#askshadowlink

      “Well I agree -- My adoptive parents were utter and complete trash. Hence why I killed them -- Wait...” 

                    ✫ask--shadow-link

Send me a ✍ and a character and I’ll draw the character horribly on MS Paint.

"So, child?" Koh purred, coiling around the fallen princess.  Azula had lost a drastic amount of weight in the two years she’d been interred in the asylum.  Two years of ritual humiliation and routine torture, two years of writing letters to Zuko about her treatment there…  She had no idea that they’d been intercepted by the asylum staff, that Zuko had no idea of the abuses she suffered there.  Given the bad blood between her and her brother running already, she assumed he was complicit in it, if not the one that had ordered it outright.

After two years, she could take it no longer.  She’d begun pleading to the Spirits, for assistance, for death, for anything to get her out of that place.  The one that had answered her was Koh, the trickster and face stealer, but also a very wise old spirit who sometimes dealt in knowledge.  Or, it seemed, in favours.

"I’ll take you somewhere you will not be tracked.  You will not be chased.  You won’t be able to do anything against your brother or his allies from there, but neither will they against you.  This is a fresh start, completely.  I’m not going to offer you useless platitudes about turning over a fresh leaf, but it would be a waste if you didn’t learn from some of your old mistakes.  For the duration of your life, you won’t need to worry about our agreement at all.  I’ll come for you when you die.  You won’t be using your face after that anyway, so I’ll have it then.  Do we have a deal?"

Reflexively, Azula reached up to run her fingers over her eye and cheek, now sunken and hollow, and shadows appearing below the first.  Despite the nervousness she felt dealing with a Spirit that was known to cause havoc, she nodded her head.  She really had meant it.  Anything to get her out of that place. “W-we have a deal.  The terms are fair.”

"Lay down, child," Koh murmured, patting the bed Azula had in her cell in a mockery of parental affection, switching to the face of a moderately pretty woman of Fire Nation descent.

Azula stretched out obediently, closing her eyes for a moment…

Now…

The room was quiet, still and empty and mostly in darkness. Then, suddenly, thirty, maybe fifty feet of a giant insectoid body and its mass of many, many legs, all at once appeared there, winding around the room and twisting through the furniture, irreverently knocking things over. A face painted with makeup to look like a mask peered down into the Shadow's eyes. The painted lips of the mask-like face pulled into a smile, and the creature held out the body of an unconscious sixteen year old girl, forcing her into the other’s arms. ”Here, you can have this,” the creature said, then withdrew, skittering up a wall and out of reality.

Honestly, he was quite overwhelmed by the sudden influx of visitors. It was rare for him to get even near this many on a normal day, and, as he had not been expecting them, really, it was made all that much worse. Still, he supposed it best to simply play along and hope for the best –– there couldn’t be that many more, right?