Hey everyone, won't take too long for this but thought I'd do a story for an interesting scenario I had in my head for awhile concerning Korra as you can tell by the summary lol. This is a what if scenario in the realm of dbs and Legend of Korra But more towards the xenoverse side of things. Anyways that's enough from me, enjoy!
FLAME EYED BENDER
A Chronicle of Two Worlds Colliding
Chapter One
Foreboding Dream — The Vision of Korra
Sleep should have come easy.
That was the thought Korra kept returning to as she twisted once more in her sleeping bag, the fabric bunching beneath her restless limbs. There was no reason for this. No injury, no argument, no pressing worry that she could name. She was seventeen years old, strong enough to level a wall with her fists, and by every right she should have been dead to the world the moment her head hit the pillow.
And yet.
Why can't I sleep?
She stared up at the wooden ceiling of Tenzin's home on Air Temple Island, listening to the distant sound of the bay lapping against the rocks below. It had been only a few days since her arrival in Republic City — a few days since the world had gotten so much louder, so much faster, so much more than anything her upbringing in the White Lotus compound had prepared her for. But that wasn't it. She had adapted quickly. She always did.
No, this restlessness was something else. Something she couldn't put a name to. It clung to the back of her mind like smoke, shapeless and irritating.
I'll ask Tenzin about it in the morning, she decided. For now... sleep.
And at last, reluctantly, the darkness took her.
◈
The dream was the same one she'd been having for three nights running.
It began in darkness — not the warm, forgiving kind, but a cold and featureless void that pressed against her from every direction. She walked, though she couldn't feel the ground beneath her feet, following the only landmark available to her: a faint luminescence somewhere far ahead, like the dying ember of a lantern seen through fog.
Keep moving, some instinct told her. Keep walking.
She reached for the light.
It detonated.
White expanded in every direction at once, swallowing the darkness whole until she was standing in a void of pure silence and blinding space. Korra blinked the glare from her eyes, turning in a slow circle, and that was when she heard it — the deliberate sound of footsteps coming from behind her.
Old training took over before thought could. She spun, her feet hitting a battle stance, and fire erupted from her palm in a roaring arc toward the intruder.
The intruder fire-bent right back.
The two streams collided in a violent bloom of orange and red, and for a moment the entire dreamspace was nothing but light and heat. Korra lowered her arm slowly, staring across the dissipating flames at the figure who had caught her attack without so much as flinching.
A boy.
He couldn't have been much older than she was — perhaps the same age, perhaps a year or two beyond. His skin was dark, his build lean but coiled with a quiet, certain power. His hair fell long and loose, a deep, almost unnatural shade of blue that reminded her of deep ocean water at midnight. And his ears — pointed, she realized with a jolt, elongated at the tips in a way that was distinctly, unmistakably not human.
But it was his eyes that stopped her entirely.
They were blue, like hers. The same shade, even. Yet there was something burning behind them that had no business being in blue eyes — a quality like staring into the heart of a candle flame, the kind of gaze that made you feel, absurdly, that you were the one being seen through rather than the one doing the looking.
His clothes were Water Tribe in design, close to her own style of dress — though where her garments were plain, his were marked at the chest with a symbol she had never seen before. A shield wreathed in flame, two crossed swords laid over it, the whole emblem cradled within what appeared to be a single ember. Strange. Foreign. And somehow, despite everything, familiar.
He was not alone.
To his left stood a girl.
Korra's breath caught.
The girl was her. Or almost her — a mirror that had been run through some warping filter, every feature subtly, fascinatingly wrong. The same dark skin, the same strong jaw, the same upright posture. But her hair fell in waves of the deepest crimson Korra had ever seen, so dark it was nearly black at the roots. Her clothing combined the practical lines of a Water Tribe fighter's outfit with overlapping plates of what looked like metalbender's armor, ornate and well-worn. At her hip rode weapons Korra didn't recognize.
And her eyes.
One was blue — brilliant, familiar blue. The other was orange. Not amber, not hazel — orange, the kind of orange you saw in a forge at full heat, in a sunrise over open water. And were those...
Pointed ears.
The girl had pointed ears too.
To the boy's right stood a third figure: another young man, lighter in complexion, with shoulder-length jet-black hair and that same burning orange in both eyes. He wore the robes of an airbender beneath mismatched, battered armor that looked as though it had seen more battles than the boy wearing it might have lived years.
Three teenagers. Three strangers.
Korra knew all of them.
She had no idea how. She had never seen any of these faces in her life. And yet the certainty sat in her chest like a stone in still water, undeniable and perfectly at rest. I know you, she thought. Somehow, I know all of you.
"I..." she started, the word coming out small and uncertain in a way she hated. "I know you three. Somehow. But I don't understand how."
The boy with blue hair — the first one, the one whose fire had met hers — let out a short, quiet laugh. It wasn't mocking. If anything, it was gentle, the way someone laughed when they were fondly amused by something they'd been expecting.
"Of course you do," he said. His voice was calm and warm and held a note of something she couldn't name — affection, perhaps. Certainty. "Mom."
The word landed like a stone through glass.
Korra's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"...What?" she managed. "What did you just—" She stopped. "Say that again."
"You sure you're okay, Mom?" The crimson-haired girl's voice was gentle too, though her mismatched eyes were creased with something that might have been concern. "You look pale. Like you've seen a ghost."
Mom. They were both calling her Mom.
Korra slapped herself across the cheek. Not hard, but firmly — a solid, reality-testing slap of the kind that ought to wake a person up if they were dreaming within a dream. The sting was sharp and immediate.
She was not dreaming within a dream.
She was just dreaming. And three teenagers were calling her their mother.
