Lina’s heart ached with a strange, impossible empathy for this creature. “Then why are you like this with me?” she whispered, her fingers tightening on his arm. “Why do you wait? You have more power than I can imagine, yet you act like… like you serve me.”
He turned his full body to face her, his immense frame blocking out the last of the sunset. He looked down at her, and the fiery intensity in his eyes softened into something that looked like a gentle, profound reverence.
“Because that is the oldest law, the one even I cannot break,” he said, his voice dropping to an intimate murmur that vibrated through her. “The power I wield could shatter a mortal will. The firstmangkukulam, in her wisdom, bound me not just to serve, but to revere the agency of the one who calls. My strength is a storm, Linang. The covenant demands that you, and you alone, command its direction. I can protect you. I can provide for you. But I can never choose for you. My will is bound completely to your desire.” He paused, and the weight of his final words hung in the air between them. “For this season that I am yours.”
The revelation struck her with the force of a physical blow. His deference was not a condition of his servitude; it was the ultimate expression of his respect. After a lifetime of having her choices stripped away, of having her will subjugated by a man who claimed to love her, this magnificent, terrible being was offering her absolute power. He had made her a queen in this small, perfect kingdom, and he would not move without her decree.
In that moment, a profound shift occurred within her. The last vestiges of the victim she had been were burned away, replaced by the woman she was becoming. A woman of power, of choice, of desire. And she desired him.
She slid her hand from his arm up to the nape of his neck, her fingers tangling in the cool, heavy silk of his black hair. She pulled his head down to hers. His fiery eyes widened slightly, not in protest, but in solemn, waiting acknowledgment of her choice. She rose on her toes and pressed her lips to his.
The kiss was an explosion - firm, electric, tasting of ozone and incense. Power arced between them, a circuit completed at last. He did not kiss her back at first; he simply allowed it, his body a monument of restrained energy, surrendering to her command. But she felt the inferno banked within him, a storm held in check just for her. Emboldened, she deepened the kiss, and a low growl rumbled in his chest - a sound of ancient hunger, finally unshackled.
His arms came around her, pulling her flush against him. The sheer strength in his embrace was both terrifying and thrilling, yet she knew, with absolute certainty, he would not harm her. He was a force of nature, and she was its epicenter.
Without breaking the kiss, she led him toward the bedroom, the moonlight painting silver across the lilac sheets. In his eyes, she saw her own reflection: a woman alight with a power she was just beginning to understand. She shed her dress, standing before him unashamed, her body a testament to her survival.
He reached for her, but she paused him with a glance - her desire, her decision, her command. The air between them shimmered, thick with promise and restraint, as she drew him close. The sigils beneath his skin burned with amber light beneath her touch, illuminating the darkness between them.
The night closed around them, moonlight and shadow twining as their bodies came together at her bidding. For the first time, Lina understood what it meant to be both storm and sea, power and surrender - and in the space between lightning strikes, she finally let herself drown.
Ancestral Echoes
She was torn from the dream with a violence that left her gasping in the pale moonlight of her own bedroom. One moment she was on a storm-lashed shore, the shriek of the wind a physical blow against her eardrums; the next, she was tangled in lilac silk sheets, the only sound the frantic, ragged pull of her own breath. The transition was so abrupt it felt like a death. A phantom taste, acrid and coppery, coated her tongue - the taste of her own blood, offered in desperation. Her skin was clammy and cold, slick with a ghostlyseawater that evaporated into the quiet air of the sanctuary. She sat bolt upright, her heart hammering a frantic, discordant rhythm against her ribs.
Her hands flew to her face, her chest, searching for injuries that were not there. Her fingernails ached with the memory of digging into wet, coarse sand, of clawing sigils into the earth. She looked down at her hands in the silvered darkness. They were clean, the nails short and neat. There was no dirt, no blood. The ghost sensations were more real than the reality of the room, and the dissonance made a wave of vertigo wash over her. It was a memory, she realized, but one she had not lived. It was a scar on her bloodline.
The blood-dark talisman, a constant, gentle warmth against her sternum, flared with a sudden, intense heat. It was not the searing brand of Ramon’s judgment, but a responsive pulse, a thrum of shared energy that seemed to acknowledge the vision she had just endured. The heat spread through her chest, a steadying force against the disorienting chill of the dream.
