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hysterialyywrites · 1 year

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the sun never sets on the amihan

— one.

My favorite thing about the Amihan tickets—and this is the part everyone sees, whether you’re taking the trip or not—is the way it disappears into the access gate’s ticket slot with a puff of gold dust.

A light ring echoes in my ear, not unlike the sounds the cash register makes at the local department store. I make sure to pay extra attention to the way the dust lingers around the slot when I cross the turnstiles, catching a whiff of petrichor in the air. Still on brand.

As I pass the gates and grab my ticket on the other side, the sounds of the late afternoon rush hour die down and disappear behind me as I look up to see an emptier and cleaner Katipunan station. People who’ve taken the trip say there’s a certain glow and brightness that permeates the scene—or perhaps the senses, like a filter—and it’s like you see the world in sunset.

Despite being underground, there’s patches and streams of soft afternoon sunlight that flood into the station, and you can only wonder where the windows are until you realize it doesn’t really matter. Everything is tinted in a warm, pale orange glow, which stands in complete opposition to the way the stations transform when you slot in a Habagat ticket instead: blue, somber, mellow. But the Habagat trains stopped running three years ago.

As I make my way downstairs to the platform, I see a number of people standing around the entrance markers scattered across the length of it, sure I can count the number of passengers on both hands. I make my way over to an empty marker to the far left of the platform, taking in the soft breeze and the smell of rain, and for a split second I’m convinced I’m dreaming.

As I wait for the train, my peripheral vision catches a lone silhouette to my immediate right. For a while I internally grapple with whether or not to make eye contact with this stranger. Eventually I relent, seeing as how there aren’t many fellow passengers about to board the Amihan. And people could use the little extra kindness. Especially here.

So I nod and send a small smile to the stranger, noticing the way he lets out a shaky breath with an accompanying wipe of his hands down the side of his smart trousers. I note the way his shoes and watch shine and the way he styles his hair with wax and the neat way he carries himself and I think about how this may be the only time I’ll ever be sharing a commute with someone like him.

“First time on the Amihan too, I’m guessing?” He greets, after a nod and a smile in return.

I give his character the benefit of the doubt when I don’t detect malice or mockery in his voice, though I’m sure any semblance of pride is stripped away when you’re about to take a supposedly humbling, life-changing trip. Getting an Amihan ticket does that to you.

“Yes,” I reply. But not really. Caught off-guard by the attempt at small talk and unsure of what to say to someone who’s obviously here with the hopes of finding answers (or at least a direction to an answer) to some personal, deep-rooted issues, I turn back to the tracks in front of me, feeling a little exposed.

“How long have you had to wait for your ticket?” He continues, obviously antsy. I don’t blame him.

“Around two weeks maybe.” I pause, wondering if I want to continue this conversation. I figured I might. “You?”

“Same.”

“You didn’t choose the Express option?”

He chuckles. “Is that how you see me?”

Shit. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine,” he interjects, shaking his head. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

I scramble to think of anything to say before he mercifully does it for me.

“I wasn’t in any hurry, if you know what I’m saying,” he starts. “It’s a little nerve-wracking, thinking of where this might take me. Some problems just aren’t easy to face, y’know?”

I nod, pursing my lips in understanding.

“Actually, after I submitted the form, I thought they’d cancel my request. I started doubting myself, wondering if I really was ready to…” He pauses, raises his hands to gesticulate. “To… confront that I needed to confront. Like I thought they’d sense my hesitation somehow. ‘Coz a lot of people don’t get these tickets y’know? And I thought that was because they—the DOTMT I mean—could sense the smallest ounce of fear in the decision. But I realize no one’s ever truly not afraid when they make these kinds of decisions, right? Well, fuck, I don’t actually know the criteria or how they think people are ready to take the trip but the point is—I wouldn’t complain if they made me wait a month or two or maybe even a year before they decided I was ready.”

He falls silent, thinking. I look at him properly and realize he’s probably not much older than me. Apparently not all that different from me either. When he doesn’t continue, I do.

“Well, the fact that you’re here now means that you are, even if you’re still scared.”

He turns to look at me and I find an unexpected expression of gratitude in the way he smiles at me, so small and vulnerable, before he realizes he’s showing a little too much for a first encounter and picks himself up again. “Thanks,” he says with a slight nod. “That… means a lot. Sorry, I was rambling.”

I smile back, small and vulnerable in my own way. “It’s okay.”

And as I stand there waiting for the train to come, I think about how nice it is that I get to share in this somewhat intimate space with a stranger on even grounds. We’re not here because of money, like how it would usually go. We’re here because of time. And that’s something that everyone has, which makes it the Amihan’s perfect currency, accessible to all. That is, if the DOTMT decides you’re ready to spend all that time on this trip.

We mostly kept to ourselves after that, and it’s minutes before I pick up the change in pressure in the air. The train is close.

“Oh that feels nice,” the stranger remarks. I look to my right to see him closing his eyes, basking in the cooler, lighter air. “Feels hopeful, doesn’t it?”

I was about to agree when the scent of petrichor thins out briefly before coming back as sea salt, and the breeze picks up as the Amihan rolls by in all its red-coated grandeur, gold dust drifting across the tracks, spilling onto the platform. From the front facade of the train, a painting of a beautiful woman—abstracted and made unique by her artist’s style—comes to life, traveling along the bold red surface of the length of the train, opening doors and welcoming us in.

When she stops at our door, she looks at me with a sad smile as I enter. She knows. And she closes her eyes and places her hand over her heart as if to apologize.

— two.

A year after they pulled the Habagat from operations, the Department of Time and Magical Transformations announced that they’d use the now abandoned Habagat trains for the Amihan, repurposing it to “take people to the future instead of the past.” After a year of stripping and recasting charms and another year of magic fitting and test runs, the Amihan was ready to run, and has been running for almost a year now.

The stranger and I part ways once we step foot inside the train, mutually understanding each other’s needs to process our own journeys separately. The moment I settle into my seat, still trying to wrap my head around how the train looks when it’s not filled to the brim by commuters trying to get home in time for dinner, I look out the window across from me and appreciate the way the sunset cast the whole of Metro Manila in a soft orange glow. It’s a sight much preferred compared to the Habagat’s 3 AM late night view: cold, desolate, lonely. Hopeless.

I sit in silence for a few minutes, my eyes closed, my mind wandering (sometimes to places I’d rather not revisit), until I hear a voice somewhere above me.

“May I sit with you?”

I look up to see a man staring down at me expectantly yet kindly, suddenly feeling my heart clench. He awaits my affirmation yet poses no pressure of judgement if I don’t.

Were we in the regular LRT 2 line, I’d have questioned his need to ask to sit with me when it’s a first-come-first-serve world. But maybe it’s the way the crows feet around his eyes crinkle to life when he smiles, or the way his skin stretches around his face when he speaks, or the way he holds his posture as he leans forward ever so slightly, looking for company, not at all unlike someone I knew, that I figured the company might do me—or rather, the both of us—some good. I keep my eyes on the floor in front of me.

“Sure, of course.”

I unconsciously scoot to the side to make room when there is virtually no need to, given the amount of free space around the train. But I like to think it a consolation to myself that it’s an act of my express desire to let him know that I very much welcome his company, if it helps me take my mind off of certain things for a while.

“You’re new here.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You’ve been here…”

“A while yes,” he finishes with a small smile.

I choose my next words carefully. “May I ask… how long…?”

He laughs, and the sound echoes across the passenger car. A few people turn to look with varying levels of amused, relieved, or annoyed. Out of the corner of my eye, he shrugs, resigned. “I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to.” He gestures to the windows across from us. “The sun never sets on the Amihan. I’m sure you knew that. And the watches are useless too.”

I nod and purse my lips, looking down at my own. 5:46 PM. The second hand hovering still. “And time works differently for everyone on board.”

Some people have sworn they spent only fifteen minutes on the Amihan only to arrive at their destinations six months later, while some have said they spent what felt like two hours on board only to come back thirty minutes after they boarded. People have stopped trying to figure it out.

“You working?” The man asks.

“I am.”

“Good thing they let you leave indefinitely for this trip.”

I chuckle, remembering. “My boss said she’d give me a Christmas bonus if I come back before December.”

“She’s a kind heart, that one. Do you like your job?”

“It’s okay. I like seeing the people though. Makes me look forward to coming to the office every day.”

“That’s good. It’s hard to find a good job to settle in.” His face turns a little sad at the thought, but he shakes his head. “Your family know about this trip?”

I change the subject. “Do you not like yours? Your job I mean.”

“Oh… I did.” He’s quiet for a moment, twiddling his thumbs. A familiar habit. “They had to let me go though, when I told them about this trip.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I’m aware that different companies have different policies when it comes to trips like this, so I find it unfortunate that this man had to choose between his job and his journey.

“Ah, don’t be,” he says lightheartedly. “I understand why. And good thing they did too. I’m still on this train after all. Wouldn’t do well for the business.”

“And you needed this trip,” I said without thinking. “I mean, just like everyone else here, I think.”

He smiles. “You’re right. We all need this trip.”

We fall into a comfortable silence after, perhaps thinking. The painting of the woman from the outside is now making her rounds inside, greeting passengers with a comforting smile, blowing tears away with gold dust. I find myself entranced with the way she fixes the shawl of a sleeping elderly woman to my far left, her fingers pinched, moving in an upwards motion, never leaving the walls, yet the shawl hiking itself up nicely above the lady’s shoulders, tucking her in.

When she comes close to us, she looks to me with a sad smile once more, placing her hand over her heart, her head bowed. She turns to the man next to me and bows to him as well, hand still over heart, before she blows a kiss to the both of us goodbye.

This surprises me. I almost look at him. My eyes now glossing over the dirt on my shoes, I ask. “You’ve been to the…?”

“Ah, and I assume you have,” he says somberly. “No, but I have lost someone. To the Habagat.”

My mouth drops open slightly, unsure of what to say, of how to approach the subject. I settle on the default answer, feeling stupid and at the same time vulnerable. “I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head, his lips pursed. “No, I’m sorry. With the way she looked at you”—he gestures to the painting of the woman on the passenger car beyond us—“it must’ve been hard.”

I stay quiet for a moment. “When you said you assumed I have… how did you know?”

He gives me a knowing smile. “Well, I have been on this train for a while. Perhaps much longer than I’d like to admit. You end up talking to people, noticing a few things, finding patterns. Especially when a certain lady likes to circle the cars like clockwork.”

I look over to the passenger car to our right, Amihan drifting slowly and steadily across the walls, her eyes ever soft and gentle.

“Do you think it’s the DOTMT’s way of apologizing?” I ask, the bitterness in my voice slightly seeping through.

The man scoffs, takes my bitterness in stride. “Maybe. As if it solves anything.”

It’s silent again before the man continues.

“But sometimes… sometimes I like to think that it’s Amihan apologizing, not the DOTMT. She’s done nothing wrong, yet she still feels the need to apologize for her brother’s or her lover’s or whatever legend you’ve read… but my point is, she still feels the need to apologize for her counterpart’s actions, and the genuine look on her face when she does… there’s just something comforting in believing in that, even if it isn’t real.”

I did find brief solace at the gesture when she first did it to me outside the train. “I think I understand what you mean,” I reply. “But in the end… it’s not really the Habagat’s fault, is it? Because the people who stayed behind decided to stay behind,” I say, my voice hard. “But the Habagat always gave them the option to come back. It was just a matter of willpower.”

I look up at the man, his face tight with constrained irritation. My eyes widen, my regret palpable. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean—I was just trying to be objective and—it wasn’t the right thing to say at all, and I—”

“No,” the man says sternly, clutching his hands together tightly. He takes a deep breath. “No, no, you’re… you’re right.”

Silence. He looks down at the floor. I wait—no, hope—for him to speak. And to my relief, he does.

“It’s true that people do come back on the Habagat. But you’re probably the only person on this train I’ve talked to who doesn’t blame the magic. Which I find surprising, considering you yourself have been on the train.”

Hoping to stall this conversation for as long as I can, I ask him first. “May I ask… who you’ve lost to the Habagat?”

The man sighs. This is not the first time he’s had this conversation.

“My daughter.”

I keep quiet, listening.

“Her mother and I… it was good while she was growing up. We were a happy family, no problem too big for us to handle, but… things just changed. Maybe it was the bills, the increasing rent. The taxes. The tuition. The fact that I’ve been laid off more times than I’d like to admit. And suddenly it was one too many fights, one too many late night shifts, trying not to lose another job. Couldn’t see how that was affecting our little girl.”

There was no show nor dramatics of any kind. He’s numbed himself to it, probably still figuring out how to deal with it.

“She was in her second year of college when she took the trip.”

He looks up at me, and I take a peek at his expression. Tired, somber, still grieving. “That willpower you talked about… I have no right to wish that she had enough of that to come back, but…”

He falls silent once more, and I keep my eyes on him. The crows feet. The ley lines across his skin. The twiddling thumbs. The kindness when he approached me. The reason why he approached me. The reason why I agreed.

“The Habagat… was meant for good things, I feel like,” I start.

The man ducks his head, looking at his hands. He’s listening.

“The idea of bringing people to their most important memories when they were facing a roadblock in their life was supposed to be a good idea… Because, well, I think there’s merit in remembering the good things and using those to remind you of why you should keep going, right? There’s this saying my dad always threw around: Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.”

But there’s harm in dwelling. Some people chose to stay in memories. The disappearances weren’t as frequent at first to cause a stir, but the threat was there.

“When my mom brought up the idea, I was heavily against it. My dad… had just gone then. A heart problem. But she wanted to see him again. Even if it was just a memory.”

I pause after hearing my voice crack. I take deep breaths.

“We were… so close to the doors.” Against my will, I start crying. But I will it to hold back. “It was my high school graduation. I didn’t want to leave but I knew we had to. I knew we couldn’t stay. But my mom looked so happy.”

I remember it vividly. The memory cloaked in blue, like I was watching it unfold from under the ocean ripples, the sunlight breaking through the surface. You moved slow in a memory, like how you’d move in a dream. That made it much harder to run back to the doors.

I remember Habagat from the surface of his blue train, beckoning for me to come back, his face stricken with grief. The humidity was thick and uncomfortable, the sweat making my toga stick to my skin.

“I had to make a decision. With or without my mother.”

I eventually let the tears spill. The man hands me his handkerchief. In the next few seconds, I feel gold dust on my cheeks, and I remember the silver that held me all those years ago, on my way home alone from the memory.

When I calm down, we don’t attempt to make conversation. I appreciate the man’s effort to maintain the silence for as long as necessary. I look out the window. Still, Metro Manila’s golden. Still, I’m on this train, waiting for my stop.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I ask, breaking the silence that has stretched on for who knows how long.

The man next to me smiles. “Don’t we all?”

I smile in return, feeble and tired. “Of course.”

He sighs. “But I’m not sure if she’ll want to see me again.”

“Your wife?”

He nods.

“She will,” I reassure him.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But you have to believe she will. Otherwise, you won’t ever get off this train.”

He’s quiet, processing my words. For some reason, I have the confidence to continue, not caring about whether or not he wants me to.

“All you have now are each other. I’d want to make it work, if I were you. If I were her. If I still had the chance. Grieving alone… I don’t recommend it.”

Silence still. And he nods, turning towards me with an endearing smile. “Thank you.”

The train rumbles on with a low, rhythmic sound.

“You still do. Have a chance I mean,” the man says.

I shake my head, incredulous. I fail to find any sense in his words. He continues, perhaps as unapologetically as I did.

“This may be a bit of a selfish reasoning but… you can still say what you want to say to the people most dear to you… even if they’re not around anymore.”

I look at him, bewildered.

“You just need to let it out. Accept things as they are, no matter how unfair. You haven’t spoken about your past much to others, have you? Haven’t given yourself time to process?”

I look down at my shoes, staring intently.

“Thank you,” I say after a while.

“No, thank you.”

We take one long look at each other, and I like to think we’re allowing ourselves one last chance to see our loved ones and bid them one final goodbye.

“It’s time,” the man remarks, nodding. “I’ll be getting off soon, I think.”

Amihan floats over on the wall across from us, sending the man a knowing smile.

“It’s been good talking to you,” I say. I hand him back his handkerchief.

He shakes his head. “Keep it,” he says. “Something to remember an old man by.” Then he takes one of my hands, holds it in both of his. “I wish you well. Truly.”

And he walks off, Amihan following closely behind him. I look back at the sunset and wait patiently for my stop, trusting the Amihan to take me where I need to go.

— three.

I don’t recall how long I’ve actually been on the train.

When I get off, Amihan sends me away with gold dust on my cheeks and the smell of rain in the air. I pull out my phone and watch as the time and days speed by, not unlike the way the reels in a slot machine would spin. Eventually it shows me the winning combination, starting with the date, then the hour, then the minute. I smile to myself.

After a few taps and scrolls, I put the phone to my ear. She picks up after four rings.

“Hello?”

“Do I get my Christmas bonus?” I ask playfully.

“Oh my god, you’re back!” My boss greets cheerfully. “How was the trip?”

“Oh, well… I’ve realized a few things,” I respond sheepishly.

“Like? Oh, is it okay if I ask? You don’t have to—”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I reassure her. I clutch the handkerchief still in my hand. “I um… I wanted to ask if… you’re still doing those Friday night team dinners?”

“Yes! Oh, will you be joining us this week? Everyone would love to have you there! They’re always asking me about you, y’know?”

Her excitement is endearing. Heartwarming. Not at all ingenuine and something I’ll have to get used to. “Maybe not this week, since I’ll have to settle down for a while, get back to the things I missed but… count me in for next week?”

“Oh absolutely!” She beams, before settling into a more relaxed tone. “We’d love to have you there. We’re always here if you need anything, we’ve told you that, right?”

“Yes, yes you have… and um, I also wanted to ask you… you mentioned going to therapy before, right? I was wondering… if we could talk about that more? Maybe over coffee?”

“Of course! And um…” She pauses a bit before continuing. She says the next few words cautiously. “I’ll actually have you know that my therapist specializes in processing Habagat trauma.”

I pause, caught slightly off guard. I try to imagine what this conversation would look like if she was in front of me. If she locks eyes with me. Serious. Careful. Empathetic.

