A story written by Sara, based on the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, about a Dalit girl from South Asia—Vaidehi—who becomes a master of Shastar Vidya.
CHAPTER 1
The forest did not belong to the Fire Nation.
Zuko knew it the second his feet left the ash-covered path for the greenish, spongy undergrowth, where light no longer traveled in a straight line, and silence wasn’t emptiness… it pulsed. The mist was thick enough to drink.
It wound around his boots like it was alive, fading the world into gray blobs of branch and stone.
He lost the bounty. Again. His arm burned where the flames had kissed him wrong… burned by his own bending, again.
Uncle had told him not to chase soldiers this far into the Earth Kingdom borderlands.
“There are places,” Iroh had said, “where even war forgets to follow.” Zuko hadn’t listened; he rarely did.
Now he staggered through the woods on his own. Wounded, breathing shallow, anger subdued by pain.
Then something moved. Not a twig, not an animal. A hum. A noise without breath or footfall. It was above him, around him. A vibration of metal, like a sword remembering its name.
Zuko turned at the wrong time.
A sheen of silver whipped through his visual field. A ring, perfectly round, spinning faster than thought. It touched his ear, cutting only air… but with intention.
Not an assault. A warning.
He slipped into a defensive stance, drawing his broadswords. “Show yourself!”
Mist thickened. Then she emerged.
A girl… barefoot, dark-skinned, draped in robes he couldn’t quite place in any nation Zuko recognized. Her salwar swayed in the damp wind, worn red with gold thread hanging from the hem. On her back: a leather harness holding multiple circular weapons. Chakkars, he would learn later. Her eyes never left him. Not harsh. Not cruel. Just… watching.
Her head tilted slightly, as if she were a bird. Her hands were wrapped up tightly in linen strips, stained with herbs and charcoal.
She didn’t look like she was armed, but Zuko was certain she was much more dangerous than she appeared.
“You followed the ash,” she said. Her voice sounded wholly even. Low. As if repeating something, it was hardly even remembered.
Zuko clenched his jaw. “You could have killed me.”
She blinked once. “That wasn’t the lesson.”
“What lesson?!”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she knelt. Slowly. Intentionally.
She reached into her satchel, retrieved a pouch, and set it between them. She unwrapped it. Inside the pouch was a folded cloth…and inside that cloth a dark green salve. With one hand, she scooped some salve and extended the hand toward him.
He did not move. So, she placed the salve gently on the flat stone and made a symbol beside the salve in the earth with her forefinger. She drew a looping script he did not recognize. Three strokes, two arcs. A ring inside a flame.
Then, she was up. She turned and faded into the fog without another word, the chakkar on her back whispering as she disappeared.
Zuko remained transfixed on the mark she made far after she had gone. Something about it tugged at the edges of his memory, the same way a long-forgotten song does when it bubbles up from the background of an ethereal dream.
The salve’s scent was earthy and burnt sweet…tumeric and smoke. He rubbed a healthy portion of it over the burn on his arm despite the advice against it. The sting transformed to a dull throbbing immediately.
Who the hell even is she?
He followed her. Not because he felt like he was obligated to…there was no bounty for this girl. Not because he was afraid of her…she already weaponized him and spared his life. No, he was following her out of something more foreign.
Curiosity. And shame.
He found her again, the sliver of sunlight stretched into dusk.
She stood in an opening, with trees leaning slightly inward as if to listen. Her arms out, one hand holding a curved blade … the kirpain … and the other one balancing a spinning chakkar above her palm in a slow revolution.
She moved like clockwork, like a ritual. Not sparring. Not meditating, remembering. Zuko was crouched behind the trunk of a large cedar, watching. Her movements cycled: sweep, turn, pause, bow.
Every time the chakkar came to a stop she muttered something under her breath and then picked back up again. It wasn’t Fire Nation tongue. Not Earth. He caught snippets … shabad … seva … khalsa … something foreign, yet spoken with a sacred cadence.
Then, she stopped.
Without turning, she said, “Hiding is a way to dishonor your ancestors.”
