“You’re not eating, Faturaki?”

“No.” The old tohunga, shoulders tight after a morning at the paddle, passed his share of fish to the younger warriors. Hunger no longer troubled him. Decades of fasting gifted the knowledge of an advantage only an empty belly provides. For a tohunga, fasting opened the way to the spirit world: no food to weigh down his hā, no meat to hold his wairua to the body. “An empty shell is easier to float, my boy. Pass me some water, aye.”

He caught the gourd tossed from the stern by Galiaga, drank, and raised his chin to the sun. Around him, the others were still in the water, spears flashing below the surface. His thoughts drifted between the now and the before.

Ten years had passed since Faturaki had last seen Ho and the man most Kafiki Islanders recognised as the greatest warrior in at least three generations. Who he was and what he had done were much talked about, spreading from reef to reef and beyond, even into the world of spirits. From chief to child, commoner to slave, all spoke his name. Ho’s self-exile, and the discord left in his absence, rippled through the islands’ intertribal web of gossip. What was Faturaki’s adopted son doing in isolation? Why had he abandoned his wife, the beautiful healer Selai? Why had the great Tohunga Faturaki climbed down from Takali Foto after all these years hidden away? Was he commanded by the council of chiefs to retrieve his son?

“Shut up old man,” he mumbled to himself. Keen to keep his inner ramblings to a minimum, aware he had a full waka to command. But I miss my home, being alone, my gardens—and of course, my mountain god, Takali Foto. What if she stirs while I’m away? After all this careful work? I won’t even get to see the flames kiss the sky, he thought. Just shut up. And don’t think about her.

Earlier that day, the warriors had anchored to dive and spear fish. Left alone, without distraction, Faturaki took the chance to slip away into the spirit realm.

He sensed a presence—not divine, but something lesser. Though the bond between them still pulsed, this energy felt altered. Perhaps the boy had changed? Perhaps he had begun to understand the sickness in him, the thing that choked his mana and twisted it into shadow. Those with sight, or those under puga’s influence, saw it as a dark cloud, though Ho could not see it himself. He knew it only when fear or rage brought it rising. After all, the fault had never been with the boy himself, but in the nature of his lineage.

Drifting, Faturaki had opened a path to remembering: Ho and his endless questions during training, his mind wandering when it should have been still.

“Why, Faturaki? I can crush most men’s skulls with my bare hands.”

“Boy, it’s not just about being the strongest,” he would reply, trying not to sound too fatherly. Back then, he still felt annoyance, not gratitude, that six of Kafiki’s great chiefs—rarely of one mind—had entrusted the boy to a tohunga instead of a childless couple.

“It makes my brain hurt! All this concentration on not concentrating at all,” Ho complained.

Even in adolescence, when Faturaki first tried to calm his wayward temper, the boy was already more substantial than most men. Accessing one’s reserve of mana never came easily to him—especially when he could dismember a tohunga before they could even lift a god-stick.

“It’s about entering the mindset of a fight without ever needing to shed blood. It’s about restricting oneself. Surely you can appreciate that, Ho?”

“No. No, I can’t, Tohunga Faturaki. You make no sense to me. Why restrict my own power? Who has that right?”

Mentoring a former captive was difficult; they lacked ancestry. Ho’s family had been erased for reasons unknown, and the boy enslaved while still at his mother’s breast. He often said he had no memory of a mother—no sense of a female spirit—making him too hard to hold, fit only for battle.

Any chance of tracing his lineage vanished once Ho escaped his Autara captors. Regrettably, he destroyed the last knowledge of his own blood when he returned to that village years later. His revenge was swift: he pressed the skulls of men, women, and children into the earth, wiping away every voice that might have named him.

Perhaps this was his sickness, this absence of lineage. This hollow where ancestry should have lived.

Slowly, his mind came back to the moment, though his wairua seemed to have slipped free without his knowing, carried above the clouds on unseen currents. Below, the swell darkened as Rā sank beyond the horizon. If he rose higher, perhaps he could glimpse Ho’s island itself.

A voice called up from below, “Faturaki! Are you asleep?”

All the warriors were back aboard, dividing their catch of three great snappers. One jabbed the butt of his paddle into Faturaki’s shoulder. From above, he could see them clearly, feel the pressure through his sleeping limbs. Keep prodding, he thought, and you’ll pull my spirit back in like a kite on its string.

“Aue—Tohunga is dead!” Galiaga cried, kicking at his knee.

That did it. Faturaki reeled his spirit home to the waka and out of the trance.

“Stupid fool,” he growled, snatching the steering oar and rapping the young warrior’s head.

“Oww! I thought you were asleep au!”

Faturaki pointed past him. “Look—toward the horizon. What do you see?”

The four warriors quickly got to their feet, as if called to battle. As they turned, Faturaki wedged his feet against the hull and rocked the waka sideways, shifting it from beneath them and spilling them into the water. Faturaki cackled at the sky. From beneath the horizon, Rā pierced the gloom with one last approving ray.