The Eyes of The Goddess (rated PG-13)

[lisana]

Hey, I just joined this forum and this is my first major fanfiction. Please leave me a message telling me what you think!

(Rated PG for violence)

IN THE BEGINNING....

Kira collapsed in the mud.
She let her tiredness bring her down. She was too tired to fight any more. She knew now that her pleas, her defiance, her running were all pointless.
She knew that she had no right to demand the life she should have had, the life she was born to. She was too frail to fight for that, and she knew it.
She knew she couldn’t risk bringing down more innocent people, risking their lives for her own safety. People that might one day help her daughter.
Kira gazed at the sleeping child in her arms. A lock of her own black hair had twisted over her daughter’s face, almost as if to protect her from the world. She remembered Lisana’s birth – her baby’s tightly closed mouth and bluish lips. Her daughter had clung to life that day, clung to her place in the world. Lisana was a fighter. Lisana could fight for what she was born to. If Kira could give her the chance.
Her daughter’s future lay in her hand, in the carved amulet she held. Her long pale fingers played over its surface, its smooth dull black stone flashing with a glint of fiery red. The teardrop-shaped flame in her hand seemed to come alive with flashing colour.
Kira smiled. She could only see the colour with one amber eye. The other was blind, blind since birth. Her daughter hadn’t suffered the same bad luck. Kira remembered seeing her daughter’s burning blue eyes for the first time, blue as the heart of a flame. She’d seen them only once before, and that was on the walls of the old Temple of Ishtar, when she was six.
They had frightened her, because they were neither hers nor Kyito’s.
She had nothing to remind her of Kyito, nothing to hold and dream with. She remembered him, angry, ashamed at the slaughter of his people and the way he had to remain in hiding. They had felt so much alike.
Kira smiled bitterly. How the mighty have fallen, she thought to herself. She had fallen, fallen from the Fire Nation nobility as her mother had before her. She hadn’t learnt how Kiret had died until the word had started to circle amongst the Fire Nation nobles. The rumour of the woman who had waded into the sea, boots filled with stones, had intrigued her until she heard the woman’s name. She’d been sixteen.
How had she stopped herself from pulling out the stones? Kira had no idea. She only knew that she, her mother and Kyito were fallen.
Kyito’s death was a blur of memory to her. A smear of smoke, a rush of heat, the lurid colours of the flames as they rushed towards him, her flight out of the temple before she could see the charred corpse. She’d known straight away that he was dead. She felt no remorse; Kyito would have wanted her to keep his daughter alive.
Lisana had been unborn then, a stirring of heat inside her, but even then she’d known that her child had to live.
‘Live, Lisana,’ she whispered, amid the soft sound of rain on mud and water trickling between branches. ‘Hold on to whatever you have, tight, or my cousin will try to take it from you.’
Her cousin. Ozai. She remembered him, dark and faceless in the shadowed Air temple, Kyito’s anger, the blur of smoke, the roar of heat as she ran outside. She thought of her tears. How could he be so heartless? she had cried to the people of Ba Sing Se. He has a son. How could he kill my lover, the father of my child?
Silly questions. Kira smiled and kissed her daughter’s frail, almost hairless head, her lips wet with rain and earth.
‘My Lisana,’ she whispered. ‘You will bring him down, him and all his line, and take back what is ours.’
She lay in the mud in the forest outside the walls of Ba Sing Se and let the amulet carry her to the other world.

