Breathe. Breathe. Even though you are dead you must breathe—

Oh, you are running. I suppose you could run. Run, then, if you never want to know what killed you, and why, and where you are now. For I have seen that thing like a great flying beast, which crackles and buzzes and trails smoke and light and fire as it comes down screaming from the sky. Then the sheer presence of it above you, and its impossible geometricality, its breadth and width like twenty war-wakas lashed together. But hovering, somehow, so gently.

Something like that—stay there—brought me here, too.

It is a waka, of a kind. A waka built by gods, with a mouth on the bottom of its hull, which spits out a very peculiar sort of death. A death like being swallowed up by a sunbeam.

Our deaths.

Focus. It is not easy, I know. Embodying yourself again after dying like that. The blinding flash of a death like that, the impermanence that followed, and the wondering without sense or time how a mind can live on without a body. Here—you have been given another. Identical to your old one. Focus on the sea-spray, cooling, yes? On the smell of the ocean; here some things are the same.

Forget your father, now, child. Forget your mother too. This ocean cannot bring you back to them. Only the gods could build such a waka, and they are not inclined. But here you can help them, more than they will ever know. Here, in the land of the gods, we think it is a Heaven for the navigators, it must be…

I disbelieved too, when the gods first brought me here. It all seems so lifelike, the…the weight of yourself. Your corporeality, the vividness of your senses. But all I will ask you to do is look up. Behold the twin suns of this otherworld, and the burnt-orange haze of its midday sky, and if this place is not our afterlife then I challenge you to tell me where else we might be.

We are dead. You must believe this.

Quiet. Quiet, now. I know what will bring you peace.

You were learning to be a navigator, yes? All who end up here are. Then close your eyes and think with me. Think of the sea, that mortal sea, of lying down in the hull of a canoe. Your parents just onshore, the laughter of your friends at play. And the boat, rocking, rocking. The sea speaking through the swells. Before the other children were taught how to listen, you listened, to the currents and the wind and the waves. They spoke to you. You knew.

And the other signs, before the masters even began to school you: you had glimpses, yes? Of the knowledge they guarded the most? You studied the stars wheeling above you in their houses, you studied the birds overhead. The glow of the ocean, too, a glow that is not the shine of the moon nor algae’s living light. That shimmers and bursts forth underwater like lightning to point a wayfinder towards land.

Before you were taught to see it, you knew.

I will tell you a story in return. Small recompense, I know. But only in this place are we privy to such truths.

Take my hand. I will take you to our village. And I will tell you why we were chosen to come of age in the land of the gods.

You will find that our gods are sightless things.

However your storytellers have described them to you, the brilliance of their chiefly plumage, their coming in the forms of men or birds or sealife, or even in the arc of lava or in the coming storm—that is not how they show themselves here. Here they are chitin and bone. Here they are eyeless, sightless, they chitter about like spiders. They no longer speak to us. They only ever spoke to the first of us.

Aka, he was named. You know him? He has many names. You may know him as Lata, or Rata. No? Oh, he was a great wayfinder. The mortal masters had trained him, like they would have trained us. He learned the wind-compass and the star-compass and the sacred mnemonics of the star-tales, which laid out the astral geographies, and told him how to set his courses. They were harsh, his masters. If he misplaced a word in a star-tale they beat him with a splintered paddle. A misplaced word in a star-tale is a star gone from the sky, a star you cannot use to navigate. And on a night obscured by the clouds a single star can be the difference between life and death.

Aka was good. He won great acclaim for his people and his chief, but most importantly, he thought, for himself.

He sailed the whole rim of the world. But for one like Aka this would never be enough. Among his peers there was one last, great wayfinding prize. The distant oceans to the west, into the setting sun. There, he sailed. So far west that the gods had not yet sketched the fullness of the place. The birds and the sharks came to his canoe to warn him off. But he wanted to be the greatest navigator in the world—he wanted to see all that there was. He pressed on.

So the gods came down in their star-ship, and they worked a strange death on him.

First the lights flashed around him, white, tinged with green, that enveloped him until he was only thought. Where is my body? he wondered. He was not sure if he was asleep, or awake, or alive or dead, or if he had been light for a moment or for a thousand years. But his body began to signal him again. Bones creaking uneasily, only just set back inside of him. Mouth abuzz with the taste of copper—yes, yes, it is familiar, yes?

I was soothed, too, hearing that even heroes had felt what I had.

He woke on this very island. He woke among these very trees, which bear plenty fruit; the seas around us teem with the arrowlike fish of this realm. For those just arrived, used to the shape and earthly coloration and the number of eyes on a mahimahi or a tuna, their appearance can be quite frightening. But I assure you they are edible just the same.

It was almost like Paradise. But with an unfamiliar wind prickling his skin, as twin suns set into a deep-green dusk, he looked up and saw that the gods had scattered the stars.

