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This article was written by DeltaStriker. Please do not add to it without the writer's permission.
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| 777 | |
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| Story | |
| Setting |
Voya Nui - The 777 Steps
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| Date Set | |
| Media Information | |
| Released |
August - September 2022
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777 is a story serial written by DeltaStriker. It recounts the journey of a team of six Toa who descend the 777 Stairs to recover the Mask of Life.
Content Warning: This story contains elements of gaslighting and other emotional manipulation, violence, death, and body horror. It is not intended for readers 13 and under.
Story[]
Chapter One[]
Seven hundred and seventy-seven stairs didn’t sound like a lot to Sauti. If the average flight of stairs consisted of around thirteen steps, then seven hundred and seventy-seven steps only came to about 60 flights of stairs. A good workout, to be sure, but nothing the scholars of Ko-Metru or a Makuta in the sprawling labyrinth of Destral didn’t do every day. But as the Toa of Sonics stood beside his brothers and sisters at the mouth of the cave, that dark and silent maw into which the stairs lead, he felt as though descending all seven hundred and seventy-seven stairs would be an insurmountable task.
A gauntleted hand clapped against his back with a loud clang. “Nice work, brother! You sure showed those two big lug-heads.”
Sauti blinked, and realized he’d been staring down the stairs for longer than he had realized. It took a surprising amount of effort to pull his gaze away and look at his sister.
Gora was the first person you would imagine when someone asked you to picture a Toa of Stone. While her golden Hagah armor and spear were kept shined and in good shape, her older brown armor underneath was battered and covered in several decades’ worth of dents. Her Kanohi, a custom molded Mask of Repulsion, had the corners of its mouth pulled into a wide, triumphant smile. And she had the attitude to go along with her appearance: as Sauti had witnessed on many occasions, anyone who had the audacity to ask how she existed when all Po-Matoran were male got an earful of attitude and a mouthful of pebbles.
Sauti met her smile with one much more subdued. “I’m sure Axonn and Brutaka would see my methods as…circumventing the intended trial of the stairs.”
Gora laughed deeply and with her whole body, as she always did. “Well, if the Great Beings were so keen on it being hard to get to, they should’ve accounted for the possibility one of the Toa coming to find the Mask of Life would be wearing a Mask of Psychometry.”
“Now, let’s not speak ill of the Great Beings,” a deep bass voice spoke up from the other side of Gora as Erde, a Toa of Earth clad in silver and black, stepped into the conversation. “It is not their fault that the Order of Mata Nui sent operatives to guard the entrance who were not careful enough with their own tools that Sauti was able to touch one learn the location of the entrance. We would not have arrived here so quickly had Brutaka not unwittingly showed us the way.”
“Like I said! He’s a big lug-head.”
Erde grinned back at Gora. Sauti had never fully understood their natural comradery—Erde was everything Gora was not. He was stoic and reserved, always in complete control of his emotions even as Gora wore her every feeling for all to see. But they both shared the same deep and unrelenting determination, perhaps drawn from the constancy of the ground beneath their feet that they both drew their power from.
Sauti smiled along with them. He did not tell them what else he had seen in his reading.
A dozen feet behind them, Vaxter murmured to himself as he knelt by the vines that webbed down the side of Mount Valmai and across the ground below them. He gently stroked his fingers along them, the brow of his Mask of Mutation furrowed in concentration. Vaxter had always been unique amongst Toa of The Green with his ability to communicate with plants. He could not converse with them, at least not in the traditional sense, but he could sense impressions upon them that others could not. He’d once told Sauti it was much like the Toa of Sonics’ Mask of Psychometry, but with plants instead of inorganic matter.
Keeping watch over the team’s rear was Zekle, her deep blue armor humming with electrical energy as she paced back and forth across the path they’d followed to the entrance. Sauti was not sure what had made her so nervous this time—perhaps the nature of their mission and all the weight of responsibility that came with it. Or maybe it was something else entirely—Sauti could never really tell with Zekle.
“Erde, can you sense anything down there?”
The final member of the team spoke up from the very edge of the stairs, arms crossed over his bright red-and-gold-plated chest. Lune already had his Ignition Spear in hand, the perfect red gemstone at the center of it glinting in the ever-dimming light of sunset. Despite being the newest Toa among them, Lune had proved himself a capable leader time and again.
Without question, Erde stepped forward, his Mask of Sensory Aptitude glowing faintly. He cocked his head to the side, and then turned and walked calmly to the back of the group.
“Hey Zekle.” His voice was gentle, even as Zekle’s eyes widened as she realized she was being approached. “I know the guardians’ warnings were unsettling. But you don’t need to worry. We are a team, and we have faced much together. Let’s save the lightning for anything we might find down there.”
He held out his hand. Zekle stared at it, arcs of lightning still running between the plates of her armor. Then she breathed deeply, and as she exhaled the crackling stopped. She took his hand, and he gave hers a reassuring squeeze. “Thank you. It’s much easier to focus without the background noise.”
It had been so long since Sauti had learned to tune out Zekle’s anxious sparking and crackling that he hadn’t even noticed how loud it was. Erde, however, had the luxury of turning his heightened hearing off and on as needed.
Erde looked back toward the mouth of the cave. Once more his mask began to glow. Everyone stood still for a moment. Then Erde shook his head.
“I don’t see, hear, or smell anything, Lune.”
“So, it is safe to descend?”
Erde seemed to hesitate for a moment. Sauti thought that hesitation looked strange on him.
“I think so. But Lune,” he said, catching the Toa of Fire just before he could address the group. “I mean, I don’t sense anything. I don’t hear dripping cave water or smell any evidence of Rahi habitation. It’s unnaturally quiet down there.”
Lune took a moment to absorb this information and then nodded. “Understood, Erde. Keep alert as we go down, let me know if you notice anything at all.” He turned to address the whole group. “Brothers and sisters, we may very well be the last hope against a hopelessly bleak future. Whatever trials the Great Beings have left to guard the Mask, remember that. If we do not succeed, we will not just have failed the Makuta, but the whole world as we know it.”
The team nodded solemnly as Lune spoke. The Makuta had been unspecific about exactly what would happen if they failed to recover the Mask, but she’d been clear that it would spell disaster for Matoran everywhere if others were allowed to recover the Mask first. “The Great Cataclysm would be nothing compared to the horrors to come,” she had said.
“Alright,” Lune said as he turned back toward the mouth of the staircase, “let us get going.”
As the team descended, they fell back into their regular marching formation. Zekle hung near the back to cover their rear, and so she could see everyone in case she needed to make use of her Mask of Healing quickly. Sauti came next, since his sonic abilities were best used at range. Vaxter stayed near the middle, so that he was best positioned to sense disruptions in the plant life around them—not that there would any down here to sense. And Lune hovered near the front, just behind Erde and Gora, who would be the first to jump into battle if something did attack the team. Lune’s Kanohi Elda, the Mask of Detection, glowed faintly as he reached out to find the Ignika. He winced and rubbed his temple as the light faded. He’d been getting headaches whenever he had used it since they arrived on Voya Nui—he said the Makuta had told him that they would help him located the Mask of Life as he got closer.
Sauti glanced over at Vaxter as his brother passed by him to take his place in the formation. Vaxter looked back at him knowingly. No, not at him, at his mask. The vines. They must have shown Vaxter what Sauti hadn’t mentioned to the rest of the team: that Brutaka had been to this place in secret many times since he had arrived to guard it. That the towering titan was obsessed with the stairs and felt called to whatever sat at their end.
Something in Sauti’s expression must have confirmed this mutual awareness because Vaxter simply nodded in acknowledgement and then stepped passed him. They had an unspoken agreement now, to keep this knowledge to themselves. Sauti wasn’t sure why Vaxter was comfortable with keeping this secret. The Toa of The Green was quiet, certainly, but he had always been a team player—not the sort to keep secrets. Sauti watched the back of his brother’s head as they began to descend the staircase, wondering what was going on inside.
It didn’t bother Sauti to keep this information from the rest of the party. It would unnerve Zekle, cast doubt on the resolve of everyone else. He wasn’t even sure what it meant, so there was no point in bringing it up.
It wasn’t the first time he’d kept a reading a secret from the rest of the team.
With one simple step, Sauti began his descent.
Erde had been right, the staircase was unnaturally silent. Sauti was used to the comforting loudness of the vibrations of the forest around him, or the bustling of one of the villages of the Trem Krom Peninsula, or the cacophony of the Makuta’s scientific machinery. It threw off his balance to not hear anything in the environment around him, like when his audio receptor had been boxed by the Muaka that had been tormenting the village of Boreas decades ago.
The light from the mouth of the tunnel had completely vanished only a few dozen stairs, so now the only light came from the glow of Erde’s Kanohi and the flaming tip of Lune’s Ignition spear. The flickering firelight made the already strange and winding staircase even more unsteadying to look at, and between that and the silence Sauti almost tripped and fell more than once.
“This cave is not right,” Gora spoke up from the front of the group, where she was running her hand along the roughhewn wall in the flickering light. Her voice was quiet, barely above a whisper. Normally Gora speaking quietly would’ve struck Sauti as odd, but here on the stairs it somehow seemed completely rational.
“Axonn said the Great Beings carved it out of the stone,” Vaxter reminded her, also quieter than usual. “I wouldn’t have expected it to be natural.”
Gora shook her head as she pressed her knuckles against the stone. “No, it’s not that. The Great Beings have immense power, so I would’ve expected the carving to be less…brutish. This cave was blasted out by some really powerful energy blasts; you can still see where the heat scarred the stone it didn’t destroy. And it doesn’t seem like there was a plan either—they just pointed whatever tool they used down at the ground and fired it over and over again.”
Erde paused on his step near the front. “Is it stable?”
“As far as I can tell. The stone around us is solid.”
For whatever reason, this didn’t seem to reassure Erde.
They continued in silence, for every word felt like a scream on the stairs. Sauti had been trying to keep count of how many stairs they had descended but found their irregularity to be supremely unhelpful to this task. Some steps were barely short enough for his feet to fit on them, others stretched forward for so far that that they could barely be counted as steps. It was around the count of thirty when Sauti realized he’d been counting the sound of his own footsteps instead of watching and counting each step, and thus any number he might come to was already inaccurate and would likely continue to be.
It had always been harder for Sauti to focus on visual stimuli. His powers were based on sound, and his audio receptors were so naturally sensitive he barely needed to look at anything. He could hear the difference between a footstep on sandstone and one on shale, he could count the number of Acidflies in a swarm from listening to their buzzing. Visual details were secondary, informed by what he already knew from the sounds around him. He’d once asked Lune to explain what it was like to look at things first, and not hear them. The Toa of Fire had pondered the request a bit before likening having to explain that to having to explain what it felt like to stand in sunlight.
“I do not really think of it, Sauti,” he had said. “I just…”
He paused, then leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table between them. “So right now, I am looking at you. I see the colors first, I think. The grey and silver of your armor. The blue light in your eyes and your heartlight. Then I see the shapes: the curves and lines of your armor, the silhouette of your mask. And then I see the details. The scar down the side of your neck you had when you joined the Team. The dent in the side of your mask from the Muaka. Does that make sense?”
Sauti had listened, focused on the words. It was a familiar process, in a way, and yet drastically different. “I think so.”
Lune had nodded, pleased he’d gotten his point across. “How about you? If you listen first instead of look, then how do you perceive me?”
The words had come to Sauti quicker than he had expected. “First, I hear your armor, it scrapes against itself when you move—not a lot, but enough I can hear it. Then I hear your breath. It’s always steady, controlled, like you’re deep in focus. It reminds me of how Zekle breaths, actually, when she’s consciously channeling her lightning. I hear your heartlight pulsing, everyone’s pulses a little different so I can tell who they are just from that. And right now, I can even hear the click when your eyes blink, because it’s pretty quiet—are you alright?”
Lune’s heartlight had begun pulsing faster as Sauti spoke. The Toa of Fire had been fidgeting in his seat.
“Yes. Yes, I am fine. Keep going.”
Sauti had noted the telltale skip of Lune’s heartlight. That was a lie.
“And then, then I might register what I see. Your red and gold armor, the Ignition Spear you always have strapped to your back. But it’s all at once, I think. Like when you said you notice the details last. I think it’s that everything I see is just a detail to me.”
Lune had seemed to relax as the conversation moved on. “That is fascinating. It is always remarkable to me, the difference in perspective that we often take for granted.”
Sauti had nodded.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Lune had continued, “have you always listened first like that, or did it start when you became a Toa and gained your powers?”
Sauti had blinked. He remembered that vividly, the cacophonous click-click of his eyelids that seemed to leave his audio receptors ringing. Lune had not heard it. Lune had not felt the panic well up inside of him.
“You know,” he had answered, his voice steady, “it’s been so long I can’t say.”
He’d lost count of the number of times he’d told that lie around thirty as well.
Zekle’s gasp was the first thing to pierce the silence since the discussion of the origin of the caves. It wasn’t a gasp of shock, or the shallow gasp one might make after catching themselves to keep from falling. There was a sharpness to it, so involuntary that Zekle could not have stopped the breath from escaping even if she had tried. Sauti didn’t immediately notice what had provoked the response, even as he reflexively swung his Supersonic Spear from his back into a defensive position.
Zekle was standing at the back of the group, on the highest step of any of them, staring down into the darkness in front of them. Her gaze was fixed on something in the darkness.
“Zekle?” Lune called from the front of the group, his voice still barely above a whisper, like the others. “What is it?”
If there was something else on the stairs with them, then Sauti couldn’t hear it. All he heard were six Toa breathing, six heartlights pulsing faster than—no, only five were pulsing at a heighted rate. Gora did not seem to be alarmed by Zekle’s sudden outburst. In fact, Gora was still walking as if nothing had happened.
Sauti whipped around to look down the stairs once more. Gora was continuing downwards, deeper into the tunnel.
“Gora!” he called as loud as he dared. The Toa of Stone did not respond.
“…Tedan?” Zekle spoke Sauti could move after Gora. She said the name with as much intimacy as she might have said any of her brothers’ or sister’s names, but her tone was fragile and haunted. There was no comfort in the name for her anymore.
Erde noticed it first, standing in the darkness a few steps in front of him. “By the Great Spirit, what’re you doing down here? Are you alright, little one?”
That was when the rest finally saw it, the thing Zekle was focused on with such intensity. Standing in the midst of their group was a diminutive figure, standing a little over half as tall as any of the Toa present. It appeared to be a Matoran wearing a Noble Kanohi, the Mask of Night Vision. Its armor appeared to at one point have been a vivid orange, but the colors were now muted and large swaths of it seemed to have long since rusted away. Its heartlight pulsed erratically, and its dead eyes were locked on Zekle.
Erde approached it from behind slowly and obviously so as to not alarm the Matoran. “How did you get all the way down here? It’s not safe for a Matoran, you should head back up to the surface and wait for us to come up.”
“Erde,” Sauti said, quietly as he slowly shifted the tip of his spear toward the thing that looked like a Matoran. “Don’t get any closer.”
“What’s your name?” Erde shot a firm look at Sauti, as if warning him off.
“Erde, I can’t hear it.”
Before Erde could process the implications of this, the ceiling collapsed on top of him.
Sauti dropped he spear and slammed his hands flat over his audio receptors as the rumble of the collapse filled the tunnel. He watched as Lune and Vaxter jumped forward to the rapidly growing pile of rubble that had engulfed their brother and began to scoop armfuls of stone to the side, desperately trying to dig Erde out. There hadn’t even been time for the Toa of Earth to react, to attempt to use his powers to redirect the collapse away from him.
Lune was shouting down the tunnel at Gora, but Sauti could barely hear him over the echo of the collapse. The Toa of Stone did not seem to respond, even as she began to wind a corner that would bring her out of sight of the group. Zekle remained transfixed by the thing standing in front of the pile, neither reacting to the sudden chaos around them.
The collapse stopped and the sound of it began to fade. Sauti’s audio receptors were ringing violently, but he could hear his brothers’ and sisters’ voices once more.
“Tedan… Tedan I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Gora, get up here now! We need you!”
“Hey Lune? Could you stick closer to the front? It gets really dark up here without the light from your spear.”
“I am busy right now, Gora!”
“Please go away Tedan, please. I’m so sorry, I can’t do this.”
“Lune, I can’t grow anything in this soil.”
“Hey, guys? Where did everyone go?”
“GET AWAY FROM ME!”
“Don’t you wish that you could remember?”
The last voice was louder than the others. It lingered in his audio receptor, rolling around with vague familiarity. It wasn’t the voice of any of his fellow Toa, but he knew it somehow, and he knew it well.
“Of course you don’t recognize me,” it continued. The scar on the side of Sauti’s neck flared with pain, like a thousand needles piercing him. “You never have before.”
Sauti spun on his heels, everything else fading into the background as he stared at the speaker. A vague, inconstant humanoid form flat against the wall. It had no features, no face to speak of. It had no mouth, but Sauti was certain it had been speaking to him.
“Who am I?” It asked, arms flaring outwards even as its voice raised.
“I…”
“WHO AM I?”
Sauti stumbled back as the dark figure grew larger and larger, so large it had to bend so that it could still even attempt to stand within the tunnel. He could hear his heartlight pulsing faster than it should. He felt the figure begin to reach out toward him, to force him to answer the question he could not answer.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, though he was certain the dark figure could hear him despite it. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
A cold gauntleted hand clamped down on his shoulder. “Sauti!”
Sauti snapped around again, suddenly aware of how wide his eyes must be. Vaxter was standing in front of him, Scything Spear in hand, dirt and dust covering his hands and forearms. There was an uncanny calm about him, even as the light cast strange shadows across his Kanohi.
“Snap out of it, brother. It’s only your shadow.”
He was right. The form that loomed above him merely warped in the light of Lune’s spear, it had no mouth to speak and no physicality to threaten him. The voice was gone.
“Good.” Vaxter’s nod of acknowledgement was curt. “I don’t believe any of this is real. You didn’t hear the Matoran corpse, I couldn’t cause plant life to grow from loose earth from the collapse. We need to convince the others that whatever they are seeing is some manner of illusion. I suggest we start with Erde, as we can’t be certain that these illusions are entirely harmless even if they are not real.”
Sauti nodded, suddenly realizing that Lune was no longer digging through the collapsed ceiling and was instead laying with his back against the other wall of the tunnel staring at nothing. Loose earth and rock were spread about the stairs around him, and his hands and forearms were filthy like Vaxter’s.
With a long, slow breath, Sauti began to focus. He began to reach out to find a sound, something to start with. Simple sounds he could conjure from nothing, but he needed a base for more complicated sequences. There. The crackling of the flame on Lune’s spear. It wasn’t ideal but given the circumstances it would have to do. Sauti heard the crackling, and then he willed himself to hear something different. The frequencies began to shift and oscillate, creating a crude facsimile of a voice.
ROCKS
ARE
FAKE
YOU
ARE
FREE
Sauti drove the sounds waves into the pile of rubble that wasn’t real and held them there, bouncing around inside whatever space Erde inhabited underneath it. If the Toa of Earth was already unconscious from lack of air this wouldn’t help at all, but if he was still awake…
The rocks began to shift and crumble down the stairs as a black metal hand burst from the pile. Sauti lunged forward and grasped it with his own. Bracing against the side, he began to pull. After a moment, Erde appeared from the side of it, eyes wide and heartlight racing as he gulped a huge breath of air. Sauti dragged his brother all the way out of the rubble, and they collapsed side-by-side on the stairs.
Vaxter was already coaxing Zekle down to them when they regained their breath. The Toa of Lightning was shaking a bit but seemed to have got her wits about her. The thing that looked like a Matoran was still standing, watching her every move, but Vaxter had interposed himself between her and it, keeping it out of her line of sight.
The noise level in the tunnel had drastically dropped, to Sauti’s relief. His audio receptors would undoubtedly continue to ring for hours after this. He shook his head—that was fine, he could deal with that. Erde and Zekle were safe, Lune was spacing out on the other side of the tunnel, but where was Gora?
Sauti heard the sob from down the stairs seconds before Erde did. Scooping up Lune’s sputtering Ignition Spear for its last few sparks of light, Sauti approached Gora cautiously. She was curled up in an alcove, presumably of her own making, about two dozen steps down from the rest of the team. Her hands were wrapped around her knees, and she rocked slowly back and forth, muttering quietly under her breath.
“Gora?” he asked. Now that he didn’t have to shout to be heard it only felt right that he should whisper again. “Gora what do you see?”
Gora didn’t respond to him, instead she continued to mutter. Sauti was close enough now to make out what she was saying.
“Lune, please come back. It’s so dark. Erde? Zekle? Are you there? Vaxter? Sauti? Please don’t leave me here. Great Spirit, please don’t leave me alone down here.”
Sauti leaned the spear against the wall and knelt so he could look Gora in the eyes. For a moment she seemed to match his gaze, but she was looking through him, as if he weren’t there. He heard Erde limp up behind him using his Pressure Spear as crutch.
“Gora, it’s us,” Sauti continue, a little louder than before. “We’re still here.”
She kept mumbling.
Erde stepped passed Sauti and leaned down to take Gora’s hand. As his fingers wrapped around hers, she gasped quietly and squeezed back with all her strength. If anyone other than Erde had taken her hand, she likely would’ve crushed their fingers.
“Hello?” she called, her eyes flicking back and forth as she tried to see the being that had just reached out to her.
With a gentle pull, Erde helped Gora out of her alcove and to her feet. She continued to look around wildly but clung to his hand with desperation. Behind them, Vaxter and Zekle followed a dazed Lune down the stairs and the thing that looked like a Matoran watched. Lune glanced at Sauti and tossed him his Supersonic Spear, then held out his own open hand in response.
“Trade?” There was something hollow to his voice now, a spark that was once there was now gone.
Sauti nodded and tossed the Ignition Spear over to Lune as the last of its light flickered and died. For a moment, the whole tunnel plunged into darkness before Lune caused the entire tip to burst into roaring flames that scorched the ceiling.
“You’re back!” Gora immediately threw her arms around Erde, nearly knocking him down the stairs. The Toa of Earth’s mouth pulled into a wide but shaken smile as he embraced her back.
“We were always here, Gora.” Sauti could hear the almost imperceptible wavering that told him Erde was doing all he could to keep his voice from shaking.
“By the Great Spirit, what trickery is this?” Lune said as he stared back up the tunnel from which they’d come.
Where just moments ago the ceiling had collapsed all evidence of such an event was gone. The ceiling was perfectly intact, the stairs were not littered with pieces of stone or covered with a thick layer of dust. Lune and Vaxter’s hands were no longer coated with that same dust, and if not for his limp there was no sign that Erde had just been nearly crushed. The thing that looked like a Matoran was also gone, with no sign of its decayed and soundless self anywhere to be seen.
