The lair breathed with her. Bioluminescent fungi pulsed in time to Tawaenure's languid exhales, their azure glow washing over her obsidian scales like moonlight on a tar-black sea. Her claws—each as long as a Na'vi's spear—scraped lazily against the cavern floor, carving molten furrows into the rock that cooled into glassy scars. Above, stalactites dripped with venomous nectar, their droplets hissing as they struck her spined tail. She was the heart of this place, its rhythm synced to the low, volcanic thrum in her chest.

Then—rupture.

Irkan staggered into the chamber, his breath ragged, the stench of human sweat clinging to him like a second skin. His boots slipped on the biofilm-slick stone, and he fell to one knee, trembling not from exertion, but from her. The bioluminescence dimmed, the fungi recoiling as Tawaenure's head lifted, her six eyes igniting one by one—a chain of wildfires sparking to life.

"M-Massey," Irkan choked, throat bobbing as he averted his gaze from her withering stare. He gestured weakly toward the tunnel entrance, where tendrils of crimson smoke slithered inward, reeking of phosphorus and human arrogance. "The Avatar... he's at the eastern ridge. He demands—"

Tawaenure's tail slammed down, the impact cracking the stone like a gunshot. Irkan flinched, a whimper escaping him as shards of rock bit into his palms.

"Demands?" Her voice was a tectonic growl, the air warping around each syllable. The walls wept mineral tears, their glowing veins darkening as her fury leeched the light from the chamber. She uncoiled, her massive form casting Irkan into shadow, her breath scorching the sweat from his brow. "Let him demand. Let him beg. Let him choke on the ashes of his predecessors."

Irkan dared a glance upward—a fatal mistake. Tawaenure's jaws parted, revealing a throat ablaze with blue-white fire, and for a heartbeat, he saw his reflection扭曲 in the inferno: small, fragile, mortal.

"Tell your pitiful kin," she hissed, embers spitting with each word, "that the Avatar has come to feed the flames. And I am hungry."

As Irkan scrambled backward, Tawaenure surged toward the cavern's mouth, her scales shifting from black to searing crimson—a warning beacon in the gloom. The fungi withered in her wake, their light snuffed out by the heat rippling off her body.

Beyond the tunnel, the jungle shuddered. Hexapedes screeched, fleeing the Avatar's scent. Somewhere, a river boiled.

She would not merely fight him.

She would make the forest itself his pyre.

SCENEBREAK

The sky wept in hues of violet and indigo, the first droplets of a coming storm hissing as they struck Jake's Ikran. The beast snapped its beak, iridescent feathers bristling at the scent of ozone and something darker—charred bone, molten stone. Jake steadied it with a Na'vi hunter's hum, his human hand lingering on the scar where Neytiri had once saved him from a thanator's jaws.

Patience, he told himself, though his pulse thrummed like a war drum.

Then—silence.

The rain froze midair, droplets glittering like suspended diamonds. The Ikran shrieked, recoiling as the clouds tore open. Tawne plunged through the rift, her draconic form a blur of gilt-edged fury. Wings wider than a Valkyrie's shadow cast the valley into twilight, their downdraft flattening ferns into bioluminescent carpets. Her scales were not mere gold but living ore—shifting between volcanic crimson and auric fire as she banked, her six eyes burning like dying suns.

Jake's breath vanished. For a heartbeat, he was human again—small, fragile, staring into the maw of something older than Eywa's first song.

Then she changed.

Lightning arced from her talons as she spiraled downward, the transformation neither fluid nor gentle. It was violence reshaped: scales fracturing into shards of light, wings collapsing into a vortex of embers that seared the rain into steam. Where the dragon had been now stood a woman—taller than any Na'vi, her silhouette edged in a corona of heat haze. Her skin held the memory of scales, shimmering faintly as if dusted with starlight and ash. Hair like liquid onyx cascaded down her back, threaded with filaments of gold that hissed and sparked.

But her eyes... Those never changed. They remained slitted, molten, a furnace glare that pinned Jake where he stood.

"You wanted to talk?" Her voice was winter in a world of fire—sharp, crystalline, laced with a predator's patience. The words slithered through the air, leaving frost creeping over Jake's boots.

He forced himself to breathe. This was why the Omatikaya elders had refused to speak her name aloud, why even the viperwolves fled when her shadow grazed the treetops. She was catastrophe given flesh, a storm wearing a crown.

"Yeah," Jake said, matching her coldness with a soldier's steel. He stepped forward, the Ikran's nervous trill fading behind him. "About Quaritch. And the fires devouring the eastern plains."

Tawne's lips curled, revealing teeth too sharp, too numerous. "You mistake me for a custodian of your wars, Toruk Makto." She closed the distance between them in one fluid stride, her scent engulfing him—smoke and iron and the tang of deep-earth metals. "The fires cleanse. They always have."

Jake held his ground, though his human instincts screamed to retreat. "Cleanse? Or punish?"

Her laugh was a blade dragged across stone. "Ask the humans burrowing into my nests. Ask their machines how they burn." A flick of her wrist, and the suspended raindrops ignited, forming a swirling helix of flame between them. "You stand with one foot in both worlds, Jake Sully. But when the inferno comes..."

The fire helix collapsed, leaving a smoldering glyph in the mud—a Na'vi rune for choice.

"...even shadows must pick a side."