"Aunt Korra." The black-haired boy's voice was quieter than the others, careful. "Are you all right over there?"
Aunt. On top of Mom.
Korra pressed her fingers to her temples, breathing out slowly through her nose. She looked at them again — really looked, this time, without the shock muddying her vision. The first boy's face. The way his jaw set and his eyes watched her. The girl's posture, the exact angle of her chin when she was waiting for an answer. These were not strangers. These were people who knew her face as well as she knew her own reflection.
These are my children.
The realization arrived with the quiet finality of a door closing. Two of them, at least. The third was clearly someone else's — someone she loved, or would love, enough that their child called her Aunt like it was the most natural word in the world.
The blue-haired boy tilted his head, something flickering in those burning eyes. "Oh," he said, as though he'd just remembered something important. "Right. You haven't met Dad yet, have you."
It wasn't quite a question.
Korra shook her head, a little numb.
"I can't tell you much," he said, and his tone shifted — became more measured, more careful. "Any of us can. Changing too much in your timeline..." He shook his head. "It's not something we're willing to risk. And we don't have long. You're going to wake up soon."
"But," the girl added, and she was smiling now, the tiniest curve at the corner of her mouth, "you'll meet Dad sooner than you think."
The black-haired boy stepped forward, and his expression had grown serious. He had the look of someone delivering news they had been rehearsing for a long time, someone who understood the weight of what they were about to say. "We're glad we got to see you early, Aunt Korra. Truly. But there's a reason we're here." He paused. "You and your friends are not prepared for what's coming. Not yet. You're going to need Dad's help."
Korra straightened. "What's coming? What do you mean?"
The three of them exchanged a glance — silent, brief, the kind of communication that only passed between people who had known each other their whole lives.
Then the girl spoke. "They call themselves the Time Breakers." Her voice had gone quieter, stripped of its warmth. "But that's only what they choose to be called now. What they are — what they were — is something else. They are fallen Gods. Makaioshin."
"Makaioshin," Korra repeated carefully.
The blue-haired boy nodded. "Deities who lost the grace of the King of All. Grand Zeno — that's what the current Gods call him — he rules over the universes. These ones were cast out of his order. Now they want revenge." He was watching her steadily, making sure she was following. "Their plan is to take over the universes under Zeno's jurisdiction. Incite a rebellion. Declare war on every God still standing."
The dreamspace felt colder than it had a moment ago.
Korra opened her mouth to ask a dozen questions at once — but the edges of the three teens were already going soft. Fading. The light behind them was intensifying, eating at their outlines like flame consuming paper.
"Bye for now, Mom," the blue-haired boy said, and he was smiling again, and there was something in it that cracked her open just slightly. "Looks like you're waking up."
"Wait." She reached toward them. "Your names — I have to know your names—"
"Oh, that's easy," the girl said, laughing softly. "In case you forgot, my name is—"
But they were gone. The light swallowed them whole, and with them went the sound of her daughter's voice, the name dissolving before it could reach her, and—
◈
Korra woke up gasping.
The cold sweat was immediate — her shirt damp, her pulse rabbiting in her throat, her eyes wide and staring at a ceiling that was blessedly, solidly real. The room around her was still and grey with very early morning. Outside, somewhere beyond the walls of Tenzin's home, a bird called once and fell silent.
She lay there for a moment, breathing.
What a strange dream.
But even as her heartbeat slowed, the important parts didn't fade — the warning, the mention of the Time Breakers, the Makaioshin. Those stayed with her, sharp and clear as though they'd been written on the inside of her eyelids.
She sat up slowly, pressing the back of her hand to her face, and froze.
Her fingers came away damp.
She touched her cheek. Then the other one. The tracks were faint — already drying in the cool morning air — but unmistakably there. She had been crying in her sleep. Silently, without waking herself, she had been crying.
Korra stared at nothing for a long moment.
Then she got up, rolled her sleeping bag aside, and went out back to bend.
◈
She didn't notice Tenzin watching her from the doorway at first.
She was too far gone into the motion — fire, then earth, then fire again, the elements cycling through her hands in a pattern that was more catharsis than practice. Her bending instructor's son had seen her bend before. He knew what it looked like when she was focused, when she was sharp and in control. This was not that. This was wild and uneven and loud in the still morning air, each strike a little too hard, each transition a little too fast, every movement driven not by technique but by the need to push something out of herself.
"Korra."
She stopped mid-form. Turned.
Tenzin stood in the grey dawn, hands folded within his robes, watching her with an expression she recognized — calm on the surface, but with concern running underneath it like a current beneath ice.
She was panting. She hadn't realized how hard she'd been pushing herself.
"Master Tenzin?" She blinked, trying to orient herself. "Why are you up?"
"I could ask you the same," he said, stepping out onto the grass. "Though I suppose the answer would be the same for both of us." He moved closer, and his expression shifted into something more direct. "I heard you, Korra. Tossing. Turning." A pause. "Crying."
She almost denied it. Almost.
Instead she exhaled, shoulders dropping, and looked away toward the bay. The water was flat and silver in the pre-dawn light, and the city across it was a string of distant lights going slowly dim.
"You got me," she muttered.
"Come," Tenzin said simply. "Sit down. Tell me."
And she did.
She told him everything she could remember — the dark void, the white light, the three teenagers, the fire they'd shared between them, the names they wouldn't give her. She described their faces in careful detail, the pointed ears, the burning eyes, the Water Tribe clothes with the strange emblem at the chest.
Tenzin listened without interrupting. When she reached the part about being called Mom, she watched him go very still — not alarmed, exactly, but clearly recalibrating. He was quiet for a moment after she finished.
"A vision," he said at last.
"I know." She had worked that much out herself. "But what kind?"
