A Young Princess's Guide to Usurping The Throne | Chapter 9 (Patreon)

The rain fell across the land. His boots were stained with mud as he looked upon the walls of Ba Sing Se from a distance. Lu Ten wiped the blood from his cheek as he looked upon his men. They had countered an attack that would've crippled them, but they succeeded, and at his feet, they lined up each Earth soldier on their knees.

"Kill them." Lu Ten said and watched as two men under his command nodded; their blades came down and decapitated each man with ease. Blood mixed into mud, but it didn't deter him from what was in front of him.

Up close, they were something else entirely: an inheritance of stone so vast and old that they seemed less built than grown, layered over centuries like the rings of a tree, each band holding the scars of dynasties, earthquakes, sieges, and the stubborn will of men who refused to die unnamed.

Lu Ten studied them in the first hard light of dawn from the ridge where his command post had been dug into the earth. The outer wall rose from the horizon in a clean, unbroken arc, its scale mocking every spear, ladder, catapult, and prayer that had ever been turned toward it. Beyond it, hidden by distance and haze, lay the city’s inner circles and the royal center, the Earth King’s seat.

He came here for blood, and he would be given it. This would go down in history. Ba Sing Se, a city too big to conquer and a fortress too broad to outflank. A prize so impossible that only fools would attempt it, and only legends would dare to dream of taking it.

Now he stood before it with his hands stained in blood and human fat.

A gust moved across the plain, dry and cold, carrying the smell of churned earth, lamp oil, Komodo rhino shit, and the metallic sting of old fire. Below him, the Fire Nation host stirred in disciplined layers: engineering crews tightening siege lines, infantry columns checking spearheads and straps, messenger riders threading between formations like needles through cloth. The men looked up at him whenever he passed, and he understood the look in their faces because he had seen it in his own reflection before battle. Expectation. Trust. Hunger. And Fear.

He had inherited command not only from rank but also from blood, and in the Fire Nation that meant every word he spoke carried the invisible echo of his father’s voice. It was a burden and a weapon both. He could feel that even here, miles from the capital, even with the walls before him and his men waiting for the first order of the day, he was never simply Lu Ten. He was the prince’s son. The general’s heir.

A shadow fell over the ridge as a messenger approached.

“Lieutenant General,” the man said, saluting sharply, “the forward teams report a weakness in the western drainage approach. The outer patrols have been drawn inward. The city’s lower maintenance corridors are less guarded than anticipated.”

Lu Ten turned his gaze toward the wall. “Less guarded,” he repeated. “Or guarded differently.”

The messenger hesitated, then nodded. “The Earth Kingdom has been moving patrols through the interior passages instead of the exterior paths. It seems to be a response to our scouting raids.”

“Then they know we’ve been mapping the surface,” Lu Ten said. He kept his tone calm. Inside, his mind was already arranging the pieces. A city that did not defend every inch of its surface equally was a city that believed the wall itself was enough. The mistake of the complacent. “How deep?”

“Our engineering teams believe the access channels connect to service corridors beyond the lower districts. If we can breach and hold them, we may be able to insert troops inside the first ring.”

Maybe. The words always sounded smaller than the lives they cost.

He looked over the assembled officers. Some were older than he was, scarred and hard-eyed, veterans who had survived enough campaigns to treat uncertainty as a professional insult. Others had the clean, eager faces of men who still believed history rewarded those who moved quickly. They all waited on him with the same stillness. He wondered, not for the first time, whether the certainty they saw in him was a thing he possessed or merely a shape he had learned to wear.

“Captain Varo,” he said, “take two companies and prepare the engineering teams. If the drainage route is usable, we will exploit it before they reinforce. Lieutenant Suren, redistribute archers to cover the western approach. Commander Hesh, have the reserve battalions ready to advance once the breach is confirmed. No heroics. If the corridor collapses, I want that sector sealed before the enemy can counterpush.”

The officers bowed and moved off at once, the efficiency of the response comforting in the way a blade’s edge is comforting.

Only after they were gone did Lu Ten allow himself a deeper breath. The air entered his lungs and did not quite settle. He rubbed the heel of his gloved hand against his sternum, as if he could smooth the tightness there. It did not help. It never did.

Behind the command line, the army began to shift. The first barrage of stones, drenched with oil, was set on fire and went over the walls. They struck in the interior somewhere, and a muted pulse of dust rose above the parapets. Ba Sing Se's military answered with its own artillery; earth heaved from hidden platforms and repelled siege engines, the ground shuddering beneath the Fire Nation lines as if the city itself resented being disturbed.

