The Legend of Ba Sing Se ○ ATLA

4 ○ Ripple

The war.

Kiiya's worries hadn't been for nothing. The war was here, right at her doorstep.

Kiiya couldn't think of anything but the war as she said goodbye to Jinju, walked home, attempted to go to sleep, roused herself the next morning. It was here. It clouded her mind, as if a fog had settled on her brain, and her futile attempts to swat it away just made it permeate even more.

Her mother's requests for her to make deliveries were obliged without argument, but just forced Kiiya to think about it even more. Her thoughts followed her into the evening, into the Lower Ring, underground. Her swords felt heavier in her hands today as she swung for her revenue.

The war. It was no longer an argument of fact or fiction, Kiiya thought to herself. More so, it was no longer something the city would be able to hide. It just depended on how long they could evade its discovery by everyone else.

The Outer Wall wasn't really a monorail ride away from the Lower Ring. The Agrarian Zone spanning between the two sections rolled on for miles and miles. Could there even be a chance that someone would catch wind of it? Or would the scheming government find a way to somehow hold together the quickly forming cracks of this dreadful discovery?

But even that couldn't stop the reality of the situation, Kiiya concluded. The war had finally met them here. It had only been a few years since the last time. The Siege of Ba Sing Se lasted for 600 days, and had happened in Kiiya's lifetime. Just six years ago.

She had been living in the Lower Ring at that point and had just narrowly escaped death when it happened. Though the Siege never made it past the Outer Wall, it didn't mean it hadn't effected them. For her and everyone else who had experienced that Siege, the war had become the most real, and was no longer a "fake fear" that could be fabricated into a rumor by the government.

Now, it was back. And who could know how long it would take for the Fire Nation to strike again? They were merciless. Kiiya knew the horrors of what they could do. Of what they'd already done. To her, only time could tell when they would strike again. It wasn't a question of "if". Only "when."

And then, the absolute world-changing revelation. The Avatar.

Now, those were rumors that no one could have known were true or not. While no one questioned the realness of the war (though they couldn't speak of it), there was nothing to truly prove that the Avatar was alive and back. Those words that had trickled down the river could have likely been reshaped and reformed over time.

But Jinju's assertion of this intelligence meant that the rumors could no longer be questioned. Kiiya knew that the daughter of two palace guards was nothing less than a fountain overflowing with classified information. And information like this was something you just couldn't make up.

The thing that really nagged at Kiiya's mind when it came to the Avatar, however, was not the fact that he was truly alive, or that he was finally here...

It was the repercussions of his arrival.

Sure, she thought to herself, maybe others thought of him as the savior of the world, the one who could bring "balance"... but, look what he had just brought to her home.

He brought the war here. Which made him nothing less than a threat.

The idea of her home being decimated plagued Kiiya's mind all day, and worse so the idea of the person who brought it here.

How could the Avatar be called the savior of the world? Abandoning it for so long was one thing. But now, he was bringing death and destruction with him wherever he went.