“She’ll help you out,” she reassures me with a soft lilt in voice. “And I’ll be here too, if you need additional support.”

I smile gratefully, but not without a little bit of fear. I forget she doesn’t see me. The air is cooler, lighter. I feel like I’m floating. I still see the world in sunset.

“I’d like that.”

written: november 28, 2022 revised: december 13, 2022

from banaag: stories of alternate manilas

#short story #fantasy #urban fantasy #philippines #manila #trains #magic #amihan #habagat

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hysterialyywrites · 1 year

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a form of protest against man and his machine

The media blackout in Cavite was unsettling.

April nights in the Philippines were always hot and sticky, and I could feel the sweat trickling down my neck mixing in with the blood on my shirt. It was silent in my small, dark, and dusty apartment, and I owed much of it to Meralco for making sure my electric fans weren’t working like they were supposed to because I didn’t pay like I was supposed to. The water should be cutting off any day now too. I tasted blood on my lips. I didn’t even realize my nose was bleeding.

I got up from my place on the floor, next to the wall where I knew my neighbor placed their TV on the opposite side because of how loud they always played the 6:30 PM news. An hour and a half later and there were talks of the perpetually rising oil and food prices, motorcycle accidents, fires in Tondo, minor cases of hacked Holos, the usual EDSA traffic, and of course, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Ego Moran’s newest high-rise company buildings in BGC. But nothing on Cavite.

I made my way around my desk to sit in front of my HIVE monitor, my eyes adjusting from the darkness to the only source of light in the apartment. (Thank you, Mr. Moran, for always making sure we had power to do our jobs even if we didn’t pay the bills.) I grabbed a tissue on the way here, using the blue light to help me dab off the red down my skin, though I can’t really do much about the shirt.

I had contemplated on going for a new shirt or staying at the computer.

I stayed at the computer. The shirt could wait, because I was angry and I wanted to be angry when I wrote tonight’s submission.

I started off. I decided to keep EVA on, because I wanted to see if EVA could tell me what I was feeling better than I could. I spoke in bold while EVA replied in italics.

It had been around two months since I last heard from Gil. It was beautiful, in the way that he spoke softly of my name all those days ago, whispering how he understood why he had to leave so I could live, that I deserved more lives than what he could give me. He offered me his heart. A parting gift, he says. With more hearts, he went on, I could live for longer. Live forever.

I laughed. This was the first time I ever let EVA suggest anything worth injecting into my writing, and I was reminded of why I never used it in the first place. I thought about Ego Moran sitting in his big, shiny, new office in BGC, wondering if he ever took the time to sift through all our submissions to decide which works were appropriate to feed into his AI. But of course, he doesn’t need to do that. He simply needed to impose guidelines, hard rules: The AI can only be good.

His people will do the sifting for him.

It had been around two months since I last heard from Gil. I had known it wasn’t him I was talking to all this time because I had mistakenly dropped the word “poor” in one of our conversations to describe my current shitty living conditions and he had not retaliated in his usual, antagonistic, Gil way. ‘I don’t like that word,’ he’d always say. ‘It’s not our fault,’ he’d insist. And truly, it wasn’t. We forgave each other because we loved each other. We got married in the fall of our third year together and had little Kevin not long after. He was a bundle of joy in our lives, the way he’d wrap his little fingers around mine, the way he’d squeal and run around the front yard with his little toy truck. Jenny came soon a year later, and so did Kyle. They were twins. They all grew up so fast.

I scoffed. I loved Gil, sure. But not in the way EVA insisted. I had just stumbled upon him on a message board about Y3K around a year ago. We were participating in a heated discussion about whether or not it was going to be as real as Y2K was (or wasn’t). Of course it isn’t going to be, I’d said. Because Y2K was a hoax. And technological advancements since then have been way off the charts. What makes Y3K any more of a threat, especially when it’s so far away?

But then Gil, being the “opportunist” that he so called himself, posited that that was exactly the point. Anything was now almost possible with technology. It could’ve been the end of the world at the turn of the last millennium, given how much was dependent on tech. To some people, possibly the sociopaths, Y2K was a revolutionary idea to turn the world over its head, and Y3K was their next best shot. They now had not only the vision, but also the advanced technological means to carry it out. If I was any good at code, he’d said, I’d give it a shot. Introduce a bug that’ll set the world on fire.

Gil was a lot of things, but he was rarely ever honest about how he felt, hiding instead behind witty comebacks and sarcasm. He’d told me how it was being an artist for HIVE, how it all felt like peaches and sunshine and that it was the best job in the world, doing what he loved only for a machine to steal it and spit it back out like a wad of Wrigley’s on the pavement that people were more than willing to pay hundreds—if not thousands—for, because anything a machine made was better than what humans could make. I had told him it’s not so different when you’re a writer either. We were two unfortunate peas in a pod. But the best part was, we were always together. We’d go and watch the sunset together, get ice cream from that shop down Fifth Avenue. We’d go to Broadway shows because he knew I loved Broadway, and he’d always surprise me with fancy dinners and new clothes. I was the happiest woman alive.

I was happy because Gil was real. Gil was ugly with his words and crass with his tone, and no one could ever mimic how fatally flawed he was to the point of rarity because Metro Manila at the hands of an aggressive businessman like Ego Moran was paradise. A technological hotspot that he personally handcrafted to bring out the best in tech at the worst of times. AI was only good when you were a consumer. As a producer, you had people like Gil and me.

It had been around two months since I last heard from Gil. I had known it wasn’t him I was talking to all this time because I had mistakenly dropped the word “poor” in one of our chats to describe my current shitty living conditions and he had not retaliated in his usual, antagonistic, Gil way. ‘I don’t like that word,’ he’d always say. ‘It’s not our fault,’ he’d insist. But instead he’d replied, “i’m sorry. is there any way i can help?”

Gil was a lot of things, but he was rarely ever honest about how he felt, hiding instead behind witty comebacks and sarcasm. He’d told me how it was being an artist for HIVE, how it all felt like peaches and sunshine and that it was the best job in the world, doing what he loved only for a machine to steal it and spit it back out like a wad of Wrigley’s on the pavement that people were more than willing to pay hundreds—if not thousands—for, because anything a machine made was better than what humans could make. I had told him it’s not so different when you’re a writer either. We were two unfortunate peas in a pod, working low-wage, contractual labor so we could tell AI how to be perfect.

Gil was brutally honest. That’s how I knew that ‘i’m sorry is there any way i can help’ was only the fake niceties of EVA PRIME. But last I heard they were still beta testing. It wasn’t supposed to roll out until the end of the year. And by the end of the year I was making the biggest breakthrough of my life. I wrote essays, short stories, novels, poems. I wrote and wrote and wrote. About love. About life. About heartbreak. About sadness. About happiness. And the cycle repeats. Everyone loved my work. I won awards. I gave talks and speeches and workshops. I was independent and successful, and I could afford to indulge myself in life’s greatest pleasures: travel and good wine.

I hated wine. But Gil loved it. He had connections in Cavite, knew the ins and outs of his city like the back of his hand, knew where to source wine at the friendliest discount of 100%, and he was convinced he could convert me after a little trial and error. I just need to get a feel for what your taste buds might be into, he’d said. No one could ever hate wine. That’s just stupid. You just need a little help, find the right one for you. Then you can thank me for being the shit, yeah? lol

Gil was a lot of things, but he was rarely ever honest about how he felt, hiding instead behind witty comebacks and sarcasm. He’d told me how it was being an artist for HIVE, how it all felt like peaches and sunshine and that it was the best job in the world, doing what he loved only for a machine to steal it and spit it back out like a wad of Wrigley’s on the pavement that people were more than willing to pay hundreds—if not thousands—for, because anything a machine made was better than what humans could make. I had told him it’s not so different when you’re a writer either. We were two unfortunate peas in a pod, working low-wage, contractual labor so we could tell AI how to be perfect.

Before Gil became Fake Gil, he’d told me something. About an uprising in Cavite. He said he and a hundred or two artists had a plan, and it was going to be huge. Thank God for tech, he’d said, because we could crack into the Holos across the city to make them show what we want. Don’t need to spend a fuckton on actual paint and shit. Just tweak a little code and voilà. Anarchy. That’s where it starts. The inciting incident you always called it, yeah? Just a little spark.

Gil was a lot of things, but he was rarely ever honest about how he felt, hiding instead behind witty comebacks and sarcasm. He’d told me how it was being an artist for HIVE, how it all felt like peaches and sunshine and that it was the best job in the world, doing what he loved only for a machine to steal it and spit it back out like a wad of Wrigley’s on the pavement that people were more than willing to pay hundreds—if not thousands—for, because anything a machine made was better than what humans could make. I had told him it’s not so different when you’re a writer either. We were two unfortunate peas in a pod, working low-wage, contractual labor so we could tell AI how to be perfect.

Every conversation since then has only been futile attempts from Fake Gil to make right the wrongs in my life by dropping apologies and asking questions about how my tragic life made me feel, like I was getting free therapy and that was supposed to make me feel better. But slowly I was receding back into the life I hated before I met Gil, where I slaved away like an assembly line worker, pumping out nonfiction and poetry like I was in labor every night, where I’d suffered through headaches and fevers to meet every 12 AM deadline because I couldn’t afford to stop, because medicine was expensive and, after I met Gil, so was the bus to Cavite, and thank God Gil lived in Bacoor because if he lived beyond Dasmariñas I wouldn’t have even dared to dream that I could finally see him. No, of course I dared to dream. I loved him. I loved him so much I was willing to overlook everything that was wrong with him because that’s what love is, isn’t it? To love him is to choose him everyday, no matter how hard things got.

I inhaled sharply and punched the screen as hard as I could. The monitor fell backwards with a loud thump to the floor, its fall cushioned by my old and tattered carpet. Of course, when I picked it back up and fixed the wiring, the monitor came away with barely so much as a scratch. My knuckles, I realized, were still throbbing. From the screen light, I could make out the spots on my knuckles where my skin split from the impact. The machine was fine. I was not.

I didn’t know how to write about Gil. I didn’t know how to write about him without trying to put into words why I had to write about him. EVA is a machine. It’s not supposed to know. But it was taught to.

I turned EVA off.

Gil was a lot of things, but he was rarely ever honest about how he felt, hiding instead behind witty comebacks and sarcasm. He’d told me how it was being an artist for HIVE, how it all felt like peaches and sunshine and that it was the best job in the world, doing what he loved only for a machine to steal it and spit it back out like a wad of Wrigley’s on the pavement that people were more than willing to pay hundreds—if not thousands—for, because anything a machine made was better than what humans could make. I had told him it’s not so different when you’re a writer either. We were two unfortunate peas in a pod, working low-wage, contractual labor so we could tell AI how to be perfect.

I almost have enough. Just one last submission. Then I can finally say: fuck you. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing with EVA PRIME. Don’t think I’ll forgive you for what you did to Gil.

I submitted the draft and turned off the computer. In the next few seconds I could hear the clattering of coins resound across the apartment from the money chute next to the front door. I collected my payment, got out what used to be a tin of powdered milk I was hiding under the kitchen sink and dropped the coins in along with the rest of my savings. Then I packed the tin and whatever valuables I had left and changed into clean clothes.

I left the apartment, flexing my hands and fingers, the knuckles stinging slightly still, but feeling the joints in my fingers come loose and free. I looked at my watch. I still had time before the last bus left for Cavite. I could only hope I don’t see him there, I thought. Bacoor is close to the border after all.

HIVE doesn’t take nicely to desertion; there are only so many artists after all. I also highly doubted they’ll let EVA take in that bullshit I pulled just now, but I gave it a shot. Introduced a bug that’ll set the world on fire.

written: october 17, 2022 revised: december 16-22, 2022

from banaag: stories of alternate manilas

#short story #science fiction #philippines #manila #artificial intelligence #dystopia #adaptive technologies

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hysterialyywrites · 1 year

Text

the rain falls in slow motion under a spotlight

The downpour doesn’t make it any easier for Caloy to hold the blood-soaked banig in his hands.

It slips from his grasp once and Caloy feels a sting, long red blooming slowly from his palm. His breath catches in his throat before he holds onto the side of his sando, letting it absorb as much blood as possible. He grabs his end of the banig again, his body still wracked with sobs. His little hands are barely enough to support half the weight of his father’s corpse—what with his thin, malnourished body—but Ponso tells him to hurry up. The latter’s voice cuts sharp and clear through the sound of the rain, and Caloy momentarily stiffens in fear before he follows his older brother through the alleyways of their barangay, the hum of the rain a welcome distraction from the events that transpired on that dark and stormy night.

When Caloy speaks, he has to yell over the sound of the rain. He struggles to make his words coherent. “Kuya, where are we going?” he hiccups. He has an inkling of the destination in mind, but for some reason he still hopes that Ponso will prove him wrong, that maybe the kind, caring, and protective brother he used to play taguan and patintero with is still there. Not this crazed, cold-blooded stranger. But a body hangs limp and heavy between them.

Ponso turns to look back at his brother, wild-eyed and deranged. “Just hurry it up, will you?” he hisses. He looks up at the sky and swears, squinting through the raindrops that obscure his vision. “This fucking rain isn’t making things any easier.” The banig slips from his drenched hands, a clear thud from the impact of their father’s skull on the uneven pavement, a sound that seems to reverberate around them before it’s eventually drowned out by the sound of the rain.

It might work in their favor tonight.

“We’re moving double time now,” Ponso tells his younger brother, dragging the banig with him as he moves forward. He could hear Caloy yelp in surprise behind him from the sudden tug forward. “The dump site’s still a ways away. We have to move now while the rain’s still coming down.” Then Ponso turns back to look at Caloy once more. “You have to fucking hurry up or we’re fucked, you hear me? We’re fucked,” Ponso spits, then swears some more under his breath.

Caloy follows silently behind Ponso, trying to keep his breathing in check. He doesn’t miss the news, the chika that goes around the houses whenever a new dead body shows up at the Payatas dump site. If he recalls correctly, it’s been five boys so far, all of them close to his age of twelve or thirteen, Caloy doesn’t remember, but the past five months have shaken their barangay to the core: the kids who pick scraps around the dump site are now more agitated and panicked, and Caloy understands why. If they can’t stay out long enough to find something worth selling or eating, the next few days become harder to live through. And that’s if they don’t end up dead in a ditch somewhere.

Caloy briefly wonders if the appearance of a grown man’s corpse would change anything.

They pass by the makeshift half-basketball court they always frequented with the neighborhood boys, and Caloy judges they still have about two and a half blocks. He takes this chance to hazard a suggestion for his brother. “Kuya, should we be doing this tonight? There’s a killer on the loose isn’t there?”

“I don’t want this asshole anywhere near us for a second longer, Caloy. The sooner we get rid of his body, the better,” Ponso replies coldly. Then he mutters something under his breath. The rain drowns out the last of his syllables and Caloy is reminded of the weight in his hands and the task at hand. Right now, Caloy isn’t sure which fear he’d be willing to engage more: possibly being the next dead boy to show up in the dump site or the brother who’s bringing their dead father to the same exact place.

While Caloy is immersed in his thoughts, Ponso seamlessly weaves his way through the houses and the alleyways, moving beneath the shadows that skirt along the edges of the light from the street lamps and the glow of the full moon. It takes a while before Caloy notices the ease by which his brother moves through the neighborhood, as if he’s already done this before.

Before Caloy could say anything, Ponso stops in his tracks. They’re hiding in a dark, narrow alleyway that opens up to a wide neighborhood street just a few feet ahead. They’re careful not to stumble over the potted plans that are lined up against the gray brick wall to their left, and Caloy realizes with a start that they’re already so close to the bakery they’d frequent whenever they had change to spare. (Hot pandesal for 2 pesos, and if they were lucky they could get small sliced monay for 20. Medium for 35.)

One and a half blocks.

When Ponso speaks, it’s in hushed, hurried tones.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, Caloy. You know that right?”

At first, Caloy thought that he was talking about the killer on the loose. Then Ponso turns back again to look at him, shifting the weight of the banig slightly to move closer. In the darkness, Caloy could see his older brother’s face stricken with rage, yet his eyes are strikingly sorrowful. Sensitive. For a second, Caloy sees his brother again. The one he looked up to so much.

“You understand why I had to do what I did back there right? Right?”

Caloy nods. Out of genuine understanding or fear, he’s not sure. Perhaps it’s more of the latter, with the adrenaline currently running through his veins.

“If I didn’t do what I did, he’d keep…” Ponso’s face scrunches up, as if the next words are painful for him to acknowledge. “He’d keep hurting you. Us. Enough’s enough. I had to do that, okay? You understand?”

Caloy nods again, now more out of genuine understanding. He’s had it bad, but he knew Ponso’s had it worse. Perhaps he should’ve expected this day to come sooner or later, because Ponso was strong. But he wasn’t invincible.

“Good. Now hurry the fuck up so we can come back home, yeah? Then it’ll just be the two of us.”

As they move again, Caloy hears what sounds like a mantra coming from his brother’s mouth. A mantra he doesn’t think he understands.

“I’m doing the right thing… I’m doing the right thing…”

But Caloy remembers his brother’s promise. He wants to believe they can come back home with no more shitty fathers to hide from. No more crying. Just the two of them. If they make it back home, Caloy believes that his brother will come back too. The brother he looks up to the most. The one who taught him the best way to scavenge for scraps, who taught him how to haggle and beat the other kids at basketball and sipa and tumbang preso. The brother who always took the hit for him back home.

As they reach the street, Caloy feels a dread forming in knots at the pit of his stomach. Maybe it was the split second of vulnerability Ponso risked showing just minutes before, but the older brother now has his guard down, even if just for a moment. They can hear the sound of tires on asphalt before they can register what it would mean for the both of them. They step down the pavement, almost halfway through jaywalking in the rain, when a car turns into the street from a curb a few meters to their right.

For a moment, both brothers are blinded. But Caloy regains some semblance of sight first, and he feels temporarily suspended in time, the rest of the scene unfolding as if trapped in liquid amber. The way the rain falls slowly. The way the banig shines in the headlights from the droplets on its surface. The way the red of their father’s blood makes the brothers’ own run cold, still splattered across both of their clothes. The blood across Ponso’s arms, his hands, under his fingernails.