“Begin the diversionary pressure,” Lu Ten ordered.

Drums sounded. Archers advanced. Firebending units moved with practiced symmetry, each squad sending controlled arcs of flame toward the battlements, not to breach, not yet, but to force the defenders to reveal themselves. A war of irritation began, the kind that left bodies in the dust long before it left a memory in the mind. The Earth Kingdom troops responded in ranks, shields raised, stones emerging from the wall.

From this distance, the defenders looked almost abstract, green and brown shapes against the massive pale stone, but Lu Ten knew that each shape was a man with a name and a home and perhaps a child waiting somewhere beyond the lines. He knew that and did not permit it to touch the decision before him. If he did, he would never decide at all.

The opening came near midday.

The drainage approach was not glamorous, not dramatic, and that made it more valuable. It lay partially concealed in the terrain, a half-forgotten maintenance throat where runoff from the wall’s inner systems could be diverted and where, with the right combination of timing and violence, a specialized force might gain passage. The engineering teams had worked the entire morning with chisels, drills, and small controlled blasts that rumbled in the earth like distant thunder. When the first slab gave way, the opening yawned black and wet beneath the wall; a wound appeared upon the city's skin.

“Assault teams, move,” Lu Ten said.

He went with them.

The decision surprised no one outwardly. It was, after all, standard for any commanding officer to inspect the breach personally. Yet the men around him straightened a little when they saw him step into the forward line, and Lu Ten felt the charge of their regard. He understood the effect of proximity in battle. Men fought differently when they believed a superior shared their danger. It was one thing to give orders from safety and another to descend into the dark with the first wave.

The breach tunnel smelled of mineral rot and stagnant water. It narrowed quickly, forcing the advance into single-file clusters with torchbearers at intervals and shielded troops at the front. The walls dripped cold, and the sound of boots in mud was magnified by the confined space.

Earth Kingdom guards had been stationed farther in than expected, and the first clash came in near silence, a sudden brutal compression of bodies and weaponry. There was no grand exchange of speeches, no warning. One moment the tunnel held only breathing and movement; the next, it was full of shouted commands, sparks, grunts, the crack of fire against stone, and the dull thud of earth-shields catching blows.

Lu Ten drew his blade only once the line ahead of him buckled. He moved into the gap with efficient violence; he cut into the neck of the first man he saw, giving a grunt, tossing the body aside only for a club to connect to his ribs and making him drop his weapon. His firebending came, fueled by rage, a series of disciplined bursts that forced the enemy back step by step. Heat rolled down the tunnel. The Earth Kingdom soldiers, trained to fight in confined terrain, slammed their hands to the walls and drove fists and forearms into the stone, sending jagged slabs outward. One caught the shieldman to Lu Ten’s left and pinned him against the tunnel wall with a sickening crunch as bones poked through armor.

“Forward,” Lu Ten barked. “Keep pressure on them. Do not stop.”

The men obeyed. They had no choice but to obey. The tunnel offered no room for hesitation. A second line pushed forward behind the first, and the defenders were forced inward. For a terrible ten minutes, it became clear that the Earth Kingdom had not anticipated a breach this deep, this fast, and Lu Ten’s advance made use of that shock with ruthless clarity. He did not allow himself to admire it. He simply kept moving.

"MARCH!!!" He screamed as he clasped his hands, creating ample room for his men to move.

Then the Dai Li arrived.

They came through the walls.

One moment the stone looked solid, the next it split in a clean, impossible seam, and men in dark green robes and armored bracers stepped out of it as if born from the masonry itself. Their movements were unnervingly quiet. Their faces were blank in the way of officials who had long ago surrendered any private life to duty. Their hands rose, and the tunnel answered them. Stone snapped from the floor, from the sides, from the ceiling’s edge, lashing at the Fire Nation vanguard with unnatural speed. The earth underfoot surged and buckled, turning footing into a trap.

“Dai Li!” someone shouted.

Lu Ten had heard the shout and cursed. Every two brains within the Fire Nation's military who had fought in the Earth Kingdom war had heard of them: secret police, enforcers, and loyalists of the city in its hidden, hardest form. The rumors were always thicker than the facts. Some said they never slept. Some said they had no families and no names, only orders. It was nonsense, mostly, but their actual skill was frightening enough without the legend. They were disciplined earthbenders trained for ambush and containment, and in a tunnel the size of a throat they were worse than dangerous. They were anatomy made into a weapon.

