Hey everyone I'm back with another chapter here. In case any of you are wondering, Yes I actually plan on making a sequel to this story involving the children of the main cast. So yes, the sequel will take place in the timeline that the legend of korra takes place.
Anyways quick disclaimer before we move on: I own nothing other than my OC's!
Chapter Three: Those Bound by Fate — The Exile & the Princess
Part One
Time Skip: Following the Cave of the Two Lovers
The hill crested and the world opened up before them.
For a moment, it was almost beautiful — the sprawling architecture of Omashu spread across the mountainside in its familiar terraced geometry, the great chutes and platforms catching the afternoon light the way they always had, the city's silhouette unchanged from every story Aang had ever told about it. Sokka had already begun his announcement with the confident energy of someone who had been composing it in his head for the last several miles.
Then he stopped.
Then Aang stopped.
The banner hung from Omashu's front gate with the particular arrogance of a thing that had been placed there to be seen from a distance. The red and black emblem of the Fire Nation. Not a patrol flag, not a temporary marker — something permanent, something settled, the visual language of occupation made cloth and dye and iron fixtures.
Sokka's carefully prepared announcement died somewhere around the third syllable.
"Welcome to—oh no."
"That's not good," Asura said, from just behind him.
Sokka turned with an expression that suggested he had strong opinions about that particular observation. "Yeah, ya think?!"
"Easy," Goku said, stepping smoothly between them in the way he always did when Asura and Sokka found themselves occupying the same emotional frequency. "Both of you. Let's think."
Odyn had already closed his eyes.
He stood slightly apart from the group, head tilted fractionally, his awareness extending outward the way it did when he was searching — past the walls, past the sounds of occupation, past the surface layer of things. Looking for something specific. Something with the particular resonance of an earth bender who had been bending since before most of the current generation had learned to walk.
He found it.
It was faint — deliberately contained, he suspected — but unmistakable. Tucked somewhere deep in the city's interior. Somewhere enclosed. Somewhere metal.
He opened his eyes.
"He's in there," he said. "Somewhere they've put him that limits his bending. Metal walls, most likely." He looked to Aang. "Where would they take a prisoner they knew was dangerous?"
Aang's expression had gone through several things in quick succession and arrived at the particular focus that replaced despair when he decided action was more useful. "Somewhere he absolutely can't earthbend from. Metal cage, maybe. Or a prison chamber."
"Right." Odyn turned to Asura and Goku. "You two — stay out here. If things go badly, we'll need people on the outside who aren't already in the middle of it."
Katara raised an eyebrow. "You two aren't coming with us?"
"We're more useful out here," Asura said. "Better angles. Fewer variables." He glanced at Odyn with the easy shorthand of someone who has planned escapes with the same person often enough to have developed a shared vocabulary for it. "We'll keep in touch."
Aang turned at this. "How, exactly?"
Odyn touched two fingers to his temple.
"Telepathy. A technique we developed for situations like this — it functions like a mental line of communication. You'll be able to hear each other's thoughts if you're projecting them consciously and the distance isn't too great." He paused. "You won't be hearing everything — just what's deliberately sent. Think of it like speaking quietly in a crowded room. Only the ones close enough to listen will hear you."
Sokka's expression underwent a brief crisis. "So you're going to be inside our heads?"
Katara reached over and cuffed her brother on the ear with the practiced efficiency of someone who has been doing this for years.
Odyn pressed his mouth into a line to keep from laughing. He didn't entirely succeed.
"Not literally. You direct the thought outward, we receive it. The range is limited, so don't wander too far." He glanced at Goku, who gave him a thumbs up. "We'll be listening."
"Got it," Aang said, nodding with the decisive air of someone filing information away for immediate use. He paused, then added, more quietly: "This isn't just about finding an earthbending teacher. Bumi is my friend. He was my friend when I was twelve years old, and he never stopped being one."
No one argued with that.
They went in through the sewers.
It was not, Odyn reflected, how he typically preferred to enter a city. The passages were low and cold and smelled of things that did not bear thinking about, and the air — as he noted aloud approximately three minutes into their transit — was becoming aggressively unpleasant in a way that qualified as a health concern.
"The air's going stale down here," he said. "We should surface."
Aang went up first — a careful hand displacing the sewer cover just far enough to scan the street above — then gave the signal. All four of them pulled themselves up through the gap and onto a quiet side street, and Odyn lowered the cover back into place with the same careful silence he'd applied to lifting it.