"The Avatar's dreams are not ordinary dreams," Tenzin told her carefully. "When a spiritual being of your magnitude dreams with this kind of clarity — with this kind of persistence — it is typically regarded as a vision of a possible future. A path the world may yet walk." He paused. "What they warned you of... this danger they described. You said they called themselves the Makaioshin?"
"Fallen Gods," Korra said. "That's what the girl — what she called them. Deities who lost the favor of someone called the King of All. Grand Zeno." The name sat strangely in her mouth, foreign and enormous, like a word in a language she hadn't been born knowing. "They want war. Against all the Gods who are still standing."
Tenzin stroked his beard, the way he did when he was working through a problem. "And they said you would need help."
"The father of the — " She stopped. My children. The words still felt strange to even think. "He has something to do with it. They said I'd meet him soon."
Another silence. This one longer.
"Did they say anything else about this person?" Tenzin asked, in the measured tone of a man choosing his words with great care.
"No," Korra admitted. "They said it would change too much. That they couldn't — " She trailed off, then shrugged one shoulder. "They disappeared before I could get their names."
She heard Tenzin clear his throat quietly — once, and with great dignity.
"Well," he said. "That is... certainly a great deal to take in."
"You think?" She let out a short, humorless laugh.
"Korra." His voice was steady, reassuring in the way only someone who had spent decades as both a teacher and a parent could manage. "Whatever comes, it will not come tonight. What you need now is rest — proper rest. A clearer mind will serve you better than an exhausted one." He gestured back toward the house. "Go back to sleep. We'll speak more in the morning."
She looked at him. This man who wasn't her father, who wasn't even her blood, who had welcomed her into his home without question and sat with her in the dark while she told him about the children she hadn't had yet.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "You're right. Thank you, Tenzin."
"Sleep well, Avatar."
She padded back inside, and Tenzin stood alone for a long moment in the grey morning, watching the lights of Republic City flicker across the water, his expression thoughtful and still.
Then he too returned to bed.
◈
Morning came faster than she expected.
She had slept — truly slept, dreamlessly and deep, the way you did after something heavy had been set down. When she woke the second time, sunlight was coming through the window and the sounds of Air Temple Island going about its morning routine drifted in from outside. Children's voices. The soft percussion of airbending practice wheels.
She lay there for a moment, oriented herself, and let the events of the night settle.
The dream. Tenzin. The warning.
Time Breakers. Makaioshin. You're going to need Dad's help.
She closed her eyes.
And then, like a candle being lit in a dark room, the vision came to her.
She had experienced this before — only once, once before, in the hazy half-space between sleeping and waking. A flash. A face. The same impossible quality of I know you and I don't know how. It arrived without announcement in the middle of her morning, while she was pulling on her boots and thinking about meeting Mako and Bolin at the gym.
A boy. A teenager, probably near her age. Dark-skinned, like her. Hair the color of a deep ocean current, long enough to fall past the middle of his back. Pointed ears, elongated at the tips. And those eyes — she had seen those eyes before, hadn't she, in her dream — flame-colored and direct, the kind of eyes that looked at you and saw you, that burned without heat.
He was there for exactly one heartbeat, perfectly clear and utterly real.
And then he was gone.
Korra sat very still for a moment, her boot half-laced in her hands.
Then she laced it the rest of the way, straightened up, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.
"What is wrong with me?" she muttered to the empty room. "Why do I keep seeing that— that boy—"
She blew out a long breath through her nose.
No use in it. She had a team to get to, a training session she was already running late for, and two boys who were almost certainly going to give her trouble about the bags under her eyes. The vision — whatever it was — would have to wait.
She grabbed her jacket and headed for the city.
◈
They were running late to morning practice, as it turned out, because mornings were evil and Korra said so at volume.
The gym of the pro-bending arena smelled like sweat and chalk and old ambition. Korra caught the training ball Mako tossed at her and whipped it back hard enough to knock Bolin clean off his feet when he caught it. The younger earthbender hit the mat with a grunt and an expression of mild betrayal.
Both brothers were watching her before the echo of the impact had faded.
"Hey," Bolin said carefully, sitting up. "Are you... okay?"
"I'm fine," Korra said, a beat too quickly.
Mako crossed his arms. He had the look of someone filing a word away for later. "You sure? Because you look—"
"Tired, I know, thanks, I'm fine." She rolled her shoulders. "I've just been having weird dreams. It's nothing."
She got maybe four words further into her explanation before Butakha arrived to drain their winnings with the cheerful efficiency of a man who had long since made his peace with other people's despair — entry fees, equipment costs, apartment rent, groceries, tournament buy-in. Thirty thousand yuans. By the end of it, Mako was staring at empty palms and Bolin was looking at Korra with the expression of a man with a very foolish plan forming.
"You wouldn't happen to have a secret Avatar bank account overflowing with gold, would you?" Bolin asked.
Korra turned her pockets inside out.
"Sorry," she said. "I've never needed money. People have always just... taken care of me."
Mako picked up his bag and started walking. "Then I wouldn't say you had nothing."
Something in his voice made her look at him more carefully. There was no cruelty in it — just a quiet, uncomplicated kind of weariness, the tone of someone who had been taking care of themselves for a very long time and wasn't bitter about it, exactly, but hadn't quite forgotten it either.
We've been orphans, Bolin said. Just kinda on our own, ever since we were little.
Korra watched Mako walk away and didn't say anything.
The city found its rhythm around her as the day unfolded — the search for Bolin, the empty warehouse, the speeding truck with her new teammate's terrified face glimpsed through a closing door. She and Mako gave chase on Naga's back, fire streaming from Mako's hands, the city lights streaking past in blurs of amber and white.