Ponso reacts faster. He pulls the banig forward in a sprint, causing Caloy to stumble over his own feet at the sudden tug. They make it across the street in a flurry, feet ankle-deep in the street gutter before sending splashes of rainwater up in the air, scrambling to get up on the pavement on the opposite side of the road. Caloy feels his right foot sting at the sole, and he realizes he no longer has his right slipper. Must’ve lost it in the gutter. A quick check tells him a piece of glass from a beer bottle just wedged itself into his foot.

Caloy is about to yell at Ponso to turn back and get his slipper when the latter beats him to it first. But Ponso doesn’t notice the slipper.

“Fuck,” he swears. A string of profanities flow past his lips before he calls to his younger brother again. “Hurry the fuck up, Caloy! We’ve been seen. This isn’t good, this isn’t good, we have to move faster, faster…” And Ponso is lost in self-mutterings again.

A similar wave of panic washes over Caloy at that same instant. If they were seen, then the local police would catch wind of their little escapade. They’ll see the blood, examine the body, find the knife tucked into the waistband at the back of Ponso’s shorts. Then they’ll find their house a bloody mess, then they’ll take Ponso away. Where will Caloy go? He has no other family left.

Caloy notices they’re now half-running, half-stumbling through a familiar route towards the dump site. He remembers the wider alleyway, the campaign posters, the graffiti. And while the moonlight offers some respite from the long stretches of darkness they were hiding under, Caloy feels too exposed, like the car’s headlights never left his vision. Soon enough they’d reach the intersection up ahead, see the church to their left. Then it’s half a block before they do the job.

He tries to strain his ears to hear through the constant pattering of the rain. If he tried hard enough, he could hear a few words sifting through the downpour. Faster… almost there… need… talk… help… Kuya Alex…

Kuya Alex?

“Who’s Kuya Alex?” Caloy asked without thinking.

Ponso stops in his tracks. So does Caloy.

It’s a few seconds before Ponso speaks. Caloy can see his brother’s shoulders stiffen from behind him.

“You know, Kuya Alex,” Ponso starts rather hesitantly. “The dentist we met at the mobile clinic a few weeks ago. When we went to get arroz caldo from the church.”

Oh. That Kuya Alex. Or Dr. Alex, actually.

Ponso resumes his steps, picking up the pace he was maintaining before he was interrupted by Caloy. Caloy follows.

“Why do you call him ‘kuya’?” Caloy asked nervously. “I didn’t like him very much. He kept looking at me weird.”

“I know,” Ponso interjected quickly, much to Caloy’s surprise. “I know you don’t like him, but he’s been… helpful… to me.” Ponso adjusts his grip on the banig. “We help each other out.” The hilt of the knife at the back of Ponso’s shorts glints menacingly under a streetlight they just passed. They’ve reached the intersection.

“Helpful how?”

“You don’t need to know,” Ponso replies sharply. Then he continues, this time much softer that Caloy almost couldn’t hear it. “But you don’t have to worry about him. He’d never harm a hair on you.”

Caloy raises his eyebrows, feels a bit uneasy about what it might mean. For a moment they drag on in silence, Caloy in deep thought. He tries to control his shaking, from the cold or the fear, he’s not sure. He decides to ask his brother. “What do you—”

“We’re here.”

At this, Caloy looks up to see the Payatas dump site stretch far and wide in front of him, the mountains of garbage piling high and low both near and far. It’s a sight not unfamiliar to both Caloy and Ponso, what with their main source of livelihood dependent on what little useful things they could find here.

Caloy just never expected to bring their father’s corpse here is all.

They were just about to enter the dump site when they hear the wailing of police sirens in the distance.

“Fuck, that was way too fast, goddamn it,” Ponso exclaims, tugging on the banig. “C’mon Caloy, we have to dump this fast and leave, before they find us.”

Hearing the sirens also sent Caloy reeling in panic, and he scrambles after his brother as they both wade their way through the piles of garbage around them. They take care to avoid passing by any of the shanty houses scattered around the dump site, lest they find anyone who would recognize them. The stench of the garbage hangs heavy in the air and Caloy tries not to gag at how much stronger it is tonight than usual. He tries to ignore the stab of pain he feels every time he steps with his right foot, and he’s wondering when he’ll be able to get the glass out in the midst of all this fiasco.

By the time they find an ideal spot to dump the body, they’re deep into the heart of the dump site. It’s a space so closed off from the rest of Payatas that the sirens in the distance seem muffled and muted to Caloy’s ears, and the only sounds he can hear are the rain and their labored breathing, while the only scents he can smell are the garbage and the putresence from the banig between them.

They dump it by the foot of one of the garbage piles and Caloy thinks it’s over, they can finally go home. But Ponso gets down and unrolls the banig, revealing the corpse Caloy would have a hard time forgetting for the rest of his life.

The sando their father was wearing is drenched in deep red, the blood starting to dry and coat along the fabric, the blood crusting across dark skin. Caloy’s eyes scan the face and he wishes he hasn’t, seeing the eyes still open in shock, the mouth hanging agape. Their father’s face frozen in surprise and maybe even a little bit of fear, because ever since then, Ponso’s been different. The moment he buried the knife hilt deep into their father’s abdomen, he’s been different. Caloy still remembered the wide-eyed, frenzied look, as if he was seeing a side to his brother that was always in hiding this whole time.

Bent over their father’s corpse, Ponso has this unreadable expression on his face. Caloy didn’t notice when, but Ponso has his knife poised over the body, specifically below their father’s right earlobe, as if he wanted to slice the chin open all the way to the other ear. But the knife is frozen, Ponso’s hand unable to move.

Again, Ponso mutters to himself; whether or not Caloy hears him seems irrelevant to him now. “I can’t, I can’t—too messy. Can’t do it like Kuya Alex can. Messy, too messy—”

A shout from behind them has the brothers craning their necks to the sudden intrusion. From the distance, they can see faint beams of light shoot up and around from the ground, the rain offering little assistance as to the exact positions of these beams of light. But it’s unmistakable what they mean: the local police have arrived at the scene, and they’re scouring the area for two malnourished boys in bloodstained clothes.

Caloy turns back to the sound of his brother swearing. He sees Ponso fumbling with the knife before putting it back behind him. He hastily heads over to the side of their father’s corpse and places his hands under the torso.

“Caloy, help me get his body off of the banig,” Ponso orders.

“What? No, Kuya, let’s just leave the body with it and go, the police are almost here—”

“Just do it, Caloy, I need—”

“Need what? Kuya, I don’t understand you. Let’s just go, please,” Caloy begs, his tears mixing in with the raindrops on his face.

“Jesus Christ Caloy, just do it and we’ll go, okay?” Ponso hisses. “I just need to see him with the junk and rats like the fucking garbage he is, putangina.”

The voices are getting closer now. Between confronting the police and getting home with his brother, it wasn’t that hard for him to choose.

Together, they roll their father’s corpse off of the banig, Ponso’s hands on the torso and Caloy’s on the legs. Caloy can’t help but wince when they push the body haphazardly into the garbage heap in front of them, as if he could somehow feel the sinturon when he gets home for the blatant disrespect they’ve treated the body with, but at the same time there’s a certain relief and freedom with the action. Caloy almost feels like laughing in glee.

But the police are a lot closer than he remembered.

By the time the first flashlight found them, Ponso had been shoving the banig off to the side. For a moment, both brothers are blinded. But Caloy regains some semblance of sight first, and again he feels temporarily suspended in time, the way he did when they crossed the street just minutes before.

He doesn’t miss the way the rain falls in slow motion under these little spotlights. The way the banig shines in the flashlight from the rainwater and blood on its surface. The way the red of their father’s blood makes Ponso’s crime undeniably real and true, the way it’s still splattered across Ponso’s arms, his hands, under his fingernails. And Caloy feels a dread settle in his gut, knowing in the back of his mind that he won’t be able to go home with his brother after all.

The two make eye contact. Ponso’s expression is unreadable to Caloy. They hear the scurry of rats somewhere off to the side, and Caloy jumps but manages to hold his gaze. He sees his brother’s face is stiff, his eyes wide, his lips pursed, his shoulders squared. Caloy sees Ponso’s body angle off to the side, his knees bent, his foot pivoted. Then Caloy feels his heart drop to his stomach, grabbing his attention the way the glass still pierces and stings the sole of his foot, because he realizes what’s about to happen.

Ponso’s different now. Life will be different now. That’s the real, hard truth.

Caloy doesn’t even get more than two words out when his voice cracks. “Kuya—”

“I’m sorry, Caloy. You be safe. I love you.”

The next few moments go by in a blur. The flashlight beams swiveling across the dump site in a flurry. Calls for a chase. Men in uniform scrambling to get a good look at the corpse. Being grabbed by the arms and dragged away. The sting on his right foot. Ponso’s back getting smaller and smaller in the distance until he disappears into the darkness.

Caloy’s throat feels rubbed raw from all the screaming and crying before he passes out. In fatigue or despair, he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s both.

written: october 03, 2022 revised: december 12, 2022

from banaag: stories of alternate manilas

#short story #horror #philippines #manila #smaller and smaller circles

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hysterialyywrites · 1 year

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i want to tell you (about the little things)

sometimes i wonder if there's any worth in telling you about something so forgettable that i start to think if it even happened at all

like the time my mother and i found a stone on the ground unhinged and separated from the rest of the stones glued as ornaments on the pavement and we decided to take it home and for a while it sat on the soil of one of our potted plants now part of the family

or the time i scraped my leg on the corner of one of my hardbound math textbooks leaving a scar so deep it took years before i remembered how much i loved looking at it because math was hard and it felt like a battle scar

or the time i learned about death for the first time i was a child and it was so incomprehensible that i couldn't breathe from all the crying remembering the way my father held me in his arms not even bothering to make promises he knew he couldn't keep because he knew better than to teach a child what it meant to choose to lie to someone you love

i wonder how i can tell you about the little things without feeling like i shouldn't have because they're so forgettable i'd wonder if it'd make any difference

but i never forgot i never forgot the way it felt when i held your hand when i ran my fingers through your hair when i touched your face with what i hoped was warmth in my palms

and so i want to tell you it's the little things

it's the way i learned about family about hurting and bleeding about death (about you and how it felt to touch you) and how i still remember despite being forgettable that i know it makes all the difference

—

i saw it then that day the way the clouds dipped from the sky like i was seeing the water ripple from under the surface (and i just wanted to share that with you) and as i looked on, i thought how tragic it'd be if the world ended the very next day

—

but still we are here and you are holding my hand and i'm seeing the scars without the bandages from a time when you loved before me (and i wonder if it still hurts) and the world hasn't ended yet and it's such a little thing (but i will never forget) and that's exactly why i want to tell you that it makes all the difference

written: november 15, 2022 for you

and for better appreciation about love and the little things

#poem

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

Text

there's a problem with our bathroom

i watched the water leak in the bathroom

and as it did i scrambled to clean up the mess with a piece of my old shirt from when my mother was happier knowing i'd still come home

now she thinks i won't just because i let the pipes burst showed her how messy i really got as i outgrew my old shirts

(she never taught me how to burst a pipe i think it's just natural for me to know after seeing her do it for years)

i outgrew my old shirts (and i guess she did too) (but that doesn't mean i won't come home)

the floor is drying up the piece of my old shirt squeezed and hung up to dry and i breathe a little knowing she'll come at night to a dry bathroom not worrying about a thing because i've learned how to clean up (i learned it from her) but it still leaks (we never talk about it)

we've shared this bathroom for years how did we get so good at cleaning up behind each other's backs? and how did we ever let it get this bad?

written: july 09, 2022 family can be hard to love

#poem

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

Text

the cold draws its power from a dying fire (series)

coming from the CRWR 102.03 collection, i'm proud to present to you my CRWR 101.03 collection, which is a short story series consisting of writing exercises leading up to a short story i worked tirelessly on for my fiction workshop class. like my previous nonfic course, this workshop was easily my favorite class for the semester. i hope you enjoy reading about my sons boys kai and theo as you explore the lore of the cold world i've built since the start of the year.

i would encourage you to start this series from part i to get the full experience, but if time constricts, reading the finale should be enough, since part iv was written to stand alone as a short story on its own. you can always read parts i to iii afterwards as extra material, like those prequels authors usually release years after their original books.

➳ writer's statement (a.k.a. the vague plot summary you can usually find at the back of YA novels)

➳ part i: fire

➳ part ii: memory

➳ part iii: protector

➳ part iv (finale): frost

#vignettes #writing exercises #short story #story #short story collection #fiction

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

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writer's statement

the cold draws its power from a dying fire is a collection of vignettes leading up to a short story about, simply put, love and struggle.

Growing up familiar with loss, loneliness, and regret, Theo befriends a boy named Kai who helps him realize there’s still hope in a world fraught with dangers both inside and outside their little village. Assuming the role of protector, Theo vows to shield Kai from facing a reality so evil it could threaten to snuff whatever goodness remains in the latter’s heart. But when an outsider named Yuzu comes to their village as the bearer of bad news, Theo’s life takes a turn for the worse. Not only is he at risk of losing the only life he knows, he might also be at risk of losing the only friend he has ever torn his walls down for. And so a chance encounter deep in the woods on a cold night forces Theo to make a decision: to join the evil that presses itself relentlessly against his life and future with Kai, or to risk losing that life and future forever. To Theo though, there’s only one option: to make sure that Kai has a future at all, even if he’s not in it.

The idea for this series was initially supposed to follow the simple story of a boy in a village who wanted to leave a difficult life behind in search of a better one outside, risking an unknown danger that may or may not be worse. But after reading minhyukwithagun’s Pyrophoros, I was inspired to take a more daring direction with the story, expanding the world to include monsters, hunters, and heroes; in fact, many elements in this series are actually pulled from Pyrophoros and tweaked to fit the lore. I was also encouraged to explore Theo and Kai’s friendship more after seeing the positive reactions to their dynamic. I realized then that I enjoyed writing more from the perspective of tragic heroes like Theo than from the eyes of honest, naïve characters like Kai. Using their strong, intimate friendship as the eventual cornerstone of the conflict, I ended up with a story about—as a classmate put it—“the tragedy of heroism” and what love and power can drive someone like Theo to do.

from the cold draws its power from a dying fire (series)

next >> part i: fire

#writer's statement

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

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part iv (finale): frost

The night is deep and cold, frost-bitingly so.

He hadn’t meant to come this far into the woods. The cold feels as if it has burrowed itself so deep under his skin, it was meant to find a home in his bones.

“Wonderful night, isn’t it?” a lighthearted voice asks.

Theo finds himself face-to-face with a man deep in the forest, the moonlight casting long shadows on the ground below them.

His instincts are on high alert. He doesn’t miss the small smile on the man’s sharp features, his face narrow yet pointed. His arms rest loosely behind him, a calm, unassuming demeanor radiating off him in waves. The menacing aura Theo feels from this man despite his easy-going attitude tells him this is not a show of ignorance or foolishness. No man should be this confident in a place as dangerous as the forest.

“To you, probably,” Theo replies, trying not to shiver. He refuses to give any impression of fear, replacing it instead with sarcasm. “Good weather for a hunt, yeah?”

The man smiles even wider, lowering his head briefly. A small chuckle escapes his lips before he looks up at Theo once more, his teeth on full display.

Not sharp, Theo notes. But still dangerous.

“I’m glad we’re on the same page, young man. Saves me a lot of trouble from having to explain all the good stuff, eh?”

“Perhaps. You don’t look like the rest of them, after all. But you all have that same stench of death around you. I have to admit though, it’s my first time seeing one this well-mannered. Usually the rest of your friends just go in for the kill.”

“Ah, well, I’m happy to make your acquaintance,” the man says tastefully, sweeping his left arm in front of him before bowing forward in a show of grace. “As you say, some others of my kind come off as… barbaric. They sharpen their teeth to land easy kills, but that’s not very elegant, is it? I much prefer fine dining.” He puts his hand out to Theo. “I’m Giran. Of course, I know who you are, Theo. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. This chance encounter beneath the moonlight must be fate, no?”

Theo makes no move to accept Giran’s outstretched hand and raises an eyebrow. “Meet me? How do you even know me?”

Giran retracts his hand, the earlier closed-mouth smile now back on his face. Dropping all pretenses, he answers, “I have an informant in your little village. It’s quite easy to convince someone they should help you if you know how to take advantage of their anger. Give it an outlet, y’know? And I happen to be a very good listener.” Giran steps to the side, circling Theo as he continues his explanation, like a predator assessing his prey. “It just so happens, you see, that the source of this boy’s seemingly permanent anger is standing right in front of me.”

Theo’s eyes widen. He curses under his breath, a name bubbling up to the surface of his mind.

Aizen.

Giran’s smile doesn’t falter. “It seems to me you’ve recognized him.” He stops circling Theo and walks forward, heading straight into the darkness of the forest beyond. “Come,” Giran invites. “Let’s take a little walk.”

Theo makes no move to follow.

Giran turns his head back to find Theo still rooted to the spot, eyes wary and suspicious. “Ah!” he exclaims with a chuckle. “Of course, my apologies. Perhaps I should tell you outright just to make things clear.”

Giran turns and walks back to where he came. “You have nothing to worry about, surely,” he says, crouching down to the latter’s eye level, his smile unwavering. The fogs from their breaths mingle with the close proximity. When their eyes meet, it takes everything in Theo not to let the fear consume him. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it by now,” Giran breathes.

—

It doesn’t take long for Theo to register the scene in front of him: the villagers huddled around the edges of the village square, watching what feels like an execution unfolding before their very eyes. A boy standing triumphantly to the side, his fist stained with a blood that wasn’t his. Another boy on the ground, blood staining his face, his clothes, the cobblestones beneath him. Blood where it doesn’t belong. Then Theo feels blood draw from his heart, seeing a brutality that wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to someone like Kai.

He catches the fist before it deals any more damage. “That’s enough, Aizen,” he spits.

“Theo,” Aizen snarls. “I see you’re still playing the knight in shining armor for this loser.”

“I see you’re still playing gang leader to a nonexistent troupe. Where are your underlings, Aizen? Left you along with your brother I’m guessing?”

“Don’t you start with me, pretty boy. You could never beat me in a fist fight.”

“That’s because I’ve never tried. And I hope you don’t push me this time.”

