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Nanu grunts as the little orphan tugs at the sleeve of his shirt.
"Tell me the story of when you got made kahuna, uncle!"
Nanu sighs. How many times has it been already?
"Gimme a break, kid, we've been through this before."
Seventeen times. That's how many.
"I wanna hear it again!"
Of course she does. This fascination she has with him can't be healthy.
"Arceus' sake…"
She whines as she jumps up and down.
"Pleeeeaaase?"
She knows it will get her what she wants. He also knows, of course, that he won't need to go very far. Acerola may only be six, but she already had the makings of an orator. (Nanu wonders where she picks it up from, considering he certainly isn't the most verbose person around.) He would only need to start, and then be content to let her continue, as she inevitably would, as if she had been there, telling a slightly different tale each time, none any less fantastic than the last.
Lies. All lies.
But they were consoling ones. If only they knew. Nanu suspects that he will never be able to articulate the reality of that dark, oppressive night, the last night before all of Ula'ula woke to a new kahuna.
It was desperation that finally drove him to head into the Haina. The desperation of a man who thought that perhaps a death trip into a desert might finally be enough penance to stave off the endless nightmares. But despite that, like a cruel reminder of how everything else he attempted ended in failure, in the end he never even felt the lashing of the sandstorm. Just a dull, burning sensation between his temples and a heartbeat almost but not quite loud enough to drown out the repeating TWO ONE FOUR THREE TWO ONE FOUR THREE coming from somewhere inside him.
It only took an hour, but to Nanu it felt like days before he realised he was no longer swallowing sand with every breath. Suddenly there was the altar before him, and he knew at that moment it was an image he would never forget: the stone walls towering around him, the faint glow of the candles (who lit them?) frozen by the thickness of the air, and the small stone statue watching him, ready to pass judgement, as if it stared into his very soul. His legs were foreign when they moved, and foreign still as they carried him up the wooden steps. It was only when his fingertips touched the stone, and when the searing pain in his shoulder blade drove him to his knees, that he finally found the voice to cry out to the gods.
For many folk, being a kahuna is a matter of honour and glory. For others, an object of reverence and awe. For Nanu, it was a sentence to life. Poetic justice, he thought, as he felt the deity looking down upon his writhing form on the altar, the mark of the tapu freshly engraved on his flesh. He was Bulu's now. Worse than a fly, he was a man condemned to be the property of a capricious god. Such was the crowning of a new king. There was no bang, no whimper. Just the cold clack of stone against wood as the deity left him his very own shackle to serfdom.
He realises Acerola has stopped talking. Why was it raining in there?
"Uncle Nanu?"
"Yeah?"
She wipes the water off his face. Arceus, when did she become so endearing?
"Why are you crying?"