A lifetime spent guided by those stars, child. You could not imagine it. Those were never my stars; I could not imagine it, either. But for a navigator like Aka, who spent years at sea, decades, for whom the placement and the movement of the stars was his only constant—it must have been like being struck blind.

He could never make his way home again.

“The gods are punishing me,” he wailed. “I have violated the tapu of the gods.”

And he thought the gods responded when the dusk lit up, with something other than starlight, more than moonlight. With dim reds and verdant greens which danced in the sky. The orange skies of Heaven’s daytime are nothing, child, compared to the first time you will ever behold the dancing lights.

They will settle you, they will answer the question that I know is still ringing in your bones.

You will know that you have left your mortal world behind.

For nine days and nine nights he wailed, Aka, he raged and sorrowed at his own death.

But in him was the exploring urge, irrepressible. And the trees which bore fruit were mighty and tall, and as he inspected them he realized they had the qualities of koa, and that if they were cut down they would make fine canoes.

Five gods watched him through the curtain of dancing lights. They watched him hew the canoe out of the trees of paradise. And before he set off to sail they stepped out of the lights to appear to him. Their massive limbs crashed down into the water, they threatened to take the tops off the strange trees. But the gods walked and arrayed themselves before him without destruction.

A mirage, thought Aka. And it was a mirage. But it was also the first time Aka beheld the true form of the gods in Heaven.

One stepped forward, on five insectile legs, and leaned its sightless head down to Aka. Though it had no mouth it spoke inside his head, among his thoughts.

“Behold your gods,” it said.

Arrayed across the horizon, they made for a terrifying sight.

No—listen, listen. The voice of the gods in your head, it is…it is not frightening. I assure you. Of course they inspire awe, but…

Who am I to tell you that your tears are not warranted? I was much the same, when I first came here. The very same.

There, there.

Come on. It’s all right. Get up, and I will continue.

“We have searched high and low for one like you,” said the god. “We have searched every star in the sky.”

Aka found his tongue and dared to question them. “You are gods?” he asked them. “I know gods. The storytellers have described them to me. You cannot be my gods.”

The god cast about in Aka’s head and saw what Aka needed to believe. It took on chiefly plumage, and the sheen of firelight, its limbs became wooden and whorled and carved with the faces and genealogies of Aka’s ancestors. “I am called Fakafuumaka,” it said. “I have been in your world since it was only sea and rock and underworld. I am One Who Comes from Stone, and you will pay me my due respects.”

Aka, chastised, shook and bowed and knelt before it.

“We are a vast and mighty race,” Fakafuumaka continued. “But there is much we have forgotten, too.”

Fakafuumaka said, “Our pathfinding instruments are mighty. As you sail the oceans, so we sail the space between stars. But we have come to depend on our instruments too much. We have replaced our eyes with them, our skin. We cannot feel the winds. We cannot see the stars. And though we can see through the heavens and the earth, good and evil, the mana in all things, there are things we cannot sense. Not anymore. Not since…”

The blind god hissed at the dancing lights. Aka now understood that they were devil’s lights, which stopped magic from working here.

And Aka understood that his being here was no punishment.

He asked, “Where would you have me navigate?”

Fakafuumaka said, “I would have you navigate my son and I to the birthplace of the Universe, so that we may perform the ritual that staves off its end.”

Aka said, “If I do this for you gods, will you bring me back to my village and my people?”

Fakafuumaka said, “Do this for us, Aka, and we will record your name in our annals. You will be the greatest navigator in two realms.”

That old hunger for glory rose up in him again. Aka assented.

Then he learned that even gods have temples of their own. Fakafuumaka told him about the temples of their forefathers, great constructions of stone and obsidian that whirred and creaked and groaned. Temples that floated and wove great unnatural paths across the water. Not like driftwood, but as if they had minds of their own. Temples that could elude blinded gods.

How awesome and frightening is our cosmology, thought Aka, if even our gods have gods of their own?

But now Aka was their champion. Their temples would not elude him. Not if he could sail the starpaths of the gods themselves.

Fakafuumaka walked up to Aka, and in one chitinous limb he had a four-pointed staff, which he touched to Aka’s forehead. And immediately Aka knew the stars of this place. They were set into his bones, and he could recall them as easily as the stars of the upperworld set into him by his earthly teachers.

The staff of the gods crumbled, and they wailed.

“That knowledge is lost to us,” said Fakafuumaka. “We will not be able to pass our star-lore down to another.”

“I am the great navigator of my age,” said Aka, “and am I not in the netherworld, and therefore already dead? You will never need another.”

At this the gods gave a great rumble but said nothing.

Here Aka saw a chance to bridge the spirit-world and his own, a way that he might influence the gods. He thought of his own village and said, “We will need rowers and riggers and hewers, adze-men and woodcutters. The canoe behind me is just that, a one-man canoe; to find this temple we will need a waka. And there is no waka without the whole of a village.”

