RINA'S POV:
The air in the mountains of Bacolor was a suffocating blanket tonight, thick and heavy in my lungs. It carried the taste of an oncoming storm—copper and ozone—a metallic tang that made the back of my throat prickle. It clung to my skin like a damp shroud, the humidity a physical weight pressing in from all sides. Above, the moon was a bleeding wound in the velvet black, its crimson light filtering through the canopy to paint the ancient trees in shades of rust and dried blood. The Bloodmoon.
I hated it. Not because it was ominous, but because it was beautiful, and that beauty felt like a personal insult. It was a spectacle in a sky that no longer belonged to us. This wasn't a scene from the fantasy manhwa I escaped into; this was my life now, and the script was getting worse. For three months, I'd existed in a state of suspended disbelief. Waking up, seeing the impossible leviathans hanging in the stratosphere, and then forcing myself to look away. You can get used to anything, I learned. You can learn to ignore the floating islands that mock every law of physics, treating them like oddly shaped clouds. You learn to tune out the low, sub-audible hum that vibrates deep in your bones, a constant, nagging reminder that the world is fundamentally wrong. You learn, or you go mad. Tonight, that hum was louder. It felt like a promise of change I didn't want.
"Are you ready, Rina?"
I flinched, my eyes snapping open to the chalk-drawn circle at my feet. Lola Elara's voice, usually as soft as worn silk, cut through the oppressive silence with the full weight of her expectation. I looked at my grandmother, her face a beautiful roadmap of wrinkles, impossibly serene in the moon's unholy glow. Her long, silver hair, woven with strands of sampaguita, seemed to drink in the light, the white petals appearing a ghostly, bloodless red. She was the last true Babaylan of her line, a conduit for the old gods, a healer whose hands could mend wounds of both flesh and spirit. I had always been in awe of her. Tonight, her certainty felt like another suffocating weight.
Her hands found my shoulders. They were surprisingly strong, her calloused fingers a stark contrast to her gentle nature. They felt warm, an anchor of life against the chilling fear coiling deep in my gut.
"I… I want to be, Lola," my voice was a weak, honest tremor. "I'm just scared."
"Fear is a tool. She will learn to use it," a voice grunted from the edge of the clearing. My grandfather, Lolo Kael. His words were a low rumble, like stones grinding together deep within the earth. He was the shadow to my grandmother's light, a coiled, waiting thing. He came from a long line of Mambabarang—the black witches of Filipino lore who commanded swarms of insects to deliver curses of excruciating pain and madness. A low, continuous hum vibrated around him, a living, shifting cloak of iridescent beetles and night-black moths that obeyed his every unspoken command. The insects on his skin shifted, their legs skittering over one another, their restless energy a mirror of his own. The people in the lowlands feared his kind, and for good reason. Yet this man, who could command a plague with a flick of his wrist, used that power to weave a protective barrier of chittering life around our home, a shield no monster from the crashed Dungeons dared to cross. He had abandoned the dark path of his family the moment he fell in love with the one person who should have been his sworn enemy. A Babaylan who heals, a Mambabarang who curses. Their love was the foundation of my life, but their legacy felt like a crushing weight.
Lola Elara squeezed my shoulders, her gaze pulling me in. "Rina, this will not be easy. The power of my ancestors, the blessings of the gods, will flow into you. It is a light that has guided and healed for generations. You must be the vessel."
Lolo Kael stepped forward, his bare feet silent on the packed earth. The insects around him swirled, their collective hum rising. "And the power of my blood," he said, his gaze so intense it was like a physical touch. "The strength of the crawling, burrowing things. The darkness that consumes and commands. It is a poison, girl, but it is also a weapon. You will not be just a vessel. You will be the hand that wields it."
The reason for this desperate ritual haunted the space between their words: my father. An Engkanto, a being of immense natural power, who had charmed my mother only to steal her away. He had tried to take me, too. I was just a baby, but I carry a scar of a memory—a phantom feeling of cold, green light and the cloying scent of crushed flowers. Lola Elara had fought him, her divine power clashing with his ancient nature magic. She saved me, but my mother was lost. They were preparing me for the day he might return, forging me into a fortress because they could not bear to lose another prize.
"It is time," Lola Elara declared, her voice leaving no room for argument.
She guided me to the center of the circle. The grit of powdered bone and salt crunched under my bare feet. The symbols weren't just drawings; they felt alive, thrumming with a latent energy that prickled my skin. She began to chant, her voice rising in an ancient dialect that vibrated not in my ears, but directly in my bones, shaking me from the inside out. The air grew frigid, and the crimson moonlight seemed to narrow, focusing on our small circle like the eye of a predator.