Then Theo twists his grip, hearing Aizen yell in pain. The latter retracts his hand from Theo’s vice-like grip and retreats to the outer edge of the crowd.

“You’re messing with the wrong crowd, Theo. You were better off with us,” Aizen spits, his tone lethal.

“No, I’m better off with him,” Theo responds firmly, gesturing to the boy behind him. “And you’re better off alone.”

The villagers look on still, making no move to stop a fight that doesn’t concern them. This is, after all, a trait about the village that Theo has learned from a very young age, when he lost his father to the Frost: it’s every man for himself.

It’s no different now.

Kindness will only lead to your downfall.

—

“You were quite the hero today, weren’t you?” Giran asks after a minute of walking in silence.

Theo scoffs, folding his arms in front of him in an attempt to keep warm. “What, did Aizen already come crying to you that fast?”

“If that’s how you would like to see it. Though I have to admit, the boy doesn’t seem to do much else but cry and whine about such things. You must have been important to him, for him to react so violently over you.” Giran stops abruptly in his tracks, turning to face Theo with that same, unnerving smile. “Over your betrayal.”

Theo stops walking the same time Giran does. He winces, shaking his head. “All he wanted was my strength. To make him seem bigger than he actually is.”

“And that’s why he couldn’t accept it when you chose the weakling over him?”

A brief flash passes by Giran’s vision before he feels the cool surface of a knife at his throat.

“Kai is anything but weak,” Theo growls, eyes wide with anger. “You say anything against him one more time and I’ll slit your throat. Trust me, I’ve done this to your friends before.”

—

Theo thinks it’s fate for a Hunter to be taken by the Frost. He’d lost his father to it seven years ago, and Kai’s lost his the year before.

Kai collapses to the ground in tears, dropping his bow and quiver to the dirt next to him. Theo kneels in front of him in an instant, taking his friend into his arms.

“Shh, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pushed you to do this.”

For a while, Kai doesn’t answer, his body wracking with uncontrollable sobs. It was all Theo could do to hold him and not break apart himself.

“No,” Kai says moments later, when his breathing eases out enough for him to get a few words out. “You didn’t push me into this, Theo,” he hiccups. “I was the one who pestered you into helping me overcome this fear of mine.”

“You don’t have to do this, y’know?” Theo assures him softly, rubbing soothing circles on his back. “Soran’s strong enough to hunt, and she understands why you turned your back on training. It’s not your fault, Kai.”

“But what if it is?” Kai asks. Theo feels the tears on his shirt. “You’ve seen her, Theo. More scars and bruises before the old ones even heal. What if one day she doesn’t come home? Like my dad?” His voice cracks. “All because I couldn’t become a Hunter? All because I couldn’t kill?”

“No, she’ll come home, trust me,” Theo says, albeit heavily. “She’ll always come home,” Theo promises. He’ll make sure of that.

To his surprise, Kai chuckles humorlessly. “I don’t know how you’re so certain of that,” he says. “But I’ll believe you. I want to believe you.”

Theo returns a dry laugh of his own before holding Kai closer to his chest, still rubbing circles on his back. “She’ll come home,” he says softly. “None of this is your fault.”

When Kai doesn’t reply, Theo looks over his shoulder at the deer on the ground behind him. An arrow sticks out from where the heart must be, and the animal lays there lifeless, looking up at Theo with cold, empty eyes.

Kai could kill if he wants to. But he chooses not to.

—

The revelation makes Giran laugh. “We’ve really let ourselves go then,” he says. “To be killed by a mere Hunter initiate… which begs the question: why are you here? Last I recall, Hunter initiates weren’t allowed to venture this deep into the forest for their lack of training and experience. The boy Aizen tells me you were days away from initiation, yet you chose to turn your back to being a full-fledged Hunter. Why?”

“Unlike you, I prefer not to depend on violence to keep myself alive.”

“And yet here you are, with a knife to my throat.”

“You’re an exception,” Theo smiles sardonically before dropping it almost immediately. “I’ll kill to protect if I have to. Hunter or not.”

Theo presses the knife deeper into Giran’s throat, but not deep enough to draw blood.

“Apologies then,” Giran chokes out, his arms raised in surrender. “I prefer you not kill me before I tell you my real business with you.”

At this, Theo slowly withdraws his knife, his eyes never leaving Giran’s.

The latter clears his throat. When he speaks, it’s with a somberness befitting the cold of the night. “I want you to come with us.”

—

“Live with you?”

Kai nods, keeping his eyes on the task at hand. Theo follows his gaze, looking down at the cuts on his left arm, feeling the sting of the salve as Kai dabs the ointment lightly across his wounds. The gesture is soft, feather-light, and Theo thinks he’s imagining the pain when it’s replaced so seamlessly by the gentle touch of skin on skin.

“I’ve thought about it, ever since my dad died,” Kai starts. “Back then, he was just trying to respect your decision to remain distant. You just lost your dad then, when he started looking out for you, leaving you enough food and medicine at your door every now and then, and when you refused to come over and eat with us, he figured you were the type to process things alone.” Kai sneaks a glance at Theo before continuing, finding a new scar to heal. “And so he told us he’d wait ‘till you were ready, even if it’d take him years.”

Theo closes his eyes and grimaces. From the prickling of the salve or the guilt, he’s not sure. Maybe it’s both. “I’m sorry.”

Kai shakes his head, smiling sadly. “It’s not your fault. You wouldn’t have known. You were just trying to heal.” He looks up and Theo finds his eyes, finding himself blessed with an absolution he didn’t think he deserved. “I am too.”

Theo returns a smile of his own, looking down at where his skin made contact with Kai’s. “You’re doing well.”

“Well, I wish I could say the same for you,” Kai replies, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Is work at Wuon’s really this dangerous? What kind of blacksmith’s assistant takes this much damage at the forge?” Kai asks, lifting Theo’s left arm to examine it from all sides. “I’ve a mind to talk to Wuon today…”

Theo laughs heartily. “You talk to him everyday. At the orphanage, whenever he brings over new toys. Don’t scare the kids by berating the big guy.”

“Think about it this way. They could learn a thing or two about taking care of their friends more,” Kai jokes, then continues more grimly. “I’m serious Theo. You’re rarely around whenever I pass by the forge. Wuon keeps telling me you’re either snoozing off in the back for a break, or you’re out collecting new ores from the miners who just came back. He doesn’t have half the scars you do, and he’s the head blacksmith.”

Theo says nothing, keeping his eyes on Kai’s hands. He feels the sting of his wounds returning, prickling slowly, and he tries not to wince.

“Where have you really been, Theo? Why are you doing this?” Kai asks, pain laced in his tone.

For a moment, Theo considers lying. He considers affirming Wuon’s excuses, building up on the story, saying that amateur blacksmiths usually sustain more injuries up the learning curve when he knows that’s far from the truth, that Wuon would never allow such a thing to happen if he could help it. He considers assuring his friend that he has nothing to worry about, that these scars will heal, and that they’ll be okay.

But when Theo looks up and sees the hard look in Kai’s eyes mingled with an undeniable fear, he knows he doesn’t need to lie. Because Kai already knows; he’s known for a long time. Theo thinks it’s good, because he’s done his job well. But Kai doesn’t need to know why. He just needs to be scared. Ignorant. Protected.

“How’s Soran? Is she okay?” Theo asks instead, dodging the question with another question, as he’s always done before.

Kai slowly closes his eyes, and Theo feels a familiar disappointment and hurt so palpable in the air around him he feels like he can’t breathe. Then the former nods slowly, rearing his head down, returning to the task at hand. Theo feels the salve across his scars again, and this time he lets them burn. He doesn’t deserve to feel the soft, gentle touch of skin on skin.

“She is,” Kai replies, his voice small. “Better than you, at least.”

Theo doesn’t miss the way Kai purses his lips, keeping it from trembling.

“Good,” Theo says, nodding. Soran will always come home to her siblings. Theo made sure of that. “I’ll think about it.”

Kai looks up, confused. “What?”

“Living with you and your sisters,” Theo reminds him with a small smile. “I’ll think about it.”

—

“Come with you?” Theo scoffs. “After what you’ve done to us?”

Giran smiles, almost sadly this time. “We do what we can to stay alive.”

“You don’t need to feed on humans to stay alive.”

“Oh but we do,” Giran says pointedly. “See, this is something I don’t think you Hunters and villagers will ever understand.”

Theo says nothing, trying to even his breathing. Giran continues.

“Ever since the number of wild animals in the forest started declining, the hunt for meat has only grown more aggressive. We’re hunting them down faster than they can reproduce. Our food sources are dwindling, boy. Do you see where this is going?”

“You’re despicable, every single one of you,” Theo spits.

“We—the Holos, that’s what you’ve named us, right?—understand that wild animals aren’t the only source of meat we could hunt for. And that’s where we have better chances of surviving. Much longer than any of you.”

Theo holds his tongue from cursing at the man in front of him, knowing it won’t change anything. He swallows thickly, trying to hold down the bile in his throat. He clenches his fists to his sides, trembling from the cold and anger and disgust.

“We almost found your village, did you know?” Giran asks, almost too brightly for Theo’s liking. “Twice. The first large-scale raid was eight years ago, on a cold night like this. The second was two years ago, also on a cold night like this. You people started calling it the Frost, the boy Aizen told me. Both attempts have been thwarted by foolish Hunters from your village who thought it was a good idea to sacrifice themselves to save the other Hunters who would never care to do the same. Weren’t you taught that self-preservation was the only way to survive?”

Theo feels numb as the realization kicks in. When he speaks, he feels detached, as if his voice doesn’t belong to him. “It’s also Hunter code run to run away from the village when pursued so as to protect it.” Theo’s voice almost cracks, and he starts blinking rapidly, feeling his eyes prick with tears, but they don’t fall. Theo doesn’t let them.

He remembers how cold it was then on those two fateful nights. The frost clung to his bones, never really leaving him all these years.

Giran laughs. “Running. That’s all you Hunters are good at, isn’t it? Running away? Like you did from us last night?”

—

Theo hears a rustling somewhere behind him. A menacing snarl echoes through the deep silence of the forest.

“Look,” the young man pinned below him starts. A knife was poised in midair between them, Theo ready to kill if he has to. “We have to get her somewhere safe. Whoever did this to her is about to come back, and it’d be faster if we both haul her back to your village.”

Theo purses his lips, but reluctantly agrees. This man doesn’t seem to be one of them, he thinks. He hasn’t checked the teeth, but he knows it would’ve been useless anyway. Not all monsters look the same.

Theo releases his grip and they both make their way over to a bleeding Soran on the ground, each taking a side of her limp body. Together, they stumble through the woods, the moonlight offering little guidance.

Theo expertly weaves his way through the trees, like he’s always done a hundred times before. The snarling that was once tailing their heels was gone in mere moments, and before he knows it, he sees the faint glow of a lampfire in the distance.

As they draw closer, Theo recognizes the village, the lampfire illuminating the nearby cottages in an orange glow. He sees the familiar outlines of a boy and girl through the trees at the outskirts of the forest. He hears the woman’s distressed voice, her tone very familiar. He hears it every time he comes to visit Kai.

The night is deep and cold, frost-bitingly so. That’s always how the Frost is, unforgiving in its raw, bitter cold. Theo thinks it’s fate for a Hunter to be taken by the Frost, but he made a promise.

Soran will always come home to her siblings.

—

“You were supposed to take Soran last night,” Theo says matter-of-factly. Of course, Theo knew this. That’s why he left the forge that day, despite Wuon’s protests.

“Supposed to, yes. But you saved her, Theo, isn’t that right? You’re quite the hero after all,” Giran remarks. “How’s that Exid doing?”

“Exid?”

“You give us a name, we can do the same. The Exids are what we call those who live in the one village we weren’t able to plunder. Unlike your village, they’re a very tight-knit group. After fending us off, they’ve dedicated themselves to warning and saving other villages from our raids. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they don’t.” Giran pauses, taking in Theo’s stiff expression. He smiles his signature smile. “We’re determined to make sure they do fail this time. With the kind of village you live in, it should be easy.”

Giran closes his eyes, whistling. “It’s been so long after all since we’ve had a proper feast,” he says wistfully.

The next moment Giran is on the ground, Theo’s knife poised between them as the latter pins the former down. Theo is breathing heavily, blood pounding his ears, anger pulsing through his veins.

“Now this is a familiar sight,” Giran observes with a smirk.

“It won’t be once I’m done with you,” Theo hisses. “Fuck you and your feast. No way in hell am I coming with you.” He raises the knife.

“Even after you’ve been replaced?”

The knife stops, Theo’s grip tensing. “What–”

“Don’t think I don’t know what’s happened in the twenty-four hours since last night, Theo,” Giran starts. “We Holos have very good hearing. Your little friend Kai seems to like that Exid boy—Yuzu, was it?—no? He seems to be a much better friend than you, doesn’t he?”

Theo doesn’t realize he’s dropped his arms to the side, the knife hanging limp in his right hand. He gets up soundlessly, backs away from Giran on the ground, his strong facade on the verge of cracking.

Theo doesn’t deny it. He knows what he heard a few hours ago.

“Oh, you poor boy,” Giran coos. “No longer a knight in shining armor, are you?”

Theo says nothing, feeling his chest constrict with every breath he tries to take. The night is colder than ever.

Giran clears his throat then. “I want to make a deal with you, Theo.”

—

Theo helps Yuzu and Kai bring a weary Soran home that night. Fortunately, Soran regained consciousness much faster than the village doctor, Enzy, had anticipated, owing it to her innate strength. When Kai’s younger sister, Hani, opens the door to welcome them in, Theo drags Yuzu by the arm after Kai and his sisters have settled in. “Come with me for a second,” he says.

“I can tell you’re not very fond of this arrangement,” Yuzu replies the moment they’re outside the cottage. Theo then remembers his failed efforts to convince Kai to let Yuzu stay with him instead.

“Oh no, I’m very fond of this arrangement,” Theo says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Listen, you talked to Enzy, yeah? About why you’re here? His father, the village chief, is irresponsibly out hunting ‘till tonight, so you had no other choice. Anyway, I heard from him. And here’s the deal: Kai is very adamant about leaving this village. That ‘fight’ with Aizen I stopped earlier today will probably give you a hint as to why. He’s taken a liking to you because he thinks he can fish answers out of you, because Soran wouldn’t tell him shit, and I think we both know why that’s the case.”

Yuzu nods slowly. Theo continues.

“Whatever you do, don’t give him what he wants,” Theo says firmly. “It’s important he doesn’t want to leave any more than he already does. It’s safer for him here. He doesn’t need to know what’s going on; it’ll crush him.”

Theo can see this doesn’t sit right with Yuzu. “So, what, you’re keeping him in the dark? I don’t think that’s very fair,” the latter remarks.

“It doesn’t matter what’s fair. What matters is that he’s safe. I don’t need him worrying about what’s out there.”

Theo notices Yuzu’s gaze flitter to the window beside them, where the former knows Kai is watching. Theo then realizes he’s underestimated the outsider, seeing Yuzu make the connection.

“For someone who doesn’t want his friend to worry, you’re worrying him an awful lot by showing off your scars. Wouldn’t hurt to wear a shirt with sleeves on, would it? I’ve seen a few of those in your cottage this morning after our little escapade.”

Theo’s glare is cold. He takes a step closer to Yuzu. “That,” he starts, shoving a finger to Yuzu’s chest, “is none of your business. I’ve worked my damned hardest making sure he stays safe here, and I’m not about to let you ruin it.”

“Theo,” Kai says from the front door, his voice stern. “We’re all pretty tired. Maybe it’s best we all turn in for the night.”

Theo relents, but not without a final glare at Yuzu. “Yeah, you’re right.” He turns to Kai. “Good night, Kai.” Then to Yuzu. “Yuzu.”

—

“What deal?” Theo asks, his voice small. He feels numb.

“You can still be the hero. You can still protect Kai, like you’ve always done,” Giran proposes in a soft tone, circling Theo once more.

Theo shakes his head, dejected, but he asks anyway. “How?”

—

Theo doesn’t leave. He doesn’t trust the outsider to understand how to protect Kai the way he’s always done. And so he stays, waiting until Kai closes the door before he makes his way back to the window, crouching silently in the shadows.

“Sorry about Theo,” he hears Kai say. “He can be a little rough at first, but he’s got a good heart.”

“It’s okay,” Yuzu says. Theo sees him take a seat in front of the lit fireplace. “Are your sisters asleep already?”

“Soran is. Hani’s watching over her, making sure she doesn’t relapse into a fever or something.”

“I’m glad your sister’s okay.”

“Me too.”

Me too, Theo thinks.

He sees Kai take his place next to Yuzu. For some reason the sight makes his insides churn, and so he sits in the shadows under the windowsill, opting to listen to the conversation instead. He feels the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and he knows Yuzu picks up on his presence. He can only hope Yuzu doesn’t try to snuff him out in front of Kai.

“I’m guessing Theo told you about me wanting to leave this village, and that you shouldn’t encourage me to,” Kai says sadly after a while.

A pause. Then Yuzu chuckles. “You’re good friends, aren’t you? You know him well.”

“We are. I do. I also know him well enough to know that he’s been leaving the village in secret. Theo is anything but clumsy, and those scars aren’t something you can get in a little village like ours.”

It’s silent once more before Yuzu speaks again. Theo can tell the outsider’s wary of his presence.

“I can tell he cares about you a lot,” Yuzu eventually says. “I can hear it in the way he speaks to you, the way he talks about you.”

Kai scoffs, and Theo feels his heart clench. “Yeah, maybe he cares a little too much.”

“What do you mean?”

Another pause. Then Kai starts. “Did you know he used to hang out with Aizen? He used to be a bully, y’know?” Kai chuckles. “Beating other kids up, not caring about anything or anyone else…

“But now, he looks out for me and my sisters. Whenever I’d get into trouble, he’d always bail me out. Whenever I’d get sick or injured, he’d always stay over to help Hani take care of me. He’s got a good heart, I told you that. Whenever a Frost would come, Theo would always rush over, making sure it wasn’t Soran.