Zuko flinched, then stepped out into the light. “You speak to me like you know me.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But I know your kind.”
“My kind?”
“Those of you who confuse power for inheritance.”
Zuko bristled and clenched his fists. “You don’t know anything about me.”
She turned to look at him. The chakkar came to rest in her hand.
“Then tell me, exile,” she said softly, “what are you here to burn?”
Zuko had no response. He never did, not when people asked him why he pursued the Avatar, not when Uncle talked about destiny, not when he looked at his reflection in the water and only saw the scar of his father staring back at him.
He hated that she could see straight through him. Hated even more that she was unimpressed at what she saw.
She approached. Not with caution, with intent.
“I saw you bend fire earlier. Wildly. You were hurt.”
“I misfired.”
“No,” she said. “You betrayed your element.”
That hurt worse than the burn.
“What do you understand about firebending?”
“Enough to notice a lack of rhythm.”
Zuko was left speechless. She pointed to her own body.
“I was moving in patterning. In rhythm. Not to control…but to listen. That was how I lived through what I probably shouldn’t have even touched.”
He frowned. “What does that mean?”
“I was born into a caste that was historically even regarded as polluting…or even just my shadow.” She was quieter now, but she didn’t break her gaze. “My ancestors were beaten for touching iron. My teacher put a chakkar in my hand, and told me to let my defiance be circular…without end.”
Zuko didn’t understand everything, but he heard enough to feel something twist in his chest. Her strength came not from domination, but from refusal. Refusal to disappear.
He looked down. “Why did you not kill me?” She seemed taken aback by the question.
“Why would I waste a death upon someone still unlearning?”
Then she bowed…but not to him; she bowed to the earth between them. She took her kirpān out again and pressed the blade lightly to her forehead. She whispered again the same phrase she had uttered before but this time slower, and clearer.
“Deg Tegh Fateh.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“ ‘Victory through service and sword.’ The sword must never forget the bowl.” She left him to ponder that.
Later, as darkness arrived, and Zuko was crouched near a dying fire, he found himself imitating her motions with a stick. He didn’t know why.
Something was soothing about the movement: sweep, turn, pause.
It was like a breath he had forgotten how to take. His fire flared once. Then coughed.
The girl in the fog haunted him- not like a ghost, but like a mirror. For the first time in his exile, Zuko wondered if there were forms of strength that hadn’t been named for him.
CHAPTER 2
Zuko reentered the clearing at sunrise.
He hadn’t intended to. But there was something in his body that acted before his mind could intervene… just as fire is drawn to spread, and like shame that follows the scent of an action uninvited.
She was already there.
Vaidehi stood in the middle, bowing toward the east with sword in hand and palm facing the sky. Her breath was moving in cycles… 4 counts in, 4 counts out… like the cycle of a forge.
Zuko stepped outside.
She didn’t flinch. Did not acknowledge him at all. Instead, she continued the breath prayer until she lifted her head.
“I figured you would come.”
Zuko narrowed his eyes. “You lured me.”
“Not lured, you followed.”
He blushed and said, “A lesson, you keep talking in riddles.”
“And you keep mistaking a lesson for a fight.”
She reached behind her, retrieving a second chakkar…smaller than the last, cobalt blue on the edges.
She set it down flat on the ground between Zuko and her, along with her kirpān, and drew out a third weapon Zuko hadn’t yet seen. It was a bow. Not elaborate…simple wood, polished but worn. Instead of arrows, she took elegance from a small pouch and, with the most calm and sweet dexterity, strung the tīr kamān. No quiver. No tips. Just thread and air.
Zuko frowned. “Wait. You’re actually not going to fight me?”
Vaidehi: “This isn’t a duel.”
Zuko: “What is it, then?”
She stepped back. She gestured at the weapons they had between them.
Vaidehi: “Fatehnāmā.”
Zuko blinked. “What?”
Vaidehi: “A crossing ritual. We spar not to win, but to witness.”
“To witness what?” Her eyes softened as if she were seeing someone else behind his scar.
