Prologue The First Bargain #3
Mateo’s hand froze mid-swing. The drunken haze in his eyes cleared, replaced by a flicker of confusion, then stark, animal terror.
He slowly turned, his breath catching in his throat.
He looked up, and up, at the impossibly tall, perfectly formed man who had appeared from nowhere.
He saw the cold fire in Maruz’s eyes and whatever drunken bravado he possessed shattered into a million pieces.
“What… what in God’s name are you?” Mateo stammered, scrambling backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing to the floor.
Maruz did not answer. He simply raised a hand, palm open, toward the cowering man.
The air around Mateo began to shimmer, to warp like heated glass.
Ghostly images flickered into existence, visible only to Ligaya and her husband.
She saw herself, a week ago, her face contorted in pain as Mateo twisted her arm behind her back.
She saw herself last month, weeping silently as he threw a plate of food at the wall beside her head.
Mateo screamed, a raw, ragged sound, clutching his arm as if it were being broken anew. “No! Stop!”
Another image bloomed in the air - Mateo slapping her so hard her head snapped back, the sharp crack echoing in the hut. And on the floor, Mateo cried out, his own head jerking to the side as a phantom blow landed, a trickle of real blood suddenly appearing at the corner of his mouth.
“You are judged,” Maruz’s voice was a low, pitiless rumble. “You will now feel every moment of pain you have given.”
One by one, the memories of his cruelty played out in the shimmering air, a litany of bitter years.
Each shove, each kick, each venomous word manifested as physical agony upon his body.
He writhed on the floor, weeping, begging, screaming apologies to a woman he had never shown an ounce of mercy.
Ligaya watched, her face impassive, her heart a cold, hard stone in her chest. This was not vengeance. This was balance. This was justice.
When the last memory faded, Mateo was a broken, sobbing wreck on the floor. Maruz lowered his hand.
In the center of the room, a patch of darkness began to form.
It was not a shadow, but a hole in the world, an utter absence of light, sound, and substance.
It was a void that did not expand violently, but simply grew, inexorably.
It touched Mateo’s foot, and his foot vanished without a trace.
He let out one last, choked shriek of pure terror as the nothingness crept up his body, erasing him from existence.
The silence that followed was more profound than any she had ever known.
When the void receded, the floor was bare.
Not a drop of blood, not a thread from his clothes. Nothing. He was simply gone.
The tension left Ligaya in a single, shuddering exhalation. The strength that had held her rigid drained away, and she began to tremble uncontrollably, reaction setting in.
Maruz turned to her. The infernal light in his eyes softened. The terrifying aura of judgment receded, replaced by an unnerving calm. He crossed the room in two silent strides and knelt before her. He gently tilted her chin up, his cool fingers a stark contrast to the memory of Mateo’s brutal grip.
His gaze fell on her split lip, which had started to bleed again.
“He marked you,” he murmured, his voice a soft caress.
He brought his thumb to her mouth and gently wiped away the droplet of blood.
A faint, cool tingling spread across her skin, and when he pulled his hand away, the pain was gone.
The cut was sealed, leaving no trace it had ever been there.
The gentleness of the act, coming after such a terrifying display of power, undid her.
A single tear escaped and traced a path through the grime on her cheek.
Maruz caught it with his fingertip, his expression unreadable.
In that moment, surrounded by the shadows of her former life, Ligaya felt a strange and dangerous connection to the entity before her, a bond forged in blood and sealed in an unholy salvation.
In the weeks that followed, the small hut transformed.
The air, once thick with the stench of fear and stale tuba, now carried the clean, earthy scent of drying herbs and the faint, ever-present aroma of incense and sea salt that clung to Maruz.
The oppressive silence of dread was replaced by the low murmur of his voice as he taught her things no priest or village elder could ever imagine.
Ligaya herself was remade. The haunted, downcast gaze was gone, replaced by a steady, watchful intelligence.
She moved with a newfound purpose, her hands, once raw from menial labor, now learning a darker, more intricate craft.
They sat on the floor, the silvery light of the waning moon filtering through the open window. Spread between them on a clean woven mat were the elements of their new work: smooth, dark river stones, bone fragments bleached by the sun, pieces of driftwood worn into strange shapes by the sea.
“Every vessel must be unique,” Maruz said, his voice a low vibration that seemed to settle in her bones. He picked up a flat, black stone, his large hand making it look like a pebble. “It must resonate with the woman who will wield it. It must be a piece of her story, her pain.”
He placed the stone in her hand and guided her fingers to hold a sharp shard of flint. “The power is not in the object itself, but in the will behind it. It is unlocked by the blood freely given - a deliberate act of sacrifice, not of victimhood. There is a universe of difference.”
His hand covered hers, guiding the flint as she began to scratch a symbol into the stone’s surface.
His touch was cool and firm, his proximity an enveloping presence that was both comforting and dangerously intoxicating.
Under his tutelage, she learned to feel the latent power in the objects, to channel her intent into the carvings, to understand the grammar of this terrible, liberating magic.
Their lessons were intimate, their bodies often close, their hands entwined as they worked.
It was a courtship conducted in a language of symbols and blood.
“The women still suffer,” she said softly. “I hear them at the well. I see the bruises they try to hide. They pray to the nailed god, but he does not answer them.”
Maruz turned from the window, his volcanic eyes locking with hers. “Their god offers salvation after death. I offer justice in life. It is a different kind of faith.”
The first winds of the monsoon began to stir in the nights that followed, carrying the scent of rain from the sea. A restlessness grew in Maruz. He would stand for hours facing the ocean, as if listening for a call she could not hear.
“The season turns,” he said one night, his voice devoid of its usual undertones. “My time grows short.”
A cold knot of panic formed in her stomach. The thought of being without him, without his power, his presence, was now unthinkable. But she was not the same woman who had stumbled bleeding into the forest. She would not beg. She would build.
“Then your work is not finished,” she stated, her voice clear and strong. She gestured to the half-dozen talismans they had crafted, each one unique, each one humming with a dormant power. “This knowledge cannot die with me. Your justice cannot be mine alone.”
His expression was unreadable, but she saw a flicker of something in his eyes - pride, perhaps. Or respect.
“This path is a lonely one,” he warned. “They will call you mangkukulam. Witch. They will fear you.”
“They already fear women who are not afraid,” she countered. “Let them have a reason.”
In the final days, they worked with a new urgency.
He taught her the rituals of initiation, the words of binding and release, the signs by which she would recognize true desperation in another.
They established the foundations of a creed built not on piety, but on shared suffering and the promise of retribution.
It would be a whisper network, a covenant of shadows passed from one woman to another. The Sisterhood.
The night the first rain fell, he stood by the door of the hut, the air cool and heavy with moisture. His form was already beginning to shimmer, to lose its solid definition.
“They will call,” Ligaya said. It was not a question.
“I will answer,” he promised. His voice was beginning to echo, to sound as it had in the clearing, a sound from everywhere and nowhere at once. “And those who bear your talismans will find justice, as you have.”
He reached out, not to touch her, but to gently caress the original blood-dark talisman that now hung on a cord around her neck. His fingers passed through it like smoke. His form dissolved into the rainy dark, the scent of incense and sea salt swept away by the coming storm.
Ligaya did not weep. She stood in the doorway of her hut, her home, her temple, and watched the rain wash the world clean.
She clutched the talisman to her chest, its faint, familiar warmth a comfort against her skin.
Her mind was already at work, cataloging the faces of the women in her village, searching for the first flicker of defiance in their eyes, the first sister of her new, dark faith.