Excerpt Ten

“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 turned to mist, and the mist had vanished inside the bodies of the Toa.

Gali was the first to notice that the atmosphere in the chamber had changed. “It’s gone,” she said softly. “The evil in this place… is gone.”

“You mean we’ve won?” Tahu asked.

“Makuta chose to fight us with our own fears,” Kopaka said. “A calculated gamble that might well have worked… if not for Pohatu.”

“Unfriendly types don’t bother me, Kopaka,” Pohatu replied, gentle laughter in his tone. “After all, I hang around with you, don’t I?”

But the struggle was not over. Now Makuta himself appeared to the Toa in the form of a Matoran villager. When the Toa would not yield to him, he took the form of a viscous, swirling mass of darkness, and attacked. Though hard-pressed, the Toa defended themselves with all their raw elemental power and drove Makuta off… but he had merely been delayed, not truly defeated.