"Oh, hello!" 

"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…

It was a cold day in Berk, but then, that was normal really.  The sky was clear, and just a little bit of snow was falling.  Given the usual state of things, it was good weather.  A large creature moved through the trees, definitely not a dragon, but more like a centipede, with a face like a human's.  It caught sight of Toothless and set something in its arms down, then vanished into smoke as if it hadn't even been.

The dropped item, on the other hand, was most decidedly there, and it seemed to be a human girl!  She was in poor state, too—clearly malnourished and having been maltreated for some time. Her hair was matted and her eyes were shadowed, and around her wrists were the marks of shackles and restraints that likely hadn’t been removed often for a very long time. The clothes she wore were decidedly too thin for the cold climate she’d been brought to, and she immediately started shivering, even though she was unconscious.