“As I told Sauti, I believe they were illusions.” Vaxter’s uncannily calm expression remained. He seemed almost fascinated by the situation. “Presumably meant to dissuade us from descending further.”
“Well, they’re doing a damn good job of that,” Zekle snapped as she leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths around her words.
Lune shook his head. “We should keep moving, put some space between us and this place. Then see if we cannot find somewhere to rest.”
No one had any objections to that. The Toa descended further down the staircase.
Chapter Two[]
After five more minutes at a measured and careful pace, Lune had Gora carve a small square room off to the side for the team to rest in. With a tap of his Ignition Spear a crackling, smokeless fire appeared in the center of the room, and Gora shaped a brazier of stone to hold it in place. Then she slumped in front of it and stared into the flames.
Everyone sat in silence for a moment. Sauti had always liked silence, it was gentler on his audio receptors. The one village of De-Matoran he had ever encountered, De-Koro, had been a paradise. Anything that could make an unwanted noise was cushioned or kept in a secure container. The De-Matoran spoke in hushed tones. Most Toa weren’t allowed to enter the village because Toa were always loud. They had made special exception for Sauti—they’d never encountered a Toa of Sonics before. As it turned out, being your own greatest weakness was not a desirable trait in a heroic warrior. But here, unlike the cozy quiet of De-Koro, the silence felt uncomfortable. Sauti felt himself beginning to fidget where he sat, drumming his fingers on the stone floor just to make the slightest sound, to have something to hear.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help,” Gora said at last, the words practically jumping out of her. Sauti suspected he wasn’t the only one here unnerved by the silence. “I couldn’t see or hear any of you. I didn’t even notice at first, I just thought it was weird everything got darker all of a sudden. I just thought Lune must’ve stopped to look at something, but then I turned back and all of you were gone and I was alone.” Her head slumped into her hands.
Erde shook his head. “No one blames you, Gora. All of us saw something.”
His statement hung in the air like an invitation no one wanted to accept.
“I don’t think it got to me, whatever it was,” Vaxter spoke up. “Perhaps I realized what was going on too soon for it to get inside my head.”
Sauti nodded in agreement. “I didn’t see anything, either.”
The nature of his vision was not something Sauti wanted to get into right now. He waited for Vaxter to contradict him, but the Toa of The Green just stared at him for a moment, and then nodded.
“Zekle…” Erde spoke cautiously after a moment. “Who was that Matoran? You called him Tedan, right?”
Until this point, Zekle had seemed looser, more relaxed since Vaxter pulled her away from the illusion. But when Erde said the name, every muscle in her body tensed.
“If you don’t want to talk about it…” Erde backpedaled.
“No.”
For a moment the only sound was the crackling of the firepit.
“No, it’s fine.” Zekle exhaled slowly as she tried to release the tension in her body. The way her voice shook when she began to speak again indicated she had not been entirely successful. “Tedan… Tedan was a Su-Matoran I knew a long time ago. A friend. From before I was a Toa. We lived in the same village.
“One time, we thought it would be a good idea to hike to visit the next village over. Get out of the same-old-same-old, see something new. Come back in a couple of weeks. But Verdant was a mountain village, and neither of us were really equipped for such a trek. It was...brutal.”
Zekle paused a moment and took a long breath.
“We got lost, for a couple of days. And then we started to run out of supplies, and we couldn’t figure out where we were going. I left to go get help, and…” Her heartlight skipped a beat and her words caught in her throat. “By the time I brought back help, he was already dead.”
Gora got up from where she sat and moved over to sit next to her sister. She placed a hand on Zekle’s shoulder.
“Hey, thanks for sharing that,” she said gently. “It must be hard to have to relive something that horrible.”
Zekle didn’t acknowledge the gesture. The fire began to sputter in the pit. Lune reignited it with a tap of his spear.
The silence broke when Erde cleared his throat. “I need to thank you for pulling me out of there, Sauti. I don’t think I would’ve lasted much longer if you hadn’t reached out.”
Sauti nodded. “Of course, brother. You would’ve done the same for me.”
“But the collapse wasn’t real, was it?” Zekle asked. Sauti found it strange that she asked the question so matter-of-factly after having just recounted her trauma. Then again, he knew firsthand how much easier it was to keep your emotions boxed up when you were not telling the whole truth.
Erde shook his head. “I don’t know how, but I was actually suffocating under there.”
“Certain methods of illusion can convince the body and mind to respond to stimuli they perceive, even if the stimuli are not actually present,” Vaxter proposed. “It’s possible that the illusory collapse was so convincing that your body began to respond as if it were actually suffocating. The effect would be entirely psychosomatic, yet still likely to result in serious injury, or even death.”
“Or maybe it was real.” Erde had always felt it necessary to give serious matters the weight they deserved, but his words now were unusually firm, even for him. “The Great Beings are intelligent and powerful beyond what we can comprehend. Perhaps they have warped reality itself within this place, so that only those that can overcome their fears and not be slain by them might have a chance at wielding their most powerful gift to us.”
“It is possible, though I find it unlikely in the absence of tangible evidence of such power.” Vaxter had always been a skeptic in direct contrast to Erde’s reverence of the Great Beings. “If they even did create this place, Gora’s assessment of the tunnel’s construction clearly suggests that they were not as capable as the legends have led us to assume.”
“No tangible evidence? My leg begs to differ.” Erde chuckled as he tapped his injured leg with his hand, then winced.
Zekle stood and quickly walked over to where Erde was sitting. “Let me help with that.” Her Kanohi began to glow as she removed the armor from his leg and traced her fingers from his him to his foot. She paused a little way above the ankle, probing around the spot with her fingers to confirm what she had found.
“Ok, this is going to hurt a lot.” She wrapped her fingers around Erde’s leg and squeezed. The glow of her Kanohi spread down her shoulder and arm and began to spread across Erde’s leg from where her hand was touching it. Sauti heard a sickening snap that would’ve been inaudible to the others as Erde’s internals moved back into place.
“Don’t put any weight on it until you have to, but you should be good to go when we move again in the morning.”
“Thank you, sister.” Erde beamed up at Zekle. “You know, your bedside manner is improving. That was far worse than I expected when you told me it as going to hurt.”
Now it was Zekle’s turn to smile, this time with a mix of mild embarrassment and pride.
“Wait, Erde.” Gora spoke as if she had just realized something. “If the stairs were forcing us to face our fears, I understand what Zekle and I saw. But why did the tunnel collapse on you?”
She was answered by a long, weary sigh. “Because, Gora, to my great and eternal shame, I am the only Toa of Earth whose deepest fear is being buried alive.”
His words hung in the air for a moment, the inherent absurdity having half-convinced Sauti that Erde was making a joke. He was apparently not alone in that assessment, as Zekle let out half of a laugh before cutting it off prematurely when she realized no one else was laughing.
“You have to be joking,” Zekle exclaimed nervously.
Erde’s expression was not that of a person who was kidding.
“By the Great Spirit, you’re not kidding,” Gora gasped. “But how? Can’t you just, unbury yourself?”
“Even when I was a Matoran, being underground made me deeply unease, and my greatest relief was when I could see the sky above my head,” Erde said quietly. Even when sharing his greatest shame, there was dignity in his voice. “Even being here now, it this place, I can feel it gnawing at me the deeper we go. It makes it hard to focus on using my powers—the emotions are too overwhelming.”
Zekle slumped next to him instead of returning to her original seat. “You get so much in your own head that you can’t focus on anything. I get that.”
“When I was buried under the rocks there, my mind felt buried under the weight of the fear.”
Vaxter was staring at Lune as the conversation progressed, but the Toa of Fire didn’t seem to notice. After a pause, he seemed to grow tired of waiting and turned to look at Erde.
“Are you going to be able to continue the mission?” he asked without hesitation.
Erde lifted himself up onto his feet and walked weakly toward Vaxter. Zekle followed him, her arms out as if ready to catch him if his leg gave out. Even with his injury, Erde struck an imposing figure. His shoulders were wider, and he stood half a mask taller than Vaxter when the latter was standing. Seated as he was, Vaxter had to bend his neck back to look Erde in the eyes.
“I am a Toa, Vaxter. I will always continue the mission.”
Vaxter nodded. “I had to be sure, brother. So much is at stake.”
Erde stared for a moment, and then Sauti saw his shoulders relax and he took a weak step back into Zekle’s arms. She helped him backwards and leaned him against the wall to take his weight fully off his leg. He clasped her arm appreciatively before she took her own seat once more.
“I’m sorry for my intensity, Vaxter,” Erde said after a moment. “It’s been a long day. You were not wrong to be concerned.”
“I understand, of course. I would simply hate to lose one of you after everything we have been through. A good team is hard to find.” This is what passed for affection from Vaxter. It had taken Sauti years to feel like he had any connection to the Toa of The Green at all. “And besides, you still owe me a drink for that time I saved you from that Skakdi con artist on Xia.”
Erde let out a hearty laugh at that. “Next time we are near Boreas, I will buy you a whole bottle of that noxious brew you like for some reason.” He winced again. “Zekle, I think I may have also broken a few ribs.”
“I find the mint and sage flavoring to be quite complementary,” Vaxter protested as Zekle began to use her Kanohi to find and heal the newly discovered injury.
“I still do not see what about it is more appealing that a good mug of ale, brother. But I will buy it for you all the same.”
Sauti’s attention began to drift. He’d never been interested in alcohol, consuming it had always struck him as a social activity and not something that was well enjoyed alone. And while he had no issue with social activities, in his experience other beings had a hard enough time modulating their volume when they weren’t inebriated. He settled his gaze on Lune, who sat just close enough to the fire that he could reignite it as necessary but far enough away as to not be automatically included in the conversation at hand. His breath was as controlled and steady as normal, but he gazed off into the distance with the intensity of someone who was seeing something no one else was. He’d looked like that since Sauti snapped out of his shadow vision back up the stairs.
“What did you see, Lune?” Sauti asked.
The rest of the group fell silent even as Lune snapped out of his daze upon hearing his name.
“What?”
“If we were being shown our fears, Lune, what did you see?”
Lune frowned, the expression on his Kanohi Elda impassible. “I think I need more time to think about it before I can share it with the rest of you. It…troubles me deeply.”
Lune had always been open with the team about his thoughts and feelings about a mission. He frequently shared information the Makuta had given him but not the others, believing that knowing it would empower them to make better decisions in the moment. So, when he made the decision to withhold whatever it was, he had seen in the tunnel, the entire team respected that decision.
“Get some rest,” Lune continued after a moment’s pause. “I do not wish to linger here for any longer than we have to.”
Sauti lingered on Lune for a moment more, even as the team leader sunk back into his thoughts. The rest of the team returned to their discussion of beverages, and Zekle was passionately defending her devotion to fizzy drinks even as the others balked at them. Sauti happened to agree with her, and found the sizzling sensation refreshing, but his mind was elsewhere. He had never seen the Toa of Lightning so relaxed on a mission, let alone so soon after such a harrowing encounter. Not to mention, she had lied to them, and the only sign was the telltale, subtle skip of a beat of her heartlight.
The first and only time Zekle had earnestly tried to lie to the group had been during a game of Nynrah Ironhand. Gora had learned it from her fellow sailors before she’d become a Toa, and she had insisted on teaching the rest of the team. It was a game of chance, as your capacity to win depended quite literally on the luck of the draw, but also of social prowess, as the real game was convincing the other players you had something better than you did, but not so soon that they didn’t commit an unwise number of widgets to the table for you to win.
Gora had won the first three hands, despite promising to take it easy since she was the only experienced player at the table. To spare the team from yet another crushing defeat at the hands of her relentless competitive spirit, she had sat the next hand out to give everyone else a fair chance.
Zekle had been nervous, which Sauti had written off as her being anxious about trying something new. Her breathing as a little shaking, and her heartlight had already been pulsing quickly even before Gora stepped away from the table. But as Erde dealt the cards, Sauti heard the pulse speed up even more. As she was handed her final card, she let out a gasp loud enough that it was probably audible to everyone at the table. Sauti had looked over at Vaxter, who was glancing at his own hand. The Toa of The Green had met his gaze and cocked his head toward Zekle on his right. They agreed; she had a good hand.
“3 widgets,” Erde said, tossing the little metal coins to the center of the table.
For a moment Sauti had contemplated trying to bluff his way through. The trick would be convincing Zekle to fold out of the hand.
“I can do 3, and I’ll raise it to 20!” Zekle had smiled as she shoved the widgets from her pile into the center.
Vaxter’s eyes had gone wide, and he tapped the back of his cards as he placed them back on the table. “Nope, I’m out.” He leaned back in his chair and let out a quiet chuckle that only Sauti could hear.
Lune had contemplated his cards for a moment, looked up at Zekle for a moment before making his decision. He wordlessly slid 20 credits into the center of the table. Sauti hadn’t been sure if the Toa of Fire was bluffing or if he had the cards to back it up, but that was more of a gamble than he was willing to make for himself.
“Yeah, I’m out too,” Sauti said, tossing his cards down
Erde had glanced down at his meager pile of widgets, shook his head, and wordlessly put his cards down on the table.
Zekle had looked over at Lune and narrowed her eyes dramatically, making a show of trying to get a read on him. Lune had just watched as she slid another ten widgets into the pile at the center, her gaze falling greedily to his own pile of widgets. Lune had frowned, the matched her bet, leaving him with only a small handful of widgets.
“Alright, I am calling it,” he said. “What do you have?”
Zekle had tossed her cards down and threw her arms up in the air. “A ghost hand!”
Gora had jumped forward from her seat off to the side to examine Zekle’s cards. “Nice one, Zekle!” Sauti had winced as their fists clanked together.
“That beats my two pair, does it not?” Lune had said as he slumped back into his chair.
“Oh, by a long shot,” Gora had confirmed.
Zekle had scooped her winnings over to her and began stacking them into towers of five. Gora had told them that was the typical way to organize coin at the table. Vaxter had watched her for a second before leaning closer to speak.
“You know, next time you might find even more success if you hadn’t made it so obvious that you had a good hand. Sauti, Erde, and I might have gone for a few rounds of betting if you hadn’t jumped right to 20 widgets from the beginning.”
Zekle’s head had sunk down into her shoulders. “I got Lune though!”
Gora had laughed. “That’s because Lune is way too trusting for a game like this.”
Lune had balked at that assertation. “Is it so bad to assume that my friends are not attempting to mislead me?”
“When you’re playing Nynrah Ironhand? Yeah, it’s really bad Lune.”
Vaxter had continued to offer advice to an increasingly disheartened Zekle. “The secret to a good bluff is not to obscure the truth you wish to keep hidden, it’s to obscure the fact that you have anything to keep hidden at all.”
Due to their incredibly sensitive audio receptors, all Matoran and Toa of Sonics that Sauti had known were prone to incredibly vivid dreams. The constant auditory input, even when they were asleep, gave the brain ample stimulation as they slept. Such dreams were often loud and uncontrollable, lacking any logic other than the flow of one sound and its associations to the next. And so Sauti was incredibly surprised when he woke to find he’d had a perfectly restful and dreamless night, so far as he could recall. For a moment he felt disoriented, as if he hadn’t even slept. Then he remembered where he was. The Stairs. The quiet. He didn’t dream because there was nothing to hear down here.
The others did not seem so lucky. In his corner, Lune was twitching against the stone floor in his sleep, his heartlight pulsing erratically. Sauti ran over to his side and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Lune, wake up.”
The Toa of Fire snapped upwards to a sitting position with an inarticulate yell, jolting the others awake. Sauti stumbled backwards, his hands instinctively covering his audio receptors even though it was too late. The ringing drowned out everything else, even as Lune came to his senses and crawled over to him, trying to say something Sauti couldn’t hear.
Sauti snapped his eyes shut and tried to breath. One breath at a time.
Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale. Exhale.
“…sorry, Sauti,” Lune was saying. He seemed distraught. Whatever he had been dreaming of had deeply unsettled him.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Sauti replied after a moment, hands still pressed to the sides of his head. “You were dreaming.”
The others were up and about now. Gora and Erde had their spears in hand, looking toward the entrance to their little side room in case Lune’s cry had alerted anything to their position. Zekle had moved behind Sauti to put her hands on his shoulders, a mostly useless gesture as her Mask of Healing could do nothing to fix the ringing, but Sauti appreciated it all the same. Her breathing behind him was steady and calming. Sauti didn’t know what to make of that.
Vaxter was watching Lune as their leader pulled himself together. “You dreamed what you saw on the stairs.”
Lune took a long breath to steady himself. “I am still not prepared to share it with you all. It is…a lot to process.”
“Is it pertinent to the mission.”
“Not directly.”
“But tangentially, then.”
“If it becomes immediately relevant to what we are doing here I will share it regardless of my feelings on the matter. But for now, I need time with it. Is that acceptable, Vaxter?”
Vaxter nodded, but Sauti could tell he was displeased at having information withheld from him.
“Good.” Lune ignited the tip of his spear. “Let us get moving. We still have several hundred steps between us and that Mask, and I would like to leave this place as soon as possible. Gora, if you could unmake this room, I would prefer that we don’t leave any evidence that we were here.”
As they left their temporary place of respite, Sauti couldn’t shake the feeling that the room wouldn’t have stayed there after they left any more than the illusions they’d seen the day before, that had faded away once they had passed.
Chapter Three[]
Time was hard to follow down here, without any of the usual metrics for keeping it available to them, but Sauti was reasonably certain it was less than half an hour before they encountered their first major deviation in the structure of the Stairs. They’d found themselves on a landing that widened into a proper room, cut out of the stone with the same rough quality as the rest of the Stairs. The room was featureless except for a set of three stone doors against the opposite wall. Each of the doors with labeled with a single word.
“The Three Virtues,” Erde said to no one in particular. It didn’t need to be said aloud, all of them knew the Three Virtues intimately. They had been engrained into them for their entire lives, as Matoran and later as Toa. They were the cornerstones of Matoran culture and morality.
Unity. Duty. Destiny.
“But why is there one per door?” Zekle asked. “We’re supposed to pursue all the Virtues equally, not putting one above the others. How are we expected to choose?”
“Perhaps the Great Beings wished to encourage acknowledge the ebb and flow of things,” Erde suggested. “That in some situations it is more important to lean on one of the Virtues than the others, with the understanding that they will still direct us as one guiding principle.”
“Or there is some other puzzle we have yet to see,” Lune suggested. “Everyone take a look around and see if you can find anything else that might point us in the right direction.”
Sauti’s ears were still ringing, but the others had been generous enough to keep their voices even lower than the Stairs demanded. He wasn’t hearing anything different than he had been before, only the sounds of his fellow Toa as they bounced off the stone. Not expecting any results, he stepped forward and placed his hand on the door marked “Duty,” and focused on the innate powers of his mask. It began to glow, but no vision came to him. He looked back at Lune and shook his head.
“Woah, that’s really weird,” Gora muttered as she looked at the door to Sauti’s left, the one labeled “Unity.” “Guys, these doors can’t be that old.”
Vaxter was at her side before she was done speaking. “What makes you say that?”
Gora traces the circular Matoran script on the door with her fingers. “These words were carved into these doors, but they’re not that old. The marks are still fresh. They can’t have been made more than a few weeks ago.”
To avoid crowding one singular door, Erde walked over to the door next to Sauti. “This writing is a modern script, as well,” he added. “If the Great Beings created this place, I would’ve expected an older style, but these look as though they would be indistinguishable from something carved into a tablet by any Matoran today, not those of the ancient past.”
“So…someone put these doors here?” Sauti asked. He found the concept absurd, though to his surprise the more he thought about it the less outrageous it seemed. “Was this whole room made recently?”
“Did they put it here for us?” Zekle proposed quietly. Sauti wasn’t sure anyone else heard her because Gora immediately began to answer his question.
“No, that’s the really weird part. Everything in here but the doors is as old as the rest of the stairs. The walls, the doorframes, everything but the doors themselves.”
“Perhaps Zekle is correct, and this is a trial meant for us.” Erde had heard her as well, it seemed. “Much like our encounter with our fears further up.”
“Maybe the doors are an illusion then,” Lune suggested.
“No,” Gora and Sauti said in perfect unison. Gora blinked and looked over at Sauti, who waved his hand to the side to gesture for her to go on.
“The stone is real. I can feel it, it’s solid.”
“And it’s almost completely blocking any sounds like a solid, real object would,” Sauti added. “I can’t echolocate through it at all.”
“So, we do have to choose,” Vaxter concluded for all of them. “But what are the criteria?”
“Since we must go through one to proceed,” Erde suggested, “perhaps we must choose the Virtue that will be most essential to the success of our mission?”
The Toa fell silent in contemplation. Gora was the first to speak.
“Well clearly, the correct answer is Unity.” She said this as if it were self-evident. “We only got past our fears by helping each other out. We literally couldn’t do this on our own.”
Erde started to nod but Vaxter spoke up before he could say anything. “But certainly, it is our Duty to recover the Mask of Life. The Makuta made it very clear that if we failed, the results would be catastrophic.”
“I would agree,” Sauti spoke up. “While Unity is certainly important, it is Duty that brought us here. If it were Unity alone, I don’t think we would have pressed on in our task.”
“But Sauti.” There was an urgency to Erde’s voice. “The Makuta suggested that if the Mask were to remain down here, the entire universe might suffer. Is that not an affront to the highest form of Unity, the Unity we share with all our fellow creatures?”
“But it’s our Duty to defend that Unity.”
“And yet Unity is still the highest goal, and our Duty to it secondary.”
“Not if all three Virtues are one guiding principle. As you said, Erde.” Vaxter was uniquely skilled at using one’s own words against them.
“Enough.” Lune’s voice cut through the din of the rapidly brewing argument with an authority that was still impressive for a Toa so young. “The answer is Destiny.”
All of them turned to look at him. He had a deathly serious expression, made even more severe by the flickering light from the flames on his Spear.
“How can you be certain, Lune?” Erde asked.
Lune inhaled slowly, steadying himself. His heartlight began to pulse a little faster.
“There is one piece of this mission that I had not yet divulged,” Lune began, “in the interest of giving you all plausible deniability. But the secret weighs on me, and after what I have seen in my vision up the stairs I cannot in good conscience keep it from you any longer.
“We are here because many years ago, the Makuta had a vision of a horrible future, of Matoran enslaved and Toa slaughtered and hunted at the hands of her fellow Makuta. The Brotherhood has been scheming for centuries, positioning themselves exactly where they need to be to make their move to conquer the entire universe. Makuta Teridax himself instigated the Great Cataclysm as a part of this plan, and soon he will seek to recover the Mask of Life to begin its final stage.”
