The jeepney rumbled through the mistladen hills
of Cebu, its rusted body groaning with every
bump. Raul Delgado, once a nurse in Dubai,
stepped off the vehicle with a duffel bag slung
over his shoulder. His mother’s face lit up from
the window, her hands clasped in prayer. He
hadn’t seen her in seven years.
The village had changed. The old church stood
untouched, but the new road cut through the rice
fields like a scar. His younger sister, Lita,
greeted him with a mix of pride and suspicion.
She didn’t trust men who left home for work.
That night, she whispered about the diwata that
had taken three boys from their barangay—each
one vanishing without a trace.
Raul was assigned to investigate by the barangay
captain, a man who owed him a favor. The mission
was simple: find the missing boys and stop the
killings. But the deeper he dug, the more he
realized this wasn’t just a case of folklore.
Old records hinted at a hidden shrine beneath
the church, where rituals were performed in
secret.
His father had been the last to speak of it,
before he disappeared during the Martial Law
years. Raul remembered the stories—of men who
vanished after touching the shrine’s altar, of
whispers that the diwata demanded blood for
protection.
The first clue came when he found a boy’s shoe
near the riverbank, halfburied in mud. The
second was a torn shirt hanging from a tree,
soaked in rain. Each discovery brought him
closer to the truth, but also to danger.
One night, under the light of a full moon, Raul
followed a trail of footprints to the shrine.
The air smelled of damp earth and burning
incense. Inside, he found the altar—a stone slab
covered in symbols he barely recognized. And
there, behind it, lay the bodies of the missing
boys, their eyes open, frozen in terror.
He was not alone. A figure emerged from the
shadows, cloaked in white, their face obscured.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” the voice said,
low and familiar. It was his father.
The shrine’s power had bound him, twisted him
into something neither human nor spirit. The
diwata demanded sacrifice, and now, it wanted
Raul.
But Raul had spent years abroad, learning how to
survive in a world that didn’t care. He reached
into his bag, pulling out the small vial of
antiseptic he always carried. With a swift
motion, he shattered it on the altar, releasing
a cloud of chemical fumes that startled the
entity.
The shrine cracked, the altar splitting down the
middle. The spirits fled, and the ground
trembled. As the villagers arrived, Raul stood
amidst the ruins, his father’s body gone, his
mind clear.
He had returned not just to his home, but to a
past he thought buried. Now, he would fight for
the future—not as a soldier, but as a son.