The first blow nearly took Lu Ten’s head off.

He ducked on instinct as a slab of stone shot past where his face had been and smashed into the torchbearer behind him. The man fell without a cry, flame spilling from his grasp and licking over the floor. Lu Ten pivoted, hands already moving, and thrust a sheet of fire into the nearest Dai Li agent. The man crossed his arms, and the earth around him rose in a shield that took the blast with a shudder. Another agent swept a foot and slipped on the floor, trying to unbalance the line.

“Spread them!” Lu Ten shouted. “Do not let them hold the tunnel center!”

His officers echoed the order. Men shoved forward, shoulder to shoulder, blades out, fire bending in short, controlled intervals that lit the corridor in flashes of orange and gold. The Dai Li moved with a terrible economy, each gesture a sentence in the language of collapse. One agent raised both hands, and the tunnel roof groaned. Another slammed a palm forward, and the floor kicked upward, throwing Fire Nation troops into each other. A third disappeared into the stone entirely and emerged behind a pair of archers, taking them down before they even understood they were being hunted.

Lu Ten’s command became less a matter of strategy than of maintaining coherence amid splintering violence. He shouted names, redirected units, ordered a retreat when a section began to fail, and advanced when the enemy overextended. The tunnel was no longer a passage but a machine grinding two armies against each other until one was reduced to pieces. He saw a young soldier with his hair bound too tightly and his face still soft with adolescence get struck across the chest by a slab of earth and disappear into the press of bodies. He saw a veteran lose an arm to a crushing wall of stone and continue fighting one-handed until the blood slicked the floor beneath him. He saw fear, and rage, and resolve in equal measure, all compressed into the same narrow corridor.

The air grew hotter with every minute. Fire consumed oxygen. Smoke gathered in pockets under the ceiling. Somewhere behind him, someone was crying out for a healer. Somewhere ahead, the Dai Li were pulling the tunnel apart stone by stone. Lu Ten felt his pulse in his throat, in his wrists, and in the base of his skull. He knew the shape of this moment. Every siege contained one. The first success only opened the gate to a longer, uglier struggle.

“Reserve in,” he commanded. “Now.”

A new line pushed through the rear, fresh troops taking the place of the shattered advance units. The tunnel finally began to fill to capacity with bodies, and that helped the Fire Nation. The Dai Li relied on space and precision; crowding reduced their options. Fire spread faster than their earthwork could fully contain. Lu Ten and his men forced the fight, inching the clash deeper into the city’s interior. Once they crossed the first threshold, the defenders began to fall back toward the larger corridors.

That was when Ba Sing Se changed shape around them.

The tunnel opened into a service gallery lined with arched stone conduits and old maintenance channels, an interior artery meant to carry water, waste, and heat through the wall network. Here the city’s immense architecture finally revealed a little of its machine-like complexity.

'These bastards were advancing the same as us?'

'What could've happened if they had a few more years to advance? What weapons would emerge..."

Pipes ran along the ceiling, columns stood at measured intervals, and narrow side passages branched away into unseen districts. The place was not beautiful, but it was astonishing.

It was also where war became intimate.

The Fire Nation advance poured into the gallery, and the Earth Kingdom defenders met them from side passages and above. Arrows came down from concealed openings. Earth benders tore up floor stones and used them as shields and missiles. The Dai Li moved through narrow alcoves, appearing only to strike and vanish again. Every inch gained cost blood. Every doorway became a choke point. Every intersection became a small hell.

Lu Ten could no longer see the full field of battle. He saw only the nearest layer of it: one soldier stumbling to his knees, another dragging a wounded comrade by the collar, a firebender with a burned cheek collapsing after overextending, and a Dai Li agent being driven back by three spears only to bring down the floor beneath them all. The gallery echoed with screams, commands, and the grinding sound of stone shifting under stress.

He felt his voice begin to fray.

“Left side, hold the left!” he shouted. “Seal that passage. Captain Varo, where are your engineers?”

“Trying to open the next channel, General!” Varo called back from somewhere in the crush. “The Earth Kingdom collapsed the access vein!”

“Then force it open!”

“We’re trying!”