And then the chi-blockers, precise and pitiless, and the ground rushing up to meet her, and the stunning, terrible emptiness where her bending should have been.
She thought it was over.
The daggers of light hit the pavement with a sound like thunderclap. One moment the men with their spinning lassos were drawing closer — and the next they were not. The shockwave from a single descending boot cracked the street and sent them scattering, and one man went end over end into a wall from the force of a kick that Korra had barely seen coming.
Silence.
Two figures resolved out of the shadows.
Korra looked up from the ground.
The boy was exactly as she had seen him that morning in her vision. Exactly — the long blue hair, the dark skin, the pointed ears, the scar running jagged beside his left eye and the second one, X-shaped, lower on his face. An army green coat over dark colors, a gold-trimmed headband holding his hair back from his face. Boots worn to the sole. The kind of wardrobe that had not been assembled all at once but accumulated over years of constant movement.
And those eyes.
Those eyes.
Looking at them directly felt like standing too close to a fire on a cold night — the warmth before the burn, the pull before the caution.
The woman beside him — sister, something told Korra, though she hadn't heard it said yet — was all crimson hair and silver armor and quiet, coiled alertness. Her eyes matched his. She had weapons strapped to her back that Korra didn't have names for.
"Are the two of you alright?" the boy asked.
His voice was calm. The kind of calm that wasn't peace but restraint.
"Yeah," Korra said, still getting to her feet. "Thanks to you."
"Brother." The girl's voice was low. "Roy found the trail. We need to move."
He turned. And that was when Korra saw it — the emblem on his back, visible between the folds of his coat. The flaming shield. The crossed swords. The ember.
Oh.
Oh, it's him.
"That emblem," she breathed.
He paused.
"They took your friend that way," he said, without turning fully to face her — only enough to gesture down the street. "Whatever you do, don't fall behind."
"Wait—"
He turned.
His eyes were patient. Waiting.
"What's your name?" Korra asked.
A long pause. Those eyes moved over her face in a way that was difficult to read.
"Not important," he said at last. "What's important is finding your friend before it's too late." The faintest shift at the corner of his mouth — something that was almost dry humor, but quieter than that. "Besides. I doubt this will be the last time we run into each other, Avatar."
Then both of them were gone — a flash of light, a vanishing, as clean and final as a candle going out — and Korra stood in the empty street staring at the place where they'd been.
My name isn't important, she thought, turning the words over. I doubt this will be the last time.
She remembered a boy in a dream calling her Mom.
And for the first time since she'd woken up that morning, the restlessness in her chest felt less like frustration and more like anticipation.
◈
The map pieces fit together in her hands like a promise.
Four flyers, four fragments of a single image — unremarkable in isolation, damning when assembled. Korra held the completed picture up against the large city map at the bus stop while Mako pressed his palm flat over the corresponding district, his finger landing on a building she wouldn't have looked at twice on her own.
"Bingo," he said quietly.
Korra lowered the flyers. She was already thinking about disguises.
◈
The venue was a large converted warehouse several blocks from the canal district — the kind of building that had once held cargo and now held something far more dangerous: a crowd that believed in something.
Korra pulled her scarf higher over her face as she and Mako joined the line filtering through the entrance. She had looped her arm through his without thinking about it, and he had looked at her with a startled expression that she'd answered with a pointed we're blending in stare before he could say anything about it.
The man at the door was broad enough to use as a wall.
"Private event," he said. "No invitation, no entry."
Mako produced a flyer.
The man's face split into something that was almost warmth. "The Revelation is upon us, brother and sister."
He stepped aside.
Inside, the space had been transformed. Rows of people filled the floor from wall to wall — men and women of every age, every background, every nation, packed together in a silence that hummed with a kind of collective held breath. Banners bearing Amon's insignia hung from the rafters. The stage at the far end was lit from above by a single shaft of amber light, as though whoever had designed this event understood that theater was half the battle.
Mako murmured near her ear. "I knew a lot of people hated benders. But this many in one place..."
Korra said nothing. She was scanning the crowd.
She found them after barely a minute of looking.
Two figures near the left-side wall, standing slightly apart from the nearest clusters of people. Dark hoods pulled low over their faces. But she recognized the height, the posture — the particular stillness of people who were paying attention to everything in the room while appearing to look at nothing.
"Mako." She touched his arm. "Over there. Left wall."
He turned. She watched his jaw shift.
"What the—" He caught himself. Lowered his voice. "They're here too?"
"Same side as us, at least." She watched the hooded figures and thought about daggers of light hitting the pavement. About a boot coming down hard enough to crack stone. "I think."
The lights shifted. A roar went through the crowd that made Korra's skin prickle — not the joyful roar of a sporting event, but the electrified, devotional roar of people who had been waiting for someone to show up and tell them their anger was righteous.
"Give it up," the announcer's voice rang out over the crowd, "for your hero — your savior — Amon!"
He walked to the stage as though he had all the time in the world.
Korra had expected many things from the man who had declared war on bending. She had expected someone loud, someone theatrical, someone who performed conviction the way an actor performed grief. What she had not expected was this quietness — the absolute, centered calm of a man who had stopped needing to convince himself of anything a very long time ago. The white mask gave nothing away. The dark hood framed it like a painting. He moved to the front of the stage and took the microphone without ceremony.
"My quest for equality," he said, "began many years ago."
She listened. She hadn't wanted to — had planned to let it wash over her, background noise while she planned how to reach Bolin. But he was a careful speaker. Precise. Every word placed like a stone, each one building toward a structure that was impossible to ignore once you saw it taking shape.
He talked about the farm. The fire bender who had extorted his father. The night his family was taken from him. The scar beneath the mask. And as he talked, Korra looked around at the faces in the crowd — at the men and women who were nodding, or still, or quietly crying — and felt something complicated move through her that she didn't have a word for yet.
