Into the Darkness, Chapter 10 - Previous Chapter
Chapter 11
Wisps of black thread unravel from the air itself, thin and fraying like burned film, wrapping around Damian’s arms and chest with a pressure that isn’t quite touch and isn’t quite gravity. The moment he’s caught, motion tilts sideways — not forward, not backward, but into a nauseating wrong angle that makes his inner ear rebel. The sensation carries a hollow drag to it, like falling through cold oil, like being gently crushed by absence. His thoughts smear. Time loses its edges. The darkness presses inward with a faint, crushing insistence, as though the space itself resents containing him.
There is no tunnel. No landmarks. Only rushing black layered with faint streaks of dim distortion, like submerged lightning trapped under ice. The slipstream hums with negative motion — movement that feels subtractive rather than directional — draining warmth, orientation, and certainty. His body feels slightly delayed inside itself, as if each nerve is half a heartbeat behind reality. Something about this passage feels incorrect, a flawed translation of travel that leaves residue inside the bones.
Then the pressure releases.
Air slams into him. Wind tears past his ears. Weight returns violently and without warning. He drops out of the dark and into the sky, the world snapping back into existence too fast to understand. The impact with water is brutal — a thunderclap of force that drives the breath from his chest and sends cold exploding through every joint. Black water closes overhead, swallowing light and sound, wrapping him in heavy, silty silence. For a suspended moment, there is no up or down. Only cold, pressure, and the slow drifting brush of unseen things against his skin.
When he breaks the surface, the night feels thick enough to breathe.
Humidity clings to him like damp fabric. The air smells of stagnant water, wet earth, and something faintly metallic, old and buried. The surrounding darkness stretches outward into uneven silhouettes — tangled tree lines, crooked growth, indistinct shorelines dissolving into shadow. No familiar stars. No comforting geometry. The sky hangs low and clouded, muting the moon into a pale blur that barely reflects across the rippling water.
Silence settles — not empty, but layered. Insects pulse somewhere beyond the trees. Water laps faintly against unseen roots. Far away, a subtle, irregular sound drifts through the air, impossible to judge for distance or direction, fading in and out like a nervous system misfiring. The sound carries no meaning yet. Only unease.
Damian doesn’t know where he is.
He doesn’t know how far he’s fallen — or how far he’s travelled.
He only knows that this place does not feel neutral.
The darkness seems to hold its breath around him. The air presses faintly against his skin, heavy with the sense of being enclosed by something vast and patient. The water beneath him feels deeper than it should be, its surface trembling with subtle movements that don’t belong to wind alone. Even the shadows seem slightly misaligned, as though the world here assembled itself from imperfect memory.
Damien treads water in a slow, widening circle.
Each rotation feels heavier than the last. His soaked suit drags at his limbs like a half-remembered gravity, fabric swollen with cold and resistance. The lake offers no horizon, only black water merging into black air, the shoreline dissolved into indistinct smudges of shadow. He turns again. Nothing resolves. No landmarks. No familiar geometry. The night refuses to give him bearings.
Then sound slips into the darkness.
At first it’s so faint he almost mistakes it for ringing in his ears — a soft vibration, uneven and distant, threading through the humid air. He stills, listening. The sound gathers shape: gentle strumming, hollow percussion, the fragile architecture of human music carried across water. Laughter follows, thin but unmistakable. Living voices.
Relief stirs, cautious and reluctant.
He angles his body toward the sound and begins to swim. Progress is slow. Every stroke pulls against the sodden weight clinging to him, fabric resisting motion as though the water itself has learned how to grip. His muscles burn quietly. The lake feels deeper than it should, colder near the legs, its surface broken only by the steady rhythm of his breathing and the distant pulse of music slowly growing clearer.
Time stretches without landmarks.
When his hands finally scrape against submerged sand, the sensation feels unreal — texture returning after so much liquid abstraction. He drags himself upright, boots sinking slightly as he staggers out of the water. The shoreline reveals itself in firelight: a low beach, damp sand glistening like dark glass, palm shadows wavering behind a small gathering of people arranged around a crackling flame.
They look ordinary.
Too ordinary.
Smiling faces glow warm and gold in the firelight. Acoustic instruments rest against knees and shoulders — a guitar, hand drums, something strung and unfamiliar. Laughter rises and falls easily, unguarded, woven into the soft music. Their clothes are dry. Their posture relaxed. The fire pops and settles with domestic comfort, its smoke curling lazily into the night.
Damien approaches, water streaming from his sleeves and hems, leaving a dark trail in the sand behind him.
“Where am I?” he asks.
One of them looks up, smile faltering into confusion, eyes flicking over his soaked clothes, his posture, the lake behind him. Damien turns slightly, gesturing back toward the water.
“Name? Location?”
Murmurs ripple faintly through the group — not fear exactly, but unease, the instinctive tightening that happens when something doesn’t fit the expected pattern of the world.
From the far side of the fire, a male voice rises, firm but edged with caution.
“You’re scaring my friends, sir. Please leave us.”
Damien pivots toward the voice, lifting one hand to shield his eyes from the fire’s glare. The flames distort the man’s features into bright fragments and shadowed hollows.
“Tell me where I am,” Damien says, steady despite the cold still clinging to his bones. “And I’ll leave you be.”
A brief cough. A clearing of the throat.
“You’re at Marugo Lake. Capiz.”
The words land with weight, even before meaning fully assembles.
Damien turns away without another word, boots grinding softly into wet sand. He walks a few steps toward the dark water, staring out across the surface he just crossed — the black plane swallowing reflections, offering no hint of depth or boundary.
“The Philippines,” he murmurs to himself, the realisation settling like a misplaced puzzle piece forced into the wrong picture.
His gaze lingers on the lake, on the way the firelight fractures across its surface instead of reflecting cleanly. The air feels subtly heavier here, pressing against the skin with a quiet insistence. The distant music resumes behind him, softer now, as though wrapped in cotton.
“But why was that portal different…”
The thought hangs unfinished in the humid air, unanswered, sinking slowly into the dark like a stone dropped into deep water.
Lights shimmer ahead through the trees.
Not bright — not electric harshness — but the warm, uneven glow of scattered bulbs and lanterns strung between low huts raised slightly above the damp ground. The structures look temporary, weathered by salt air and rain, wood darkened with age and humidity. Shadows stretch long and crooked between them, bending around posts and railings like slow-moving stains.
Damien heads toward them at a measured pace, letting his breathing settle, letting his senses recalibrate to land after water and disorientation. The air carries layered smells now: cooking oil gone cold, wet rope, old smoke, faint algae. Somewhere metal clinks softly against wood in the breeze. A radio murmurs from deeper within the settlement, its signal slightly warped, voices fluttering in and out like distant ghosts trapped inside static.
As he passes one of the huts, something pale catches his eye.
A towel hangs loosely over a railing, still faintly damp, smelling of sun and detergent and human skin. He hesitates only a moment before pulling it free and rubbing the water from his face and hair, the fabric rough but grounding, proof of ordinary domestic life. Just beyond it, draped over another rail, a pair of loose swimming shorts slowly dries in the warm air. A pair of flip-flops rests by a doorway, their straps worn thin with use.
He gathers them quietly.
Behind a screen of bushes, half-hidden from the path, he strips out of the soaked suit. The material peels away reluctantly, heavy and cold, as if reluctant to release him back to the world. He discards it into the shadows and pulls on the shorts, slips his feet into the flip-flops, and drapes the towel across his shoulders. The simple change of texture — dry fabric, open air on skin — restores a fragile sense of normality, like borrowing a stranger’s life for a few minutes.