"Try harder," Lu Ten nearly snapped, but the words died in his throat. He could not afford panic. Panic was contagious. Instead, he swallowed the urge and drove himself forward; he picked a stray blade in one hand and conjured a flame in the other. He was aware, in that detached part of the mind that survives battle despite the rest, that he was being watched. His men looked to him. The enemy watched him too, because the man in command was always a target. He made himself visible because leadership demanded it, though each exposure was a risk.

A Dai Li agent stepped from behind a column and thrust both hands forward.

The stone floor buckled in a wave toward Lu Ten’s knees. He jumped back, but the edge of the surge clipped his shin and sent him skidding. Before he could recover, another agent launched a slab from the wall. Lu Ten twisted and got his forearm up just in time to deflect part of the blow. Pain lanced through the arm as the force jarred bone and tendon. He hissed, teeth clenched, and answered with a burst of fire that forced the agent to break cover.

For one instant the agent’s face was visible. Not blank, as Lu Ten had assumed from a distance, but focused with a kind of hard, professional fatigue.

The recognition changed nothing and everything. Lu Ten hated him all the more for it.

He advanced with renewed fury, and the line behind him surged. The Earth Kingdom resistance in the gallery began to bend. Not break. Not yet. But bend.

At the same time, other parts of the city were already beginning to suffer.

One of the bitterest necessities of siege warfare was that victory could not be separated from deprivation. The army that held the outer routes controlled what entered and left. In Ba Sing Se, that meant water, food, medicine, tools, and messages. The Fire Nation had no interest in a swift humanitarian occupation. It wanted pressure. It wanted the city to feel itself tightening from within, to learn that its walls were not enough, that every district could be made into a cage if the siege lasted long enough.

So the supply routes were cut. Wells and distribution points near the contested sectors were seized or rendered unusable. Public fountains were fouled and broken. That task was assigned by subordinate officers with the grim indifference of bureaucrats writing requisitions, and Lu Ten heard of it in reports as he moved through the lower gallery. He did not ask for details. He did not need them. He knew what it meant when a city began to thirst under occupation. He knew the slow panic of queues, the rise in desperation, and the way discipline frayed when children cried and old men collapsed from heat. He knew the shame of using deprivation as a weapon.

He also knew that if he objected to every necessary cruelty, Ba Sing Se would remain standing long after his army ran out of bodies.

That knowledge did not make him feel cleaner. It made him feel older.

His father would come, and he just needed to keep the pressure.

Somewhere deeper in the city, civilians were running. He could hear them now in intervals between the crash of combat: footsteps, distant screams, the clatter of dropped baskets and toppled goods, the confused ringing of alarm bells. The Earth Kingdom had never seemed more vulnerable than in those moments when its hidden machinery was exposed and frightened people moved through corridors designed to make them obedient. The city that prided itself on permanence had begun to tremble.

Lu Ten rounded a stone pillar and stopped short.

A side passage had opened onto a residential corridor, and there, just beyond a collapsed market cart, lay the body of a young Earth Kingdom girl. She could not have been more than twelve or thirteen. Her brown hair was tied back with a strip of cloth. One arm was curled beneath her body as if she had fallen while running. Her face had the blank stillness of a sleep too deep to wake from. There was no spectacle to the sight, no obvious wound from where he stood, only the unbearable fact of her stillness. A child in a city under siege. A life cut off before it had even acquired its own shape.

Lu Ten stopped moving.

The battle continued around him. A soldier shouted for him to keep advancing. Somewhere metal struck stone. Smoke curled from a nearby doorway. Yet all of it receded a step, as if the corridor had narrowed around the girl alone.

His jaw tightened.

For one wild second he saw his niece instead, younger than the dead girl, bright-eyed and sharp-tongued, a creature of running feet and impulsive questions. He remembered her handing him the strange little contraption she had insisted be used "in an open field test,” though its brass casing had been assembled from scraps and its mechanism refined with stubbornness more than expertise. She had pressed it into his hand with that fierce, proprietary pride children had when they made something they believed could change the world. "Come back," she had told him, as if returning from war were a matter of willpower and not weather. Come back and show me whether it works.

He had smiled at the time and promised he would.

Now, looking at the dead girl on the floor, he felt the promise twist inside him like a blade.

The grief that rose in him was not a clean thing. It was not a noble sadness fit for songs. It was rage mixed with helplessness, and underneath that something more exhausting: the knowledge that war did not care who it took or how much a commander might wish to believe his purpose could be kept separate from the wreckage his purpose created.