“But…” Another sigh. “I don’t know, after he found out I wanted to leave the village, it’s like he’s doing all he can to show me that I can’t. He never lets me handle my own fights, never lets me do stuff on my own. He thinks I can’t handle myself, that I can’t think for myself. And then he started these secret excursions into the forest, I don’t know what for, and it just scares me y’know? It’s bad enough that Soran would come home with an injury visibly worse than the last, and it doesn’t help that I sometimes see him looking like he’s just been through hell and back. He always changes the subject whenever I bring it up, but he doesn’t exactly deny it either.”

Kai groans, and Theo can imagine him running his hands through his hair. “I don’t know what he’s thinking and it scares me. It scares me because seeing what he and my sister are going through makes me want to just stay here, and that’s saying a lot because I don’t want to stay here.”

Theo feels relieved hearing Kai saying he wants to stay here, but he’s not sure if the means he employed justifies the end he envisions. Maybe not.

“Why do you want to leave?” Yuzu asks.

Theo scoffs. He feels childish, reacting this way, but he can’t seem to help it. He feels his ego inflate, thinking the outsider doesn’t know Kai as intimately as he does.

But Theo feels his heart break too, realizing that Yuzu might understand Kai the way he never could.

“For a better life,” Kai says softly. “My mom… she disappeared two years ago, not long after my dad did. She loved him a lot, see, and her loyalty was so strong that I guess she ended up unknowingly walking into the forest in her sleep to try to find him. And of course, she never came back. It was cold that night, but they never found her body. I don’t want to believe in the Frost, but I like to think she’s alive somewhere in a better place. Where people are actually nice to her. Where people don’t pitch stones at her just because they don’t trust her kindness. I want to believe I can find a place like that somewhere beyond this village, somewhere where there’s no need for violence.”

Theo doesn’t notice a tear slip down his cheek until he realizes he’s breathing heavily. He clutches at this chest, squeezing his eyes shut, trying not to sniffle loudly lest he give away his presence.

I’ve got it all wrong, Theo thinks. All wrong. He doesn’t understand Kai like he thinks he does. He probably never did. And that realization hurts more than all the scars he’s ever suffered through.

“I think you can,” Yuzu says.

“What?” Kai asks, taken aback.

“I think you can find a world like that. You don’t have to stay here. It won’t be easy, though. I’m sure you’ve been told enough times that it’s dangerous outside, and I can attest to that too. But you don’t have to hide here.” And Theo tortures himself by imagining Yuzu smiling reassuringly at Kai, offering him hope and security in a way that Theo never could. “I believe you can make it, Kai, but not alone. I’ll help you.”

“You will?” Kai asks again, his voice cracking.

“I will,” Yuzu promises.

At this, Theo gets up silently, hearing enough. He makes his way to the woods, not wanting to go home yet. He feels Yuzu’s watchful gaze behind him.

Kai will be fine now, Theo decides with resignation, disappearing into the darkness.

He’ll be fine with Yuzu there.

—

The night is deep and cold, frost-bitingly so.

Theo hadn’t meant to come this far into the woods. The cold feels as if it has burrowed itself so deep under his skin, it was meant to find a home in his bones.

“If you join us,” Giran starts, “we won’t harm a hair on Kai and his sisters. Hell, maybe even the Exid too. You need someone to watch over Kai now that you’re gone, right?”

“No,” Theo shakes his head, but he doesn’t seem to feel his head moving from the gesture. “No, I’m not gone, I’m not coming with you—”

“Oh, but you have to,” Giran says, his voice now dropping an octave lower. “We show no mercy, boy. We do this to survive.”

“Why do you even want me?”

“Perhaps the boy Aizen and I are not so different after all,” Giran replies, his voice back to normal, a whimsical quality to it hanging in the air. “We want your strength. To make us bigger than we actually are. The Exids are growing stronger by the day, and we need all the manpower we can get.”

Theo says nothing, staring long and hard at the patch of ground in front of him, illuminated by the moonlight.

“You’re strong, Theo. Incredibly skilled. Hunter or not. I saw that last night in your encounter with the Exid. We could use your skills in our ranks,” Giran says thoughtfully. “But you still have much to learn.”

Theo tilts his head in confusion, looking up at Giran. “What—”

“You thought you lost me last night as you were bringing that Hunter woman home, but I simply followed. Hiding my bloodlust. You need more work sharpening your senses. It’s thanks to you that I found your village at all.”

Theo’s blood turns cold. He watches Giran walking in the direction of the village. “Wait—”

“Come, Theo,” Giran invites with a wave of his hand. “Let’s see your village one last time before we raze it to the ground.”

“You can’t,” Theo breathes out, stumbling after Giran. Kai is still there. “Please, you can’t—”

“Do I have your answer, then?”

And the pair find themselves at the boundary between the forest and the village. To his surprise, Theo finds a breathless Yuzu running from the other side of the village square, entering a cottage he and Giran were currently hiding behind. He realizes this is Kai’s cottage.

He feels his heart plummet to his stomach.

Theo hears Yuzu warn Kai’s family from an open window. “We need to leave.”

“What?” Soran says, as Theo hears her climbing down the stairs. “Why? It’s not safe out there.”

“We need to find Theo,” Kai pleads with tears in his eyes. Theo’s breath hitches, his heart beating loudly.

Why was he looking for me?

“Is he really gone?” Hani asks.

“He is,” Yuzu confirms. “I’ve checked. But more than that, the Holos are here. We need to leave, now.”

“The Holos? What are they?” Soran asks, her confusion eventually turning into guarded anger. “What crap are you spouting now, outsider? What do you want from us?”

“The Holos—those monsters who attacked you. I’ll tell you more after we’re out of here, but we need to go, now.”

Before anyone can retort, they all hear a scream in the distance. Then came multiple screams. Then, past the cottage, Theo saw an outpouring of villagers from the opposite corner of the village, running to the forest boundary on the other side. More screaming. More running. Then came a menacing snarl, then another, then another. The same kind Theo heard in the forest the night before.

Then came the fire.

It started with one cottage, and when an ember would fly to the neighboring thatched roof, the fire would grow. It grew enough to rise high into the sky, and Theo is momentarily stunned. In the distance, he sees a Holo emerge from the fire, blood coating his lips, sharp teeth on full display. In one hand he holds a dismembered arm, taking a bite off of it as he slowly makes his way to Kai’s group, who by now is standing outside Kai’s cottage. Theo sees the Holo marching triumphantly, reveling in the fear he’s instilled in their hearts.

“I’ll join you,” Theo says, his voice resolute but defeated. His face is streaked with tears by now, the dry tear stains making his face glow tragically in the fire. “I’ll join you, so please…” he implores desperately to the Holo beside him, watching a grief-stricken but determined Kai tug on Yuzu’s arm. Kai seems to be saying something to Yuzu, to which the latter nodded. Then Yuzu looks behind him, a grim expression on his face. Theo realizes he’s looking to Soran for her final decision.

“Oh, I always knew you would,” Giran says proudly. “But I have measures in place—Maru over there, the one with the arm—to make sure your little friends make it out of here alive. From what I know about this Soran girl, she gets the final say, but she’s not so fond of leaving this little village. Oh, that must be mostly our fault, actually. Apologies.” Giran turns to look at Theo, mock guilt on the former’s features. It takes everything in Theo not to punch him in the face.

“Let’s go,” Theo hears Soran say.

And they turn their backs on the fire. Theo crosses over to the other side of the cottage, watching them reach the forest boundary on the other side of the village. Once they’ve disappeared into the woods, the Holo—Maru—stops in his chase, turning around to continue his rain of terror over what’s left of the village in flames.

Theo breathes out a sigh of relief. He can only hope Wuon and Enzy have made it out too.

“We should get going now too, my dear Holo initiate,” Giran says, walking back to the darkness of the forest. “You have much to learn before you’re ready to serve our purpose.”

Despite the fires all around now, Theo searches for the cold, desperately grasping for the familiar sensation, some reminder of the life he’s about to leave behind. But the cold has burrowed itself so deep under his skin, it was meant to find a home in his bones. It won’t leave him.

Theo follows Giran into the darkness, numb all over. When he feels the Frost again, he welcomes it home.

—

The cold is a part of Theo now.

He walks casually up to the gates leading out of the Holo camp, nuzzling into the thick scarf around his neck, his breath drawing clouds. He sees Maru and Bulti standing guard on either side of the spiked gate, the small fires mounted in sconces above their heads casting their ugly faces in a sinister light.

“Maru,” Theo nods curtly to the Holo on his left, then addresses the one on the right. “Bulti.”

“Giran’s dog,” Bulti greets in response. Maru simply growls. He never learned how to speak, that one.

“Ever the gentleman, are you, Bulti?”

“Don’t give me none of that elegant bullshit. Giran was always a stick up my ass,” Bulti snaps.

Theo sighs heavily. “That makes two of us.”

“Recon work again, is it? That’s fucking boring, boy. I feel sorry for you.”

“Say what you will. It’s what gets your stomachs filled.”

Bulti smirks, turning to Maru with a nod. They both open the gates for Theo.

“And yours now too,” Bulti remarks as Theo passes the gates. “Holo.”

Theo’s face hardens. He nuzzles himself deeper into his scarf, resentful.

Minutes later, Theo follows the trailblazed route east of the Holo camp, a route he set up as per order of Giran and the rest of the Holo council. They believe a village lies in this general direction, for a few Holos have spotted some Hunters scouring the area for game. Should Theo keep up the recon effort, they should be able to reach the village in a few weeks time.

However, Theo diverges from the path, using his memory to find a particular hunting ground in the forest where he knows he’ll find some familiar faces. And in fact, he does.

Theo hides his presence among the trees and the undergrowth, just like Giran taught him. Beyond him are two Hunters, a rare sight to see, for Hunters usually operated solo. But he knows this pair, knows the routes they take, knows the location of the Exid camp they reside in.

Theo did not diverge from the trailblazed path he was instructed to build; he simply redirected it from its real target.

He peeks around a tree trunk to watch the two Hunters spread out, sensing their instincts to be on high alert. The one on his left, Yuzu, advances slowly from the center of their planned route, keeping his eyes and ears peeled for whatever wild animals could still be found. To his right, Theo sees Kai advance as cautiously and as slowly as Yuzu, craning his head up to look at the canopy. After a year, it has become a familiar sight to Theo, yet it always makes his heart swell.

You’re strong, Kai. You’re probably even stronger than I remember.

Theo reaches under his shirt, pulling out a leatherbound notebook tucked in the waistband of his pants. As per routine, he leaves it by the roots of the tree he’s hiding behind, knowing either of the two will chance upon the area sooner or later. That should be the last one, Theo thinks. The last bit of information you need to take down the Holos once and for all.

Theo then turns to leave, making his way back to the path, opting to continue building it before he returns to the Holo camp. For some reason, Theo feels a pull, and without thinking, he glances back over his shoulder. He sees Kai among the trees, an arrow nocked on his bow, his sharp gaze scanning the thicket. For a moment, it seems like his eyes lock with Theo’s. It sustains. And Kai recognizes.

Kai immediately lowers his bow. Theo turns back to the front again, swearing under his breath. Don’t call my name, he silently pleads. We might not be the only ones here.

To his relief, Kai doesn’t. Theo smiles to himself, knowing Kai remembers his training. Against his better judgment, Theo turns back to see his friend once more. He pulls his scarf down, gives him a small smile, then faces forward again and disappears into the thicket.

Back at the Exids’ hunting grounds, Yuzu runs over to Kai.

“Kai, what’s wrong?” Yuzu whispers. “You didn’t fire your arrow. Did you see anything?”

“Yeah, I did,” Kai replies, running away from Yuzu towards the tree trunk from which the former saw Theo emerge.

Kai finds the leather notebook on the ground. “So it is you,” he whispers.

“Kai,” Yuzu breathes moments later, catching up to him. “What’s going on?”

Kai picks up the notebook. “Another one,” he replies, smiling. “C’mon, let’s go back to camp,” Kai says enthusiastically, already walking ahead. “We have a lot of planning to do.”

written: may 21-22, 2022

from the cold draws its power from a dying fire (series)

read again >> writer's statement

#short story

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

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part iii: protector

Theo was eleven when the cold first came.

“Did you hear about Gido?”

He didn’t understand then why the cold would burrow itself so deep under his skin, as if it was meant to find a home in his bones. He only realized what it meant when he heard about his father in the whispers that stole past his cottage window at the crack of dawn, when the death had already passed.

Thieves. Ambush. The Hunters scurrying and fleeing like rats in the dark.

“Should’ve expected it, shouldn’t he? That’s what he gets for trusting someone else so easily.”

“Partners. Ha! It was only a matter of time before one would betray the other.”

A team of two among the Hunters. Rare in the history of the village. Looked down upon, because being a Hunter was known to be a solitary endeavor. A Hunter operated best when he operated alone.

“Gido was a fool to try to hold them off. Ozal was right to turn tail and run. He had his wits about him.”

Betrayal. Theo’s father died because his partner decided to save himself.

“Had. Doesn’t seem like he has any of that now.”

When Ozal returned, he barricaded himself into his cottage. The paranoia was evident: a wild-eyed mania, uncontrollable shakes, an almost feral look on his face, or so Theo heard. He refused to speak a word about what had happened that night. The story of Gido’s death came instead in bits and pieces from the Hunters that came before him.

It was expected then that Ozal would no longer continue as a Hunter from that day forth.

“Gido was a fool.”

That was always how the story ended. It seemed a good reminder to the village that the system they abided by holds true, that self-preservation is the only way to survive.

Theo’s first lesson then from the village as a child was that to trust someone with your life means death. It conflicted so strongly with the one lesson his father persistently taught him, that to trust someone with your life means you’ll go far. Together.

Together was a lie.

Theo swore by that lie, seared it into his mind, tried to undo the years of propaganda that was done onto him by his father. But Gido was persistent, even in death. His lessons have burrowed themselves deep in Theo’s heart, and it’s all Theo can do to deny these lessons a sliver of hope that the village could be wrong.

But when Ozal drives a stake through his own heart the very next day, Theo is convinced there’s no other truth than the one taught by the village. Together meant death. He swears to live by its values for the rest of his life, determined not to meet the same fate.

(But still, his father is persistent. Even in death. Theo will long for a connection, no matter how hard he will try to deny it.)

—

Theo is sixteen and has spent the past five years of his life living with the cold in his bones.

“That old codger still after you?”

When Aizen speaks, it’s with a confidence that boasts of his ill-gotten victories against the weaker kids in the village. For years, Aizen has built an untouchable reputation as the village roughneck, standing above the others with sheer power alone.

“You could say that.”

Theo has also spent the past five years of his life taking. It didn’t matter to him what he took, whether it was his neighbor’s clothes hanging out to dry or random trinkets from stalls in the village square when the merchants weren’t looking. The thrill of his crimes would set his heart ablaze, and for a moment he’d forget. But after the highs always come the lows, and the cold always remembers to come home.

“Isn’t he annoying? Been five years already. What’s he want with you again?” Aizen asks, looking out at the crowd.

As if in acknowledgement of Theo’s grit, Aizen took Theo in as his second-in-command. Now Theo would also get into fistfights, impressing Aizen even more by never losing one. But winning or losing never really mattered to Theo. Nothing did, except staying alive. His crusade with Aizen is nothing more than a precursor to this very motivation.

“To take care of me, I guess. Ever since my dad died,” Theo replied.

Aizen scoffs. “What’s that, some Hunter obligation now? Some Hunter dies and now you gotta take care of their kid? Do we have to do that after we get initiated?”

“No, Ravn’s…” Crazy. Dull-witted. Simpleminded. A moron. He could list Aizen’s favorite insults by heart, but it still wouldn’t sit right with Theo, not after five years of Ravn’s perseverance (and Theo’s consequent stubbornness). “Different.” That’s fine. Safe. “He’s just different.”

“If his weirdo son is anything to go by, then yeah they’ve all got some screws loose.”

Ravn’s son, Kai. Tall and skinny, but not malnourished. Messy mop of wavy brown hair. Small, thin eyes. Helps out at the village doctor’s clinic with his younger sister. Feeds the strays. Talks to the orphans. Unbearably kind. A nobody. A weakling. A fool, like his father.

Aizen clicks his tongue. “C’mon Theo, we have training now.”

He gets up to leave, Theo following close by. The latter finds it bizarre, training for an occupation that led to his father’s own demise, but he feels there’s nothing else worthwhile to do in this village. When he makes his way toward the forest, he sees Ravn’s son among the masses, his gaze scanning the crowd. For a moment, it seems like his eyes lock with Theo’s. It sustains. And then it passes. But it’s enough for Theo to decide.

Theo then makes sure to visit the village square at least once a day. He rationalizes, thinks he’s doing Ravn a favor, keeping his son out of trouble. He keeps Aizen in check, redirects his attention whenever Kai is close by, making sure the latter finishes his errands without incident. And he can’t help but think, all pretentiousness aside, that Kai is doing something similar for him too, because for every new scar he sustains at training, he finds a new batch of ointment or medicine along with the rations Ravn leaves by his door every once in a while.

When their eyes lock, it takes everything in Theo not to let it linger. He makes sure nothing more comes out of this illicit, mutually beneficial arrangement, because he learned early on that to trust someone with your life means death.

It feels like death too, when one night he wakes up in a cold sweat, feeling the death of another Hunter. Nights like this aren’t uncommon, but against his will he remembers a particular night, five years ago, when his own father died. Betrayed.

He tries to fight the cold, tries not to think which Hunter didn’t come home, tries not to think but what if it’s Ravn? And he curses his pride for trying to survive without him.

The next morning the murmuring starts.

“Did you hear about Ravn?”

No, I don’t want to hear it. And Theo makes sure of it.

He doesn’t think he’s missing much by living as a recluse for the past few days, barricading himself in the cottage like Ozal once did. Both hunter training and terrorizing Aizen’s litter of weaklings doesn’t offer much respite. He thinks it’s better in the cottage, where he doesn’t have to worry about facing the son Ravn left behind. But he thinks about it, and Theo feels his own despair expand like the scorching summer heat.

The next day, a knock at the door sends Theo reeling. He knows it’s him.

Theo doesn’t want to, but he feels a pull. A warmth. A hope. A lesson burrowed deep in Theo’s heart breaks the surface and he wants to believe there’s truth in a long life together.

