my good buddy Hitori09 Hitori09 made this pic recently. also Hitori does a commission art stream every Sunday picarto.tv/HitoriArtist and a Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/Hitori_Artist if you want to see more fine works like this, give some thought to commissioning or supporting his Patreon page ^_^
as some of you might know, artist Cowledman https://www.deviantart.com/cowledman returned after a several year long hiatus and has been posting images again, I have found much inspiring about his work in the past and some of his most recent images has inspired me once more. In this case he made this image https://www.deviantart.com/cowledma.....mate-775674286 and when I saw it I enjoyed the subtext and wanted to expand on it my own way, so I made a fan edit (that he's approved me sharing) that did more then just add in text https://sta.sh/0y85rzyb3r6 and explored the idea of them being more then just dressed up for a game, this split into two images, (one I may post here) and the other being the image you see here :D

btw I know its a little confusing because usual dialogue bubbles work top to bottom right to left, unavoidably because of the size difference, Toph's dialogue is first and Katara's is second.

click here for a textless version http://www.furaffinity.net/view/29850354/

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After helping Korra become a great Avatar, like all mortal beings Toph and Katara eventually pass away from old age around the same time as at the cross roads of existence Toph's spirit is met up with Katara's who wanted to explore the spirit world with her oldest friend before they parted ways through reincarnation, Toph feeling she's got nothing better to do goes along with it and the two enter the spirit world Aang talked about so much which brought them back to their youth.....literally, their spirit forms became themselves when they were younger which brought back alot of happy memories but deep down also some subconscious regrets as one spirit local watched the two human souls and prods those feelings from afar until they start coming to the surface.

Toph and Katara couldn't hold back their long suppressed resentments that their legacy wasn't their own, but a footnote in Aang's as he was the one history will remember while they were merely in his shadow, the spirit drudging up these negative emotions was testing the humans to see if their minds and souls had the clarity to be here as emotions effect the reality of the spirit world and having failed its biased test of character, it swoops in and grab's Katara and Toph and before they could fight it off, drops them into a large foggy area and fly's away, little did they realize this was the Fog of Lost souls, a kind of spirit prison where human souls are trapped in a endless reflection of their own insecurities and regrets.

For hours they wondered around trying to find a way out, but their bending wasn't working here and what Toph saw through her Seismic sense made not sense at all to her, ontop of that, the feeling that they were pawns in Aang's greater destiny continued to overtake their thoughts as the reality around them began to warp. The ground around them started turning white and black in a checkered pattern, Toph obviously wouldn't have noticed this because of her blindness but even Katara didn't because of her own mixed emotions distracting her even as she herself changed.

Katara and Toph's youthful forms began to shrink as they stood there, their cloths falling off and disappearing as their naked figures start belling outward more and more until they no longer resembled human beings, instead they had both become literal plastic pawn pieces frozen in place with the exception for their heads as the fog rolls back enough to reveal that the ground was their chess board and without really acknowledging what they had become like its how they always were as the two began to play the game.

For many decades onward, Katara and Toph were trapped in a never ending game of chess, they were the only two pieces on the board and to escape the emotional sorrow of their prison, they accepted what they had become and fully absorbed themselves in their game and its rules as each girl took turns trying to checkmate the other, following the movement patterns of the pieces they were. Toph grew up in nobility, she use to have a chessboard with raised squares so she could feel out the board, Katara later discovered the game for herself after her kids grew up and left the nest, so each knew the rules and were completely invested in the joy they got from dueling each other as the winner got moved up a role, from Pawn, to Knight, to Bishop, to Rook, and finally to Queen since it was just a game between girl friends as winner moves up a rank while loser goes down one.

There is one special rule they have, if one side wins more then 10 times in a row, then when they finally lose they have to reset all the way at the bottom to a Pawn while the winner gets to jump straight to the top and Toph finally checkmated Katara after all these years. To be continued.