“Lieutenant General,” someone said softly behind him.

He did not turn. After a moment, he spoke in a voice so controlled it barely seemed human. “Keep moving.”

The soldier hesitated.

“Now.”

The man obeyed.

Lu Ten did not allow himself to look again at the girl. He forced his feet forward. That was what command was, sometimes: the refusal to kneel, even when every private instinct in the body demanded it. He walked on with the dead child behind him and the living war in front of him, and the ache in his chest was so sharp he could hardly breathe around it.

The city answered their pressure with a counteroffensive.

Earthbenders emerged from stairwells, from ceiling gaps, and from hidden doors in the stone. Militia units in mixed armor surged from the side districts, trying to close the breached corridors and isolate the Fire Nation spearheads. The Dai Li appeared again in force, no longer content to harass the invaders but aiming now to sever command and crush the offensive at its core. They had the shape of the city on their side. They knew every passage, every angle, every weakness of the architecture. That knowledge made them more dangerous than numbers alone could have.

They also had the advantage of terrain in a way that made the whole city feel complicit.

Lu Ten’s force was pushed back twice, then regrouped. They fought climbing into a stairwell before disengaging and finding themselves under a bridge that became a furnace when firebenders lit the air. They crossed another narrow bridge over a water channel where Earth Kingdom troops tried to collapse the span beneath them. They held the line long enough for sappers to reinforce the support arches with quick-setting stone plugs stolen from the defenders’ own supply stores. At every turn the battle demanded a different answer, and Lu Ten gave them as many as he could.

His left arm throbbed from the earlier impact, but he barely noticed anymore. Blood had begun to darken the sleeve beneath his forearm guard. He did not know if it was his own or someone else’s. It no longer mattered.

It was already the third day, and the air inside the inner sectors had become oppressive. Smoke collected beneath the high ceilings of the city’s lower civic structures, trapped by stone vaults that normally kept climate controlled and now turned battlefield exhaust into a choking haze. Heat lingered. The smell of burning oil, dust, and sweat clung to everything. Men coughed as they fought. Water was rationed to the point of cruelty. The city’s elegant infrastructure, designed for peace, was being repurposed by war into a pressure chamber.

That pressure centered on the royal district.

The Earth King’s location was not, strictly speaking, a secret. It was a center of tradition and formality, surrounded by layers of court access, ceremonial guards, and palace bureaucracy. But the palace itself was vast, and the confusion caused by the siege had made even the most organized defenses unreliable. Lu Ten knew that if he could force the inner ring into disarray, the defenders would converge on the monarch’s position out of instinct as much as duty. That was where the real prize lay: not the body of the king, not yet, but the symbolic collapse of Ba Sing Se’s certainty.

“Move the infantry forward in wedges,” he told his officers. “Keep pressure on the approaches to the center. If they fortify the direct route, we go around. If they seal the side halls, we burn through them. I want the palace defenders thinking in circles until they stop thinking at all.”

Captain Varo, his face streaked with ash, nodded sharply. “Yes, lieutenant general.”

“And the civilians?”

The question slipped out before Lu Ten could stop it.

Varo looked at him, perhaps surprised by the tone if not the content. “They're being driven inward by the panic. Most sectors are evacuating toward sheltered districts.”

“Good.” Lu Ten hesitated. “Limit unnecessary harm where we can.”

It was a weak sentence, almost laughably so in a siege. Varo did not mock it. He simply nodded once, as if preserving the shape of mercy inside an army were a technical issue not unlike securing a breach.

They advanced toward the palace ring by way of a ceremonial concourse lined with statues of past Earth monarchs. The irony struck Lu Ten with bitter force. He had expected grandeur. Instead, he found propaganda in stone. The monarchs stood with impossible serenity, all broad shoulders and raised chins, carved to suggest permanence more than personality. Several had already been damaged by stray fire or collapsing masonry. One had lost its head; another had been split down the center by an earthquake and now leaned like a dying tree.

The irony of war was that it often made monuments look childish.

A column of flame erupted behind the advance line.

The blast came from the rear, not from enemy artillery but from Fire Nation forces. A controlled detonation, bright and terrible, throwing sparks and heat through the corridor behind them. For a heartbeat, every soldier within sight turned instinctively, expecting disaster. Instead, they saw the smoke rolling up in a tall, inward-moving plume.

Lu Ten knew before anyone named it.