Then his voice shifted.
"As I'm sure many of you are aware," he said, "the Avatar has recently arrived in Republic City."
The sound that came from the crowd was like a pressure change.
Korra pulled her scarf higher. Beside her, Mako very slightly angled his body to block her from the nearest cluster of people.
"If she were here," Amon continued, "she would tell you that bending brings balance to the world." A pause, perfectly measured. "This is not the case. Bending has been the cause of every conflict in every era."
She pressed her teeth together and said nothing. The air around her hands had gotten slightly warmer.
"The Spirits have spoken. They have chosen me. They have granted me the power to take a person's bending away." Another pause. "Permanently."
Korra's breath stopped.
That wasn't possible. That wasn't something a person could do. Only the Avatar — only someone in the Avatar State, drawing on the full accumulated power of every life she had ever lived — could reach into the spiritual connection between a person and their bending and sever it. It was not a technique. It was barely even an act. It was more like asking the world to unmake something, and the world agreeing.
No masked man should have been able to do that.
"I know many of you have been wondering," Amon said, "what the Revelation is." He turned toward the side of the stage. "You are about to find out."
Lightning Bolt Zolt was not a man who frightened easily — that much was clear from the swagger in his step, even with his hands bound behind him, even on a stage in front of hundreds of his enemies. He looked Amon up and down with the contempt of a man who had survived worse.
"You're gonna regret this, pal."
"In the interest of fairness," Amon said calmly, "I'll allow you to fight."
Zolt fought. Korra had to give him that. Streams of fire, arcs of lightning — he threw everything he had at the masked figure, and Amon moved through all of it with a dancer's economy, never once meeting force with force, only redirecting, stepping, flowing. When he finally got behind Zolt and brought him to his knees it looked almost gentle.
He pressed his thumb to the center of Zolt's forehead.
The lightning died first. Then the fire — guttering out like a candle in a sudden wind, smaller and smaller until there was nothing left, not even the warmth of an ember. Zolt slumped forward and stayed there for a moment with his head bowed.
Then he stood and tried to bend.
Nothing.
He tried again.
Nothing.
"What did you do to me?" His voice had changed. Something had gone out of it.
"Your fire bending," Amon said, "is gone. Forever."
The crowd's response was something Korra would spend a long time trying to forget — that single unified surge of sound, equal parts horror and triumph, that came from hundreds of people watching a man lose a fundamental piece of himself and not agreeing on whether that was a tragedy.
More benders were dragged onto the stage.
She found Bolin's face in the line. Terrified and trying very hard not to show it, which meant he was more terrified than he looked.
There. She was already moving.
"Wait." Mako caught her arm. His eyes swept the stage, the wings, the pipes running along the left-side wall. "There. Steam pipes. If you can build enough pressure—"
"It'll give us a window." She had already seen it.
"Korra." She was about to go. He stopped her with just her name, and when she looked back, there was something in his face that had nothing to do with tactics. "Good luck."
"Same to you," she said.
The maintenance corridor behind the stage was dark and smelled of rust and old water. Korra moved quickly, keeping low, her hands finding the nearest wheel valve by touch. She turned it. Steam hissed out in a thin, angry stream that curled against the ceiling — not enough.
She moved to the next one.
"Hey." The guard's voice came from her right, sudden and aggressive. "What are you doing back here?"
She turned. The man was already moving, and she had half a second to choose between fight and misdirection — she tried misdirection.
"I just got a little lost." She spread her hands, all innocence. "I was looking for the—"
He swung a wrench at her head.
She ducked and the wrench punched through a pipe behind her, opening a ragged hole. Steam screamed out through the gap. The man stared at what he'd done, and Korra used the distraction to put her palm flat against the pipe's valve and redirect the released pressure — pushing it sideways, feeding it back into the system, forcing it to build.
More. Not enough yet.
She needed more than hissing pressure. She needed a rupture.
She thought of Mako. Of the line of benders on that stage and Bolin's face near the end of it. She grabbed the smaller handle beside the main valve and turned it hard in the wrong direction, feeling the pipes shudder against the wall.
Then she heard something, on the other side of the thin partition: the sharp, quick sound of blades punching through metal.
Three precise impacts. Three new cracks in the same set of pipes, from the outside.
What—
Through a gap in the wall boards, she caught a glimpse of crimson hair. Of silver armor. Of Sarai pressing close to the wall with three of her blades already drawn back, and then glancing through the gap straight at Korra with an expression that said, clearly: hurry up.
Korra almost laughed.
She earthbent.
The floor lurched. The pipes buckled. The guard went sideways into the wall and stayed there. And the steam — all of it, from every compromised joint and cracked weld and punched-through gap — erupted outward at once, flooding the chamber and rolling through the vents into the main hall in a white, impenetrable cloud.
◈
On stage, everything went to chaos at exactly the right moment.
The crowd surged. The equalist guards moved to contain the exits. Amon stood in the rushing white fog and turned his masked face slowly toward the source, and whatever was behind that white porcelain expression, it did not look surprised.
He was almost calm about it.
Bolin was not. He was the last bender left on the stage and the first one moving when the steam hit, scrambling sideways with his feet barely under him, looking desperately for somewhere to go.
What found him instead was a hand on the back of his collar.
Amon turned at the sound.
The figure that had stepped onto the stage from the left wing was not large, but he occupied space the way a fire occupies a hearth — specifically, completely, with the suggestion that it could be much bigger if it chose. The hood was already back. The blue hair, the scarred face, those burning eyes — Korra, watching from the edge of the dispersing crowd, felt the bottom of her stomach drop when she recognized him.
