The cold had stopped being sharp—that was the problem.
At first it had been a knife, all edges and cruelty, the kind of cold that made you grit your teeth and swear just to prove you were still alive, rolling back and forth from bare shoulder to bare shoulder, trying to prop herself up until giving into discomfort, until it was all just too exhausting. But now it was… dull. Not quite numb, but she felt too heavy all over, and so spent was her bending that warming herself with breath alone—something she had gotten quite a bit better at with her own ship being less than delightfully insulated—wasn't easy.
Raven's breath came in shallow, uneven pulls, and it was like someone scraping their nails inside her throat, more vicious each time. She focused, welled up the least bit of stamina, allowed every ounce of heat to sap from her limbs no matter how much it felt like giving them up for good. She had to wait until she was on the brink of consciousness, until her chest burned and it felt like her ribs would crack from the pressure, if she wanted to really feel warm again even briefly.
"Asha..." she croaked, breath still held in. She'd never cried over her. She wouldn't let herself get over it. Relief was her bitter foe, worse than the cold, and the last thing she'd let in. Twisting her neck, rolling her battered, frozen shoulders, the raw passion boiled just behind her eyes. It threaded anger through her veins like venom. It was so painful it could break her, she knew letting it in made her sink into madness that might never come undone. That... she let happen.
If the guards were looking, they would have seen the pulsing glow of a forge at the back of her throat, but staring at the topless Lady Arza sounded like a great way to die very slowly, so they didn't so much as glance even when curiosity came knocking.
It wasn't enough though. Raven saw her own willpower like it wasn't her—like a spoiled, blubbering child who needed to grow the fuck up. She'd poke, prod, stab or strangle it till it did what she said. If she failed, it would be because her body broke first, damn it. That passion roiling in her mind sank low, pulled into her chest with everything else just to fuel her breath of fire once more, and for a brief instant her head spun.
A flash of sunny, grass fields. Somewhere exotic on a windswept plateau, with azure horizons behind clouds that dipped so low they kissed the broad yellow leaves of the treetops. But within a familiar field of fluffy white flowers, a pale girl with long black hair and a white dress glowed in the brilliant sunlight. A soft sing-song humming. Asha? No. NO. Don't. Think. About. Her. That. Way. She wasn't ready yet—to release the breath, of course. She forced her hazel eyes open, breaking the salty frost on her lashes, and stared at the walls almost blue with frost, and the orange rust underneath like old bloodstains. Perfect. She'd seen the pool of blood. Her pretty dark hair matted in it... that fucking look on her face, like she'd died crying and begging, completely alone.
Something snapped in her. She squeezed her eyes shut, opening again to vision that shifted worse than when on the root, the colors growing brighter, the blues more icy and almost clear, the orange rust more red, bright, and then dripping like a fresh kill. She could almost taste it.
"Arzaya-a-a-a..." she groaned. "I. Know. You're. There."
And it was true. Arzayanagi wasn't far at all, just above her somewhere, the heat of it pulsing just out of reach, just far enough she couldn't quite touch her fingertips to the blaze, and it was infuriating. Raven didn't care if that psycho bitch got what she wanted, so long as she wanted it too. She'd NEVER forgive her, but she wasn't stupid. She knew it was her only way out.
"Don't let him WIN," she demanded.
She heard the rustle of the soldiers. They didn't dare look. They wouldn't have seen what she did anyway. The walls weren't metal anymore.
A cackling, wicked laughter swept down the halls of ice and stolen lacquered wood. The queen was practicing her awful, mind-shattering bending with the girl again, it seemed, but something wasn't quite right. The girl was laughing too? That had never happened before. Koani was not the kind of queen who told jokes that children laughed at. She hurried and found others already gathered, having noticed too that something wasn't right, and it wasn't just the kid's voice, but some horrible feeling just like when the pirate queen clawed into your mind, but faint, though still causing panic, pounding hearts, and clenched jaws. The dark-skin of the fur and leather armored men handing out spears and knives was painted here or there in blue tattoos, their weapons and markings more glorious and rich all according to their ranks... or perhaps just their brutality.
Everyone was whispering, building each other up to actually approach, to turn the last corner to follow Koani's voice. They finally did it, it wasn't clear who lifted their heavy, stained boots first, but they all moved nearly as one like a school of fish. Numbers were safer.
The corridor outside Koani's bedchamber had been carved straight through ice, polished by years of boots and spilled seawater, and reshaped again and again with her masterful bending to intricate, but grisly designs that she painted with blood. It held onto screams like a conch shell held the sound of the ocean.
Her men, pirates but loyal, gathered there because it was louder than usual, and not the right voice, nor tone. Not at all.
