Aoraki: My version

This is a story about Aoraki and his brothers, but it may be a tiny bit different to the version you may of heard. This is my version of the story.

 Me and my brothers got bored one day in the sky with our dad, Rakinui. Aoraki was the one with the brilliant idea to visit our mother, Papatūānuku. Oh, how I missed her. Every day, every night, every second. What can I say? I’m a mummy’s boy. We packed our gear, everything we would need. We spent hours everyday behind our fathers back making a waka big enough for us all to fit. Oh, did I mention he doesn’t know we’re going? We knew we were going to get in trouble, but I didn’t care, and neither did my brothers. Aoraki was the mastermind behind this plan, but if anyone asked, we did it together. I looked up to my eldest brother, admired him, I really did. Now you’re all caught up, let’s skip to the day, today, when we finally finished the waka. We celebrated and cheered, for finally our waka was done! We didn’t care if our father heard us, although we should have.

We hopped on the boat that had beautiful pounamu eyes of Aoraki, who was carved from wood and stuck on our mast. We said the incantation and we descended slowly out of the clouds and down to the water. Suddenly, we heard the angry roar of Rakinui. But we did not regret what we had done. We were off. We sailed on for hours and hours, looking for our mother, not realising that we wouldn’t find her. The waves got rougher and rougher, turning the waka side to side and making me seasick, and scared. I was scared out of my mind, and so were my brothers. Except Aoraki. He put on a brave facade but he couldn’t fool us, his brothers. We pleaded with him to go back home, and although he was sad about it, he saw the fear in our faces and decided that we would go back. There were shouts while we tried to steady ourselves enough to do the incantation. 

But as we were about to say the incantation, the backslash hit us. If we went up to the sky, we would face dad’s wrath. We hesitated to say the incantation, and our father took his chance in our one moment of hesitation. A strong gust of wind hit us, not any wind, wind strong enough to tip our boat, strong enough that we knew that this was purposeful. Our father was made at us for leaving, and now he was teaching us a lesson. The boat turned, and we went under. We scrambled to the top of the overturned waka so we wouldn’t drown. We stayed like this for hours, pleading with our mother to help us, apologising to our father. But no help came. We turned as stiff as ice, and turned to stone. Our waka became the south island, while we became the mountains there, while our brother stood tall above as, as he did in god form, as he did now as a mountain.