"Mortimer?" I repeated, the name unfamiliar on my tongue. "Who or what is that?"
Tadewi's eyes narrowed, the lines of age and power deepening around them. "You young ones really don't know anything, do you?" she scoffed. "The world forgets so easily."
"Not by choice," I said. "Most of the Fire Nation's records were burned centuries ago—to spite the gods, or maybe to erase them. Depends on which historian you ask."
Muir crossed his arms. "We don't waste time with old stories where I'm from. History's just bones and dust. We believe in the present—and in what's coming."
Tadewi exhaled slowly through her nose, a sound halfway between amusement and disappointment. "A shame," she said. "Many of the things you face now were born from that same arrogance—forgetting what came before."
She tur