Vaidehi: “What is left when you let go of all the ideas of proving yourself that you are worth being?”
The bow was hers from the start. All the retracting arrows! What a mere notion. Strands of thatened silk space were established over by her, giving Zuko a transcending-from-are-you-really-able-to-mean-beat-bottom-its-own-chimes existence!
Every act that she performed followed every breath he could hear. Every pause reverberated with the last.
Zuko circled cautiously. “This does not make sense.”
“Correct,” she said. “Because you were trained to make war with your fists. I was trained to make memory with my body.”
She turned sharply…not with aggression but precision. The chakkar flew from her hand in a perfect arc…not toward him, but around him, touching tumbled soil in a low sweep. A test. Not a threat.
“Defend yourself,” she said, with a kind tone but firm.
Zuko hesitated for a moment and then saw the wisdom in raising his swords.
In three steps she crossed over to him…kirpān in one hand, chakkar in the other…and struck without striking. Each contact was redirected at the last instant, landing with the magnitude of intention rather than injury.
Zuko parried. He was confused. “Why are you holding back?!”
“I’m not,” she said, sidestepping him.
“I’m telling you who you are.” He swung wide, and fire flickered over one of his blades.
She winced. And pulled back.
“Too loud,” she said. “Too sharp.”
Zuko hesitated. Vaidehi crouched and touched the soil with two fingers. Her voice softened.
“Your bending screams even when it’s whispering. Every time you have tried to control the flame, overlistening to it, you burn yourself.” Zuko stumbled back and panted. His fire flickered again in his stalking fists.
He hated how she moved without heat. She disarmed him without humiliation.
He growled. “Stop pretending like you know me.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But I recognize fear masquerading as honor.”
They both started over. She walked slowly and deliberately back toward the circle. This time, she handed him one of her chakkars.
He looked at it as if it were forbidden. “I don’t know how to use this.”
“Then start the way I did,” she said. “Mistakenly.”
Zuko laughed dryly. “You think this is funny?”
“No,” she said, without a smile. “I think starting over is sacred.”
They turned in circles again, but slowly this time.
She mirrored his stance, instigating his arms with a ghostly touch. No contact at all, if not necessary.
When he produced fire too near to her face, she flinched, shoulders tightening.
“Too loud,” she repeated.
Zuko held still. “You said that earlier. About my fire.”
“Also, the sound.” He looked at her more closely, whenever she wasn’t moving his gaze fell on her leg as her fingers tapped lightly against her thigh.
Then, every movement of hers was in fours. Her eyes looked at patterns, with no expression.
“You don’t like loud sounds,” he said slowly. She didn’t reply, just nodded her head once.
“You follow a pattern,” he added. Nodded her head again.
“You’re …. different,” she finished, “Like rhythm in a world that wants noise.”
Vaidehi stepped back, lifted her bow again. This time, she did not use it at all. She just stood still with it cradled between both hands like a staff, with the silken thread draping down like breath.
“I do things to help me not hurt the world,” she said. “Ritual. Repetition. Breath. The bow is not always a weapon. Sometimes, it is an anchor.”
Zuko lowered his swords. He didn’t completely understand, but he could see how she held herself…not rigid, not loose, but like she was a container for something too big to let it all go at once.
Zuko: “Is this how you fight?”
Vaidehi: “This is how I fight back against someone trying to train me to fight.”
Zuko: “Who trained you?”
She hesitated. Her hands twisted the bow tightly.
Vaidehi: “A woman. A warrior of the castes you would call ‘untouchable.’ She found me hiding behind a burning temple. Taught me to name violence as a choice….and not a destiny.”
Zuko nodded slowly.
“The Fire Nation doesn’t believe that.”
“I know,” she said, eyes narrowing.
“So, of course, your bending looks like punishment.”
Zuko’s temper flared. “You don’t know anything about…!”
“About your father?” she interrupted. “I don’t have to. I’ve seen the shape of the wound he left.”
Zuko froze.
She lowered her weapon. Stepped closer. “You carry fire like it owes you something.”
He swallowed.