His father had arrived.

There was something unmistakable about Iroh’s presence even when he was not visible: the way the air seemed to sharpen around his intent, the way men straightened without being told, the way the battlefield itself felt suddenly organized by a will larger than any one officer’s. The arrival of his father's support unit was not merely reinforcement. It was a declaration. The prince had entered the war’s center of gravity.

Lu Ten exhaled once, slowly, and felt a portion of the pressure in his chest loosen. Not because the battle became easier; if anything, it became more dangerous, but because he understood, in the private recess of sonship, that his father had come in time to matter. It was a brutal comfort, and he hated himself for feeling it.

“Signals received from the rear,” Varo reported. “General Iroh's assault groups are engaging along the outer arteries. They’ve begun a pincer.”

“Then we keep going,” Lu Ten said. He lifted his chin toward the palace district ahead. “If Father is tying off the city behind us, we only need to break the center.”

He said it like a tactical conclusion, but the words carried another layer he did not name. If his father was here, then Lu Ten was not alone. The burden of success was no longer entirely his.

He hated how relieved that made him feel.

The march on the palace became, in practice, a series of hard-fought advances through increasingly narrow and defended corridors. The Earth Kingdom troops clustered around choke points with desperate focus. The Dai Li did everything in their power to make the Fire Nation advance bleed. They lifted floors, collapsed ceiling panels, sealed off routes, and forced the invaders to choose between time and casualties. Lu Ten chose time, again and again, because time was what brought the city down. He sacrificed men to save momentum. He watched squads disappear in earth collapses and did not let himself turn back.

That was the part no song would ever honor: the leading commander’s refusal to remember every face.

He remembered enough.

He remembered the boy with the broken helm whose family had sold lacquer bowls in the capital. He remembered the healer who kept moving despite a shoulder wound because there were too many bleeding men and too few hands. He remembered names called out and not answered.

The casualties mounted. The war swallowed them. He ignored them in the only way he could continue functioning, and yet each loss lay down inside him like another stone.

By the time they reached the final approach to the royal inner chambers, Ba Sing Se had begun to feel not merely attacked but suffocated. The Fire Nation had sealed off multiple access points. Smoke from burning stores and damaged ducts drifted deeper into the palace complex. The Earth Kingdom defenders, boxed in and increasingly unable to coordinate, had started retreating into the central halls. That retreat, Lu Ten knew, could become either surrender or trap. He intended to make it the latter.

“Do not storm the throne room directly,” he ordered once the scouts confirmed the inner layout. “They’re expecting that. We smoke them out.”

Varo frowned despite the fatigue lined into his face. “Smoke them out?”

Lu Ten glanced toward the vaulted entrances ahead. “If they want to shelter the Earth King in the heart of the palace, then we make the heart unbearable. Seal the side exits where possible. Set controlled burns in the outer galleries and keep the heat pressure rising. If the royal chambers are forced to stay closed, the smoke will do the rest.”

It was ugly, effective, and exactly the kind of solution a siege produced when elegance had long since failed. Varo’s expression settled into something grimly understanding. He saluted.

Within the hour, the plan began to take shape.

Fire Nation troops moved through the palace’s outer halls with disciplined speed, igniting selected draperies, timber supports, and oil lamps, not enough to collapse the structure but enough to fill the enclosed spaces with thickening smoke and choking heat. They blocked ventilation routes where they could, and where they could not, they turned the flow of air to their advantage by forcing the palace’s own climate channels to carry the smoke inward. The defenders reacted by trying to open escape corridors, only to find those paths sealed or contested. Every attempt to move the Earth King became an exposure to fire, ash, and panic.

Lu Ten watched the operation from a central gallery overlooking the palace court below. From here he could see the geometric beauty of the royal complex, all arches and tiled floors and formal pools, now ruined by war’s blunt hand. Statues were toppled. Hanging lanterns swung in soot-darkened air. Smoke thickened near the ceilings like stormclouds trapped indoors. Beneath it all, the sounds of battle grew more desperate.

The Earth Kingdom soldiers remained brave. That much he had to give them. Brave enough, perhaps, to be tragic. They knew the center could not hold forever, but they held it anyway because honor and duty and loyalty were the last walls left to them. The Dai Li operated near the royal quarters with special ferocity, likely not only to protect the monarch but also to preserve the city’s political order. Lu Ten found them in small units, darting from cover to cover, trying to preserve some illusion of control as the siege closed over them.