He steps back onto the path.
The radio grows clearer as he walks.
“…News flash,” a voice crackles through the static, brisk and impersonal, “another body was found early today, missing organs…”
Damien slows.
The sentence lands oddly in the quiet settlement, too sharp for the sleepy glow of huts and night insects. The signal warbles. The voice stumbles into interference before any details follow, dissolving into hiss and distant music.
He stands still for a beat, listening for continuation.
Nothing.
Only static breathing through the speaker and the soft hum of the night reclaiming the space.
“Hmm,” he murmurs under his breath. “Missing organs…”
The phrase sits uncomfortably in his mind, unanchored to context, like a loose thread snagged on a memory he doesn’t yet have. He lets it drift for now and resumes walking, flip-flops whispering softly against packed earth.
A small group drifts past him along the path, laughter spilling ahead of them in uneven waves.
They move with the loose choreography of alcohol — shoulders bumping, voices overlapping, feet slightly out of sync with intention. One of the women slows as she passes, her gaze catching on Damien with open curiosity. Firelight from a nearby hut skims across his damp hair, the borrowed towel resting across his shoulders, the quiet geometry seemingly perfect athletic build. She stops outright, eyes lingering a second too long.
One of the lads notices.
He squints theatrically, swaying slightly, then breaks into a sharp, exaggerated grin. In a high, drunken sing-song voice he announces, “Oi, look — Amelia’s found herself a new hunky boyfriend!”
The group erupts into sloppy laughter.
Amelia flushes, rolling her eyes as she gives him a half-hearted shove. “No I haven’t,” she protests, then glances back at Damien again despite herself. A crooked smile creeps in. “Well… he is pretty fit though.”
Their laughter ripples again, playful and unthreatening, the kind of moment that belongs to warm nights and harmless mischief.
Damien doesn’t respond.
He keeps walking, gaze forward, footsteps steady and unhurried. Their voices fade behind him, swallowed quickly by the trees and the layered night sounds, as if the encounter never quite anchored itself in reality.
Ahead, something mechanical stirs the darkness.
A rickshaw creeps along the narrow road at a patient crawl, its small motor buzzing softly, headlights cutting thin tunnels through drifting insects and dust. The vehicle looks almost insect-like in motion — low, narrow, persistent — its frame rattling faintly as it scuttles past.
Damien raises one hand and flags it down.
The driver slows and stops beside him with a soft sputter of engine noise. Damien climbs in, settling onto the worn seat, the vinyl still warm from the humid air.
“Take me to town, please,” he says.
The engine hum deepens as the rickshaw turns and pulls forward, carrying him away from the quiet huts, the borrowed warmth of firelight, and the half-heard laughter that already feels like something remembered rather than something lived.
The road stretches ahead into darkness.
The night air shifts.
Not wind — something heavier, a pressure change that ripples across the skin like a held breath being released somewhere far above. The insects fall abruptly silent, their chorus collapsing into a brittle hush. Even the rickshaw’s engine seems to hesitate, its hum thinning as though the machine itself senses intrusion.
A shadow slides across the road.
The driver reacts instantly. The engine cuts dead with a sharp click. The rickshaw rolls a short distance on fading momentum before settling into stillness. The man bows his head, hands coming together tightly at his chest, lips moving in silent, frantic rhythm. His breathing becomes shallow, controlled, as if afraid even air might betray him.
Something passes overhead.
Damien tilts his gaze upward.
Against the dim smear of clouded moonlight, a shape glides across the sky — vast wings stretched wide like torn sails of night. The membrane ripples faintly as it rides the air, skeletal lines visible beneath the thin darkness of its flesh. But there is no lower body trailing beneath it. No legs. No grounded symmetry. Only a torso tapering into a naked, exposed spine that trails behind like a grotesque tail, vertebrae catching faint glints of pale light as it moves.
It doesn’t flap often.
It coasts.
Confident. Economical. Predatory.
The air beneath it feels subtly displaced, like pressure waves rolling over the ground. The shadow it casts fractures unnaturally across the road and trees, stretching in directions shadows should not stretch.
Damien lowers his voice instinctively.
“What is it?” he whispers. “Tell me.”
The driver does not respond. His lips continue moving in prayer, eyes squeezed shut, knuckles pale with tension.
The creature glides onward, disappearing beyond the treeline, swallowed by distance and cloud and dark. The pressure lifts gradually, like a heavy hand finally withdrawing from the world’s throat. The insects hesitate… then cautiously resume their fragile chorus.
Only then does the driver open his eyes.
“Manananggal…” he breathes, barely audible. His voice trembles like a damaged instrument string. “Manananggal…”
He turns toward Damien slowly, terror still wide and glassy in his gaze.
“Tell me about it,” Damien says quietly. “Help me understand.”
The driver studies him for a long moment — not just his face, but his posture, his calm, the strange mismatch between what had just passed overhead and the way Damien still holds himself together. Something in his expression shifts from fear toward decision, as though a door has quietly closed behind him.
He nods once.
“You come with me,” he says softly. “You come to my home.”
The engine coughs back to life.
The rickshaw turns off the main road, carrying them into narrower streets where the lanterns grow fewer, shadows growing thicker between clustered houses. The settlement thins into quieter domestic darkness, where sleeping lives curl behind thin walls and fragile locks.
They ride the rest of the way in silence.
The rickshaw hums softly through narrow streets where the lights thin and shadows thicken, buildings leaning closer together as if sharing secrets. The driver avoids the main roads, steering instead into tighter arteries of the settlement, where the air smells faintly of cooking oil gone cold and old rain trapped in concrete pores.
He stops beside a narrow alley.
They dismount. The alley is barely wide enough for two shoulders to pass without brushing walls. Damp stains climb the brickwork like slow-growing shadows. Somewhere above, laundry shifts gently in the night breeze, whispering fabric against rope.
The driver leads Damien up a tight stairwell, each step creaking softly in protest. Inside the apartment, the air changes — warm, human, layered with the quiet breathing of sleep. Bodies lie scattered across thin mattresses and folded blankets, children and adults tangled in the fragile geometry of rest. The driver moves with practiced care, placing each foot deliberately, guiding Damien through the maze of sleeping forms without waking a single one.
At the far end, he gestures toward a narrow door.
A small balcony waits beyond it.
Damien slips through quietly.
The balcony is barely more than a concrete shelf overlooking dark rooftops and distant trees. Moonlight washes it in pale gray. A single chair rocks gently back and forth despite the still air.
An old woman sits there.
Her frame is thin, almost fragile, wrapped in layered cloth despite the warm night. Deep lines map her face like riverbeds carved by time. Around her neck hangs a garland of garlic cloves, their papery skins catching faint light. In her lap rests a small container of salt, its lid worn smooth by decades of handling.
Her eyes lift to Damien — alert, steady, unafraid in a way that only long familiarity with danger can produce.
She motions for him to sit.
He lowers himself carefully onto the edge of a low stool opposite her.
“The manananggal…” he says softly, keeping his voice low out of respect for the sleeping apartment behind them. “Tell me about it, please.”
The old woman does not answer immediately.
Instead, she reaches into the container, pinches a small mound of salt between her fingers, and flicks it sharply over her shoulder into the darkness behind her. The grains scatter faintly against concrete and night air. Then she tips the container forward and gives it a short, insistent shake toward Damien.