He opens the door, his eyes adjusting to the sun from the darkness of the cottage. For a moment the two boys stare at each other, seemingly equally dumbfounded. Theo notices the bloodshot eyes and the puffed up cheeks. Grief doesn’t suit him.

Kai finds his words first.

“You haven’t been coming.”

Theo nods, purses his lips. “I haven’t.” His throat feels scratchy from days of disuse.

“So I came to see you.”

Theo then remembers his father’s words. To trust someone with your life means you’ll go far. Together. He refuses to admit he’s gone this far because of Ravn. But deep in his heart, he knows. (Gido is persistent, after all. Even in death.)

And here now was Ravn’s son.

Theo thinks back to the night Ravn died, how he nestled into himself, trying to draw all his warmth towards him, trying not to think of wavy brown hair and small, thin eyes and kindness and hope and warmth. But he did. And for a moment his heart was ablaze once more, blind to the stolen life of a Hunter that night.

Theo longs for a connection, no matter how hard he tries to deny it.

“Did you now?” he says.

“I wanted to see if you were okay.” Kai admits before realizing what he said. He quickly shakes his head. “I mean— how you were doing. It’s been days since… y’know… and I was hoping to give you your usual rations at the square, because I didn’t know how you’d feel if I went straight to your door… but you never came so…”

It was only then that Theo noticed the familiar basket in Kai’s arms, the one he got used to seeing outside his door so often. He felt a pang in his heart, seeing it again, this time in the hands of a boy who made the extra effort to see him when Kai should’ve been the one holing himself up at home, mourning the loss of his father. Not Theo.

He takes the basket, accepts it properly for the first time.

“Thank you.”

Kai smiles despite the grief, and Theo thinks he’s glowing.

Not long after, he realizes what betrayal feels like. But not from the side of the betrayed.

It’s a particularly vivid scene. The blistering summer heat. The sound of the cicadas. The scorching humidity pressing onto his skin. Kai on the ground, Theo shielding him from Aizen and his group of bullies. He senses a critical turning point. A betrayal. Theo branded as a defector, a traitor.

“You’re kidding me, Theo,” Aizen spits, outraged. “You’re siding with this nobody?”

“He’s somebody to me,” Theo says, surprisingly calm. “More than you ever were.”

He raises his arms, ready to fight. For the first time, Theo finds purpose in power.

—

Theo is seventeen when he finds out that Kai wants to leave the village. Shion, Kai’s mother, had just disappeared then, and it’s as if it triggered an outburst in Kai that Theo had never seen before in their one year as friends.

“But Kai, it’s dangerous out there,” Theo exclaims. Hunter training had told him enough to know without ever having to venture too far from the outskirts of the village: Hunter initiates were trained well enough to be able to kill a man, more so than mere game.

If Theo didn’t know any better, that was probably what the final ultimatum of being a Hunter was all about. But Theo knew Kai wouldn’t understand, not when the latter stopped his own training within three days of his father’s death.

“You think Soran hasn’t already told me that?” Kai points out, exasperated.

Of course, Soran knows, Theo thinks. Better than I do. She was initiated the year Ravn died. The year I stopped going to training.

“Why did you stop?” Kai asked, as if reading Theo’s thoughts.

“Because you did.” Theo shrugged. “I didn’t want to become a Hunter if you didn’t.”

—

Theo is eighteen when he realizes Kai best responds to wounds.

When Soran comes home with an injury visibly worse than the last, Kai becomes noticeably less vocal about his desire to leave the village. Theo then begins entertaining a plan to drive the idea from Kai’s mind entirely, all while satisfying both his and Kai’s curiosity about what lies outside the village; Kai thinks it’s a better life. Theo thinks it’s humans, the kind they seemed trained to kill. But Theo doesn’t say this, because Kai doesn’t need to know. Kai glows better when he’s ignorant. Protected.

Theo uses Soran as an excuse. He needs his own reason to leave the village. Something that Kai could understand. Something he can’t oppose, at least not directly. The scars are important, he thinks. I need to show him what it’s like. I need him to know he’s safer where he is, where his family is. And he knows Kai, knows how much he loves his sisters. He knows how much he shakes whenever the air would grow cold and Soran hasn’t come home yet. Knowing this is enough for Theo to decide.

But to lie to someone like Kai pains him more than any earth-bound scar.

“You got a job with Wuon?” Kai asks when Theo starts carrying out his plan, the excited curl of his voice tearing the latter’s heart apart. It’s not completely a lie though, Theo tells himself.

“Yeah.” Theo manages weakly. “He says he needs more muscle around the forge. A blacksmith’s job suits me well, don’t you think?” he continues with a smirk, finding it easier to feign confidence than to conceal fear.

Fear? No, I’m not afraid. He looks at Kai and he’s glowing. How can I be afraid?

“It does!” Kai answers enthusiastically, and Theo feels his chest swell. “I’m glad it’s with Wuon too! I like him, he’s nice. He drops by the orphanage a few times to talk to the kids, gives them toys when he makes some. He’s got a really good heart,” Kai exclaims. Then he smiles at Theo, the warm kind that he loves, as if it was reserved just for him. “I’m really glad, Theo. You’re in good hands. Wuon will take care of you.”

“Yeah,” Theo agrees.

And I’ll take care of you.

—

Theo is nineteen.

The air is starting to grow cold.

“Theo,” Wuon starts, his voice wary. “You’re not going to do what I think you’re going to do, are you?”

“Why even ask that question when you already know the answer?” Theo replies with a dry chuckle, getting ready to leave the forge. He grabs his knife from the counter, regarding it regretfully. “I’m sorry you had to make this for me. I know you don’t like forging weapons.”

“Theo, I know I agreed to help you. I have a soft spot for you kids, and I know you have good intentions, but you can’t go on like this. Those scars aren’t a joke. Enzy can only do so much. I’ve told you before, sooner or later you won’t be able to come back, and that’ll ruin Kai. Did you ever think of that?”

I have, Theo thinks. He’s thought about that ever since he started shadowing Soran, ever since he saw for himself how dangerous it really was to be outside. But Wuon won’t understand. As long as Kai’s alive, he won’t be ruined.

“Maybe it’s Soran tonight, did you think of that?” he snaps back, albeit unintentionally. Then his voice softens. “I owe you a lot, Wuon. Covering for me whenever he’d come around, offering me an actual job here when I only suggested it as a front for my plan,” he explains. “But I have to go.”

“Honestly, the one time you stay here…” Wuon sighs heavily, running a hand through his soot-stained hair. “She’s supposed to be good isn’t she? Initiated after only three months—she’s better than you, Theo. Should you really be worried?”

“You don’t know what it’s like out there,” Theo says, his voice small. “Soran’s strong, but those… things,” Theo purses his lips. Then he looks up at Wuon, his eyes hard. “They’re stronger.”

“The monsters?”

“No… no, not literally, at least.” Theo gives Wuon one last look, a grave smile on his face, before turning to head out. “You know the drill, Wuon. Not a word to Kai.”

“I can’t stop you, can I?” Wuon asks, faint desperation in his voice.

Theo shakes his head. “I won’t forgive you if you do.”

Then he leaves the forge, stealthily making his way towards the edge of the forest.

written: may 19, 2022

from the cold draws its power from a dying fire (series)

next >> part iv (finale): frost

#vignette #writing exercise #dialogue study #conflict study

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

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part ii: memory

Time as keeper is more than just clockwork.

It holds in its keeping, among many others, the history of a certain village, the birth of a certain child, the death of a certain Hunter, and the remembrance of certain collective experiences that encompass these particular certainties. When time keeps, it clusters certain memories together to construct a lived reality, but it ultimately favors no one memory over another, and no human can choose which memory to offer to time. It takes all, remembers all. Time as judge then demands that certain truths be made known through a retelling, a restaging of human memory.

Time first learns of a truth when fed one for the first time.

She’s mad, that one. Shion’s peculiarity forms the heart of this particular memory. It unfolds in the village square, a vast expanse of grey and dusty cobblestone, its fringes lined by shabby, drooping cottages. The throng of villagers move with a practiced gait, maintaining brisk and hurried strides as they go about the habitual motions of survival, but never quite jostling the shoulder of another villager in their haste. A restrained control in the restlessness of the crowd feels palpable in the air, like a string pulled taut with tension; any slight shove or disturbance could snap the string in half, could release an antagonism that was simply lying dormant within the crowd, waiting for a chance to be realized.

A realized antagonism then comes in the form of silence; this is demonstrated in this particular memory. The hum of the bustling village fizzes down, assumes a solemnity befitting a funeral. No, an execution. Where the villagers would once keep their eyes trained to their boots, they now fall upon the withering form of a woman on her knees in the middle of the village square, her head hung low in despair. Her arms, cut and bruised and grazed by the stones pitched her way, are raised in futile self-defense. The blood runs slowly down her pale skin, dripping onto the cobblestone below her.

Shion’s values have always opposed the values upheld by the village. To live a long life, one must always prioritize the well-being of the self. There is no room to even think about the fortune of others. The moment this mentality buckles under empathy and the unfathomable desire to offer assistance to those in need, the social system becomes vulnerable to deceit, deception, trickery. To be empathetic is to show weakness. To be kind is to be a fool, to be a target. No good comes out of being humane. Once hoodwinked, the shame and regret remains in the heart forever.

But shame and regret finds no home in Shion. She doesn’t see the risk of deceit in goodwill, only the reality of the villagers’ fear. She understands that her acts of kindness have been met with such brutal retaliation because the villagers don’t trust her intentions, doesn’t believe in her compassion, believing that such things are simply tools to evoke empathy in the target, to dismantle the system for personal gain. The villagers are convinced that once they start believing in Shion’s “unnatural” goodness, they lose the game. Then come the trickery and deceit, then the shame and regret.

Shion believes in goodness. She believes that the fear can be subdued. She thinks of her children back home, of Soran’s strength (and how she’s so much like her father) and of Hani’s wisdom despite her young age. She thinks of Kai, who took so much after her that she sometimes fears for his own safety in the village, but she wants to believe he won’t have to suffer through the same ordeal she’s presently confronted with. She wants to believe in goodness, for the sake of her children. So she raises her head, lowers her arms, numbs herself to the stinging and the pain, and looks into the eyes of her attackers, still holding stones, with a naïve forgiveness. She then sees the discomfort, the fear. She braces herself. They pitch the stones.

Time then learns of a truth: that goodness has no place in this certain village. The blood continues to mark the cobblestones and it’s days before the stains wear off in the resumed bustle of footfalls in the village square, as if the public humiliation of a “madwoman” never took place before then.

Years later, Shion disappears. The villagers believe it to be, quite simply, the natural consequence of her foolishness.

—

The stones in the village square recognize the blood being spilled on its surfaces, and it triggers the judge in time to restage a particular memory. To make known a certain truth.

“Your sister should’ve died, don’t you think?”

The villagers are again silent, the antagonism apparent. The scene that unfolds before them is not unfamiliar, especially to the older ones who knew of Shion and that day years ago in the village square. The sight of her son on his knees on the stones is intentional; it’s time restaging a truth. On the other hand the villagers believe it to be, quite simply (and independent of the intentions of time), the natural order of things: the son takes after the mother, in more ways than one.

The struggle to lift himself from the floor is taxing, and Kai tastes the blood on his lips, hears the ringing in his ears. When his vision starts darkening around the edges, he starts to consider the possibility of death. But hearing his sister and death spoken in the same breath was unforgivable, and Kai, who usually draws strength from his mother, draws it this time from his father.

“You take that back, Aizen,” he starts, and the boy’s eye twitches, his face contorting into restrained anger. The name feels like a curse on Kai’s lips, foreign on his tongue, but the retaliation feels good. The memory ripples slightly; time does not remember retaliation the first time blood was spilled on these stones, but time keeps this new memory, as time does.

A scoff, a kick. The antagonism unravels more threateningly at this diminutive display of rebellion. A new, electrifying wave of pain blooms from Kai’s stomach, and he finds himself lying facedown on the stones once more, the sole of Aizen’s boot digging into his ribs. “You’re all talk, Kai,” he counters, and Kai’s feels his name sting like an insult, the way Aizen draws it out. “But you can’t even hunt like the rest of us do. You had to get your sissy to do it for you, because you’re weak, aren’t you?”

At this, time reviews its keeping. It sifts through its history and floods Kai’s mind with poorly repressed memories. The night his mother disappeared. The refusal of Hunter training. The near loss of a loved one, just the night before. When Soran didn’t come home from her hunt by sundown, time reminds Kai of his refusal to train because of his vain incapacity to kill. Time tells him it was Soran, not him, who stepped up as the breadwinner of the family after they lost their father, because Kai couldn’t kill.

When Soran turned up in the cold of the night, so close to death with the blood that followed her trail, he feels a relief and a guilt that will make a home in his heart forever.

A shove with Aizen’s boot sends Kai to the center of the square. The villagers look on with a solemnity befitting an execution, for this is exactly what it seems like.

“Get up, Kai,” he commands, and he feels the sting in his name again. “Show me what you’ll do if I don’t take back what I said about your sissy.” He feels himself lifted from the stones by the collar of his shirt and he comes inexplicably close to Aizen’s face. He feels the resentment boring holes into his skull, and he wills himself not to shrink in fear.

Seeing this close the face of a boy excessively loyal to the village’s social system of extreme self-preservation, Kai finds himself wondering why. Through the hazy cloud of pain in his skull, he wonders why the people in this village are so horrible, so indifferent. To simply know that ‘things have always been this way’ is never enough to accept it. Kai wants to know why.

Time, of course, knows why. But time keeps, judges. Never tells. Only reveals. Soon, Kai will realize this, but now, it’s enough for him to keep asking why.

When Kai makes no further show of disobedience, a shove to the chest sends him reeling on the ground once more, and he looks up to see Aizen circling the square, his deep breaths filling the silence in the air. Kai finds himself at the mercy of a predator, who takes his public humiliation as a form of leisure. But Kai takes after his mother, despite his many why’s, and he wants to believe in goodness, wants to believe that Aizen could be more than his anger. He doesn’t want to give the system the satisfaction of proving its truth, that no good can come out of being humane.

Time as keeper remembers the forgiveness of the mother in the face of severe animosity. To reinforce the truth of the futility of goodness in this certain village, it restages this forgiveness in the son. The final performance of antagonism will then be solidified by the boy who remains standing, who remains faithful to the system, and the restaging of the memory will draw to a close. The truth is then that the son indeed takes after the mother, in more ways than one.

When Aizen sees the pity on Kai’s face, he closes the distance, his nerves pulsing, itching to inflict pain for the grave discomfort that settles under his skin. This is then the moment the restaged memory digresses, and time then will learn of a new truth about goodness, perhaps even loyalty, in this certain village.

“That’s enough, Aizen.”

A hand stops the downward swing of Aizen’s fist before it makes contact with Kai’s face. The movement was silent in its execution, so deftly and swiftly and gracefully carried out, that the entire village square is stunned into a new kind of silence befitting the live witnessing of a miracle, for this is exactly what it seems like.

Kai can hear Aizen snarling, the name of the newcomer sounding jagged and strained in his throat. “Theo.”

And time understands then that no, this is not a deviation of the memory. This is a restaging of another memory altogether, seamlessly interweaving itself with the one staged before it.

Time then works to revive a distant memory in Kai’s narrative. The blistering summer heat. The sound of the cicadas. The scorching dirt beneath his palms. His place on the ground. And he sees a younger Theo’s back to him, shielding him from a younger Aizen and his group of bullies standing their ground beyond him. He senses a critical turning point. A betrayal. Theo branded as a defector, a traitor. Succeeding memories that follow this are variations of the same scene. A villain. A hero. A victim.

This is a memory time knows well. It is a memory restaged regularly in Kai’s history. Its reappearance now is no anomaly, simply a function of time.

The sense of forgiveness Kai felt from earlier melts away into a mix of emotions that he’s had trouble making sense of for a while now. There’s relief and gratitude, of course, but there’s also faint traces of indignance, disbelief, irritation. The sources of these contradictory emotions, Kai doesn’t feel ready to acknowledge. And so he tucks them away, compartmentalizes them in some obscure, dusty corner of his mind.

“I see you’re still playing the knight in shining armor for this loser.”

“I see you’re still playing gang leader to a nonexistent troupe. Where are your underlings, Aizen? Left you along with your brother I’m guessing?”

A low buzz of tension hums in the air. This, of course, is another memory not unknown to time, but now it echoes a scar in Aizen’s history. His group of thugs were only held together by respect for his older brother, a Hunter. Once he disappeared, so did they. Not all Hunters after all are as fortunate as Soran to be able to come back home.

Kai hazards a guess this is what Aizen meant when he said Soran should have died. Because if his brother never came home, why should she? And as if enlightened by a revelation, Kai sees his blood on the stones and feels his wounds justified.

But Kai remembers Theo is crossing a very thin line. He realizes Theo is the only one who can. From his place on the ground, Kai sees Aizen’s temper simmering to a new tipping point.

“Don’t you start with me, pretty boy. You could never beat me in a fist fight.”

“That’s because I never tried.” Theo’s voice remains calm, even, authoritative. His stance doesn’t falter, and his grip on Aizen’s fist tightens in his own expression of sharply controlled anger. The impassive, composed manner in which Theo has carried himself without fail creates a disquieting atmosphere in the village square, yet nobody moves for fear of breaking this strangely beguiling trance. “And I hope you don’t push me to this time.”

Aizen’s wrist twists, crackling with a piercing stab of pain. He yells, retracts his hand from Theo’s vice-like grip, and retreats to the outer edge of the crowd. He’s livid, having the humiliation turned on him from its focus on Kai.

“You’re messing with the wrong crowd, Theo. You were better off with us,” Aizen spits, his tone lethal. He attempts to appeal to a power in their history, when the world was at their feet. But power is transitory. When time keeps, power is lost to time. Aizen still clings to its shell. Theo has long washed his hands clean of it.

“No, I’m better off with him,” Theo responds firmly, gesturing to Kai behind him, and Kai’s heart swells. “And you’re better off alone.” Kai picks up a repressed tension drift between the two, a friction familiar from Theo’s past. When Theo speaks next, it’s with a tone of finality. “Go home, Aizen.”

