Flames of Mana

by Matt Larkin

  She grunted. Sure, easy enough. If she could move. She hesitated just long enough to see if he intended help her. He didn’t. Part of the lesson, she supposed. Forcing her to pick herself up, to drag herself those last few feet to the fire.

  He’d told her, the other day, that the time would come when she would have to fight for her survival. That she would have to fight against foes stronger than herself, to protect not only her own life, but things she might treasure more than her life.

  Pele rolled onto her side, panting with effort. Then, trying her best to ignore the pain, wiggled her way along the ground until she could drop her hand into the fire.

  It didn’t burn her, of course. Its incredible warmth was relaxing, actually. For a few breaths, she just lay there, trying not to think. That was not her strong point.

  Honestly, how was this man so sure she could do any of this? Six months of training hadn’t given her control—just a bit more power. What did any of that matter, though? She had no one to protect anyway. Every person she had ever cared for—or should have been able to care for—had left her.

  The flame reacted to her sudden bout of frustration, flaring up.

  “Wrong direction. You have to draw energy from the flame, not feed it.”

  Damn it. Why was it so hard to control her rage? Was that a gift from her father?

  No.

  No, thinking about him would only inflame her anger. She needed calm. She needed to get as close as she could to the meditative trance Lonomakua always urged her to achieve. The kahuna liked to reach that state by staring into the flicker of a fire. Watching its patterns unfold, always changing, always shifting, adapting, and yet—somehow—always the same.

  She kept her eyes locked on the fire he had built for her. The kahuna was always watching out for her. Oh, but he would let her fail. Let her get hurt. And sometimes, mostly at night, he would remind her that one day she would have to be strong enough to live and rule without him backing her up. She liked to tell herself that day was a long way away.

  Of course, she knew she was probably lying to herself. If he was human and she kupua, she might outlive him by a century or more. Maybe much more.

  That thought, and the secret burst of fear it carried with it, cost her her concentration, and again the fire flared. This time, the kahuna said nothing, just slunk down across the fire from her. As he faded from her sight, she pushed him from her mind. There was only the fire.

  Fire was the source of light, heat, and ultimately life. Creating and consuming. And all her fears and pain and rage, she was meant to pour those back into the flame to be transformed. Everything goes into the flame. Lonomakua had repeated that mantra again and again when first trying to teach her meditation. No matter how many times she repeated it in her mind, she had never quite gotten there.

  Still, she let the mantra roll through her consciousness. Everything goes into the flame.

  With a sudden start, she felt herself falling. Her balance disrupted, she jerked upward, trying to steady herself. The fire had dimmed, diminished. And with it, some of the aches of her head and ankle had begun to fade. Indeed, how had she even managed to sit up? Moments ago, she could barely move. Had she done it? Somehow drawn the energy back into her body? It was as if, in pouring all her thoughts into the fire, she had emptied herself and allowed it to fill the void.

  “You’re afraid to let go,” Lonomakua said, his face now visible across the dimmed fire. “For a moment, you teetered on the edge of eternity, ready to connect with the universe. And in fear, you pulled back.”

  Pele bit back any response. Yes. She had been frightened, instinctively righting herself when she began to fall. Who in Lua-o-Milu wouldn’t do so? She blew out a breath. “Tell me more about Maui.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “About Toona.”

  Lonomakua rubbed his hands before the fire, silent for a time. “Toona was a taniwha, a dragon of the deep which legend claims served the god Kanaloa. No man can say for certain why Toona came to Sawaiki. Perhaps Kanaloa directed the dragon. Perhaps the dragon merely sought food. Perhaps it sought out its mo‘o cousins that had come to Sawaiki in Maui’s company. In those days, taniwha were more common.

  “What is held to be true, though, is that Maui lived on in a valley beneath the volcano Haleakalā, on the island of Maui‘i. He lived there with his wife, Hina, and their son, watching over the inhabitants.

