I do not own anything in the world of Avatar. Not even this character.

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Dukkha’ is a concept in Buddhism that can generally be translated as ‘suffering’. The idea is that by living in the right manner i.e. the Noble Eightfold Path, the suffering that we are born into - which takes many forms - can be escaped, by simply not allowing it to have any hold upon you. The spiritual Air Benders have always seemed rather like Buddhists to me, and since in ‘The Guru’ reference was made to ‘chakra’ points (a Hindu term), I thought it would be interesting to introduce teachings of another religion into the Avatar world.

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Sister Iio had taught her of suffering when she was a little girl, just beginning to learn her sutras. She told her of the nature of suffering, of the causes of it – loss or craving chiefly among them – that it could cease and, most importantly, how it could cease. How it might be quelled by cleansing of the spirit, by living the right way, by doing the right thing and knowing when to do it.

Sister Iio said that in the world, in everything, there was suffering; in birth, in age, in sickness and in death, in dissatisfaction, in not getting what you wanted, in getting what you did not want – all that and more, was suffering. Suffering was in the very air around you that you breathed and bended, in the blood in your body, in your mind and in your heart. It was always there.

Curiously, perhaps naively, Sister Iio had spoken of suffering and not about it, as if knowing nothing of it but expecting her little pupil to nonetheless. But why should she? How could she? All the nuns of the Eastern Air Temple lived together in peace and happiness, with everything that could be had. She had never known a day when she was hungry, or a time when she was sick. She did not see her mother and father very often, true, but she did not mind so greatly, for she did not lack love from her many sisters and every few months her mother and father would come to visit her and she knew that when she was older they would take her with them on their journeys across the world, so she did not long for it or them desperately. She had everything that she needed, if not everything that she wanted.

How then could she know of suffering? Why should she know of it at all? And why had she been taught how to make it stop?

Malu the Ghost Witch now knew the answers to all of those questions; and she knew also that Sister Iio, naïve as she had been, had also been remarkably foresighted.

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Those of you who know your Avatar will know that Malu is not an OC; she is a character from the trading card game. I’ve always quite liked her, so I started thinking about how to expand upon her story. I mean, how would you stop yourself going mad with rage and hate when your entire race was wiped out, and it seemed as if you were the only one left…