Lolo Kael stood opposite her. He didn't chant. He simply watched. As he watched, the humming of his insectoid legion grew louder, a thousand tiny wings beating in unison, creating a dissonant, maddening harmony with my grandmother's prayer. A swarm of fireflies lifted from his shoulders, their glow a sickly, jaundiced green, and began to circle me.
"Breathe, Rina," Lola Elara commanded. "Accept what is given."
I closed my eyes and drew a shuddering breath. The pain was instantaneous and absolute. It wasn't a cut or a burn; it was a total system shutdown. My brain couldn't process it. My blood felt like it was simultaneously boiling and freezing. My muscles seized, arching my back as if I'd been struck by lightning. A blinding white light exploded behind my eyes, smelling of jasmine and ozone, and for a terrifying second, I was certain I was dying. It was like a lifetime of memories that weren't mine—of kindness, of mending, of boundless compassion—was being shoved into my soul, a beautiful but deafeningly painful symphony.
Then, before I could process it, came the darkness.
It began as a chittering, scratching sensation in my toes, as if a thousand tiny legs were skittering under my skin, clawing their way up. It was Lolo's power. The feeling of deep, cold earth, of roots breaking stone, of the relentless, silent work of decay. I could feel the hive-mind of every insect around me—the beetles' armored patience, the spiders' predatory cunning, the centipedes' venomous hunger. Their absolute loyalty to my grandfather became a cold, hard knot of pragmatism in my gut.
The two forces met in the center of my being, and a scream tore from my throat, raw and animalistic. It was a war inside me. The light sought to purify the intrusion; the dark sought to consume the light. My body convulsed, thrashing against the hard-packed earth as Lola's chanting grew more fervent and Lolo's insectile hum reached a fever pitch.
"Hold on, Rina!" Lolo's voice boomed, cutting through my agony with desperate urgency. "Do not let one devour the other! You are the bridge! You are the balance!"
"She is both the sun and the soil, the prayer and the poison!" Lola cried out, her voice straining. "Accept it, Rina! Claim it! Make it yours!"
But as the two warring legacies threatened to tear me apart from the inside out, a horrifying thought pierced through the agony: What if I wasn't strong enough to hold them? What if, instead of becoming a weapon, I was simply the battlefield where they would destroy each other, and me along with them?
My mind was tearing itself apart. I forced the warring energies not to merge, but to intertwine. Like a poisonous vine wrapping a sun-warmed stone, they coiled together within me, separate but inseparable. The pain didn't just subside; it transformed into a profound sense of completeness. The light did not extinguish the dark, nor did the dark corrupt the light. They simply were. And they were mine.
I lay on the ground, gasping, my body slick with sweat. The ritual was over. The bloodmoon still bled across the sky. The humming of the insects softened to a gentle thrum, a sound that now felt familiar, like a second heartbeat. Lola Elara knelt beside me, her composure finally breaking as tears of relief streamed down her face. Lolo Kael stood over me, and for the first time, I saw a crack in his stoic facade—a glimmer of pride, relief, and a fierce, profound love.
He reached a hand toward me and had just opened his mouth to speak when it happened.
It wasn't a sound. It was a feeling. A deep, planet-shaking vibration with no epicenter. It was everywhere at once. The ancient trees swayed violently with no wind. Then, silence. The night birds, the hum of Lolo's insects, the whisper of the wind—all of it was snuffed out. The ground beneath me shuddered, not like an earthquake, but like the entire world was a bell that had just been struck by an impossible hammer.
Lolo Kael's head snapped towards the sky. "What is that?"
Lola Elara was already looking up, her face bone-white, her serenity shattered and replaced with pure, primal dread. "The gods are silent," she whispered, her voice filled with a terror I had never heard before. "Something is wrong."
I pushed myself up, my newfound senses screaming. The air wasn't just heavy anymore; it felt like it was being crushed from above. I followed their gaze. The stars were going out. Not winking out, but being blotted out by enormous shadows descending from the void. Silent. Gargantuan. Utterly alien.
The floating islands.
They filled the heavens, their rocky undersides scarred with colossal, glowing glyphs that pulsed with a malevolent light. Some were the size of mountains, tearing through the cloud layer. Others were sprawling archipelagos that stretched to the horizon. They weren't just floating; they were arranging themselves with a purpose that felt both intelligent and deeply, terrifyingly wrong. The fictions were lies. The stories I'd devoured, the ones that made this kind of thing feel thrilling, were a cruel joke. They hadn't prepared me for the sheer, soul-crushing scale of it. This wasn't an invasion; it was an overwrite. The sky I had known my entire life was gone, erased. They had just reforged me, given me power to survive a monster from my past, only for the entire world to become a monster.