A gesture, not a request.
A requirement.
The salt rattles softly, dry and hollow, like bone in a cup.
The message is clear: before words, protection.
The night beyond the balcony feels suddenly closer — not louder, not moving — simply attentive, as though something invisible has leaned an inch nearer to listen.
Damien mirrors her motion.
He takes a pinch of salt and throws it back over his shoulder. The grains disappear into the dark. The old woman watches closely, eyes following the arc, as if measuring more than just obedience.
Only then does she relax — just slightly.
The rocking chair creaks once.
Her voice, when it comes, is low and roughened by age and memory.
“Now,” she murmurs, fingers closing again around the salt container. “We can speak.”
The garlic shifts softly against her chest as the night presses in, listening from the edges of the balcony, patient and unseen.
The old woman’s fingers tighten around the salt container.
Her rocking chair sways once, twice, a slow pendulum marking time older than clocks. When she finally speaks, her voice is thin but steady, worn smooth by repetition rather than weakness.
“Long before roads,” she says quietly, eyes drifting past Damien toward the dark rooftops beyond the balcony, “before radios, before engines, before the lake had a name that stayed the same… there was a woman who wanted more than a human life could hold.”
She pauses, letting the night absorb the sentence.
“They say she was beautiful once. Clever. Hungry for power the way some people hunger for love. She learned old ways — ways that spoke to the dark spaces between breath and shadow. She drank what should never be drunk. She made promises to things that do not keep them.”
Her fingers make a small, absent circle over the lid of the salt.
“The magic worked,” the old woman continues. “At first. She became strong. Her senses sharpened. She could smell sickness in the air, hear hearts beating through walls, taste fear like metal on her tongue. But magic that feeds on hunger does not stop feeding.”
The rocking chair creaks softly.
“Her body could no longer hold what she had invited inside herself. So the night learned how to take her apart.”
The old woman finally looks at Damien.
“At sundown, her lower half grows heavy and useless — like an empty shell. The rest of her tears itself free and rises into the sky. Wings stretch from her back like the shadows of bones. Her spine trails behind her, long and bare, not meant to be seen by the living. She flies without sound most of the time. When you hear her, it is already too late to trust your ears.”
Her mouth tightens slightly, not with fear, but with old familiarity.
“She still wears a woman’s face. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes kind. That is the lie. Beneath it is a hunger that never learned how to be human again.”
Damien listens, unmoving.
“She feeds on what keeps people alive inside,” the old woman says. “Not meat for strength. Not blood for heat. The soft, vital things that carry life, breath, memory, and growing futures. She takes them because she no longer has her own. Every night she hunts, she tries to fill the hollow she created.”
Her voice drops lower.
“But it never fills.”
The balcony feels smaller somehow, the darkness pressing closer to the thin railing.
“She cannot cross salt easily. Garlic confuses her senses. Firelight unsettles her. But these are only barriers, not cures. The real danger is forgetting she exists. The real danger is believing the night is empty.”
The old woman leans back slightly, garlic shifting softly against her chest.
“She is not a beast,” she finishes. “She is a mistake that learned how to fly.”
Silence settles between the words.
The city breathes quietly below them. Somewhere far away, something moves through the upper dark, unseen.
The old woman’s eyes remain steady on Damien.
“Now you know what shares the sky with you.”
Damien pauses mid-motion, the salt still sifting between his fingers.
The old woman watches him, rocking chair creaking in slow arcs, her eyes sharp and curious. There is something in the tilt of her head, the shadowed hollows of her face, that says she has seen far too much and yet recognises a spark of understanding in him.
“I knew you were here for a reason,” she murmurs, her voice a frail rasp, barely carrying over the night air. “Don’t ask me how… or why…”
She flicks another pinch of salt over her shoulder. The grains scatter into darkness like tiny stars falling into shadow. Then she lifts her hand, beckoning Damien to mirror her motion. He does, feeling the ritual’s rhythm seep into his bones, anchoring him to the gravity of the threat he cannot yet see.
“Does she have a lair? A hideout?” Damien asks quietly, his voice almost swallowed by the night.
The old woman’s gaze follows his, and with a slow, deliberate gesture, she points down the street. Far enough to be hidden in shadow, close enough for fear to thicken the air: a derelict building, windows like hollow eyes, walls weathered by rain and neglect, looming against the dim glow of scattered lanterns.
She leans forward suddenly, frail but startlingly strong for her size, and grips his arm. Her fingers are thin and warm despite the chill, a tether pulling him closer. Her breath brushes against his ear — dry, rasping, and intimate — and sends a shiver crawling down his spine.
“Salt… and garlic… and lots of it,” she whispers, each word punctuated with quiet insistence, “before she rejoins…”
Then, as suddenly as the tension built, she slumps back into her rocking chair. The movement is deliberate, practiced, like a ceremony concluded. Her fingers snap sharply.
From the shadows, the driver appears instantly, his steps careful, respectful, but urgent. “You are similar size, grandson,” the old woman says to him. “Give him clothes… and what he needs…”
The young man, alert and obedient, inclines his head. “Yes, grandmother.”
He steps toward Damien, holding out a bundle of dry clothing, gloves, and a small satchel, the weight of the old woman’s ritual still hanging between them. Without a word, he gestures for Damien to follow, moving down the balcony steps and back into the shadowed alleys, where every corner could hide a predator, and every gust of wind could carry the faint, terrible echo of wings.
Damien follows silently, every sense taut, the whispers and warnings of the old woman vibrating in his memory. The derelict building looms ahead in the distance — dark, silent, unnatural — and the night seems to lean just a little closer around him, listening.
The alley ends in a jagged shadow, the derelict building looming above them like a broken tooth against the sky. Damien and the grandson slip inside, careful not to disturb the brittle debris underfoot. Wood groans in protest, loose plaster flakes drift down like snow. Darkness pools in corners, swallowing shapes, swallowing certainty.
The air inside is thick with rot. Dust coats the lungs, carries the acrid tang of decay, and somewhere deep, far below, the sour metallic scent of blood. The grandson carries the salt and garlic in trembling hands; Damien feels the weight of the moment pressing into his chest, his muscles taut, every sense alert.
They move quietly, footsteps measured, until they reach the center of the main hall. Moonlight pierces through shattered windows and gaping holes in the roof, sketching the skeleton of the structure in stark lines of pale silver. And there, half-hidden in shadows, something lies… grotesque.
The lower half of a human body, legs splayed unnaturally, pelvis exposed in raw, impossible anatomy. Muscle and sinew cling in twisted, uneven strands, stretched and scorched by some invisible force. Skin is pale, almost translucent, veins like black threads pulsing faintly beneath it. The weight of what it must have cost to tear this body from its upper half presses on Damien’s chest; he can almost hear the tortured scream embedded in the ragged sinews, feel the wet, sticky resistance of each tendon severed against bone.
The legs twitch once — a small, horrifying reminder that even separated, this thing carries the memory of life. The pelvis curves in a way that defies natural posture, as if the creature had been forced into its own nightmare. Every instinct screams to look away, but Damien knows they cannot.
Above them, the building creaks again. Then — a hollow, tearing sound, like metal scraping bone.