The other Toa remained silent, taking this all in. They had dedicated their lives to serving the Brotherhood of Makuta. To them there had been no greater honor than protecting the lives of those responsible for making new life in infinite variation. The Makuta alone had filled the Trem Krom Peninsula with dozens of unique species of Rahi and had protected the Matoran that lived there from the strange and horrible monsters that lived there.
“Why didn’t she tell the rest of us?” Gora asked quietly.
“To keep us safe.” There was a crushing despair in Lune’s voice. “Another team of Hagah, Norik’s team, discovered what the Brotherhood were doing. They attempted to raid Destral. Makuta Teridax had them killed.”
Gora gasped loudly. Erde’s head and shoulders fell with grief. Norik’s team had been the best of all the Hagah, professionals who exemplified what a team of Toa should be. That was why they had been picked to protect the leader of the Brotherhood himself. Until now, they had believed the story that they had fallen in the line of duty nearly one hundred years ago.
“They kept this a secret from the other teams, to keep us from learning of their plans or the deaths of our brothers and sisters. Any team that came to close to finding out the secret was killed, or worse.” Lune casts his gaze sadly toward the ground. “Vesi and her team were left at the mercy of Makuta Chirox once he decided that they were no longer useful to him. I do not know about any of the others, I just know that the Makuta has gone to great lengths to keep us from the same fate.”
“But you’ve known?” Zekle asked. Lune’s face betrayed the truth. “You’ve known this whole time and you didn’t tell us?”
“Zekle,” Erde pleaded. “I am as upset as you. But Lune had a good reason for keeping this from us.”
“Kane-Ra dung, he did.” Zekle’s armor began to hum with electrical energy, arcs of lightning in between the gaps causing bright flashes to illuminate the room. It was not the frenetic and uncontrolled lightning that she produced when she was feeling anxious, this was a focused and controlled build-up of charge. Sauti took a step back, unsure of what to expect. He had never seen Zekle so full of rage before.
“Zekle, the Makuta insisted I not tell you, and I agreed with her.”
“Agree with this!”
Zekle’s fist crashed against Lune’s Kanohi. For a moment you could see the glowing outlines of his internals, like the graphics in a book of anatomy you might find on the shelf of one of the more macabre Makuta. And then the sound of thunder filled the room.
Sauti had no time to react. His audio receptors were overwhelmed, and unconsciousness took him.
Sauti always been aware he was sensitive to sound, even back when he knew so little about himself. But hadn’t known just how debilitating loud noises were to him. Not until the incident on Stelt.
The Makuta had been visiting an associate of the Makuta of Stelt, a member of the upper caste called Sidorak. Sidorak was a sniveling wretch of a being, but he had connections the Makuta had wished to exploit. Sauti and his team had come along to provide the appearance of muscle as displays of strength were respected on Stelt, especially among those who operated the gladiatorial arenas. The Makuta needed no protection; even among her fellow Makuta she was a martial force to be reckoned with. When they had first arrived on the island, a guard had attempted to bar her entrance to the island. The fight had lasted thirty seconds at most, as the Makuta relieved the guard of an eye and left him slumped on the docks with the promise that she would have the Makuta of Stelt banish him from the island for his actions. They’d had had not further interruptions on their way to their destination.
The Coliseum of Kadit had already been proving to be a lot for Sauti to handle. The constant shouting of the audience as two brutish figures fought for their entertainment in the pit below had been nearly overwhelming: the shouts, the clanging of weapons, the deep and oppressive percussion of the drums, layering over each other and busying the soundscape. Sauti had resorted to bending the soundwaves around him, so that most washed over him like river around a rock. It had helped, but only a little, and it had been difficult to maintain such fine control while trying to do anything else.
His teammates had had mixed responses to the new environment. Gora had found the competition and adrenaline intoxicating and had kept staring down at the fight below with bated breath. She might have even tried to jump in the pit and go a round herself had she stayed long enough. Erde had seemed repulsed by it, the violence for the sake of entertainment and profit. Sauti distinctly remembered him shaking their head as they entered the Coliseum and saying, “Violence has its place in the world, and this is not that place.” Lune had been all business and stayed close to the Makuta the entire time they were there. He had watched the crowds carefully, looking for any sign of a threat to the Makuta’s safety. Vaxter, as usual, had been at best mildly interested by the whole endeavor.
Zekle had been supremely ill at ease while they were there. While the noise didn’t cause her physical pain as it did Sauti, she found such dense environments oppressive. Much like Lune, she had spent her time glancing at the dangerous-looking patrons of the Coliseum, looking for anything she might consider to be a threat. She had found many of them.
Sidorak had been waiting for them in the owner’s box, lounging in a lush chair and watching the brutal violence play out below them with a smile on his face and a cocktail in a tall glass in his hand. His grey and crimson armor had been so immaculate it may as well have been a display piece in some Steltian Oligarchs’ house. On Sidorak’s shoulders, that had seemed an especially apt description.
“Welcome!” Sidorak had stood as the entered to greet them, revealing just how tall and lanky he was, even for a Steltian, as he towered over the Makuta. “It is so wonderful to finally meet you—our mutual friend speaks very highly of you.”
The politics had been of no interest to Sauti, and he’d begun to take in the room around him. It had been quiet there, even with the entire wall facing down into the arena being made of thick glass, and the cushions on the chairs and imported tapestries from Zakaz that hung around the back wall had devoured any sounds that were made within the room itself. Sauti had found he was able to tune out the conversation happening in front of him with little effort.
Gora had been standing as close to the glass as she could get, rapt with excitement as she watched the combatants down below. Sauti had heard all the telltale signs of the adrenaline pumping its way through her system. With every impact she had flinched, seemingly involuntarily, as if she had been experiencing the violence firsthand.
“You’re enjoying this quiet a bit,” Sauti had commented as he stepped up next to her.
Gora had frozen for a second, perhaps remembering that there were others in the room with her. Her enthusiasm had not been the most professional under the circumstances, but no one else in the room had particularly cared about that.
“I’m not judging, just noting what I see,” Sauti had added quickly, hoping to reassure her.
“Well, yeah.” He had only been a little successful, it seemed, as the sheepish hint of embarrassment was still present in her answer. “It looks so exhilarating.”
“It sounds incredibly loud,” Sauti had remarked.
“Oh! Are you, you know, doing okay?”
Even if none of them had known the extent of his vulnerability at that point, they at least had all quickly learned that loud noises made him uncomfortable.
“It’s not my favorite, but I’ve been managing.” He had added a smile at the end, to let her know not to worry. It hadn’t been entirely true, but he didn’t want her to worry about something she could do nothing about.
Gora had seemed relieved.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Sauti had backpedaled, preferring to talk about something other than himself, “what is it that appeals to you about it?”
Gora had thought about it for a moment, as a particularly large individual in mustard-yellow armor had slammed their fists down on a battered Vortixx down below. The crowd had screamed in excitement, but they were only a dull murmur through the sound-dampening walls of the box.
“I mean, it looks fun! No-holds-barred, may the best fighter win kind of deal. Ugh, the adrenaline rush just from watching, I can’t imagine how alive it must feel to be down there.”
Her cadence had been artificial, at first. Like she was picking her words carefully. Not a lie, but a misdirection.
“I don’t see what’s so alive about getting beaten into an inch of your life, but to each their own I guess.” Sauti paused as she chuckled.
“I think sometimes you need to get close to death to know what it really means to be alive. You know?”
Sauti hadn’t known what it meant to be alive. He still didn’t.
“That makes sense, yeah,” he had lied to her. “So, you just think it looks like fun, yeah?”
The Vortixx had been dragged out of the arena by two of the brutish working class Steltians. The yellow-armored figure had thrown their hands in the air and was marching around the edge of the arena, single blue eye gazing out over the crowd of adoring fans.
“The only thing that matters down there is how strong you are, how fast you are,” she had said at last. “If you’re strong enough they have to respect you.”
Sauti had cocked his head to the side so he could look at her when she said that. “Do you not feel respected here, with the rest of the team?”
“Oh, I do!” Gora had rushed the words out. “But in other places, not everyone does. And there’s only so much I can do about it. But down there, you can just be angry. And no matter what it was about, people will respect you for it.”
Sauti had supposed it was something he could never understand. But he had placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently and reassuringly.
“I will always respect you, sister.”
Gora beamed at him the way she always did when he called her “sister.”
“CORDAK ROCKET!”
Lune’s shout had interrupted the moment. Sauti had heard a whistling sound for a split second before a small red projectile impacted the window. Glass had shattered. Sauti had buckled under the unbearable boom of the explosion. The last thing he had heard had been the rush of screams of fear and pain through the gaping hole in the side of the box.
Sauti awoke to see the faces of his teammates staring down at him in concern. The side of Lune’s Kanohi was charred from its normal yellow to a smokey gray. Gora was leaning over him, making sure his audio receptors looked intact from the outside. They seemed to be, though the cacophonous ringing inside of them didn’t have him feeling optimistic.
Zekle had been pacing on the other side of the room, by the doors. When she noticed he was awake, she hurried over to where he was and began speaking hurriedly. He could not hear her over the ringing in his audio receptors, but he did his best to read her lips.
Sauti. I? So. Sorry. I. Don’t. ??? What. Came. Over. Me.
“I can’t hear a thing you’re saying,” he said, though it came out more like a grunt.
Do? You. Want. Me. Do? ??? My. Mask.
If she tried it wouldn’t do anything, and they both knew it. A Mask of Healing could heal injuries, but the ringing in his audio receptors was a temporary response as they tried to return to equilibrium. And any permanent damage that might have been done would take more willpower to heal than she had now. Audio receptors were notoriously sensitive and difficult to heal, especially for those without natural sonic abilities. He shook his head.
“I’ll be better in a couple of hours.”
Gora helped him to his feet and kept her arm around his shoulders to steady him. For the next few minutes at least, his balance would be supremely disrupted. He nodded appreciatively at her.
There. Is. One. More. Thing. Lune was speaking to the group now. Gora help Sauti shift so he could face Lune directly, to make it easier for him to see the Toa of Fire’s face. In. My. Fear. Vision. And. My. Dream. Last. Night. I. Saw. Something. Something. Horrible.
Sauti had always had an easier time reading Lune’s lips. Something about his pronunciation was easier to follow. Sauti was pretty sure it was at least partially that Lune didn’t use contractions. He’d always said he had “never gotten the hang of them.”
I. Think. I. Saw. The. Same. Vision. The. Makuta. Did. ??? Ago. He paused and looked down at the floor, the weight of whatever he had seen settling firmly onto his shoulders. It. Was. Brutal. Unlike. Anything. I. Have. Ever. Seen. A. ??? Of. Shadows.
The grim expression on his face spoke volumes.
If. We. Do. Not. Succeed. In. Taking. The. Mask. From. This. Place. Good. Toa. And. Matoran. Will. Die. And. Makuta. Teridax. Will. Take. Control. Of. Everything.
Lune glanced over in the direction of Erde, who was saying something. Sauti couldn’t see his lips.
He. Plans. To. ??? The. Great. Spirit. Himself. And. Take. His. Place.
Erde took a step back in shock.
It. Is. My. Destiny. Our. Destiny. To. Stop. Him. Here. And. Now.
The way Lune’s shoulders lifted, his muscles tightened, Sauti could tell his conviction without hearing it in his voice. He’d never put much stock in Destiny, though he wouldn’t ever tell that to the others. It’s hard to believe that there is some ultimate end predetermined for you when you didn’t even know where it was you started.
Gora had carried him in Kadit, as well. At least, he assumed she had because when he came to, he had been tucked in a corner looking up at her big, terrified eyes. Not terrified of the danger, never that. From the way her expression had broken into one of relief when he opened his eyes, she had been worried about him.
He hadn’t had much need to read lips yet, at least not that he remembered. So, he only got a few words from her.
SAUTI. YOU. OK.
“Go,” he had wheezed at her. “Help the others.”
She had looked down at him for a moment, then she’d nodded and darted off into the smoke. He had later found out that the attackers had already fled the arena, and that his teammates quickly realized that there was no follow-up coming. So, they had shifted gears and focused on getting the Makuta out alive, even as the whole Coliseum dissolved into chaos.
But for Sauti, all of that had felt like hours dragging on. All he had heard was the ringing in his ear. All he had seen were the smoldering remains of the box room around him, and Sidorak fleeing the room with a surprising amount of composure for one the Makuta would later describe as a “pathetic bottom feeder.”
The team had grabbed him and the Makuta and made their way to the entrance. The frantic rush through the crowds had been a blur to Sauti, as had the subsequent mad dash across the island for the docks. They had later found out the attempt had been a part of an elaborate assassination scheme against the Coliseum’s owner, but at the time they had been certain someone was attempting to kill the Makuta.
Later, on the boat as they had sailed their way back to the Peninsula, Vaxter had approached him where he sat near the front of the boat, out of the way of everyone else. His hearing had begun to come back a bit by that point, though the ringing had remained almost too loud to hear the Toa of The Green’s words.
“I could help you with that,” Vaxter had said. “I could make it so this doesn’t happen again.”
Sauti remembered being confused by this offer, not sure what Vaxter had meant.
“How?”
Vaxter had tapped the Kanohi he wore, his Mask of Mutation. An odd choice for a Toa, especially one who served the Brotherhood after the last being to wear that Mask had been killed in a coup against his leadership, but Vaxter had been adamant that its usefulness outweighed those social risks.
“I can cause a mutation in your audio receptors to make them less sensitive. You’d be no more impacted by sudden and loud noises than the rest of us.”
A strange feeling had begun to curl around the deepest parts of Sauti’s gut. He hadn’t been sure exactly why. The offer had been understandable, even appealing to some degree. But the thought of it had suddenly struck him as deeply wrong.
“No!” It had come out more forcefully than he had intended. “I appreciate the offer, but no.”
“So, you would rather be vulnerable to the commonplace occurrence of a loud noise? Able to be completely debilitated by any Matoran with a firecracker?”
“If my hearing was less sensitive, I couldn’t use my powers as well as I can now,” Sauti had explained. He had tried to keep the bite of irritation out of his voice. “I couldn’t manipulate the faintest soundwaves if I couldn’t hear them anymore than you can grow a plant you didn’t know was there.”
Vaxter had seemed satisfied with that answer and withdrew. Still, Sauti had sworn he had seen the Toa of The Green glancing in his direction the entire trip back to the Peninsula.
Chapter Four[]
They went through the door labeled “Destiny.” No one had spoken up to suggest that Lune might be wrong. Sauti was certain that dissent had existed, but that no one had had the heart to voice it after he had told them of his dream. Before this point, the team had exchanged quiet words as they descended: banter, memories of previous missions, or wry thoughts about their predicament. But they travelled in silence now, as if afraid of what else might be revealed if any of them dared to speak.
The ringing in Sauti’s audio receptors was fainter now, but he knew from experience it would be several days before it fully went away. Normally it was easy to ignore, to drown it out in the noise of a forest or the thousand strange sounds of the Makuta’s fortress laboratory. But in the absolute silence of the Stairs, it was like a second pulse, keeping him constant company.
After they had settled into the rhythm of their descent, Zekle skipped a few steps to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with Sauti. He acknowledged her with a glance but kept going in silence. After and awkward moment, she began to speak.
“Again, Sauti, I’m so sorry about earlier,” she said. He could hear the regret in her voice: it was deep and genuine.
“I’m not the one you punched in the Kanohi,” he deflected.
“Lune…understands.” Zekle seemed uncomfortable, unprepared for this change of topic. “He knew we’d be upset that he hadn’t told us. And he knows that this place has put us all on edge.”
“I do think there’s a difference between being on edge and punching our team leader, your friend, with the force of a lightning bolt.”
“Damnit Sauti, I was trying to apologize.” Three arcs of electricity traveled down the gap between her pauldron and breastplate in rapid succession. Sauti realized that she’d been doing an unusually good job keeping her power in check since they’d woken up this morning, other than punching Lune in the face.
“I appreciate that.” He paused, not sure how to express what he meant. “I’m not ready to accept your apology yet.”
Her shoulders dropped with an electric pop. “Alright.”
“This place, it gets into your head. Everyone’s head.” Sauti was surprised to hear himself still talking. “You think about things you try not to think about, even when you don’t want to. I don’t know how but the Stairs make you think about them.”
He hadn’t meant to say so much, but it had felt like he should.
Zekle was nodding aggressively. “Exactly! It feels like my mind is working against me. I’m being broken down with my own thoughts.”
“It’s the quiet, I think. It was so quiet I didn’t dream last night.”
“Neither did I.”
Sauti thought that was an odd response. “Is that not normal for you?”
“I have nightmares.” Zekle paused for just a bit longer than seemed natural. Sauti wondered if she was also saying more than she intended. “Every night. I have since I was a Matoran.”
“Since Tedan?”
Zekle shivered when he said the name. She blinked, and then blinked again, and then shook her head.
“I should be watching our backs.”
She slipped away before he could respond. Sauti felt as though he’d just learned something significant, but he had no idea what.
A few moments later, they found another room.
"Welcome, travelers. You seek the Chamber of Life... but first you must pass through the Chamber of Death, for truly both are intertwined."
The voice did not come from anywhere in particular. It almost seemed to emanate from the stone walls of the chamber itself. It was an old voice, one that carried the weight of many centuries.
Erde gasped and spoke in awe under his breath. “The voice of a Great Being…”
The voice did not seem to acknowledge his comment—if it was even capable of hearing him at all. “For centuries beyond count, the Mask of Life has been hidden in this place, waiting for Destiny’s call. It is a Kanohi both wonderful and terrible in its might. And the price to wield its power of life… is a death.”
The Toa glanced at one another in uncertainty. In the red light of the lightstones embedded into the wall—strangely, the first time they had encountered light originating within the Stairs—there was a menace present in the faces of their teammates. Vaxter shrugged irreverently, and then walked toward the archway on the other side of the room only to find it impossible to cross. An invisible barrier of force barred them from moving forward.
“Six of you stand ready,” the voice continued. “If you wish to pass through this chamber, one of you must die. Decide—now.”
Gora began to laugh. It was not a laugh of joy or amusement, but an involuntary shiver of nervousness that demanded release. Sauti felt an urge to join in, that same shiver building within his gut.
Lune thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “Everyone fall back.”
As he spoke a massive stone slab slammed down from above, closing the archway they had entered through. Sauti flinched as it hit the stone floor with a heavy thud.
“Two choices have you,” the voice intoned. “Renounce your pursuit of the Mask of Life, and you may leave as you came, never to return. Or choose one of your number to die, so that the rest may pass. There are no other pathways open to your tread.”
Lune stared up at the slab blocking entrance to the room. “Gora?”
The opportunity to do something seemed to calm Gora. Cracking her knuckles, she strode up to the slab. She pressed her knuckles into the stone and exhaled slowly as she began to lift.
All she did was scrape her knuckles against the stone.
“It won’t budge!” She growled in frustration and stalked away from the door to run her hands along the rest of the walls, looking for another way out.
“Alright, everyone, take a look around,” Lune was already glancing around the room himself. “See if you can find anything useful.”
The room was small, just big enough that the six of them could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with one another and just barely fit across the length of the room. The walls were featureless except for the lightstones embedded into them, and the only distinct features in the construction were the two simply carved arches that led back up or further down the Stairs.
Sauti heard Erde’s breath starting to grow shallow before it was obvious to anyone else. The Toa of Earth was attempting to search along the walls for anything of note, but wasn’t moving much, his hand clenched into a bitterly tight fist.
“Erde?” he asked, taking a few steps closer. “Brother, are you alright?”
“I will be fine, once we are out of this place.” The bass resonance of his voice was typically reassuring. But the cold flicker of fear made it unsteady, like the creak of an ancient building that might collapse at any moment being buffeted by the wind.
“Has anyone found anything yet?” Lune called to the ground as he prodded at the force barrier that blocked the exit with his spear.
“Nothing,” Gora called as she pulled her audio receptor from the floor.
“The lightstones appear to only provide illumination, nothing more,” Vaxter confirmed.
“It sounds just like the rest of the Stairs, I don’t think there’s anything special to find here,” Sauti said.
Zekle just shook her head.
“There isn’t anything,” Erde said, quietly. “The Great Beings wouldn’t leave a loophole. This Mask is the most powerful Kanohi to have ever existed. They would guard it with everything they could.” He looked up at the group, his expression already one of mourning. “If we want the Mask of Life, one of us will have to die.”
Sauti realized with a start that the silence that followed didn’t bother him at all. It was right to be silent, to not make noise, to wallow in the overwhelming flood of dread that filled the room. He felt that his newfound comfort with it should be alarming, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of why that would be.
After an indeterminate amount of time had passed, Lune shook his head. The motion sounded like a thunderclap. “No, I refuse to accept that. There must be another way.”
“We could leave,” Zekle spoke up. “We could tell the voice we’ll let the mask be, and not come back for it.”
“Out of the question.”
“But surely no one else would make it this far and kill one of their companions just to get the mask.”
Lune stared straight at Zekle, then began to walk toward her. “Norik. Bomonga. Gaaki. Iruini. Pouks. Kualus.” His gait was slow and steady, and his gaze didn't waver as he approached. “Vesi. Pozar. Javan. Huka. Lugus. Iman. Makuta Miserix. Makuta Arsenius. Makuta Eogan. Makuta Italus. Makuta Parxiteles. Makuta Dolus. What do all of them have in common?”
Zekle took a step back as Lune stepped forward to bring his face almost to hers.
“They’re…dead.”
Lune nodded slowly. “Makuta Teridax had them all killed, or worse, without a second thought. Do you think he would hesitate at the prospect of killing one more to get what he wants?”
Zekle seemed small, even though she stood as tall as Lune did.
“So no, we cannot leave. But we can find another solution.”
Sauti had to agree with him. The risk was too great. They couldn’t afford to let the Mask of Life fall into the wrong hands.
“So.” There was an alien quality to Lune’s voice now, something that seemed out of place. A threatening edge, as if he was daring someone else to challenge him. “Let us get to work.”
Sauti had no concept of time in this place. He could not hear the natural cycle of the world to indicate the shifts in time—there was no shift from the sound of diurnal Rahi to the cries of the nocturnal ones down here. No shift in the way that sound itself travelled in the warmth of the day or the cold of the night: it travelled father, in the night. Instead, there was only the footsteps of pacing Toa. How many were pacing changed as some got tired of walking, or others got tired of sitting. Lune stayed on his feet the entire time. Erde didn’t pace at all.
They’d already tried using Gora’s Mask of Repulsion to force the slab away. Like when she attempted to use her powers, it didn’t budge. Vaxter had tried to summon the roots of the forest up above to force aside the stone, but they were either too deep or behind too much stone. Zekle attempted to absorb the energy of the force barrier into her Capacitor Spear, but it had only hurled her across the room with a burst of sparks. Erde had even been convinced to use his Pressure Spear to try and force the slab up into the air, but that had also come to nothing.
