/// IN THE GOLDEN STATUE OVERLOOKING INARAWAN

The six of them looked about the central clearing first, the one with a table on the middle. “It looks like it belonged to some millennial living alone in the Manila somewhere,” pointed out Jonathan.

The other snorted. Unfortunately the joke was lost on the two strangers.

“You think we can sell the gold here?” asked Esther.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Gold here,” said Jaime, “has the same value as candy wrappers you would find on the side of the street.”

“Ah” said Jonathan. “Because they’re abundant here?”

Jaime only nodded in response.

Mattheo was nodding, his face in a state of realization. “Huh, I heard somewhere that the Philippines was rich in gold, back then. My mom would keep watching videos about it. How we had an old Kingdom known as Maharlika and whatnot.”

“That’s not real, though,” said Jonathan. “They don’t have evidence, and whatever evidence they do scrounge up don’t really add to their credibility. Bible verses, forged documents… It’s propaganda.”

“There was no Maharlika in your Universe, yes,” said Jaime. “But perhaps in another.”

“Wait,” said Mattheo. “How would you know, exactly?”

“Trust me, I would know.”

“But you could be lying.”

“If so, then I would be telling the only truth.”

Angela blinked. “Wait, what does that mean--”

Jaime decided to cut her off by walking up the stairs, and then beckoning them to follow.

And they did. At the top of the stairs, they did indeed find another floor, but this one was… strange.

The entire room was circular, with a single strange larawan idol sitting atop a raised golden platform, like a pedestal. There was almost nothing else in the room, but strewn about the floors were parchments of paper and scrolls of bamboo. On the side of the walls were scrawled endless calculations and innumerable strings of words and sentences, most of which they couldn’t read for it was written in some other kind of language. Without another word, the six of them stepped within, and they felt something change outside.

“No monsala,” said Jaime.

“Great, that means we can get out of here!” Mattheo was the one who took the backside, and he was already eager to just get out of there as soon as possible.

“Wait,” said Casias. “I am intrigued by that thing in the middle.”

Jaime grinned close-lipped. “You know what? I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”

“I will see if it is hounded and chained in witchery.” Casias brought out tawas from a satchel hanging on her side, closed her eyes, and then applied it onto her eyelids. When she opened her eyes, Angela saw that her eyes glowed with a slight green hue. That made Angela curious, and she made a mental note to ask Casias about it later on when they were safe and if they were still together.

“Well?” prodded Jaime.

Casias shook her head. “Nothing, it is clear, but it does burn with an exorbitant flame, as if imbued with the power of… something.”

“I don’t think you should touch it,” said Mattheo, voicing out a common sensical reality.

“‘It fits not a Datu to venture,’” said Casias, and she grasped the golden idol. Jaime stepped forward, ready to protect the kids if any danger were to suddenly leap up and threaten them. Angela too, had readied a battle stance, a new, fierce kind of intensity in her eyes.

But there was nothing, only a sudden dampness coating them, as if they were submerged into water. “That’s it?” said Mattheo.

“It got a bit damp in here,” Jonathan pointed out.

“We’re out in the sea,” said Esther. “Of course it’s damp.”

The golden idol lost its golden sheen. It became one of pure wood. Casias removed her grasp from the idol by forcefully pulling her hand off of it and pushing it off the pedestal. The idol fell to the ground and shattered.

“Shit!” Jaime snarled, and his tattoos began glowing magenta once again, ready to pounce at any danger.

But, again, there was nothing.

“This is all very embarrassing,” Jonathan said.

Jaime straightened up, removing the magenta glow of his tattoos and relaxing his might. “That it? Just a useless idol?”

“No,” said Casias. “Something… something’s different.” She turned around and removed the alum in her eyes. Her eyes were suddenly bloodshot, as if she had been awake for an entire month. She turned to Jaime. “I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s not like… Wait, what did you do…?” There was a moment when all of them waited around for something to happen.

“At this point, after the slew of horror movies I watched,” Jonathan said. “I fully expect you to suddenly transform into some kind of grotesque ghost demon and try to eat us, and say you were possessed by the idol or something. That would make a lot more sense than whatever is happening right now.”

Esther, Mattheo, and Angela all nodded in agreement.

“No, nothing happened to me,” Casias said, shaking her head. She pointed outside.

Jaime squinted his eyes, turned to the four of them. They all shrugged.

“Come, then, from where we came.”

“After you,” Mattheo said to Jaime. Jaime went down first, and the six of them arrived at the bottom. Mattheo made sure that Casias was with them the entire time.

“You okay, Casias?” asked Mattheo.

“Yes, worry not.”

“Okay, just wondering.”

Casias didn’t care much for it, but Esther looked back at him and made a face of disdain. A kind of mocking disdain, one that made fun of you, but in an amiable kind of way, in that kind of way friends make fun of friends for being themselves.

At the bottom of the statue, by the clearing, there was indeed a difference.

