The first hunt took three weeks.
She found the firebender in a mountain pass, far from any village, far from any witness.
He was a patrol captain, broad-shouldered, confident, the kind of man who had never lost a fight because he had never fought anyone stronger than himself.
He rode alone.
He always rode alone.
It was a point of pride.
Pride, Hama had learned long before this body was hers, was the easiest weakness to exploit.
She stood in the middle of the pass and waited.
The captain saw her from a distance. A woman, alone, unarmed.
He slowed his mount.
His hand drifted to the hilt of his sword, but his expression was more curious than threatened.
"You're a long way from anywhere," he called.
"Lost?"
"No," she said.
"Refugee? If you're looking for shelter, there's a town half a day south. I can escort you."
"That's kind of you." She raised her hand.
"But I'm not looking for shelter."
The captain opened his mouth to respond.
His jaw froze mid-word.
His eyes went wide.
His horse, sensing something wrong, tried to bolt, but Hama's other hand was already raised, and the water in the animal's body recognized her authority as surely as the water in the captain's.
She pulled him from the saddle. He hit the ground hard, his body rigid.
She walked toward him, her footsteps crunching in the thin mountain snow. He couldn't speak.
Couldn't scream.
Couldn't do anything but lie there as she knelt beside him.
His eyes were wild, rolling in their sockets.
His lips moved, trying to form words, trying to demand answers.
She didn't provide any.
There was no point.
He wouldn't remember this conversation.
He wouldn't remember anything.
She placed her palm against his chest.
Through the water in his blood, she felt his heartbeat stutter.
Taolu stirred within her.
The violet-crimson light kindled behind her eyes, not the serene white glow of the Avatar State, but something darker.
Something hungry.
The captain's body arched as the light reached toward him.
She felt it, the fire in his blood, the spark in his breath, the elemental gift that had been his since birth.
She pulled it free with one clean motion.
He screamed once. Then went still.
When it was over, she stood.
She flexed her fingers.
A small flame danced across her palm.
Hesitant at first, then stronger, fed by her breath and her will.
She left him in the pass.
He would wake in an hour with no memory, no bending, and no way to explain what had happened.
The Fire Nation would call it a medical anomaly.
A spiritual affliction.
A soldier broken by the stress of war.
Anything but what it actually was.
"Tsk tsk tsk, dickhead." she said.
She walked east.
Earth was harder.
Not because earthbenders were stronger than firebenders, they weren't, not inherently, but because they were harder to find.
The Fire Nation had spent decades capturing them, imprisoning them, working them to death in labor camps.
Those who escaped went to ground.
They hid in caves and quarries and abandoned mines, places where the earth itself could shelter them.
She tracked a rumor to an abandoned quarry in the mountains.
Not a rumor about bloodbending, no one knew about bloodbending but a rumor about a spirit.
A demon in the pits.
A creature that moved stones without touching them, that had killed three Fire Nation soldiers who'd wandered too close.
The locals whispered about it in the market.
They made signs to ward off evil when they passed the quarry road.
Hama knew a desperate earthbender when she heard one.
The quarry was deep and dark and cold.
She descended into it slowly, her footsteps echoing off the stone walls.
The earthbender felt her coming, she sensed him through the vibrations in the rock, a skill she was only beginning to recognize.
He attacked from ambush, launching a boulder at her head with enough force to crush a skull.
She caught it with water and set it aside.
"Impressive," she said.
"But unnecessary."
The earthbender was a young man, younger than she'd expected.
His face was gaunt, his clothes were rags, and his eyes held the hollow look of someone who had not eaten well in months.
He raised another boulder.
His hands were shaking.
"Stay back," he said.
"I'll kill you if you get any closer! I've killed many before you."
"I'm sure you have." She walked toward him, hands loose at her sides.
"What's your name?"
"None of your business."
"Fair enough. My name is Hama. I'm a waterbender from the Southern Tribe. The Fire Nation took everything from me. Everything." She stopped a few paces away.
"I think they took everything from you too."
The boulder wavered.
"You're not Fire Nation?"
"Do I look Fire Nation?"
He studied her face.
Her dark hair.
Her Water Tribe features.
Slowly, reluctantly, he lowered the boulder.
"They killed my family. My village. Everyone. I've been hiding here for two years."
"Two years alone in the dark." She shook her head.
"That's not living. That's waiting to die."
"It's surviving."
"Is it?" She met his eyes.
"I can give you something better than survival. I can give you purpose. Join me. I'm hunting the Fire Nation. Taking their bending. Making them pay for what they did to our people."
The young man stared at her. Hope flickered in his hollow eyes, hope and suspicion in equal measure.
"You can take bending?"
"I can." She raised her hand and let a small flame dance across her palm.
"This was a Fire Nation captain's bending, now it's mine. I took it from him the way they took everything from us. I can teach you how, and i can give you the power to bend other elements. We can use that to fight back, agaisnt them, together!"
He hesitated.
The boulder dropped.
"I don't even know your name."
