MAHARLIKA and the Cursed Descendants of the Orient

Sequential Revelation

A crow carrying a porcelain jar that’s secured around its neck by a black cloth flies to a starless dark sky. It lands on a branch of the biggest gnarled tree in the area before shapeshifting into a woman. The woman jumps down to the moist soil with ease and saunters the gloomy street where the residents bow down when she passes by in front of them before entering a cabin which is erected in the outskirt of the forest.

When she lays the jar on top of a wooden table, she earns a slap from an old woman. Though her cheek turns crimson, she maintains her composure, fixes the artificial flowers that are tucked behind her ear then presses her lips on the old woman’s forehead.

“Lilom, how could you? Why did you allow this to happen to your brother?!” the old woman cries while rubbing her face on the smooth surface of the jar.

“Silim was strong. I didn’t expect him to be…” Lilom raises her chin and straightens her back before continuing. “I didn’t expect that a kid could be stronger than him. So I watched them from afar while they fight.”

The old woman is about to slap her again but an old man grabs her wrist. “Pilar, calm down.”

“Calm down? Our grandson is dead!”

“Will it change anything if you blame our granddaughter?” asks Pedro.

He offers Lilom a sit and kneads her back, Lilom on the other hand still declines to exhibit any emotions. The space becomes darker when the lamp at the center of the table runs out of fuel. Pedro takes it to another room to refill it, leaving his wife and granddaughter alone.

“Who did this?” Pilar asks. Her eyes are full of rage.

“A foreigner. We’re yet to discover who is he and where is he from.”

Pilar smacks the table with her fist while gritting her teeth. She then walks to the corner of the living area and takes out a pouch from a drawer and hurriedly hands it over to Lilom.

“Give it to that brat and make sure to get something that he owns. Then I’ll make him suffer using my pets and once he dies…” She contemptuously laughs while wiggling her fingers in front of her face. “We will feast him!”

Lilom lifts an eyebrow then smirks.

“What are you smirking about?”

“Don’t worry lola, it’s not you. I just thought about my past action. If I had known that he’d be the cause of Silim’s death, I should have kept his coins instead of letting him bought me something to eat.”

Pilar wrinkles her eyes and puts her hands on her hips. “What do you mean?”

“I disguised myself as a homeless boy before and gifted him a pouch of pita. I did it for fun and to teach him a lesson.”

Pilar pounds the table repeatedly and aggressively while Lilom crosses her arms and legs and serenely stares at the old woman’s nasty behavior.

“Relax. I’ll get him next time,” Lilom says.

The old woman only stops whacking the table when a voice from outside the cabin calls out her name. After greeting her neighbor, who offers her a pot, she heads back inside and places the pot on top of the table. For the first time, she sits down on a chair across Lilom.

“She says it’s for you. Open it.”

They inhale sharply, lick their lips and swallow the air on their throats when Lilom takes off the lid of the pot. Pilar slides her hand inside and takes out a heart, a human heart and proffers it to the young woman in front of her in which she gladly takes with both hands. Bloods drip down from Lilom’s fingers and arms as she brings the heart close to her nose and splendidly sniffles it.

“This is the reason why I love going home. I can’t eat as fresh and delicious as this outside Gaba,” Lilom says.

Though she doesn’t have fangs like the other Gabans, she effortlessly devours the heart. She gasps and smiles with every big bite and when she’s done, she licks and sucks her bloody fingers. Pilar wipes the remaining blood on Lilom’s chin and cheeks with the hem of her blouse.

“Satisfied?”

“Absolutely,” Lilom responds then stands up. “I’ll take a nap in my room.”

Leaving her grandmother, she enters a small dark room and reclines on a firm and dusty bed then quickly wipes a tear that wets her cheek. She brushes her thick white bangs and skims the ugly scar on her forehead with her fingertips then closes her eyes and reminisces her childhood when Silim and her parents were still alive.

[Glasses cracked and crashed as young Lilom and young Silim’s drunk father shoved the plates from the kitchen’s cabinet. The siblings, who were playing in the living area, ran to their bedroom which was adjacent to the kitchen and hid themselves under the bed with their arms covering their ears and heads.

“Stop it!” a woman’s voice said while taking away the bottle of distilled palm liquor from her husband’s hand.

The man plunged her to the floor and continued to gulp the sweet coconut flavored beverage. The man hunkered down and squeezed his wife’s cheeks between his fingers.

“You stop telling me what to do or I’m gonna tell the entire kingdom your little secret. If somebody finds out that you are an aswang, you, your parents and your entire clan will be doomed!” the man threatened.

When he let go of her, she desperately pummeled the man’s chest as she sobbed.

“How could you say such thing in front of your children!?”

The man grabbed her wrists and twisted them hard that she screamed in pain while saliva streamed down from her mouth. He smirked then stared at his children through a door that lead to the bedroom. The siblings were quivering in fear while begging for him to stop hurting their mother.

“They have the right to know how your parents tricked me in marrying you just to fulfill their ambitions of having grandchildren who would have Mayari’s bloodline!” he lamented. His eyes manifested disgust and hate.

Tears kept on spurting from the woman’s eyes. “But you said,…you said you love me. We were happy back then.”

The man sniggered and when he stopped, he glared at his wife and wrapped his hand on her neck. “Do you think I would say that if I had known you’re a blood sucking, flesh eating entity?! Nobody would wanna be with you. You ruined my life!”

His insults were too hurtful to be ignored so the woman didn’t hold back and spitted on his face which made him even angrier. He pressed his lower and upper teeth against each other and clutched both his hands around the woman’s neck. The woman was booting her legs and shaking her body while scratching the man’s face and arms with her fingernails.