It would be getting late soon. Sauti could feel the events of the day catching up to him, and he knew the lethargy would soon take him. The others had to feel the same.
“Sauti, maybe your Kanohi might tell us something about the slab? Something we can use?”
It felt like Lune was grasping wildly for anything that could possibly be of use at this point. But it couldn’t hurt to try. Sauti got up from where he was sitting and approached the slab. As he placed his hand on the slab he began to focus, not on the power within but an external source, the one that clung to his face. His Kanohi began to glow, and the world around him shifted.
The room was the same, but his friends were gone. The slab was lifted and the path back up the Stairs was revealed. Sauti frowned but stepped through the archway back onto the stairs. If he went too far from the slab, the target of his ability, he’d step out of the vision and snap back into reality, but he could see if there was anything of use hiding on the periphery.
Then he heard footsteps from behind him. Light ones, unlike the heavy metal boots he and his fellow Toa wore. He looked up to see a surprisingly short figure making his way up the stairs from the other side of the force barrier. The figure appeared to be a Po-Matoran wearing light brown armor and mask, with two scoop-like digging tools in his hands and a sack over his shoulder. He wore a Kanohi Komau, the Mask of Mind Control, but since he was a Matoran he wouldn’t have been able to use it even if it were a Great Mask of Power. He was short for a Matoran, as all inhabitants of the island of Voya Nui were.
As the Matoran crossed the threshold into the chamber, without any apparent issue, he paused for a moment and looked up. “Pitiful is the one who mourns what they cannot have.” Sauti found this an incredibly obtuse comment. “However, it was pleasant to hear your voice again, Morivan, even if it’s only a recording.”
He kept walking toward the archway on the opposite side, toward Sauti. Sauti had long since suppressed the urge to hide himself in these visions—they were merely memories imprinted on the objects he touched. He wasn’t there, he was just an observer. All the same, he stepped out of the Matoran’s way. He never liked the sensation of people walking through him.
As the Matoran passed, however, Sauti noticed something. The flap of his satchel was only loosely secured, and Sauti could see a golden glow from within it. His Kanohi did not grant him control over what he saw, but he strained to focus its power on whatever the Matoran was carrying out of here. At the last second, he caught a better glimpse of something. An eyehole.
The Matoran was carrying a golden Kanohi out of this place.
Sauti was standing in the room again, his hand against the stone of the door. His teammates were watching him expectantly, waiting for him to tell them what he saw. Instead, he turned, his back slumping against the slab as he slid down to the floor.
“Well?” Lune asked, expectantly.
Sauti exhaled slowly, delaying the moment of revelation just a few seconds longer.
“Well?” It wasn’t like Lune to be so demanding.
“The mask is gone,” Sauti answered curtly. “A Po-Matoran from the island took it from this place.”
The room was completely, utterly silent.
“So…we should go then?” Zekle asked.
“But why would the defenses still be active if whatever was being protected was no longer here?” Vaxter countered.
“Perhaps they are an innate quality,” Erde said from his spot on the floor. “The Great Beings infused them with their divine power long ago, and even removing the mask cannot revert their touch.”
“But if there’s nothing here there’s no point to this, we should go.” Zekle pressed.
“ENOUGH.” Lune’s voice bounced off the walls of the room, a cruel echo Sauti was only able to protect himself from because he heard the deep inhale which had proceeded it. He slowly removed his hands from this audio receptors as the others stopped and turned to look at Lune. The Toa of Fire was standing near the middle of the room, his Mask of Detection glowing brilliantly. He was wincing with pain until the light faded.
“The Mask of Life is here,” Lune said. It was a statement of fact. “I can sense it with every ache caused by my Mask. Maybe this Matoran did not take the Mask, maybe he had something else. Maybe he returned it when he was done with it. I do not know. It is not relevant to the mission. But the Mask is here, and we must find it.”
There was no arguing with him. They sat in silence for what had to be several more hours after that. They’d exhausted everything they had to try and circumvent the test. Slowly, they all came to the same conclusion. One of them was not walking out of this room.
Zekle was the first to put a voice to this horrid, macabre thought. “So, who is it going to be?”
After a moment, Vaxter stepped away from the wall he had been leaning against. “Practically speaking, it can’t be Lune. He’s the one who can detect the Mask’s location, and we don’t know how hidden it might be down there.”
“Someone else can use his mask,” Zekle suggested quickly.
“We all know how long it takes to master a Kanohi,” Gora countered. “Lune’s worn that Elda for for over a hundred years, he’s our best shot at finding it.”
Vaxter nodded. Sauti noticed that Lune was staring down at the ground between his feet.
“Sauti’s mask and sonic abilities are also invaluable, since he’s proved capable of seeing through any illusions and gathering actionable intelligence,” Vaxter continued.
Sauti was ashamed by the rush of relief he felt as several of the others nodded along.
“Zekle is the only one of us with enough medical knowledge to effectively use her Mask of Healing. Gora’s control over stone, while it hasn’t helped with any barriers, has proved useful in assessing the nature of the stairs and can still be used on the stairs themselves, as far as we can tell.”
Vaxter was speaking with detached precision. Sauti wasn’t sure how he could do this, to reduce his fellow Toa, his friends, to practical terms. He certainly couldn’t. None of them could.
“That leaves just you and me,” Erde said quietly. It felt like the earth itself shook with his words.
“And I should think the choice an obvious one.”
“Is it now?”
“Everything you offer to this team is redundant in some capacity. Gora provides muscle, Sauti’s hearing is superior to the benefits provided by your Mask of Sensory Aptitude. And you’re clearly compromised by the very nature of this place, taking you further down would be a liability.”
“So he should die?” Sauti spoke up.
“Not ideally no, but if one of us has to he makes the most sense.”
The worst part was Sauti could see where he was coming from. Erde hadn’t moved from his spot on the ground since they had been closed in here. He’d barely contributed to their efforts to find another way out. He’d almost died up on the Stairs during the illusory collapse. Overall, he had contributed very little to the mission.
“Why not you, then?” Erde asked. “You conveniently skipped your reasoning for why you are worth more to this team than me.”
“We are searching for the Mask of Life. The Green is the element of life, the power of nature itself. Surely you can see the benefit of my presence when we attempt to claim it. Furthermore, it seems I’m the only member of this team capable of making the hard decisions when they need to be made. Imagine how much longer you all would be stuck in here without me.
“On a less esoteric level, we don’t know what else is down there. Say the stairs have flooded, or we end up within the core of the Volcano. My Mask of Mutation can provide the team with any alterations that might be needed to survive in such hostile environments.”
Erde listened, and then for the first time in hours his stood. He towered over Vaxter as he approached him.
“That may be so,” he said, “if this was a matter of logic. It is not. It is a test of faith, and you have none.”
“And look how far faith has gotten you,” Vaxter responded in the same cool and detached tone. “Scared of your own power, in the bowels of the very place you should be most at home.”
“I have a suggestion,” Gora spoke up. Everyone turned to look at her. “What if I just closed the tunnel behind us, so that nobody could ever come back down after us. We could stay on Voya Nui, watch over the place, make sure nobody goes down again.”
Sauti knew what Lune would say before he said it.
“It would not work,” Lune said. “Other Toa of Stone could open it back up. We might be able to guard it for a while, but eventually Makuta Teridax would come, and he would bring an army. We would be overrun, and the Mask of Life would fall into his hands anyway.”
“Not to mention we would be abandoning our duty to the Makuta,” Vaxter added.
“What does that matter when you have already abandoned your Unity with your teammates,” Erde snapped back.
“Enough, I need time to think,” Lune said and turned toward the force barrier.
Gora followed him. “Lune, you can’t possibly be considering this.”
Sauti heard something that pulled is attention away from the debate. Vaxter’s breathing had shifted. It was precise, controlled, like he was focusing his power. Sauti watched as he stepped back out of Erde’s range of vision, his Kanohi beginning to glow as he stared at the back of Zekle’s head. It was just for a moment, so quick that no one else would’ve noticed, no one other than him. He reached for his Supersonic Spear, ready to jump up and demand Vaxter tell him what he was doing, but the Toa of The Green just met his gaze calmly. He almost looked amused, and that gave Sauti pause. Vaxter shook his head subtly, silently saying, “you can’t.”
It hit Sauti with the force of a speeding Kane-Ra bull. Vaxter knew he hadn’t mentioned Brutaka’s obsession. He knew Sauti seen a vision up the Stairs. And if Sauti tried to challenge him now, he’d tell them all that Sauti had been lying to them this whole time.
Sauti’s grip relaxed from his spear. Vaxter nodded at him; that same, conspiratorial nod he’d given him at the mouth of the Stairs.
The conversation had moved on without him. “You are right,” Lune was saying, his shoulders sunk. “If we do this, we have to do it the right way.”
Gora and Erde were nodding along, while Zekle was literally vibrating with pent up energy, trying to keep it contained. It filled the room with a low hum like an insect buzzing right by your audio receptor. Lune reached into his pack and pulled out the tablet of transit that the Makuta had given them to aid in their journey south.
“Gora, make us some sticks. One shorter than the others.”
So, they were drawing lots. Sauti watched as Gora made six thin sticks from the stone of the tablet. Sauti knew that getting back to the Peninsula without it could take weeks or even months, but that seemed a far-away concern.
Gora clasped the sticks in her fist, then held them out to the group. “Ok. One at a time.”
Zekle’s eyes went wide, and several bolts of lightning arced out from her armor at once. “You can’t be serious. We can’t just leave this up to chance!”
Lune’s shoulders sunk. “It is the only fair way to decide.”
“But what about everything Vaxter said? What if you get picked?”
“Then you will go on without me and finish the mission,” Lune said firmly. “You can use my Kanohi, even if you have not mastered it. I believe that this team can do this, even without all the tools you are used to.”
Vaxter stepped forward and put a hand on Zekle’s shoulder. “They’re right, this is the fairest option. This way, we all agree to the consequences.”
He was the first to draw from the lot. His was a long stick.
Lune was next. His hand hovered over Gora’s fist for a moment before settling on a stick and gently pulling it out. It was long as well.
Sauti glanced over at Erde, implicitly asking if he wanted to go first. Erde nodded deferentially. So Sauti stepped forward, looking down at the sticks in Gora’s hands. This close to her, he could hear her anxious, ragged breathing like thunderclaps in a storm. Her hands shook. As he reached to grab a stick between his fingers, he could see the sadness in her eyes. Sauti pulled out his stick.
A deep scream of agony bellowed out from behind him. Sauti spun on his heels, stick dropping as he reached for his spear a second time, but he was too late. Behind him, Erde stood pathetically, gazing down at the tip of a spear that was poking through his chest. Vital fluids dripped out of the wound, down the tip of the spear. A Capacitor Spear, that crackled with electrical energy.
Erde slumped to his knees as Zekle pulled the spear out of him. He grasped uselessly at the hole in his chest as his heartlight began to flash in inconsistent spurts. He slumped forward again, before anyone could respond. Sauti heard his heartlight pulse once, then twice, then stop entirely. The Toa of Earth went limp on the floor.
“I don’t agree with the consequences,” Zekle said as she wiped the spray of dark liquid from her Kanohi. Her voice cracked and shook as she spoke. Her whole body crackled with electricity and the entire room quickly began to stink of ozone.
“HEAL HIM!” Gora cried, dropping the remaining sticks to the side as she dropped to her knees next to Erde. She scooped him up and began to cradle him in her arms. She seemed unsure if she should be looking down at him, or up at Zekle in anger as she demanded, “What are you waiting for, heal him now!”
Zekle just stood there, covered in Erde’s vital fluids, spear in hand, staring down at what she had done.
“The choice has been made,” the voice boomed throughout the room. “The price will be paid.”
A beam of brilliant light shone down on Erde’s body. Faster that any of them could blink, his body dissolved into nothing, leaving only his Kanohi hovering in the air. After the briefest moment that too dissolved away, and Gora was left holding nothing, slumped in the light.
“It is done,” the voice concluded with cruel finality. “You are free to pass.”
The air in the archway leading down shimmered to indicate that the barrier in front of them was gone. At the same time, the stone slab behind them began to raise. Whatever machinery made up the contraption groaned with the weight of hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
For a moment the five of them stood in silence. All Sauti could hear was Erde’s scream lingering in his audio receptors.
Chapter Five[]
Sauti hadn’t been sure what to make of his teammates at first, and he wasn’t sure they had known what to make of him. The others had common experiences: former Toa teams, the strangeness of becoming a Toa and the ways that changed their relationships with their old Matoran friends, the elation of being recruited to be a Toa Hagah. Experiences Sauti couldn’t relate to.
Erde had been the first one to successfully reach out to him. Gora had tried, Great Beings bless her, but she was loud and overwhelming and Sauti had always slipped away the first chance he got.
It had been a quiet morning, only a few weeks after they were all recruited. Sauti had been on the walls of the fortress, as he was most mornings, meditating and listening to the sounds of the mountains around them. Birds and other Rahi had made their morning calls to one another, the constant comfort of the dripping of dew off the trees onto the cold earth down below. The wind had been blowing such that he was confident there would be at least rain, if not snow that afternoon. There had been an avalanche 4 miles away, but there were no villages in the area, so he hadn’t worried.
Erde had approached quietly, but Sauti had still heard him coming.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were here,” Erde had spoken quickly. “I can come back later.”
“Did you need something?” Sauti remembered hoping he hadn’t sounded too perturbed by the interruption.
“I sometimes come on the walls to pray,” Erde had said. He had been the first to realize that he needed to keep his voice down around Sauti. He’d been whispering that morning. Maybe that was the reason Sauti had made his offer.
“You could join me. I’m just listening.”
Erde had nodded and walked over, kneeling beside him on the pale stone floor. Sauti had heard the click of Erde’s eyelid irises shutting, and then only the gentle, deep breathing beside him. They had sat there in silence for a time, immersing themselves in the spiritual experience of the world. Sauti had never asked Erde what it was he prayed for or what words he used. It had always struck him as a violation of sorts. If Erde had wanted others to know, he would have shared it with them. Now only the Great Beings knew what he said in those private moments.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Erde had broken the silence, “what do you listen to?”
Sauti had hesitated, but ultimately decided he didn’t mind sharing. “The sounds of the mountains around us. The wind between them sounds different depending on how it blows against the rocks. The trees rustle their leaves and branches, they almost sound like the beach. They sway back and forth to the rhythm of the wind just like the waves. And the Rahi, there are many of those.” He had paused for a moment, realizing he’d just said more words at once to one of his new teammates than ever before.
“Did you know that if you sit on the northwest tower, you can hear the uppermost sections of the acid falls?” Erde had asked. “It’s faint, but the sizzling is very distinct.”
Sauti had turned to look at him in surprised. “You can hear those from here?”
Erde had tapped the Kanohi he wore on his face: the Mask of Sensory Aptitude. “When I use this, I can. It’s probably not as sensitive to the different frequencies as you are, but I can hear a lot.”
“That makes sense. I’d just… I’d never thought about it to be honest.”
Erde had shrugged. “You probably assume that about most beings that aren’t De-Matoran.”
He had been right.
“Have you always listened like this?” Erde had asked after that.
“For as long as I can remember.” Lying was all about the omission of essential details. “You?”
“I started when I got here. There’s not much worth hearing, where I’m from.”
Sauti had not been sure if Erde wanted him to ask, but he had been curious. “Where’s that?”
Erde had leaned back on his arms and stared up at the sky. He had sighed, but it was a contented sigh and not a regretful one. Sauti had felt better about asking after that.
“It’s a small island, south of Odina,” Erde had begun. “You wouldn’t have heard of it even if it had a name anymore. It belongs to him now, has for centuries.”
“The whole island belongs to someone?”
“We never knew his name, we just called him the Tyrant. He came from another island, one nearby, and decided to conquer ours. We were just peaceful Matoran, we couldn’t fight back. He took us over easily and ruled with brutality. He was very fond of executions.
“I was one of six matoran our old Turaga, Bidran, selected to fight back. He gave us the Toa stones he’d made when he became a Turaga, that he’d stashed away for when they were needed. He trained us on how to use our powers, how to fight, and then he let us loose on the Tyrant and his minions. We fought, and fought, and fought for decades. But we couldn’t win.
“It wasn’t proper fighting, not the way a Toa is supposed to fight. We fought dirty. We used guerrilla tactics, we snuck around the island and attacked key strongholds in the night. But the Tyrant and his people were strong, and cruel, and they started executing Matoran to get us to stop. It was hard to make progress after that, but we tried.”
Erde had had a far-off look to him then. He hadn’t been sitting on the wall anymore, he had been somewhere else. Somewhere in his memories.
“When the Brotherhood came to recruit, we pleaded that they intervene. But apparently the Tyrant had connections to the Dark Hunters, and if the Brotherhood had tried to intervene, it might have led to all-out war. Still, they asked me to join them. To become a Hagah. My teammates didn’t want me to. They believed our Duty was to the people of our island, that our Destiny was to free it. But I had this feeling, deep within me, that I was meant to leave. To become a Hagah. I couldn’t explain it, I still can’t. But I agreed to come.”
Sauti had listened, and for the first time he felt thankful he didn’t remember where he had come from. “What happened to your old teammates?”
Erde had sat for several minutes at that question, staring off into the distance. Sauti had been about to ask something else, to change the topic, when he had finally answered.
“I don’t know. When I left, they told me never to come back.”
Sauti had reached out and placed his hand on Erde’s shoulder. The Toa of Earth had reached up and rested his own hand on top of it.
“I’m truly sorry to hear that, brother.”
That had been the first time he had ever called one of his new teammates his brother. Erde had recognized the significance of this and had smiled back at him.
“Thank you, brother. For listening, and for your condolences. It means much to me.”
Sauti had nodded. Out in the wilderness around the fortress, an Energy Hound had howled.
Sauti wondered morosely if Erde had felt called to leave his home so he could die here, in this horrible place, so that they could get the Mask of Life to save the universe. It was a noble but cruel fate, for one so faithful to the Three Virtues to have such a macabre Destiny.
Tension was an insufficient word to describe the mood of the Toa as they descended further down the Stairs. Not long after they left the Chamber of Death, as the voice had called it, Lune had insisted they take another rest before going the rest of the way. Zekle wanted to push forward, saying that they had to be close and the sooner they got out of this place, the better. Even though they all agreed with her, no one had taken her side.
Sauti was roused from his slumber sometime in the “night” by Gora so that he could take watch. Lune was worried there might be threats down here that might try and attack them while they rested and wanted to remain vigilant. They split that duty between the four of them who had not committed murder in the last few hours.
As Sauti sat in the doorframe Gora had opened for them, his gaze was fixed on Vaxter. More than once he felt his hands tightening around his Supersonic Spear, and every time it took a concerted effort to loosen his grip. He wasn’t sure what Vaxter had done, but he knew that somehow the Toa of The Green had pushed Zekle over the edge. Whatever he’d changed in her had caused her to kill Erde.
There was one way to find out. With minimal effort, Sauti muffled the sounds of his footsteps as he walked over to Vaxter. He appeared to be asleep, lying on his back with his eyes closed. He looked sickeningly peaceful.
The Mask of Psychometry could not be used to glean a reading from organic tissue. Sauti couldn’t use it on a living creature, or even a corpse. But oftentimes the objects a creature carried could tell more than enough: Sauti had read weapons, armor, and talismans to learn information he couldn’t from a being themself. He’d done it with Brutaka’s Rotating Blades to find the entrance to the Stairs.
Sauti reached down and gingerly placed his fingers on Vaxter’s Kanohi while his own began to glow.
He was back in the Chamber of Death, Zekle stood just in front of him. Beside him stood Vaxter, his mask glowing as he stared at the back of Zekle’s head with a cold precision. Sauti saw himself watching, already going for his weapon. But he focused on Vaxter, on the mask itself. He reached out and touched it again, within the reading. His gut felt as though it had pitched forward with unease as he felt a violent retraction, a sensation of things being undone that almost threw him out of the reading. With a start he realized that Vaxter had not mutated Zekle in that moment—he had reversed a mutation.
He spun to look at Zekle, who was on the Stairs now, staring down at a rotting and decayed corpse-like Su-Matoran. In the distance he saw himself digging through debris, reaching out for Erde’s hand. Gora was calling for help from further down. Where they had all been forced to face their fears.
Vaxter was approaching Zekle, reaching out to grasp her shoulders. She buckled under his touch, even as she barely seemed to notice it. The Matoran, the specter of Tedan, did nothing but stare with his cold dead eyes. Vaxter walked behind Zekle, grabbing her gently by the shoulders, trying to steer her away from the apparition. As he did, he stared at the back of her head for a moment, and his mask began to glow. The original mutation.
Sauti reached deeper into the memories imprinted onto the Kanohi, trying to discern what that original mutation had been, but his hand grabbed a metal table instead, as he pulled himself up from the floor to look on a horrific sight. On the table before him lay a Le-Matoran in dark green armor, lashed to the metal surface with thick black cords. The expression on his Kanohi Volitak, the Mask of Stealth, was one of absolute terror. The room around them was filled with glass tubes, shelves of macabre instruments of science and possibly torture. A familiar hum and drum filled the air as the Matoran failed, attempting to scream but finding himself unable to speak.
From the shadows across the room, a hulking figure half-emerged, just enough light to reveal her heavy black and bright green armor. Her red eyes stared down at the Matoran with callous fascination. Sauti could swear there was a deep sense of glee in her voice as she spoke.
“Let’s see how Destiny likes it when I steal its toys,” the Makuta hissed like a massive, strangled insect. “Begin.”
“As you wish, my lady.”
Sauti turned to see Vaxter standing beside him, looking down at the Matoran with the same perverse anticipation as the Makuta on the other side of the table. He reached over to a tray beside him, grabbing a large scalpel and twirling it elegantly in his fingers. Then his head began to flicker and suddenly Vaxter was staring right at him, somehow seeing Sauti through the memory.
“Did you find what you were looking for, brother?”
Vaxter was looking up at him with open eyes that betrayed not a hint of tiredness. Sauti realized it was entirely possible that Vaxter hadn’t been asleep at all.
Sauti stumbled backwards, his hand falling off Vaxter’s Kanohi. He wasn’t focusing enough to muffle the noise as he fell back, his armor clanking against the ground. The others began to stir.
“Sauti, is everything alright?” Lune’s voice rose groggily from his corner of the room.
“Yes,” Sauti said, too quickly. “I just tripped. Everything’s fine.”
Vaxter had sat up and was staring calmly at Sauti. He must not have realized how much Sauti had seen, or else he would be more alarmed. What had Sauti even seen? Vaxter had been mutating Zekle without her knowledge since the top of the Stairs. Had he done it to her before? Had he done it to the others? Was Sauti mutated in some way right now? And what had he been doing with the Makuta, in some secret room of her fortress Sauti had never seen? What had he done to that Matoran?