A hole in the broken roof fractures the night, and the upper half of the manananggal drops through. Its torso is lean and skeletal, wings snapping open with a soft, terrible swish. A necklace of organs hanging around its neck, lungs, kidneys, spleen… The spine curves unnaturally as it rises, vertebrae visible through taut skin, eyes gleaming with hunger that tastes like frost and iron. It hovers, just above Damien, smelling the fear and life radiating from the two humans below.
Damien steps forward, arms out, voice steady but low. “Go now!” he hisses to the grandson. “Rub it in! Salt and garlic — don’t wait, don’t hesitate!”
The grandson kneels quickly, trembling, fingers pressing cloves of garlic and coarse salt into the open, raw lower half. The creature thrashes slightly, a strange, piercing sound that twists in the air, both shriek and hiss, but it cannot strike downward — Damien has bought the distance.
Damien moves like a shadow himself, drawing the creature’s attention: waving, shouting, ducking, keeping it focused on him instead of the grandson. Each motion is deliberate, desperate, a dance with hunger and death, the creature circling, flapping, coiling in the air above them.
The smell of salt and garlic bites into the night, a pungent, biting cloud that crawls across the creature’s severed lower body. It recoils, wings beating in panic, shrieking a sound like cracked stone and wind.
Damien shouts and gestures wildly, every heartbeat pounding against ribs and floorboards. The grandson works feverishly, pressing, rubbing in the salt and garlic.
The manananggal thrashes upward, the upper half twisting impossibly, wings beating against the hole in the roof. Its gaze flicks toward Damien, a flash of fury and awareness, but the lower half — now scorched with salt and bruised by garlic — screams its own denial of wholeness, something that was once human now twisted into desperate, incomplete horror.
Every second stretches into eternity. Damien continues to bait, to distract, to scream and move and dance a fool’s choreography under a predator’s eyes. Behind him, the grandson finishes the ritual — salt and garlic pressed deep, a barrier, a sting, a statement that the night’s hunger is not unopposed.
The creature arches, a spine-twisting, bone-snapping scream, then hesitates mid-air. The upper half hovers, confused, drawn to instinct, but held at bay by the ritual and the pain radiating through its abandoned lower body.
Damien leans back against a wall, panting, sweat and salt crusting his skin, eyes never leaving the upper half of the creature. The grandson exhales a long, trembling breath, lowering himself slowly, eyes wide with terror and relief.
The creature thrashes in the broken ceiling air, wings snapping, vertebrae gleaming like ivory in the half-light. Its upper half dives, rises, hovers — the raw, hungering intelligence of it staring directly at them. Salt and garlic cling to its severed lower half, sizzling faintly, steam rising in thin curls as it writhes, trying desperately to rejoin its abandoned pelvis.
Zoren crawls quickly across the debris-strewn floor toward Damien, eyes wide and frantic.
“Zoren…” Damien glances down, confused.
“Zoren, my name…” the boy whispers, catching his breath, trembling hands clutching the satchel of remaining salt and garlic.
Damien nods, keeping his focus on the upper half of the monster. “I’m Damien,” he says softly.
“Grandmother says it will die when daylight arrives…” Zoren mutters, voice tinged with fear and awe.
Damien glances around. Through the grimy, dust-streaked windows, the first faint slivers of dawn are creeping across rooftops — pale, hesitant light stretching thin fingers into the warehouse. Inside, the shadows remain heavy, but the world beyond is slowly waking.
“Stay here, Zoren,” Damien commands quietly. “Not a word to anyone.”
Zoren nods, retreating slightly, clutching the salt and garlic like a talisman.
Damien steps into the center of the room. Dust swirls around him in shafts of half-light. The creature halts mid-air, wings quivering, eyes burning with pure, animalistic fear laced with rage. It recognises him — and instinct screams threat.
Then it dives.
A twisted, vertical slash through the air, wings slicing wind, spine trailing grotesquely behind it. The smell of something burned and ironed blood presses against Damien’s nose. He doesn’t flinch. Not even a muscle twitches.
Shadow tendrils erupt from him like living darkness, curling and snapping outward, striking the windows with explosive force. Glass shatters, spraying shards into the room, the sound a thunderclap of liberation. Light pours in suddenly, raw and relentless, flooding every corner of the warehouse, pushing back shadows like a tide of white fire.
The manananggal screams — a shriek like cracking stone and splintering metal — its wings beating frantically, hunting for a corner, a shadow, any refuge. It claws at the walls, the ceiling, anything that will hide it from the purifying light.
But there is none.
The sunlight catches its pale upper torso first, glinting along the taut spine, the thin membrane of wings, the skeletal arms that reach instinctively for the lower half it cannot yet reclaim. It thrashes violently, screeching, twisting, the raw, impossible anatomy of its severed body exposed for the first time in full grotesque clarity.
It bursts toward a patch of shadow in the far corner — desperation guiding it, blind and furious — and then the dawn hits it fully. Fire ignites along the fractured flesh, a sudden, grotesque bloom of flame crawling over its torso and wings. The creature thrashes, twisting, trying to escape the light, but the fire spreads with unnatural speed, consuming it from head to spine.
A sound erupts — half scream, half crackle, half explosion — and the manananggal explodes, sending ash and smoke spiralling into the rafters, blackened flakes raining down like cursed snow. Silence follows, deep and oppressive, the echoes of its thrashing fading into the pale gray light of dawn streaming through broken windows.
Damien stands amidst shattered glass, salt-streaked floor, and lingering smoke, chest heaving. He looks toward the corner where Zoren crouches, wide-eyed, safe.
The warehouse smells of charred flesh and sulphur, the morning sun filling every shadow, pushing the dark out like a tide.
Zoren stares at the ruined center of the warehouse, mouth slightly open, eyes wide with disbelief. The ash from the manananggal’s fiery end drifts down like slow-falling snow, coating his hair and the floorboards in a gray hush. He swallows, voice barely above a whisper.
“It… it’s gone,” he mutters, almost to himself. His knees wobble as he shifts, half-crouching among the shards of broken glass and salt-streaked floor. Every instinct in him screams that it shouldn’t be gone — that something like this cannot simply vanish — yet the evidence of fire, ash, and scattered wings tells another story.
Damien moves toward him, shadow tendrils unfurling like liquid night, coiling and stretching upward. The tendrils wrap around him briefly, lifting him off the floor. Slowly, he floats, suspended in the inky darkness of his own making, just inches above the ground. Zoren watches, awe and fear mingling, unable to tear his eyes away from the living darkness that carries Damien effortlessly through the ruined warehouse.
They drift toward a shattered window. Damien extends a tendril outward, wrapping it around the frame, and silently they glide into the morning air. Dust and ash swirl below them as they float, carried gently yet inexorably, the city stretching quiet and oblivious beneath the early sun.
Above the rooftops, Damien hovers near the balcony where the old woman sits. She is waiting, motionless, her gaze calm and deliberate, the garland of garlic and container of salt still resting in her lap.
Damien simply inclines his head. A nod, subtle but deliberate.
For a heartbeat, the balcony is still, the air heavy with unspoken acknowledgement. Then the old woman slowly rises, shaking slightly with age but steady in her purpose. She returns the nod — deliberate, measured, final and removes the garlic garland from around her neck, dropping it on to the floor.
Without another word, Damien allows his shadow tendrils to unfurl further, coiling into a dark swirl of impossible geometry. A portal opens within the living darkness, its edges rippling like oil on water, and he slips inside, disappearing silently, leaving only the faint echo of displaced air and shadow behind him.
Zoren remains on the rooftop below, chest heaving, eyes wide, watching the space where the darkness—and Damien—vanished.
