by Matt Larkin
Poli‘ahu …
The feminine voice came not from Waiau, not from her own mind, but from the depth of the shadows, drawing her toward it, beckoning her forward with ever greater urgency. Knowing herself a fool, still she plodded into the clinging darkness.
Poli‘ahu …
Unwise direction, Waiau warned. Return to your body …
Did the Mist spirit not hear that voice?
The half-formed substance of the Roil lapped at her ankles as she pushed through darkness that swallowed everything around her in waves. Liquid shadows rose up, splashing her shins and tugging at them, threatening to pull her down into oblivion.
Chills claimed her, had her warming her arms in a way she didn’t think she had done in decades.
Poli‘ahu …
She had to find the source of that voice.
Stop! Waiau ordered in her mind.
The swirling darkness rose up as if on a balcony above her, a play of shadows hosted for her alone. A tableau depicting a vision … a woman in finery unlike any Poli‘ahu had ever seen. The figure stared out at the vast kingdom before her, ignoring the man in her chambers behind her. Watching, as the flood waters surged in and toppled mountains in the distance. Watching, as the land broke away in a glimmer of apocalypse.
Was that … the Deluge?
Why did she feel she knew the woman?
Come back …
She knew that voice, too, though it seemed so far away now.
She felt it, as the shadows crawled their inevitable way up to her thighs. As they nibbled at parts of her, feasting on Will and memory, stealing away the essence of the soul to feed the ceaseless hunger of this Realm.
You will lose yourself …
She should have cared … should have felt terror … a vestigial part of her knew she should have balked at the horror consuming her. But she could not seem to care.
The Lethe has you …
A jolt, a pummeling inside her mind, and she was violently yanked free of the clinging shadows. Her body moved of its own accord, stumbling in darkness back toward the paler shadows of the Penumbra, back the way she had come.
A word, a sound, foreign came to her, binding her to the woman.
Khione.
The moment stretched on forever, giving her time enough to realize—to reclaim her missing horror—Waiau had possessed her body. The spirit, never fully bound under control, was exerting itself to control her limbs.
Snarling, Poli‘ahu flung her Will at her erstwhile sister. The Mist spirit pushed back, and still Poli‘ahu’s astral body lurched step by step back toward its physical counterpart. Back up the shadowy stairs of Haupu that in this realm twisted upon themselves so much to seem a slide. Back through the darkened chambers to where her unconscious form lay.
Only at the threshold did she manage to drive the akua down and reclaim herself.
And even as she settled into herself, she was left with a lingering question … had Waiau alone saved her from being devoured in the Roil … or had the spirit acted because there was something she didn’t want Poli‘ahu to see?
Her return was greeted by Kahoupokane, the snow sister conferring with Lilinoe on the far side of the Veil. The two of them watched Poli‘ahu, seeming to radiate apprehension, as if warring over whether to speak some unwelcome truth.
Groaning in the discomfort of her weariness, Poli‘ahu rose and plodded over, staring down each in turn. “What is it?” she demanded.
For a time, neither akua spoke. Then Kahoupokane bowed her head. “News from Hilo.”
Shouts and grunts punctuated Kaupeepee’s rough stare. He kept casting glances back between Poli‘ahu where she stood in the shade, and his men, hurling more rocks and javelins down upon invaders who simply refused to give in. As if Hina—though she remained concealed within the fortress—somehow compelled these men to throw their lives away over and over. As if she induced them to see if they could sap away all the weapons of Haupu with their very bodies.
Then, of course, the body was the very thing she asked now of Kaupeepee himself.
“Be like dying for the old ways, then,” he said, looking not quite at her gaze, as if not meeting it would somehow lessen the impact.
“It will be …” Poli‘ahu frowned, considering lying. “Worse.” Given all she had seen of Pō since gaining the Sight and doubly so since beginning to Spirit Walk, men were right to fear death. But if Kaupeepee agreed to Saveasi‘uleo’s bargain, he would instead spend centuries going mad in a prison without walls. It was hard to say, even, how long the mer could sustain a host like him. Certainly long enough that when death finally came to him, there would most likely be little left of him to experience it.