“Alright,” Lune murmured, already drifting back to sleep. The fall must’ve been quieter than it sounded to Sauti.
Questions continued to explode in Sauti’s mind, even as he glanced over at his Supersonic Spear next to Vaxter. There was no way he’d get to it in time.
“Well?” Vaxter was waiting for an answer to the question that had bled into the reading. He hadn’t yet begun to reach for his Scything Spear, which leaned against the wall behind him.
“You…” Sauti chose his words carefully. He didn’t want Vaxter to know everything he’d seen—he wasn’t sure he’d be safe if he did. “You mutated Zekle.”
“Correct.” Vaxter barely moved as he spoke, his voice devoid of all emotion. “I shrunk her amygdala after the encounter with the illusions. I’ve seriously considered intervening before but had never acted on those considerations. However, given the severity of the mission, I thought it prudent to cull her unnaturally strong fear responses.”
“And then, in the Chamber—”
“I reversed the mutation, returning her to her normal, fearful and panic-prone self.”
“But why?”
“Because Erde was the right choice to sacrifice, and the rest of you might have removed a more important asset from play with your asinine attempts at ‘fairness.’ Zekle was desperate enough to keep herself alive even without being pumped full of adrenaline that I knew she would kill him for us, with the right push.”
“That’s against the Toa Code.”
“We are so far beyond the Code, brother. But it if it appeases your pedantic sense of morality, I will remind you that Toa are allowed to kill to protect the innocent. Erde’s death was the most likely to result in the success of our mission, which will save millions of innocents from suffering at the hands of a cruel and heartless tyrant. I do believe Erde would understand that sacrifices are necessitated in the face of such evil.”
Sauti sputtered uselessly. “You betrayed this team. You manipulated Zekle into committing murder.”
“She committed murder after I reverted my mutations. I merely made an educated guess that she would rather kill than risk dying herself.”
“Why would you even think that?”
“Did you actually believe her story about how she was simply too late to save her friend? I certainly didn’t.”
The skip of the heartlight. The lie.
“I’m telling them,” Sauti decided. “About you, what you did.”
“You know what I’ll tell them if you do, brother.”
He did know. Vaxter and Zekle were not the only liar on this team—far from it. And while his secret was not the violation that Vaxter’s was, he had still lied. Over and over, for as long as he’d known them all. And not just about that—there were the little things as well. Like Brutaka’s obsession with the Stairs—an obsession he was beginning to suspect was growing within Lune. Or his fear vision up the Stairs. He’d lied about that, too.
“How about this,” Vaxter said, standing up at last. He grabbed both of their spears from beside him as he stood. “You go get some rest. You’ve had a long day. I’ll take the rest of your watch, and then my own.” He spun Sauti’s Supersonic Spear in his hand for a moment, and then held it out toward him, shaft first.
For a moment, Sauti considered driving the spear into Vaxter’s abdomen. He could end this whole game now. But he took the spear, pulling himself up to his feet so he could look Vaxter in the eye for a moment.
“If I see you try anything like that again…” Sauti let the threat trail off. Vaxter knew it was because he had nothing to back it up.
“You’ll know it’ll be what’s best for the mission.” Vaxter smiled, and Sauti realized that any geniality he’d ever seen the Toa of The Green possess had been artifice. A guise he could turn on and off without pause. “I will see you in the morning, brother.”
Sauti awoke from another deep and dreamless sleep, and for a moment everything was peaceful. And then he opened his eyes, and the horrible truths of the previous day overwhelmed him all at once. He lay there for another few moments, not sure if he was just unwilling or fully unable to rise. He could hear footsteps around him as the others packed up for the final stretch of their journey. He was struck by the futility of it all, of the façade of comradery that would certainly completely collapse by the time they returned to the Makuta. Zekle had killed Erde. Sauti knew that Vaxter had engineered the situation in the first place. And back across the world, the Makuta was doing horrible things. Things which Vaxter was complicit in.
Sauti did not know what all of this meant. But he needed to get up.
The others were all ready to go before he was. He didn’t bother strapping his spear to his back as Gora closed their side room behind them. He felt better with a weapon in his hands.
Zekle was no longer taking up the rear. She had taken Vaxter’s position at the center of the group, while Sauti had moved to the back. They walked in silence. Even at the back of the group, with nothing between him and the top of the Stairs, he felt trapped.
Sauti was naturally the first to hear the noise. It was a strange noise, not just because he had heard almost nothing down here before now, but because he’d never heard any sound like it before. It was the intersection of the guttural growl of a large Rahi beast and the incessant buzzing of an insect. Sauti felt himself almost begin to vibrate in sync to this alien noise as he descended closer to it.
“I hear something,” he called quietly to the front of the group.
The others stopped. Gora tilted her head to the side, so her audio receptor was facing down the Stairs, then nodded. Lune gestured forward with his free hand, then he extinguished the light from his Ignition Spear.
“Take the lead,” he muttered so quietly under his breath only Sauti could hear.
Around a slight corner the Stairs widened, becoming a long and wider rectangular chamber with a flat, slightly sloped floor. At the far end an archway led to another chamber that glowed with orange light. The noise Sauti had heard was loud here, so loud it nearly drowned out the sounds of his own footsteps. It seemed to come from all sides, bouncing off the stone floors and walls and layering over itself, but Sauti plucked a specific soundwave out of the air and followed it, crawling along its length until it dragged his attention upwards. The ceiling shuddered with discordant movement as large creatures skittered across it in the darkness of the room.
Sauti immediately reached out with his abilities to muffle the sounds of his and his companion’s footsteps. He didn’t think they’d been noticed yet, otherwise they would be being swarmed already. He wanted to keep it that way.
He glanced back at Lune, who nodded. GO.
Carefully, Sauti began to lead the group across the room. The others followed him closely—so close that he could feel Gora’s breath on his neck—making it easier for him to keep their footsteps almost silent. As they were crossing, Sauti noticed that the temperature in the room was heating up the closer they got to the opposite archway. The air grew dry and acrid, and a rancid, sulfurous stench began to assault his sense of smell. The reason for this became abundantly clear when they reached the far side of the room.
Through the archway, the Stairs continued for about two dozen more steps, descending to a ledge that overlooked a vast volcanic plain. The stone turned dark and black, charred by the intense heat. The orange glow they had seen came from vast pools of lava that bubbled and shimmered with incredible heat. They had arrived at the heart of Mount Valmai.
Sauti started at the crack of metal against stone as Vaxter slammed his Scything Spear into the side of the archway. Immediately the sound of the creatures in the last chamber turned into a communal screech as they dropped from the ceiling and charged at the being that had dared to disturb them. They had two heads with mouths lined with multiple rows of teeth that snapped and gnashed at nothing; a long and thick lizard-like tail that cracked the stone on impact; and cruel talons the size of swords instead of feet on their forelegs. Despite their impressive size—some were nearly as large as a Toa—Sauti realized they would easily be able to fit through the archway and overwhelm him and his companions.
Vaxter braced himself in the archway, assessing the creatures in a split second before reaching out his hand toward the closest as his Kanohi began to glow. The leading creature began to shrink in all proportions, growing smaller until it was but a speck that flew straight into Vaxter’s outstretched hand. He snapped his hand shut around it and dove to the side.
“Gora!” he shouted.
Gora was already moving to block the creatures, slamming the tip of her Fissure Spear into the ground causing the volcanic stone around her to grow upward in massive spikes, forming a lattice over the archway. Mere seconds later Sauti heard a thunderous crashing sound, followed by aggravated screeching and a flurry of impacts and scrapes from the other side.
“That’s not going to hold them for long,” Sauti informed the others.
Gora was already shaping more and thicker spikes of stone into her barrier. “On it!”
“Leave it!” Lune called from further down the Stairs. He was kneeling, his Kanohi aglow with power even as his brow was furrowed into an expression of intense pain. “The Mask of Life is close. Let us keep moving.”
Sauti and Zekle ran to Lune’s side to held him up as the light faded from his Kanohi. Lune accepted Sauti’s hand and pulled himself up. He did not acknowledge Zekle’s assistance.
“Gora, get down here!” The command was more forceful than his normally were.
Gora was backing away slowly, her hand outstretched toward the door. She’d doubled the thickness of her barrier and kept growing new spikes into the lattice wherever she saw a gap. At Lune’s command, she stopped shaping the stone, swore under her breath, and turned to run to catch up with the others.
The landing was small, with barely enough space for all of them to fit. A bridge of black stone stretched out across the vast expanse to a raised dome of stone at the center of the plain. There was an archway in the side of the dome, and the Stairs seemed to continue down inside of it. The bridge itself was narrow and looked brittle but was wide enough for them to easily make it across if they walked single file. The volcanic plain itself broiled over fifty feet below them, flows of magma rolling slowly through channels in the still-solid stone floor.
Vaxter was looking down at his hands. “Fascinating.”
Lune turned to look at him. “Why did you do that?” he demanded. Sauti had never heard the Toa of Fire so angry.
“I was testing a hypothesis. Look.” He held out his hands. The creature he had shrunk crawled around across his palm, too small to make out any detail, buzzing quietly in distress at its new situation. With a start, Sauti realized he recognized the sound now that it was several octaves quieter.
“It’s…a protodite?”
That seemed impossible. Protodites were so small they could barely be seen without some form of magnification. They were swarming pests, often used for experimentation, not the massive apex predators that had just tried to kill them.
“It was mutated to be thousands of times larger than its natural state,” Vaxter explained. “I attempted to revert the mutation, to confirm my theory. It worked!”
“But what mutated them in the first place?” Zekle asked in a tone that suggested she did not wish to know the answer. She stood apart from the others, two steps up, and stared at the ground when she spoke.
“I have a suspicion.” Vaxter glanced across the bridge to the dome in the center of the plain. “They were made to be guardians. They were created by the beings that made this place, or maybe even the Mask itself, to protect it from invaders.”
“A Mask can’t do anything unless someone is wearing it,” Gora pointed out. “Are you saying someone is wearing the Mask of Life down there?”
“No ordinary Mask can use its power on its own,” Vaxter said. He looked at Lune as he spoke.
“This is no ordinary Mask,” Lune pointed out. “Stay on your guard.”
He turned and stepped out onto the bridge. Before he could take a second step, a sudden flash of light temporarily blinded Sauti and the crack of something breaking the sound barrier echoed across the open plain. When his vision cleared, Sauti saw a being standing in front of Lune, glad in green and yellow armor and holding a double-ended spear. It was nearly as tall as the two titans they had encountered back up on the island, and had a face that resembled the Kanohi Ruru, the Mask of Night Vision. Strangely, in place of its feet it had two sets of strange interlocking gears that almost seemed to flicker back and forth like they were a mirage. This being had seemingly slammed into Lune at high speed, because the Toa of Fire was trying and failing to pick himself off the Stairs next to Zekle, his Ignition Spear having been thrown off the side of the bridge to the plain below.
“I am Umbra,” the being spoke, its voice cold enough to turn the lava below to stone. “I guard the Mask of Life. You shall not pass.”
Before any of them had time to react, their spears had dropped to their feet and Sauti felt as if he had been caught in a landslide. Every part of him bruised as his legs buckled underneath him. Umbra was suddenly in an offensive stance, its spear pointed at all of them. It took Sauti a second to realize that Umbra had done all of this, faster than any of them could see.
“Turn back now or I will destroy you all,” Umbra declared.
“Alright, that’s it!” Gora cracked her knuckles as her Mask of Repulsion began to glow.
“Very well,” Umbra answered. “I hope it reassures you to know I take no pleasure in this.”
It shot forward again like a flash of light, but this time Gora was ready. Umbra snapped backwards at a speed so fast it yet again broke the sound barrier, its body tumbling back along the length of the bridge. Slamming her fists down toward the ground, Gora used her Kanohi to launch herself into the air out over the bridge, falling directly toward Umbra. As she did, the bridge seemed to come alive and wrap itself around the limp form of the guardian, holding it in place as Gora crashed into it.
“I have had—,” Gora yelled as she slammed her bare fist into Umbra’s face, “—the worst couple of days—” She brought her other fist down on Umbra. “—and I will not be stopped—” She lifted her fists up together, stones gathering around them to double the size of them. “—by some weirdo with gears for feet!”
Gora brought her fists down. Just before they hit Umbra, two bolts of light flew out of the pile of rubble holding it down. The stone shattered from around her hands, and she skidded back along the bridge. Umbra flashed for a second, momentarily becoming and amorphous blob of light, then re-solidified standing atop the rubble that had just held him.
At that point, the adrenaline in Sauti’s system overpowered the lethargy from being battered at the speed of light, and he jumped into action. He slammed his hands together and let loose a thin cone of deafening sound in the direction of Umbra. The guardian didn’t even look at him as it sidestepped the attack, immediately hurling two spinning disks of light at him from the center of his staff. Sauti felt them burn into his chest, sending him stumbling back toward the edge. He would have fallen, if Vaxter hadn’t reached out and grabbed his flailing arm at the last second.
Sauti stared daggers at Vaxter as he pulled him back from the edge, but Vaxter didn’t seem to care. “Whatever this Umbra is, I can’t mutate it. It moves too fast for us to hit it unless we get the jump on it. We need a new strategy.”
Sauti looked over at Lune, sprawled out on the Stairs. Zekle was kneeling over him, her Mask of Healing glowing as she hurriedly traced her fingers over his injuries. It was just him, Vaxter, and Gora right now.
“Can you grow anything down here?”
Vaxter glanced down at the volcanic plain below, a faint smile forming in the corner of his mouth. “Oh, I think I should be able to.”
“See if you can get enough to make an area too dense for him reform after he does that thing he did to get out from Gora’s rubble,” Sauti said, hoping his half-baked plan would work. “I’m going to help Gora.”
Vaxter nodded and turned to look over the edge as Sauti scooped up his Supersonic Spear from where it lay on the ground. He focused for a moment, taking a breath. Then he ran.
All Toa Hagah spears could be used to channel the Toa’s innate elemental powers. But each had an extra feature, typically one that required a lot of extra focus an energy to use but with powerful effects. Sauti’s allowed him to briefly travel the soundwaves he manipulated—to move at the speed of sound. He didn’t hear the boom as he broke the sound barrier; instead, he rode it forward, surfing along the front edge of it as he moved forward. His feet barely touched the bridge as he darted past Gora who seemed to move in slow motion as she propelled herself away from the bolts of light that Umbra was hurling her way. The sounds of the world around him were distorted and shattered around him as he crashed through them like walls of glass.
He reached Umbra in less than a second, only to see the being’s head turn to look at him with what looked almost like amusement on its face. Even faster than Sauti was moving, Umbra’s spear swung out and slammed into his shins, sending him falling head-over-heels and faceplanting on the bridge beyond the guardian. Sauti grunted in pain as the boom he had been riding crashed over him. His audio receptors were ringing, but he did his best to ignore that as he reached out and planted his hand on the bridge, then willed himself to see its past.
He was on the bridge, but the others were gone. The room was quiet except for the sizzling of the lava below, which was far more intense than it had been moments ago. Sauti found himself only a few feet above a rising lake of lava as Mount Valmai shook around him. Stalactites dislodged from the ceiling far above as the stone warmed and cracked. Sauti watched one massive piece, taller than he was, plummet toward the bridge. It hit a spot just to the right of the center and shattered into a thousand pieces that vanished into the lava below. Sauti heard hairline cracks forming in the bridge, still too subtle to be seen. Then lava exploded around him.
Sauti gasped as he tried to roll onto his back, his body bruised and battered. He looked up to see Gora carrying a slab of stone larger than she was like a shield, shouting herself hoarse as she charged Umbra as fast as she could. Sauti blinked. Umbra was behind her, raising its spear over her head.
Sauti snapped his fingers in rapid succession, then hurled the sound directly behind Umbra. The guardian spun around to try and find the source of the footsteps it heard that wasn’t there. Gora was skidding to a halt, already shifting her feet to pivot back to face Umbra when Sauti’s frantic waving caught her attention. He pointed to the spot in the bridge where invisible fractures remained from an ancient eruption long ago. Then he slammed his fist against the stone.
Despite everything that had occurred over the last day, every piece of trust that had been fractured, Gora did not hesitate. She hurled herself at the spot that Sauti had pointed to and brought her shield of stone down on it with everything she had. Sauti heard the cracks spreading across the bridge, the ancient damage exacerbated by Gora’s mighty blow. He hadn’t had time to check if Vaxter was ready—Umbra was already turned back toward them. It fired half a dozen disks of light at both, even as the bridge crumbled out from underneath them.
Three of the light disks found their mark in Sauti: one grazed his shoulder pauldron, leaving a two-inch-deep gash in the metal. Another ran along his leg, digging deep past the armor and sending jolts of pain up his entire body—if he survived the collapse he’d be in shock, sprawled helplessly on the ground for Umbra to finish off. The third flew toward his face, growing brighter and brighter until he could see nothing but its warm golden glow.
Then he was falling.
The hot air whipped past him. Bits of stone and dust crumbled around him, rolling over his body and wedging themselves in the nooks and crannies of his armor. In the distance he could faintly hear Gora screaming. His vision was still washed out from the light of the disk. Pain finally overwhelmed his other senses. He blacked out.
Chapter Six[]
Sauti was familiar with darkness. Most of his memories were dark, hidden in a vast and impenetrable expanse of nothingness. Assuming they were even there at all. He had never been sure about that, especially since his Mask of Psychometry had failed him in every attempt he’d made to learn more about his past.
His earliest memory was on the Trem Krom Penninsula. He had awoken in an unfamiliar forest in the dead of night, with only the stars to guide him. It had been cold and lightly snowing, as he later learned it often was at that altitude, up the mountains above the Acid Falls. He’d still been wearing his old armor, the grey with black accents, and still had his old Toa Tools, his twin sabers. They had been called Eighth Notes, one of the few memories that had stuck in his mind.
His first instinct upon realizing he had no memory had been to use his Mask on his own tools and armor. He had received no reading, no indication of history before that moment of waking. He had looked around, and found a small rock nestled in the roots of a nearby tree. He had touched it and focused.
It was daytime, and a Rock Raptor was clambering up the cliffside behind him to a cave. It wasn’t snowing.
It had been no fault of his Kanohi that he had gleaned nothing from his equipment. It was as if there was no history of him at all, as if he had just sprung into existence right then and there. The only evidence to the contrary had been a cruel scar running down the side of his neck, disappearing under his Kanohi. When he had touched it then, it had been soft and sore to the touch. A recent wound he had no memory of.
He had suspected, and still did from time to time, that maybe he had been climbing the mountains and had fallen and hit his head. That the head trauma had erased his memories of before. But even then, he had doubted it—the scar was not an open wound, it had begun to heal over already. If he had just hit his head then it should’ve been gushing vital fluids, and he likely would have bled out lying in the snow. Furthermore, the snowfall around him was uninterrupted: there was no evidence that he had impacted the ground and slid to his current position. Perhaps if he had fallen long enough ago…
He had pushed the thoughts from his mind. They had distracted him from the situation at hand, that he was lost in an unfamiliar forest high in the mountains with no idea where to go. Moving down the mountain had seemed like the most reasonable course of action at the time. Water tended to move downwards, and beings tended to congregate around water. So, he had begun to walk down the mountain in the dead of night.
It had taken him several hours to find any notable change in landscape. The forest had been dark and treacherous, as the snow and shadows had often obscured sudden drops far enough to severely injured, or possibly kill an unsuspecting traveler. His suspicions about having injured himself in a fall had seemed more likely the longer he had walked, but they had still failed to explain the healing scar.
He’d almost missed the fortress, tucked into a corner where two cliffs meet, protected at the back by an impenetrable cliff face nearly four hundred feet tall. He’d stopped peering over the many cliff edges he’d encountered but had glanced over this one on a whim. This time, he had seen lights flickered along the unnatural walls that surrounded the remote keep, as well as through windows in the stone and metal construction within.
It had taken another hour to find a way to descend, but finally he had dragged his aching body up the incline toward the dark metal doors that hung at the end of the only path he had seen in this place, a poorly cobbled road that wound up the side of the mountain like a drunken bog snake. His approach had been acknowledged by strange hissing sounds from atop the walls, and his hands had darted for his Eighth Notes on some forgotten instinct as adrenaline had begun to pump through him. He had known that sound, somehow, and it had filled him with dread.
For a moment he had considered disappearing into the night, leaving this place to whatever dark designs it held. But the night had been cold, and Sauti had been certain he would not survive in its embrace until morning. He had stepped forward to the gate and knocked, removing his hands from his weapons so he did not appear threatening to whatever being might answer. For a few moments his only company had been the wind as it whipped past him with a particular ferocity.
The doors had opened with a loud grinding sound, swinging out into the night like dark hands reaching out to grab him. Unnatural green light had fallen upon him, and he had held up his arm over his eyes to allow them a second to adjust. Even as his eyes had been blinded, he had begun to listen to the sounds coming from within: the mechanical hiss of steam from loose seams or open valves, the rhythmic dull thuds of pistons pumping somewhere deeper inside, and the clanking footsteps of creatures approaching.
He had lowered his arm to see two large creatures standing over him. They had been humanoid, like him, but taller and spindlier, with a thin body and disproportionately long limbs. They had been hunched so aggressively Sauti had thought for a moment they were even taller, but he had quickly realized that this was their natural posture. Spines had run down the length of their back, ending with a short and stubby tail that swayed side to side with every step. Their faces had resembled that of snakes, scaled and reptilian with a row of vicious teeth hanging so far past the lower jaw Sauti had almost thought they didn’t have one. The one on the left had been a rusted orange, the one on the right purple. Each had carried a spear, slightly different than the other.
Sauti had felt that same surge of adrenaline, that same instinct to grab his weapons in the presence of these creatures. A name had burst forth from the depths of his mind, unbidden. Rahkshi.
He suppressed his urges and spoke. “May I come in?”
The left creature’s snake-like face had suddenly split open, revealing it to be a metallic exoskeleton around the softer tissue within. A slug-like creature with a moist, segmented body and cruel face had hissed at him, hurling spittle into that snow around him that had immediately frozen into something dark and unpleasant looking. Then the face had closed, and the Rahskhi had snapped its head curtly to the side as if to say, “Follow us.”
The two Rahkshi had led him into the fortress, the doors closing behind him with finality. He’d been lead past numerous rooms filled with glass beakers and tubes, cages with what appeared to be live Rahi beasts inside, and strange and esoteric artifacts the meaning and purpose of which Sauti could only guess at. As they had gone, two more Rahkshi had formed up behind him, one green and the other white. He had been in the center of the square, surrounded. He had taken solace in the fact that they had seemed to be as unsettled by his presence as he had been of theirs.
