by Matt Larkin
All she had heard of this place was the warning, when she was young, never to swim here, never to risk provoking another conflict with the he‘e. Like all young mer, it had chafed her scales—the thought that they, spirits, should fear the wrath of mortals. And perhaps, had they not been so wary of Hiyoya, they might well have brought the he‘e under their control once more. Then again, she now knew how much of all this had always been part of Kanaloa’s mesh of schemes.
“This was Kane-huna-moku,” Taema said, swimming up beside Nyi Rara, apparently noticing her examination of the ruins.
“The Wake?”
“Since the Rogo War, yes—it became the Wake of Rogo’s Wrath. Here, your grandfather held his pleasure palace.” She indicated a massive pile of rubble at the extreme end of the colonnade. Debris stacked so high the construction must have rivaled the city of Mu itself. “There, I imagine it—a rising tower climbing up to the surface, supporting an island grown out of the power and indulgence of our ‘ohana. Near a thousand he‘e slaves worked here, bringing humans up there to service every salacious desire the mer could think up. There are tales of orgies involving two hundred mortals or more.”
“Truth?” Nyi Rara asked, knowing it had to be.
Taema nodded. “The he‘e slaves worked tirelessly in the fathoms down below, serving up feasts that continued for days. They would catch and deliver every delicacy of the sea and …” The mermaid flinched, shaking her head.
“What?” Nyi Rara asked.
Behind them, Tilafaiga snorted. “She fears the rumors.”
Nyi Rara twisted around to take in her other cousin. “What rumors?”
Tilafaiga grimaced. “That, caught in the throes of decadence, the royals and their guests sometimes demanded the most exotic of courses to sate their whims.”
Nyi Rara glanced around, suddenly feeling the sea growing thick, as if it pressed in around her. And there, shifting through the rubble, she saw Piika. The mo‘o swam further away, as wanting physical distance from the conversation, as if he knew …
A crawling sensation seized her gut, and she looked back to Tilafaiga. “The mer of this place … they ate mo‘o.”
“Mo‘o, taniwha, human … he‘e. How do you imagine the octopus people enjoyed having to offer up their own kin for consumption by the mer court who thought it their right? I remember …” Tilafaiga sniffed. “I remember, once, Dakuwaqa took it in his mind that the young would prove more succulent, and thus demanded a he‘e child, couldn’t have passed more than ten years. I remember … my stomach roiling, my host—still young, not completely broken—trying to rebel against me, to deny it as the court pulled the he‘e apart, limb from limb. I remember the shrieks of the child and its mother.”
Fucking Deep! “Y-you …” Nyi Rara was choking on the water. “You ate a sentient child?” The part of Nyi Rara that was Namaka recoiled, wanted to deny any fragment of herself could hold kinship to those who could act with such wanton disregard for life.
“Me?” Tilafaiga spun. “No, I was young myself, and had no formal standing here.”
The lack of empathy spirits felt toward mortals, driven home by the gold-tailed sisters’ words, it shot through Nyi Rara like a lance, boring out her insides. Ravaging her brain. Inciting an oath—that she would do better. That she would, if able to restore the glories of the old world, never fail to forget the mortal half of where she came from.
And in the darker corners of her soul, the fear … what if she could not stop herself from breaking that oath? What if the passing of ages rendered her as dispassionate as her grandfather?
Small wonder, she supposed, that the Rogo War had erupted. All chafed under bondage, of course, and the he‘e were worse than slaves. They were held as … as self-aware entrees. The sum of their lives reduced to the whims and casual cruelties of a court who barely considered them sentient.
The Wake stretched on and on, and rather than look upon the grandeur of it and wonder, Nyi Rara found herself writhing in disgust at opulence grown out of control. Was this the price inherent in extreme wealth and power? The decay of one’s own soul as despotism became banal?
The further the ruins expanded, the more the sense of abhorrence in her grew, until she wanted to retch. To deny any connection to those who had given rise to this place.
Her grandfather.
And surely … surely her father had been here, too.