“Papa, stop! Please!” young Lilom cried.

But absolute madness cloaked the man’s consciousness as he choked the woman underneath him. Second by second, the woman’s skin was becoming pale, her pupils were clinging to her eyelids and her breath was weakening until she ceased moving then her arms flopped on the floor. When realization stroke him, he removed his hand from her, took the empty bottle on the floor, stood up and walked towards his children. Lilom yelled when the man smashed and shattered the bottle on her forehead causing blood to stream down from it. Before the man could do anything else, Silim impaled a shard of glass on his father’s shoulder provoking him to divert his attention to his son. Horrified Silim stepped back whenever his father strode forward. Lilom took the biggest glass shards that was scattered on the floor and violently stabbed her father’s back. The man grabbed both of them by their necks and suspended their bodies from the floor while their backs were pressed against the concrete wall.

“You two shouldn’t exist! Before others find out that I’m connected to creatures like you, you better die instead!”

Lilom and Silim produced a rattling sound as they wheezed for air. Both of them were too weak to retaliate and when Lilom lost her consciousness, her body was tossed to the bed. After thinking that his sister was dead too, a sudden indescribable strength enveloped Silim. He’s able to remove his father’s grip on him with his hands which taken his father by surprise.

“How did you…?”

Silim created a soft guttural sound from his throat then his shadows moved without definite shape and direction. When his father attempted to attack him again, his shadows encircled themselves around his father’s body. Some of the shadows turned into strips with sharp tips then punctured the immobilized man relentlessly. In less than a minute, the man stopped screaming as the shadows flumped his lifeless body down, his corpse bathed with blood. Then Silim’s shadows retracted and went back to its normal shape.

“Silim,” Lilom whispered. Even though her eyes were partly open, she saw everything that took place.

“Lilom! I didn’t understand what just happened,” Silim cried.

“It’s alright. He’s gone, our suffering is over,” she said, calming her petrified brother. “You have me, I have you. No one can harm us anymore.”

The siblings waited until the dead of the night before burying their parents on their backyard to avoid the possibility of any neighbor seeing them. Their grandparents arrived at their house two days after the incident. They received a letter from Lilom detailing what happened while seeking for their help.

Pedro and Pilar took their grandchildren in their custody, raised and treated them nicely like how their mother did to them. For the past fifteen years, the mystery of their parents’ murdered was unsolved and kept from others, only the four of them knew the truth. During those years, the siblings went back and forth between Gaba Island and Maharlika’s capital without anyone noticing them. Because of indebtedness, they were obliged to follow Pedro and Pilar’s only wish – to give them food to feed themselves and the rest of the clan members.

At first, the pita’s victims were the homeless and alone whom nobody from the society cared about so it was easy to get away with the crime. When Lilom was given the highest post in the Peace and Order Faction about less than a year ago, the aswang and the Barang became greedier and hungrier leaving her with no choice but to do the extreme measures. Unlike before when Silim, alongside some corrupt castle guards, could barter pita in a broad daylight, now they had to carefully choose their timing on where and how to offer it to their targets. They cannot immediately exchange the pita with any object that the victims own, the victims must obsess themselves over it so that the situation would come across as a simple drug addiction instead of a murder and a*******n.

Lilom’s plan was going well but that changed when Tala was appointed by the king to have the second highest post in her faction a little more than a week ago. Though Tala idolized and trusted her, she’s passionate and diligent in finding out the truth about pita. Just when she thought that she could easily persuade Tala with her lies, Liyab made an appearance.]

Lilom sits at the edge of the bed when Pedro enters the room, carrying a gas lamp on one hand and a blanket on the other.

“You should sleep some more,” Pedro says while laying the lamp on a shabby desk at the side of the bed.

“No. I have to go.”

“I’m sure with Silim’s cremation, you haven’t rested yet. Besides, it’s almost daybreak.”

Lilom walks closer to her grandfather and rubs his arm. “Lolo, I hate the sun’s heat and glow but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be under the sun.”

“Yeah. I forgot, you’re not a full aswang like the rest of us.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just want to imply that there's no need to brood over me.”

Pedro grins and hands her a medium-sized sack of pita. “Don’t forget to gift this to him.”

In the living area, Lilom takes one final glimpse at the jar she’s carrying earlier. It is placed on top of a long desk covered with black cloth, surrounded with white candles and decorated with Silim’s photos. When she steps out, she pays no attention to the Gabans who are lining up in front of the cabin and weeping over Silim’s death. Once she shapeshifts into a crow, she flies as fast as she can until she crosses the sea and reaches another forest. After making sure that no eyeballs could see her, she transforms back as Lilom. Just a few meters away from where she stands, is the open ground where Silim was killed and in the middle of it is the faction’s carriage waiting for her return.

In less than ten minutes, she arrives back at the headquarter. She peeks her head through the window when she notices a clamor in front of the gate. Several of the guards are sprawling on the ground while a young man keeps on shouting.

“Let me in! Let me in!”

Lilom gets out of the carriage while raising an eyebrow. “What is the meaning of this?” Who are you?”

The young man turns his face to meet her eyes. “I’m Sinag and I’m looking for my brother.”

Lilom smirks. “This is not the right place to look for missing people.”

Sinag clutches his fists. “It’s the talk of the town that a young man with a sword was transported here through a prison cell chariot!”

Lilom inhales deeply. “His name?”

“Liyab.”

Before Lilom could say a word or move a muscle, some of the guards run towards her and tightly clasp her arms. Her eyes widen when Tala, Liyab and the other members of the faction step out of the gate wearing clenched expressions with eyes piercing at her.

“What are you doing? What’s the meaning of this?!”