He straightened, brushed his hands together, and turned to survey the street.
Then he noticed Sokka's face.
Specifically, the thing on Sokka's face — a small, many-limbed creature of deep purple coloring, adhered to the warrior's cheek with the implacable determination of something that had found its new home and had no intention of discussing the matter.
"Not to interrupt," Odyn said carefully, "but — Sokka. What is that on your face?"
Sokka's eyes crossed as he attempted to look at his own cheek. Then the full reality of the situation apparently reached him, because he opened his mouth to produce a sound that was entirely inappropriate for a covert infiltration of an occupied city.
"AHH — NO — GET THIS THING OFF M—"
A hand clamped over his mouth.
Odyn's expression was the particular blend of patience and exasperation he reserved for moments when Sokka was technically right to be alarmed but catastrophically wrong about the timing.
"Sokka," he said, in a whisper that managed to convey significant volume through sheer intensity. "Are you trying to get us all arrested?"
Sokka shook his head carefully, his eyes communicating several things at once, none of them fully formed thoughts.
Aang crouched beside them with the unruffled calm of someone who has encountered purple pentapuses before and found them entirely manageable.
"It's just a pentapus." He extended one finger and gently stroked the top of the creature's head. It released Sokka's cheek with a small, satisfied sound and curled around Aang's finger instead. The process left a constellation of small red marks across Sokka's skin in a pattern that was, Odyn had to admit, remarkably convincing as a symptom of something.
He and Aang looked at each other.
The idea arrived in both of them at roughly the same moment, which was something that had been happening with increasing frequency ever since they had started spending time together. Odyn decided he didn't find this surprising. The avatar had good instincts.
"Aang," Odyn said. "Those marks."
"I was thinking the same thing," Aang said. "If we collect a few of these—"
"Create enough visible symptoms—"
"Act like we're all coming down with something contagious—"
"The guards won't want to come near us." Odyn looked at Sokka, who was inspecting his own face with an expression hovering somewhere between offended and intrigued. "Sorry about this in advance."
Sokka lowered his hand from his cheek and squinted. "Are you two telling me that my face is the key to this plan?"
"Your face is integral to this plan," Aang confirmed.
Sokka took a moment with this. "I can work with that."
The guards found them approximately four streets later. Two of them, moving with the brisk authority of a garrison force that has spent long enough in an occupied city to stop being surprised by anything — right up until the moment they were.
"You kids — it's past curfew. You'll be coming with us."
The guard's hand reached toward Sokka.
"Wait —" Odyn stepped forward, voice pitched at exactly the register of someone delivering alarming news as gently as possible. "Please don't touch him, sir. I don't think you want to do that."
The guard paused. "...Why not?"
"Well—" Katara turned Sokka's marked cheek toward the light with the practiced concern of someone who has been worried about this for some time. "You see these?"
The guards looked. Something shifted in both their expressions simultaneously — that particular human instinct that predates rational thought, the one that says unknown illness, do not approach, written somewhere deeper than the brain.
What followed was several minutes of increasingly committed performance. Katara developed symptoms first — a cough, a concerned press of her hand to her forehead. Odyn followed, with the particular misery of someone who is trying very hard to pretend they aren't falling apart in public. Aang added his voice to the chorus with the earnest conviction of someone who genuinely cannot lie particularly well but is making a heroic effort.
The guards backed up.
"Go — go that way, and stay away from people before you give them whatever that is—"
They were alone on the street thirty seconds later.
"Well done," Aang said, keeping his voice low and his expression neutral with visible effort.
"The theater's loss," Odyn agreed, and they moved deeper into the city.
Aboard Azula's Vessel — Elsewhere on the Sea
Lo and Li occupied their accustomed positions on either side of the princess with the serene permanence of things that have always been there and intend to continue being there. They spoke in their characteristic rhythm — sentences traded back and forth between them like water passed between two vessels — and what they said was, as it usually was, precisely correct.
"When tracking your brother and uncle, traveling with the Royal Procession may no longer be wise." One.
"If you hope to keep the element of surprise." The other.
Azula stood at the bow of her vessel and looked at the water moving past the hull. The advice was sound. She turned it over with the efficiency of a mind that had been trained since childhood to process information and discard sentimentality, and arrived at the same conclusion Lo and Li had already arrived at.