  “Oh, they had found strife aplenty on Sawaiki, for the islands were home, at that time, to the menehune. Another kind of akua, ones tied to the Earth and jealous of their secrets.

  “Regardless, after a long struggle, Maui and Manua, the first king of that island, had established a new home for their people. The Sun akua, La, however, sought to enslave mankind as their god-king, and many worshipped him.

  “Maui left him be for some time, until the sacrifices grew too great. Legend claims it was Hina that drove Maui to fight La. So, Maui climbed Haleakalā and confronted the sun god, bound his limbs and broke his legs. They fought … a long time.

  “Before Maui returned from the mountain, Toona attacked his home, bringing with it a kai e‘e that flooded the lowlands, including the house where Hina and the children lived. So many people died that day …

  “Maui hunted Toona for what the dragon had done. He hunted it from its lair in Moloka‘i, all the way back to Mau‘i, where he burned it and buried it with the fires of Haleakalā. He buried the dragon alive in a torrent of lava, entombing it to suffer for what Toona had taken from him, in the very site of the dragon’s crime.”

  Pele pushed herself up. “Maui could make an entire volcano erupt?”

  “Yes, if pushing himself to the limit, though tales claim he paid a terrible price for it. But his power was never so great as yours might become. Your flame is not stolen, Pele, it is within your own breast, pulsing and raging and answering your call.”

  “I-I can make a volcano erupt? And we’re living beneath one? That … does not sound like a good idea.”

  Lonomakua chuckled and shook his head. “That’s part of the point, child. You need to learn control. There will come a day in your life when you require every drop of power and mastery and discipline you can manage.”

  “You saw that in the flames?”

  But Lonomakua offered no further answer.

  After that, even after she healed, she’d avoided that tree. Looked on it with anger and fear and—though she wouldn’t have admitted it—shame.

  Until finally Lonomakua caught her watching it one day. “Are you going to let it beat you? Are you going to spend the rest of your life afraid of it?”

  Growling, she forced herself to climb the banyan again.

  And she’d fallen again too.

  He didn’t judge her, though. Didn’t look at her with scorn or frustration or anything but expectation. It made it worse. He fucking knew she’d keep at it until she scaled it.

  And she did.

  “What do all those tattoos mean?” Pele asked Lonomakua, a few months later, while they practiced climbing a jungle-covered slope. “I mean, I’ve seen similar tattoos on kāhuna and some on warriors, but some of yours are different.”

  “You have a keen eye.”

  “Not an answer.” The better part of a year together, and she was catching on to his games. Even as he taught her power, he wanted more than that. He wanted her to stretch her mind, to be able to treat even a conversation like some game of kōnane, moving pieces to uncover someone’s deeper thoughts.

  Some days, he’d done nothing but discuss logical fallacies, forcing her to continually reevaluate her opinions on almost everything her other tutors had ever taught her. At first, that had been jarring, but she’d gotten used to it. Which was usually about when he tended to push her mind in some other random, unexpected direction.

  “Before the continents sank during the Deluge, in Old Mu, tattoos were used to harness mana, as a school of the Art. Most such knowledge is lost, of course, but a littl
e of it remains. For many warriors and even many kāhuna, the tattoos they bear are remnants of that knowledge. The tattoos have lost their efficacy, so far as their original purpose is concerned, but they do offer a boon in confidence for the bearers.”

  Pele huffed, pulling herself up onto a tree branch to look out over the jungle. Most days, Lonomakua paired physical exertion with his lessons, claiming a healthy mind and a healthy body were interrelated. Pele had no idea if that was really true, but she couldn’t believe the limits of her stamina.

  Lonomakua had told her she could use her own mana to give herself endurance, obviating the need for rest for a time, pushing herself to superhuman levels, even. The more her normal physical limits expanded, the more effective those techniques would become.

  “It is said Maui trained many pyromancers in his day,” Lonomakua continued. “Those who accompanied him across the Worldsea became the kāhuna of Sawaiki, while others remained in Kahiki and here in Uluka‘a. He taught some of them what he knew of the tattoo Art of Old Mu, which is largely the origin of what you see among the kāhuna these days. A dying art, of course, though some claim certain mer ‘ohana also preserve it.”