If Kira concentrated, she could feel herself sleeping in the other world – her home world. She felt dreamlike, unreal, even though she was as solid as any of the others who inhabited this world. She felt a strange recklessness, somehow, lost in a strange world in the middle of the night.
The dead feeling as she recognised the loss of her powers didn’t particularly bother her. She’d never been very skilled at the control of fire – another reason why she could never be Fire Lady. She was glad for that, as bitter as she felt about the fact that one of her cousins would steal the title from her Lisana one day. She could never have borne the immense weight of power upon her shoulders. She felt old already, and she was only thirty-two. Maybe that was a sign, a sign that she could give up soon.
She made herself walk the strange, flat, dark, moonlit road, her boots making an odd sound as they hit it. Shen Yi and her family in Ba Sing Se had offered her clothes, but she had refused to take them. She had wanted to wear her stiff Fire Nation garments with pride, a mark of honour despite the mistrusting glares she had received from the earthbenders and warriors. She regretted that now, regretted the sharp looks it had brought her when they discussed ‘the Fire menace’, regretted the way they had all avoided her after they’d seen her bend fire.
She chose a strange, flat, square house. A house with an equally square green object – a ‘bin’ out the front of it.
Kira opened the lid. She felt shame at having to place her only child in such a dark, smelly hole. ‘You should have been raised as a princess – or at least as nobility. In the Fire Nation, where you belong,’ she whispered to the now sleeping infant.
She removed the stone amulet that she’d threaded on a thin plait of her own hair, as her own mother had taught her. As she would never be able to teach Lisana.
She pressed the cord into the fragile, strangely protruding bones of her daughter’s hand.
Kira suddenly felt guilty. I should leave her with a name, she thought. The name she was born with, the name she will be hailed by as ruler – if she returns someday.
She spotted a shard of glass, protruding from the dark hollow of the bin, glinting bluish with moonlight.
Kira tore off a strip of her own dress. As she raised the shard of glass above her wrist, she smiled. She would leave her daughter an unforgettable legacy. One written in blood.
She gripped the jagged edge and gouged at her own wrist, oddly feeling no pain. She was rewarded with a long, dark welt of blood, glistening black in the moonlight.
Kira had learnt some of the letters of this world – she’d been back and forth many times. Enough to write her own name and Lisana’s.
She stared at her pale wrist, slowly dripping blood onto the ground. Precious blood. There was only enough to write one name.
It took time, but gradually she managed to stain it, clumsily, childishly, onto the strip of cloth.
Lisana slept inside the bin, its lid propped open slightly for air. The bin was nearly full, so she was close to the top. Her only scraps of physical memory were a bloodied band tied around her wrist, bearing her name, and a small amulet, shaped like a stylized flame.
Walking away, Kira felt pangs of guilt and concern again. What if her daughter died of cold? What if no one came to get her in the morning?
Feebly, Kira pushed the worries out of her mind. She was giving Lisana the best chance of survival she could.
More than Ozai would give her, if he ever found out who – what – she was. Kira often wondered why she hadn’t been born Ishtar’s chosen one. Maybe she was too depressed and suicidal.
The thought should have been bitter, but it wasn’t. It entered her mind with a sense of finality, nothing more.
Kira returned her thoughts to her sleeping Avataran self, floating back to her own true body. She felt a sense of peace.

Her one good eye flickered open.
A firebender, in a skull-like white battle mask, stood over her.
Kira had no time or will to feel shock. She merely felt a calm acceptance of the fact of her own imminent death.
The firebender didn’t kill her. The face of the skull mask was replaced with one that would be considered far more frightening – the face of the Fire Lord himself.
She’d been running from her cousin Ozai for so long, it was almost a relief to give in to the fear, to finally face him.
‘You killed my husband,’ she said. She didn’t whisper it. She didn’t shout it, or scream it. She merely stated it calmly. Why shouldn’t she? It was a fact.
She dimly heard something in return, through her fog of memory and tiredness. He was not her husband. Then, she must die.
Strangely, something broke inside Kira. It was as if the pressure of all her past fears had finally manifested, setting her free.
She remembered Kiret, whispering to her when she was only five. Something that should be too long ago to remember. The truth will set you free. That is why you must always tell the truth, if only to yourself, Kiri. That is why I will tell you who you are, give you the necklace of our female ancestors, for to lie to yourself is a suicide.
The first words flashed into her mind again. The truth will set you free…
The thing, whatever it was, was still breaking inside of her thirty-two year old self. Kira opened her mouth – and began to laugh. Manically, wildly. Not because she wanted to frighten him, or let him think she was mad, but because he was going to be brought down by a dream, in a world of dreams, by her dying wish.
“She’ll take you down!’ she screamed. ‘She’ll be more powerful than you ever were, Ozai! She is the last of Kiret’s descendants, the last of the true line! Hear me when I say this! Neither you nor your brother nor your son nor your unborn child will be the ruler of the Fire Nation!’
Kira sensed the rush of heat, the roar of flames before they came for her. She felt no fear.
The truth will set you free.
She released all of her sorrows, her guilts, her concerns, her demons into the fire and accepted her fate.
She was Princess Kira of the Fire Nation. She had died for her daughter.
Beside her, blood from her wrist slowly seeped into the mud.

[Sam(The one in charge)]

Interesting. It was a nice story. I guess your a newbie! ^_^ Welcome to Balanced Dreams! I'm glad you made something here. So anyway, when you get the chance introduce yourself on the Welcome board then keep writing!!

<3~Sam(Head Admin&Owner)

[lisana]

Thanks for reading...will do! Here's the next chapter...

