Avatar: The Book Of The Phoenix

Epilogue

The last garrisons did not fight because there was nothing left to fight with.

Azula and Rokkun rode from Ember Island along the inner coast, the Iron Dragon a dark promise on the water beside them. At the first fortress the gates opened before the horns finished. Officers came out in full armor and laid their swords on the stones as if the metal had become too heavy to keep.

At the second, a commander stared at Rokkun for a long time, then at the empty yards behind him, then got down on one knee.

At the third, someone in the back rank started to shout and was dragged quiet by his own men.

No one called it loyalty.

They called it the end of a week.

The capital did not fire a shot.

The harbor batteries sat unmanned. The palace steps were crowded and still. Rokkun rode through the main avenue with Azula at his side and the Fire Nomad host filling the street behind them like a second city. People watched from balconies. A child started to cheer and was hushed.

The old crown was not on anyone's head. The chair in the throne room was empty because the man who belonged to it was already in the air, somewhere south, still breathing.

Rokkun did not hurry.

He let the city look at him.

The Fire Sages met them in the hall of the dragon.
What they did there was older than Zuko's reforms and uglier than Ozai's blessing at Xanadu. They took the title Fire Lord off the table as if it were a cup that had cracked. In its place they spoke a different word, one the palace had not used for itself in living memory.

Emperor.

The circlet they set on Rokkun's head was not the typical gold. It was the darker metal from the Nomad forges, accepted now by men who had once sworn only to the old line. A smaller crown followed, settled into Azula's hair.

Empress.

She stood as if the hall had always been this shape.

Outside, the square waited.

Rokkun came out onto the steps.

He did not shout. The city leaned in anyway.

"Your Fire Lord is gone," he said. "He took your army to a holiday shore and left you the rumor of a peace that could not hold. I am not here to apologize for winning. I am here to put this nation back into one pair of hands."

A murmur moved the older faces first. Men who had grown up under Ozai's shadow. Women who had watched the war end and felt the ending as a theft.

"The world was told we were finished," Rokkun went on. "That our dead had been spent on nothing. That a broken map was the same thing as honor. I do not accept that story. Neither should you."

He let the quiet work.

"You will have order. You will have a throne that does not ask permission of the other three. You will have a future your children can name without flinching." His eyes moved over the square, over the ones who believed him and the ones who were only still. "Kneel, and this city stays a city. That is the whole of the offer."

For a moment nobody moved.

Then an old soldier in the front went down.

Then another.

Then the square gave way in a spreading, reluctant, inevitable wave, knees to stone, heads bowed toward the man who had taken the island and then taken the street.

Some of it was faith. Most of it was arithmetic.

Azula stood on the steps and watched the city go down.

She had wanted this shape of the world since she was a girl. A nation that did not apologize for existing, a crown that did not have to share a table.

Rokkun's voice carried the way hers used to in conquered halls. The older faces in the square softened. The younger ones emptied. Both reactions pleased some old part of her. Both reactions sat wrong in a newer part she did not intend to name.

Zuko was not in the chair.

That should have felt like winning. It felt like a room with one person missing. She could still see him on the pavilion at Xanadu, asking if she was alright, and she could still hear herself telling him to leave. She had meant it. She also knew what the kneeling meant for him, wherever the airship was pointed. Brother. Enemy. The same boy who had once cried over a tart he did not get to eat.

Rokkun's hand was near hers and not quite touching.

The smaller crown was a light weight and a heavy one.

Empress...the word fit. The word also dragged behind it the asylum, the lists, the nights she had asked clerks for a name that never came back. He had come back. He had given her sons and a nation and a war that would not stay on Ember Island.

She had said she was ready. On the steps, with the Fire Nation on its knees, ready looked like a city holding its breath.

She did not smile.

She did not look away.

If doubt was going to live in her, it would live quietly, the way her searching had. In public she was what the square required: the Empress beside the man who had made the world kneel.

Inside, she counted the heads going down and wondered, only once, what Sozin's face would do when he was old enough to understand the sound.

And the Fire Nation knelt once more before its conqueror.