“They say a thousand he‘e rose up in one night, strangling their masters,” Taema said when they finally reached the furthest extent of the Wake. Beyond, Nyi Rara could feel the seafloor drop away into the Tenebrous Chasm and almost welcomed that abyssal darkness rather than what she left behind here. “It was all chaos, and few survived … but there is the tale that Rogo-tumu-here rose up from the Tenebrous Chasm and descended in the midst of the coup, a he‘e to rival Kanaloa in bulk and majesty. I even heard it speculated that he was Kanaloa’s son, or perhaps an alias of the he‘e god-king himself. Either way, his arms encircled the porticos and brought them low. He encompassed the great supports holding the island palace above the waves and sent it tumbling down, drowning hundreds of humans in the process, and burying countless mer in the debris. By the time word reached Mu of the rebellion, Kane-huna-moku lay in utter desolation. Mere Wake in the passage of Rogo as he closed in on the capital to free the remains of his brethren.”
The Rogo War ended when the he‘e withdrew—after killing Dakuwaqa and stealing back the Chintamani pearls. Of course, it led immediately to the years of recriminations, the ‘ohanas blaming one another for the loss. The Sundering that created Hiyoya, when Rongomai and Tinirau ‘Ohanas fled to the far south and founded their own kingdom near to Kahiki.
Was it always inevitable, from the moment Kanaloa ceded the first Chintamaniya, or was this end forced upon them by the degeneracy of those corrupted by their power? By her kin?
Oh, and the Sundering had directly shattered Tilafaiga and Taema’s family, half their kin in Mu, half in Hiyoya. The way they both looked at her, surely it was in their thoughts now.
Silence claimed Nyi Rara—what could be said of wrongs committed in ages past by kin she never knew?—and so, instead, she pushed on, into the darkness of Tenebrous Chasm. Deeper, deeper, into the place where once she had died.
Its oppressive, dancing shadows welcomed her back.
28
The nature of thought was such that even in the throes of the complete concentration necessary for sorcery, Poli‘ahu occasionally caught fragmentary moments in which she found herself watching herself, imagining what the Art must seem to an outside observer not possessed of the Sight. She would muse over how a sorceress must seem mad, forever speaking to something others could neither see nor hear—afflictions that only enhanced the already erratic behavior prompted by skewing the mind in the ways necessary to perceive the underlying Truths of reality.
Or, as now, when she incanted in Supernal and imagined how it must have seemed to the subjects, bound now upon their rocks. Her voice almost singing in dissonant tones that would have sounded as much as disruptions in the harmony of the world as foundational aspects of it. Without the Sight, they could not see the cacophonous vibrations running through Pō, distorting the psychic miasma that comprised the world just beyond their perception. They might feel a disquiet, an unnamable unease at the sounds, but—for all they knew—she merely sang nonsense and danced the hula naked beneath the full moon.
The blood of twenty sacrificed slaves ran over the rocky island, streamed down her arms, ran between her breasts to drench the singing stone amulet, and coated her back.
What an image she must have cast.
But the time for musings was fleeting—a space between heartbeats—before her dance flung her into wild gyrations, heaving hips one way and the other. Sweat mingling with blood. Her panting almost impinged upon the incantation as she implored spirit after spirit to pour their mana into her that she might, in effect, redeclare the very foundations of nature.
T
he moon dipped lower and lower, until it seemed to fill the entire sky.
Did the others see it in all its awful glory? Its harmony thrummed through her chest, her whole body, ravaging her insides and consuming conscious thought. The dance took on a life of its own. Her fingers were no longer hers. Her hands, arms, legs, hips, all became independent of anything resembling her. Poli‘ahu was a conduit of something immense beyond measure.
The moon trembled, as if an earthquake shot through it. It cracked, a fissure running along its surface.
And that fissure blinked.
From its depths peered an eye, staring only at her—struck agape at her temerity—gazing into the depths of her soul. A tidal pull seized Poli‘ahu’s insides and seemed to yank her very pith up into the sky, though she remained at once grounded, still dancing a dance, singing a song not of her making.
