The wind tasted wrong.
Not the salt—salt was honest. Salt was the same in every age. It was the other flavor riding the breeze, sharp and metallic, like lightning trapped inside glass.
Māui stood barefoot on black rock that had once been a familiar ridge. Below, the ocean rolled and shattered itself against the cliff face, throwing up white hands of foam. Beyond that, the coastline curved into a bay glittering with impossible lights—towers that shone like trapped dawn, streets that braided through the city like glowing rivers, and ships that cut across the water without sails, leaving thin, clean wakes.
A city of stars… built by mortals.
He let out a slow breath, forcing his chest to settle. Panic was for prey. He had never been prey.
His tatau—marks inked into skin, alive in the way stories were alive—seemed to tighten, as if they too were trying to understand this skyline. The patterns shifted subtly over his shoulders and arms, the old shapes (waves, hooks, birds, teeth) rearranging like warriors changing formation.
"You've grown strange," he muttered to the tattoos. "Or maybe I have."
His right hand held the Hook.
It was not a toy. Not a trophy. Not a prop for songs. It was a tool that remembered what it had done—sunlight beaten into patience, oceans dragged into new shapes, monsters yanked screaming into the air. Even now it pulsed with heat, the carved edges glowing as if the metal drank from the sun itself.
He lifted it and the wind bent around it, as though the world recognized the weapon before it recognized him.
Far overhead, the sky had a second feature that should not exist.
A spiral.
A swirling eye of pale light, huge and slow, coiling within the stars like a whirlpool made of night. Around it, thin streaks of brightness cut the heavens—falling embers, shooting stars… or something else descending.
Māui had battled gods who called themselves natural law. He knew the difference between a storm and a warning.
That spiral was a warning.
The city below didn't seem to notice. Its lights remained steady. Its towers stood proud. Tiny dots—vehicles—moved along roads like bright insects, busy with their small lives.
Mortals always did that. They kept living right up until the moment the world snapped its teeth shut.
Māui rested the hook against his shoulder and began walking down the slope toward the city. Each step loosened a memory—grass that used to grow here, the echo of old chants, the smell of a cooking fire that wasn't there anymore. The land felt older than it looked, like a face wearing a new mask.
As he reached a lower ledge, the ground trembled.
Not a quake—too clean, too deliberate. A single pulse, like a heartbeat, traveling through stone.
Then another.
The ocean below responded first. The water near the rocks darkened, a stain spreading outward in a slow bloom.
Māui stopped.
His tattoos tightened again, and for a moment he saw something reflected in the wet rock at his feet: a shadow that was not his shadow. A shape moving beneath the surface, long and patient, like a thought that had learned how to swim.
The stain expanded.
A fishing instinct older than fear snapped into his bones. This was not oil. Not algae. Not mud.
This was something that wanted the sea.
Māui tossed a pebble into the spreading darkness.
It vanished without a splash.
The surface didn't even ripple.
That was the moment the city finally screamed.
A siren rose from the waterfront—sharp, mechanical, and urgent—followed by a second, then a third. Lights along the docks flashed red and white. On a distant pier, people ran like scattered fish.
And above the bay, the sky spiral brightened.
Māui's jaw tightened. "So that's how it is."
He slid the hook from his shoulder into both hands, letting its weight settle through his arms, through his spine, into the ground. He didn't pray. He didn't beg. He didn't ask permission.
He simply decided.
The way he always had.
He stepped to the cliff's edge and raised the Hook toward the ocean, as if he could snag the darkness itself.
The stain in the water reacted—lifting, swelling, forming a bulge like the sea was trying to stand up.
Māui smiled, small and grim.
"Come on then," he said to the thing that moved without ripples. "Let's see what you are."
The ocean heaved.
The darkness rose.
And the first shape broke the surface—smooth, glistening, wrong—like a piece of night pulled out of the water and taught how to breathe.
Māui didn't flinch.
He swung.
The Hook carved an arc of fire through the air, and the wind screamed as if it remembered old battles too.
The strike landed—
—and the darkness split, not like flesh, but like liquid turning into more liquid. The impact didn't wound it.
It multiplied it.
The stain burst outward in branching streams, racing across the bay like living ink, leaping from wave to wave, turning the ocean into a highway for something hungry.
For the first time since he woke on that cliff, Māui felt a chill crawl under his skin.
"Ah," he said softly. "That's your trick."
The city sirens wailed louder.
Above, the spiral in the sky rotated faster, brightening as if it liked what it saw.
Māui lowered the Hook, watching the dark water spread.
Then he looked toward the city of glass towers and glowing streets—toward all those busy mortal lives—toward the world that had no idea it was about to be swallowed.
"Alright," he said, voice steady. "If water is your road… then I'll take your road away."
And Māui began running toward the neon shoreline, Hook blazing, tattoos shifting, already building a plan that only an ancient rule-breaker would dare.
Because if the new age had its own monsters—
—then it was about to remember what an old hero looked like.