#fire practice

[tallerthantale]

[muffinlance]

Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.

Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.

---

Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--

Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and

and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.

Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.

Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.

“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”

---

She choose her own.

...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.

Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--

Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.

“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.

The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.

---

He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.

---

“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.

The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.

“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”

Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.

Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.

There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.

He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.

“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”

---

They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--

They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.

And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.

“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”

Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.

---

Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.

---

Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.

---

It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.

Oh. They were going hunting.

“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.

The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.

“I can hunt,” he scowled.

He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.

---

“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.

She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.

“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.

“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”

“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.

“Is it,” said Kanna.

---

Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).

Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.

“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.

“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”

---

Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.

---

Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.

The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.

“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.

“...No.”

“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”

She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.

---

Elsewhere, the war continued.

The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.

The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.

The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.

---

Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.

[moonlit-lian]

When I'm necromancin'

Everyone's dancin'

No one can stop me,

Ï̸͝ ̴̬̾d̶̈́̕ä̶́̀r̷̈́e̵̢͠ ̸͝you to trÿ̵́͋

~ Song lyrics are from Necromanncin Dancin by Bear Ghost!

Finally finished Ghost King Phantom! REHEHE

[mintaikk]

Wind Archer Cookie can kiss goodbye to peace as he knew it

(Inspired by @ strawberrysproutss on tiktok)

[zillychu]

[zondearts]

Garden

[tallerthantale]

[pokeattorney]

it's been a bit

[choccy-milky]

☼ seb & clora x elden ring ☼

SUPER self-indulgent thing i had to draw once i got the idea, bc i love FromSoftware and all their games (...& also bc i will never get tired of drawing clora like an ethereal lightbulb LOL 🔆) ↓ extra doodles and a lot of yapping below❗ ↓ (& elden ring DLC final boss spoilers)

their boss mechanics bc im a nerd LMAO🥰

if you target clora and kill her before seb, seb will be inflicted with madness/frenzy, and his stats will be raised for the remainder of the fight

with clora dead, seb will stop using holy/slash damage, and will instead use occult, madness/frenzied flame, and his own blood to inflict bleed damage

killing clora first makes the fight wayy harder, but also reaps much better rewards/a unique item (like the ornstein and smough boss fight in DS1)

if you kill seb first and don't finish off clora quickly enough, she'll just keep reviving him over and over (like the twin princes fight in DS3)

when you get seb down to like 10% health, he'll stop going on the offensive and will instead do everything he can to protect clora (while being visibly beaten up & limping😭kinda like sif in DS1)

this is the boss i re-skinned them as (promised consort radahn) bc i love this design...and even the lore makes sense bc the big guy (radahn) was brought back to life to serve miquella and fight for him (kinda like my seb and his horcrux👀) i also considered giving clora a halo similar to miquella's (but in the design of her hairclip) except i scrapped that bc i thought it looked weird LOL. i still like the idea tho so...just pretend its there LMAO🙂‍↕️🙏 ok im done 🗣️

[buckleysclipboard]

Some crayon drawings of an Eddie breakdown 🥺

anyone who wants to see my scribbles 🫣

[rorah]

Feralmitri taking a bath? Yes, and he's mad about it >:1 Byleth sent him to bath

[aestheticallynotdeerlightful]

Thoughts and doodles

.

(Please do not use, or repost my works anywhere without explicit permission from me thank you <3)

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Fire Gang - Labyrinth (1986)

[submastrain]

Jester!Ingo! 🔥 I just had to make a back view too of this outfit.

[zondearts]

Some quick Skywing stuff

[nuyokaiart]

Claude warmup sketch