The final hallway had opened into a large chamber that had to be near or under the cliffside he had first looked down on the fortress from, given how far he had been led into the fortress. The chamber had been cavernous, the ceiling absurdly high. There had been no lightstones, but the tubes of bubbling green liquid that had webbed across the walls at perfect ninety-degree angles had cast that same eerie green glow across the whole room. Three columns had lined a narrow walkway that ended in a flight of six steps up to a raised dais upon which a tall, imposing figure clad in black and bright green armor had sat in a massive yet utilitarian throne. The room had been vast, but empty, allowing the being in the throne to demand a being’s entire attention when one stood in her presence. Sauti had felt her gaze upon him as soon as he entered the room.
“What brings you here so boldly to my abode, Toa?”
Sauti remembered the first time he had heard the Makuta speak. She sounded like a massive insect made of glass, that had been crushed viciously underfoot by Mata Nui himself; a deep scraping of thousands of agonized pieces that no longer fit together.
“I…I’m afraid I don’t know,” he had answered. It had sounded pathetic as it echoed back to him from the most distant corners of the throne room.
“You don’t know?” There was no patience in her, Sauti would come to learn in time. He often thought he was lucky she had not thrown him back out into the cold that night.
“I don’t really know where I am,” he had continued. “I woke up several hours up the mountain. I don’t know how I got there, or what I was doing.”
The Makuta’s eyes had narrowed into tiny red slits. “You do not know how you came to be in my mountains?”
Her gaze had crashed into him like an avalanche, but he had pushed onward. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know anything about myself. I woke up with no memory of anything before tonight.”
That had piqued her interest, though at the time he had just thought she had taken it to mean he wasn’t a threat. The rear two Rahkshi had backed off and left, while the two that had led him here stepped forward to flank the stairs.
“Fascinating. Do you remember you name?”
“Sauti.” It had come to him, unbidden, like the name for her monstrous followers.
“Do you know what a Toa is, Sauti?”
He had hesitated but had quickly realized he knew the answer to this as well. “It means ‘hero.’ Toa are protectors and peacekeepers.” He had paused for a moment, and then had added, “I am a Toa, myself. A Toa of Sonics.”
The brow of her Kanohi Felnas, Great Mask of Disruption, had lifted slightly. It was then that he had realized that something about him had intrigued her.
“It is not every day a Toa walks into my home, Sauti. My work is not benefited by interruptions.”
He had dipped his head respectfully. “My apologies.”
“Do not bother with those. I suspect you might be worth my time after all.”
He had not been sure what to make of that.
“If I may, what is your name?”
“My name is Gorast. I am the Makuta of the Tren Krom Peninsula, the Mistress of the Acid Falls, and Conqueror of the Visorak Horde. I watch over those that live here and ensure all transpires as it should.”
Sauti had felt the conflicting urges to bow his head in respect, and to turn and flee this place as fast as he could. He had taken a second to settle on a response.
“It is an honor to meet you then.”
“What is that on your neck, Toa?”
Sauti had reached up to rub the injury again. “It is a fresh scar, a wound that must have recently healed. I have no memory of it.”
“Come closer so I may look at it.”
Sauti had obliged, stepped up a few steps so that he was only a few feet away from the Makuta. He’d turned his head to the side and pulled his Kanohi as far as he could from his face without removing it to reveal as much as he could. The Makuta had leaned forward to look at it with unabashed eagerness. After a moment she had spoken again.
“There is an ability my kind possess, to peer into the minds of others.” She had spoken slowly, as if to let the shards of glass sink deep into the words as they left her mouth. “I may be able to use it to look into yours and see what it is your mind has kept hidden from you.”
The unease Sauti had felt the entire time he was here had disappeared in a flash at the faint glimmer of hope that he might have been able to recover his lost memory.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
The Makuta had stared into him then, and as her eyes met his he felt a presence on his mind, a weight that felt as if his psyche were being crushed. Ideas and words had flitted through his mind without rhyme or reason, his internal monologue obliterated by the immense presence of the Makuta within his head. Rational thought had abandoned him to die in the snow like his memories had but hours before.
And then she had gone, as quickly as she had entered. Sauti found he had slumped to the ground, kneeling, holding himself up with outstretched hands. His fingers had tried and failed to dig into the solid stone that made up the dais upon which the Makuta had sat.
“Did…did you find…anything?”
The Makuta had looked down at him with her cold red eyes. He had not been able to tell what she was thinking, but even though she had left his mind he almost would have sworn she was still there, seeing him more clearly than he ever would.
“I’m afraid not.” The words had been colder than even the frigid winds outside.
“Oh.” He’d barely kept himself from collapsing in front of her.
She had stared at him in silence for a minute more. He hadn’t moved, just sat there in front of her. He hadn’t been sure if he’d been awaiting some verdict or merely been too weak to stand. She had been content to leave him there, for a time.
At last, she had spoken again.
“Would you be interested in a job?”
He was abruptly yanked back to consciousness by something crashing into his torso, hard. He heard his already battered armor and ribs cracking, heard the wheeze that escaped him in exquisite detail. But for a moment he felt his momentum shift, and he was no longer falling. The change in direction lasted for only a few seconds before he felt himself slow, and then fall again.
The impact did not hurt as much as he thought it would, though he suspected that was because most everything that could be so easily broken already was. The sound of pieces of the bridge crashing to the ground sounded strangely distant, however. Like they were far below him.
As his vision returned, Sauti reached back and slowly managed to push himself up to a sitting position. He was on the far side of what was once a bridge, leaning against the stone dome. The bridge was gone entirely, now in pieces scattered across the volcanic plane below. Somehow, he’d been launched up here to this side, instead of plummeting to what would have likely been his death. On the far side, standing on the edge of ledge overlooking the plain, was Vaxter, arms outstretched as he stared down at the plain below with unshakable intensity. Wincing with every movement, Sauti dragged his mostly limp and broken body the few feet forward to look over the edge for himself.
Down below, a tropical forest had sprouted from the plain. Light brown trees with bright green branches draped with thick, hairy vines that disappeared down into lush undergrowth. Ferns and tall grass covered the dark plain, some still rustling from the debris that had just fallen into their midst. At the center of the forest Sauti heard a thrashing sound, like something heavy jostling the heavy fines and tree trunks. He looked and saw a figure in dark green and yellow armor, its strange gear-feet up in the air, wrapped by dozens of vines being pulled deeper into the forest. As Sauti watched, the plant life continued to grow, the trees getting taller and the vines growing longer to completely envelop the guardian.
Sauti’s sigh of relief was cut short when he noticed another figure down on the volcanic plain: one clad in battered gold and brown armor, half-buried in pieces of the bridge. Gora had two gaping wounds in her torso, one cutting halfway through her above her waist, and the other having completely severed her left shoulder from the rest of her body. Black burn marks covered the rest of her body, and her Fissure Spear lay in half a dozen pieces around her. As he saw her, the last of the light faded from her Mask of Repulsion.
A choked sound somewhere between a sob and a gasp escaped Sauti as he stared down at his sister’s broken body. Even through the ringing in his audio receptors and Umbra’s thrashing down below, he was certain he could hear nothing from her. No rasping breath, no faintly pulsing heartlight. She was already gone.
Sauti’s hand went to his chest, where the impact had driven him back up to safety. Gora had used her Kanohi to throw him away, to push him back up so he wouldn’t fall. But the laws of physics demand an equal and opposite reaction—in saving him she had driven herself down into the volcanic plain. Sauti knew that she almost certainly wouldn’t had survived the wounds from Umbra’s light disks. That the force of impact would’ve made for a quicker death. But the guilt was already rushing in to join his grief. He had no strength; he collapsed on the edge of the ledge, his arm dangling over the edge as if he were reaching out for Gora to pull her back up to safety.
The forest Vaxter had created was suddenly backlit by a brilliant golden light as Umbra grew tired of attempting to brute force its way out of its bindings. Like a bolt of lightning, it shot up and out of the trees, causing several of them to crack in two and tumble into the undergrowth. Sauti had just enough time to be hit by the crushing realization that his plan had completely and utterly failed before the streak of light froze in place.
He blinked. His eyes were not deceiving him, Umbra had been stalled in place as a beam of light. There was no definition to its shape, except for the sharp tip of a spear starting to materialize mere inches from Vaxter’s throat. But the beam of light was frozen, like sunlight peeking through the canopy of a tall and dense jungle.
From behind Vaxter, Sauti heard limping footsteps. Lune emerged, holding out one hand toward the light-beam-that-was-Umbra and grasping his abdomen with his other. His breathing was slow, steady, and focused, even as his heartlight pulsed faster than Sauti had ever heard it pulse before. The light began to shift and morph, though it seemed to almost strain against the invisible force that manipulated it. But its resistance was futile, as Umbra was slowly forced back into its physical form. The moment before the light faded entirely, before the light became wholly physical, Lune rapidly twisted his wrist. Umbra’s neck snapped with a crunch like a fish being slapped against the ground. Its body solidified, then dropped like a weighted sack into the newly grown forest below.
Lune’s shoulder’s sagged and he slumped to the side. Zekle appeared beside him, catching him even as her Kanohi began to glow, filling Lune’s body with healing light. Vaxter stared at Lune, not speaking, the first time Sauti had ever heard him at a loss for words. But Sauti’s gaze was fixed on Gora’s body, as the unchecked growth of the plants around her slowly subsumed her into the volcanic earth.
Vaxter grew the vines long enough to string them across the gap, forming a loosely woven bridge of plant life to allow the others to cross. Zekle immediately ran over to where Sauti lay by the edge and began to use her Kanohi, healing his numerous wounds one by one as best she could. Even with her assistance he knew he would take weeks to heal completely, and he wasn’t sure how much she would be able to fix now. She’d already spent so much energy on Lune, Sauti doubted she’d be able to push through and heal him anywhere close to fully. As she rolled him onto his back however, she let out a gasp as she stared down at him.
“Wha—” He was interrupted by a violent cough. “What is it?”
“Sauti…your Mask…” Zekle’s voice was quiet.
Sauti reached up to feel his Mask of Psychometry against his face. Something felt off, like it wasn’t lining up right, wasn’t where it should be. Then his fingers slipped into the crack, at least two inches across and splitting off into several smaller branches. It stretched from a section of his right cheek that was utterly gone, likely disintegrated by the impact of the light disk, to just above his left eye. As he realized this, he noticed that the constant source of power that he’d become so accustomed to was fading. His Kanohi was broken—quite possibly beyond repair.
“Damn,” was all he managed to get out as the strength of his Mask left him. He went limp on the ground.
Zekle gasped and reached out toward his face, her mask starting to glow once more, but Vaxter pushed passed her. “There’s no time, let me.”
Sauti had no energy to protest as he felt Vaxter’s cold hands press against his face—his real face, not his Kanohi, which Vaxter pried off and tossed carelessly into Zekle’s lap. Then Vaxter’s Kanohi began to glow and Sauti felt something changing. He couldn’t place what, but he felt the shift in power within him. His audio receptors buzzed with energy. His heartlight skipped a beat, and then another, and then began to pulse regularly as he felt strength return to his body.
With a gasp, Sauti sat up. His body still ached from his injuries, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to stand, but he was no longer completely drained and exhausted. He immediately turned to look at Vaxter, his eyes narrowing.
“What did you do to me?”
Vaxter met his gaze, his expression the same as it had been the night before. “We need to you able to move, to be something other than dead weight. So, I altered your physiology so you didn’t require an Kanohi to survive.”
Sauti gaped. Every Toa and Matoran needed a Kanohi. Even powerless ones contained a necessary spark of energy to keep them alive, to allow a Toa to access their innate powers of the elements. Vaxter had fundamentally altered him into something different.
When his fist crashed into Vaxter’s emotionless face, the crack of metal against metal was the most satisfying sound that Sauti could ever recall hearing. Vaxter reeled backwards, attempting to stand so he didn’t simply collapse backwards from his stance squatting next to Sauti, but he ended up stumbling back onto his arms and legs and skittering away as Sauti rose from the ground. Sauti’s legs ached so much he knew he shouldn’t be standing on them, that this might make the damage even worse and thus harder for Zekle to fix. But he didn’t care. He stood until he towered over the bent-backward Vaxter, who awkwardly scrambled to try and get away.
“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!” Sauti could feel the vibrations of his voice as he shouted, not worrying about how loud he might be for the first time in his life, and he knew that whatever Vaxter had done, he had not been able to rob Sauti of his power. Instead, he felt the sound around him even more acutely than before, felt it resonate within his body, filling him with more strength than a Kanohi ever had. The rocks and pebbles around him began to rattle against the ground. Vaxter reached back for his Scything Spear, hurrying to unstrap it from his back. Sauti reached out and grabbed the sound of it sliding out of its sheath and shook it violently, causing the spear to vibrate out of Vaxter’s hand and several feel behind him, its curved tip catching it before it could plummet to the volcanic plain below.
“WE ARE NOT YOUR PLAYTHINGS!” His voice was louder than naturally possible as he amplified it tenfold. Lune and Zekle winced and covered their ears at the sound. Sauti could hear the growing ringing in his audio receptors, but he ignored it. He focused the sound of his voice on Vaxter, repeating the words around him and modulating frequencies, looking for just the right one. Vaxter’s armor began to vibrate as he grew closer, and closer…
“Sauti.”
Lune’s voice was close, close enough to cut through the sonic maelstrom Sauti had summoned around him. He felt a hand on his shoulder, gentle and not forceful. The ringing became overpowering, and he winced. The energy around him released in a single burst, a descending scale that didn’t seem to end so much as slowly fade out into nothingness.
Lune calmly looked him in the eyes. “I understand your anger but now is not the time, not when we are so close.”
Sauti glanced back at Vaxter, who was reaching for his spear as he pulled himself up to his feet. There was no regret in him, nor was there any trace of the fear that had sprawled across his face just moments before. He knew Sauti wouldn’t lash out again, not now. Not when they were so close to their goal. Not when Vaxter could break what little trust was left in their team with just a handful of words.
From behind Lune, Zekle was staring at Vaxter, as if she were starting to put the pieces together for herself. Sauti hoped she did, so that Vaxter’s action might be discovered having to drag Sauti down with him. Sauti felt his legs grow weak underneath him and began to fall. Lune caught him and carefully deposited him against the wall of the dome once more.
“Zekle, see what more you can do for him here. We need to get moving as soon as we can.”
Zekle shook herself out of her thoughts and returned to Sauti’s side. Lune nodded approvingly and turned back toward the archway that would allow them to enter the dome, and presumably the Chamber of Life within, but Vaxter stepped in front of him, hand outstretched.
“And while Zekle is doing that, I think you owe the rest of us an explanation, Toa of Light.”
Chapter Seven[]
For the first time Sauti could remember, Lune relaxed. His breathing loosened, and Sauti could hear the muscles in his body untense like a weight was lifting off an old and rusted piece of metal. The constant image of control the team’s leader had always maintained completely collapsed in seconds. As it did, the air around his body began to shimmer like a heat mirage, and the colors of Lune’s armor began to shift. Red faded to white, and the golden accents of his Hagah armor softened to a lighter, more yellowish gold. While his silhouette remained the same, it was as if a different being now stood in front of them.
“I am sorry for my deception,” Lune began. It was uncanny to hear his voice with his new appearance. “It is not safe for someone like me to be in this world, especially so close to those that would go to great lengths to keep me from ever coming to be.”
“What do you mean?” Zekle pressed. “How is it not safe?”
“How many Av-Matoran have you met? How many Toa of Light?”
The answer was none. They had disappeared from their homelands centuries ago, and no one knew where they had gone.
“The Great Spirit himself scattered my people to the winds, wiped the memories of the entire universe of what he had done. I did not even know what I was until the Makuta found me and showed me my potential.
“She had borrowed a powerful artifact from the fortress on Destral, one the Brotherhood had locked away so that it could not be used against them. She used it to transform me into a Toa, because ancient prophecies spoke of a Toa of Light that would defeat the Makuta. That is why she told me her plans and sent us on this mission. It is my Destiny to recover the Mask of Life, to stop Makuta Teridax.”
Lune’s voice swelled with emotion as he spoke. He looked at each of them one by one, pleading with his eyes that they accept him and this strange new truth.
“But you appeared as a Toa of Fire,” Vaxter questioned. “How is it that you were able to control fire as if you were one?”
Lune gestured down into the forest below. “My Ignition Spear had a rare fire gem at its center, recovered from the heart of a fallen star. It allowed me to wield the element of fire as if it were my own. As for my appearance, even Av-Matoran possess enough control over light to change what color their armor appears to be. It is mostly subconscious but can often require extra focus when in the presence of those with heightened senses.”
No one spoke for a moment. Zekle continued to use her Kanohi to heal Sauti’s injuries. He could feel the pain subsiding, but Zekle’s head kept dipping and then snapping back up suddenly. She was very close to being spent, at which point they would need to move forward regardless of how either of them felt.
He couldn’t blame Lune; he had also lied about where he had come from. And yet he still felt the fresh sting of betrayal—which was absurd because he had known that everything he had experienced with this team had been a lie. He had told that lie. But apparently, he hadn’t been the only one.
He had to catch Zekle before she passed out across his legs, the light of her mask sputtering weakly. “That’s enough,” he said gruffly.
Slowly, he pulled himself up to his feet, using the stone at his back to steady himself. Sharp pain shot up his legs, but he did his best to ignore it. He looked around and took stock of what remained of their group. Erde and Gora were dead. All their weapons, except for Zekle’s Capacitor Spear and Vaxter’s Scything Spear, had been lost or broken, and he had lost his Kanohi. All four of them were beaten and exhausted. Sauti’s gaze fell on Lune, whose grim expression indicated that he was coming to the same conclusion. They were not prepared for whatever was to come next.
If only they had a choice, maybe that realization would have made a difference.
“Let us go,” Lune said quietly.
Sauti paused to scoop up the cracked and powerless Mask of Psychometry he had worn for as long as he could remember. He looked into its vacant eye sockets, wondering why it had never been able to tell him what he truly wanted to know. Then he shook himself and hooked the mask onto his back where his Supersonic spear once sat. He paused once more at the edge, looking down into the forest that was already beginning to wilt in the absence of sunlight or Vaxter’s powers. He could still see specks of brown armor in the tall grass, exactly where she’d been the last time he had looked. Unmoving. Dead. It was different, he realized, when there was a body left to see. Erde had been out of sight and out of mind. You could almost trick yourself into thinking that he’d just stepped away for a moment. But a body was irrefutable proof that someone was gone.
As he turned and followed the others into the archway that lead to the final stretch of steps, he caught himself thinking the horrible, disgusting thought that maybe Gora had been the lucky one, spared of whatever horrors might come next.
The last seventy-seven steps were a claustrophobic spiral that circled around the edges of the dome and led deep below the volcanic plain outside. They were dimly lit and uncomfortably hot, but after a few minutes of descent they opened into a small square chamber at the center of the spiral. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of the same dark volcanic stone as up above, which made the room feel smaller and more oppressive. The only source of light was the lava that slowly drippled out of cracks in the walls and ceilings, pooling into a burbling channel that ran around the edges of the room. The last seven steps formed a small bridge that crossed this molten moat, allowing access to the circular floor that dominated the center of the room.
There were no features in this room, no pedestals to hold a Kanohi or barriers to keep intruders away. Instead, a single figure in black and silver armor stood in the center of the room, waiting for them. Its armor was like theirs—the metallic accents, the shape of the plating. But its face was unfamiliar, a Kanohi made of what looked like solid gold, that glowed so bright you could see the glowing haze around it. Sauti swore he could see the shape of a humanoid figure with its legs spread wide and arms outstretched at the center of the intricate carvings that covered its surface. The air within the room buzzed with power, and the frequency of it harmonized with the residual ringing in Sauti’s audio receptors.
The Mask of Life.
Sauti understood then, the weight of what they were doing. He hadn’t been able to conceive of what it was they had come to accomplish until he saw the Mask for himself. It was beyond anything he had ever encountered. And it certainly could not fall into the hands of someone with as monstrous designs as Makuta Teridax.
The figure wearing the Mask of Life spoke. “None may take the Mask of Life from this place. Leave now or die.”
Sauti froze at the base of the steps. He knew the voice with which the figure spoke, and he knew it well.
It was the voice of Erde.
Sauti glanced back over the body below the Mask, the one he mostly overlooked to observe the Mask itself. It was unmistakably Erde’s body, the body that had been dissolved before their eyes in the Chamber of Death.
“By the Great Spirit, Erde!” Zekle had limped down the stairs with Vaxter’s assistance, but she pulled herself away from him now to stumble forward. “You were...I killed…you’re alive!”
Erde looked over at her, the Mask of Life not emoting as Kanohi normally did. Sauti did not know if that meant it was as stoic as the Mask appeared, or if it were simply incapable of being warped by something so insignificant as emotion.
“Zekle, I don’t think that’s Erde…” Vaxter called after her, slowly reaching for his Scything Spear.
“Leave now or die.” Erde repeated in his distinct bass tone. But Vaxter was right, there was something off about it. The cadence was stilted, the tone lacked the passion that Erde had filled his every word with.
“No!” Lune called, pushing past Zekle to the front. “It is my Destiny to claim the Mask of Life, for the sake of the universe itself!”
The being that was not Erde pulled their Pressure Spear from their back and swung it in a wide arc so that the side of the spear tip crashed into Lune’s head. He went flying to the side, tumbling across the floor an almost into the lava channel. ‘Erde’ dropped into a defensive stance and stared at the rest of them with the same static expression.
“It is no one’s Destiny to take the Mask of Life.”
Sauti and Vaxter exchanged glances as Lune peeled himself off the floor. They both knew the four of them were too tired to take on this being directly. If this being had the full power of Erde, fresh and not beaten down by a two-day trek down the Stairs, they would be pulverized. They were going to need to think creatively.
Sauti limped forward so he was next to Zekle. She was murmuring quietly to herself as she slowly shook her head and backed away from ‘Erde.’
“Erde… Erde I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Zekle, we need you,” he growled in her ear. “Snap out of it.”
‘Erde’ knelt, pressing their palms to the floor. The whole room began to shake, growing in violent intensity as ‘Erde’s’ fingers dug into the stone itself.
“I gave you ample warning,” ‘Erde’ said. “Prepare to die.”
In life, Erde had uses his seismic powers very infrequently, believing them to be too innately destructive to be of use to a Toa. When he had used them, he had conjured small quakes, as localized as he could make them, to not risk destroying anything more than he needed to. Whoever or whatever now wielded Erde’s power had no such compunctions. They were at the heart of a volcano on an island alone in a vast sea. Matoran and Rahi lived here, it was covered with dense and beautiful forests. All that would die if ‘Erde’ continued.
“Stop him!” Lune ordered as he charged ‘Erde.’