Kaupeepee grunted in obvious discomfort at the thought. Maybe she should have lied to him. She bore him no special love, and their best chance of success here did rely on his capitulation. Yet, given all he had already paid for the cause, she felt compelled to provide him with the truth. She asked him for a sacrifice beyond what most men could even conceive. A price more than his life.
She needed him to take this step. Pele had destroyed Hilo, broken Poli‘ahu’s kingdom. Killed … Her jaw trembled at the thought of Nalani, buried in the torrent of lava. They had paid so much for this.
Another grunt. Another look at his men. “Yeah. Gave up my ‘ohana for this anyway. Gave up my birthright. Not about to see it only half done.”
Poli‘ahu nodded solemnly.
They had all sacrificed too much to turn back.
Despite her broad spectrum of studies, Poli‘ahu knew precious little of the magical tattoo Art practiced in Old Mu. She supposed it made little difference, since now she needed but make the mark, not concerning herself with infusing it with mana. Either way, Kaupeepee lay on his stomach in the room she’d claimed for her sorcery.
By the light of a candlenut torch, she inked him, drawing the precise curves and flourishes of Saveasi‘uleo’s spirit glyph. Through the Veil, Lilinoe had provided some additional instruction in the tattooing itself, something Poli‘ahu hadn’t ever had much practice with. How the Mist spirit knew of such things, Lilinoe didn’t say.
The process was long, exacting, and twice she paused to massage her wrist which had begun to ache from the precision needed. Glyphs were different from other art forms, for they were—often—expressions of a singular entity. Too much variation, and the symbol would miss its mark, having no effect, or worse, an unexpected one.
Kaupeepee, for his part, remained near motionless, making things easier. Perhaps he tolerated the pain, though given the amount of awa he’d imbibed, she supposed it was also possible he was simply so drunk he had no idea what was happening. Were she in his position—suffering pain only so that he might then suffer a worse, unending agony—she imagined she’d have quaffed every bit of the narcotic on hand herself.
It may yet be your fate …
Waiau’s voice grated. Poli‘ahu still couldn’t decide if the akua overtaking her body had been a blessing—saving her from Pō—or a curse. An ever-present threat that the spirit might attempt it again at her leisure.
Her only answer was a wispy cackle in her mind.
By afternoon, Kaupeepee had returned to the battlements and stood staring down at the water, clearly waiting for a sign. A redemption of his impending sacrifice.
Poli‘ahu wanted to pity him, but all she had inside was a chill. An ache to have done with all this, to return to Mauna Kea. To see … Hilo, and hope against hope that some small vestige of her people had survived. That Nalani had …
No. She knew that for self-delusion. The woman would have been in the palace, helping oversee the kingdom, and would have been among Pele’s first targets. One more victim for the Flame Queen, but one she would pay dearly for.
But first, Poli‘ahu needed to see these damn invaders dead. All of them, dead.
Too much had passed.
Too much suffered on both sides.
When pushed to such extremes, blood became
the only answer. It beckoned, like to like, calling for more and more, until the loss left both sides faint or one side dead.
“There,” Kaupeepee said, pointing out to the horizon. “The island’s coming closer.”
Poli‘ahu joined him, squinting against the sun, given the angle of the island. Not that it was an island, really.
To the invaders, she imagined it would seem a moss-drenched mountain drifting in toward the beach where they camped, as if being sucked into the gulch to plug it up. In her mind’s eye, she saw them point in wonder, exclaiming, calling out to the ‘aumākua for guidance. For answers. Perhaps they thought Kanaloa himself sent this incoming mountain.
Not entirely inaccurate, for certainly it had come from the same alien realm as the Ocean God. Ah, but this behemoth was something else. Sailors’ mo‘olelo spoke of them … turtles that slept for centuries at a time, until greenery sprouted upon their rocky shells and all seemed land in truth.