And he does, begrudgingly so. Time senses a relevance in the boy’s anger, keeps it, as time does. The crowd disperses not long after, the trance lifted, the drama unfolded. When Theo crouches down to Kai’s level, an irksome annoyance threatens to surface at the harmless gesture, but Kai swallows it down. Time reminds him of Theo’s past, his betrayal, their history and friendship. He tries not to wince in pain, tries to hide it from Theo.

“Can you stand? Give me your arm, I’ll take you to Enzy.”

Kai refuses Theo’s offer, tries to stand by himself. But he staggers in his efforts, the pain almost unbearable, and Theo forces Kai’s arm around his shoulders. “Don’t be stubborn. You need help,” he chides. “It’s okay, I’m here. You can depend on me.”

The obscure, dusty corner of Kai’s mind demands his attention, and he thinks no, not now. Not when Theo’s just saved me. Again. Kai wills himself to focus on the dependable comfort in Theo’s innate, unwavering strength, and he lets his weight sag freely against the steady support. Kai closes his eyes, lets Theo lead the way. Like he always does. Whether Kai asks for it or not. Most times, he’s glad either way.

Time as judge misconstrued the flow of these restaged memories, finding the sudden intervention a pleasant surprise. It then learns of a new truth, one forged from the fires of bond: that goodness thrives in this certain village when shared with another. The onset of conflict will then trigger the judge in time to restage these particular memories once more, maybe weaving more into the fray. But the truth remains: that with blood comes loyalty.

In time, this certain truth will be made known again.

written: march 29, 2022

from the cold draws its power from a dying fire (series)

next >> part iii: protector

#vignette #writing exercise #setting study

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

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part i: fire

They say the cold draws its power from a dying fire.

It starts slowly, when a Hunter would disappear. It would manifest throughout the village first as an unassuming chill, burrowing itself deep under the skin so as to become unnoticeable to those who could still afford to deny it exists. At night, it takes its roots deeper, the cold stealing slowly over the body until it makes itself known in the shivers that rattle the bones. When the breath starts to form clouds, they say his fate is sealed. The Hunter will not come home. Beyond the village, his embers die out. His family will mourn in the empty coldness of the night, and their neighbors are haunted to sleep with the grief that hangs in the air.

The village lies deathly still when Kai runs out of the cottage. The fire in the lamp provides little respite for the fear that takes root in his stomach. The night is deep and cold, frost-bitingly so, and when his breath starts to form clouds he tells himself the cold is just a legend, spun desperately by the villagers to rationalize losses they weren’t prepared to take. It’s happened too often without warning, and the time that expands between the news and the denial and the grief and the mourning have become too commonplace to be an isolated experience. In a village that thrives on individual self-interest and chronic cynicism, the residents have found themselves in morbid solidarity through the cold and its message: My loss is lived and bred and done. Now it’s your turn.

Soran had not yet come home.

“Kai, please.”

Behind him, Kai hears his younger sister’s labored breathing, laced with the same fear that threatens to suffocate him to death. In her eyes are the telltale signs of panic, and were the other villagers present in their midst, they’d hazard a guess and say it was more like hysteria. They’ll think they weren’t off the mark, that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In the morning they’d shake off the frost from their bones, rekindle the rumors of Shion’s disappearance, find comfort in knowing that her eldest daughter has followed in her footsteps, and that the youngest would trail along soon after. They’d unite over the stronghold of Kai’s four losses: the madness that fell over his mother and sisters and the death of the Hunter father that had instigated it all. They’d seek refuge in knowing that Kai’s losses would outweigh the individual suffering harbored by most of the residents at that point in time, when the Hunter population in the village was dwindling to near extinction. Here is a pain felt worse than mine. There is hope yet for me.

It mattered to them that they could put a finger on such a story, because being able to say that to die of madness provided them a security that the unexplained death of a Hunter could never offer. There was relief in knowing. It didn’t have to be true. It just had to be convincing enough to continue existing. It was enough to keep their eyes off of the things that they couldn’t understand, like the cold and how much it takes without ever telling why.

“I have to go find her.” The fog that follows his words is undeniable. Kai wants to believe it’s only a legend.

“Kai, please, it’s so dark out there, you’ll never be able to see anything,” Hani pleads. He hears the crack in her voice, sees the shine of tears in her eyes. The lampfire works against him and takes advantage of this sight, her distress vivid and undeniable, and he feels his resolve crumble. He’s aware of the dangers of adrenaline, albeit only hazily with the rush consuming his senses, his provisional strength and bravery owed to the disappearance of his older sister. His innate recklessness should have already led to his own demise in the forest much sooner in his haste to find Soran, but Hani is good at what she does. The only reason he’s tethered still to the darkness of the village is because he listens well to the younger sister when the older one isn’t around. The respect is only natural when she’s always known better than he ever did when it came to consequential decisions.

For a moment he considers it, going home. He considers living with the cold, to start dealing with this new frost that will cling to their bones for the rest of their lives at the loss of a third family member. To Kai, that could be the future. He’s dealt with the cold ever since they lost their father. Nothing would change, except for that: the cold. It draws its power after all from the death of a loved one.

But Kai remembers, refuses this future, and when he speaks, it’s fast. He was racing against time. Right now, the clouds are only a legend. He wants to believe they are. It’s the only hope he has left. “This fire should be enough to get me by. It’s cold, but there’s no wind. Nothing will blow it out. The Hunters follow a footpath, leave markings on the trees to find their way back. You know this, Soran—”

“It doesn’t matter what Soran told us. It won’t help you out there.” At this point, Kai senses a certain desperation in the words. He recalls bolting out the door mere moments earlier, playing deaf to her pleas to stay home, though with considerable difficulty. He knows she’s just trying to keep him safe. Alive. And for this, he can’t blame her for what she says next. “You’re not a Hunter, Kai. You made sure of that when you turned your back on training.”

The silence that follows hangs heavy in the air. His next few breaths are the same.

It stings him, and he feels a nerve twitch, feels his hand clench around the handle of the lamp, feels the fire burn his skin despite the frigid air. Of course, Kai knows what she’s doing, taking him apart. Unravelling his insecurities, his weaknesses. He couldn’t become a Hunter because he was weak. He couldn’t stomach hunting deer and other animals because he couldn’t bear taking away the life of another living thing, even if it was for survival. Soran had to enter into training in his stead as the next breadwinner of the family because he couldn’t become a Hunter. He couldn’t kill because it was so easy. It was so easy for his father to die at the hands of thieves, so easy for his mother to follow him in her sleep in her grief. It was so easy to realize too late that she had wrested the door open that night, had sleepwalked herself too far away, that by the time Kai realized what was happening in his fatigue-induced wake, sprinting to the edge of the forest in what he knew was a futile attempt, it was already too late. The cold had set in, burning the soles of his bare feet. His screams broke the deathly silence of the village that night, his anguish a signal for morbid solidarity. Blood drew from where the crests of his fingernails dug into his palm. Blood drew from his heart. He was weak. His loss is living and breeding and nowhere near done. It’s not your turn. It shouldn’t have to be anybody’s turn.

Kai looks Hani hard in the eyes. New blood from his heart. He takes a shaky breath, strengthens his resolve. Kai knows what she’s doing, and he can’t thank her enough.

But Kai remembers, and when he speaks, it’s fast. It’s been two years, he was only seventeen then, and now he’s at the edge of the forest again. He breathes and remembers the clouds are only a legend. They have to be.

“Hani, no one else will look for her. Nobody here looks for anybody once they’re gone. Our parents are gone and there’s nothing to remember them by.” His voice cracks. He remembers his mother. He remembers he’s weak. He remembers that Soran hasn’t come home because of him. “It won’t be the same for Soran.”

Kai starts to feel his throat constrict, starts feeling the weakness manifest, but he fights it, blinking fast. He doesn’t miss the way Hani’s eyes fall in despair at the finality of his decision. He turns around, wishes he has missed it, his already scant willpower threatening to abandon him.

He takes a few tentative steps forward before Hani speaks again, a venomous edge to her voice. What he hears next chills him more than the cold.

“This is it, isn’t it? You’re finally getting what you’ve always wanted.”

Kai turns around slowly, makes no move to approach his sister again. He knows what she’s doing, and for the first time, he thought Hani was dangerous. She’s crossing a line that Kai himself has a hard time drawing on his own, but she’s risking it because she’s desperate. And to Kai that made her dangerous.

He remains on the defensive, rearing his guard up to buy himself a few seconds’ worth of time to just think. About what, he doesn’t know. He never expected to have this conversation right now at all, never expected Hani to wield such a dangerous weapon against him.

“What do you mean?” he asks weakly.

“You know what I mean.” Kai tries not to wince at the sharpness of her voice, like it pains her to have to do this. “You’ve always wanted to leave this village. Ever since Mom disappeared. Maybe even before that.” Her eyes soften a little. “I’ve always admired you, Kai. You could be clumsy and naïve to a fault, but it’s like you understood the most. Mom was always telling you, ‘be nice to everyone here, help out when you can,’ even when the last thing people deserved here is to be helped out by someone like Mom. We saw it our whole lives growing up here, how people would slander her for being too helpful, being too nice, because being too nice made you too easy a target to be fooled. You know how the people here are like, Kai. It’s almost taboo to be someone for other people.”

Yes, Kai thought, I know all too well. He often violated the taboo himself, feeding the strays, giving extra change, returning a lost basket, all the motions of basic human decency and respect, if not more. All this had no place in their village.

“I could tell you knew, even though she tried so hard to hide it from you, how horrible this place is. You told her we could leave, find a better place outside the village, where we don’t have to live on the brink of starvation almost everyday, where we don’t have to risk our lives hunting to survive, where people could just be human to each other.”

Kai remembers the memory, remembers the way his mother’s eyes widened with a fraction of horror, like she’d seen a vision so unspeakable she showed her son fear in a moment of weakness, before she quickly reeled back into a role model of strength and virtue. He remembers the strain in her voice when she said, “We’re not ready for outside yet, Kai.”

He never brought it up again.

“I can tell you’ve thought about it ever since. Could see it in the way your eyes linger in the trees, could tell where you always went off to when I couldn’t find you in the village.”

So she knew. Of course she knew, Hani has always been the smartest between her siblings. Kai doesn’t have it in him to look up at her. He’s weak after all.

“This is your chance now, isn’t it? Mom disappearing was the first step to breaking out of that cage. It’s like you finally had an excuse to be open about leaving the village. Now that Soran’s gone too, no one can finally hold you back.”

Kai realizes what she really means by saying all this, realizes it’s not just a way to keep him here. She’s been thinking about this for a long time, could see it in the way her eyes are pleading, hoping he would prove her wrong, that no, Hani, it’s not easy to leave you. I would never leave you.

Kai raises his hand, reaches out to Hani, wants to tell her he’s sorry, that thinking about this is not as easy as she puts it. But he stops.

He could smell it before he heard it. It cut through the cold in the air; the impact of the stench was so strong he could feel the world spin slightly beneath his feet.

Then he hears a grunt and a long groan and he thinks it sounds familiar, and he turns around to see Soran sprawled out on the cobblestone ground, a dark pool of blood flowing slowly through the cracks between the stones like rivulets.

For a moment neither of them move. The blood continues to flow. The air remains cold. But a fire is still flickering on the ground in front of them, no matter how small. Then Hani stokes it, realizes the gravity of the situation and it’s like she wasn’t about to break apart mere moments earlier. She crouches down to her sister, assesses her condition, yells at Kai to bring the lampfire nearer. When he does, the sight of Soran’s injuries knocks the wind out of his lungs. He stands glued to the spot, eyes wide with terror, and it’s like he has a better idea of the kind of vision his mother saw that day, when he said they could leave. For a brief moment, Kai believes that leaving seems impossible. It was a legend truer than the cold under his skin.

“Kai, please,” Hani pleads. The panic and fear and sadness and pain from minutes ago had come together to manifest a different kind of horror in the air, one that seemed to buzz loudly in Kai’s ears. “Help me get to Enzy, I can’t treat this on my own.”

Kai takes Soran’s other side, careful not to aggravate her injuries. He turns away from them, the stench of blood so strong against his nostrils, and he tries not to pass out from the sheer intensity of it. Against Kai’s better judgement, he tries to imagine what it was like for Soran to make it back here, feels his heart clench at her beaten, battered form, feels a new wave of tears prick at his eyes. She’s alive, he thinks. The clouds from his breath are just that: clouds. The cold in the air is just that: cold. She’s here, and she’s alive. There is no dying fire here.

But he looks down at his older sister, a dying, bleeding ember, stoked desperately by her siblings and she’s alive but at what cost?

Kai carefully shifts Soran’s weight against him, hobbling with his younger sister towards the village’s only doctor, holding the lampfire aloft. He looks sideways over at Hani, the fire casting deep shadows across her face. He sees the weariness and the exhaustion, the determination, the strength. It was their mother’s strength. And he remembers his mother and feels a blaze in his heart.

The night is deep and cold, frost-bitingly so, but Kai believes no, there is no dying ember for the cold to snuff, not from any of them.

written: march 23, 2022

from the cold draws its power from a dying fire (series)

next >> part ii: memory

#vignette #writing exercise #character study

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hysterialyywrites · 2 years

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draft 1.2 (the first draft): Death for Life

Steve doesn’t believe in the supernatural. The word, I mean.

He kneels at the foot of Mrs. Walker’s bed, adjusting the infrared camera to face the ceiling above the side of the bed she sleeps on. “There’s natural phenomena that we understand, and then there’s natural phenomena that we don’t.”

The eclipse used to scare primitive humans to death, he tells Mrs. Walker. She stood a little ways to his left, fidgeting with her mug as she listens to an unprompted explanation of what Steve believes, or doesn’t believe, to be the supernatural. Does this stuff capture the supernatural? she simply asked, gesturing to the equipment set up by the foot of her bed after handing Steve a mug of his own. He let out a chuckle in response.

“They had no idea what it was,” he continues. “The eye of an angry God. An evil spirit.” He shakes his head, one corner of his mouth raised in disbelief. “Nothing supernatural about it, though. Once we understood what it was, well, it was just natural.”

Steve prefers the word “preternatural.” Natural phenomena that we don’t quite understand yet.

And as Mrs. Walker’s eyes flit across the bed to Steve’s equipment and back, I thought about her sleepless nights. When Irene Walker lays down on her side of the bed at night, she sees her dead husband’s corpse hanging upside down from her ceiling, his face a deep purple like the blood had all pooled in his cheeks. She sees the rainwater and blood drip off of his figure, feels it as it splatters down on her cheeks. She hears the car horn from her dead husband’s open mouth, the sound a remnant of his tragic accident from a big storm some years back, and she remembers to scream.

Steve understood these to be natural phenomena as he laid alone on her side of the bed that night. The rainwater, a leak in her ceiling. The car horn, a few near misses at the intersection outside, a silver pole standing by the road with no sign. “And the man I saw hanging from my ceiling?” asked Mrs. Walker the next morning.

“The mind… it is a powerful thing, ma’am. Especially the grieving mind.” Most times, ghosts are just what we want to see, he adds a bit later.

Mrs. Walker’s lip twitches as her head tilts to the side ever so slightly, looking affronted and livid. “Why would I want to see my Carl like that?” she stresses slowly, her eyes shining with the onset of tears.

“Because it’s better than never seeing him again,” says Steve sympathetically. “Most times, a ghost is a wish.”

ii.

The Haunting of Hill House (the series, not the book) didn’t come out until 2018, until I was in my first year of college. I didn’t hear Steve talk about the supernatural, or the preternatural, or whatever it was he called it when I was in 5th grade, standing with a few of my classmates in the middle of the green-tiled bathroom of our classroom in the sunlight that filtered through the window. I can’t remember how many we were, who I was with, or what exactly we were doing and when exactly we were doing it. All I remember is that we were playing with something that wasn’t meant to be played with.

I stood in front of a classmate, eyes closed and arms hanging limp on my sides. “One thousand, dead on the bed, come to me,” I heard them say, and I thought of them wriggling their fingers on either side of my arms as if to pull my limbs up towards themselves without touching them. And from my arms I could feel a pull from the inside of my wrist, like a string was tugging them up, up, up, until I was too freaked to continue. I pulled my arms back and opened my eyes. I was probably smiling around at my classmates in the bathroom, eyes wide with terror yet lips turned up in thrill as I told them what happened.

I wasn’t held or even touched by the wriggling fingers, and I didn’t move a single muscle in either of my arms. I left them limp and hanging, and I felt the string tug and I let it, and from my wrist I could feel the string pulling my arms up like I was a marionette, and I didn��t dare to resist for fear of losing the connection with this invisible puppet master.

My classmates took turns, some being the puppet and some being the chanter (and the chanter just wasn’t the puppet master, everyone just knew it that way), and they all felt the tug of the string. I wasn’t sure if some of them were faking it or not, but I excused the mere thought of there being a liar among us because I wanted to believe that the string in my wrist was real, that whatever was controlling our arms was in a plane of existence that was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I wanted to believe I was looking, but I just wasn’t seeing.

The puppet master never as much as tugged a string after that. In the safety of the fluorescent lights in the classroom there was talk of the events in the bathroom. A few of us nudged one another, somebody telling somebody they wanted to try it out after the next class ended. Another was too scared. Others murmured and nodded in agreement. Some of those who were in the bathroom couldn’t stop talking about what it was like, having your arms raised like the undead when you weren’t so much as twitching a nerve. I remember someone talking about God. I remember him basically telling us we were in for a lot of shit if we didn’t stop what we were doing.

I don’t think we ever got back to playing around with the puppet master after that. The thrill of this unknown had a good run. It would eventually settle in the back of my mind as a distant memory, distant but not forgotten, because it was my earliest recognizable encounter with the unknown.

For years I’ve heard stories of sinister encounters from the people around me, stories that told of things that happened but couldn’t be explained, stories of hauntings that fascinated me as much as it scared me. I’ve told these stories over and over from memory to multiple people in multiple circumstances, told them in hushed tones and whispers like I was wary of waking the dead, and reveled in the fear that propagated in its wake.

The puppet master, the “one hundred, dead on the bed, come to me,” is a distant memory, distant but not forgotten, because it was the first encounter I could tell as a story that was my own. I could watch the fear surface on the faces of my companions as I tell them the story of the string that tugged from the inside of my wrist. I could watch the fear morph into a mix of wonder and disbelief, because my story, like all other scary stories, held as much (or as less?) credibility as the next one. You could listen to scary stories all your life and not believe a word of it.

