Surprise flickered across his face. It was not a grand expression, but a minute, unguarded shift in the muscles around his eyes, a crack in the stoic mask he had worn for centuries. The fiery amber lights deep within his volcanic-glass gaze pulsed once, brightly. For a being who had witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations, who understood the intricate mechanics of human cruelty, this simple, heartfelt admission was something utterly new.
“No human has ever seen me as you do,” he murmured, and his voice was different. The layers of command, seduction, and ancient authority were gone, leaving only a resonant baritone, raw with a vulnerability that stole her breath.
He drew her to him then, his movements still imbued with that liquid, predatory grace, but it was a movement not of possession, but of supplication. He pulled her from her sitting position and into his embrace, his other arm circling her back, pressing her body against his. The cold of him was a shock, a deep, consuming chill that seemed to sink into her bones. But beneath it, there was a desperate strength, a need that went far beyond the physical. She wrapped her arms around his massive torso, trying to hold him together with the sheer force of her will. She buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder, inhaling his familiar, intoxicating scent of rare incense and sea salt. It was the scent of her salvation and her damnation, and she no longer knew the difference.
They stood entwined in the shifting shadows, a mortal woman and a fading god, their bodies pressed together. The bargain that had bound them was a thing of blood and power, a contract. This was something else entirely. This was a choice. A connection forged not in a ritual circle, but here, in the quiet intimacy of shared pain. He was her demon, and she was his last believer.
The morning arrived with a brutal, indifferent sun. The light streamed into the marble room, chasing away the shadows and the profoundintimacy of the night before, leaving Lina feeling exposed and raw. This was it. The last day. Tonight, the moon would be full, a silent, silver judge in the sky, and the bargain would come to its end. He would be taken from her.
She rose from the bed, her body aching with a tension that had settled deep in her bones. The space beside her was empty and cool. He was somewhere in the house, a fading presence, his existence now a clock ticking down its final hours. She walked to the wardrobe and selected a simple, unadorned cotton dress, the color of sand. It draped over her curves, hiding the talisman that rested heavy and cool against the hollow of her throat. It was the dress of the woman she used to be, a fragile armor for the mission she had to undertake.
The walk into the village was a disorienting journey through a world that no longer felt like hers. The packed-earth path was the same, the crowing of roosters and the distant laughter of children playing by the well were the same, but she was different. She saw Tita Letty sweeping the porch of her sari-sari store, her gaze sharp and assessing, and felt a chasm open between them. She was a keeper of secrets that would make the barangay’s worst gossip seem like a child’s tale. She was a woman who conversed with demons and dreamt of murder.
Nanay Rosita’s hut stood at the very edge of the community, where the tended paths gave way to untamed wilderness. It seemed to lean into the shade of the forest, half in the world of people, half in the world of spirits. A trio of skinny cats watched her approach with unnervingly intelligent eyes from a patch of sun on the cracked porch tiles. The air here was different, thick with the scent of woodsmoke, drying herbs, and the faint, metallic tang of blood or copper. Despite the bright daylight, she could see the flicker of candles burning within, their small flames defiant against the sun.
She paused at the door, her hand raised to knock, but before her knuckles could touch the weathered wood, it swung inward on silent hinges. Nanay Rosita stood there, a hunched and wizened figure, her dark, penetrating eyes fixing on Lina with an expression that held no surprise. She simply nodded, a silent invitation, and stepped aside.
Lina explained her purpose in a low, strained voice, the words feeling clumsy and inadequate in the face of the hut’s ancient knowledge. She spoke of the full moon deadline, of Maruz’s fading form, of the choice he had laid before her. Finally, her voice dropping to a near whisper, she confessed the true heart of her dilemma. “I… I have grown attached to him.”
Nanay Rosita listened without interruption, her expression impassive. She was stirring a small, dark pot that simmered over a low flame, the liquid inside a murky, fragrant black. The slow, rhythmic scrape of her wooden spoon against the clay was the only sound.
When Lina finished, the old woman ladled the steaming liquid into two small, handleless cups. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was as raspy and dry as the herbs hanging above them. “Such attachments to demons always end in tragedy,anak. That is the first lesson, and the last.” She placed one of the cups into Lina’s trembling hands. “The Sisterhood exists because we understand the price. What he offers you is a lie wrapped in a beautiful truth.”
Lina looked down at the dark liquid, its surface reflecting her own haunted face. “What do you mean?”
“Each judgment,” Nanay Rosita said, her gaze sharp and pitiless, “strengthens the demon. It weaves him more tightly into the fabric of this world. But that power must be drawn from somewhere. It diminishes the woman who calls for it.” The old woman took a slow sip from her cup before continuing. “It hollows you out, piece by piece. It eats your connections to this life, your pity, your joy, your fear.It replaces them with a craving for the power itself. You become less a woman and more a conduit. A gate. You save him, perhaps. But you lose yourself.”
The words landed like stones in the pit of Lina’s stomach. This was the part of the bargain Maruz had not explained. The hidden cost, the fine print written in a language of souls. To keep him was to slowly erase herself.
Nanay Rosita watched her, her ancient eyes seeing every flicker of horror and doubt that crossed Lina’s face. She gave a small, humorless smile. “He is not the only monster in this bargain.” She gestured with her cup toward Lina. “Choose carefully,anak.”
Lina held the cup of bitter tea, the rising steam caressing her face like a ghostly hand. The choice was still hers, but the scales had shifted. It was no longer one man’s life against her happiness. It was his continued existence against the slow, deliberate suicide of her own soul.
