Chapter 7

“What… are you?” Tahu whispered. Just the sight of these dark imposters filled him with disgust and dread.

“Don’t you know, Toa of Fire?” hissed the shadow Tahu. “I am you… the part of you that you try to hide. I am your power, your ambition, and my flames are not held in check by conscience. I will rule, or Mata Nui will burn.”

“We are what you wish you could be,” shadow Gali said, in a voice like the slithering of water snakes. “Victory is the only thing that matters. Who cares if the oceans are thrown into turmoil, or the rivers are bent and twisted to serve my ends? What possible difference could that make to me?”

“No!” Gali shouted. “To use my power without regard to what it could do to the world around me… No, spirit, I reject you!”

“We know all about rejection, don’t we, brother?” shadow Kopaka said softly. “We drive others away… freeze them out… so the opportunity will never arise to fail them. And we would fail them, wouldn’t we? Then they would abandon us and we would be all alone, brother…”

Kopaka raised his sword of ice. “I… am… not… your… BROTHER!” he said, sending a blast of pure cold at his counterpart. But the ice passed through shadow Kopaka’s form as if the dark one was not there…

“Toa, these things are not real,” Onua said. “They are just illusions. Ignore them!”

“Always so wise are we,” shadow Onua responded. “Always so strong are we. Strong enough, perhaps, to reach up and pull down the sun? Then we could walk on the surface like all the others do, see like they do, and not be blinded by infernal light. How sweet that would be…”

In the far corner, Lewa did a flip over his double. But the shadow Lewa merely dissolved and reformed in front of the Toa once again.

“Why do you run, brother?” shadow Lewa said. “We don’t need them… any of them. The important thing is to have fun. Let the other Toa worry about their petty responsibilities. There is a whole world to explore!”

Faced with these dark reflections of themselves, even the Toa began to know doubt. Little by little, they backed away, as their shadow selves grew stronger and more insistent. Only Pohatu stood his ground, looking at his duplicate as if it were something he had stepped in.

“So what’s your story?” Pohatu grumbled.

“I don’t have one,” shadow Pohatu answered. “I am invisible… unwanted… Onua is wiser, Tahu more powerful, Gali more in harmony with her world. What am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?”

Pohatu chuckled. “Am I supposed to be scared by that? Everybody has doubts and fears… everybody worries sometimes that maybe they’ll lose their friends, or screw something up… but you get up and you keep going and you take the chance.”

The Toa of Stone took a step forward… and amazingly, the shadow Pohatu retreated. “That’s called being alive, spirit,” Pohatu continued, as relentlessly as a hammer against a stubborn rock. “Something you wouldn’t understand. I don’t run from my fears — I use them to keep me going, keep me striving to achieve something more.”

Pohatu reached out and plunged his hand into the midst of the shadow. “You can’t scare me, spirit — you are me.”

With a cry, the shadow disappeared inside Pohatu. The other Toa stopped, stared, and halted their retreat.

“We cannot reject these things,” Gali whispered. “We must accept that they are part of ourselves.”

“Parts we wish did not exist,” Kopaka agreed. “But we are strong enough to master them.”

“And master them we shall,” Tahu said.

With that, the shadow Toa gave a mournful wail and began to break apart. In seconds, their substance had seemingly split from their spirits, and with the spirits of the Toa having turned to mist, and the mist had vanished inside the bodies of the Toa. Only the substance now remained, as if lifeless, empty vessels of the elements, mindlessly fighting the Toa.

“Toa, we have faced our own elements before and won!” Tahu declared. “Let us join our power now as the guardians of Mata Nui!”

“Not just as its guardians,” Pohatu added. “As a team.”

With that, Pohatu shattered a boulder with a mighty kick. The stone enemy fell back to avoid the shrapnel of stone, but instead pressing the advantage, Pohatu spun away and glanced quickly around the cavern.

“Tahu!” Pohatu shouted. “Stand back!”

Gathering his energy, he leaped upward and struck the ceiling of the cave with a mighty blow of his fist. As the pieces broke off and fell, Pohatu directed them straight onto the Fire Toa's opponent.

The smoky stranger raised its arms to protect itself. Flames shot out of its sword, but it was no use. It couldn’t melt the falling stones fast enough. Within seconds it was buried beneath a mound of rocky debris.

Tahu glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Water Toa was on the ground at the edge of the the lava pool, her enemy advancing upon her.

“Gali!” Tahu cried. “Hold on, I’m coming!”

As the Shadow Gali whirled to face him, he pointed his fire sword. Heat and flame danced out from the end, wrapping around the enemy. Steam hissed out in all directions, obscuring his view. When it faded, nothing remained of the Shadow Gali but a puddle on the cavern floor.

The defeat of two of the shadow enemies gave the other Toa new strength of purpose. Gali re-formed her flood and sent it gurgling toward the Shadow Onua. Water pounded against it, eroding it away into nothing but a bit of sand.

The distraction gave Onua the chance to help Lewa. Seeing that the Air Toa’s enemy was somersaulting high in the air out of reach, Onua quickly summoned the earth beneath his feet to rise up, trapping the high-flying enemy in a floor-to-ceiling column of dirt and stone.

“Nearly there,” the Toa of Earth exhaled.

Freed from his enemy, Lewa saw that Kopaka and Pohatu alone remained under attack. While Pohatu was holding his own, Kopaka was losing his footing.

“I’m coming!” Lewa shouted, tumbling through the air around the icy battle. “Kopaka!” he cried. “DUCK!”

The Ice Toa looked startled, but threw himself to the floor. A split second later, the whirlwind roared down around him, grabbing the icy enemy into its grasp and spinning it around and around at dizzying speed.

The icy creature cracked into shards which crashed against one another again and again. Before long they had disintegrated into tiny sparkles of ice.

“Bad move,” Kopaka said bleakly. “What if they all form into enemies again?”

“Not a problem,” Tahu said, blasting the ice crystals with his fire sword. Within seconds, they had melted and evaporated into steam.

“Guys?” Pohatu called breathlessly. “Um, hey — anyone want to give me a hand here?”

The Toa of Stone was still trading blows with his shadow self. “Oops!” Lewa said.

“I’ll take care of this,” Kopaka said. “Stand back.”

Taking a deep breath, the Ice Toa blew out a frosty blast, freezing the area around Pohatu into a sheet of ice. The Shadow Pohatu skidded across, winding up in Tahu's pool of lava, where it sank with a gurgle.

✴        ✴        ✴

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Once again, the cave was nearly silent. The Toa stood there for a long moment, staring at one another. Then, as a group, they collapsed wearily to the ground.

After catching his breath, Tahu sat up and glanced at Onua, who was watching the others thoughtfully. “What do you think, brother?” he asked the Earth Toa.

Onua smiled, though there was a hint of wariness in his eyes. “I think,” he said, “that we have won an important battle, and of that we can be proud. But there is more to come.”

Tahu nodded, his grin fading as he gripped his fire sword more tightly. Yes, Onua was right. He could feel it, burning in his mind like a half-remembered dream. There was much more to come.

“Makuta hoped to overcome our strength with the brute force of the Manas,” Onua observed. “Then he hoped to overcome our spirits with these horrible illusions. But our trials on this island have given us the power and courage to overcome. Now,” he said, nodding to the final door, “he himself awaits.”

“The first trials are complete,” Tahu said. “But the greatest still remains.”