Because in this ring,
in this moment,
there is just you,
and the flame.
It sings from your breath in searing cerulean arcs.
It grins from your mouth as you exhale as a dragon does.
It sways from your fingertips as you let it burn cold with your joy.
For a time, you are nothing but the Dragon Emperor—but there is no Dark Water Spirit for you to challenge, no Dragon Empress to charm back to your side.
There's just the way your feet slide from stance to stance as you accelerate through kata after kata and never miss a step, even when you start inventing your own because the most complex Imperial forms still don't let someone toy with fire like a ball on a string, like it exists only and always and forever for you.
There's just the way a bare flicker of your attention is enough to keep every lantern and every torch burning blue even as you fill the sky with a hundred crackling stars and swallow them with a raging maw of flames that splits into a dozen soaring comets that crown the night with the radiance of your soul.
There's just the way the erhu has stopped trying to give you rhythm and started trying to catch yours instead, your one-two heartbeat the only music the flame has ever needed.
You can hardly tell what this looks like to the crowd by this point—you can barely see their faces, aware mostly of their general vicinity so you can make sure you don't set them alight. All your focus has narrowed to the hollow void in your skull, where the lightning lives.
Where it begs once more to be free.
You press two fingers against your heart and draw it out, a sharp, trembling shard of cold fire more dangerous than anything the whole band of dancers could call combined. It wreathes your fist, then your wrist, then your elbow, until it looks like you plunged your hand into a storm and dragged it down to earth—and then a languid flex of your shoulders rolls it across your back until it crawls up your other arm as well.
Until you hold a lightning bolt around you as others might a lover.
You thrust both arms to the sky and with a ferocious
boom, the bolt blast outs from both of your bladed fingertips at once to converge back on itself precisely above your head, bright enough to blind anybody watching if not for the smoke of the collision.
When it clears, there's a new Sun in the sky.
It's small.
It's hissing, sparking, spitting.
But it's bright enough that when you snuff every lantern and every torch in the whole street, light still fills every hole they should have left behind.
Your whole body is shaking, hammers pounding on the inside of your brain, your skin hot enough that your sweat starts to boil off as steam, but you still force the words out, impossibly loud in the sudden silence.
"From the fire," you say, "comes
all."
You force your hands together in a clap, and the ball lightning hanging twenty metres overhead swells to three times its original size, large as a komodo rhino—
—and then you tear them apart and the ball
shatters, hurling electric embers across the stars in mimicry of the grand lunar fireworks that the Fire Nation welcomes each new year with.
You hold out your hand, one finger extended, and wait.
One final, fizzing fragment of the cold fire drifts through the air and lands right on your fingertip.
You lift that fingertip to your lips and swallow the spark.