  Pele chuckled, shaking her head.

  “That amuses you?”

  “Not at all. I’m just a little overwhelmed by how much random shit you know. You clearly never slept through a single lecture, did you?”

  “Do you sleep through my lectures?”

  Pele snorted and hopped down from the branch. “No. You always turn them into conversations and verbal puzzles.”

  “Perhaps that, too, is a lesson.”

  She shook her head. “Yeah, I don’t think I’d be much of a teacher. I’m not interested in trying to impart wisdom to anyone.”

  “You might be, one day.”

  Pele flinched. It was always like that with him. He knew a lot more than he said, without doubt. Maybe he even knew about her murdering her sister. The sister Kū-Waha-Ilo had wanted her to raise, to teach, to do with what Lonomakua now did with her.

  And suddenly, the pressure of it, the guilt, hit her like a lava flow, sweeping her feet out from under her. Pain clenched in her chest and tears welled in her eyes. She slipped down into the dirt, heedless of mud caking her pa‘u. Even breathing had become hard, like someone was driving a knife into her lungs.

  Lonomakua knelt in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You have something you want to tell me?”

  Oh, she’d wanted to tell him many times, over the past months. But how was she to admit she’d done such a thing? If he learned of it, she might lose him. She could see him, walking away, shaking his head in disgust. Maybe he’d find another pupil, maybe not, but he’d never look at her again.

  This man, this kahuna had stuck by her side every day for the better part of a year, never faltering. Never easy, either. Always pushing her, demanding she push herself.

  He was the only one she had.

  But the words started spilling from her mouth, pouring out against her will. A confession of guilt. She had murdered what seemed a monster, and thus become a monster herself. And she could not stop speaking, could not hold back the flow of pain.

  His eyes, those ocean-blue eyes, just held hers. Deep, and not containing the judgment they ought to have.

  When she’d said it all, admitted all her weaknesses and vileness, he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

  And that was when she knew.

  It didn’t matter what she’d done: he would not leave her as long as she needed him.

  “It is human nature to dwell on the past,” Lonomakua said in the evening, while staring into their campfire. “To replay it over and over in our minds, as if it were so easy to turn back the river of time and change its course. But history is immutable. What has happened has happened and will not come undone. All our mistakes compound to make us who we are, in this moment. We cannot change them. We can, however, learn from them.”

  “If I had it to do over …” Pele mused.

  Lonomakua poked at the fire. “You will not find a specific instance repeats exactly, but it may repeat in kind. You may find yourself, one day, faced with a similar choice. To take a harder path, make the more difficult climb. On such a day, you have the chance to make the mistakes of your past count for more than self-loathing.”

  Pele sighed, wishing she could see whatever he saw in the flames. He’d claimed pyromancy would come in time, when she learned to clear her mind and embrace meditation. “You mean we can atone for the things we’ve done?”

  “Atonement?” He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. That’s a question philosophers through the ages have struggled with. Does anything we do now ever abrogate us from responsibility for our pasts? That seems unlikely, and yet, perhaps we are still compelled to try. Maybe the effort to make up for our mistakes is the best we can ever do and the most the future can expect from us.”

  “Huh.” She glanced at him. “You don’t seem like someone who makes too many mistakes.”

  He looked to her now, mouth hanging slightly agape as if she had finally, after so long, rendered him speechless. Slowly, the kahuna shook his head. “You have no idea, child. No one gets through life without making mistakes. No one. The longer you live, the more they compound upon themselves, in vicious cycles of pain and loss and regret. We become the sum of our scars.”

  A sudden thought occurred to her then. Had he failed a student before? Was that why he was like this with her? Was he trying to atone for some mistake as a teacher in the past?

  But Pele knew he would not offer her the answer, even if she asked. Not yet. Not this easily.

  Everything with Lonomakua was a challenge for her to overcome.