Chapter 11
Wisps of black thread unravel from the air itself, thin and fraying like burned film, wrapping around Damian’s arms and chest with a pressure that isn’t quite touch and isn’t quite gravity. The moment he’s caught, motion tilts sideways — not forward, not backward, but into a nauseating wrong angle that makes his inner ear rebel. The sensation carries a hollow drag to it, like falling through cold oil, like being gently crushed by absence. His thoughts smear. Time loses its edges. The darkness presses inward with a faint, crushing insistence, as though the space itself resents containing him.
There is no tunnel. No landmarks. Only rushing black layered with faint streaks of dim distortion, like submerged lightning trapped under ice. The slipstream hums with negative motion — movement that feels subtractive rather than directional — draining warmth, orientation, and certainty. His body feels slightly delayed inside itself, as if each nerve is half a heartbeat behind reality. Something about this passage feels incorrect, a flawed translation of travel that leaves residue inside the bones.
Then the pressure releases.
Air slams into him. Wind tears past his ears. Weight returns violently and without warning. He drops out of the dark and into the sky, the world snapping back into existence too fast to understand. The impact with water is brutal — a thunderclap of force that drives the breath from his chest and sends cold exploding through every joint. Black water closes overhead, swallowing light and sound, wrapping him in heavy, silty silence. For a suspended moment, there is no up or down. Only cold, pressure, and the slow drifting brush of unseen things against his skin.
When he breaks the surface, the night feels thick enough to breathe.
Humidity clings to him like damp fabric. The air smells of stagnant water, wet earth, and something faintly metallic, old and buried. The surrounding darkness stretches outward into uneven silhouettes — tangled tree lines, crooked growth, indistinct shorelines dissolving into shadow. No familiar stars. No comforting geometry. The sky hangs low and clouded, muting the moon into a pale blur that barely reflects across the rippling water.
Silence settles — not empty, but layered. Insects pulse somewhere beyond the trees. Water laps faintly against unseen roots. Far away, a subtle, irregular sound drifts through the air, impossible to judge for distance or direction, fading in and out like a nervous system misfiring. The sound carries no meaning yet. Only unease.
Damian doesn’t know where he is.
He doesn’t know how far he’s fallen — or how far he’s travelled.
He only knows that this place does not feel neutral.
The darkness seems to hold its breath around him. The air presses faintly against his skin, heavy with the sense of being enclosed by something vast and patient. The water beneath him feels deeper than it should be, its surface trembling with subtle movements that don’t belong to wind alone. Even the shadows seem slightly misaligned, as though the world here assembled itself from imperfect memory.
Damien treads water in a slow, widening circle.
Each rotation feels heavier than the last. His soaked suit drags at his limbs like a half-remembered gravity, fabric swollen with cold and resistance. The lake offers no horizon, only black water merging into black air, the shoreline dissolved into indistinct smudges of shadow. He turns again. Nothing resolves. No landmarks. No familiar geometry. The night refuses to give him bearings.
Then sound slips into the darkness.
At first it’s so faint he almost mistakes it for ringing in his ears — a soft vibration, uneven and distant, threading through the humid air. He stills, listening. The sound gathers shape: gentle strumming, hollow percussion, the fragile architecture of human music carried across water. Laughter follows, thin but unmistakable. Living voices.
Relief stirs, cautious and reluctant.
He angles his body toward the sound and begins to swim. Progress is slow. Every stroke pulls against the sodden weight clinging to him, fabric resisting motion as though the water itself has learned how to grip. His muscles burn quietly. The lake feels deeper than it should, colder near the legs, its surface broken only by the steady rhythm of his breathing and the distant pulse of music slowly growing clearer.
Time stretches without landmarks.
When his hands finally scrape against submerged sand, the sensation feels unreal — texture returning after so much liquid abstraction. He drags himself upright, boots sinking slightly as he staggers out of the water. The shoreline reveals itself in firelight: a low beach, damp sand glistening like dark glass, palm shadows wavering behind a small gathering of people arranged around a crackling flame.
They look ordinary.
Too ordinary.
Smiling faces glow warm and gold in the firelight. Acoustic instruments rest against knees and shoulders — a guitar, hand drums, something strung and unfamiliar. Laughter rises and falls easily, unguarded, woven into the soft music. Their clothes are dry. Their posture relaxed. The fire pops and settles with domestic comfort, its smoke curling lazily into the night.
Damien approaches, water streaming from his sleeves and hems, leaving a dark trail in the sand behind him.
“Where am I?” he asks.
One of them looks up, smile faltering into confusion, eyes flicking over his soaked clothes, his posture, the lake behind him. Damien turns slightly, gesturing back toward the water.
“Name? Location?”
Murmurs ripple faintly through the group — not fear exactly, but unease, the instinctive tightening that happens when something doesn’t fit the expected pattern of the world.
From the far side of the fire, a male voice rises, firm but edged with caution.
“You’re scaring my friends, sir. Please leave us.”
Damien pivots toward the voice, lifting one hand to shield his eyes from the fire’s glare. The flames distort the man’s features into bright fragments and shadowed hollows.
“Tell me where I am,” Damien says, steady despite the cold still clinging to his bones. “And I’ll leave you be.”
A brief cough. A clearing of the throat.
“You’re at Marugo Lake. Capiz.”
The words land with weight, even before meaning fully assembles.
Damien turns away without another word, boots grinding softly into wet sand. He walks a few steps toward the dark water, staring out across the surface he just crossed — the black plane swallowing reflections, offering no hint of depth or boundary.
“The Philippines,” he murmurs to himself, the realisation settling like a misplaced puzzle piece forced into the wrong picture.
His gaze lingers on the lake, on the way the firelight fractures across its surface instead of reflecting cleanly. The air feels subtly heavier here, pressing against the skin with a quiet insistence. The distant music resumes behind him, softer now, as though wrapped in cotton.
“But why was that portal different…”
The thought hangs unfinished in the humid air, unanswered, sinking slowly into the dark like a stone dropped into deep water.
Lights shimmer ahead through the trees.
Not bright — not electric harshness — but the warm, uneven glow of scattered bulbs and lanterns strung between low huts raised slightly above the damp ground. The structures look temporary, weathered by salt air and rain, wood darkened with age and humidity. Shadows stretch long and crooked between them, bending around posts and railings like slow-moving stains.
Damien heads toward them at a measured pace, letting his breathing settle, letting his senses recalibrate to land after water and disorientation. The air carries layered smells now: cooking oil gone cold, wet rope, old smoke, faint algae. Somewhere metal clinks softly against wood in the breeze. A radio murmurs from deeper within the settlement, its signal slightly warped, voices fluttering in and out like distant ghosts trapped inside static.
As he passes one of the huts, something pale catches his eye.
A towel hangs loosely over a railing, still faintly damp, smelling of sun and detergent and human skin. He hesitates only a moment before pulling it free and rubbing the water from his face and hair, the fabric rough but grounding, proof of ordinary domestic life. Just beyond it, draped over another rail, a pair of loose swimming shorts slowly dries in the warm air. A pair of flip-flops rests by a doorway, their straps worn thin with use.
He gathers them quietly.
Behind a screen of bushes, half-hidden from the path, he strips out of the soaked suit. The material peels away reluctantly, heavy and cold, as if reluctant to release him back to the world. He discards it into the shadows and pulls on the shorts, slips his feet into the flip-flops, and drapes the towel across his shoulders. The simple change of texture — dry fabric, open air on skin — restores a fragile sense of normality, like borrowing a stranger’s life for a few minutes.
