An Unexpected Development

By TeraWatt

It had been four years since Iroh's world had turned upside down.

The Crown Prince had been experiencing unprecedented success in his campaign against the Earth Kingdom and had even penetrated the famed impenetrable city. When he had captured the Earth Kingdom General, he had gloatingly renamed the city Na Sing Sei much to his prisoner's impotent rage. Iroh had the General's pearl dagger sent home to Zuko while the man's sword had been gifted to Lu Ten.

The six-hundred-day siege had begun well enough. The enemy had been left reeling as the vast tracts of arable land within the Outer Wall fell under the control of the Dragon of the West. And yet, only a scant few days of respite were enjoyed before everything started going wrong.

Iroh's plan had been brilliant in it's simplicity; hold the city's farmland hostage. The main problem with this objective was that the area between the Outer Wall and the Inner Wall was so vast that it took a full day's train ride to go from one wall to the other. It was no exaggeration to say that if you were able to stretch the Outer Wall into a straight line, it would reach from one side of the continent to the other. No army in the world could hope to hold such an area of land and maintain even the slightest semblance of a siege. Therefore, Iroh gave orders to begin burning the crops. After all, the less crops needing to be guarded, the more heavily they could concentrate their forces.

Iroh had split his army into three battalions; the first to hold the area where the Outer Wall had been breached (at the West-most section of the Wall), the second to proceed south between the two Walls, burning the crops as they went, and the third to do the same, but in the other direction, to the north. This wasn't to say they wasted the resource of captured food, but that once it had been captured and brought back to the first battalion, the remainder was put to flame to deny it to the city.

The first indication of the hell to follow was the night raids. Some nights food went missing, some nights men who wandered too far from their hosts went missing; the lucky ones were found buried alive. Some nights the not so lucky men who had disappeared, reappeared with wild eyes and a terrifying determination to see their fellow countrymen dead. Some nights, their food was poisoned; incidentally, veterans of the siege could later be easily be identified by being the last to eat their food as they waited to see if any of their fellows would start choking on death gifted them by an Agent of the Dai Li.

The next blow came when mobs of rabid refugees unleashed from the slums of the Outer Ring of the city proper. Half mad from starvation and livid at the sight of the crops aflame, these berserkers would appear at all hours of the day and night to try and recapture the crops being brought from the second or third battalions on their way back the the first battalion. Iroh still had the occasional nightmare from how some of those poor ambushed soldiers were discovered.

Iroh's son, Lu Ten had been given command of the battalion that headed south.

The fateful six-hundredth day of the siege, that to the current day still haunted Iroh, saw a three-pronged pre-dawn sneak attack directed at the leadership of the besieging army.

Iroh's command tent, along with his second in command, were sucked into the ground entirely in a split second. Mere chance had Iroh wake in the night with the need to stretch his legs, when otherwise he would have been killed thusly in his sleep.

The Terror Team, led by their commander, later to be promoted to General Fong, obliterated the northern battalion, almost to a man, when they collapsed a five-hundred meter stretch of the Outer Wall on their encampment.

Lu Ten's fate had almost been worse, or might have been had it not been for the thoroughly pessimistic and acerbic Corporal Mushi who saved Iroh's son from being abducted by a Dai Li Agent. Iroh believed to the present day that they were planning to bend his son's mind so that with Iroh dead, Lu Ten could return home as a sleeper agent to assassinate Firelord Azulon and throw the nation into chaos.

Iroh had ordered for all remaining forces to withdraw and then had arrived the letter sealed with a black ribbon and golden wax.

To this day Iroh had not the first clue what prompted the orders to withdraw from the siege, and then the shocks kept coming. The Firelord declaring an armistice from out of the blue had shocked Iroh to his core. The term "inexplicable" was entirely inadequate to encompass this turn of events.

When Iroh had returned home, his brother Ozai and Ozai's family were absent from the Caldera and the Firelord wasn't inclined to divulge why this was. All Iroh could determine was that whatever had transpired had done so shortly after the day of Zuko's presentation.

Now, after years of not having seen his nephew, this reserved young boy of eleven years was being given a tremendously delicate task in the name of the Firelord. Lu Ten had taken up royal duties when he returned home with his father, but he was a man grown at the time.

Iroh hoped that young Zuko was up to the task or he may bring great shame upon himself, and being only present as an advisor, there was precious little Iroh could do to shield his nephew from the repercussions should the mission go awry.

Iroh broke from his wool gathering and followed his very young, yet seemingly stoic and determined nephew up the gangplank onto the ship to begin the three week sojourn to their first destination.

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Two weeks into the voyage.

"Uncle?"

"Yes Prince Zuko?"

". . . Are we there yet?"

AN: I will be very pleased if following chapters are as easy to come up with as this one was. Here's hoping the updates continue apace.

Cheers, TeraWatt