Odyn.
He had Amon's arm in one hand. He was holding it with no particular effort, as though restraining a grown man was simply a matter of deciding to. His eyes were lit from within — literally, she realized, the orange burning brighter than it had been, like someone had turned a lamp up. It didn't look like reflection. It looked like he was the source.
"Go ahead," he said, and his voice carried over the crowd noise without being raised. It was the voice of someone who had practiced being heard without needing to shout. "Try and take my bending. Human scum."
The hall went quieter than it had any right to.
Amon looked at him. Behind the mask, something shifted.
"Those eyes." His voice was careful. Studying. "I see. You're one of them. You're one of the Forsaken."
"A race of people," Odyn said, and his voice had gone flat and cold, "once regarded as the strongest benders alive." The light behind his eyes intensified. "You talk about suffering. About what it means to be hated for what you are." His jaw was set hard. "How would you like to be hated simply for existing? Your people know nothing of that kind of pain. Nothing."
Amon regarded him for a long, level moment.
Then, from somewhere else in the smoke-filled room, the sound of Korra's bending tearing the last of the pipes apart shook the walls — and the crowd's controlled panic became a rout. People moved for the exits in every direction. Guards shouted. The steam rolled.
Amon disengaged from Odyn's grip with one precise, economical movement, and stepped backward into the white fog as cleanly as a stone dropping into water. In two seconds he was invisible. In three he was gone.
Odyn stood alone on the stage, the steam parting around him, his hand still extended where the other man had been.
From the side of the stage, Sarai's voice cut through the noise. "Brother. Now."
He moved.
Outside, the brothers made it to the service exit one step ahead of pursuit — and stopped that particular step short when an equalist guard came off the roof above them, crackling tonfas first.
The ladder electrified. Bolin and Mako fell.
Bolin was on his feet first and earthbending before he'd fully found his balance, chunks of the street rising and launching toward the guard in a rapid, uneven volley. The man wove through each one with a fluency that made it look choreographed, closing the gap between them in a straight line while Bolin scrambled backward, and then the tonfas found their mark and Bolin folded with a cry and went down hard.
Mako had his fire up before his brother hit the ground.
He was good. Fast, controlled, with a fire-bender's instinct for pressure and angle. The streams he sent were tight and well-aimed. They connected with nothing. The guard moved like smoke through every attack — lateral, compact, tireless — and then he was inside Mako's reach and the tonfas cracked against his chest and the fire went out.
Both brothers lay on the broken pavement, dazed.
The guard straightened. He looked down at them, and what was in his face was not cruelty but something worse — the calm indifference of someone who did not consider this a contest.
"Benders," he said, "need to understand something. There is no place for you in this world anymore."
He raised the tonfas.
A blade appeared at his throat.
Not swung. Not thrown. Simply there, held in a steady grip by a hand that had materialized out of the dark beside him as silently as a thought, the edge close enough to his neck that any movement would answer its own question.
"I wouldn't be so sure about that," Sarai said.
The man froze.
"Move," she said quietly, "and you lose your head. I want to be clear about that."
He didn't move. For three seconds he was perfectly still, weighing options, and then he felt the vibration in the ground beneath his feet — the deep, building rumble of something coming up fast — and his body made the decision before his mind could, throwing itself sideways on pure instinct.
He barely cleared it.
The spike of earthbent street that erupted from the pavement would have pinned him flat. Instead it clipped him on the way up and plastered him against the far wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He slid down it and didn't get up.
Korra lowered her leg from the kick that had driven the earth upward, exhaling.
"I wouldn't count us out just yet," she said.
Mako grabbed her arm and pulled himself to his feet. Bolin was already up — barely, swaying, but up. The three of them turned for the street and found it blocked.
More chi-blockers. Eight, ten, a dozen, spreading out to cut off every exit. They had the calm efficiency of people who had done this before and expected it to go a certain way, and watching them close in, Korra felt the cold truth of it settle over her: she was still blocked. She couldn't bend. Mako and Bolin were half-wrecked. And there were too many of them.
Then Odyn came through the side door at a dead run.
He moved differently than anyone she had seen fight — differently than the chi-blockers, differently than Mako, differently than anyone she had trained with or against in the compound. There was nothing wasted in it. Each movement connected directly to the next, no preparation, no wind-up, as though his body simply translated intent into consequence without the intervening steps. The first two chi-blockers he hit went airborne. The next three he moved through like weather, redirecting their attacks with the backs of his hands and returning them tenfold.
Sarai was on his left flank, faster and lighter than him, her blades drawn and kept flat — she wasn't cutting, just redirecting, disarming, using the edges as levers to strip weapons and break grips and put people off-balance with half the effort it should have taken.
They worked together without speaking. Without even appearing to look at each other.
The chi-blockers kept coming.
Odyn stopped in the center of the street. He crossed his arms across his chest, went very still for exactly one breath, and then flexed — and the air around him detonated outward in a perfect dome, a wall of displaced atmosphere that hit the surrounding fighters simultaneously and sent every last one of them tumbling backward across the pavement.
The street went quiet.
"This way!" Sarai was already moving. "Come on — no time—"
Odyn turned, and his eyes swept the three of them — checking for damage, Korra realized, a fast triage — before he fell into step.
"Quickly," he said. "Avatar and friends."
Korra whistled for Naga.
The Polar Bear-dog came around the corner at a full run, ears flat, eyes bright. Korra and Mako vaulted onto the saddle. Naga caught Bolin by the shirt on the way past and he bounced along behind them, each impact punctuated by a pained yelp, until he managed to haul himself up.