She added, quieter: “But fire owes no one. Not even a prince.”
They stared in silence. The sparring ended. Or, it had changed.
Zuko broke the silence. “Why teach me any of this?”
Vaidehi scratched her head. “Because you didn’t kill me when you had the chance. And because you need to learn a way of being that doesn’t end in ashes.”
Before she left, she made him do the sparring sequence three times. Slowly. With the chakkar. No bending. Just moving.
Sweep. Turn. Pause. Breathe.
She muttered the counts under her breath, echolalic, rhythmic. A tune only she could hear. He was matched.
Once.
Then again.
Then a third time.
When he stumbled, she said, “Good. Stumble. That means you didn’t lock into one of your old patterns.”
As the sun broke through the mist, Vaidehi crouched again, marking the soil with the same mark he recognised from the first day. Three lines. Two arcs. A circle in the flame.
He squatted next to her.
“What does that mark mean?”
She smiled a little. “It means ‘the fire in the circle.’ Where I’m from, we refer to it as a mark of remembrance, that no flame should exist without a center.”
Zuko watched it for a long time. “I think I want to learn.”
“Then stop trying to win,” she paused a little and looked at him and said, “and start listening.”
CHAPTER 3
Zuko never intended to follow her again.
But whenever it became silent after the morning drill, and she was no longer in the area, something eddied inside of him and wouldn’t allow for her to leave.
She moved east, her figure fading between birches and mist, skin bathed in warm sun, soles of her feet brushing downy needles.
Zuko picked his path carefully, careful not to crack branches and twigs underfoot. She didn’t turn around once.
She didn’t need to turn around. Her awareness seemed to be rippling in all directions, moving onward like a breath sustained through water. Eventually, the forest opened up.
What was laid before them was more than ruins…it was a forgotten temple; half-eaten by moss and forgotten memory.
Ivy vine climbed branches along broken pillars, and shades of stark, faded gold and indigo prayer flags hung from the rafters. And, in the centre of the wide, cold stone floor, like a triad assembly of prayer flags, was Vaidehi barefoot, encircled by children.
Zuko considered stepping backward.
He hadn’t seen that coming.
They were surrounding her. Six or seven, maybe more. Some stood tilted forward on one foot, focused, still. Some sat cross-legged, copying her methodical hand movements.
A girl with burn scars on her arm had a wooden staff with some carvings. A boy with a bent leg wove a couple of forms from seated stillness. They moved fluidly, rhythmically…the water memory still in them, in their bodies, incapable of being erased.
Vaidehi was leading them without being the leader; she moved with them, not ahead of them.
“Inhale…hold…exhale along with the turn.” She spoke with a soft and steady voice, as a metronome made of earth and care.
Watching from the shadow of a broken arch, Zuko sat.
She had never mentioned these kids. These students. But it really clicked everything into place…the methodicalness of her instruction, the orderliness of her routine, the way she never raised her voice. This wasn’t merely her practice. It was her life.
The children shifted into a new arrangement, the semi-circle, palms together. The youngest child, who was no more than six, stepped forward and whispered something into Vaidehi’s hand. She nodded, and very gently helped him raise what looked like a stick wrapped in cloth.
Then, she spoke a word that Zuko suddenly recognized.
“Fatehnāmā.”
The ritual was underway.
Not a spare. Not a battle. An interweaving.
Each child stepped forward and performed one brief sequence with the weapon they had used – staff, cloth chain, palm strikes, breath; Vaidehi matched each of the children’s movements exactly, never dominate. Each contact was iconic in nature; a shared weight, a mimicked action.
At the conclusion, each student touched their head with their fist in respect. Not to her…but to the earth that was in between them.
Zuko moved in a little closer; he could not be hidden anymore.
This time, Vaidehi saw him. There was no surprise reaction, just a turn of her head, followed by a gesture.
“If you’re going to linger,” she called out, “you may as well bow.”
Zuko felt himself stiffen with embarrassment, but took a step forward.
The children looked at him with naked curiosity. Some narrowed their eyes: one boy with pale vitiligo patches over his arms crossed them.