And so the star-ship of the gods returned to the upperworld. But in their wisdom they did not end an entire village; they took one at a time, or two, to allow each people to participate in the staving off of the end of the Universe. There was a great confusion of tongues as the dead poured in from across the ocean.

But in the end Aka got a village, even if it was not his.

Aka and the newly dead built all that you see here. First they built the marae, that great stone platform at the center of our village. When the gods come for their rituals, that is where they ground their star-ships. They built those thatched homes, on stilts, one of those will be yours. They cleared land, and tilled those great fields, and carved the fishing ponds away from the sea.

Here, sit down here. You are inside a maneaba—is that the custom, among your people? To receive your instruction in a building like this? Ah, of course, you had not reached that age.

It is your custom now.

And they felled trees, Aka’s peers, and they built hulls and great crossbeams out of the wood, and fitted them together. But they did not voyage.

“I am the sacred navigator of the gods,” said Aka. “Their star-lore is mine alone.”

The people rebelled and groused, but that is a story for another time. Importantly, they built. They built lashings and sails, and sanded hulls, and soon enough, in our village’s harbor, floated the first waka that this Heaven ever saw.

Aka was ready to ferry the gods—

One moment, please.

Everyone, get away! Away! This child is my initiate. Introduce yourselves later.

Your classmates. Here is a sweet-yam from one of them; I think you’ll get along nicely. You’ll have more than enough time with them soon. In here.

Look up, at the domed roof of the maneaba. Look at how it is separated by the eaves. Look at the rafters, how they meet in the middle there, yes? That is Hōkū Pa‘a, our polestar, around which the other stars wheel. And see how we have separated the rafters with other beams? We have segmented the night sky for you, it makes for easier memorization. These are the houses of the stars, each with their own star-tale…

Excuse me. I am getting ahead of myself. I am happy to wait, if you would like to eat that. We are certainly due a break. I remember my first taste of a sweet thing here, it reassured me—hm?

Of course. I will just pack that away for you, then. Of course we can continue.

Perhaps there is some grit in you after all.

Now I will tell you what happened when the gods returned.

When the gods returned they did not do so in a vision. They sailed a massive star-ship into the village, and came themselves.

In Aka’s vision they were magisterial and infernal, with all the trappings of divinity. And the star-ship was massive, and glowed, and made many loud noises, which lined up with those impressions. But instead the two chitinous things that came out of it moved about unsteadily on the marae, and slowly, baby birds taking their first steps.

Still they were gods. Fakafuumaka still spoke in Aka’s mind.

“We are weakened, here. But I have enough strength for this. Listen and prepare. I will make a sacrifice of myself to myself. And the temple will hear. You will see that it hears. Take us there, for our ritual. Do you understand?”

Aka said, “I understand.”

He also asked, “Who is this?”

The smaller of the gods tilted its head at Aka, and reared up on two of its limbs.

“I am the only one with the knowledge to speak to you,” said Fakafuumaka. “But this is my son.”

Aka placed a hand on his heart and bowed to the godling, as well.

And Fakafuumaka raised his shining head to the sky and his limbs curled up and into his body as he screamed a soundless scream across the world. He parted the dancing lights. The scream expended so much of Fakafuumaka’s energy that he fell to the ground, and Aka could not tell if he were alive or dead. His son pawed at him.

But Fakafuumaka had fulfilled his part of the ritual. And the people murmured and pointed, across the edge of the island. It was the temple’s response: a beam of light on the horizon, a column of light brighter than the dancers, brighter than the stars and sun.

Aka studied the night sky around the light-beam, the houses and the constellations that it cut through. He committed those houses and constellations to memory.

He could set a course for it.

He summoned his crew, and they gathered the sleeping god and the godling into their waka, and in the wild seas of Heaven there, for the first time, sailed man.

As they sailed towards the temple, Aka and his crew contested with the many fantastic beasts and taniwha which populate the underworld, and their battles form the font of many of our star-tales. But their most formidable adversary was the spirit of ’Aikanaka, Man-Eater and King of Sharks, killed by mortal heroes and moved on to our world. The spirits of the fish have come here, and been transformed. Same with our trees, our crops. Why would it be different for the most awesome of our ocean spirits?

’Aikanaka’s spirit sailed above Aka like the air was water; indeed, it had its own sails, which it flapped in the air to move faster than the fastest of wakas. It thrummed war-cries out of two mouths, and it had many terrible tentacles and appendages. It circled Aka and his crew and made to eat the sleeping body of Fakafuumaka, around which the godling curled defiantly.

Aka directed his men to hurl many volleys of fishing spears at ’Aikanaka, but it dodged the spears easily and approached them at other angles.