The element of surprise required smallness. A small team, precisely chosen. People whose skills complemented the gaps in her own — which were few, but real, and she was not so vain as to pretend otherwise. She would need trackers. She would need fighters with particular specialties. She would need people she could trust, which narrowed the field considerably, which was why the list she was mentally assembling was so short.
Two names. Both of them clear.
And as an addendum — because her father had asked it of her and her father's requests were not addenda but imperatives wearing the costume of suggestions — she would also need to identify and retrieve one Odyn Albanar Chevalier. The boy with the golden flames. The boy the surviving officers from the North Pole had failed, unanimously, to find adequate language for.
The one the prophecy spoke of.
Her soulmate, apparently.
Azula turned this information over with the same analytical remove she brought to tactical problems. It was not especially useful to have feelings about it either way. The prophecy said what it said. The mission was what it was. She would encounter this boy eventually, assess him on her own terms, and form her own conclusions.
She was not the sort of person who let ancient texts tell her how to feel.
"Set course for the nearest circus," she said.
Back in Omashu
The discovery of Flopsie came first — Bumi's enormous, devoted, perpetually enthusiastic pet, chained to a wheel mechanism in a courtyard that felt like something between a stable and a detention facility. The creature heard Aang's voice and immediately attempted to bridge the distance between them with the full force of its affection, only to be brought up short by the chain, which it appeared to find deeply confusing.
"Flopsie!"
"Hang on," Aang said, moving toward the restraint mechanism. "I'll get you—"
"No need."
Odyn dropped down from the wall above with the casual economy of someone who has spent a great deal of time moving across vertical surfaces. He crossed to the chain in two steps, assessed it, and applied a focused point of Ki-enhanced pressure to the weakest link in the mechanism. The chain parted. Flopsie did not waste any time — it covered the remaining distance in a single lunge, collected both Aang and Odyn into an embrace of considerable structural force, and proceeded to demonstrate its feelings about the reunion at length and volume.
"Okay," Odyn said, from somewhere inside the embrace. "Okay. Yes. Hello."
Aang laughed.
They climbed onto Flopsie's back and went to find the King.
What they found instead was the confirmation — from the resistance members who found them, from the young woman named Yung who looked at them with the particular expression of someone carrying a grief they have not yet found a container for — that Bumi had surrendered before the fighting even began. Not from defeat. Not from fear. From something more deliberate and more difficult to hold than either.
Aang was quiet for a moment after hearing this.
Then he said: "We get everyone out. That's what comes next."
At the Circus — Ty Lee
The ringmaster introduced the Fire Lord's daughter to his audience with the breathless reverence of a man who is aware, on every level of his being, that his continued employment depends on this going well. He led her to a seat of honor, inquired after her comfort, offered everything the establishment had with the generosity of someone spending freely from an account he hopes will never be called in.
Azula sat. Smiled. Watched.
Below, on the wire, Ty Lee moved the way she always moved — as though gravity was less a law she was subject to and more a suggestion she occasionally found charming. She was extraordinary, and she knew it, and the way she knew it was entirely different from arrogance — it was the settled knowledge of someone who has worked at something long enough that the work has become invisible and only the result remains.
The crowd watched her with open mouths.
Azula's smile did not change.
"Will she fall?" she asked, conversationally.
"Of course not," Shuzumu said, with the confidence of someone speaking the obvious.
"What if you removed the net?"
A pause. Slightly longer than was comfortable.
"We — the safety of the performers—"
"What," Azula said, with perfect pleasantness, "if you set it on fire?"
The ringmaster looked at the net. Looked at the princess. Arrived at the same calculation that everyone eventually arrived at when looking at Princess Azula, which was that certain conversations had only one possible ending.
The net ignited.
The fire spread along the bottom of it with the particular appetite that fire has for things it has been invited to consume. Forty feet above the ground, Ty Lee felt the change in the air before she saw the light, and something in her stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with the wire.
Azula. Ty Lee thought, with a feeling that she recognized as warmth trying to coexist uncomfortably with alarm. Of course.
"What variety of dangerous animals do you keep here?" Azula inquired.
The ringmaster's mouth moved soundlessly for a moment.
"Release them all," Azula said. "It would make things considerably more lively."
Below the wire, the cages opened.
The Bridge at Omashu's Gate
The pentapus plan worked. It worked extremely well.