"Hama. I told just told you earlier didn't i? And you are?"
"...Taizo, that's what my mother named me." He stepped forward, out of the shadows.
"If you're lying to me..."
"Come to me, and i will give you the power to bend fire to your will."
Her whispers were hypnotic, like a preditor slowly seducing its innocent prey.
She slowly extended her hand towards Taizo.
Taizo reached for it.
Their fingers touched.
Suddenly, a violet-crimson light flared.
Taizo's eyes went wide, not with betrayal, not yet, but with confusion.
He didn't understand what was happening but by the time he did, it was too late.
His bending tore free with a sound like roots ripping from soil.
He screamed.
A raw, broken sound that echoed through the quarry.
Then he collapsed.
Hama stood over him.
The earthbending settled into her body, grounding her, anchoring her to the stone beneath her feet.
She could feel the quarry now, every crack in the rock, every vein of mineral, every hollow space where the earth remembered being carved.
"I didn't even put enough effort on that performance. Mortals these days are so gullible." she said.
She looked at Taizo's crumpled form.
He was still breathing.
She could have killed him.
She probably should have.
But a live earthbender with no memory and no bending was just another refugee.
Dead benders attracted attention.
She left him in the quarry and climbed back toward the light.
She found a cave in the mountains and made it her own.
Not a prison.
Not a lair.
A workshop.
The walls were smooth stone, shaped by her new earthbending into something resembling comfort.
A stream ran through the back, giving her access to water.
A fire pit near the entrance provided warmth and light.
She had been here for three months now, and it was starting to feel like home.
The body was the problem.
She sat cross-legged on the stone floor, examining her reflection in a pool of still water.
The face that looked back at her was Hama's face looks somewhere around late twenties, Southern Water Tribe features, dark hair beginning to show threads of gray at the temples.
She had been in this body for less than six months, and already it was showing signs of wear.
The aging would accelerate.
She knew this from the knowledge in sorcery Loki had carried across realities.
Mortal bodies were fragile.
They broke down.
They died.
The original Hama would have lived another forty or fifty years at most, and then the bending would be lost, and Taolu would need a new host, and the hunt would begin again from nothing.
Unacceptable.
She closed her eyes and reached inward.
Taolu pulsed within her.
A dark echo of the spirit that had been Vaatu, hollow but responsive.
Through Taolu, she could feel the elements she had claimed.
Water, Fire, and Earth.
Three of the four.
Each one a tool, and each one a key.
Waterbending regulated the body's fluids.
That was obvious.
Blood, lymph, the water between cells.
All of it moved at her command.
She could flush toxins, maintain organ function, and prevent the slow dehydration that accelerated aging.
Earthbending stabilized the body's structure.
Bones, teeth, cartilage.
All of it mineral, all of it within her domain.
She could reinforce density.
Press back against micro-fractures.
Hold her skeleton together with deliberate intent.
Firebending controlled the body's energy.
Temperature, electrical impulses, the metabolic furnace that kept flesh warm and alive.
She could regulate her heartbeat.
Maintain nerve function.
Keep the cold creep of age at bay.
Three elements, three tools.
Three ways to hold back time.
She began the ritual that morning.
Water first, with a slow, deliberate circulation of every fluid in her body.
She felt her organs respond, felt the sluggishness of the prison years begin to fade.
Then earth, tracing the minerals in her bones and pressing against the wear and tear of age, reinforcing what time had weakened.
Then fire, stoking the heat in her core and steadying her heart's rhythm while sharpening the electrical signals in her nerves.
It took an hour to perform, but when it was done, she opened her eyes and looked at her reflection again.
The gray was gone from her hair.
The lines around her mouth had faded.
The face in the water was the same face she'd worn on the night of her escape.
"Now that's better." she said.
The decades passed.
She wandered.
She didn't hide, there was no fear in her, but she didn't announce herself either.
The world was vast, and a woman who didn't age could move through it like a ghost.
She crossed the Fire Nation from coast to coast.
She visited the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes, the scattered islands that belonged to no nation.
She learned the shape of the world and the shape of the war that was tearing it apart.
Sometimes she wore disguises.
An old woman begging at a market.
A Fire Nation merchant traveling with a caravan.
An Earth Kingdom refugee fleeing the front lines.
Sometimes she wore her own face, Hama's face, unchanged across the years and let the rumors spread.
She was the witch in the mountains.
She was the spirit in the forest.
She was the woman who didn't age, who walked through battlefields untouched, who looked at soldiers with eyes that were far too old for her face.
The rumors became legends, and legends became stories, and stories were eventually, forgotten.
She didn't care.
She was waiting.
Air bending remained impossible to obtain.
She could feel the absence like a hollow in her chest.
Taolu stirred restlessly whenever she thought about it, the missing element, the sealed gates, the Avatar frozen somewhere in the ocean.
Without air, she was incomplete.
Without air, the cycle could not properly reincarnate.
If this body died, the next host would inherit only what Taolu carried and Taolu carried only water, earth, and fire elements.
