Empress Of The Old World {Legend Of Korra}

PART 1: Out Of The Ice

The area around her was cold but warming. She hadn't felt this conscious in a long time. Just as Sukara was trying to put the pieces together in the dark she was suddenly jerked forward.

Hands and knees hit the ice. Cold and hard, it hurt her already sore joints. Sukara opened her eyes to see that she was facing the exit of a cave. The walls held symbols that were a little too familiar for her, on them.

She had just managed to pull her legs underneath her so that she could sit on the floor rather than stay on all fours when an old woman yelped at the end of a corridor. Sukara turned her head to see the woman hurrying towards her with a blanket.

"I knew, I knew you'd come," she said as she wrapped the animal hide around Sukara's shoulders, "when Unalaq came looking for the spirit portal I knew. Freeing it, would free you."

"Who are you?" Sukara asked, her voice croaking as she spoke for the first time.

"Of course, you don't know," the old woman said as she went to try and pick Sukara up, "my name is Hata, come with me. I'll explain everything."

Sukara let Hata help her up off of the floor. She knew it had been a long time since she had used her body but she hoped that the pain it took to move would not last long.

Hata took Sukara further into the cave and to a room filled with scrolls and bits of paper and a banner with her face on it.

"Legend is that they burnt the rest," Hata told her, "all your work, the bending, the original manifesto. All of it. But your most loyal salvaged what they could."

"The bending? They would sacrifice knowledge just to erase me?" Sukara said in disbelief. She knew what she had done had been terrible and keeping knowledge of the propaganda would have been harmful but she had expected them to keep her work on bending.

"Your family, the rebellion, they didn't see what you did," Hata told her, watching Sukara as she limped around the room, "they tried to kill you but we saved your body. We knew that one day the spirit bending they did would break and we could reunite the pieces of you."

"Right," Sukara said under her breath, she lifted a piece of paper to reveal a scroll that contained the manifesto that she wrote. "Why would you keep it? Why would you stay?"

"Because I believed in you," she told her, "because I believed my father when he told me that you fought to put non benders in their rightful place and benders into their natural order."

As Hata spoke the words, it sent a shiver down Sukara's spine. She couldn't believe that the ideal she had invented to seize power had survived such a long time. It had no factual grounds, she was surprised it had convinced people 20,000 years ago when she came up with it, let alone now.

"You shouldn't have," Sukara finally said, cutting Hata off while she had been talking about her devotion to her, "they should have burned this along with the rest of it. It doesn't make any sense, you're not better or worse than any other bender because you bend water. You're all the same, I made it up. You've wasted your time reading these. They should be filed under fiction."

Hata was shocked. This was not what she thought finally meeting her hero would be like. She shouldn't have expected praise but she definitely didn't expect this. A complete dismissal and a change of ideals. This was not the great Sukara, Empress of the old world. This was not the woman she had read about.

"You're confused," Hata said, not wanting to believe what she was hearing.

"Perhaps, but I've had 20,000 years to think about this," Sukara told her, "and repent for what I did. Do with this what you will, I won't stop you. But I'd rather not be a part of it either, what I would like is to see what the world has become."

"It's changed a lot," Hata said, the disappointment not even barely being hidden in her voice, "the water tribes are still here but everywhere else has changed. You're currently only a couple of miles from the southern water tribe. We thought it best to keep you at home."

"Thank you Hata," Sukara told her.

"I'll fill you in before you go," Hata said, leading her down a different corridor, "and I wouldn't tell them who you are, I doubt the Avatar would give you a warm welcome."