Hi'iaka

Pele had once slipped away from her own body in spirit, travelled in secret to a hula at Kauai, and won the young chief Lohiau as a husband. She left him after a few nights together with a promise that a messenger would come for him. Back among her own household at the crater, Pele called for a volunteer to fetch him, and only Hiiaka came forward. She asked for a god's own power to survive the journey and was given it, though the forty days Pele allowed for the whole errand would prove far too few.

Crossing Hawaii by the upland path, Hiiaka first had to clear it of hostile mo'o. With the war gods Kuliliaukaua and Kekakoi and three conch shell blowers at her side, she fought and beat one monster after another: the mo'o woman Panaewa, who blocked her three times over as fog, as driving rain, then as a candlenut tree, before Hiiaka trapped her and her followers in a tangle of vines; two more mo'o, Kiha and Puaaloa, caught in a flood of lava whose shapes still show there; a shark that had been seizing swimmers at Waipio, hunted down and killed; and Moolau, a mo'o chief, among them. On Molokai and Oahu she hunted down Kikipua, a mo'o who stole men from their wives and lured travellers to their deaths across a false bridge made of her own tongue, laying her own skirt down as a true bridge in its place, and greeted the standing rocks Makapuu and Malei on Oahu's shore as her own supernatural kin.

At Kauai the news was already grim: Lohiau had died of grief after the woman who came to him at the hula vanished. Two women of Honopu had stolen his body and hidden it in a cave high on the cliff at Kalalau. Hiiaka caught his spirit as it fluttered loose and destroyed the two women with a chant, then she and her companion Omao climbed the cliff and chanted for ten days while people below danced the hula in time with them. At the end of it Lohiau was alive again, and the three came down from the cliff on a rainbow and washed clean in the sea. The return journey still lay ahead, the forty days already spent, and at sea between Kauai and Oahu the shark gods Kua and Kaholeakane and the sea goddess Moananuikalehua raised a storm to keep their kinswoman from marrying a mortal.

Two of Hiiaka's companions went ahead of her to tell Pele why the journey home was taking so long, and Pele, too furious to wait for an explanation, burned them both to death on the spot. Then, at the very edge of the crater and in full view of her own sister, Hiiaka let Lohiau embrace her, the first time she had allowed it. Pele ordered her own sisters to burn him for it; they refused, unwilling to harm someone so beautiful. She called on her fire gods next, and when they defied her too and blew the flames away, she banished them for their disloyalty to the bare lands of Hulinuu, where they took to the sea afterwards and became canoe builders in other lands.

Finally Pele closed on the two lovers herself and wrapped them both in flame. Hiiaka's body was divine and could not be burned, but Lohiau's could, and it was consumed. So Hiiaka went after his spirit a second time, digging straight down through the earth. At the first layer she passed the god of suicide; at the fourth she found the bodies of the same two friends burned earlier, and brought them back to life on her way past. She was about to break through the tenth layer when Wahine-omao stopped her, warning that it would let water in on her sister. Lohiau's spirit had already fled overseas by then, first to Kauai, where he told his friend Paoa to go to Pele, then on to Laa in Kahiki, where Kanemilohai, left there to guard the edge of the islands, caught him and restored him to life. He was listless at first, until Laa's two bird messengers, Plover and Turnstone, stirred his interest in the world again, and he and Hiiaka were reunited at last at Pele-ula's home.