One.Lisana

Lisana stared out the window.
She felt so alone.
She didn’t seem to really connect with anyone, if there was such a thing. Not Claudia, or Willow. Or anybody else, either. Not that that was their fault. She distanced herself on purpose. It was easier that way.
Maybe her adoption had made her the way she was.
She’d been five. She hadn’t yet learnt how blank her life was of identity, how unmagical it was. Even then, she’d known she’d had no parents. She had sensed an unknown store of memory, of things she should know and could learn if she tried hard enough. She had tried, for a time at least. She’d only found it depressing, and stopped. It was worse now that she knew the popular scientific theory, that humans retain and remember everything they have ever seen or heard somewhere in their minds. It meant that the memories, memories which could have shown her a past, were gone, blocked by downwards brainwaves and a lack of memory retention chemical. Sometimes she hated science.
The five-year-old Lisana had been in a dreamlike daze when the woman and her daughter drove away with her in their car.
She hadn’t really understood what was happening. She hadn’t understood a lot of anything then, other than what was put in front of her on a sheet of paper – she’d been one of the few children to learn to read then.
She’d been inept at guessing other people’s emotions – still was – but even she had been alarmed by the look of emotionless curiosity on the daughter’s face. It had bordered on open hostility.
The girl’s acid-green eyes had been full of a predatory warning, a warning to stay out of her territory.
Fourteen-year-old Willow, the girl who was supposed to be her sister – by law at least – was no different from her five-year-old counterpart in Lisana’s memory. Even though she’d never done anything openly hostile to Lisana, her manner was always full of a cool politeness that was more appropriate for a stranger, or someone she was forced to stay on good terms with but never really liked.
It had been hard at first, but Lisana had gotten used to it. She’d never really been close to other people – something regarded as unusual for a fourteen-year-old girl – and she had no desire to become that way.
Claudia, her adoptive mother, seemed to be like her in that respect. Claudia was tall, quiet, and dark-haired, a writer in her forties. She looked quite like her biological daughter, Willow, with the only difference in her age and eye colour. Instead of acid-green, her eyes were a cool, glassy blue-grey, like a rainy sky. Her face was smooth, lightly lined, pale, flat, and ovallish. Lisana had to think to remember her voice, because she spoke so rarely.
Lisana had never asked Claudia why she’d been adopted. She expected to receive a long silence, a vague comment, a blandish answer if she did. Claudia didn’t shutter herself purposely, as Lisana knew she herself did. She was just the way she was. It was as if she was saying, This is who I am and you cannot change me.
Lisana herself wasn’t set-in-stone, one-hundred-percent certain who she was. She wasn’t sure if it was something that could be expressed neatly and concisely in a single statement anyway. She just knew that she didn’t want anyone else trying to force her into their idea of who – or what - she should be. So she kept herself hidden, hunching over herself like she was a chameleon. Except at school. School was the only place her personal camouflage didn’t work. There, she had to defend herself with silence and the occasional flash of temper. It was the only thing that the soulless, oh-so-shallow idiots could understand.
She turned away from her window, fingering the necklace around her throat. An odd-coloured stone pendant on a strand of what looked like plaited black human hair, it was her only inheritance. Shaped like a stylized flame, it was all that had been found with her in the recycling bin, on that morning that was fourteen years ago today. That and the bloodied strip of fabric.
The red strip of cloth she kept in a wooden jewellery box underneath her bed. It had frightened her once, but now she saw it as an object with an indefinite, maybe even infinite story. She kept it locked in the jewellery box because she didn’t want any harm to come to it. It was part of who she was, or at least who she had been.
It confused her, though. She wasn’t sure what to think, whether it meant that one of her parents – the one that had left her in the bin – had loved her or hated her.
If either her mother or father had cut themselves, squeezed out blood to leave her with a name and an only legacy, was that an act of great love? But if it had been, why would they have left her in a recycling bin?
She tried to make herself stop asking the questions. She tried to tell herself that in the world of the twenty-first century, where identities could be created or destroyed in the time it took her to blink, a past didn’t matter. But she couldn’t fool herself. She did want to know about her past and her parents and maybe even a biological family. It wasn’t that she hated Claudia, she just wanted to know. As long as she could remember, her mind had been that way: always asking questions, always wanting to know more. And she couldn’t think of any way to seek out a past. Looking up a private detective seemed too clichéd, too Nancy Drew.
She sighed. She couldn’t even distract herself with school work in the middle of the holidays.
The heater was on in her carpeted bedroom, and the window had begun to fog up. She glanced at it again, staring at the blue-black sky and the misting on its outside surface on the glass.
The misting was on the inside too. She stood up, walked over to the window and cleared a circle on it, shining wet. There was a deep, almost luminous night outside, enchanting her with its darkness.
Lisana reached her long, pale hand across her chest, catching a snarl of long fair hair in her fingers momentarily. She shook it out impatiently and the red parts glinted in the light from her desk lamp as she moved her hand free and touched her pale bare arm.
Her skin tingled. It knew there was a breeze outside. It wanted to play with it, jump with it, bend it to its will. It was an almost physical pain, her own powerlessness.
She felt so heavy, so frail.
She knew she shouldn’t be thinking like this. She knew she had to make herself think normally again.
She just didn’t know how.

[Sam(The one in charge)]

Cute. ^_^ I like where your going with it.

[Guenhwyvar]

A beautiful beginning. You are a great storyteller. Please continue...