Whare Potae (The House of Mourning)

Chapter Four

Author's Note: I noticed this morning that there were several important lines missing from the end of the previous chapter. I must have done a shitty cut-and-paste job when I was uploading. Sorry about that!

The previous chapter, Chapter Three, is now up-to-date and correct. Please feel free to go back and read the new chapter ending, which will probably help this next chapter make just a little more sense. Thanks so much!

Chapter Four

It had been so many years since Moana's original journey to Maui's island that she'd forgotten how long the trip took. The first time she'd gone, she'd been so busy trying to keep afloat and trying to prevent Heihei from drowning himself that the time had just flown by.

This time, the trip was much less eventful. There were, mercifully, no terrible storms, and no difficult chickens to keep trapped on the boat. Night fell without incident and the stars came out, revealing Maui's glittering fish hook in the sky and giving Moana a much clearer mark by which to steer her canoe.

If anything, the trip was just a little lonely. Moana's body still ached, but the pain had dulled significantly since she'd started out, and it had become much easier to take deep breaths and move her arms and shoulders. She hummed to herself as she sailed, songs of her people that the fishermen sang when setting out to haul in the morning's catch. The more she sang, the calmer the sea became, almost as if it enjoyed the music, until she found herself speeding along with the unbroken ocean current, Maui's thousand-year prison looming just on the horizon as the sun came back up and stars disappeared.

By the time she finally reached the beach, Moana was more than a little exhausted. After hastily pulling her boat up onto the sand, far enough away from the waves that she wouldn't risk having it stolen by the tide, she stumbled into the cave in which Maui had once tried to trap her while he sailed off in her canoe. She curled up in the sand, yawned, closed her eyes, and was just about to give herself over blissfully to a few hours of well-earned sleep when she noticed something glittering out of the corner of her eye. It looked like it was sticking out from beneath that large boulder propped up against the wall.

For a brief moment, Moana considered getting up and going to examine it, but in the end, the fatigue got the better of her. Reasoning groggily that whatever it was would still be there when she woke up, Moana passed out with a face full of sand.

When Moana opened her eyes again, she was in an unrecognizable world. The walls of the cave had become glimmering walls of water, and when she looked around, she realized that she was standing in the middle of a sort of dome underneath the sea, surrounded on all sides by waves that swayed and glimmered, but which somehow managed never to touch her.

"Huh?" She blinked, turning slowly around, trying to take it all in. "Is this...Rarohenga? But, how did I-?"

Then she caught her breath and fell silent, noticing the austere, terribly beautiful woman standing before her. It was a goddess of the sea who looked like she was made of the finest, most delicate blue and black corals which curled around her arms and waist and which made up a sort of knot at the back of her head where eels and sea snakes slithered around like thick, slimy tendrils of hair.

There was something in the woman's eyes, too; something endlessly empty and blank that sent chills rocketing down Moana's spine.

"Hine-nui-te-po," she breathed, belatedly sinking to her knees in the sand and bowing her head.

The goddess of death said nothing.

"I," gasped Moana, "am Chief Moana of Motunui. Please, I beg you, release the sea from the curse you have placed upon it and allow my people to voyage and fish again in peace. We have done nothing to harm or hinder you, and our children are dying. Please, please, cease your anger and let us be. Please..."

Still, Hine-nui-te-po said nothing. When Moana finally had the courage to look up into the goddess's eyes again, she was shocked to see Maui kneeling on the sand only a few feet away from her, with his head also bowed. As Moana watched, he looked up at her, flashed her one of his classic cheesy, friendly, over-confident smiles, and something warm stirred in Mana's heart.

She opened her mouth to speak to him, but suddenly the goddess's long coral-encrusted fingers were on Maui's shoulders, and Maui's smile faded away. His body stiffened up and all the color began to drain out of face and body. The goddess leaned in, kissed his long hair, and she breathed inaudibly against his neck.

"M-Moana," mumbled Maui as his eyes went wide, cold, and lifeless like the goddess's eyes. He looked horribly empty and frozen, and Moana reached desperately for him.

"Maui?"

He didn't respond, but instead slumped backwards into Hine-nui-te-po's arms. The goddess smiled a mirthless smile and began dragging him away, back into the darkness.

Moana started to scream.

"MAUI!"

"AHHH!"

She awoke from her nightmare, sweating and panicky, and sat bolt upright on the floor of the cave, banging her newly-tattooed shoulder into the wall as she did so.

"Ow! Maui?!" Moana sucked in a deep breath, took a quick look around, and then slowly exhaled again, intensely relieved as reality took control.

"Okay," she muttered to herself, "I'm...definitely awake now. Nope, noooo more sleeping for me, today. Actually, after that, I think it's very possible that I might never be able to fall asleep again, ever. Ugh. Dad was right...talk about the stuff of nightmares. Ow, my arm."

Shaking as much of the sand as she could out of her face and hair, Moana turned to gaze at the spot under the boulder where she could still see a patch of glittering light.

Cautiously, she nudged at the boulder with her foot, then slowly shoved it aside with both hands, until the glittering patch turned out to be a hole in the earth of the cave, through which she could see shimmering water deep down below. She could hear the splashing, shifting sounds of the ocean as well.

"Well," she reasoned with herself, "either the ocean led me here so that I could find the entrance to Rarohenga and save the day, or this is just some totally coincidental hole in the ground. I could get lucky, and this could turn out to be one of those magical underwater realms, like Lalotai, where humans can breathe even though we're theoretically who-knows-how-far under the ocean. On the other hand, if this really is just a hole in the ground, I can only hold my breath for about a minute, and I'll probably drown before I get halfway to wherever they're holding Maui. Wait, the spirits of the dead don't need to breathe, so I might drown either way. Hard to say."

She gazed down into the hole for a long moment, trying not to be logical, trying not to think about all the myriad ways that she might be about to jump to certain death. Then, she sighed.

"Oh well. I've come this far, so there isn't much point in getting cold feet now. Um...here goes."

Moana steeled herself, shut her eyes, jumped, and plummeted down into the ocean realm below.

It was a familiar feeling, but not one she'd ever particularly cared to repeat.

"Ch-chee-hu!" she called, trying to channel her inner chiefly power and not to sound as frankly petrified as she felt. "Ah-aaaaaah!"

Author's End Note: A quick note about Maui's favorite war cry, "chee-hu." I've done some research on this, and this is actually not the right spelling, nor is it even the right pronunciation of the word. This is more of a modern colloquial form of of the cry, used primarily by younger generations, so Maui wouldn't actually have used it.

I'm going to keep using it, though, because he only says it like forty different times in the movie, and I want to do my best to be character-accurate whenever possible. Just thought I'd throw out that little bit of cultural anthropology to show that I have been doing my homework. Thank you!