He steps back onto the path.
The radio grows clearer as he walks.
“…News flash,” a voice crackles through the static, brisk and impersonal, “another body was found early today, missing organs…”
Damien slows.
The sentence lands oddly in the quiet settlement, too sharp for the sleepy glow of huts and night insects. The signal warbles. The voice stumbles into interference before any details follow, dissolving into hiss and distant music.
He stands still for a beat, listening for continuation.
Nothing.
Only static breathing through the speaker and the soft hum of the night reclaiming the space.
“Hmm,” he murmurs under his breath. “Missing organs…”
The phrase sits uncomfortably in his mind, unanchored to context, like a loose thread snagged on a memory he doesn’t yet have. He lets it drift for now and resumes walking, flip-flops whispering softly against packed earth.
A small group drifts past him along the path, laughter spilling ahead of them in uneven waves.
They move with the loose choreography of alcohol — shoulders bumping, voices overlapping, feet slightly out of sync with intention. One of the women slows as she passes, her gaze catching on Damien with open curiosity. Firelight from a nearby hut skims across his damp hair, the borrowed towel resting across his shoulders, the quiet geometry seemingly perfect athletic build. She stops outright, eyes lingering a second too long.
One of the lads notices.
He squints theatrically, swaying slightly, then breaks into a sharp, exaggerated grin. In a high, drunken sing-song voice he announces, “Oi, look — Amelia’s found herself a new hunky boyfriend!”
The group erupts into sloppy laughter.
Amelia flushes, rolling her eyes as she gives him a half-hearted shove. “No I haven’t,” she protests, then glances back at Damien again despite herself. A crooked smile creeps in. “Well… he is pretty fit though.”
Their laughter ripples again, playful and unthreatening, the kind of moment that belongs to warm nights and harmless mischief.
Damien doesn’t respond.
He keeps walking, gaze forward, footsteps steady and unhurried. Their voices fade behind him, swallowed quickly by the trees and the layered night sounds, as if the encounter never quite anchored itself in reality.
Ahead, something mechanical stirs the darkness.
A rickshaw creeps along the narrow road at a patient crawl, its small motor buzzing softly, headlights cutting thin tunnels through drifting insects and dust. The vehicle looks almost insect-like in motion — low, narrow, persistent — its frame rattling faintly as it scuttles past.
Damien raises one hand and flags it down.
The driver slows and stops beside him with a soft sputter of engine noise. Damien climbs in, settling onto the worn seat, the vinyl still warm from the humid air.
“Take me to town, please,” he says.
The engine hum deepens as the rickshaw turns and pulls forward, carrying him away from the quiet huts, the borrowed warmth of firelight, and the half-heard laughter that already feels like something remembered rather than something lived.
The road stretches ahead into darkness.
The night air shifts.
Not wind — something heavier, a pressure change that ripples across the skin like a held breath being released somewhere far above. The insects fall abruptly silent, their chorus collapsing into a brittle hush. Even the rickshaw’s engine seems to hesitate, its hum thinning as though the machine itself senses intrusion.
A shadow slides across the road.
The driver reacts instantly. The engine cuts dead with a sharp click. The rickshaw rolls a short distance on fading momentum before settling into stillness. The man bows his head, hands coming together tightly at his chest, lips moving in silent, frantic rhythm. His breathing becomes shallow, controlled, as if afraid even air might betray him.
Something passes overhead.
Damien tilts his gaze upward.
Against the dim smear of clouded moonlight, a shape glides across the sky — vast wings stretched wide like torn sails of night. The membrane ripples faintly as it rides the air, skeletal lines visible beneath the thin darkness of its flesh. But there is no lower body trailing beneath it. No legs. No grounded symmetry. Only a torso tapering into a naked, exposed spine that trails behind like a grotesque tail, vertebrae catching faint glints of pale light as it moves.
It doesn’t flap often.
It coasts.
Confident. Economical. Predatory.
The air beneath it feels subtly displaced, like pressure waves rolling over the ground. The shadow it casts fractures unnaturally across the road and trees, stretching in directions shadows should not stretch.
Damien lowers his voice instinctively.
“What is it?” he whispers. “Tell me.”
The driver does not respond. His lips continue moving in prayer, eyes squeezed shut, knuckles pale with tension.
The creature glides onward, disappearing beyond the treeline, swallowed by distance and cloud and dark. The pressure lifts gradually, like a heavy hand finally withdrawing from the world’s throat. The insects hesitate… then cautiously resume their fragile chorus.
Only then does the driver open his eyes.
“Manananggal…” he breathes, barely audible. His voice trembles like a damaged instrument string. “Manananggal…”
He turns toward Damien slowly, terror still wide and glassy in his gaze.
“Tell me about it,” Damien says quietly. “Help me understand.”
The driver studies him for a long moment — not just his face, but his posture, his calm, the strange mismatch between what had just passed overhead and the way Damien still holds himself together. Something in his expression shifts from fear toward decision, as though a door has quietly closed behind him.
He nods once.
“You come with me,” he says softly. “You come to my home.”
The engine coughs back to life.
The rickshaw turns off the main road, carrying them into narrower streets where the lanterns grow fewer, shadows growing thicker between clustered houses. The settlement thins into quieter domestic darkness, where sleeping lives curl behind thin walls and fragile locks.
They ride the rest of the way in silence.
The rickshaw hums softly through narrow streets where the lights thin and shadows thicken, buildings leaning closer together as if sharing secrets. The driver avoids the main roads, steering instead into tighter arteries of the settlement, where the air smells faintly of cooking oil gone cold and old rain trapped in concrete pores.
He stops beside a narrow alley.
They dismount. The alley is barely wide enough for two shoulders to pass without brushing walls. Damp stains climb the brickwork like slow-growing shadows. Somewhere above, laundry shifts gently in the night breeze, whispering fabric against rope.
The driver leads Damien up a tight stairwell, each step creaking softly in protest. Inside the apartment, the air changes — warm, human, layered with the quiet breathing of sleep. Bodies lie scattered across thin mattresses and folded blankets, children and adults tangled in the fragile geometry of rest. The driver moves with practiced care, placing each foot deliberately, guiding Damien through the maze of sleeping forms without waking a single one.
At the far end, he gestures toward a narrow door.
A small balcony waits beyond it.
Damien slips through quietly.
The balcony is barely more than a concrete shelf overlooking dark rooftops and distant trees. Moonlight washes it in pale gray. A single chair rocks gently back and forth despite the still air.
An old woman sits there.
Her frame is thin, almost fragile, wrapped in layered cloth despite the warm night. Deep lines map her face like riverbeds carved by time. Around her neck hangs a garland of garlic cloves, their papery skins catching faint light. In her lap rests a small container of salt, its lid worn smooth by decades of handling.
Her eyes lift to Damien — alert, steady, unafraid in a way that only long familiarity with danger can produce.
She motions for him to sit.
He lowers himself carefully onto the edge of a low stool opposite her.
“The manananggal…” he says softly, keeping his voice low out of respect for the sleeping apartment behind them. “Tell me about it, please.”
The old woman does not answer immediately.
Instead, she reaches into the container, pinches a small mound of salt between her fingers, and flicks it sharply over her shoulder into the darkness behind her. The grains scatter faintly against concrete and night air. Then she tips the container forward and gives it a short, insistent shake toward Damien.
