“He will arrive before the next sunset,” Maruz stated, his voice a low vibration that traveled through the floor and up her spine. “When he crosses the threshold of this place you have claimed, his life is forfeit. I will unmake him, as the pact demands.”
Lina could only nod, her throat too tight for words.
“But the pact allows more,” he continued, taking another slow, deliberate step toward her. He was close enough now that she could see the swirling amber fire in the black glass of his eyes. “My judgment is swift. My presence is not. I am bound to this world for a season, tied to the one who summoned me. To you.”
A season. The word was both a comfort and a terror. He was not just an executioner who would perform his task and vanish. He was a consequence that would linger. She looked at this being of terrifying beauty and power, and tried to imagine him here, in her home, for weeks. For months. The walls of the apartment seemed to tremble, the very structure struggling to contain the scale of his existence. A glass of water on the kitchen counter vibrated, its surface stirred into frantic, concentric rings.
“I will remain,” he said, and it was a promise, a sentence, and a vow.
Lina’s hands were shaking, not with the memory of Ramon’s rage, but with the reality of her own. She had done this. She had called thismagnificent, lethal storm into her life, and now she had to stand in its eye. She squeezed her eyes shut, a useless defense, and when she opened them again, he had not moved. He was still watching her, his gaze stripping her down to the bone, seeing not the trembling woman but the summoner, the gatekeeper, the mistress of his temporary doom.
The silence stretched, thick and alive. Maruz stood like a statue of judgment, his presence a tectonic plate shifting beneath the foundation of her world. Lina’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. But beneath the terror, something else was taking root. A fierce, defiant curiosity. This being was hers. She had called him with her blood and her pain. She would not cower from him.
She pushed herself off the wall, the movement stiff at first, then more fluid. She took a step away from the plaster and into the open space of the room, into his domain. He had stopped his circling and turned his full attention to her. In the fiery depths of his eyes, she saw a flicker of something she couldn’t name - not surprise, exactly, but a re-evaluation, a shift in his ancient calculus. He had expected a victim. He was being faced with a survivor.
Her fear had not vanished, but it had changed shape, condensing from a paralyzing fog into a sharp, clear point of focus. “It wasn’t just the hitting,” she said, her voice quiet but carrying in the charged air. “That was only... the punctuation.” She walked toward him, her bare feet silent on the floor, stopping just a few feet away. “The worst partwas the waiting. The silence. The sound of his car in the driveway, and not knowing which man would be walking through the door. The good husband, or the other one.”
She hugged her arms around herself, a reflexive gesture of protection that she immediately forced herself to release. “He would hide my keys. Or my phone. Just small things, to make me feel like I was losing my mind. He would tell our friends that I was… emotional. Fragile.” The words, which had shamed her for so long, were now just facts. Evidence. “He made the world very small, until this apartment was all of it, and he was the only person in it.”
Maruz listened, his inhuman face a mask of perfect stillness. The only movement was the slow churning of the amber fire in his eyes. When she finished, he inclined his head, a gesture of solemn acknowledgment.
“I have witnessed centuries of such cruelty,” he said, and the resonant vibration of his voice sank into her, a strange and terrible comfort. “The patterns repeat. The excuses are always the same. Your suffering is known to me,Linang.”
The old name,Linang, was a key turning a lock deep inside her. It unlocked a grief so sharp and sudden it made her gasp. A tear escaped, hot on her cheek. This ancient, infernal thing understood her in a way no one else ever had. Not Carmela, with her worried pity. Not the Kapitan, with his empty promises. He knew the shape of her pain because he had seen it carved into the souls of a thousand other women.
A new boldness seized her. He had to see. He had to bear witness not just to her words, but to the text written on her body. “Look,” she whispered. She pulled the thin strap of her nightgown to the side, baring the dark, plum-colored bruise on her shoulder. “This was last time. For being too quiet.”
She turned slightly, letting the candlelight catch the faint, silvery traces on her back, near her shoulder blade. “This one is older. From a pot of boiling water he threw at the wall beside my head. A few drops splashed.” She traced another mark, a small, circular scar on her forearm, pale against her warm brown skin. “A cigarette. Because I looked at another man at the market for too long.”
As she spoke, recounting this litany of quiet atrocities, the air in the room grew cold. It was a deep, biting cold that had nothing to do with a change in temperature and everything to do with a shift in power. It crept from the corners of the room, a killing frost that leached the warmth from the air. The single lit candle flame, which had been burning hot and high, began to sputter, and a thin, perfect web of ice bloomed on the inside of the windowpane, stark against the humid Manila night. His rage was no longer a furnace. It was the absolute zero of the void.
Lina finished, her hand still resting on the cigarette burn. She looked up at him, at his face, which was now a mask of breathtaking, lethal fury. He was beautiful and terrible, a god of righteous vengeance. And in that moment, she felt a surge of something she had never allowed herself to feel before: pride. She had survived this. She had endured it. And now, she had a champion.