“Shit,” said Jaime. “What is this?” and he walked over to the door that had inexplicably made itself materialize in front of the thing. Without hesitation, he pulled it open.

Looking out, Angela could see o a strange cavern of stone and stalagmites and stalactites, with the only light coming in from further out, perhaps an opening? An escape?

The six of them filed out, all of them voicing just exactly where they were, and how they got here. Was there a cave underneath the sea? Why a cave? Why not a palace of candies instead?

Angela realized that they were walking out of the base of the crossed feet of the golden statue. But this statue, instead of peeking out of the sea, was nestled deep into a cave, as if it had been carved out of the stone. “Where the hell are we?”

“Inside a cave,” said Mattheo, matter-of-factly.

“Dumbass of course we’re in a cave,” said Esther.

“We are not in Inarawan anymore--”

“Great,” said Esther. “More captain obvious-es.”

“--we are not even in the Island of Salamuha anymore. We’re… we’re in the Northwest Edge of Paraiso.”

Jaime turned to her, his eyes wide open. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. I’ve… I’ve been here before, in my vision dreams, when I saw the many statues that stand around heaven.”

“Northwest Edge…?” Esther crossed her arms. “Well fuck us right?”

“Not at all. This means we are terribly far away from the Monastery,” Jaime inhaled and pushed his hair back. “I guess we’ll just have to make do, huh? The flow of heaven is that of violence. Come on, but make sure to keep behind me. We don’t know what might happen.” He let his frustration out anyway by mutating his arm into a huge monstrous hammer fist and destroying a nearby stalagmite.

Then, inexplicably, a voice rang from the cave’s mouth. “Hello?”

Casias and Jaime shot each other looks. He shook his head at the rest of them, and then said: “Yes? We mean you no harm.”

No response.

He walked over to the mouth of the cave.. Esther followed right behind him, and so did Angela. Mattheo, Jonathan, and Casias stood further back.

Standing by the mouth of the cave was a young girl, no older than sixteen, by Angela’s estimate. Angela was taller than her, but then again that wasn’t exactly saying anything as Angela stood a head taller most everyone else. She wore a simple white shirt and a red skirt, a simple baro’t saya that one would see in the countryside.

“Greetings, we mean no harm.”

The girl took a step back. Her skin and complexion were brown and tan, seemingly from working many days in the rice paddies and fields. Her hair was tied up neatly into a bandana. She kept one hand behind her back. “What are you doing in the place where we bury the ancestors?”

Angela’s eyes went wide and she stared at Esther. Esther cringed without looking at Angela.

“Hey, girl, I told you we meant no harm. Put the knife down--” And the girl lashed out at Jaime. Jaime stepped back and then raised his left arm, allowing it to be stabbed by the kris. Then, he pushed the girl out by shoving her head, like an older brother would shove his younger sister. “I told you, we meant no harm. That’s no way to treat some strangers.”

“Are you Apostol? Have you come to spoil our beloved grounds?”

Jaime blinked. “No. No we aren’t Apostol. Don’t worry. We uh… we just came out of the statue.” The girl replied to that with eyes growing wide at a sudden realization. “Look, child, just let us speak with your Datu, and we will get things sorted out.”

“But what if you are a demon in disguise? I cannot let you harm the Datu!” She lunged again, and Jaime turned his arm into magenta vines that lashed out and pushed the girl back, and then hung her a few feet off the ground.”

“Tell us your name, girl, and then lead us to your Datu.”

“Fine, devil. Please.... Let me go!”

“We’re Attainers, girl. Now go.” And with that, Jaime gently put the girl down, and shifted his arm back into that of a normal one’s.

“I will not tell you my name,” she said. “For I am not an idiot dealing with mangkukulam. But come, I will lead you to my Datu. Do I have your word that you will not harm me?”

Jaime nodded once. “May the earth swallow me if I do otherwise.”

“Good,” she said, breathing. She inhaled again, and then shook her head. “Your friends must swear as well.”

“If they try to harm you, I will cut them.”

“Weirdo, why would you cut your friends?” she asked that as she walked out of the mouth. Jaime turned to the rest of them and beckoned for them to follow.

The four of them appeared out into a lush rainforest path. A simple dirt path, well trodden, but still littered with stray boulders and gigantic roots. The rainforest grew large overhead, sizzling with a midday tropical heat. Large kamagong trees and narras and baletes lay claim to the land. Insects darted to and fro. A few monkeys swung from vine to vine. Flowers of multiple colors--with more colors than the rainbow--erupted from humble soil mounds. A beautiful caricature of untouched nature, primeval with its beauty.

As they walked, they could see the little diwata that lived within the trees, the boulders, the fallen leaves, the beaten dirt. They showed themselves in a simple, child-like form, looking like babies with overly large heads, with odd holes for eyes and mouth, a caricature of a face. Their color depended on what thing they lived in: the tree diwata had green hues, while the dirt diwata had a dusty white, and those that belonged to the boulder had craggy black and grays.

