The river brought smoke before it brought fire.
A bitter scent on the wind woke Iliya before dawn. He sat up in the dark hut, heart already racing. The air was too still. Too wrong.
Outside, a scream split the quiet.
By the time he reached the porch, Bayang Alon was burning.
Flames curled from the northern huts, casting dancing shadows across the walkways. Figures ran some with buckets, others with children in their arms. And above it all, a shriek, high and unnatural, echoed across the river.
"Not raiders," Ka Bino growled beside him. "Something else."
Turo appeared with a curved blade in hand, face pale. "The river spirits are gone. The charms are broken."
Iliya didn't wait. He ran.
Bridges cracked under heat. Smoke stung his lungs. But the mark on his chest was calm almost expectant. Like it had been waiting for this.
He found the source in the village center.
A shape cloaked in bark and ash rose from the ceremonial platform. Its limbs were long, bent backward. Roots coiled like ribs over a hollow chest. Its eyes glowed green with ancestral fire.
"A fallen Diwata," Ina Laya whispered, emerging beside him. "One of the old ones. Twisted by broken worship."
The creature turned. Its mouth opened no words, just a wail of grief and rot. The air pulsed. Glass shattered. People fell to their knees.
And then Iliya stepped forward.
He didn't speak.
He just reached.
The spiral mark burned. Light surged from his chest in a soft pulse not blinding, not fiery. Just deep. Like a memory.
The Diwata recoiled. Roots blackened. Its form flickered. For a moment, it looked... human. Weeping.
And then it vanished into ash.
The fire stopped. The screams quieted.
Only the silence remained.
By dawn, the damage was clear: three homes lost. One elder died. The village was shaken.
Ina Laya placed a hand on Iliya's shoulder. "You calmed it. Not with power. With memory. That's what you carry."
"What was it?"
"A spirit once worshipped. Then forgotten. It needed a voice. You gave it one."
"But I don't understand any of this."
"You will," she said. "But not here."
Later that morning, Ka Bino approached as Iliya stood by the water, watching smoke rise.
"You can stay," he said. "Plenty would call you a guardian now."
Iliya shook his head. "But I'd just be waiting for it to happen again."
Turo joined them, tossing a pebble into the river. "So where will you go?"
He turned toward the distant mountains.
"I don't know. But if there are others like that spirit lost, broken then I have to find out what's happening. Why the spirits are changing. Why am I changing?"
He looked back at Bayang Alon. "I can't protect them if I don't understand what I am."
Ka Bino gave a quiet nod. "Then it's time."
Ina Laya handed him satchel herbs, charms, a worn scroll tied in thread.
"Follow the old paths," she said. "And listen when the roots whisper."
And so, with the village behind him and the world ahead, Iliya left the only place that had shown him peace not as a boy marked by accident, but as something else.
A vessel. A question. A pact.
Waiting to be answered.
The mountains rose like sleeping titans beyond the northern treeline — ancient and wrapped in fog, their slopes marked by stone steps older than memory.
Iliya had never been this far from any village. He traveled light: dried root bread, Ina Laya's herbs, and a worn scroll bound in red twine. It wasn't a map more a spirit path, marked with old glyphs and the names of places now buried in legend.
His first steps felt like silence given form.
No carts. No firelight. Just the sound of wind through bamboo and the slow rhythm of his breath.
He followed the veins of the land creeks that led to old rock piles, slabs carved with faded spiral symbols, and at times, trees that bent not with wind, but as if bowing to something unseen.
At dusk, he stopped to rest near a tree with flowers shaped like bells. He lit a small fire and whispered a simple chant just as Ina Laya taught him:
"Alay ko ang liwanag, para sa kaluluwa ng lupa.
Pakinggan ang diwang dumarating."
The flames flickered in response but not from the wind.
Across the clearing, a stranger appeared.
Not quite a man. Not quite a shadow.
His cloak was moss, his skin etched with old scars. His face was covered with a mask made from turtle shells and gold beads. He carried no weapon.
Only a staff carved with countless echo spirals.
"You wear the mark," he said in a voice like breaking bark.
Iliya tensed. "You know what it is?"
"I know it does not belong to the living." He stepped closer, tilting his head. "And yet you walk with it."
"Are you a spirit?"
The stranger's voice lowered. "Once. Then I became something else."
He sat across the fire, his staff pulsing with faint blue light.
"They call me Lakamban. I walk between echoes. I listen when others forget."
"What do you mean, echoes?"
Lakamban leaned on his staff. "When the first pacts were broken, the world did not scream. It was memorable. And memory leaves marks."
He tapped his staff to the dirt. A glyph formed in the earth, glowing a spiral with three arms.
"There are three Echoes. Three fragments of the first vow made between the blood of men and the roots of the earth."
Iliya stared. "And you want me to find them."
"I want nothing," Lakamban said, rising. "But they are calling. And you are already listening."
The fire crackled louder. The trees swayed.
And when Iliya blinked the stranger was gone.
Only the spiral in the dirt remained, still glowing faintly in the dark.