“You will prepare a place for it,” Rosita explained. “You will anoint yourself. You will speak the words to open the gate. Once summoned, it will find the man you have named. It will look into his soul, and it will judge him. It weighs the pain he has inflicted against the worth of his life. If he is found truly deserving, it will unmake him. It will strip the flesh from his spirit and drag what is left back to the place from which it came.” The old woman’s description was delivered with the dispassionate clarity of a butcher describing her trade. “But it cannot linger. The pact allows it only a short season in this world before thetides of its own realm pull it back. It is a swift and terrible storm, and then it is gone.”
The thought of Ramon being… unmade… was a horrifying, beautiful image. A release so complete it was a kind of salvation. Lina’s breath hitched. She looked down at her trembling hands, laid flat on the dark wood of the table.
Nanay Rosita watched her for a moment longer, then nodded, a single, decisive jerk of her head. She turned and reached for a small, square box made of a wood so dark it was nearly black. It was covered in the same spidery carvings as her talisman. With a faint click, she opened the lid.
Inside, nestled on a bed of faded red velvet, lay a single stone. It was the size of a pigeon’s egg, polished to a high gloss. Its color was the deep, dark red of dried blood, with black veins that ran through it like cracks in a parched riverbed. It seemed to drink the candlelight, containing a depth that felt infinite. The candles in the room flared, casting Rosita’s face in a sudden, sharp relief as she lifted the stone from its resting place.
She held it out to Lina. “This will be yours, if you choose it.”
Lina stared at the object. It was beautiful and terrible. Her hand rose to meet it, her fingers shaking so badly she feared she would drop it. As her skin made contact, a shock went through her - not of cold, but of warmth. A deep, pulsing heat emanated from the stone, as if it held a living heart within it. The warmth was not burning; it was intimate, a feeling that spread from her palm up her arm, chasing away the chill of her fear. It felt like a recognition.
Rosita placed the talisman gently into Lina’s palm and curled her own weathered fingers over Lina’s, pressing the stone into her flesh. “The choice must be yours alone,” themangkukulamsaid, her voice now a low, serious command. “Go home. Feel itsweight. Understand what you are inviting into your life. The ritual will bind you to it, and it to you.” Her eyes held a final, dire warning. “Return at dusk tomorrow if you decide to learn the words. And prepare yourself. Once you hold the key, the demon’s attention will be on you, even from across the veil.”
Lina could not speak. She could only stare down at the talisman now resting in her hand. Its unnatural heat was a steady, living pulse against her skin. Her fingers, of their own volition, closed around it, a gesture of desperate, possessive finality. The stone fit her grip perfectly, as if it had been made for her. In its dark, polished surface, she saw her own reflection, distorted and shadowed, a woman on the precipice of becoming either a monster or a god. The dread was a cold ocean inside her, but for the first time in eight years, a fierce, hungry longing burned brighter.
Rituals of Binding
The night had not yet surrendered to the dawn when Lina left her apartment. A gray, bruised light bled at the horizon, but the streets of the barangay were still sunk in shadow and the quiet of exhausted sleep. She walked without hesitation, her path certain. In the pocket of her skirt, her hand was closed tight around the blood-dark talisman. It was no longer just warm; it pulsed with a slow, steady heat that seemed to beat in counter-rhythm to her own heart, a secret life cupped in her palm. The warmth seeped into her flesh,a strange and intimate violation that traveled up the tendons of her arm, making the fine hairs there stand on end.
The ground shifted under her sandals as she reached the edge of the neighborhood. The familiar dust and gravel gave way to the dead, black earth that surrounded themangkukulam’shut. The soil was soft, soundless, swallowing the noise of her approach. Ahead, the hut was a knot of deeper darkness against the lightening sky, a crooked shape that defied the straight lines of the world. No light showed from its single window, no smoke curled from its rusted tin roof, yet Lina knew the old woman was awake. She was waiting.
She stopped at the threshold, the warped wood of the door looming before her. The air here was cooler, carrying the damp scent of the nearby mangroves and the decay of the low tide. Lina pulled the talisman from her pocket. In the weak light, its polished surface seemed to drink the grayness, revealing nothing. She held it up, a desperate offering to a power she did not understand, and its heat intensified against her skin, a silent answer. She did not need to knock. The door creaked open of its own accord, a low groan of ancient wood that was both an invitation and a warning.