She imagined the invaders pointing, gaping, staring.
Already, their attempts to scale the wall had slackened as wonder took over.
A precursor to horror.
When it breached, waves surged up onto the shore like miniature kai e‘e. Waterfalls streamed down its sides in a hundred flows. Its reptilian head—the size of a hill itself—broke the surface with a low bellow that rumbled through the whole of Haupu.
The screams had begun up here now, too, Kaupeepee’s men crying in alarm. One fool even hurled a javelin at the island turtle, though the projectile clanked harmless off scales too thick and ancient to score with such a weapon.
Those great, snapping jaws closed in on the beach, scoping up a mouthful of invaders while digging a trench in the sand. A flipper larger than any whale smashed down upon a fleet of canoes, the impact upon the waters so loud that even up here, it left Poli‘ahu’s ears ringing.
Her face hurt.
It took her a moment to realize it was from her grinning.
She turned then to look to Kaupeepee, to see him revel in the glorious destruction his sacrifice had bought. But the man was leaning on the battlements, convulsing. His neck ruptured, skin tearing into long flaps. Gills.
He glanced her way. Met her gaze with eyes not his own.
Then he heaved himself upon the stone in a single, too-strong motion. His look held her trapped a moment, but it was not Kaupeepee. It was Saveasi‘uleo, acknowledging a bargain kept. The mer tossed aside his malo, then dove from the wall, falling like a thrown spear down into the gulch.
Gone.
Just like that, Kaupeepee was gone forever.
The island turtle’s rampage continued. Bellowing cries. Slapping flippers. Irresistible jaws. The invaders—those fool enough to fight—seemed insects pelting it.
Kaupeepee’s sacrifice had brought this thing upon her foes, and she had to imagine it was worth it … at least in the short run.
That always seemed the way with such things. Whatever one gained in the moment, the price of drawing upon Pō stretched on into the infinite, like the dark of night itself.
6
Days Gone
Poli‘ahu had just turned eleven when the woman came for her. Her mother had shaken her roughly awake while her father had sat nearby, head in his hands, mumbling under his breath.
Was he praying? Invoking the ‘aumākua?
“Mama?” Poli‘ahu asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Get up. It’s time.”
She yawned. “Time for wh—”
Her mother eased her to her feet and guided her to the house’s entrance, and out into the night. The moon was high in the sky, a bright crescent, partially hidden by great fluffy clouds that seemed to have spilled down off the mountains. Indeed, a fog had drifted into the village, and—with no torch poles lit—blanketed the entire place, preventing Poli‘ahu from seeing much beyond the neighbor’s house.
Nights like this, children claimed, Nightmarchers stalked just beyond the edge of the village, ready to snatch up the souls of any fool enough to look upon them. An army of ghosts wandering the archipelago, some claimed led by Manua himself. Other children teetered in fear and chittered to themselves, shivering and hiding inside, around fires.
Poli‘ahu had never found the tale terribly frightening. All you had to do was not look, after all. Mist scared some people, for reasons she couldn’t understand.
Out there, tonight, though, a woman moved in the mist, garbed all in white, a long kihei billowing out in the mist as though one with the vapors. The woman’s hair even looked white, tinged by frost, though she didn’t seem old. Timeless, perhaps.
Poli‘ahu glanced back at her mother. “Who is she?”
“Go with her.”
“Wait, what? Why would I—”
“Just go, Poli‘ahu! Go, godsdamn it!”
Poli‘ahu flinched from her mother’s tone. She tried to peer around the woman, to see her father inside, but her mother shoved her forward, blocking her view.
“I said go!”
“But I …”
Her mother’s gaze looked at once stern and broken, like her face was formed of crumbling pottery that might crack at the slightest touch. The pain in the woman’s eyes, the disgust, it struck Poli‘ahu like a blow and sent her stumbling backward, away from her mother.
“I …”
Her mother spun on her heel and slunk back into the house, shutting the door behind herself.