“Who’s that?” the boy asked.
Vaidehi did not say anything, allowing Zuko to step forward on his own terms.
“I’m… Zuko,” Zuko said uncertainly. “I’m learning.”
“You’re Fire Nation,” the boy said bluntly.
Zuko stiffened.
“Used to be.”
“Did you burn villages?”
“No,” he blurted out too quickly.
“I mean…my father…” The children stared. One girl with a limp twisted her lips.
“My cousin died in a Fire Navy raid.”
Zuko opened his mouth and shut it again. Vaidehi filled the void.
“This is what unlearning looks like,” she said quietly. “Not guilt. Not silence. Just remaining, long enough to be seen.”
Later, she sat with Zuko on the edge of the stone platform as the students practiced forms on their own. The smallest two were teaching each other how to draw circles in the dirt… chakkar practice, with sticks and leaves.
“This was a temple once,” she said. “Dedicated to resistance. Then came the raids. Some say the monks left. Some say they were taken. I stayed.”
Zuko looked at her. “You lived here?”
“Found refuge here,” she corrected.
“After I was cast out.”
“What happened?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Just traced her fingers along the edge of her kirpān, slowly, carefully. Then she spoke.
“I picked up a sword when I wasn’t supposed to. I was ten. The upper-caste elders said I had defiled the weapon. They broke my hands.”
Zuko’s breath caught. He turned to her sharply. “That’s…”
“They thought I would stop.” Her voice was soft. “But I learned to handle the blade differently. I trained through the pain. Until the act itself became something like a prayer.”
She paused, then added: “Until I didn’t want to fight anymore. I wanted to fight with.”
Zuko’s fingers curled instinctively around his swords. The memory of his exile…scar, shame, endless proving…flitted through him like a dying torch.
“Your students… are they all like you?”
“They are like themselves,” she said. “But yes. Many carry caste-marks. Others carry silence in their bodies. Some are neurodivergent like me. Some were cast out for something they couldn’t hide.”
He watched them, moving in awkward, beautiful patterns across the floor.
“This… isn’t what I thought martial arts were.”
“That’s because yours was made by Empire,” she said. “Ours was made by memory.”
She stood again. Clapped two times. The children moved in closer.
“This is Zuko,” she said. “He is learning how to hold fire gently.” A few giggles escaped from students, one waved their arms and pretended to firebend.
Vaidehi stepped in front of them, “Let him practice with you. Teach him to breathe. Start.”
Zuko stepped into the circle.
Initially, he noticed their movements were fragmented; too jagged and sharp, and performed. A girl named Lali, who walked with a cane and moved as still as possible, kindly tapped his arm.
“Don’t hurry the breath,” she said respectfully. “It’s not the move. It’s here.” He slowed down. He watched. He followed.
The forms moving in fours – , inhale, turn, bow, release. It wasn’t about strength. It was about timing. Patterns. Being a witness. The air felt different here. It didn’t feel heavy. It felt deliberate.
For the first time, Zuko didn’t feel like a bender. Or a prince. Or even an exile.
He just felt… human.
When night fell, Vaidehi lit a little lamp with oil in the very middle of the temple. The children were gone. Zuko remained, watching the angles of shadows and their patterns moving.
She handed him a piece of folded cloth… with the same stitching as the symbol she made in the dirt before.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A reminder,” she said. “That there are flames that heal, not destroy.” He accepted it and gripped it tightly in his hand. And then quietly, “I think I want to teach this, one day.”
Vaidehi looked at him, long and steady. “Then begin with learning to bow.”
CHAPTER 4
It started with smoke.
Not incense or sage, not petrichor or cedar; ash.
Vaidehi was the first to smell it. She halted mid-form, eyes narrowing, flaring nostrils.
Zuko glanced up from where he was practicing breathing drills with Lali and others. “What is it?”
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t have to.
In the next breath, the mountain wind changed…and a low, shrill sound tore through the forest edge. A signal horn.
Zuko, who had just been grateful to get a meaningful breath, stiffened.
Fire Nation. Bounty hunters.