The gaze of this eldritch entity held her fast and she was bilocated, her shattered soul yanked swirling into its reality.
Though a moon still hung in the sky, somehow she felt herself on the moon—or more accurately the real moon, as though what she saw in the Mortal Realm were but a lifeless reflection. Here, the world was flush with verdant life, so primal it overwhelmed. The sound of a thousand animals echoed in ceaseless tirade, cries and shrieks and squeaks and calls, all mingling with the sound of rushing waters.
This latter sound she followed, dazed, legs unsteady but unable to stop moving. It pulled her. Had her entreaties caught the whim of the Elder God of the Moon? Never had she imagined the results of her spell would find her Spirit Walking into the actual Spirit Realm, but then, she had no record of anyone ever attempting anything like what she did this night. Either way, her legs moved of their own accord, drawn forward down a path she could not have turned from had she wished to try.
She ducked under low-hanging vines, threading her way between colossal tree trunks. So arboreal seemed this place, she was left to wonder just how distinct the barrier between the World of Wood and the World of Moon truly was. Conceptually, she imagined each spirit world as its own distinct sphere, but then, they were everywhere and nowhere, so why couldn’t they overlap?
High-pitched howling cries echoed through the night, sounds from animals she had never imagined. And would prefer not to catch any glimpse of.
Up in the trees scampered fur-coated creatures resembling tiny people, but with long tails. Beyond, an owl watched her, and other birds she couldn’t identify. All seemed to look upon her with curiosity but not concern.
In the jungle beyond, she had the sense of something large and predatory shifting in the shadows, though she caught no glimpse of it beyond the dense trees. Her pulse raced, and she pushed forward faster, suddenly feeling suffocated by the foliage. Scrambling, she stumbled to one knee, banged it against an extruded root, and stifled a curse.
Reflexively, her hand clutched her amulet for strength and mana.
Waves of fatigue washed over her.
Was she, in fact, still dancing on Kaho‘olawe, back in the Mortal Realm?
Back to her feet, and she flung herself forward, gasping for air. As if resisting her, the trees only grew thicker. Branches and vines clung to her calves and ankles, grasped at her wrists, holding her inside this forest maze.
A shuddering gasp escaped her.
Forearm out ahead of herself, she thrust her way through a cluster of undergrowth and pitched face-first onto a sandy beach. Grit caked her face and ground between her teeth as she looked up to see a moon a dozen times larger than it ought to have been. Fierce tides lapped the shore ahead, breaking into violent waves, receding out without warning to leave great expanses of the seabed exposed, only to rush in a moment later, almost to the wood’s edge.
Poli‘ahu sniffed, spit sand from her mouth, and rose.
Once more, the tide fled from her, exposing a path to a rock edifice in the sea. Waves seemed to break against the path, splashing with furious turbulence, not able to quite drown the trail that lay ahead. Upon the rock rested a seal many times her size and probably weighing thousands of pounds. Its eyes were black opals staring at her, beckoning her forward.
This … this majestic, primal creature was what she had tried to summon.
And instead found herself summoned by it, called into its world to answer for her hubris, and forced to make the walk. Her legs continued to move, unbidden, carrying into the wet sand of the exposed seafloor. Sharp shells poked out here and there, and she narrowly avoided impaling her foot upon one at one point.
The creature before her possessed a glory with no obvious visual component—save its size—that made her feel certain it was perfect, in the truest sense of the word. The perfection of all seals, as if each of them were but a fragment of this queen.
At last her trudging steps brought her to the base of the rock, and Poli‘ahu fell to her knees, prostrating herself before the seal queen. For a time, she worked a mouth grown too dry. Every word she tasted and thought to speak felt so blasphemous to utter before this entity that she felt herself ready to weep for shame.
“I … implore you … make the bargain made in eras past. Let your essence and your children blend with those I offer to you. I …” ‘Aumākua, she sounded so frail and pathetic before such majesty.
