hours after sunset? It doesn't --

Ozai strangles a groan down to a hissing sigh full of steam and sparks. If he wasn't so irritated with himself, he'd probably be relieved to see his bending returned as seamlessly as it had been repressed. As it stands, he's left behind witnesses to a mad dash through the halls capped off by fleeing the palace and vanishing into thin air. And this happened after the day had already started with a pre-dawn miniature sun -- with the night before plagued by spirit dreams -- to say nothing of how he was dropped into his current present in the first place. Unc-- Iroh probably thinks he's been spirit-napped.

...Considering that Tui is inarguably the one deciding where they go and when, the assumption would not be wholly incorrect, even if Ozai did leave with the Moon Spirit willingly.

What a mess.

With his luck, the entire capital will be in an uproar by the time he returns.

A deep breath in.

A slow breath out.

One thing. Focus on just the one thing that needs to be done right now. The rest can come later.

Ozai pushes open the door and immediately sets the brush at his feet on fire.

Hama is fortunate that Tui has a claim.