FOREIGNER'S GOD; legend of korra

chapter one

[act one; chapter one     -     princess and heir]

    The walls of their home had been painted with so much laughter, so much grief. It was full of the presence of life, filled to the brim. As though it was a glass overflowing with memory.

    She stood in the hall, then, of the home she had grown up within. Her eyes, a dark amber, drifted between the portraits on the wall, the paintings that documented the lives that had once existed here. She finds, however, that her eyes linger on one portrait specifically.

    A man and a woman. Three small girls. The man, tall and scarred. The woman, dark hair and inquisitive eyes. The three girls, all exact mirrors of their parents.

    She steps closer, hand reaching to brush against the face of the girl standing to the right. She was the middle child. A girl with her mother's green eyes and her father's smile. A girl who had gone too soon.

    Her mother, Akari.

    "Aiya?"

    She turns, instinctively, hands entwining behind her back. Her shoulders straighten, back lengthening, chin tipping just so. She bent at the waist, a slight bow. "Aunt Izumi."

    The older woman smiles, so similar to the woman who had come before her—Aiya's grandmother. Lian.

    The Fire Lord steps forward, resting a hand on her niece's shoulder, following her eyes. Finding the portrait that hung on the wall, finding the eyes that reflect her own so closely. She smiles. It is sad and small. It wavers, then, just enough to be noticeable. "Thirteen years," she murmured. "Thirteen years since my mother died. Eleven since Akari."

    Aiya nods silently, eyes darting to the floor beneath her boot-clad feet. Her hands, nervous and fighting, pull at the sleeves of her red robe. "Yes," she whispered. She can see the reflection, then, the way her mothers appearance, her grandmothers, reflect in her own. How her face is so similar. How her sister's is so similar. She tips her head, looking at her aunt. "Is it time?"

    Izumi rests a hand upon the girl's shoulder and nods slowly. Quietly. "Yes," she says. "It is."

    Together, the two enter the great hall of the palace. The very heart and center of the Fire Nation. There, the two most powerful members of their nation, sit at the head. Izumi, of course, sits at the absolute center of power, while Aiya, only twenty, sits to her immediate right.

    To those who watch, to those who had seen the empires of the Fire Nation rise and fall; seen Fire Lord's come and go, they would recognize the very being of Aiya. They would recognize her in her grandfather, Zuko, and in those who had come before. She is the very image of who Zuko had once been. Perhaps, even, who he would have been had his father not raised a blazing hand to his son's cheek. From her gold and red clothing to her dark brown hair tied above her, decorated with the very flame emblem that had been passed down from heir to heir.