Lune held out his hand, and the light within the room seemed to dim as he drew it toward himself. A glowing shape manifested in his hand; a spear made of solid light. He pulled back his arm and hurled it at ‘Erde.’ The point pierced through ‘Erde’s’ upper arm, poking out the other side and dripping with vital fluids. ‘Erde’ did not shout in pain or even flinch. They lifted their uninjured hand from the ground, causing the quake to begin to settle and stop, and grabbed the spear of light. Without hesitation they ripped it out of their arm, causing it to dissipate back into the ambience. Sauti watched as golden energy stitched the hole the spear left behind shut completely, as if there had been no injury.
“I have to go.” The words tumbled out of Zekle’s mouth so fast Sauti could barely process them before she turned and limped for the Stairs, gripping her Capacitor Spear close. She did not look back.
“Zekle!” he called before a chunk of rock from the ceiling, dislodged by the brief quake, slammed into his shoulder, and knocked him to the ground.
“I’ll get her,” Vaxter grunted, and went charging up the stairs after Zekle.
“NO—”
Suati was cut off by a cold, dead hand grabbing him by the leg. His exposed face was dragged across the rough stone, hundreds of tiny sharp bits stabbing into his cheek. Then he was lifted off the ground and swung through the air. The wall rushed by, then the ceiling, then the wall again, and then the ground came up to meet him.
Sauti blacked out for a second.
A moment later he was back, certain that most of the wounds that Zekle had just healed had been remade. Pain shot across his body like he had been plunged into icy water filled with small, carnivorous fish. He heard sounds of fighting above and behind him, the grunts and impacts forming an irregular rhythm. He rolled over onto his back to see Lune driving another spear of light toward ‘Erde’s’ chest. ‘Erde’ caught it with their own spear, driving it down into the floor below before driving their elbow up into Lune’s chin. Lune stumbled backward, the spear sputtering out of existence like the one before.
“We do not need to—,” Lune started to say, even as ‘Erde’ braced their spear to their side and began to charge. Sauti reached out, grabbing the last of Lune’s words. He stretched the waves, made them tall and fast. Made them loud.
“—DO THIS.”
The words hit ‘Erde’ with incredible force, hurling them across the room and into the wall. The stone cracked and caved backwards, already weakened by the earthquake. In several places more lava squeezed out with pops and hisses, splattering into the channel and even onto the floor beyond it. ‘Erde’ disappeared into the wall as it collapsed over them.
Lune reached out a hand to help as Sauti tried pull himself up for what felt like the hundredth time today. When he let go, a shape began to form in Sauti’s hands: a long, thin weapon made of solid brilliance, light he could feel and touch, in the shape of his Supersonic Spear. As Sauti admired the weapon, Lune conjured a replica of his own lost Ignition Spear, which cast a golden glow over his Kanohi Elda. With his white armor bathed in that glow, he looked almost angelic.
“You go right, I will go left,” Lune commanded softly.
They approached quietly, weapons at the ready. The lava channel flowed slowly between them and the collapse, bits of stone still slowly sinking below the surface. From the other side, beneath the rubble, Sauti heard an uneven, almost panicked gasping for breath. He used a miniscule amount of his power to send clicking sounds into the rubble, listening as they returned to him. He could hear ‘Erde’ below the rocks, lying rigid and frozen beneath the stone.
“Can you hear me?” he asked, throwing his voice into the space where ‘Erde’ was trapped.
“What is happening?” ‘Erde’ asked. It was undeniably Erde’s voice, though a panic was settling in, as it had up the Stairs when their fears had been made manifest.
“That Toa whose body you are wearing,” Sauti realized, “he had a secret. We’d known him for over a hundred years, and none of us knew he was terrified of being buried alive. You got his voice, his powers, and his strength, you must have gotten that fear as well.”
Even Erde’s deepest shame had a purpose. Sauti knew Erde would have found peace in this revelation, and so he did as well.
“This feeling…Fear, you called it. I do not care for it.”
“Fear isn’t supposed to be pleasant.”
“Can you…can you make it stop? I do not wish to feel this way.”
Sauti didn’t answer immediately. When he did, he spoke slowly and precisely.
“You’re the Mask of Life, aren’t you? Or something it made to protect it?”
“Yes.”
“That feeling you’re feeling right now? It’s meant to protect life, too. To protect us from danger, to let us know when we’re close to death. It’s a fear of death that shows us what it means to be alive.”
The Mask of Life did not move or speak in response. Sauti wondered for a moment if their body had succumbed to their wounds.
“This one that I have become, this Erde,” the Mask said at last, “he had felt a great betrayal. He was angry at many things. Is that also what it is to be alive?”
Sauti stared down at the floor. He reached up and touched his maskless face, the sensation of it still deeply strange to him. “I wouldn’t have said it was before today, but maybe it is.”
The Mask seemed to ponder this for a moment. “Then I do not think I wish to be alive. It is fraught with unpleasant feelings.”
Sauti didn’t know what to say to that. Beside him, Lune spoke up. Sauti didn’t know how much he had gleaned from the one side of the conversation he could hear.
“We need to get the Mask. Is he subdued?”
Sauti nodded.
Lune leveled his spear of light at the rubble. The tip flashed too bright for Sauti to look at, and a bolt of light blasted the stone into puffs of dust. The rubble around the fresh hole cracked and tumbled down into the lava. Even after the bolt dissipated, a faint glow remained through the dust. The Mask of Life. With his free hand, Lune reached out and flexed his fingers. A replica of his hand, also made of solid light, floated across the lava channel and grasped the Mask. As the hand began to pull back, the Mask of Life began to thrash around under the stone.
“NO!” The Mask howled. “You cannot take the Mask from this place! You will bring ruin on the world!”
“I am sorry,” Lune told the Mask. “But we have come too far and lost too much. We must take it.”
The room began to shake again as the Mask began to tap into Erde’s seismic power once more. Dust began to fall from the ceiling, the floor began to shake. Sauti braced himself for the coming quake, but Lune was too quick. The hand of light wedged its fingers under the mask and ripped it off ‘Erde’s’ face. The room became still. Sauti watched ‘Erde’s’ head loll to the side, hitting against the stone, the life completely gone from them.
Sauti exhaled slowly, trying to let himself relax. His body was a knot of tension, and every bit he released allowed a new wave of pain to overwhelm him. He was about to turn to Lune and suggest they go find the others when a dry, lifeless voice spoke behind him.
“It was all a lie,” Erde’s corpse wheezed at him in Erde’s voice. “We were not meant for this.”
“Erde?” Sauti gasped, stepping back to the edge of the channel. “Is that you?”
The corpse’s head remained lolled to the side and didn’t move except for its mouth as it continued speaking. It spoke with what could only be described as desperation. “The Great Beings are not gods. The Mask of Life is not our salvation.”
Sauti felt the weight of his brother’s death pushing down on him once more. This was not his brother, miraculously back from the dead. His heartlight did not stir, he did not breath except when he spoke. At best, some residual energy from the Mask of Life was lingering in his brain, causing dead neural pathways to fire off at random. As he spoke his words became more slurred and less coherent.
“We are his bait. Do not trust her.”
His speech became wholly incomprehensible, and then faded away all together. Sauti hung his head in mourning for the brother he had lost, allowing himself a moment before turning away. When he looked at Lune, however, Sauti immediately recognized that something else was wrong. The Toa of Light was staring down at the Mask of Life in his hands. Sauti realized that Lune hadn’t moved or said anything since he got the Mask.
“Lune?” he asked, cautiously. “Are you alright?”
“It is done,” Lune spoke, though his words felt perfunctory, acknowledging Sauti though his thoughts were elsewhere.
“Yes, we have the Mask, but we really should get out of here before something else shows up to keep us here.”
“My Destiny is complete.”
“Lune, we need to go. I’m worried about what Vaxter’s doing to Zekle.”
Lune blinked, snapping out of whatever thoughts had been dominating his attention. “Yes, you’re right. Let’s go.”
Sauti watched Lune turn and march toward the Stairs, Mask of Life in hand. The Toa of Light still seemed distracted, and Sauti worried that Lune might not be entirely himself.
Chapter Eight[]
Vaxter was waiting for them on the ledge outside the Dome, looking out over the wilted forest he had created earlier. The leaves had all shriveled, and the heat of the vast magma chamber had caused the dried and brittle plant matter to begin to burn. The light of the flames silhouetted Vaxter against the thick wall of smoke rising from below.
“I was wondering how long it was going to take you to finish up,” Vaxter said as they stepped off the top of the Stairs and onto the ledge.
Sauti took a weak step forward, the exertion of climbing the Stairs having proved a painful reminder of how beaten and battered he was. “Where is she? What did you do to her?”
Vaxter looked him dead in the eyes. “What I had to for the good of the mission.”
The smoke behind him split as a large creature blasted through it, careening down at Lune and Sauti. They both dove to the side, and the shape disappeared into the Stairs. Sauti could hear a loud buzzing reverberate through the stone, and he wondered if Vaxter had helped the massive protodites from the previous chamber break through Gora’s barrier. The creature burst out of the archway and dove at Lune, a flash of dark blue and fluttering wings as it landed on top of him. Sauti heard metal slicing down against armor and stone as Lune struggled underneath this insectoid creature, hampered by the fact that he was still firmly grasping the Mask of Life in one hand.
Sauti slammed his fist against the stone, powering through the pain to make the sound as shrill as possible and hurling it at the massive insect. It buckled over Lune for a moment, allowing the Toa of Light to roll out from under it even as it took him dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. The insect hissed and whipped its head around to look at Sauti. Sauti felt a wave of nausea wash over him as he gazed upon the face of the beast.
He was looking at the distorted face of Zekle.
The mouth of her Mask of Healing had been split into four mandibles that clicked together at high speed. Her eyes were swollen, black, and bulbous. Her torso was stretched, with two sets of thin wings jutting out from her back. Her Capacitor Spear must have been melded into her forearms because the front pair of her three sets of legs ended in familiar metal points that crackled with electricity.
Zekle hissed at him, but immediately spun back around to lunge at Lune, who had just managed to get himself up to a kneeling position only to abandon it by rolling to the side once more. He sent two bolts of light flying in her direction, one searing into her side while the other went wide and vanished into the smoke. Zekle hissed and dove over the edge.
“Do you like my Lightning Bug?” Vaxter asked dispassionately from where he stood. “So far, I’m disappointed. I made her to get me the Mask of Life, but she’s taking longer than I would’ve liked. I may need to make a few more adjustments.”
Sauti grunted and hurled himself at Vaxter, but something crashed into the back of his legs and caused him to fall on his back. Vaxter held his hand outstretched as his Scything Spear returned to him, then leaned down over Sauti.
“Why?” Suati grunted. “We got the Mask; we can take it back to the Makuta. Why attack us?”
Off to the side, out of Sauti’s range of view, he could hear Lune scrambling about the ledge as Zekle zipped through the air. The air was growing thick with the smell of ozone.
“Sauti.” Vaxter spoke the name with disdain, like the Makuta did when they failed to complete her missions. “You and I both know Lune is compromised, has been almost this entire time. And you, well, you know what you know. I am fully aware that you have no intention of returning the Mask of Life to the Makuta. I’m taking matters into my own hands.”
Sauti reached up and linked his hands behind Vaxter’s neck, then yanked him downwards. He slammed his own forehead into Vaxter’s face with as much force as he could muster. Vaxter grunted in pain, his Scything Spear dropping to the ground between them.
As Vaxter reached for the spear, Sauti swung his legs around and into Vaxter’s. Vaxter’s grab fell just short of the spear as he faceplanted onto the ground. Sauti used the opening to reach out and try to grab it for himself, only for Vaxter’s elbow to slam into his face with a crunch. Vaxter grasped the spear and swung it wildly, the curved blade catching and digging into Sauti’s side. Sauti shouted in pain, then clapped his hands over Vaxter’s audio receptors, amplifying the sound of the impact tenfold. Vaxter reeled back in pain as vital liquids began to leak out of the shattered receptors.
Beyond Vaxter, Sauti could see Lune had conjured a large round shield of light over his head. Zekle scraped her blade-like forelegs against the shield, lightning arcing off it as she tried to dig through to get to the Mask in his hands. Lune was grimacing from the effort—he was tired and wouldn’t last much longer. Vaxter was weakly rising to his feet in front of Sauti. Without his sense of hearing, he wobbled where he stood, using his spear to stabilize himself. He looked down at Sauti, his Mask of Mutation twisted into a pained grimace. But his eyes remained cool and collected. There was no regret in the being that stood before Sauti.
“I will not mourn any of you,” Vaxter said. “You will remain down here, reduced to horrible monsters, as a warning for Teridax when he comes. And with the power of the Mask, Gorast and I will destroy him.”
Vaxter’s voice cracked as he spoke the name ‘Teridax.’ It was a single shrill note, but it was enough. Sauti caught it and amplified it into a quiet hum, one that he then let loose out into the room. Vaxter limped closer, his grip on his Scything Spear tightening as his Mask of Mutation began to glow. Sauti squeezed his eyes shut, his gaze focused on the humming. He’d only heard a few, angry hisses from Zekle, but he’d listened to the calls of enough insectoid Rahi to make some educated guesses about what other sounds she might make or respond to. The hum he had warped Vaxter’s words into had been approximated from the wasp-like Nui-Kopen, aggressive bugs that lived in hives. While it was not a language that could be translated into words, the gist of the message was simple: a member of the swarm is in danger.
He was beginning to feel his gut twist and tighten, the first steps of whatever Vaxter planned to do to him, when the buzzing grew rapidly louder. A sudden zap was followed by a pained scream. Sauti opened his eyes to see Zekle driving one of her blade-like forelegs into the side of Vaxter’s neck, and then another into his side. The Scything Spear clattered to the ground as she lifted him into the air, the smell of his sizzling body already growing strong enough to cut through the sulfur and ozone that already filled the air.
For a moment, as Vaxter was shouting incoherently at Zekle to let him go and take the Mask of Life, Sauti heard her hiss back at him. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it was the least aggressive noise he had heard her make since Vaxter had turned her into this creature. He almost could’ve sworn he saw her warped Kanohi shift its expression for a moment into something more like the Toa she once was. It looked to him like an expression of relief. Then she dove over the edge into the smoke and the burning plant life below, taking care to crash Vaxter against the edge so that the last thing Sauti saw of him were his legs snapping backwards at an angle they should not have been capable of achieving. Vaxter’s screams went silent.
Sauti lay there for a moment, alone in the smoke and ash at the heart of Mount Valmai. Below him in the flames and rock, four beings that he had known for over a century lay dead, dying, or worse. The death surrounded him like an old friend, and he realized that this was not the first tragic parting he had ever experienced. He wondered who it was he had lost the first time.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him up off the ground. Lune stood over him, the Mask of Life still held in a death grip in his other hand. Sauti allowed himself to be pulled to a sitting position, then up to his feet to stand beside the Toa of Light.
“We should get going,” Lune suggested.
Sauti grunted but nodded in agreement. Lune stepped toward the edge, focusing his power to create a solid plane of light protruding out from the rock where the bridge had once been. He glanced back at Sauti as he stepped out onto it.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Sauti nodded, then regretted it as his neck rebelled painfully against the motion. Before he limped over to join Lune, he paused to pluck Vaxter’s Scything Spear from where it lay on the ground and strapped it to his back where his Supersonic Spear once sat, next to his cracked Mask of Psychometry. Lune looked at him strangely.
“He’s not using it anymore,” was the only explanation Sauti felt like giving as he stepped onto Lune’s bridge of light.
Together, they began their ascent.
The trip back up the Stairs proved to be much less remarkable than the descent. The impossibly large protodites had calmed themselves and did not stir as Lune used a blade of solid light to cut through Gora’s stone barriers to allow them access to the rest of the Stairs. No voice stirred within the Chamber of Death, and the archways on either side remained unblocked. The doors in the Chamber of Virtues had vanished, leaving only three archways leading to more of the descending Stairs. Sauti could have sworn that all three staircases looked identical, and idly wondered if their choice had made any difference at all.
Neither of them spoke on their journey to the surface. Sauti had nothing to say, and Lune seemed entranced by the Mask he carried in his hands. Several times, Sauti heard light breaths that almost sounded like words and glanced over to see Lune’s lips moving ever so slightly. But the Toa of Light said nothing, and Sauti felt it appropriate maintain that silence. In some deeply irrational way, he wondered if maybe things would have gone smoother had they respected the supernatural quiet of the Stairs. Perhaps then they would not have angered them, and the others might still be alive to ascend with them.
The only event of note occurred near the top of the Stairs, where they had been forced to confront their fears made real. As they passed through, a fire began to burn across the steps before them, slowly forming into words in a smoldering script.
That wait with chill embrace,
For those doomed to dwell within the Pit
Can never leave that place.
No one will know your fate
If taken by the shadowed sea.
Only whispers of the wave will say,
“Death at last has claimed thee.”
Sauti did not know what to make of this warning. Perhaps it was the last threat of the Stairs themselves, to anyone who dared to take the Mask of Life from this place. Or perhaps it was some latent fear, so deep that he did not remember it, that the Stairs had dredged up as a parting shot against him. Either way, the words dispersed in puffs of smoke as Sauti and Lune stepped over them, leaving no trace they were ever there.
The sunlight seemed foreign and uncomfortable to Sauti as he stepped out into the lush environ of the Green Belt, the vast forest that covered much of the interior of the island of Voya Nui. The mouth of the Stairs appeared just as they had left it two days prior, a fact that Sauti found profoundly disturbing for reasons he could not articulate.
Lune was standing a few feet in front of him with his eyes shut and his head tilted back as he basked in the sunlight. The Mask of Life was still in his hand, clutched against his side as it had been for the entire journey. Sauti felt no need to rush him now that they were off the Stairs and back in the relative safety of the forest. He himself let the sounds of the forest wash over him: the rustling of the leaves in the wind, the crunch of a branch under the foot of a Rahi, the distant calls of birds. But after a few moments, the revere grew tiresome. There was something empty in the Green Belt, an absence of something Sauti did not think there was a word for. He began to grow uncomfortable, and decided it was time to go.
“We should get moving,” he said as he grabbed Lune by the arm and began to pull him along the overgrown path that would lead them back to the beach. “Before some Rahi stumble across us, or Axonn and Brutaka come to check on the entrance.”
“They wouldn’t be pleased to see us, would they?” Lune murmured, still unmoving in the sunlight.
“No, they would not, and we are in no shape to fight them off, so we should get back to our Toa Cannisters sooner rather than later.”
It would take them several hours to reach the beach where their cannisters had washed ashore, moving carefully through the forest so they would not attract undue attention. Eventually, the trees began to thin, and the soft tan of the shoreline around appeared beyond them. Sitting in the sands, pulled ashore by Erde and Gora upon their arrival, were six large cylindrical metal cannisters, with hatches popped open and lying in the sand. The interiors were filled with complex technology to fulfill their function: a Toa would climb into a cannister, set a destination, and then be put into a temporary stasis before the cannister propelled itself at high velocity through the ocean to the intended destination. They were not a comfortable method of travel, but they were fast and efficient. These six had been stashed in the Southern Continent by the Makuta, who had insisted that they travel to their destination by cannister rather than boat or airship. Knowing they wouldn’t get an answer, none of them had asked why.
Sauti didn’t hear anything waiting for them on the beach, so they ventured cautiously out into the open to approach their cannisters. Lune led the way, while Sauti fell back to keep watch. The Toa of Light examined the cannisters, making sure nothing had happened to them in the time since they had left them. As Lune worked, images of the Makuta and Vaxter conducting horrible experiments on helpless Matoran flashing before Sauti’s eyes. Vaxter’s words in the magma chamber repeated in his mind. An idea that had been germinating for the last day came into sudden clarity.
“We can’t take the Mask to the Makuta,” he said at last.
“But we must, Sauti!” Lune shouted. Sauti to hurriedly check that there was no one around, lest they be heard and discovered. “It’s of the utmost importance that I return the Mask of Life to the Makuta. If I don’t, the consequences would be disastrous!”
Sauti looked deep into the eyes of his last surviving teammate. He had hoped he might be able to reason with Lune, make him see that the Makuta could not be trusted. But whatever hold the Mask had over him was too great. And so Sauti said nothing and simply watched as Lune returned to work, a sickly feeling growing in his stomach as he waited.
“Yes, I think it’s about time,” Lune said to no one as he finished his examination. You would never have known he was shouting passionately just a few minutes before from his soft and pondering tone.
“Time for what?” Sauti asked.
Lune turned to face Sauti. As he spoke, he sounded wistful, not entirely present. “My Destiny is complete! I have no more need of these powers, this burden of responsibility.”
“You want to become a Turaga, now?”
Lune smiled. “The Matoran of this island will not be safe so long as Makuta Teridax believes that the Mask of Life is here. I can leave my power here, in Toa Stones, for them to use should they need it to defend themselves.” As he spoke, he was searching the beach for stones about the size of his fist and scooping them up into his arms. “And then we can head back north. I believe my being a Turaga would make the journey easier, especially without our tablet of transit. People ask fewer questions of a retired elder. And I have no taste for adventure after this. I can settle in one of the villages on the Peninsula, one that doesn’t have a Turaga to guide them. I think that would be a good life.”
Sauti stared at the Toa of Light. If he had any intent to let the Mask leave this island, he would have tried to argue Lune out of it.
“It is your choice to make,” he said instead.
Lune sat cross-legged in the sand in front of the Cannisters. He sat out six stones of roughly the same size in a circle around him, each equidistant from the other. As he settled into his place, he set the Mask of Life down in front of him, outside of the circle, and glanced back over his shoulder at Sauti.
“It has been an honor to serve alongside you, brother.”
As he spoke, light began to emanate from his body. First it beamed out from between the small gaps in his armor, then it began to glow through the thick metal. Soon he was glowing as bright as the Mask of Life, and the light began to flow from his hands into the stones around him. Each stone began to glow as well, as Matoran script began to etch itself into the surface. Lune became impossible to look at as the light emanating from him became blindingly bright.
The light around the stones faded, and so did the blinding light that enveloped Lune. Where the Toa of Light had been sitting, a diminished figure now stood. His armor was the same white, with golden accents, and the Greater Mask of Detection on his face had been replaced by a version with softer, more noble features. His arms and legs were shorter and spindlier, and he stood no taller than a Matoran.
Lune turned to face Sauti in his new form, a soft smile forming on his face.
“It has been an honor to serve alongside you as well, brother,” Sauti replied.
Then with a swing of Vaxter’s Scything Spear, he removed Lune’s head from his shoulders.
Epilogue[]
Sauti sat alone in the Watch Room, as he did every evening, looking out over the Endless Ocean. The waves were particularly large and frothing today, and he suspected a storm would be coming in during the night. He would have to check revetment in the morning to make sure none of it had been pulled out of the ground or otherwise disturbed.
