Chapter 23.2- And so the Dragons Danced

We returned to the camp as conquerors. Weighed down by something as ridiculously plebeian as spoils of war, we took a much longer time to get back to the army than it had taken to get to our target in the first place, but there were few complaints. At the back of our procession, we had a caravan that contained the urns I’d filled with the ashes of all the men that had died in our attack on Fong’s base. Thinking of it now, I was forced to accept that it was not just the desire for treasure that had slowed us down. The urns had come from Fong’s treasury, but the ashes themselves had been a bit more difficult to secure. For those that had died on the base grounds, it was simply a matter of buying their bodies, and for those who failed to make it there in the first place, it was a harrowing two day search to find each of their bodies.

It was actually almost impressive that we’d managed to locate all the remains. Not a single one of them had looked pretty but I guessed it was a good thing that the Fire Nation preferred cremation to any other form of burial. And it wasn’t even just with the bodies that had met gruesome ends from the fall, but those who had died against the earthbenders. If I had her wondered what someone killed by earth bending would look like after the body got some time to decompose, then I had had that question well and truly answered before the cremating. On one hand, it was a gruesome sight, on the other, it was just the kind of thing my men needed to see to well and truly put their hearts into the fight.

We’d captured about forty-six members of Fong’s camp. Some of them had even been non-combatants. Cooks and the like. Ordinarly, I would have been fine with integrating them into our forces or otherwise leave them beyond to be someone else’s problem, but just looking into their hard eyes told me all I needed to know. They had been hard men and women who would never have submitted to Fire Nation rule. To my rule. So I had to deal with things in one way or another.

Transporting them to Omashu would have been risky, but it seemed the only reasonable choice in the end. Making them someone else’s problem was also appealing. But then the logistics of keeping dozens of earthbenders in line with my comparatively smaller force was impossible to work out. Sure, they had surrendered, but there was nothing stopping them from picking up arms and fighting again beyond their honour, and months on the front lines had taught me that earth kingdom soldiers did not have much of honour in them. So I asked myself WWSD- ‘what would Sung do?’ And that gave me an idea. I could never order my soldiers to kill prisoners. It might have been permissible since we were at war, but the stain on my honour would never have washed off. It was not a price I could pay.

So I never gave the order. I just hinted in conversations here and there that I would not mind it if the number of prisoners was drastically reduced. I never actually found out what happened to them. All I knew was that between those conversations and the day we were to leave, I heard nothing. And on that morning when I’d asked Maki to see to it that the prisoners were readied, she just lifted an eyebrow at me and asked, “What prisoners?”

A/N; War crimes? Yes please