Lina stood in the doorway, a slight figure framed by the encroaching dawn. The cool morning air swirled at her back while the hut’s oppressive heat washed over her face. In the center of the room, by the dark slab of a table, Nanay Rosita sat as if she had not moved all night. She was a statue carved from river mud and secrets, her face a mask of ancient patience in the candlelight. Her eyes, two chips of obsidian, were fixed on Lina.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. It was a test. A final chance to turn and flee back to the life that was slowly killing her. Lina thought of Ramon’s voice on the phone, the possessive rage that saw betrayal in every shadow. She thought of his hands, his weight,the sterile, bleach-scoured emptiness of the home awaiting his return. The heat from the talisman in her hand was a promise. It was the only warmth she had felt in years that was not a precursor to pain.
She took a step forward, over the threshold and into the stifling, sacred dark. The door swung shut behind her, sealing her inside. Her shadow, cast long and thin by the dawn at her back, was devoured by the hut’s gloom.
Her knuckles were white where she gripped the stone. Her shoulders were rigid with a fear so profound it was almost calm. She met the old woman’s gaze, seeing her own desperate, determined face reflected in those unblinking black eyes.
“I want to learn,” she said. Her voice did not tremble. It was a low, steady thing, a stone dropped into a deep well, and it filled the space between them.
Nanay Rosita stared at her, her expression unreadable. The candlelight carved deep ravines into her weathered cheeks. Lina saw no approval in that gaze, no pity, no judgment. There was only the solemn, weary acceptance of a choice that had been made countless times before, by countless other women, in this very room. Themangkukulamgave a single, slow nod. The pact was sealed.
The instruction began without ceremony. Nanay Rosita rose from her stool and gestured for Lina to stand in the center of the room, on the packed-earth floor between the table and a collection of coiled baskets. The lesson was not one of theory, but of flesh and sound.
“The words come first,” Rosita said, her doubled voice filling the hut. “They are the key that turns in the lock. If the key is not cut correctly, the gate remains shut.”
She spoke the first incantation, and the sound that left her throat was nothing human. It was a grating, syllabic cascade that seemed to come from the earth itself, a language of stone and root and ancient sorrows. The words were full of hard stops and deep, rolling gutturals that Lina could not imagine her own mouth forming.
“Now you,” the old woman commanded.
Lina took a breath and tried to repeat the phrase. The sound that emerged was thin, hesitant, a pale imitation that died in the smoky air.
Rosita’s eyes narrowed. She moved with unnerving quickness, her small, hard hand coming up to cup Lina’s jaw. Her thumb pressed into the soft flesh beneath her chin, tilting her head back. “No. Not from the tongue. From here.” Her other hand, surprisingly strong, splayed across Lina’s abdomen, pressing inward just below her ribs. “The words must have a root. They must be born in the gut, where the fear lives.”
Lina’s skin flinched at the unexpected contact. Rosita’s touch was dry as dust, but a strange energy radiated from it. She tried again, forcing the sound from her diaphragm as the old woman’s fingers pressed harder. This time, the syllable that came out was rougher, deeper. She could feel it vibrate in her own chest, a startling, alien resonance.
“Better,” Rosita grunted, releasing her. They continued like that for what felt like hours, Rosita speaking a phrase, Lina echoing it, the old woman correcting her with firm, invasive touches to her throat, her jaw, her chest, forcing her body to learn the shape of the magic.
When Rosita was satisfied with the words, she moved on to the circle. She handed Lina a small bowl filled with coarse sea salt. “A perfect ring,” she instructed. “No breaks. Nothing may cross it unprepared.”
Lina knelt, her knees protesting on the hard floor. She let the salt trickle through her fingers, her hand shaking as she tried to form an unbroken line on the dark earth. It was harder than it looked. The circle wavered, too thick in some places, dangerously thin in others. She felt the old woman’s critical gaze on her back. Rosita said nothing, simply waited until Lina, sweating with concentration, finally completed the ring.
Next came the herbs, a mixture of dried leaves and petals that smelled of camphor and grave dirt. Rosita showed her how to crush them between her palms and scatter them at the four cardinal points within the salt line. Then came four small, pearlescent shells, their insides the color of a stormy sky. “From the deepest trenches,” Rosita explained. “They remember the pressure. They remember the dark.”
The circle was prepared. It seemed a fragile thing, a child’s drawing on the floor. Yet the air within it felt different, stiller, expectant. In the center, Rosita placed a shallow wooden chalice, its surface dark and stained.