The moon was a raw, silver wound in the black skin of the sky. Its light was not gentle; it was a cold, absolute illumination that stripped the color from the world, leaving only stark shapes of silver and shadow. It laid a shimmering, tremulous path across the surface of the sea, a road to nowhere that beckoned the eye. The waves broke against the shore with a steady, percussive rhythm, a sound like a great heart beating in the chest of the world. Each exhalation of surf hissed as it slid across the sand, leaving the shore dark and slick like wet glass.
Lina stood where the water met the land, the retreating foam swirling around her bare ankles, cold and alive. The sand was cool and firm beneath her feet. In her right hand, she cupped the blood-dark talisman. It was a familiar weight, its strange, organic warmth a stark contrast to the chill of the night air. The warmth pulsed in time with her own frantic heartbeat, a secret rhythm shared between them. This was the source of her power, the key to his cage, the anchor of her impossible new life. And tonight, its lease was set to expire.
She had walked out of the perfect, conjured house, leaving its enchanted lights and impossible comforts behind, and followed the pull of the tide. Here, at the edge of the world, she had to make a choice. The salt spray misted her face and she tasted it on her lips - the flavor of bitterness and the deep.
A column of air beside her seemed to buckle. The steady rhythm of the waves stuttered in her ear, and a sudden, unnatural cold sank into her skin, raising gooseflesh along her arms. The moonlight warped, bending around a point of absolute nothingness that rapidly coalesced into form. He was there.
Maruz materialized not with a sound, but with a smothering of it. He stood beside her, a monument of shadow and fading light, his sheer presence a weight that seemed to dent reality. He was both more and less than she had ever seen him. The handsome human mask was in place - the broad shoulders, the powerful frame, the inhumanly perfect features cast in silver and black by the moonlight. But it was a failing illusion. His form flickered, a constant, agonizing instability. The edges of his silhouette blurred into smoke before snapping back into focus. Through the solid bronze of his arm, she saw a momentary, horrifying glimpse of the moonlit waves behind him. His skin, a landscape she had come to know with an intimacy that frightened her, shimmered and dissolved. For a horrifying second, the ancientscript beneath its surface blazed with an infernal light, and then his flesh became a translucent pane of obsidian shadow, revealing a core of burning amber embers where his heart should be.
He was coming apart. The sight was a physical blow, a pain that lanced through her more sharply than any her husband had ever inflicted. She wanted to reach out, to press her hands against him and hold him together through sheer will, but she knew it was useless. He was anchored to this world by a thread, and the moon was a silver knife poised to cut it.
“It is time to decide,” he said. His voice was a strange harmony, the resonant baritone she knew layered with the echoes of something vast and inhuman. It carried over the percussive crash of the surf, not by being louder, but by simply existing on a different frequency, a vibration that slid past her ears and bloomed directly in her mind. “Does our pact continue?”
Lina turned her head to look at him fully. The moonlight caught in her dark hair and traced the delicate line of her jaw. There was no fear in her face now. The haunted, hunted look had been burned away, replaced by a profound, sorrowful stillness. She had power now. She had stood in Nanay Rosita’s hut, a place steeped in the knowledge of centuries, and had not flinched. She had faced her own monstrous reflection in a dream and had not shattered. She met his gaze, her own eyes dark and deep as the water before them.
Down the curve of the beach, perhaps half a kilometer away, she could see other figures. They were small and insignificant from this distance, their movements unreal. A pair of tourists were trying to capture the moon with a camera on a tripod, their pale foreign skin glowing under its light. A young couple walked hand-in-hand, their laughter a faint, tinny sound carried on the wind, their concerns as mundane and distant as another star. They were living in a differentworld, a world of simple pains and simple pleasures, a world Lina had been brutally ejected from. They saw a beautiful night. She stood beside a dying god, debating the cost of a human soul.
Nanay Rosita’s words echoed in her mind, dry and sharp as bone dust. *It hollows you out, piece by piece… You become less a woman and more a conduit. A gate.*
She looked at Maruz, at the agony of his unmaking, at the being who had saved her, taught her, and remade her. The being who had shown her the echoes of a world before men and the truth of his own tragic creation. Could she let him go? Could she condemn him to that eternal, nethermost hall, all to preserve a self she barely recognized anymore?
The pulsing of the talisman against her palm was a steady, insistent question. It was a part of her now, its rhythm as familiar as the beat of her own blood. She tore her gaze away from Maruz’s dissolving form and looked down the long, silvered stretch of beach. The distant figures, laughing and living in their simple, sunlit world, seemed impossibly far away, like figures in a painted diorama.
She considered her first option: to let him go. She could simply do nothing. The moon would reach its zenith, the final grain of sand would fall in the hourglass of their pact, and he would be gone. She would be left with the house, a fortress of marble and glass, with the wealth that had appeared in an account under a name she had never used, with a life of absolute safety. She tried to picture it. Waking upin the vast, silent bed. The scent of salt and jasmine in the air, but not the undercurrent of incense. The quiet halls echoing with nothing but the sound of her own footsteps. A life free from fear. A life utterly, completely empty. The safety he offered was meaningless without the one thing she needed to be safe from: his absence. The world of those tourists was no longer hers to reclaim. He had shown her its echoes, its ghosts, its hidden currents of power and pain. He had ruined her for the mundane, and for that, she could not let him go.
