From outside the void’s edge, she saw spectral images flicker into being around her husband. Not ghosts, but echoes of sensation. A shimmering distortion in the air coalesced into the shape of a fist, and as it connected with Ramon’s phantom jaw, he cried out, stumbling back, his hand flying to his face. A bruise, dark and ugly, bloomed on his cheek, a phantom injury that was terribly real to him. He felt the dull, throbbing ache of it, the tender swelling, the press of it against the bone. He was being made to wear her pain.
The blood-dark talisman pulsed against Lina’s sternum, a steady, rhythmic beat of warmth that matched her own racing heart. Horror and a terrible, righteous vindication warred within her. To see him suffer was an abomination. To see him finally understand, to see the consequences of his casual cruelty made manifest, was a dark and intoxicating justice. She clutched a hand to her chest, feeling the heat of the stone through her dress, anchoring herself to the storm.
“This is the weight of your sins,” Maruz declared, his voice resonating with that same multilayered power Lina had first heard in NanayRosita’s hut. He was a force of nature, an agent of a covenant that stretched back through generations of suffering women. “Every tear she shed. Every silent plea. Every moment you made her feel worthless, small, and afraid. You will now carry it all.”
Inside the supernatural prison, Ramon began to shrink. It was not just a trick of the light. His broad, powerful shoulders hunched, his spine curving as if under an immense physical load. His skin seemed to lose its color, becoming gray and translucent. He was diminishing, his physical form eroding under the psychic weight of his own cruelty. He tried to run, his legs churning uselessly as if caught in deep mud. He clawed at the invisible walls of the void, his fingers finding no purchase, his screams swallowed by the absolute silence within. He was being unwritten, erased by the story he himself had authored on his wife’s body and soul.
Ramon broke. The relentless tide of spectral agony finally shattered the last vestiges of his pride, his rage, his very identity. He collapsed to his knees within the void, his diminished form shuddering with violent, wracking sobs. The phantom bruises covering his body seemed to ache with a fresh intensity. Tears, hot and real, carved clean tracks through the sweat and grime on his face.
“Lina! I’m sorry!” he howled, his voice a raw, shredded thing. He clawed at the nothingness before him, trying to reach her, his gaze finally locking on her form standing outside his personal hell. “Please, forgive me! I’ll change, I swear! I’ll be better! Don’t let him do this!Mahal… please!” The endearment, once a weapon, was now the desperate plea of a dying animal.
Maruz, who had been observing the judgment with the dispassionate focus of a god, turned his head. The infernal light of the sigils cast his bronze skin in shades of blood and fire. He looked at Lina, not with triumph, but with a profound, ancient solemnity. His fiery eyes were not gloating; they were waiting.
“His fate is sealed,” the demon said, his voice a quiet rumble that cut through Ramon’s pathetic sobs. “The pact is satisfied. But you may speak final words to him, if you wish. The end is yours to witness, or to turn from.”
He was giving her a choice. Even now, he was affirming her power. She was not just the catalyst for this event; she was its arbiter. Lina pushed herself to her feet, her legs trembling from a combination of shock, adrenaline, and a grief she had not expected. The burn on her chest where the talisman rested was a dull, comforting ache. She walked slowly, deliberately, to the edge of the void. The absolute darkness seemed to cool the air before it. She looked down at the man who had been her husband. He was so small now, a crumpled, weeping caricature of the tyrant who had terrorized her for eight years. He looked up at her, his face a mess of tears and desperation, a child begging for mercy. There was no hatred left in her for this creature. There was only a vast, hollow sadness.
Her voice, when she spoke, was steady. It was a stranger’s voice, calm and clear, carrying across the supernatural boundary with perfect dignity.
“I once loved you, Monching.”
He stopped crying, his breath hitching, hope and confusion warring on his ruined face.
“I remember when we first met,” she continued, her gaze turned inward, to a past he had forced her to bury. “At the town fiesta. You spent your last fifty pesos to win me a stupid stuffed bear from a carnival game. You were so proud.” A ghost of a smile touched her lips, fragile and fleeting. “I remember our first apartment, the one with the leaky roof. After that big typhoon, the streets were flooded, and you carried me two blocks on your back so my feet wouldn’t get wet. You were laughing the whole time.”
She took a breath, her trembling hands clasping in front of her. “On the beach in Laiya, the night you asked me to marry you, you promised you would always be my shield. You promised you would build a world for me where I would never be afraid again.” Her voice broke, just for a second, on the word ‘afraid’. “I loved that man. I believed his promises. I don’t know where he went, Ramon. I don’t know when he died, and this other person, the one who hides my keys and calls me a whore, took his place.”
She looked at him one last time, meeting his pleading, terrified eyes. “I mourn him. I mourn what we could have been.”
And with that, she turned her back. The gesture was absolute, an act of closure more profound than any shout or accusation. She walked away from the void, from him, from the entire wasted landscape of her marriage. The movement was a signal.
