Chapter 89: The Avatar State
The cold silence of the brig was shattered by the screech of the door hinges once more. This time, it was not Zuko who entered, but a vision of cold fury draped in royal crimson. Azula stood in the doorway, her posture impossibly straight, her eyes burning with a contempt that seemed to lower the temperature in the cell by ten degrees.
Her gaze swept over the prisoners, dismissing Sokka and the still-unconscious Aang with a flick of her eyes, before landing, predatorily, on Katara.
"Well, well," Azula's voice was a silken whip, lashing through the damp air. "Look what the Dragon dragged in. Again. It seems some vermin are simply too stubborn to know when they've been crushed."
Katara rose slowly to her feet, her own weariness burned away by a fresh wave of anger. "What do you want, Azula? Come to gloat?"
"Gloat?" Azula let out a light, mocking laugh that held no humor. "Over you? Don't be absurd. I'm merely… taking inventory. Assessing the tools my brother seems so inexplicably fond of." She took a step inside, her movements a study in controlled grace. "He was just in here, wasn't he? Did he regale you with more tales of the grand future you threw away? Did he try to play the magnanimous prince offering you a path back to his bed?"
"Get out," Katara snarled, her hands curling into fists at her sides.
"Oh, touchy," Azula purred, her eyes glinting. "It must be so confusing for you. One moment, you're his prized ornament, draped in silk and hanging on his arm. The next, you're back in chains. It makes a girl wonder what her true value is." She tilted her head, a cruel smile playing on her lips. "Tell me, did you actually believe you were special? That the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation saw something in a backwater water tribe peasant besides a convenient body and a useful leash on the Avatar?"
The words were designed to maim. Sokka stood up now, his face dark. "You shut your mouth."
Azula ignored him completely, her focus solely on Katara. "He confided in you, didn't he? In that gilded cage of a palace. Played his little games of trust. And you, like a fool, lapped it up. You actually thought you had a bond."
"We have nothing," Katara shot back, her voice trembling with rage. "He's a monster, just like you!"
"Are we?" Azula's smile widened, becoming a razor's edge. "Or am I just more honest about it? He wears a mask of strategy, but I see the indulgence. The way he kept you close. The way he looks at you. It's pathetic, really. My brilliant brother, brought low by sentiment for a… a water tribe whore."
The slur hung in the air, vile and absolute.
Katara didn't scream. She didn't cry. A profound, chilling calm settled over her. She looked Azula dead in the eye, and with a force of pure, unadulterated contempt, she spat. The spittle landed on the pristine, armored toe of Azula's boot.
A deadly silence filled the cell.
Azula looked down at her boot, then slowly back up at Katara. All pretense of amusement vanished, replaced by an icy, homicidal rage. The air in the cell began to crackle, the tiny hairs on Sokka's arms standing on end.
"You filthy animal," Azula whispered, her voice deathly quiet.
Aang stirred in the corner, his eyelids fluttering open, groggy and disoriented. "K…Katara…?"
Azula paid him no mind. Her body became a study in lethal geometry. She took a deep, centering breath, her stance widening. Her left hand extended, fingers splayed, drawing an arc of unseen energy from the air. Her right hand, held close to her body, gathered the power, two fingers pointed skyward. The air itself seemed to tear, a blinding, white-hot energy coalescing between her fingertips with a terrifying CRACKLE-HISS. Jagged arcs of blue-white lightning snapped around her hand, illuminating the cell in a stark, horrifying light. It was the same perfect, devastating form she had used in Ba Sing Se.
"NO!" Sokka screamed, lurching forward.
Aang's eyes flew wide open, the last vestiges of unconsciousness ripped away by the palpable, killing intent. "AZULA, DON'T!"
It was too late.
With a final, contemptuous thrust of her two fingers, Azula unleashed the lightning. It wasn't a wild blast; it was a precise, focused spear of pure destruction, aimed directly at Katara's heart.
Time seemed to slow. Sokka, with a desperate, guttural cry, threw himself in front of his sister. At the same moment, Aang, chains groaning in protest, summoned a burst of airbending to propel himself forward.
The world dissolved Into searing white light and a deafening CRACK-BOOM!
The concussion threw Aang back against the wall. When the blinding light faded, a scene of devastation greeted him.
Sokka lay sprawled on the floor, his body smoking, the front of his tunic blackened and torn. He was motionless. Behind him, Katara was thrown against the back wall, stunned but alive, her brother had taken the brunt of the blast.
A choked, gurgling sound came from Sokka. He twitched, his eyes wide with shock and pain.
"SOKKA!" Katara shrieked, scrambling towards him, her hands already glowing with healing water, her face a mask of utter horror.