The two mystery teens ran alongside — keeping pace with a Polar Bear-dog, Korra noticed, without any apparent effort — and then surged ahead, auras blazing into visibility around them like halos, and launched themselves into the dark at a speed that was not quite running and not quite flying and was its own thing entirely.
Behind them, Amon's voice drifted out from the chaos they'd left.
"Let them go."
A pause.
"The Avatar and the Forsaken are perfect examples. The city needs to see what's coming for those who resist us."
The night swallowed his words.
◈
Air Temple Island was quiet at this hour, the lights of the main house warm and low against the dark. Naga padded through the gate and stopped, and Korra sat on her back for a moment without moving, letting the adrenaline finish leaving her body.
The two mystery teens stood a few steps away. They had shed their dark hoods entirely now, and in the steady amber light of the house lamps they looked less like shadows and more like people — tired, alert, present.
The front door opened.
Tenzin came out in his sleeping robes, and the expression on his face cycled through relief, worry, and careful restraint in about three seconds. He looked at Korra. He looked at the two people with her. He clearly had a great number of questions, and he chose to start with the most important one.
"There you are. I was about to send a search party." He stepped down off the porch. "Are you all right, Korra?"
"No," she said flatly.
His expression shifted.
"I was at an Equalist rally," she said, swinging down from the saddle. "I saw Amon. I saw him do it, Tenzin — take a man's bending. Right in front of everyone." She heard her own voice and noticed it sounded steadier than she felt. "He just... pressed his thumb to his forehead, and it was gone."
Tenzin was quiet for a long moment. The composure he maintained was the kind built by decades of practice — the visible surface of a man trained to be unmoved. But she had known him long enough to read what was underneath it.
"Only the Avatar has ever possessed that ability," he said carefully.
"I know what's possible and what isn't." She met his eyes. "I'm telling you what I saw."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded — a short, sincere thing. "I believe you. Whatever this power is, however Amon has achieved it..." He exhaled through his nose. "It means this movement is more dangerous than we understood. No bender is safe."
"Ordinarily," came a voice from behind Korra. "That would be true."
Tenzin looked past her.
The two strangers were watching him with the particular attention of people who had just been evaluated and were now performing their own evaluation in return. The girl — the crimson-haired one — stood with her hands loose at her sides and her weapons sheathed, her mismatched armor catching the lamp light in dull silver gleams. The boy beside her was still.
"I'm curious," Tenzin said, with the diplomatic care of a man who had navigated a great many unusual social situations, "who is it that came home with you tonight, Korra?"
"They saved our lives," Korra said. "Twice, actually. This is—"
"We can introduce ourselves," the boy said. Not unkindly. Just with the directness of someone who preferred to speak for himself.
He reached up and caught the edge of his coat, and the motion seemed somehow deliberate — a small, conscious gesture of disclosure. He dropped the last of his traveling concealment, and in the full light of the lamps Tenzin could see him clearly for the first time: the dark skin and blue hair, the scarred face, the pointed ears, and those eyes.
Tenzin went very still.
"Those eyes," he murmured, almost to himself. "They seem... I can't explain it. I have never seen anyone like you before, and yet—"
"My name is Odyn Albanar." The boy's voice was even. "This is my sister, Sarai."
"Odyn. Sarai." Tenzin gathered himself. "It's a pleasure. And thank you — genuinely — for keeping Korra safe."
"Don't mention it." Sarai smiled. It transformed her face briefly, something warm arriving and departing quickly, like a ray of sun through cloud. "We were glad to help."
Odyn said nothing. He was watching Tenzin with an expression that was not unfriendly but was not warm either — the expression of a person who had learned to be measured about trust and hadn't been given a reason yet to revise that habit.
Tenzin looked at the two of them for a moment longer. Then, gently: "Forgive me for asking. But there's something about your features — about your eyes especially — that feels like it should mean something to me, and I can't place it. Have we—"
"Master Tenzin." Sarai's voice was careful. Practiced. The voice of someone who had delivered this particular piece of information many times and had learned to do it without apology, without drama, without bracing for the response. "I think perhaps it is because we are what your people call..." A small pause. "The Forsaken."
The word landed.
Korra saw Tenzin's expression change — not with revulsion, not with fear, but with the particular quality of a man who has just had a very large and complex puzzle piece placed in his hand and is trying to understand the shape of what it belongs to.
Odyn's jaw tightened.
"A vulgar term," he said, and his voice was flat — not angry, not pained, just stripped down to something beyond both. The voice of someone who had been called that word in many different tones, by many different mouths, and had put down the practice of reacting to it somewhere back along the road. "But accurate enough, I suppose."
He turned those burning eyes to Korra, and the flatness in his voice shifted into something harder and more direct.
"We'll help you," he said. "I want to be clear that this isn't charity. It isn't sentiment." His gaze moved briefly to Tenzin, then back. "If Amon wins — if the Equalists are allowed to strip bending from the city and the world follows — then my people lose what little standing we have left. The humans who tolerate us now won't for long if they think bending itself is something to be extinguished." A pause. "So don't misread this. I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it because it happens to serve the same purpose."
Silence.
Korra looked at him for a long moment — at the scars on his face, at the way he stood with his arms loose at his sides and his weight slightly forward, at the controlled burn of those eyes that had not yet once looked away from hers.
You'll meet Dad sooner than you think, her daughter had told her.
She thought about that for exactly one second, and then she put it away.
"I'll take it," she said.
Something moved across his face — quickly, contained — and then it was gone, back behind the same careful neutrality. But she had seen it. Something that might have been the very beginning of something else, too new yet to name.
Sarai, standing slightly behind her brother, caught Korra's eye and smiled with just the edge of her mouth. A private, knowing smile — the kind that suggested she had information Korra didn't, and found that quietly delightful.
Korra looked away before she could think too hard about what that meant.