The citizens of Omashu moved through the gate in a procession of such committed suffering that even the governor's wife — watching from the balcony above with the anxious sympathy of someone who takes illness personally — pressed a hand to her heart in shared concern. The governor himself watched the display with increasing discomfort. Mai stood slightly to one side, unhurried, helping herself to fire flakes with the detached interest of a theater critic reviewing an unremarkable matinee.
"Fire flakes, Dad?" she offered.
Her father sighed.
Below them, no one was paying attention to the governor's infant son, who had developed opinions about remaining in one place and had acted on them.
Aang returned Tom-Tom that evening — quietly, without announcement, setting the child down at the edge of the road where the lights of the compound spilled across the stones, and slipping back into shadow before anyone could see him clearly. From across the courtyard, Odyn watched the reunion play out — the woman's cry, the husband's voice joining it, the particular sound of relief that has been held back too long and finally released.
He thought about what it meant — that Aang would do that. Return a child to people who were, by every formal category, his enemies, because they were also parents who were scared, and that mattered to him too.
That's who you are, Odyn thought.
He had known it for some time. He found it, each time, quietly remarkable.
They regrouped at the hill where they'd started, in the last hour of light before the sky went fully dark. Aang arrived from his errand, and the group fell into the easy configuration of people deciding their next direction.
"Ba Sing Se, most likely," Odyn said. "Moving deeper into the Earth Kingdom makes sense — and the odds of finding you an earthbending teacher improve considerably the further we get from Fire Nation territory."
"Agreed," Aang said. "And Bumi — he told me my teacher would be someone who'd mastered neutral jing. Waiting and listening. I didn't understand it then. I'm starting to."
"We understand it," Goku said, and then grinned. "Even if it took Asura three months to master the waiting part."
Asura's expression did not change. "Funny."
"Very funny," Goku agreed.
Odyn glanced back once toward the city's silhouette against the evening sky. The Fire Nation banner was still visible, even at this distance. He held the image for a moment — not the banner, but the bridge. The afternoon. The amber eyes that had found his across twenty feet of charged air and held them with the steady interest of someone assessing a problem they intend to return to.
Azula.
He had not been surprised by the quality of her bending. The reports had been accurate, and Azula did not strike him as the sort of person who allowed a gap between reputation and reality. What had surprised him — what he was still, quietly, turning over — was the moment near the end, when he had said what he said about her father, and something in those amber eyes had shifted. Not much. Not enough that anyone else would have noticed.
But he had been watching for it, and it had been there.
She heard me, he thought. Whether she wanted to or not.
"You ready?" Katara's voice, beside him.
He turned. She was watching him with the careful attentiveness she sometimes directed at him — the look that understood more than it said, that had learned, somewhere in the weeks of traveling together, to read the spaces between his expressions.
He nodded. "Yeah."
"Talking to yourself?"
"Thinking."
"About?"
He considered the question. The city. The bridge. The Azure flames and the thing they had both been reaching toward in that fight — not victory, exactly, but understanding, the kind that only happens when two people test each other honestly and find they are more evenly matched than expected.
"About how the world is smaller than it seems," he said.
Katara held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked away, and something moved through her expression that she contained before it could fully form.
"Come on," she said, starting toward Appa. "Let's go."
Meanwhile — Azula, Mai, Ty Lee
Azula stood at the edge of the bridge in the darkening afternoon and watched the direction the gaang had disappeared into with the particular stillness that settled over her when she was filing information away.
Odyn Albanar Chevalier.
She reviewed what she had. The golden flames — real, not rumor, burning with a quality she had genuinely not encountered in any other bender alive. The speed — she was fast, faster than almost anyone, and he had matched her without apparent effort and, near the end, exceeded her. The close-quarters exchange with the flame weapons — she was technically superior, she believed, but the margin was considerably smaller than she would have liked. The strength — she had felt it in every blocked strike, in the ground's response to his ki, in the way the bridge itself had seemed to hold its breath when he shifted his weight.
He's strong, she thought, with the cold objectivity of a strategist. Genuinely strong. Not in the way that reports describe things as strong to explain their own failures.
And then there was the other thing. The thing she had no formal category for and was not going to examine in detail out here on a bridge with Mai watching.
The thing where he had looked at her — not at her fire, not at her rank, not at the tactical problem of neutralizing her — but at her. And said something that no one had said to her in a very long time, because no one was typically in the habit of suggesting to Azula that she had the capacity to be other than what she was.