Suddenly, the mist did seem cold. Foreign. Dangerous and thick with ghosts she ought not to have underestimated.
Slowly, Poli‘ahu turned back to the foreign woman lurking in that mist. “Who are you?”
“Lilinoe …” Her voice was a sibilant whisper, dancing on the wind and carrying with it a chill that had the hairs on Poli‘ahu’s neck rising.
“What do you want from me?”
“You. A child is owed. Born of royal blood of the old lines of Manua. A princess who will become the next Snow Queen.”
Poli‘ahu glanced around the empty village. Every house was dark, no sign of torchlight. She looked back to her family’s house. Could she burst through the door and hide from this woman? Or would Mama just throw her out once more? Why hadn’t Papa done something?
“I, uh … I think you’re confused. Manua’s just a legend, and anyway, Papa’s a fisherman, not a king.”
“Come to me …” The voice pulled her forward almost as if a rope was attached to her legs, yanking her toward the apparition one halting step after another.
She found herself moving without having given conscious thought to doing so. Stumbling. “Y-you’re not human,” Poli‘ahu barely managed to rasp out.
“No. I am an akua, using this body as a temporary host to assist in your transition. You, child, are kupua. Do you know what that means?”
“Half-god.” Her? That was impossible. She was just a girl. An ali‘i, yes, destined to rule this village, maybe, but no more than that.
But Lilinoe turned now, drifting off through the village, and Poli‘ahu found herself following, entranced and unable to resist. Uncertain, even, if she wanted to. What good would defiance do against an akua? What benefit to remain with her parents if they had cast her out? Nor could she stop thinking of Lilinoe’s claim that she was kupua.
Kupua were the stuff of legend, shaping the history of Sawaiki with their exploits. Since the time of Maui, she’d heard of at least a dozen kupua, all famous or infamous for their volatile temperaments, for their incredible mana. For the way they warped fate to suit themselves. Their romances were the stuff of great mo‘olelo, told long into the night. Their battles were larger than life. Their deaths were cause for great mourning … or great rejoicing.
And Lilinoe claimed Poli‘ahu was among their number.
“Wh-what’s a Snow Queen?”
The apparition did not look back at her. “Answers come in time, as your mind expands and grows ready for them. First, we walk the night and leave behind the affectations of childhood.”
Poli�
�ahu snorted. “I’ve got nothing but a pa‘u, not even a kihei.”
“You are mistaken. You carry much with you … Illusions. Preconceptions. Weaknesses. You must cast those aside to free yourself to carry far greater burdens. The weight of destiny shall fall upon your shoulders, child.” The akua cast a glance over her shoulder, holding Poli‘ahu’s gaze with intense eyes. “When you are ready, you shall become a queen the likes of which has not been seen in uncounted generations.”
With that, the akua turned back and continued onward. Deeper into the mist, away from the village, and into the forest.
Poli‘ahu looked back, unable to spot her family house through the fog. Would she ever see it again? Maybe she should run now, dash away from Lilinoe, and try to escape back home. She could beg Mama and Papa to save her from this goddess, to forgive her for whatever she’d done wrong, to love her still.
Except, her feet just kept walking, following the akua.
And Poli‘ahu would beg of no one.
They sat in near total darkness, in a cave by the seashore, the constant drip, drip, drip of water falling somewhere within like a drum banging inside Poli‘ahu’s head. Further away, if she focused, she could hear the lap of waves or the call of birds. But mostly, just the godsdamned drip … drip … drip …
“Why do we have to be in here?” she demanded.
“Because the sun is no longer your ally. Because its hateful rays would hinder our purpose. Because the deprivation of your vision will help in the fostering of other senses. Now focus. I want you to think nothing.”
Oh, sure. That made sense. Sit here on the cold, wet floor, with a pounding headache and don’t think about a godsdamn thing.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Don’t think about how she’d enjoined Lilinoe to take her back, to give her a chance to apologize to her mother for whatever she’d done to earn this treatment. How she’d shouted at the akua—shouted at a goddess—to take her back.