Blades, Body, and Bending: the Ultimate Plan for Success
Here’s the piece I wrote for @avatarbaang about the Fire Nation Trio, hope you enjoy! Shoutout to @greeninkpenguin (art here) and @babelfell for the awesome art they did for this!
Mai was already bored, and the class had just started.
It was the privileged seven-year-old’s first day at the prestigious Royal Fire Academy for Girls, and it was about as dull as she’d expected. The teachers were all stiff and strict, and all the other students seemed the same way. They all obeyed so easily, like she knew she was supposed to. Even the Princess Azula seemed far too serious about her studies for such a young age. Mai didn’t like how she was treated so formally by the teachers, like the little girl could chop off their heads if they didn’t treat her like a goddess, checking in on her constantly to make sure she was comfortable even though they hadn’t started learning anything yet. It made Mai feel angry, like she wanted to throw something and scream.
At recess, she sat alone under a tree, eating her lunch in the shade as she watched the other girls laugh and play together, smiling to herself when they were scolded for being too loud. Once she finished her food, Mai took a few small knives out of her pocket that were wrapped in a dark scrap of fabric so they couldn’t cut her. She had found them under her mother’s bed a couple weeks before, and immediately become fascinated with their shining points and strange balance of weight, and the way they cast weird beams of light across the walls when she angled them just right. She had been begging for dagger-throwing lessons for what seemed like ages now, but her father said it wasn’t proper for someone of her position of power to learn such things, especially since she hadn’t shown any signs of firebending yet. She needed to be quiet and behave instead, then she could get what she wanted. Maybe when she was older, he always said. Mai had a feeling that out of all the things she asked for, this would be one thing that wouldn’t be given to her on a fancy platter.
Now she cradled one of the small silver knives in her hand, examining the way it gleamed at one particular angle and momentarily blinded her. She held it up, gripping it the way she’d seen some of the guards do in training, and aimed for another tree a few feet away. She stopped, poised to strike, tuning out the chatter and laughter around her. She took a deep breath and threw the knife, watching it spin in the air and settle… in the ground a good two feet in front of the tree. Sighing and furrowing her eyebrows in frustration, Mai held up another one and tried again, getting close to the roots this time. Maybe one more time and she would be able to hit it—