Hardly knowing why, Poli‘ahu lowered her head, pressing her brow against the sand just before the rock. Her fingers dug rivets in the seabed, but she forced herself to silence now. Either the Seal Queen would accept her or reject her, and she knew she could never survive the latter. Words held no further sway here.
A chill, alien caress passed over her mind as the deity probed her Will, perhaps seeking weakness, or perhaps simply curious about her intent. The intrusion seemed to stretch on for infinite moments. The touch—even not overtly hostile—of something existing outside of time threatened to shatter her. Its breath upon her soul felt apt to shred her essence and destroy her sense of self. Poli‘ahu stifled her whimpers. What more could she do save endure as long as possible?
The intrusion withdrew like an eel slithering away from her, allowing Poli‘ahu to at last draw a free breath. To shudder in relief. To dare raise her gaze to the inky black one of this queen.
A bargain struck.
A price she was not quite prepared for.
It shot through her as if she’d been struck by lightning. Or, rather, as if lightning poured out from her, crackling inside her core, coursing up her spine, coruscating in her mouth and jolting out of her in a flood. An invisible surge, an inverted flow that had her flinging her arms wide in agony, arching her back as that which should have been drawn inward was instead sucked outward.
Vortices within her reversed their spin, hurling mana outward to be absorbed—no, consumed—by the World of Moon or the denizens therein. Not an expenditure, but a reduction—an integral piece of herself stripped away, stolen forever.
Rivers of mana fled from her.
And Poli‘ahu dwindled.
Mana streamed from her mouth and stole herself from herself, all she was abraded, left a shell. On and on, her insides pulled out.
Until, finally, bereft, a shadow of herself, she pitched face forward into the sand and lay there spasming, too weak even to weep for that taken from her.
It would not return to her, this much Poli‘ahu knew without doubt, even as her mind recoiled and wakened back into a body that had slumped over, no longer able to dance. The volunteers—the victims—had begun to thrash, their bones reshaping, their muscles tearing, their skin shredding. They fell upon their sides, wracked in convulsions, suffering almost as much as Poli‘ahu herself.
What had the seal done to her?
You are nothing now … Waiau mocked. Mortal.
Barely even kupua, with so much of her mana gone. How? How could this be the price? Poli‘ahu wanted to scream in frustration but lacked even the strength for that. Instead, she found herself crawling along the sand toward one of the convulsing inchoate wereseals.
Desperation sometimes lent a
dreamlike quality to action, creating necessity. At the side of the seal, Poli‘ahu raised a hand to form an icicle spike in it. Nothing happened. Not even enough mana left to perform this at the moment … and ever again? Was she utterly bereft of all that defined a Snow Queen?
Traded your very life for animals. A wispy snicker in her mind.
No!
No, she would not be ordinary.
Growling, Poli‘ahu seized up a rock. Focused upon the singing amulet. Was this the price? Her enervation? Then the seals would also pay for her. With a shriek, stone descended on a reshaping skull. A crack.
A fresh splatter of blood on her face, over the now dried flakes of prior victims.
“Poli‘ahu!” Matsya called to her, seeming far away.
More shrieking, the rock descending over and over. Blood flying, soaking her as the half-animal head caved in. Its power flowed into Pō. In wailing desperation, Poli‘ahu dropped the rock and clasped the singing amulet.
“To me. To me!”
A flood engulfed her then, as a soul and its mana writhed, drawn into the amulet and the shattered Chintamani stone at its heart. It flowed into the amulet, and through it, to her. At once, Poli‘ahu herself convulsed, her form shifting, legs fusing, arms becoming flippers. The amulet melded into her chest.
And she was a seal.
She yelped in surprise—a bark!—and found herself drawn by a primal urge to dive into the sea.
An undersea world unfolded before her, shimmering in moonlight, seeming to fly by with each powerful beat of her flippers. Twisting around with unexacting grace, she soared over a coral reef and wondered at the splendor of silver and the darting fish around it.