Then one of them appeared on the gallery wall above the court and hurled a spiked boulder downward.

The thing came out of nowhere, a grotesque mass of stone reinforced with jagged projections, spinning fast enough to blur. Lu Ten saw the motion only at the edge of his vision. He threw himself sideways on instinct. The boulder missed his head by a handspan and smashed into the floor behind him with a blast of fragments.

Pain detonated in his left arm.

He hit the ground hard, breath ripped out of him, and for a moment the world became white noise and lightning. He tried to push up and found his arm no longer obeyed him cleanly. Something had torn. Not a clean wound. He could feel the damage in the way the limb hung wrong, in the way hot, wet pain pulsed from shoulder to forearm. He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached.

The earthbender who had thrown it stepped down from the wall like a hunter descending to finish the kill.

He was broad-shouldered, armored in layered stone plates fitted over padded cloth, his face smeared with grit and sweat. He looked young enough to hate losing but old enough to know how. He planted his feet and brought both hands together, then swept them apart.

The gallery floor split.

A second strike of earth surged up beneath Lu Ten’s knee and drove him off balance. He crashed against a pillar, vision flashing. The earthbender advanced, taking measured steps, confident now that the general was wounded. Around them the battle moved onward, but the immediate world had narrowed to this: one commanding officer on the floor and one soldier of the Earth Kingdom intent on ending him.

Lu Ten tried to rise. His arm failed. He braced on one elbow, teeth bared, and felt the dampness soaking his sleeve. The pain was so intense it had become almost abstract, a fact rather than a sensation. He understood, with the cold clarity reserved for moments near death, that he had lost use of the limb. Possibly more than that. The arm was torn badly enough that even if he survived, it might never function properly again.

The earthbender read the injury in his face and raised his hands for the final blow.

Lu Ten looked up at him and, for one impossible second, saw not an enemy but the shape of a man who believed he was defending his home.

Then he remembered his niece.

Not as a child in passing, not as an obligation left behind at the capital, but as she had been when she pressed that invention into his hands with stubborn pride and told him to come back. It was small, almost ridiculous in its construction, a compact mechanism fitted with a trigger, ignition chamber, and carefully wound casing. She had explained its purpose in a dozen improvised gestures and half a dozen corrections, insisting that if someone was determined enough, a machine could be made to do more than anyone expected. He had laughed then, too proud to admit how moved he was by the gift.

Now, with blood in his mouth and smoke in his lungs, he reached for it.

The contraption had been secured in the inner lining of his coat, wrapped in cloth to protect it from damage. His good hand fumbled at the fastenings. The earthbender took another step forward, readying the next strike. Lu Ten’s fingers closed around the device. The metal was warm from his body heat.

He did not have time to consider elegance. He did not even have time to pray.

He aimed with what strength he had left. The earthbender saw the motion and shifted, but too late. Lu Ten pulled the trigger.

There was a sharp click, then the sudden snap of ignition.

The blast was not enormous, but in the enclosed gallery it was enough. The report slammed through the chamber in a burst of fire and concussive force. The earthbender’s forward motion broke as the charge struck near his center mass, throwing him back against the wall with enough violence to knock the focus out of his bending. Stone cracked. Dust exploded outward. The man crumpled to the floor, stunned, the grim certainty gone from his face.

Lu Ten’s shoulder jarred hard enough to darken the edges of his vision.

He collapsed against the pillar, half-conscious, the world tilting sideways. But he found strength and surged forward and limped towards his greatest accomplishment. He could hear shouting now, distant and urgent. Fire Nation troops were converging. Someone was calling for healers. The smoke in the palace thickened until the air itself felt solid.

Through the haze, Lu Ten saw movement at the chamber’s far end: defenders falling back in confusion, the Earth Kingdom line wavering as the pressure mounted and the heat became intolerable. He saw the palace interior beginning, finally, to yield.

And victory came with shouts as cheers echoed from all around. The doors to the throne room opened, with bodies everywhere. It seemed that even with mighty walls, they choked on their success.

Lu Ten looked at his men as they celebrated. He would too in time, but his body finally caught up with him as he crashed to the floor.

"Lieutenant General—!!"

Many would remember General Iroh as the Dragon of the West, but Lu Ten would be remembered as the Immortal Sun.

\o/

I forgot to clean this chapter, so there might be some inconsistencies and spelling errors.