A gesture, not a request.
A requirement.
The salt rattles softly, dry and hollow, like bone in a cup.
The message is clear: before words, protection.
The night beyond the balcony feels suddenly closer — not louder, not moving — simply attentive, as though something invisible has leaned an inch nearer to listen.
Damien mirrors her motion.
He takes a pinch of salt and throws it back over his shoulder. The grains disappear into the dark. The old woman watches closely, eyes following the arc, as if measuring more than just obedience.
Only then does she relax — just slightly.
The rocking chair creaks once.
Her voice, when it comes, is low and roughened by age and memory.
“Now,” she murmurs, fingers closing again around the salt container. “We can speak.”
The garlic shifts softly against her chest as the night presses in, listening from the edges of the balcony, patient and unseen.
The old woman’s fingers tighten around the salt container.
Her rocking chair sways once, twice, a slow pendulum marking time older than clocks. When she finally speaks, her voice is thin but steady, worn smooth by repetition rather than weakness.
“Long before roads,” she says quietly, eyes drifting past Damien toward the dark rooftops beyond the balcony, “before radios, before engines, before the lake had a name that stayed the same… there was a woman who wanted more than a human life could hold.”
She pauses, letting the night absorb the sentence.
“They say she was beautiful once. Clever. Hungry for power the way some people hunger for love. She learned old ways — ways that spoke to the dark spaces between breath and shadow. She drank what should never be drunk. She made promises to things that do not keep them.”
Her fingers make a small, absent circle over the lid of the salt.
“The magic worked,” the old woman continues. “At first. She became strong. Her senses sharpened. She could smell sickness in the air, hear hearts beating through walls, taste fear like metal on her tongue. But magic that feeds on hunger does not stop feeding.”
The rocking chair creaks softly.
“Her body could no longer hold what she had invited inside herself. So the night learned how to take her apart.”
The old woman finally looks at Damien.
“At sundown, her lower half grows heavy and useless — like an empty shell. The rest of her tears itself free and rises into the sky. Wings stretch from her back like the shadows of bones. Her spine trails behind her, long and bare, not meant to be seen by the living. She flies without sound most of the time. When you hear her, it is already too late to trust your ears.”
Her mouth tightens slightly, not with fear, but with old familiarity.
“She still wears a woman’s face. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes kind. That is the lie. Beneath it is a hunger that never learned how to be human again.”
Damien listens, unmoving.
“She feeds on what keeps people alive inside,” the old woman says. “Not meat for strength. Not blood for heat. The soft, vital things that carry life, breath, memory, and growing futures. She takes them because she no longer has her own. Every night she hunts, she tries to fill the hollow she created.”
Her voice drops lower.
“But it never fills.”
The balcony feels smaller somehow, the darkness pressing closer to the thin railing.
“She cannot cross salt easily. Garlic confuses her senses. Firelight unsettles her. But these are only barriers, not cures. The real danger is forgetting she exists. The real danger is believing the night is empty.”
The old woman leans back slightly, garlic shifting softly against her chest.
“She is not a beast,” she finishes. “She is a mistake that learned how to fly.”
Silence settles between the words.
The city breathes quietly below them. Somewhere far away, something moves through the upper dark, unseen.
The old woman’s eyes remain steady on Damien.
“Now you know what shares the sky with you.”
Damien pauses mid-motion, the salt still sifting between his fingers.
The old woman watches him, rocking chair creaking in slow arcs, her eyes sharp and curious. There is something in the tilt of her head, the shadowed hollows of her face, that says she has seen far too much and yet recognises a spark of understanding in him.
“I knew you were here for a reason,” she murmurs, her voice a frail rasp, barely carrying over the night air. “Don’t ask me how… or why…”
She flicks another pinch of salt over her shoulder. The grains scatter into darkness like tiny stars falling into shadow. Then she lifts her hand, beckoning Damien to mirror her motion. He does, feeling the ritual’s rhythm seep into his bones, anchoring him to the gravity of the threat he cannot yet see.
“Does she have a lair? A hideout?” Damien asks quietly, his voice almost swallowed by the night.
The old woman’s gaze follows his, and with a slow, deliberate gesture, she points down the street. Far enough to be hidden in shadow, close enough for fear to thicken the air: a derelict building, windows like hollow eyes, walls weathered by rain and neglect, looming against the dim glow of scattered lanterns.
She leans forward suddenly, frail but startlingly strong for her size, and grips his arm. Her fingers are thin and warm despite the chill, a tether pulling him closer. Her breath brushes against his ear — dry, rasping, and intimate — and sends a shiver crawling down his spine.
“Salt… and garlic… and lots of it,” she whispers, each word punctuated with quiet insistence, “before she rejoins…”
Then, as suddenly as the tension built, she slumps back into her rocking chair. The movement is deliberate, practiced, like a ceremony concluded. Her fingers snap sharply.
From the shadows, the driver appears instantly, his steps careful, respectful, but urgent. “You are similar size, grandson,” the old woman says to him. “Give him clothes… and what he needs…”
The young man, alert and obedient, inclines his head. “Yes, grandmother.”
He steps toward Damien, holding out a bundle of dry clothing, gloves, and a small satchel, the weight of the old woman’s ritual still hanging between them. Without a word, he gestures for Damien to follow, moving down the balcony steps and back into the shadowed alleys, where every corner could hide a predator, and every gust of wind could carry the faint, terrible echo of wings.
Damien follows silently, every sense taut, the whispers and warnings of the old woman vibrating in his memory. The derelict building looms ahead in the distance — dark, silent, unnatural — and the night seems to lean just a little closer around him, listening.
The alley ends in a jagged shadow, the derelict building looming above them like a broken tooth against the sky. Damien and the grandson slip inside, careful not to disturb the brittle debris underfoot. Wood groans in protest, loose plaster flakes drift down like snow. Darkness pools in corners, swallowing shapes, swallowing certainty.
The air inside is thick with rot. Dust coats the lungs, carries the acrid tang of decay, and somewhere deep, far below, the sour metallic scent of blood. The grandson carries the salt and garlic in trembling hands; Damien feels the weight of the moment pressing into his chest, his muscles taut, every sense alert.
They move quietly, footsteps measured, until they reach the center of the main hall. Moonlight pierces through shattered windows and gaping holes in the roof, sketching the skeleton of the structure in stark lines of pale silver. And there, half-hidden in shadows, something lies… grotesque.
The lower half of a human body, legs splayed unnaturally, pelvis exposed in raw, impossible anatomy. Muscle and sinew cling in twisted, uneven strands, stretched and scorched by some invisible force. Skin is pale, almost translucent, veins like black threads pulsing faintly beneath it. The weight of what it must have cost to tear this body from its upper half presses on Damien’s chest; he can almost hear the tortured scream embedded in the ragged sinews, feel the wet, sticky resistance of each tendon severed against bone.
The legs twitch once — a small, horrifying reminder that even separated, this thing carries the memory of life. The pelvis curves in a way that defies natural posture, as if the creature had been forced into its own nightmare. Every instinct screams to look away, but Damien knows they cannot.
Above them, the building creaks again. Then — a hollow, tearing sound, like metal scraping bone.
A hole in the broken roof fractures the night, and the upper half of the manananggal drops through. Its torso is lean and skeletal, wings snapping open with a soft, terrible swish. A necklace of organs hanging around its neck, lungs, kidneys, spleen… The spine curves unnaturally as it rises, vertebrae visible through taut skin, eyes gleaming with hunger that tastes like frost and iron. It hovers, just above Damien, smelling the fear and life radiating from the two humans below.