Aka had to think quickly, before they were out of spears. He quickly fashioned a kite out of spare wood and spare canvas to distract the shark-spirit. It chased their kite, and in doing so it showed them the air-breathing gills on its side. Aka exhorted his crewmen, and they slew ’Aikanaka’s spirit with a final volley of spears.

The shark-spirit gave a great wail and sunk slowly out of the sky.

Finally, they reached the end of the course that Aka had set; the temple was not there. But Aka could parse the swell of the waters, which indicated an island nearby, or a thing like an island; and further, he could see the patterns in the driftwood and drift iron, and knew that it could not be far. There it was in the distance, shining, tiny pinpoints of light dancing around the darkness of its materials. Darkness like a hole torn into the sky.

After their years and years upon the ocean, they had found the temple of the gods, and they were ready to stave off the end of the Universe.

Aka laid Fakafuumaka onto the obsidian ground of the temple, and his body cracked and warped as the god breathed life into himself again. His son leaped out of the waka and chittered happily. The two of them touched heads.

Aka made to follow Fakafuumaka and his son up the steps of the temple, but Fakafuumaka stopped him there.

“This rite is only for gods,” said Fakafuumaka.

He watched them ascend the temple steps. What the gods do there, we will never know. Not even Aka the hero-navigator was privy to those rites. But we have guessed enough. Aka guessed it, when two climbed up the temple steps, and only Fakafuumaka came down, with a heaviness in his step that did not come from his earlier frailty.

“Have you sent him on to the next Heaven?” asked Aka.

After a long while, Fakafuumaka said, “We have sent him away from this Heaven, from the ninefold Heavens, away from any underworld or natural world that you know. He is gone, far gone. We have sent him to bind together the fabric of the Universe.”

Even the gods, Aka saw, even the gods had things they worshipped. Even the gods made sacrifices.

Even the gods wept.

Aka brought Fakafuumaka back to their village, where the star-ship came to take him away.

Fakafuumaka had parting words for Aka. He said, “Although my sadness could fill an ocean, we have not staved off the end of the Universe forever. Others like me must come back, every generation, with their own sacrifices.”

He said, “Aka, my sadness is too great. My sadness will spread among the gods. We will be silent in our mourning, and we will mourn forever.”

And so it is that our gods do not speak to us during the ritual. They only speak to let the temple hear, and in the other realms.

Once he had settled back into village life, Aka was surprised at the aches in his joints, at his stiffness in the mornings.

He was dead, it is true. But he was getting old, too.

Aka could not let the knowledge of the gods die with him. They would be back, after all, to ensure the continuance of the Universe. And they would always need guides.

So he began to teach, the way the masters at the navigation school taught him. Not the splintered paddle but the sacred mnemonics, for an entirely new sky. He named the stars and the star houses and the constellations, and bound the names all up in his stories. It falls to us to remember them, and pass along his knowledge.

With his lore we began to range, us children of Aka, and establish our own starpaths between the islands here. We began to people Heaven. But of course Heaven requires the best navigators, from all worlds. And so every generation the gods call upon the upperworld again, for a great champion, for a wayfinder-hero to join the children of Aka in the heaven of the navigators and help stave off the end of the universe. In my time, I had that privilege. And today…

It is a great honor, my child, to have been called upon.

In his last years a great sadness overcame Aka. He had lived a proud life, a venerable life in service to the gods. But he missed the seas and winds of his youth. This the gods knew, as they know all. And for his service they granted him a boon. The same boon they will grant us.

As he passed from this Heaven, but before he reached the next, the gods did grant him passage back to the upperworld. The gods, who made things glow, and knew his soul.

To this day Aka returns to the mortal world to help navigators in need, navigators on pitch-black nights, for whom the clouds have muffled the voice of the stars. He brings the light of the gods, that undersea light which points its way towards land. To this day, he navigates. Not for glory and not for power. Not to be the greatest.

For his people, and for the Universe.

When you move on from here, child, before you reach the next of our Heavens, you will take on his mantle in the upperworld. You will point the lightning for them.

Weep not for your lost elders, weep not for your lost friends. You will see them once more. If they are ever caught in a squall, between islands, if the winds and the currents have buffeted them into unknown waters, you will be there. You will take them by the hand, and lead them to safety.

I am very much looking forward to seeing my mother and father again.

Look; nightfall. Come outside. I will repeat this story under the lights that dance. I will tell it as it was told to me, word for word. And as I speak I will point to Fakafuumaka’s Four-Pointed Staff, and the Adze Men, and—

—and yes, yes, well done! There, just south of the polestar, you have that one true. There are the Sails of ’Aikanaka.

You truly are a quick study, my child. Can you see how you were always meant for this? Can you see in your own self, now, what the gods have always seen?

Now hear and know the other constellations, and the houses of the stars.

Editor: Austin Dewar

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department