In the fog-draped valleys of Maoraki, where the stars pressed close enough to taste and the trees grew their roots skyward, there burrowed a kiwi that cultivated darkness.
The tribes called it Hine-nui-te-Pō , though it was no god—just a flightless bird with feathers like tilled soil and a beak that gleamed obsidian. Unlike its earthly cousins, this kiwi did not hunt insects. It planted shadows .
Each night, it paced the forest with methodical precision:
— Plunging its beak into the earth to sow fragments of expired starlight
— Tamping down the soil with clawed feet where nightmares threatened to sprout
— Harvesting the overripe darkness that gathered beneath murderers’ fingernails
Children who wandered too far from hearthlight would sometimes stumble upon its work—patches of ground so black they swallowed torch flames whole. The wise left offerings of glowworm larvae to mark these places, whispering "Kia ora, little plowman."
But when the British came with their surveyor’s chains and dynamite, the kiwi’s careful rows were disrupted. The newcomers laughed at the native warnings, blasting through sacred groves to build their railway.
That first midnight, the engineers awoke to a sound like a thousand seeds cracking open at once .
By dawn, every stretch of disturbed earth bore strange furrows—not from any plow they recognized, but unmistakably deliberate. And in the freshly turned soil, something glittered:
Teeth.
Not animal. Not human. But something older, each molar etched with constellations no longer visible in the southern sky.
The railway was abandoned by week’s end. Now when fog rolls thick through Maoraki, you can hear the methodical snick-snick of a beak turning soil. And if you’ve wronged the land, you might wake with your pockets full of black feathers...
...and the unsettling sense that something has been planted under your ribs.