Aang did not speak. He did not cry out. He simply rose from where he had been thrown. His head fell forward, then slowly lifted. His eyes were no longer grey, but blazing white, his arrows igniting with an incandescent, cosmic light. The air in the cell began to whip into a frenzy, the very stones of the fortress groaning in protest.
The Avatar had not just woken up.
He had arrived.
And he was furious.
The groan of the fortress was not a sound of stone and mortar, but the voice of the world itself, crying out in tandem with the Avatar's rage. The air in the cell, once still and cold, became a screaming vortex. Loose stones tore free from the walls, hovering in the maelstrom. The heavy iron chains binding Aang's ankles did not break; they vaporized, the metal turning to incandescent dust in the face of the raw, elemental power radiating from him.
He did not look at Azula. His blazng white eyes were fixed on Sokka's smoking, twitching form and Katara's tear-streaked face as she desperately tried to channel healing water into her brother's chest, the water sizzling and steaming against the catastrophic lightning burn.
A low, guttural roar built in Aang's throat, a sound that was not his own, but the collective fury of a thousand lifetimes. It was the sound of the world's balance, shattered.
Azula took a single, instinctive step back, her smirk finally wiped away, replaced by a flicker of primal fear. This was not part of her calculation. This was not a controlled explosion she could manipulate. This was an extinction-level event wearing the face of a child.
"Avatar, control yourself!" she shouted, her voice barely a whisper against the roaring wind.
Aang's head turned towards her. The movement was slow, inexorable. He raised a hand.
The wall behind Azula did not crumble. It ceased to exist. A massive section of the fortress's outer shell, stone, iron reinforcement, and all, was simply unmade, torn away into the howling mountain winds as if by the hand of a giant. The sudden exposure to the open sky was a shock, the blizzard outside now invading the brig. Through the gaping hole, the distant, jagged peaks of the mountain range were visible under a bruised, twilight sky.
Aang took a step forward. With each step, the floor cracked and buckled, not from impact, but from the sheer pressure of his spirit. He wasn't bending the elements; he was commanding reality.
Azula, her heart hammering against her ribs, reacted with the only thing she knew: overwhelming force. She unleashed a sustained, concussive stream of blue fire, a technique that could vaporize steel. It never reached him. The fire met an invisible wall an inch from his skin, flaring and dissipating into harmless motes of light, absorbed by the aura of pure cosmic energy that encased him.
His white eyes narrowed. He flicked his wrist.
A whip of condensed wind, so sharp it hummed with the frequency of a blade, snapped out. It wasn't aimed at her body, but at the space around her. The stone floor at her feet erupted upwards, not in chunks, but in a fine, cutting dust. It shredded the hem of her robes and scored deep grooves into her armored greaves, forcing a cry of pain and surprise from her lips as she was thrown backwards, her perfect form broken.
This was not a fight. It was an annihilation.
Aang's gaze returned to Katara and Sokka. A tremor of profound sorrow passed over his illuminated features. He raised both hands now, palms facing the ceiling.
The fortress of Firebase Kaze, a bastion of Fire Nation might, began to die.
Deep, tectonic shudders ran through its foundations. The ceiling of the brig cracked open like an eggshell, revealing the levels above, where soldiers were screaming, their shouts swallowed by the apocalyptic roar. Support beams, thick as ancient trees, splintered and snapped. The air filled with the deafening symphony of destruction: the shriek of tearing metal, the thunder of collapsing stone, the terrified cries of men being buried alive.
Aang was the calm, terrible eye of the storm. A pillar of the ceiling, a colossal weight of granite and iron, crashed down directly towards Katara and the fallen Sokka. Without even looking, Aang pointed a single finger. The pillar halted in mid-air, hovered for a heart-stopping second, and then shot sideways like a child's toy, smashing through another wall and vanishing into the chaos outside.
Through the expanding ruin, Azula scrambled to her feet, her hair disheveled, a thin trail of blood leaking from a cut on her cheek. She saw Zuko then, sprinting into the devastation from a connecting corridor, his face a mask of horror and disbelief. He skidded to a halt, his eyes taking in the scene: the Avatar, unleashed and unstoppable; the crumbling fortress; his sister, battered; and Katara, weeping over what looked like a corpse.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second, a silent, screaming exchange of "What have you done?!" before the world dissolved around them.
Aang let out a final, world-ending cry, and the very mountain seemed to answer. A shockwave of pure spiritual energy erupted from him, a expanding sphere of white light.
The last thing Azula saw was the wave of light rushing towards her, and the triumphant, absolute fury in the Avatar's eyes. The last thing she heard was the final, catastrophic roar of Firebase Kaze being wiped from the face of the mountain.
Then, there was only light, and the deafening silence of pure, devastating power.
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