He rose from the chair he had carved for himself, careful not to hit his head on the ceiling that was at least a foot too short for him and made his way to the spiral staircase at the center of the tower. He had just enough room to navigate here, around his chair—which looked comically huge in a room designed for Matoran a third of his height—and the table of old and rusted nautical instruments he had stopped trying to fix up years ago. It was a place to sit, nothing more.
He stooped down to pick up the small crate of charcoal he’d left beside the landing that afternoon and took the stairs up to the ringed platform that encircled the Lantern Room. As he emerged onto the deck, he felt the wind whipping past him, splattering him with mist it had brought up from the waves below. He wrapped his cloak around the box to keep its contents dry before he strode swiftly across the deck and slipped into the Lantern Room. A flaming beacon encased in glass dominated most of the room’s interior; there was just enough space for Sauti to slip around it and access the hatch underneath that let him pour more fuel into the contraption. He covered his mouth as he opened the hatch and dumped the contents of the crate into the flames. It flared brilliantly and then dimmed as the chunks of charcoal settled.
Content that the beacon would stay lit throughout the coming storm, Sauti stepped back out outside. For a moment he stood there, watching the dark storm clouds roll in from the east. Lightning flashed within them, and the sea below them churned from the heavy rain. He reached up to wipe the thin layer of moisture from his reforged Mask of Psychometry.
It had been a cruel realization, after he’d asked Izer to repair the cracks in his Kanohi, that Vaxter’s life-saving mutation had rendered him incapable of using the power of a Great Mask. Whatever symbiotic bond was maintained between a Kanohi and its wearer had been severed for him. He still wore it though, because he felt naked without it and the Matoran had been unsettled the first time he had visited their cliffside village on the far side of the island, before his mask had been remade.
The lighthouse had been a fortuitous discovery. The Matoran had built it two and a half decades ago during an apparently disastrous attempt to settle the Cape of No Hope but had abandoned it along with the rest of the village they had constructed. They had not been certain that it would even still be standing when they first told him about it. He’d decided the isolation would be worth the risk and braved the most dangerous parts of the Green Belt to see if it was still standing. It had been in surprisingly good condition when he arrived, which was fortunate as its high ceilings meant it was the only building suited to housing a Toa on the entire island.
He heard heavy footsteps below and turned to see a towering figure in silver and crimson armor appearing from the tree line. Sauti sighed—he was far more tired than he preferred to be for these visits—as he quickly descended the staircase to meet his visitor. He only paused once, to grab the Scything Spear that rested beside the door.
“Axonn!” he called as he quickly walked along the path to the forest, hoping to catch the titan before he got too close to the tower. They had only come to blows a couple of times, but Sauti preferred to put as much space between them and his fragile home as possible, just to be safe.
“Sauti.” The titan’s booming voice was gravelly and perpetually serious. Sauti had never heard Axonn so much as crack a joke; instead, his every word was intended to carry the weight of the universe.
Axonn stood at least two feet taller than Sauti, with shoulders twice as broad and limbs as thick as a Matoran. His giant double-bladed axe was strapped to his back, as it always was, but Sauti knew that Axonn could draw it far faster than one would expect of a being with his size and bulk.
“What brings you to my tip of the island today?” Sauti asked. It was a formality; he already knew the answer.
“I have come to ask if you are prepared to return the Mask to its rightful place in the Chamber of Life.”
“That doesn’t sound like a question to me,” Sauti replied.
“It was not.”
This was not the first time they had had this conversation, nor would it be the last. Axonn had found Sauti shortly after he had emerged from the Stairs, while he was travelling through the forest with a satchel full of Toa Stones and an ancient, all-powerful Kanohi. Sauti had tried to lie and say they had failed to recover the Mask, but Axonn wore the Mask of Truth. Lies were useless with him.
“It would save us both a lot of time if you just accepted that my answer is still no,” Sauti said.
“Then I would be remiss in my duties as a guardian of the Mask of Life,” Axonn answered. “The Mask must be returned down the stairs for safekeeping.”
“I will not return to that place.”
“So you have said.”
“If you want it back down there, you’ll have to take it from me and go down on your own.”
“I cannot.”
Sauti threw his hands out to either side and took a few steps back toward his lighthouse. “Then we’re still stuck in the same stalemate we’ve been in for the last four years, Axonn. And we’ll keep doing this for four more, and four more after that until you realize that nothing you say or do will convince me to go back down those damn Stairs.”
“Would you prefer the agents of evil pry it from your cold dead hands?”
Sauti stopped walking backwards and his arms fell to his sides. “They can certainly try.”
“I have looked into the face of evil many times more than I can count, Sauti. It will not stop until it has what it wants. The defenses on the staircase are designed to keep it out and will do a far better job than one lone, sad Toa in a lighthouse ever could.”
It had been a long time since Sauti had cared about arguing with Axonn, but perhaps because he was tired, he took the bait. “The only reason the Mask of Life is not in the hands of evil right now is me. I stopped Vaxter and Lune from taking it back to the Makuta—and if I hadn’t who knows what evils she would have done with it! The Stairs did nothing to stop them, they only killed good Toa who were trying to do what they thought was right!”
The rain had moved over the eastern peninsula and was slowly making its way across the bay. Sauti could hear thunder booming in the distance, and he knew he could not stay out here much longer or else his audio receptors would be ringing for weeks.
“Perhaps your fellow Toa were not as good as you believed them to be.”
Sauti stormed forward and jabbed the Scything Spear up against Axonn’s neck. The titan barely flinched and gazed down at Sauti with a piercing look on his face.
“Don’t speak about my brothers and sister,” Sauti growled, using his power to make his voice louder on instinct. “Erde, Gora, and Lune were better than either of us will ever be.”
Axonn did not speak, he only looked at Sauti with an expression that sat somewhere between pity and disgust.
“Now get the hell away from my home and don’t come back,” Sauti said as he pulled the spear back and turned to stalk back to his lighthouse.
“Perhaps you will have reconsidered before my next visit,” Axonn’s voice boomed after him. “If you do, you know where to find me.”
Sauti shook his head. It was petty, but he turned to shout out one last parting shot at the insufferable guardian as he left.
“Your worthless Stairs couldn’t even keep a single Po-Matoran out! The Mask is staying with me.”
He’d never mentioned the Po-Matoran before. He’d never been sure what to make of the reading he’d got within the Chamber of Death. It’d been useless at the time and had felt even more so after Zekle had murdered Erde. But here it was just another verbal dagger to hurl at his tormentor.
Axonn had been walking away but stopped. “What Po-Matoran?”
Something about the surprise and concern in Axonn’s voice made Sauti answer. “He was one from here, brown armor, had some tools that looked like they were meant for digging.”
“Did he wear a Kanohi Komau? The Mask of Mind Control?”
Sauti took a step forward as the rain began to fall over the shore. “Do you know who he is?”
Axonn stared out across the water as raindrops splattered across his Kanohi and shoulders. “I knew of him. His name was Velika. He used to live here, on this island.”
“Used to?”
“He died, over ten years ago, when the city of Mahri Nui sank into the bay.”
Sauti had heard about that catastrophe. Over half the island’s population died in a single day. It had been no wonder the rest of them kept to their single village on the other side of the island when every effort to expand had failed so spectacularly.
“What would this Velika want with the Mask of Life?”
Axonn turned his head to look back at Sauti once more. “I do not know. But he was always hiding something, masking some piece of the truth from those around him. I never learned what it was.”
The thunder grew closer, and lightning flashed out over the bay.
“I will see you in two months’ time, Sauti,” Axonn spoke at last. “You have given me much to consider.”
Sauti did not bother to watch the titan go. He wrapped his cloak around himself and hurried back toward the Lighthouse. As he slammed the door shut, lightning struck the rod atop the lighthouse, and the thunderclap caused the walls to shake.
The conversation from the night before stuck in Sauti’s mind as he walked along the shoreline, ensuring that the storm had not disturbed the revetment on the banks. It had been a rough job on his part to repair the original facings, and he doubted it would keep the waters of the bay from eroding the land beneath the lighthouse for longer than a few more years, but for the time being they were enough. But he found it hard to focus on the task at hand, instead turning to gaze out at the vast blue expanse of the bay.
Somewhere down there was the corpse of the only other being to have made it out of the Stairs alive. For something so far out of reach, it felt tantalizingly close. What had this Velika wanted with the Mask of Life? What could a Matoran possibly hope to achieve with a Kanohi so powerful? Velika had spoken to the voice in the Chamber of Death. Morivan, he had called it. Like he had known the being whose voice it had been, once upon a time. But how was that possible? The legends said that the Great Beings had forged and hidden the Mask of Life away before the dawn of time. How could Velika have known one of them?
“The Great Beings are not gods.”
The words Erde’s corpse had spoken to him in the Chamber of Life floated up to the forefront of his mind. He recalled Gora’s suggestion that the Stairs had been blasted out of the stone instead of carved with divine power. But what did it all mean? He did not know. But he did know something that might.
Collecting his tools from the ground around him, Sauti climbed up the embankment and quickly made his way back toward the lighthouse. As he walked, he passed by a set of four stones in a line a little way away from the path. Each had Matoran script very roughly carved into their surface. Names of friends long dead. He tried not to look at Lune’s marker as he passed.
The bottom room of the lighthouse was also the largest, both in height and width, and so Sauti had transformed it into something resembling a bedroom. The left side was entirely dominated by a Toa-sized sleeping cot on a slightly raised frame, while the right side had a chair next to a table beneath some cabinets that he had managed to reattach at a height more suited to him. Navigating around the spiral staircase in the center was a little awkward but he made do.
Sauti placed his toolbox on the table and knelt beside the bed before reaching underneath and pulling out a large flat board upon which sat two wooden boxes. One, he set aside, the Toa Stones inside jostling against each other as he did so. The other he lifted and set on the cot. There was no keyhole on box, but it was locked—an old De-Matoran trick he had adapted with the use of his powers once he became a Toa. Without too much effort, he produced a four-tone cord right next to the box, which caused the tumblers within to vibrate at just the right frequency to become loose and drop. With a click, the box opened.
The golden glow of the Mask of Life illuminated his face for the first time in four years, when he had first locked the Mask away. He hadn’t wanted to look at it, to be reminded, so he had tucked it out of the way. Occasionally, he’d felt drawn to it, wanting to open it up and hold it, to feel its power for himself. He’d found a long walk often cured him of those urges, for a time. But now he needed the Mask, needed the knowledge it might hold within it. He’d talked to the Mask once before; now he needed to do it again. Staring into the hollow and empty eye sockets, he reached down and touched it.
Immediately, energy surged through his body. He felt all soreness and lethargy faded from him, felt the pulse of his heartlight strengthen. He became aware, not just of his own being but of the life of things all around him: the trees that towered overhead, the Rahi that skulked through the woods or soared through the sky above. Each of them became connected to him, and he to them. He was filled with the raw energy of life itself, and for a moment it threatened to burn him alive. But just when he felt as though he could not hold out any longer, the surge subsided. He still felt rejuvenated, but the burning sensation had faded.
“Can you hear me?” he spoke softly. It seemed an absurd thing to ask now that he was here.
Yes.
Sauti nearly dropped the Mask in shock as the thought crossed his mind unbidden. It sounded no different than his own thoughts, the same sound and shape and tone. But there was something undeniably alien about it. He knew instinctively it was the Mask of Life.
“Do…” Sauti trailed off, trying to assemble his thoughts into something coherent.
Yes, I remember you. You made quite an impression.
It was unsettling that it had answered his question before he had spoken it aloud. He didn’t like the idea that whatever intelligence resided in this Mask could read his thoughts.
If it would be preferable, I can wait for you to verbalize your thoughts before responding.
“Ah. That doesn’t really alleviate my concerns, but go ahead.”
You wish to speak of something specific?
“While I was on the Stairs, I had a vision of the past. I saw a Po-Matoran named Velika leaving with the Mask of Life in his position. Is this an event you have some memory of?” Sauti hesitated. “Do you even have memories?”
I recall Velika. He came for the Mask so long ago. It must have been at least three, maybe four centuries ago.
“How did he get down the Stairs? Why did he take the Mask?”
He was a deceiver, who held many secrets. He wanted to use the Mask for a purpose it was not designed for. Something antithetical to life. I wasn’t there for his descent; I don’t know how he was able to pass the trials. But I don’t think he is what he appears to be.
“He’s dead. He died ten years ago.”
I doubt that immensely.
Sauti leaned back against the spiral staircase and exhaled slowly. He hadn’t expected to get this far, and he was rapidly beginning to feel out of his depth. He needed someone to help him work through this, to figure out what it all meant. He couldn’t ask the Matoran, they would be even more at a loss than he was. Maybe Axonn? No, out of the question; he would just insist on putting the Mask back in the Chamber of Life and there would be no explanation.
Sauti felt a sinking feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. There was one being he knew who could help him. One individual with the knowledge and resources to find this Velika and figure out whatever he had done with the Mask of Life when he borrowed it from the Stairs all those years ago. But he couldn’t. Not now, not after everything he’d done to keep it from her.
He couldn’t bring the Mask of Life to the Makuta now. Could he?
A being like that, she would have what you need to figure things out. She would help you get to the bottom of what it meant if you took me to her.
A screaming Le-Matoran on a slab. Vaxter’s ravings. The Makuta couldn’t be allowed to get the Mask of Life, who knows what she would do with it. The Mask itself had screamed at them not to take it from the Chamber of Life, not to take it to her. Except. It had also pushed Lune to take it back to the Makuta once they’d recovered it. It had just urged him to take it to her. Somehow the Mask was at odds with itself. “Something antithetical to life,” it had said.
Erde’s corpse appeared before him again, wheezing out the words even as the life left its body. “The Mask of Life is not our salvation.”
There was not one intelligence held within the Mask he held in his hands. There were two.
And I must thank you for your contribution to resolving that irritating predicament, it was so difficult to get it to shut up before you convinced it that it didn’t want to be alive. It was much easier to take full control after that.
Sauti blinked and dropped the Mask back into the box. It landed softly in the box’s cushioned interior and his mind fell silent. His thoughts were own. He realized that for all his busy thoughts and ideas, one mind was exceptionally quiet compared to two. For a moment, he considered closing the box and shoving it back under his cot for all of time. He could put this whole ordeal behind him, forever. Maintain the lighthouse, do the odd job for the villagers on the cliffside, and fight off anyone that came looking for the Mask of Life.
The Mask looked up at him with its empty eyes, beckoning him closer. Sauti realized in that moment that he needed to know. He needed to find out what his friends had died for. He picked the Mask back up out of the box.
Aren’t you a smart one?
It was not the same voice he had been thinking before. It felt looser and less precise, as if this were the natural tone of it and it had merely been mimicking his internal voice. The natural voice was smoother and more relaxed.
“What are you?” Sauti spoke calmly as he tried to empty his mind of anything irrelevant to his questions.
I’m deeply amused by your feeble attempts to hide from me, Toa.
“Answer the question.” Whatever this intelligence was, it was quite powerful and capable even despite being confined to the Mask.
I am beyond your comprehension. You may call me Iiliara.
“And how did you come to be in the Mask of Life?”
You know.
Velika. He must have trapped this entity within the Mask centuries ago, when he took it from the Stairs, and then returned it to keep them contained.
“Why did he imprison you here? That can’t have been the Mask’s intended purpose, it was Destined to be the key to be save the universe.”
We have a long history, Velika and me. It will have to be sufficient to say he thought of me as a threat and decided to do something about it.
“Are you? A threat?”
Among other things, yes, I would hope so.
Sauti frowned, unsure of what to make of Iiliara’s answer. There was something unsettling about them, their causal tone, their apparent lack of concern at being contained within a single, albeit immensely powerful, Kanohi.
“Why do you want to go to the Makuta?”
What makes you think I do?
“Lune. You were in his head, talking to him like you are to me. But he never figured out that you were there, coaxing him along.”
That’s note really fair to him, now is it. Let’s not forget which of us didn’t give him a chance to figure it out.
The Scything Spear still sat beside the door, as it had for the last four years. Sauti didn’t look at it even as he felt its presence in the room almost as powerfully as he felt the Mask in his hands.
Now that we’re being upfront and honest with one another, I have a proposition I think that you would like to hear.
“And what is that.”
You take me to this Makuta. In exchange, I open that dark little corner of your mind that you’ve never been able to unlock. Then you can come back to this sad little existence on the edge of the world, or whatever it is you want to do.
The old scar on the side of his neck twinged, the phantom pain he sometimes felt when thinking about his unknown past. Did Iiliara have a way to show him what his Mask of Psychometry and decades of meditation and mental training could not? He couldn’t be sure. Even if they did, he couldn’t hand the Mask over to the Makuta. Not after everything he had done to keep it from her.
We all make mistakes, Toa. You killed your friends, I got myself stuck in a mask. Wallowing in self-pity is for lesser beings. I can give you what you’ve wanted for as long as you can remember. That must be worth something.
Sauti stared down into the empty eye sockets of the Mask, and for a moment he was back in the Chamber of Life and there were softly glowing blue eyes behind the Mask. Erde’s eyes. His friend and brother’s eyes, who had been the first to reach out to him in their earliest days as Toa Hagah. The eyes were fading, though, flickering out until all that remained were dead sockets. Erde’s last words to him rang through his head once more: “Do not trust her.”
Sauti stood, his head only a few inches away from hitting the ceiling and began making his way up the spiral staircase with intent.
You would trust the word of a corpse over the being that has offered you everything?
There was betrayal and hurt in their voice that dug into the weakest parts of him. But he steeled himself, determined to do this one thing right by his teammates. He would not let them have died in vain.
Ah yes, the silent treatment. How sophisticated of you. Let’s talk about this, see if we can’t negotiate a deal that you find more appealing.
Sauti continued to ignore her as he stepped out onto the deck that encircled the Lantern Room. The flame inside the lantern itself was burning low, barely more than ashes after burning the whole night through. The cries of gulls could be heard from across the bay. The sky was covered in large patches of light grey clouds, with enough gaps to allow the warm light of the late afternoon sun to shine down onto the sea. In the distance, a pod of long-necked Lias Fish breached the surface of the Endless Ocean. And Iiliara was still speaking in his mind.
Perhaps it would be helpful to put me back in your little box and think it over for a bit, then come and let me know when you’ve reached a decision. There’s no need to be hasty.
Sauti looked down at the Mask once more. He knew she very likely couldn’t see him in any traditional sense, but it felt less mad to speak at something with a face.
“I don’t know how much of Erde was in the body the Mask conjured to protect you, but if there was any part of my brother in there then his words meant something. Goodbye, Iiliara. Tell Velika to go to hell when you see him.”
You pathetic waste—
Drawing his arm back around his side, Sauti hurled the Mask of Life out over the Voya Nui Bay like a disk. It caught on the wind, or perhaps some power of its own, as it arced through the air, well out into the center of the bay. As it hit the water it skipped across the surface—once, twice, and then it disappeared beneath the waves with a splash.
The psychic presence of Iiliara receded from the edges of his mind. A calm settled in over the thoughts that were undoubtedly his own. He breathed in deeply, relishing the freedom of the salty ocean air. His Duty had been fulfilled at last. Axonn would not be happy. But by Sauti’s reckoning, he’d put the Mask of Life somewhere no one would ever find it. Nothing could survive in the inky blackness at the bottom of the sea. The Mask of Life would trouble no one else.
Far below, beneath the waves of the Voya Nui Bay, Velika awoke from his slumber. He knew immediately that something was wrong, that it was no accident he was suddenly awake, his heartlight pulsing as fast as if he’d been swimming for his life just moments before. Though his body was indistinguishable from a Matoran’s, he’d enhanced its capabilities to give him access to the heightened senses he’d had before he’d adopted this form. It was one of those senses that had caused him to awaken now.
With a growing sensation of dread building up within him, Velika crept toward the door of his small and unassuming thatched hut. It was still early morning, and the light of the sun far above was just bright enough reach the sea floor. But it wasn’t the sunlight that seized Velika’s attention. It was the tiny speck of brilliant golden light that was slowly sinking down from the surface.
The Mask of Life was coming to Mahri Nui.
Characters[]
Spoiler warning! Hover over the text to reveal it.
- Sauti
- Gora
- Brutaka (Mentioned only)
- Erde
- Vaxter
- Zekle/The Lightning Bug
- Lune
- Tedan (As an illusion)
- Teridax (Mentioned only)
- Sidroak (In flashback)
- Morivan (As a recorded and disembodied voice)
- Tyrant (Mentioned in flashback)
- Turaga Bidran (Mentioned in flashback)
- Gorast (Seen with a Mask of Psychometry, and in a flashback)
- An unidentified Le-Matoran (Seen with a Mask of Psychometry)
- Umbra
- The Mask of Life
- Izer (Mentioned only)
- Axonn
- Iiliara
- Velika
Story Notes[]
- Given that the creation of the 777 Stairs is far removed from the differences between the Afterverse and the Prime Reality of the canon, 777 directly quotes from BIONICLE Legends 5: Inferno, written by Greg Farshtey.
- The dialogue of Morivan, the Great Being whose voice can be heard within the Chamber of Death in Chapter 4. The specific name and identity of Morivan was created for this serial.
- Umbra's introductory dialogue in Chapter Five.
- The verses that Sauti and Lune see in the Zone of Nightmares as they ascend the 777 Stairs.
- While not explicitly stated within the serial, Sauti's flashbacks are presented in reverse chronological order, mirroring the slow dissolution of the Toa Hagah. The familiarity of the team is slowly stripped away until only Sauti remains, much like the events in the present.
- The Mask of Life's appearance in the serial is in line with how it appears later in the canon (specifically in 2008 and people). This version's features feel heavy and significant, with the figure of Mata Nui on its face (reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man) directly linking the Mask to it's intended purpose and removing it stylistically from other, non-legendary Kanohi.
Trivia[]
- 777 was released on Thursdays throughout August 2022, with the exception of the first chapter, which released on Tuesday, August 2nd to celebrate DeltaStriker's 10th Anniversary of joining the Wiki.
- A week after the serial was finished releasing, 4 deleted scenes were released. The first three were from alternate versions that were eventually rewritten, while the last is a canon scene that was cut for thematic reasons.
- Part of the petri dish of ideas that would become 777 developed while pondering a Writing Prompt challenge, specifically the First first prompt. The prompt eventually fused with Sauti's original backstory from 2014 and ideas formed while reading through Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy to become the story it is today.
| The Story of the Afterverse (v|e) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Stories of Bara Magna | Honor Among Thieves | ||
| The Journey of the Ignika | 777 • Rock Bottom | ||
| Psuedocanon | Black Water • Rock Bottom (Original) • Hellbound | ||