Chapter 53.5- And so the Dragons Danced

The ships came with the men necessary to hold the Tribe in a matter of days, and from there things moved quickly. I worked to make sure the things that were useful were folded into the Fire Nation as quickly as possible. They had specially designed Parkas that let them traverse the coldest weathers and I made sure that was studied and copied. While the Fire Nation was broadly temperate, we did have a few mountain peaks that had been essentially abandoned for their weather conditions. It would be a good tool for non-benders to begin harnessing the resources in those places, maybe. Then there was the greatest resource they had— waterbenders.

Say what you would about Admiral Rensuke but he had the right idea after the subjugation of the South. The only issue was that he sw things too narrowly. He was one of those who saw the dream of the Fire Nation to be one where we grew in prosperity at the expense of the others in the same way Ozai and Azulon before him had. They were all wrong though. That wasn’t Sozin’s dream. That wasn’t the dream I found myself beginning to support as I grew and lived in this world. It was one of integration. Where the Fire Nation shared her superior technology, prosperity, and means with the other nations.

Already, we had begun working to repair what sections of the city we had damaged in our taking. It would take a while— maybe a generation or two to fully integrate the Northern Water Tribe, but it would happen. I would see it happen, and thanks to what I had figured out during the Comet-enhanced massacre I’d visited on the Tribe, I was certain that that wasn’t just an idle wish. First of all, I reached my thumb towards my mouth and bit hard enough to draw blood. Then, I felt at my inner flame and brought it to my hand, leaving it beneath the skin. Fire was the element of change. I just needed that change to be the change I wanted and not the one I didn’t. My intention was clear, and I stared at the wound for about ten minutes before it slowly began to clot and close itself.

It was too concentration-intensive for the time being to be anything more than a neat party trick, but the first time I conjured lightning had only come after I failed to separate the positive and negative energies close to a hundred times. The world might know me as a genius, but I knew the truth and my success came down to hardwork and a borderline suicidal level of stubbornness. I’d pound my head against a problem over and over again until something gave. Even till now, I still dedicated minutes each day to trying to figure out combustion bending with which I’d had zero luck. This one was siomething where I had working proof of concept, I just needed to turn that into something actually useful.