They had found him.
“Take the kids to the root-cellar chamber,” Vaidehi said, calm but clipped. “Second level below the Temple. They know the way.”
Zuko moved on instinct, ushering the students through the dimly lit corridors; he felt his hands shaking. He knew what bounty hunters were capable of; they would have no issue burning this place to the ground.
But when he turned to them, Vaidehi was still standing in the center of the courtyard. She had not moved.
“You have to get into hiding,” he said. “They’ll kill you if they think you helped me.”
She shook her head. “This ground is sacred. We do not run from it.”
Zuko stared at her. “This isn’t a war zone. It’s a dojo.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And what we honour, we honour differently.”
They came through the trees in clusters of three…masked, flame-cuffed, arrogant. Their uniforms shimmered with imperial sigils. The lead one raised a flame to his palm, sneering as he spotted Vaidehi’s small frame.
“Step aside, girl,” he barked. “We’re here for the prince.”
She didn’t flinch.
“You step lightly, if you step at all,” she said, voice like flint. “This land remembers before you were born.”
He scoffed. “You really think you can hold us off with scraps and prayers?”
“No,” she replied. “But I can teach you how to fail with honor.”
Zuko stood next to her then, fists clenched, heat radiating from behind his ribs.
“Don’t kill,” she reminded him, without even looking.
“They may not know who they serve. But, we know what we protect.”
Zuko nodded. No killing. Defense, not domination. Not war.
They moved as one.
As the first blades fell, Vaidehi brought her kirpān into a wide, arcing salute…fatehnāmā…before the first blade even struck. She spun around the temple yard, deflecting blows with chakkar loops and breath-led pivots.
Zuko did not unleash a roar of fire…rather, he kept time with her. With her breath, Zuko’s fire bent. Rather than releasing a raging inferno, he released small, contained bursts…intentional… a wall of heat, not a sword of anger.
They had now become a choreography of resistance: fire and steel, rhythm and stillness.
They moved in presence, not pride.
One assailant sent a fireball to the door of the temple.
Zuko jumped forward… redirecting the fire with a slight twist of his wrist, spinning it harmlessly into the ground.
He did not yell.
He did not snarl.
He exhaled.
That was it. For the first time, his fire did not burn to prove anything. It burned to protect.
In the end, the bounty hunters retreated. They were not beaten… but bewildered. They thought they’d see chaos. Instead they saw clarity. Not violence… but ritual. Not vengeance… but presence.
And nothing disorients an empire more than people who refuse to behave like either victim… or victor.
Later, beneath the shattered moon, Vaidehi pushed a cloth-covered object into Zuko’s grasp.
It was a chakkar…polished, silver, small enough to wear at the hip.
Zuko blinked. “I don’t deserve this.”
She tilted her head. “It’s not a reward.”
He unwrapped it slowly. The edges were not sharpened. It was ceremonial…a piece for training, inscribed with small letters in Gurmukhi script.
“What does it say?” She smiled.
“’Let every circle return to stillness.’“
He held it for an eternity.
“You said you do not fight anymore,” he said quietly. “You fight with.”
She nodded.
He looked up. “Can I fight with you? Not just train?”
There was a moment’s hesitation from her and then she rested two fingers on the chakkar’s edge.
“You already have,” she said. “But the next fight isn’t here.”
He knew. It was somewhere else. With Aang. With the war. With himself.
As the sun rose, he packed the little he had.
The students bowed…not in worship, in acknowledgement. Joyful smiles from some. Lali gifted a spoon-shaped wooden flame, carved like a sleeping fox.
When he turned to Vaidehi, she was kneeling, tracing the breath of a pattern in the soil.
He bowed.
A full fatehnāmā. Not a fight, but a ceremony of departure. A sign of reverence between warriors…of breath together, not weapons joined. The kind of bow that said: I see you, and I let you see me.
When he rose, she was facing away…walking back toward the courtyard, chakkar shiny at her hip.
Zuko walked into the forest, the chakkar pressed to his chest.
He was not healed.
But he had seen a different way to burn.