  Always a valuable challenge.

  16

  The waters around the Cave of the Eel were aflame with the setting sun as Namaka returned, swimming back into the place that had almost cost her her life when she was at full strength.

  Instead, she climbed onto the rock surface and tossed the soaked, squealing pig before her. She opened her mouth to call for the Nanaue king, but he was already there, had already swept the animal up in his arms. His speed was uncanny, horrifying. He had crossed from the dark depths of the cave to stand before her in two bounds.

  Without bothering to kill the animal, the mer bit down onto its spine. The animal’s shrieks of pain and terror made Namaka’s skin crawl, even as blood splattered up over Kauhuhu’s face.

  She forced herself not to react. Such savagery was no doubt meant to unnerve her. He didn’t need to know it had worked.

  Kauhuhu tossed aside the pig carcass and it landed with a wet thwack. He cracked his neck, the sound echoing too loudly off the cave walls, then stalked closer, towering over Namaka, staring down at her with those black eyes.

  “You are brave, mermaid.” His breath stank of decaying fish, his voice a baritone that seemed to vibrate in her torso. “Few ever escape this cave. Fewer still come back for more.”

  “I come as a representative of Mu.”

  The man leaned in closer, lowering his face to meet her gaze. “Why should I care about a dying mer kingdom?”

  “You know what’s happened?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Dakuwaqa has risen up against Kuula.”

  Kauhuhu paused, expression unreadable. Even with him leaning down, she had to crane her neck to see his eyes. More than likely the Nanaue could smell fear—and she was afraid.

  “If the Nanaue ‘Ohana helped oust Aiaru and the Kuula, Dakuwaqa would welcome your ‘ohana back into the kingdom in a place of honor. In ages past, Nanaue were warriors, the front lines of Mu. That is the place you deserve.”

  Kauhuhu flicked a bulbous tongue over his pointed teeth. If that was supposed to intimidate her, he must have forgotten she had shark teeth when she wanted them, too. She even debated letting them descend. He spoke before she could decide on the matter. “You think Mu rules the world. Always telling us where we can and cann
ot swim, hunt, breed. Your queen exiled us. Maybe when Mu is gone, we will swim a little freer.”

  Namaka shook her head. “That was Aiaru, and you know it. You’ve heard the he‘e have taken Mu, yes? They hunt us still. I come to ask your aid in reclaiming our homeland and overthrowing that tyrant.”

  “So we can be the subjects of Dakuwaqa instead.”

  “One ‘ohana must always hold the throne. But in more than two thousand years with Dakuwaqa ruling Mu, did the Nanaue ever face disgrace? Were your people ever afforded anything save glory and fear? Besides, if Mu falls, you cannot possibly believe the he‘e will not seek to master you as well.”

  “Mortals.”

  “Conniving, murdering monsters bent on controlling everything below and above the sea.”

  Kauhuhu placed a meaty hand on her shoulder. It was so large it engulfed the top of her arm. Namaka had to fight the urge to squirm in his grasp. It would have been pointless—she couldn’t overpower him—and would have made her look weak.

  Instead, she gritted her teeth. They both knew Kauhuhu was in control here.

  “What would you give me in exchange for my aid?”

  “What do you want?” Her voice sounded so tiny next to his. She hated it.

  “Command of all the Muian army. Name me your general.”

  That position wasn’t remotely hers to give. Even if Kuku Lau took the throne, there was no guarantee she could get her sister to agree to this. Except, if Namaka offered it to Kauhuhu, Kuku Lau couldn’t well refuse without risking having her entire coup turned on its end.

  If Mu was destroyed, the Nanaue could do as they pleased in any event. At least until the he‘e enslaved them. That thought alone—the savage mer as a directed force of terror and destruction—was enough to make her consider almost any deal to prevent it.

  She had to hope Kuku Lau could forgive her. “I will do so.”

  “Then it is done. And the Nanaue will feast on Kuula. I shall devour Aiaru, body and soul.”