At first it was just laughter, both of them, but that was all. Koani's bright and triumphant, the one that usually meant someone inside was bleeding and she was really starting to enjoy herself. But just as chilling as when it had been blood, the girl's voice rolled through the crack under the door too. The warm, breathy bursts were almost familiar enough that a few of the cultists relaxed on reflex.
Then it… shifted.
The pitch went wrong. The rhythm stuttered. The laugh hit a high, strained note, as if it had snagged on pain and couldn't decide whether to become a sob. It turned sharp, then ragged, and for a heartbeat it sounded like someone trying to laugh with a mouth full of river stones.
A shiver ran through the men closest to the hatch, just as Koani's laugh broke into a shriek.
Not the theatrical bellow she used to scare recruits. Not the angry kind she used when someone failed her. This was terror with its throat ripped open and gushing. It cracked like the daggers of ice she sunk into her victims, sputtered into all too familiar incoherent pleading, and every so often it pitched back up into another mad little burst of laughter like she couldn't stop herself no matter how hard she tried.
"Stop—" Koani's voice came through, choked and wet. "Stop, how... how?!"
But another sound threaded through her broken words, no longer a mimicry. A girlish laughter: too young, too light, too bright, but laced with poison unmistakably. It was so wrong even in those unhallowed halls it felt like a nightmare.
"Just be quiet and get over it," the girl's voice rang, disturbingly composed for something that still had softness at the edges. "What's wrong? That's REAL willpower, isn't it?"
Their wicked queen's own words echoed back at her. Every throat tightened, wondering what the hell was happening, but too tense still to so much as whisper. They jolted when Koani's scream hit a new register, something between fury, humiliation, and raw animal panic.
"Don't give in too quick!" the girl eagerly, loudly continued. There was vengeful delight in every syllable, careful as a knife tip. "Obedience is sooooo boooooring, hahahaha!"
Again, so wrong coming from anyone but Koani herself, not from that room. Her loyal pirate cultists stared at each other, frozen more than the now very claustrophobic beautiful and bloody walls. They'd all seen Koani 'discipline' the girl, she made sure they did. It was a reminder for all, and deliberate humiliation for her. Most of them had heard the queen coo about breaking her like a seal pup, about teaching her to be useful. Some of them had helped hold the girl down when Koani told them to. They'd all watched that small, furious but eerily patient face stare in silent defiance while Koani ripped into the girl's mind.
This could not be happening.
It was easier to believe Koani was laughing at her own humor, even through pain. Easier to believe the screams were a new game, some test or even joke?
The lieutenant closest to the door swallowed hard, hand hovering near the latch. He was one of Koani's most trusted knives, old enough to have scars carved in every sea, and he still looked like he'd rather face a polar bear-dog barehanded than find out what was happening in the queen's room, on the other side of the rich lacquered door and frame fixed right into the glacial ice, which had coins of gold from all over the world frozen within. But... obedience demanded he push it open and check.
It swung inward with a tremor and scrape, releasing a breath of warmer air that smelled, as always, of blood, sweat and smoke. For a moment, the lieutenant simply stood there, squinting into the chamber as if his eyes refused to accept what they were seeing.
Koani was on her bed.
Not reclining in her soft grey silks. Not lounging like a queen, despite her thousand golden trinkets. She was sprawled at an angle, many-ringed fingers clawed into the furs, spine arched as if an invisible dagger had sunk into her back. Her face was contorted in a smile so wide it looked painful, but tears streamed down her sweat-sheened sunkissed cheeks. Her grey-blue eyes were wild, gone utterly to terror.
In front of her hovered a pale girl in a simple white dress, as if standing on a cushion of air, her bare feet—red like they'd been sunk in snow—suspended inches from the bloodstained painfully cold floor, never to touch it again. Hair loose and dark against pale ice walls. Barely twelve and like a picture of innocence but for her face: too open, too hungry, too delighted in Koani's pain.
The black-haired, girl turned her head toward the doorway with slow, theatrical ease, like she'd been expecting an audience. The memory of a humming song in sunny, fluffy fields long gone.
The lieutenant's voice came out strangled. "Uhh… my queen, is everything alright?" Even though he already knew it wasn't.
The girl's eyes flicked toward him, then toward the cluster of stiff faces behind him. Koani, ever the essence of power, was trembling helplessly, babbling between her sudden wails and sobs, the forced laughter over now with the girl's attention elsewhere.
"Don't worry," the girl said, in a tone that belonged anywhere but the voice of a child. "Mommy likes it rough. Remember?"
The smile widened, impossible on a child's face without looking like a mask. She tilted her head back, laughing as if this were the funniest thing in the world, and her voice carried into the corridor with bright, lunatic cheer. As her gaze moved over them, taking in their shock like a savory meal, the dark-skinned water tribe men in the doorway went near to pale as her.