Damien steps forward, arms out, voice steady but low. “Go now!” he hisses to the grandson. “Rub it in! Salt and garlic — don’t wait, don’t hesitate!”
The grandson kneels quickly, trembling, fingers pressing cloves of garlic and coarse salt into the open, raw lower half. The creature thrashes slightly, a strange, piercing sound that twists in the air, both shriek and hiss, but it cannot strike downward — Damien has bought the distance.
Damien moves like a shadow himself, drawing the creature’s attention: waving, shouting, ducking, keeping it focused on him instead of the grandson. Each motion is deliberate, desperate, a dance with hunger and death, the creature circling, flapping, coiling in the air above them.
The smell of salt and garlic bites into the night, a pungent, biting cloud that crawls across the creature’s severed lower body. It recoils, wings beating in panic, shrieking a sound like cracked stone and wind.
Damien shouts and gestures wildly, every heartbeat pounding against ribs and floorboards. The grandson works feverishly, pressing, rubbing in the salt and garlic.
The manananggal thrashes upward, the upper half twisting impossibly, wings beating against the hole in the roof. Its gaze flicks toward Damien, a flash of fury and awareness, but the lower half — now scorched with salt and bruised by garlic — screams its own denial of wholeness, something that was once human now twisted into desperate, incomplete horror.
Every second stretches into eternity. Damien continues to bait, to distract, to scream and move and dance a fool’s choreography under a predator’s eyes. Behind him, the grandson finishes the ritual — salt and garlic pressed deep, a barrier, a sting, a statement that the night’s hunger is not unopposed.
The creature arches, a spine-twisting, bone-snapping scream, then hesitates mid-air. The upper half hovers, confused, drawn to instinct, but held at bay by the ritual and the pain radiating through its abandoned lower body.
Damien leans back against a wall, panting, sweat and salt crusting his skin, eyes never leaving the upper half of the creature. The grandson exhales a long, trembling breath, lowering himself slowly, eyes wide with terror and relief.
The creature thrashes in the broken ceiling air, wings snapping, vertebrae gleaming like ivory in the half-light. Its upper half dives, rises, hovers — the raw, hungering intelligence of it staring directly at them. Salt and garlic cling to its severed lower half, sizzling faintly, steam rising in thin curls as it writhes, trying desperately to rejoin its abandoned pelvis.
Zoren crawls quickly across the debris-strewn floor toward Damien, eyes wide and frantic.
“Zoren…” Damien glances down, confused.
“Zoren, my name…” the boy whispers, catching his breath, trembling hands clutching the satchel of remaining salt and garlic.
Damien nods, keeping his focus on the upper half of the monster. “I’m Damien,” he says softly.
“Grandmother says it will die when daylight arrives…” Zoren mutters, voice tinged with fear and awe.
Damien glances around. Through the grimy, dust-streaked windows, the first faint slivers of dawn are creeping across rooftops — pale, hesitant light stretching thin fingers into the warehouse. Inside, the shadows remain heavy, but the world beyond is slowly waking.
“Stay here, Zoren,” Damien commands quietly. “Not a word to anyone.”
Zoren nods, retreating slightly, clutching the salt and garlic like a talisman.
Damien steps into the center of the room. Dust swirls around him in shafts of half-light. The creature halts mid-air, wings quivering, eyes burning with pure, animalistic fear laced with rage. It recognises him — and instinct screams threat.
Then it dives.
A twisted, vertical slash through the air, wings slicing wind, spine trailing grotesquely behind it. The smell of something burned and ironed blood presses against Damien’s nose. He doesn’t flinch. Not even a muscle twitches.
Shadow tendrils erupt from him like living darkness, curling and snapping outward, striking the windows with explosive force. Glass shatters, spraying shards into the room, the sound a thunderclap of liberation. Light pours in suddenly, raw and relentless, flooding every corner of the warehouse, pushing back shadows like a tide of white fire.
The manananggal screams — a shriek like cracking stone and splintering metal — its wings beating frantically, hunting for a corner, a shadow, any refuge. It claws at the walls, the ceiling, anything that will hide it from the purifying light.
But there is none.
The sunlight catches its pale upper torso first, glinting along the taut spine, the thin membrane of wings, the skeletal arms that reach instinctively for the lower half it cannot yet reclaim. It thrashes violently, screeching, twisting, the raw, impossible anatomy of its severed body exposed for the first time in full grotesque clarity.
It bursts toward a patch of shadow in the far corner — desperation guiding it, blind and furious — and then the dawn hits it fully. Fire ignites along the fractured flesh, a sudden, grotesque bloom of flame crawling over its torso and wings. The creature thrashes, twisting, trying to escape the light, but the fire spreads with unnatural speed, consuming it from head to spine.
A sound erupts — half scream, half crackle, half explosion — and the manananggal explodes, sending ash and smoke spiralling into the rafters, blackened flakes raining down like cursed snow. Silence follows, deep and oppressive, the echoes of its thrashing fading into the pale gray light of dawn streaming through broken windows.
Damien stands amidst shattered glass, salt-streaked floor, and lingering smoke, chest heaving. He looks toward the corner where Zoren crouches, wide-eyed, safe.
The warehouse smells of charred flesh and sulphur, the morning sun filling every shadow, pushing the dark out like a tide.
Zoren stares at the ruined center of the warehouse, mouth slightly open, eyes wide with disbelief. The ash from the manananggal’s fiery end drifts down like slow-falling snow, coating his hair and the floorboards in a gray hush. He swallows, voice barely above a whisper.
“It… it’s gone,” he mutters, almost to himself. His knees wobble as he shifts, half-crouching among the shards of broken glass and salt-streaked floor. Every instinct in him screams that it shouldn’t be gone — that something like this cannot simply vanish — yet the evidence of fire, ash, and scattered wings tells another story.
Damien moves toward him, shadow tendrils unfurling like liquid night, coiling and stretching upward. The tendrils wrap around him briefly, lifting him off the floor. Slowly, he floats, suspended in the inky darkness of his own making, just inches above the ground. Zoren watches, awe and fear mingling, unable to tear his eyes away from the living darkness that carries Damien effortlessly through the ruined warehouse.
They drift toward a shattered window. Damien extends a tendril outward, wrapping it around the frame, and silently they glide into the morning air. Dust and ash swirl below them as they float, carried gently yet inexorably, the city stretching quiet and oblivious beneath the early sun.
Above the rooftops, Damien hovers near the balcony where the old woman sits. She is waiting, motionless, her gaze calm and deliberate, the garland of garlic and container of salt still resting in her lap.
Damien simply inclines his head. A nod, subtle but deliberate.
For a heartbeat, the balcony is still, the air heavy with unspoken acknowledgement. Then the old woman slowly rises, shaking slightly with age but steady in her purpose. She returns the nod — deliberate, measured, final and removes the garlic garland from around her neck, dropping it on to the floor.
Without another word, Damien allows his shadow tendrils to unfurl further, coiling into a dark swirl of impossible geometry. A portal opens within the living darkness, its edges rippling like oil on water, and he slips inside, disappearing silently, leaving only the faint echo of displaced air and shadow behind him.
Zoren remains on the rooftop below, chest heaving, eyes wide, watching the space where the darkness—and Damien—vanished.
