The first thing he sees is the clock tower,
broken and rusted, its hands frozen at 3:17. The
air smells of salt and gunpowder. He stands in
the middle of a street that was once a market,
now a dead zone of overgrown stone and silence.
His hands are stained with paint, his clothes
foreign—tailored, buttondown, no cap.
He walks through the ruins of what was once a
bustling town square. A child’s doll lies
halfburied in dirt. No one else is around. He
feels the weight of something missing, a void in
his mind that hums like a stopped heartbeat.
A man in a military uniform appears, speaking in
a language he does not recognize. The man points
to a sign that reads “Luzon Republic,” but the
words are in English, printed over a faded
Spanish script. The man gestures for him to
follow.
They arrive at a building with barred windows
and a plaque that says “Historical Archive.”
Inside, rows of old photographs line the walls—
faces of Filipinos in Western clothes, standing
beside American soldiers. The man hands him a
file. The name on it is his own, but the face in
the photo is not.
He flips through pages of reports, maps, and
letters. The city was renamed “San Miguel”
during the American occupation, then rebranded
as “Luzon Republic” after independence. But the
records stop in 1945. The world beyond the walls
is different—no smartphones, no electricity, no
cars. Only horses, telegraphs, and the lingering
scent of war.
A rule bites: the archive is offlimits after
sunset. He ignores it, stays late to study a map
showing the old city layout. The streets have
shifted, the boundaries redrawn. The place he
remembers no longer exists.
He finds a painting in the archive—a portrait of
himself, younger, standing in front of a church.
The date is 1938. The name of the church is
familiar, but the structure is wrong. He
realizes it’s not the same place.
At night, he walks the streets again, following
the map. He reaches a bridge where the water
glows faintly, as if lit from below. A woman
appears, her face hidden beneath a veil. She
speaks in Tagalog, but her accent is wrong—too
formal, too precise. She offers him a vial of
liquid.
He drinks it. The world shifts. The buildings
blur, the sky cracks open, and he sees the city
as it was—before the war, before the occupation,
before the name change. The people are dressed
in traditional attire, speaking in a mix of
Spanish and Tagalog. The woman is gone.
He wakes in the archive, the vial empty. The man
in uniform is waiting. The file is gone. The
only clue left is a single brushstroke on the
wall—a symbol of a sun and a sword, etched in
charcoal.
The city has changed, but the past is still
alive. He is no longer just an artist. He is a
ghost of a time that never ended.