Behind her, she did not need to see. She felt it. A final, absolute compression of the darkness. Maruz did not move, but the void itself seemed to inhale, drawing its contents into its core. There was no scream. There was no struggle or flash of light. Ramon Delos Santos, and all the pain he had caused and felt, simply ceased to be. He was a story that had reached its end, a sentence that had been erased from the page of the world.
The void collapsed in on itself, winking out of existence with a soft, final *pop*, like a soap bubble bursting. The crimson sigils on the walls flared brightly for a moment, then faded into nothing, leaving the peeling paint and water stains of the apartment behind. The phantom sound of the sea vanished. The immense, impossible space contracted, and Lina was standing once again in her small, cramped living room. It was over. The room fell into a silence so profound it was a physical presence, broken only by the shuddering, uneven sound of her own breathing.
In the deafening silence that followed, Lina felt untethered, a ship cut from its anchor and set adrift on a strange, silent sea. The apartment was just an apartment again, small and smelling of bleach, but every object in it seemed alien, artifacts from a life that was no longer hers. She stared at the spot where the void had been, half-expecting a scorch mark, a tear in the fabric of the world. There was nothing. Only the scuffed wood floor and a single, forgotten chocolate from the box Ramon had brought, lying half-melted on the counter.
Maruz stood by the window, a towering silhouette against the city’s jaundiced glow. He was respectful of her silence, granting her the space to process the cataclysm she had unleashed. His form seemed less stable now that the judgment was complete. At the edges of his powerful frame, the air shimmered, and for a moment, his perfect human features blurred into something more elemental - a glimpse of swirling smoke, of ancient wood, of starlight seen through blackwater. The fire in his eyes had banked, leaving only embers that glowed with a profound, weary knowledge. He had seen this ending, or one like it, countless times before.
It was Lina who moved first. Her limbs felt heavy, disconnected, but an instinct deeper than thought propelled her forward. She needed to feel something solid, something real in this new, formless world. She needed to touch the eye of the storm. She walked toward him, her bare feet making soft, whispering sounds on the floor. He did not turn, but she knew he was aware of her every breath, every hesitant step.
She stopped just behind him. The heat radiating from his body was a palpable presence, a hearth in the cold room. She raised a hand, her fingers trembling. The skin was still raw and chapped from her frantic cleaning, a testament to the life that had just ended. Slowly, hesitantly, she reached out and laid her palm against the expanse of his bronze back.
The contact was an electric shock, a grounding current that shot up her arm and anchored her entire being. His skin was impossibly hot, a living, breathing furnace that hummed with a power she could feel in her bones. Beneath her palm, she felt the slow, steady shift of muscle, solid and real. This was no phantom. This was the creature who had answered her call. He did not flinch or move away. He simply stood, allowing her touch, accepting it.
Emboldened, her trembling fingers sought more purchase, tracing the sharp line of his shoulder blade. She stepped closer, pressing her cheek against his back, and a sob she hadn’t known was coming escaped her. It was a sound of grief, of release, of terror, of a gratitude so profound it was painful. He finally turned then, his movements fluid and deliberate. He gathered her into his arms, pulling her against his chest.
She was enveloped. Her fragile, bruised body was lost against the solid wall of his. His heat surrounded her, a shield against the cold ghosts of her past. She buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder, breathing in his impossible scent of night-blooming jasmine, ozone, and something else, something ancient and wild like a deep forest after a rain. He held her with a strength that was absolute yet gentle, one hand splayed across her back in a gesture of pure sanctuary. In his arms, for the first time in nearly a decade, she felt safe. Utterly and completely safe.
Later, as the city outside began to stir with the first noises of a new day, they sat on the sofa. A respectful distance remained between them, but the air was charged with their new intimacy.
“It is done,” Maruz said, his voice a low, soft vibration. “His life has been… redacted.”
Lina looked at her hands, which were resting, calm now, in her lap. “What happens now? His family… his work…”
“His memory is a thread I have pulled from the tapestry of the world,” Maruz explained, his fiery gaze fixed on some point beyond the wall. The story now written into the world’s memory is that he never reached Manila. A fight with a fellow crewman, too much to drink at the last port, a reckless decision to jump ship for better pay elsewhere - then a moonless night, a slippery deck, the silent indifference of deep water. As far as anyone knows, Ramon Delos Santos simply walked away from his marriage, took what he could carry, and disappeared without a trace. It is assumed he took a job on an unregistered vessel and was lost at sea. It happens all the time.” He turned his gaze to her, and the embers in his eyes held a flicker of something akin to care. “His bank accounts, this apartment, and certain assets you never knew he possessed - it all defaults to you, his abandoned wife. No one will question it. No one will come looking for him.”
The totality of it was staggering. He had not just killed a man; he had surgically removed him from reality, leaving behind a clean, neat scar that told a plausible lie. She was free. The thought was so vast, so blinding, it was terrifying.