Outside, the bay lay dark and wide, and Republic City glittered beyond it — enormous, restless, full of things that were coming that none of them could entirely see yet. The lights moved on the water in long, broken lines.
The Avatar was seventeen years old. Her bending was still blocked, and her hands still carried the ghost-sensation of the emptiness where it should have been. She was standing in the lamplight of a house that wasn't hers yet, looking at a boy she had met twice and somehow already knew.
Somewhere in a future she hadn't lived yet, three children were waiting to be born.
For now, the night was ending. And tomorrow was already on its way.
◈
To be continued...
Next chapter — Chapter Two: Voice in the Night — Odyn's Grudge.

Ending Theme — Haruka Kanata (Bleach Ed 28)
Visuals: The screen dims to black.
Then, from that darkness, a single guitar note rings out — clean and unhurried, hanging in the silence for just a moment before the full melody arrives. It is not a sad sound, nor a triumphant one. It is the sound of distance. Of something far away that you are already moving toward, even if you don't yet know it.
The first image rises slowly from the black, like a photograph developing in still water.
Korra.
She stands at the edge of Air Temple Island's rocky shore, her back to us, facing the city across the bay. Her hair is down — loose, the way it almost never is — and the wind off the water moves it gently. Republic City glows on the horizon, enormous and indifferent and full of everything she came here to face. She does not look afraid. She does not look ready, either. She looks like someone standing at the beginning of something, feeling the full weight of it for the first time, and choosing to stay standing anyway.
She turns her head slightly, as if she heard something.
She almost smiles.
Mako.
A quieter image. He stands in the empty pro-bending gym after practice — alone, as he so often seems to be when no one is watching him. His jacket is draped over the railing beside him, and he is leaning on it with both hands, staring at the floor. The city outside the high windows is going dark. He looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with the training. He looks like someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long that he no longer notices the weight, only the absence of it on the rare occasions it's set down.
He straightens. Rolls his shoulders.
Picks the jacket back up and walks toward the door.
Bolin.
He is grinning — of course he is — and Paboo is draped across the back of his neck like a living scarf, both of them appearing entirely at home in the chaos of a Republic City side street. He is mid-laugh at something, head thrown back, one arm windmilling with the particular exuberance of a person who has decided that enthusiasm is a reasonable response to most situations. The people passing around him glance over and can't quite help smiling too.
Then he looks directly ahead, and for just a moment the grin softens into something more earnest.
He waves at someone we can't see.
Sarai.
She sits alone on a rooftop somewhere above the city, her armor set aside, her crimson hair pulled back loosely. Her mismatched eyes — one blue, one orange — are open and still, watching the Republic City skyline with an expression that is harder to read than her brother's: not cold, not warm, somewhere in between, like a fire banked for the night rather than extinguished. One of her blades rests across her knees. Her hands are folded over it, at rest.
She inhales. Exhales slowly.
Something in her face shifts — resolve, or grief, or the particular quiet of someone who has made a decision they intend to keep.
Odyn.
Last.
He stands with his arms crossed, slightly apart from everything else — the city below him, the sky above, the whole sprawling bright mess of Republic City at night spread out in every direction. The wind moves his long blue hair. His eyes are visible even at this distance, that burning orange-flame color that seems to belong to something older than the face wearing it.
He is not looking at the city. He is looking at something further away than that. Something the camera cannot follow.
For a long moment, he is entirely still.
Then he closes his eyes.
The five images drift into frame together at last — Korra at the water's edge, Mako at the gym door, Bolin on the crowded street, Sarai on the rooftop, Odyn above the city — each one separate, each one alone in their corner of this world they have only just begun to share.
The melody reaches its last measure.
The screen does not go to black all at once. Instead, each image fades in sequence — one by one, like lanterns going out at the end of a long night — until there is only darkness left, and in the darkness, only the final note of the guitar, held for just a breath longer than it needs to be.
Then that too, fades.
And the only thing left is the title, in clean and simple text:
Flame Eyed Bender
Hey guys, hopefully you enjoyed the chapter! As you can tell Odyn reluctantly agrees to help the avatar to fend off Amon. His personality will be explored the deeper into the story we go. And I figured it'd be a little different having Korra see an encounter in a dream first before it happened. If you've read the title, you should know that this is and Oc (Odyn) x Korra story. Sorry to those who thought this might be a Korrasami fic, but I don't write those kind of stories. Nothing against those who do, just... not my preference personally.
There's two more main oc's I'll be introducing in the coming chapters but that's it. If there are any others they'll just be side or supporting characters. I like to blend dragon ball and Black Clover elements into my stories sometimes and this is one such story. Admittedly it's more of on the Dragon Ball z and Super side of things though lol. If you've read my other story called Flame and Crimson, you should know what Odyn's race is already. But for those who didn't I will explain inside the story soon. This was an idea I had in my head for a story, but we'll see how long I have the inspiration for this story.
Now.. a few polls!
Since Jinora, and Ikki are older in this story, who should they end up with?
For Jinora:
1. Stick to cannon and leave her with Kai
2. Baron (Oc will be introduced in upcoming chapters)
3. Roy (Oc that was mentioned in the chapter)
For Ikki:
1. Baron (oc)
2. Roy
3. Zero (oc side character)
Who should Mako end up with?
1. Sarai
2. Asami
3. Khanna (oc who will be introduced)
Who should Sarai end up with?
1. Mako
2. Bolin
3. Milo (later on obviously lol)
How should Odyn and Korra's relationship develop?
1. Slow and steady
2. At a reasonable pace
3. Start as enemies, then grow closer as the story progresses.
4. Quick but not too quick.
That's all for the polls for now, feel free to vote for an option in each of the polls!