Her expression sharpened, annoyed. "Oh," she huffed. "NOW you're scared?"
No one answered. Not even a blink. The corridor was packed with bodies, armed men and waterbenders, but the air around the girl felt like death incarnate, and nobody dared breathe it. She hovered forward, drifting until she was near the doorway, higher till she was level with the grown men. The casual defiance of gravity—airbending so precise it left no trace—was wrong all by itself, a gentle violation that made the skin crawl. How long had she been hiding that kind of power...?
"Not as much as you should be," she said, and held an imperious sneer.
Her lips twitched as if she were fighting another laugh.
"Next time you hear my voice through the door? If I'm not calling for you?" the girl's smile returned, too sweet. "Don't open it."
She paused, as if remembering a funny detail.
"Oh, and… hmm-hmm!" She giggled, then her eyes went cold. "When I'm MAD? Remember to RUN."
The words were barely out before her arms twisted. Not a punch. A style they'd only seen Koani use, but so, so much more intense. She was using Koani's mindbending... but how? She'd never teach it to anyone. They knew that. The girl's shoulders rolled wrong. Her elbows snapped into angles that made the lieutenant flinch, because it looked like she was breaking herself, like her bones were dislocating under invisible hands.
The closest man in the corridor, a battle-hardened ruthless pirate, collapsed to his knees. He made a tittering, strangled sound and clutched his head like something inside it had caught fire.
Another dropped.
Then another.
Before the furthest could fully turn their heels, they all fell—some flat on their faces. The hallway became a mess of bodies quivering, buckling, collapsing in terror and pain as if their own minds had betrayed them. Some tried to crawl away. One frantically drew a battered knife, but it wasn't for the girl. He sunk it into his own throat, digging and twisting and gurgling, and he fell limp. Only two managed to stay on their feet, but even they were lost to wide-eyed shrieking insanity.
And at once, she released them, and all collapsed like their strings were cut. A moment of stillness... then the corridor gasped as one. It was SO much worse than Koani. It wasn't even close. Not everyone got up again, not everyone took another breath.
"I'm in charge now," she flatly stated, as if it was an obvious fact. The girl faintly gestured, pointing her finger as if taking attendance, and she said in a vicious but almost conversational tone, "and if any of you don't like that...?" She trailed off, her darkness looming over them as the few that could stared, and couldn't look away. Her upper lip twitched, teeth slowly gliding, not quite tense, and she warned, "you better bring a fucking army."
The crude language sounded wrong coming from such a young mouth, which only made it worse, because she wore it like she invented it, like Koani's filth had stained her tongue forever.
One trembling man, among Koani's top lieutenants who still breathed, managed to push himself upright. He was shaking so hard his teeth clicked. He bowed low, then lower, until his forehead touched the ice.
"Hail… Queen Arzaya," he whispered.
Arzaya hummed, tasting it. Her smile softened into something almost pleased, almost playful.
"Hm," she said. "I do like the sound of that." But she snapped into a warning, "but I'm no queen—" and she went on, but her voice changed, her lips moving, but like she was underwater, and incomprehensible. Either way she looked like she was scolding him, then smiled almost peacefully, and ran her bloody fingers along her cheek, swirling them into an oddly precise, dripping mockery of Koani's own tattoo.
No one dared question it, not even to themselves.
"You get to live," she told the man, as if granting a treat. "Whatever your name is."
The man lifted his head a fraction, trembling so hard his lashes shook. "I'm—" he started.
"I wasn't asking," Arzaya said firmly.
The man's mouth snapped shut. His nod was tiny and obedient.
Behind Arzaya, Koani's breathing rasped, fast and desperate, the way one did when they dragged themself barely out of drowning. For a moment, Arzaya's attention taken elsewhere gave Koani a sliver of sanity.
Her eyes found her men, bowing to someone else. She was frantic and furious. "Kill her!" Koani croaked, voice raw. "And you're all rich men!"
The offer hung in the air. No one took it. The silence was a verdict.
"You think you can stop me with MONEY?" Arzaya asked, and her laugh was high. Mocking. Gleeful. "Like I can't just demand whatever I want from fools whose spines you already took?"
Koani's face contorted. Rage flared in her eyes, but the instant Arzaya turned, terror came again. Arzaya hovered back into the bedchamber, so calm and blissful it chilled their blood.
"Now," she said, voice almost dreamy, "where were we…"
The door swung closed, all on its own.
The fallen pirate queen's word broke through, incoherent and desperate. "No, no, Arzaya, please! N—" and stopped, making way for only screams.