Her hand left her own arm and moved through the frigid air between them. Her fingers, still chapped and raw from the bleach, trembled but did not falter. She reached out and laid her palm flat against the hard, sculpted muscle of his forearm.
The shock was instantaneous, a jolt of pure energy that arced up her arm and straight into her heart. His skin was not cold. It was intensely, impossibly hot, a living forge beneath her touch. It was the heat of a sun, of a star’s core, a fundamental power that hummed against her palm. Where her fingers made contact, the luminous bronze of hisskin flared, the sigils beneath the surface glowing with a sudden, fierce intensity. She felt his power, raw and untamed, and it did not frighten her. It thrilled her. It was a connection, freely chosen. This was her decision, her touch, her claim. For the first time, an act of intimacy was an expression of her own power, not a surrender to someone else’s. The thing Ramon had always feared, his deepest, most paranoid delusion, was beginning to take shape not as a betrayal, but as her salvation. And she savored the sweet, forbidden rightness of it.
Hours bled into one another, measured only by the slow march of the candle’s flame toward its base. The killing cold had long since receded, leaving a strange, placid calm in its wake. They sat on the low taupe sofa, the space between them charged but no longer fraught with terror. Lina had talked until her voice was raw, unspooling the tangled, ugly story of her marriage. And he had listened, his magnificent, monstrous presence a constant, validating force in the encroaching dark. He spoke of his own long existence, of the covenants he’d kept and the judgments he’d delivered, his voice a river of time that carried her far away from the shores of her own small life.
The first hint of dawn began to stain the edges of the drawn curtains, a pale, sickly gray against the black. Exhaustion was a physical weight on Lina, pressing down on her eyelids, making her bones ache. She fought it, unwilling to cede a single moment of this new reality to the oblivion of sleep. To sleep felt like a return to the world where she was alone.
Maruz, who sat with an inhuman stillness that was absolute, turned his head. The faint light caught the sharp, perfect planes of his face. “You are fading, Linang,” he said, his voice a soft rumble.
“I don’t want to sleep,” she confessed, the admission childish but true.
“Your body is mortal. It requires rest,” he stated, his tone gentle but firm. His voice deepened. “The judgment comes with darkness. Face it rested, not hollowed.” A shiver traced her spine. In mere hours, Ramon’s key would turn in that lock, and nothing would ever be the same. Whatever strength she’d gathered in this strange night with Maruz, she would need it all.
She finally surrendered, her head drooping, the last of her adrenaline draining away. The sofa, a piece of furniture she associated with lonely nights and tense silences, felt different now, a sanctuary. As her consciousness frayed at the edges, she slipped into a dream that was not a dream at all, but a memory carried in her blood.
The cliff’s edge crumbled beneath her feet, black volcanic sand cascading down to where waves devoured the shore with angry hisses. Above, stars she’d never seen pierced a sky bruised purple like her own skin after Ramon’s rage. Salt mingled with loamy earth and night-blooming flowers in the primal air. At the precipice knelt a woman - the same one from her earlier vision, first of their shared blood. Ritualistic scars mapped constellations across skin stretched over arms that, though thin, rippled with hard-won strength. When the woman turned seaward, Lina gasped at her own face staring back - aged by suffering, hollowed by fury, every softness carved away by the knife of survival.
Arms thrust skyward, the woman’s throat tore open with ancient syllables that rode the salt wind. The sea answered. From its churning depths rose something neither water nor air - a pillar of mist shotthrough with cold blue light, save for twin points of ember-red that fixed upon her like a predator’s gaze. This was Maruz before he wore the mask of humanity: pure appetite clothed in the archipelago’s oldest magic. The obsidian blade flashed once across her palm. Dark droplets spattered the talisman clutched in her other hand, and as they struck, the column of vapor gathered substance, coalescing into something that could leave the water and walk upon the shore. With that first step onto land, the pact was sealed.
Then, the dream shifted. The ancient shore faded, and the firstmangkukulamwas standing before Lina in the void, her eyes burning with a desperate urgency. She reached out, her fingers feeling as real as Maruz’s touch had been. “He is a tool, but a tool has its own desires,” the woman whispered across the chasm of centuries, her voice a dry rustle of leaves. “The power you have claimed is a fire. It will warm you, but it will also consume what you feed it. Be careful, daughter.” Her grip tightened on Lina’s arm. “The price is always higher than you think.”
Lina woke with a gasp, her body jerking on the sofa. The ancestor’s warning echoed in the sudden, jarring silence of her own apartment. The room was bathed in the thin, watery light of a Manila dawn. For a disoriented second, she felt a spike of pure panic, convinced she was alone, that the night had been a fever dream.
Then she saw him. He was still there, sitting in the same spot, watching her. His form seemed less solid in the daylight, the edges of his bronze skin blurring slightly into the shadows, but his presence was undiminished. His fiery eyes held a profound, thoughtful expression as he gazed at her, and she had the unsettling feeling that he had watched her dream.