Behind them, they noticed the huge mountain that they came from, splitting the sky apart. “Mt. Araraw,” said the girl, offhandedly, without looking back at them.

“This was what heaven looked like, back when it wasn’t dead,” said Jaime. “Alive, teeming with life, a paradise.”

“You were there, shapeshifter?” asked Casias.

Jaime shook his head. “But I can dream, yes?”

As they walked through the forest, Mattheo--who was walking with Casias--asked: “So that healing thing you did to Jonathan. Was that like… magic or?”

Casias looked at Mattheo with a face swirling with doubt and suspicion. When her face fell and her eyebrows arched up in a sort of pitying way, she assented to Mattheo’s query: “Perhaps it is magic. It is the White Secret, the Secret of Blasphemy. Healing is a powerful form of magic.”

“Ah, so you are an Albularyo!”

Casias nodded. “As a general practitioner, yes, albularyo would be the right term. Good job.”

“You know, Esther wanted to be a nurse once.”

“Once,” said Esther, looking over her back. “But now I want to get into college through sports scholarships.”

“Interesting. Sports scholarships,” said Jaime. “Where you go to university by doing sports?”

Esther shrugged, and then said it was something like that. “Hm,” Jaime let out a short laugh. “So I guess that’s why you’re so good at punching things.”

“Hell yeah, I was the spiker.”

“She was really good, yeah,” Angela input. “She also got into a lot of trouble herself.”

“Ah right, that gang,” said Jonathan, and he ran his fingers through his hair. “Remind us not to mess with you, Esther.”

“That is obvious, from what she was able to do in Tupas’ ziggurat,” said Jaime. “But you do seem like a handful, Esther.” Esther scowled at him.

Jonathan snorted. “Thankfully the barangay tanods were able to quell whatever escalating violence there was. If not…”

The girl that led them blinked. “Gang?” She was suddenly walking closer to them.

“Let’s not get into that right now,” Esther said again, now not puffing her chest and her smile was visibly disturbed. Angela reached out and squeezed her arm, but Esther didn’t respond back.

Eventually they arrived at a place that had a large bamboo arch. Walking through the arch, they were in a barangay not unlike Inarawan: bamboo stilt houses in seemingly no orderly fashion, just positioned so that there was a wide enough road in between them. The air was fresh, and of course a river ran through the side of the barangay, with a few rafts floating there, tied to the banks, supposedly for travel to the shore of the sea.

One thing that was different from Inarawan, however, was the grand structure that stood in the middle of it all. Amidst a great courtyard teeming with great flowers and a bamboo pagoda, with a moat of clean water floating with water lilies, there stood a large house that stood on golden pillars, with eight roofs and with stairs and bamboo gilded with pure gold. It looked like a shining edifice, a stunning marvel of construction.

The girl told them to wait at the entrance of the courtyard, where there was a short gate made of bamboo. They did so.

“Huh, fancy,” said Mattheo.

“This probably did not even deplete their resources,” said Casias.

After a moment of waiting, the girl walked out. “Go in and follow the attendants of the Datu.”

They did so, keeping well to make sure they didn’t look like they were here for a fight. Unfortunately, they did look like they just got out of a scuffle, even with the healing that Casias gave them.

Within the castle was a grand courtyard, with four gardens placed in the four quadrants of its circular construction. Right before the tower kubo itself, there was a moat, populated by fish and herons. Standing by the golden bamboo bridge that crossed the moat were two women wearing colorful tapis, baros, and an elegant cloth atop their head folded so that it looked like a crown. Upon their faces there was white paint over the usual makeup that made them look even better than they should.

“Welcome,” said the attendants. “Follow us.”

And they did. They walked inside the kubo and found that the first floor was filled with portioned off rooms where more attendants walked in and out from. Not all of them were moral women either: half of them were engkantos. Large walking karabaws, fish women, garudas, elven beings made of wood. Strangely enough, almost all of them were women, or feminine in appearance.

They walked up a golden bamboo ladder that led to the second floor, past the first roof. There they arrived at a floor also made of golden bamboo. The floor had an intricately woven rug with all the colors of the rainbow laid out before them, eventually leading to a raised platform with a high-backed seat. There a strong and handsome young man sat, cross-legged, with two kampilan laid out before him in a cross. On his side sat an older woman, yet still immaculately kept, and her attendants stood at ready, whispering and asking orders.

The young man was sharp, immaculately muscled. He wore a monsala scarf over a black vest that covered his body. He wore a crimson bahag, and around that bahag a large intricately colored cloth that reached his ankles. On a head full of black hair, he wore a crimson pudong, a sign of his bravery and valor.

His face, hands, and feet, however, were that of a crocodile’s. Even his back, his spine, were the ridges of a great buwaya.

“Come,” said the man. “And meet me, the great purveyor of theodicy, Datu Purokbawi, the Crocodile Chief.”