There was a girl...young, barely past her first bloom...sunlight in the cold. A daughter of the Southern Water Tribe, where the snow met the sea and laughter cracked like ice in the air. Hama was her name, and she had been joy once. She had been hope. But joy is fragile in a world set on fire.
When the Fire Nation came, they did not come as conquerors. They came as devourers. They took everything from her. Her family, her tribe, her betrothed...all consumed in fire and smoke, their ashes scattered over a sea that no longer sang. They chained her like a beast and hauled her across the sea, burying her in a stone prison beneath the crust of a cruel empire. And there, in the bowels of the Fire Nation, where the walls sweated and stank of rot and despair, Hama began to wither.
Aeryn read this with hands trembling faintly, her breath slowing as the images painted themselves across her mind. She saw Hama curled into herself on a floor of stone, eyes fierce but afraid. The prison was not just made of walls...it was forged from silence, starvation, and the unbearable stench of burning hope. There was no sea here, no river, not even a drop to bend. The guards knew that. And they were not men of mercy. They were beasts in human skin.
They came in laughing, fire in their hands and something hungrier in their eyes. Aeryn swallowed thickly as she read the next lines, feeling her stomach turn. They pressed Hama into corners where the shadows couldn't even look. They seared her skin, tore her clothes, and violated the last sacred things she had left. Her body became a battleground, and her soul a scar.
Aeryn wanted to look away at this point. Her eyes stung, her vision blurred, but her hands refused to let go of the pages. Her breath hitched as she imagined the screams...not the loud ones, but the silent ones that sat in the throat like a swallowed knife. Hama fought with everything she had, trying to draw water from the sweat on their bodies, from the filth in the gutters, but fire devoured it, they held her down, until her voice gave out and she became a silence that bled. Her body bled, her soul fractured, and her cries died into the stone. And when dawn came, they left, satisfied.
And Hama lay half-dead on the floor, slick with her own blood, sweat, and silence.
She didn't move. Not for days. Not for weeks. Her limbs were too broken to crawl. Her soul too shattered to scream. Her face had forgotten how to cry. She watched the cracks in the stone above her, tracing the shape of monsters in them. She forgot the sound of her own name.
But then...horror took place on her flesh. her body betrayed her.
Her belly began to swell.
At first, she denied it. She could not fathom something living after what had happened. But her blood spoke the truth. Her bones whispered it. There was life in her womb. She was carrying the child of rape.
Aeryn let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. Her hands had moved without thought, clutching her own stomach as if to ward off the echo of that pain. Hama had denied it at first, refused to believe that anything could grow in a place so soaked in death. But her body told the truth. Her blood betrayed her. A child had taken root...a child born of violence and seeded in agony. Not love. Never love.
Hatred became Hama's second heartbeat. She tried everything to rid herself of the life inside her. She starved, she threw herself against the walls, she clawed at her belly until blood slicked her fingers. But the child clung to life like rot clings to damp wood. It would not die.
The day it was born, it came with a storm of agony. She bit through the pain in silence, limp on the floor, the blood pooling beneath her more familiar than breath. The baby came wailing, small and pink and screaming. She turned her head away, sickened by the sound. But when she looked...something twisted inside her.
The baby's eyes were wide open. And they pulsed.
Aeryn flinched as the description seared into her mind. Veins throbbed beneath the newborn's translucent skin, not with weakness, but with something unnatural. Something aware. Power hummed beneath its flesh. Not human. Not innocent. It was a mirror, showing her everything the Fire Nation had done to her, carved into muscle and blood. Rage rose in Hama like floodwater. Baby was now twisting into something strange. She crawled toward the child, trembling, her hand stretched out not in welcome, but in judgment. But just as her fingers hovered over the tiny throat, the cell door slammed open.
A guard stepped in. His eyes widened. He shouted. And before she could react, he snatched the child from the floor.
"No!" she screamed. "No, give it back! Give it back to me!"
Aeryn's chest ached as she imagined the scream Hama let loose...not one of sorrow, but of fury. She hadn't wanted the baby back to love it. She had begged for it so she could kill it. But the door slammed shut, and the child, was lost to her forever.
Something in Hama shattered.
She collapsed in the corner, her cries silent, her throat raw. She sat in blood, shaking, a thing unmade. She no longer knew if she was human. The image of the infant's flickering veins, its pulsing flesh, haunted her. Day after day, she saw it. Its body twisting unnaturally as if the threads of its muscles answered to something else. Something darker.
And then, one night, a rat scurried across the floor.
It was nothing. Small, twitching, insignificant. But Hama's gaze latched onto it, unblinking. Something inside her...somewhere beneath the grief, deeper than pain...focused. She didn't raise her hands. She didn't chant or breathe hard. She simply reached. Into the stillness. Into the blood.
The rat twitched.
Its back arched, legs spasming. It staggered sideways, confused and trembling. Then scurried away, half-bent and broken.
Aeryn sat frozen, her hands clenched on the page. Her skin prickled. It was not joy Hama felt then. Not even vengeance. It was control. Cold and sharp and absolute.
And it changed everything. She started to practice on rats to hone her skills.
Then after years when she finally thought she was ready enough, she carried out her plan. That day when the guards returned, the laughter in their throats turned to coughs. Limbs jerked. Bodies twisted. And the fire in their palms sputtered as they reached for her and found their own blood working against them. Hama didn't scream. She didn't rage. She simply stared...and bent.
The cell had become a womb for vengeance.
The first bloodbend was not a weapon. It was a scream.
A scream that shattered a rat's spine. A scream that snapped a man's wrist in half. A scream that would one day become a legacy.
They called it evil.
But Aeryn, her face pale and tear-streaked, reading the words soaked in memory and madness, could not find the strength to call it anything at all.
Because for Hama, it had not been born from darkness. It had been born from survival.
Aeryn was weeping by the time she reached that part. Not gentle tears, not quiet sobs, but aching, breathless cries that clawed from her throat like smoke from fire. Her hands gripped the edges of the book as if it might anchor her in a sea that threatened to pull her under. She couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. The horror of it pulsed in her blood.
This woman... this broken soul...was not a villain. Not a witch. She was a wound that never scabbed.
Aeryn wiped her tears with the back of her hand, smearing them across her cheek as her body trembled. The image of Hama lying half-dead on the floor, her power birthed in agony, haunted her like a ghost pressed behind her eyes. And the child...gods, the child. Taken. Perhaps alive. Perhaps twisted into the same empire that had ripped the mother open to begin with.
Aeryn pressed her forehead to the book, sobbing soundlessly.
She felt rage then.
Not just pity, not sorrow...but fury. A bone-deep, soul-wringing rage that tasted like iron and fire. That woman in the stone pages wasn't some dusty myth.
The voices in the wall had not been echoes.
They were screams, sealed in time, begging to be heard.
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