A flicker of movement in the darkest corner of the room drew her eye. The shadows there seemed to deepen, to gather and churn as if the darkness itself were inhaling. From that vortex of absolute black, his form began to coalesce. He did not step into the light, but rather wove himself from it and its absence. First, the impossible height, the broad shoulders that seemed to pull at the room’s dimensions. Then the skin, not bronze tonight, but the color of wet obsidian, with the familiar luminous sigils pulsing beneath the surface like captive constellations. His face was a mask of inhuman perfection, but as his gaze found her, as he registered the tremor in her hands and the wildness in her eyes, the illusion of stability wavered. For a terrifying, breathtaking second, his features blurred, dissolving into something more primal - his skin the texture of ancient, charred wood, his hair a cascade of shadow and smoke, his eyes not volcanic glass but two burning, crimson embers.The shift was so subtle and so swift she might have imagined it, but the raw, elemental power she felt from him in that instant was undeniable. He was a piece of the world’s ancient, untamed soul wearing the shape of a man.
The vision passed. He was Maruz again, magnificent and contained, and he moved toward the bed, his bare feet making no sound on the polished hardwood floor. The scent of ozone and night-blooming jasmine, his constant atmosphere, filled the room, a familiar comfort.
“Linang,” he said, his voice a low vibration that seemed to calm the frantic beating of her heart. “You are distressed.”
His eyes, now a deep, molten amber, held a question. He stopped at the foot of the bed, a respectful distance, giving her space, but his entire presence was focused on her, a shield against the dream’s lingering horrors.
The words tumbled out of her, a frantic, desperate need to give the vision form, to make it real for someone other than herself. “I was someone else. Or she was me.” She pushed a trembling hand through her hair. “Her name was Ligaya. The dream… it was her life. Her memory.”
She described the beach, not the peaceful white sand of her current home, but a shore of black volcanic grit under a sky the color of a fresh bruise. The storm was a monster, the wind tearing at Ligaya’s thin clothes, the rain coming down in horizontal sheets that stung like thrown gravel. She spoke of Ligaya’s husband, a man whose face was lost to the dream’s shadows but whose cruelty was a palpable thing. A local chieftain who wore Spanish lace at his collar and used a silver-pommeled cane to beat his wife for speaking her native tongue too loudly.
“She was trapped,” Lina whispered, her voice cracking as she relived Ligaya’s suffocation. “He kept her locked away. She was his property, his symbol of success with his new masters. He took everything from her - her family, her faith, her name. He called her by a Christian name she refused to answer to.”
Maruz listened, his perfect face an unreadable mask, but the amber in his eyes churned, a slow, building fire.
Lina’s voice grew stronger as she described the ritual. “It wasn’t like the one Nanay Rosita taught me. It was… messy. Desperate. She had pried a driftwood crucifix from the wall of his precious chapel, then defaced it - carving the holy symbol into something ancient and forbidden. She was whispering prayers, but they were all mixed up - prayers to the old spirits of the mountain and the sea, mixed with broken Latin she must have overheard.” Lina held up her own hand, remembering the feel of the cold, tarnished silver. “Her palm split open against obsidian’s edge, and crimson droplets fell onto the carved face of the crucifix. Each drop sizzled against the wood like rain on hot stone. The bleeding god and the bleeding woman became one. I watched her transform their holiest symbol into a conduit for something older, something they had tried to bury beneath their churches and their saints.”
She fell silent, exhausted by the telling, the last image of blood on silver burning behind her eyelids. She looked at Maruz, searching his face for denial, for an explanation.
He inclined his head, a slow, solemn gesture of acknowledgment. “It was not a dream, Linang. It was a memory, carried in your blood and awakened by the talisman. You saw the night of the first bargain.” A strange, complex emotion entered his voice, something that sounded almost like pride. “Ligaya. She was the first of your line to name me. She did not have a teacher. She had only fragments of the old waysand the rage of a cornered animal. What you saw… it was exactly as it happened.”
He took a step closer to the bed, the air around him shimmering with the force of his own memory. “She was clever,” he murmured, the words carrying a profound, weary admiration. “The pacts of the old world were simple. Blood for judgment. But she… she wove the power of her oppressors into the binding. By bleeding on their holy symbol, she anchored me to this world in a way I had never been before. She tied my judgment not just to her pain, but to the very concept of unjust power. She found loopholes in the ancient laws that even I had not known existed.”
He finally reached the side of the bed and sat on its edge. The mattress dipped under his considerable weight. The heat from his body was a comforting, solid presence in the cool room.
“After her husband was… redacted… she did not hide what she had done. She found other women like her. Wives of the collaborators, women a priest had wronged, daughters sold to cruel husbands. She taught them the words. She showed them how to forge their pain into a key. She was the one who named us the Sisterhood. She did not create a weapon for herself. She created a refuge.”
Lina stared at him, at this magnificent, terrible being who spoke of her ancestor with such reverence. The pieces clicked into place. This wasn’t just a demonic pact. It was a legacy of rebellion, a secret history of defiance passed down from mother to daughter, a covenant forged in the heart of a storm by a woman named Ligaya. And now, it was hers. The talisman pulsed warmly against her skin, no longer a symbol of a desperate choice, but the badge of an ancient, sacred duty.