You don't have to follow the same path.
She filed it. Cross-referenced it with nothing, because there was nothing to cross-reference it with. Moved on.
"We're not finished," she said aloud, to the empty air in the direction he had gone. Then she turned, composed as always, to Mai and Ty Lee. "We continue tracking them. They're heading deeper into the Earth Kingdom — we adjust accordingly."
Mai studied her nails. "Back on the ship, then."
"Back on the ship." Azula paused. Allowed herself, in the privacy of her own expression, something that was not quite a smile and was not quite not one. "The Golden Dragon is proving to be more interesting than the reports suggested."
Ty Lee, who had been quiet since the bridge, pressed her lips together. She was looking in the same direction Odyn had gone, with an expression that was trying to be neutral and not entirely succeeding.
She was glad he was safe. She was glad Goku was near. She was glad the world had not taken either of them from her yet.
And she was watching her best friend's profile with the particular attention of someone who has just realized that the story she thought she understood has a great deal more in it than she previously accounted for.
Azula, she thought. Oh no.
She said nothing.
The three of them walked back toward the ship in silence, the Fire Nation banner above Omashu's gate catching the last of the evening light behind them.
With the Gaang — Aboard Appa
The great sky bison rose above the Earth Kingdom with the unhurried certainty of something that has always known how to move through the sky. Below them, Omashu grew small, then smaller, then became a shape among other shapes in the darkening patchwork of stone and forest.
Sokka had already fallen asleep, which he did with characteristic efficiency and a complete absence of self-consciousness. Aang sat at Appa's head in the quiet way he sometimes sat, carrying the weight of the afternoon without showing all of it. Katara sat with her knees drawn up, watching the sky.
Goku appeared at Odyn's shoulder from the back of the saddle and dropped down beside him with the casual announcement of someone who has given up on formal approaches to conversation.
"She was something else," he said.
Odyn didn't ask who he meant.
"She was," he agreed.
"You held back."
"So did she."
Goku considered this. "That's interesting."
"A lot of things about today were interesting."
They sat with that for a moment.
"Ty Lee looked good," Goku said, with a careful lightness that didn't fully conceal what was underneath it.
"She did." Odyn glanced at his brother. "She's fine. She's with people she trusts, and she knows how to take care of herself."
Goku nodded. Didn't say anything else. His tail curled once around itself in the way it did when he was thinking about something he wasn't ready to say yet.
Odyn looked out at the sky — the vast, cold, darkening expanse of it, full of things moving toward each other along paths that had been laid down long before any of them had been born.
The Gold Dragon and the Azure Dragon, bound together by Fate.
He didn't know what that meant yet. He suspected it would take some time to know.
He also suspected, with a certainty he couldn't fully justify, that the amber-eyed girl on the bridge had already started to figure it out.
We'll meet again, he thought, to no one in particular, to the darkening Earth Kingdom spreading out below them. I'm certain of it.
Appa flew on.
The night opened up ahead of them, full of everything that came next.
To be continued...
Next: Chapter Four : Those Bound by Fate part II; The Journey to Ba Sing Se'

Ending theme: Twin Star Exorcists ending 1 (Eyes)
Visuals: replace the characters with Odyn (being the boy instead of Rokuro) and Azula( being the girl instead of Benio) Flashes of the other characters in the cast in between (Odyn thinking about team avatar before thinking about Azula at the end. Azula is shown thinking about her friends, Ozai, Iroh, and Zuko before it stops on an image of Odyn). The song ends as Odyn and Azula are then seen staring towards each other, a distance apart.
Opening theme:
Black Summoner op 1 : Dead End by RedBet
Visuals: flashes and introductions of the main cast of this story. Flashes of characters from both sides: team avatar (aang, katara, sokka, odyn, asura, and goku) and Azula's side: (Azula, Ty Lee, Mai, Zuko, and Iroh) shadowed characters are those yet to be introduced (Toph, Khanna).
Hey guys sorry for the long wait but hopefully you guys enjoyed this chapter! Apologies if it felt rushed at the end but next chapter should be good with pacing. I'll see about including the swamp with the bei fongs... actually that's inportant lol because a new character will be coming into the story with Toph. That's all i can think to say for now. Hopefully yiu guys enjoyed it. Until the next one!