Stolen elements, forcibly taken and absorbed in Hama's body and spiritual link with Taolu.
Should Hama fail to gain the ability to bend air, the elements that were plundered and kept in the body shall disperse along with her death.
This was a very annoying rule set during this world's first creation, it's Law.
Loki with with his divine authority could bend this "Law", but where is the fun in that?
So Hama waited.
She maintained the body and prolonged its death.
She refined her skills with three elements she possessed.
She pushed each art to its deadliest form, not through rage, but through the patient application of a god's knowledge with mortal tools.
Waterbending branches towards bloodbending.
Water is fluid, and so is blood.
She could stop a man's heart at fifty paces.
Control a room full of soldiers like puppets on strings and pull the water from the very air itself and leave a desert where a garden had been.
Firebending branches towards combustion and lightning bending.
She could burn a someone across a room without moving, channel chi through her forehead, and her hands.
Bend lightning with her hands effortlessly.
Earthbending became seismic precision.
She could feel footsteps a mile away.
Turn solid ground to quicksand, manipulating them like water in waves.
Collapse a building with great ease.
And through all of it, she watched the war grind on.
Decades of blood and fire and ash.
The Fire Nation pushing outward.
The Earth Kingdom crumbling.
The Water Tribes fading.
The world slowly, inexorably, tearing itself apart.
She watched.
She waited.
And when the rumors finally reached her, the Avatar returned at last, an airbender boy traveling with a Water Tribe girl and her brother.
She felt Taolu pulse with something that was almost hunger.
The Fire Nation town was quiet when Team Avatar arrived.
They wore Fire Nation clothing.
They walked with the careful, studied casualness of people who were trying very hard not to be noticed.
The boy Aang, she knew his name now, had shaved his head.
His tattoos were hidden.
He looked wrong in red.
The Water Tribe girl beside him moved with the unconscious grace of a bender.
Katara.
The last Southern waterbender besides herself.
Hama had heard rumors of her, a girl who had crossed the world to fight beside the Avatar, who had mastered waterbending in months when most took years.
She was talented.
She was fierce and she was young.
The brother flanked them both, his eyes scanning the street with practiced suspicion. Sokka.
No bending, but sharp.
Hama recognized the type.
The one who survived because he was much clever than the people trying to kill him.
The clever one... foolish, but still clever.
They were tired.
Hungry.
Looking for supplies and a place to rest.
Hama stood at the well and watched them approach.
When they were close enough to hear, she smiled.
"Hello," she said.
"You're a long way from home."
All three of them froze. Katara's eyes widened.
Sokka's hand moved toward his weapon.
Aang simply stared at her, his expression strange and distant.
"It's all right," Hama said.
"I'm a friend. Southern Water Tribe, like you." She nodded toward Katara.
"How do I know you're telling the truth?" Katara asked.
Her voice was steady, but her hands were tense at her sides.
"Anyone can claim to be Water Tribe. We've met people before who—"
Hama raised her hand.
The water in the well behind her rose in a smooth, silent column.
Ten feet, then twenty.
She held it there, letting it catch the gray afternoon light, letting the surface ripple with the unmistakable fluidity of the Southern style.
Then she lowered it back down without a splash.
"The Southern style," Katara breathed.
Her hands relaxed then her eyes were suddenly bright.
"I'd recognize it anywhere. The way you move the water, it's how my mother taught me. Before she..." She stopped, the mood of nostalgia gradually sinking.
Kitara swallowed hard.
"How did you survive? I thought I was the only one left. The raids took everyone. I thought I was alone."
"Carefully," Hama said.
"And with a great deal of patience. Come. I'll tell you everything. But not in the street."
She led them to her home, a modest house near the edge of town and close enough to the well to be convenient.
Far enough from the garrison to be private.
The inside was clean and orderly.
A fire burned in the hearth.
A pot of water was already heating for tea.
Sokka moved through the room with the quiet alertness of a soldier checking for ambushes.
He noted the single bed.
The spare furnishings.
The lack of anything that might suggest a trap.
Hama watched him and said nothing.
His suspicion was reasonable.
It was also irrelevant.
Aang lingered by the door.
He was still staring at her with that strange, distant expression.
She could feel his attention like a weight, the part of him that was Raava, stirring in her presence.
The part of him that recognized something it couldn't name.
"Have we met before?" he asked.
Hama met his eyes.
"No. But I've been meening to meet you for a very long time, young avatar."
Hama smiled sweetly.
Aang blinked.
The feeling faded.
He shook his head slightly, as if clearing water from his ears, and forced a smile.
"I'm sorry. I'm just tired. We've been traveling for weeks."
"Of course. Sit. Rest. The tea will be ready soon."
He sat.
The moment passed.
But that night, when Aang slept in her spare room, he dreamed of violet light.
A presence at the edge of his awareness.
A voice that wasn't quite a voice, asking questions he couldn't understand.
And Hama sat by the fire, watching the flames, and smiled.