But I know what I felt. I know what I saw, Mrs. Walker told Steve. I saw him, and I believe you Mrs. Walker, because I felt the string in my wrist just as firmly as you saw your dead husband on your ceiling. Natural phenomena, Steve called it. Preternatural, he said. This is coming from Steve Crain, a fictional character, a horror novelist who aptly titled his book about his experiences in his obviously haunted childhood home as The Haunting of Hill House, yet strongly believes in rebranding the supernatural as the preternatural instead. If I were to believe him, then my experience that day in the bathroom in 5th grade was going to remain preternatural forever.

A ghost is a wish, he said. And so I wonder, quite wistfully, if there was anything I wished for as I thought about what would’ve happened if I let the string carry my arms all the way up. I wonder if there was anything I truly wished for when I chose to pull back, when I felt my immense curiosity ultimately being overruled by an equally immense fear.

iii.

It was the year when The Haunting of Hill House came out. I was a few weeks into my first year of college, and it was just as I was passing through the side of one of the university’s cafeterias facing a wide garden, fifteen minutes before midnight, when I thought I saw something white skim past the corner of my eye in the dead of the night.

My head snapped to the right, eyes frantically searching the vast expanse of black grass for any signs of the white entity that seemed to run across the field. From the split second I had to make sense of what I thought I’d seen, I was looking for what I thought was a child in a long white dress. I could only hope I was wrong about the deathly pale complexion that seemed to fade into the gown that clothed it.

But the garden was empty. The campus lights glowed brightly in the distance, the chatter of students leaving their late night student organization activities whispering faintly across the walkway beyond. Maybe it was just the lights, I thought. It’s late, I’m tired, I said, as a way to convince myself that I was safe and it was the lights that told me I was safe, despite the chill in the air and the feeling of being exposed (and watched) in the goosebumps that dotted my arms.

I faced forward, walking over to the campus forest some 200 meters beyond, and it looked like a wall of darkness looming high to the empty sky. I suddenly didn’t feel I was very safe. The lights in the distance grew smaller in my peripheral vision as I walked towards the mouth of the forest, the sheer blackness of the path ahead of me seemingly impenetrable from all sides. There were no sounds, no people, and no light strong enough to guide my way through.

It’s late, I’m tired, I need to go home. A school requirement for one of my classes insists that I watch a production staged by the Ateneo de Manila’s Blue Repertory, the premier musical theater organization of the university, and I remember telling friends it was a hassle to attend a show that ran so late into the night. I live in a high-rise condominium building right next to the university grounds, and the shortest known route to home I knew back then was the path that cut straight through the forest; SOM Forest, as it’s known for, because of its close proximity to the John Gokongwei School of Management building, fondly known as JGSOM.

SOM Forest is home to the footfalls of hundreds of students and staff every day. In the daylight, you can see its 130 meters in length in its entirety and is a quick 2-minute walk from one end to the other. The red and grey brick path paves the walkway between the native trees that live in the forest, like the Agoho, Talisay, and Narra trees. A group of stone benches is situated near the pond, behind a patch of tall bushes, and it’s here I remember an old memory of sitting there with a friend. I was listening to him play his viola in the warm afternoon sun as I looked up at the branches stretching high and wide above my head, holding his sheet music as the wind blew softly across the undergrowth, carrying the viola’s notes to the brick walkway and beyond.

I remember it most fondly in the early morning hours before my first class, when the sunlight cuts through the canopy to leave jagged, flickering patches of light and warmth on the brick path and forest floor. It’s SOM Forest in the light that breeds an appreciation for wildlife, for it’s within the vast confines of the Agoho and the Narra that that deadline two days from then for a paper I haven’t started is okay, that that class I have in the afternoon for a course I don’t find very interesting is okay, that my freshman year apprehensions about a major that wasn’t my first choice is okay, because nothing else mattered to me when I was in that forest but the jagged, flickering patches of light and warmth on the brick path, and how I could breathe in a way I couldn’t when I lived in a city bordered by desert for the first eighteen years of my life.

It’s this SOM Forest in the light that disappears when the last bit of sun winks out at the onset of nightfall. It’s within the safety of well-lit rooms with securely locked doors and the company of friends that campus ghost stories and urban legends come to life. It’s in the shadows creeping among the Agoho and the Narra that fear breeds the presence of what the Ateneans back then called ‘Rendezvous Girl’.

The child in the long white dress was shoved to the back of my mind somewhere. Staring at me now was the darkness of a SOM Forest I wasn’t familiar with, a SOM Forest that was complicit with my worst fears, all festering and breeding in the dark. I was wracking my brain for bits and pieces of the fairly new urban legend that spread like wildfire across the student body in a matter of days; I was even laughing about it with friends just days before. ‘Rendezvous Girl’ was born out of a post submission made to the ADMU Freedom Wall, a Facebook page dedicated to anonymously posting the thoughts, rants, or whatever ramblings the Ateneo student community wanted to share with the online world. ‘Just For Fun’, says the category tag on Facebook, and we all believed that ‘just for fun’, a random stranger decided to share their experience in SOM Forest, where if you shout out “rendezvous” to the trees, a girl would come out and give head to whoever it was that shouted.

Rendezvous Girl eventually gained reputation as a campus joke, but oddly perpetuated through the lens of the supernatural. Later posts to the Freedom Wall started painting her as an icon to be feared. My fellow batchmates, now all of us seniors, remembered some details: she was faceless, she was naked and running around with a paper bag over her head, and she bit guys’ members off. Some of us remembered a drawing of her that was posted. We can’t remember those details anymore, but it was sinister. (I can somehow remember different shades of grey and a deep shade of red all throughout the drawing, and black eyes and a mouth open so wide it reminded me of Munch’s The Scream, yet I can’t tell you how much of this memory is just jogged by imagination.) So we were fully convinced by then that Rendezvous Girl was nothing more than a mere tall tale, a joke sent in for the laughs, because a girl who bites dicks off can’t really be on campus, can she? The school administration would definitely do something about it if it was serious.

Yet as I stood there at the mouth of the forest, with its darkness pressing in as I attempted to take a few tentative steps forward, I felt with every fiber of my being that Rendezvous Girl was real, despite my rationality protesting otherwise. What posed a bigger threat to me at that moment was not the child in the long white dress, but the girl in the forest who could definitely find another body part to bite away from me when she couldn’t find what she was looking for. I thought about what kind of teeth she’d have to be able to bite through flesh like that, and I thought that I didn’t want some poor soul to find me shredded to pieces in the morning in the middle of the forest path.

And so I backed away from SOM Forest, turning right to take the longer way home beside the busy traffic of Katipunan Avenue instead, where the headlights and taillights of the cars beside me would keep me safe from the dark. At that point, I phoned a friend. We talked to keep me sane until I got to Gate 2.5, which was a little ways off from the other end of SOM Forest, where a blockmate was waiting for me to walk me back home to the condo building (where he also lived, but in a different unit), because outside the campus grounds were a different kind of monster that could hurt girls like me in a different way.

I know what I saw. Or at least, I know what I thought I saw. A ghost is a wish, I heard Steve Crain say a month later when I watched The Haunting of Hill House for the first time, and I think back to this night on campus. I wondered briefly what I could possibly be wishing for when I thought I saw that child in the long white dress. I wondered again what kind of wish could come out of the prospect of a savage staring back at me from the darkness of the forest, waiting to shred me to pieces. I go back a few years, to when I vaguely remember a string pulling at the inside of my wrist, and I think of how lucky I’ve been to have been left alone by the unknown on three separate occasions, the question of the validity of their existence irrelevant to the sole relief at being left alive.

iv.

"Alive" is not the word I’d use to describe Osamu Dazai.

Sakunosuke Oda stood facing the aftermath of a van that exploded a few hours before. He had just witnessed the death of five orphans he was keeping under his care. The last thing he saw of them was their tear-stained faces stricken with fear through the back window of the van they were forced into. The last thing he wanted to remember of them was their bright eyes and smiling faces, all so full of life, and these are the images he chose to retain as he bid each of them goodbye with a heavy heart, with two equally heavy hand guns strapped to his sides under his coat.

“Odasaku,” a familiar voice rang out. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Osamu Dazai stood with his friend at the scene of the tragedy, clad in a black suit, a black coat, and a black heart. The bandages over his right eye seemed to color his brown hair the same shade of black. Even if you do it, he tells him. It won’t bring the kids back.

Dazai pleads with Oda to stay, and he has never pleaded with anyone for anything his entire life. He tells Oda the reason he joined the Port Mafia. “I was hoping there’d be something in it for me,” he starts. “If you place yourself somewhere close to raw emotions, where you’re exposed to violence and death, instinct and desire, you can brush against man’s true nature.”

“I thought that way, I could… I could find a reason to live somehow.”

Osamu Dazai has countless seen and pronounced death to the enemies of the underground criminal organization that raised him from when he was fifteen. From his high kill count he was seeking life at the hands of those he fell, finding a reason to stay. He might’ve thought, that by strongly appealing to his desire to live, despite the constant death that permeated the occupation they so chose to associate themselves with, he could convince Oda to find a different reason to live. You need to rely on something, Dazai told him. And for Dazai that was death.

Kafka Asagiri’s decision to write multiple famous late authors as young adults and teenagers with special abilities did well to catch my attention in 2016, a time when everything in my life was a lot easier, happier, and quite inevitably, ordinary. Naturally so.

Osamu Dazai, as written by Asagiri, and his real-life counterpart more or less share clearly defining similarities, such as the propensities of both Dazais for double suicide. Where they digress, however, is that real-life Osamu Dazai met death after his third double suicide attempt on June 13, 1948 with Tomie Yamazaki, while Asagiri’s Osamu Dazai still lives on in the chapters of Bungou Stray Dogs (lit. “Literary Stray Dogs”), where there are no dogs but definitely a horde of authors led astray.

My life in 2016 was ordinary. Naturally so. Five years later, coming down from a high fever which I hoped against all hope wasn’t COVID, I learned of a way to become extraordinary. I’d say that the term was the “supernatural” of the living, because the term “supernatural” usually referred to the dead.

Like Asagiri’s Dazai, the path to becoming extraordinary relied on something. Like Asagiri’s Dazai, to become extraordinary you had to rely on death. Or at least, something close to it.

Victor Vale and Eliot “Eli” Cardale, as born from the work of V.E. Schwab in her novel titled Vicious, rebranded the word extraordinary from an adjective to a proper noun. ExtraOrdinary, they called it. And to become an ExtraOrdinary you needed a near-death experience, three EpiPens, twice as many one-use warming pads, and the ability to perform CPR compressions. Eli submerged himself in a tub filled with ice cubes bobbing in ice-cold water and was a very unhealthy shade of whitish-blue several minutes later. Near-death experience, check. Victor dragged his college roommate and friend out of the tub, toweled off the dead weight that was Eli’s body, activated the warmers (check) and placed them at vital points around Eli’s body, and, when Eli felt warm enough (with the help of the bathroom’s heat lamp turned on), alternated between compressions (check) and jabbing the EpiPens down one at a time into Eli’s leg, thigh, and chest (three EpiPens, check).

Moments later, Eli comes back to life with the ability to regenerate his body, to the extent that his body never aged a day beyond twenty-two even ten years later. Victor would follow in Eli’s ExtraOrdinary footsteps by way of electrocution, and would come back with the ability to manipulate and enhance his own and everybody else’s pain levels like a dial, turning up or down on Victor’s every whim.

Eli believes in God. Before he dipped himself under the cold, he prayed. Victor found it perplexing, the way his friend was about to play God yet prayed to Him all the same. “I put my life into His hands,” Eli tells Victor afterwards. “Well, let’s hope He gives it back,” Victor replies earnestly.

Later, Eli asks why. Not about his second chance at life, but about his ability. “Why of all the powers I ended up with this one,” he started. “Maybe it’s not random. Maybe there’s some correlation between a person’s character and their resulting ability. Maybe it’s a reflection of their psyche. I’m trying to understand how this”—his regeneration—“is a reflection of me.” He was about to ask why God would give him this power when Victor interjected incredulousy at Eli’s mention of God. I put myself in His hands, Eli retorted. “This isn’t divinity, Eli. It’s science and chance,” Victor snapped. You didn’t put yourself in God’s hands, you put yourself in mine.

“It’s not about God,” Victor says as he confronts Eli the day after he escapes the interrogation room he was confined in. In his own haste to become ExtraOrdinary, Victor unintentionally kills Eli’s girlfriend and tells him over the phone, prompting Eli to turn him in. “It’s about us,” Victor continues, his knife hilt-deep into Eli’s stomach. “The way we think. The thought that’s strong enough to keep us alive. To bring us back.” Victor turns the dial up on Eli, listening to his friend’s screams as they fill the room they once shared. “All I could think about when I was dying was the pain, and how badly I wanted to make it stop.”

vi.

Mathias Clasen stands on an elevated platform in front of a large hall, looking around at the crowd of people sitting in tiered seats in front of him. Mathias Clasen, a horror researcher, begins his talk by saying, “I really don’t like to watch horror films alone.”

Watching horror films has got to be one of the strangest things that humans do. He brings this up a few minutes later, and there’s a question of why we do it. Why is it that around 54% of horror fans answer affirmative to the statement, “I tend to enjoy horror media”?

Clasen backs up a bit by returning to our biological and evolutionary roots. “Horror, in whatever medium… works by exploiting an ancient and evolved set of biological defense mechanisms,” or what he calls the “evolved fear system.” He explains that our evolutionary ancestors lived in a dangerous world back then, exposed to the threat of predators or creepy-crawlies or invisible microorganisms and disease, or even threat from other humans. To keep themselves alive, they evolved a fear system to respond to the dangers. “In other words, our species evolved to be hypervigilant and highly fearful, because being hypervigilant and highly fearful kept our ancestors alive in a dangerous world.”

He then talks about “fine-tuning” this evolved fear system. Like all other systems, there’s a need to “calibrate that system” to make sure it works the way it’s supposed to. “Through exposure to horror,” Clasen explains, “you give it a test run, make sure it works properly, and keep it nicely tuned.” And we want to keep it nicely tuned to keep ourselves alive in a world teeming with evolved dangers.

vii.

Steve Crain attempts to open the sequel to The Haunting of Hill House with a line about fear. “Fear is the relinquishment of logic,” he writes. “The willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns.”

I was in my second year of college when fear held me tightest in a state I was most vulnerable.

I lay on my back against the bed with my eyes wide open, stock still and staring at a beast in the middle of the room where I slept. It hovered slightly at the foot of my bed, each of its hind legs poised strategically on top of the legs of the footboard. Black, rotting flesh like severely pruned raisins clung tight around the bones of the beast, giving it a deathly withered look. It’s long, thin arms stretched ominously above me to rest on my headboard, and while it’s black, groaning head inched toward my own, I kept my head turned slightly to the right. The foot of the mattress where my mother lay on the floor beside me was visible through the large gap to the side of the beast that caged me in, and I felt my throat scream while my mouth remained shut to rouse my mother from her sleep, to awaken her to the beast that threatened to rip me apart, to have her keep me safe as she’s always done for the past nineteen years of my life. She’s a light sleeper, I told myself. She has to hear me.

But as in all of my dreams, the sound of my screams, no matter how throat-wrenching and loud, was drowned out by the silence, like a dial was turning my volume down low. I never looked at the beast’s face. I looked down towards the fingers on my right hand instead. My mind was awake, and it was aware that it was awake, but my body remained fast asleep as my brain attempted to tell it what to do. A finger, any finger. A twitch would do, I thought. And finally the twitches came in ripples; one finger, two fingers, my whole hand, until just as suddenly as I had woken up to see the beast at the foot of my bed, it was gone. It was still the middle of the night. I think I remember falling back asleep and waking up the next morning asking my mother if she heard me screaming for her last night. She didn’t.

Preternatural. I wonder what it is about sleep paralysis demons that Steve might attempt to explain as natural, in all their death and monstrosity. As he later comes face-to-face with the childhood ghosts of his past that he so firmly disqualified and labeled as mental illness, he finds that fear seems a fitting start to his sequel, which opens up with his first return to Hill House in 26 years. The relinquishment of logic. Nothing logical nor natural about the beast in my waking sleep. Nothing logical nor natural about staring at a physical manifestation of death (did I?) and living to tell the tale.

A ghost is a wish. I wondered, once more, about the string in my wrist and the child in the long white dress and the savage in the forest. I think about Asagiri’s Dazai’s defect from the Port Mafia after he watched his friend bleed to death in his arms. At least he’s with the kids, he thinks, or at least, I like to think he did, because with Oda’s death came some semblance of life as he started work with an agency that opposed the Mafia that so breeded his attachment to death. Victor and Eli played God for a chance at an ExtraOrdinary life, and waded with all their might through the muck that is death with a bunch of EpiPens and warming packs and a desire, the one sole thought that would bring them back to life. I fought death for life as it had my body pinned down to my bed but not my mind, my fear, as a system in its most evolved form, working through all the calibrations I subjected it to to fight for control of my body as I wriggled a finger, another, and another, until I was safe and alive and asleep again, the beast no more than a spill from the deepest recesses of my mind.

Fear is what drove me from the full upright pull of the string, what drove me to find solace in the busy traffic next to my university’s campus grounds. I like to think it’s what convinced Asagiri’s Dazai to leave the Port Mafia, because the death of his friend told him that death in the Mafia did not make him a good person. Become a good man, Oda told him with shaky breaths as he lay limp and bleeding in Dazai’s arms. It’s probably fear of pain that forced Victor from death, bringing back with him something extraordinary. And it’s fear that allowed me to fight the beast in my sleep.

With horror comes the fear of the unknown, of everything there is beyond the veil of death, and I probably brushed against this veil on four separate occasions with my physical body, and chanced upon it some more numerous times before, in the things I watched, the stories I listened to, the stories I told, and I think of how lucky I’ve been to have been left alone by the unknown on every single occasion, the question of the validity of their existence irrelevant to the sole relief at being left alive.

written: october 17-26, 2021

from the CRWR 102.03 collection

#essay #nonfiction #creative nonfiction

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