Long before Spanish crosses cast shadows across these islands, the darkness already had a name.
Aswang.
They were the whispers that made mothers bar their doors with salt. The reason children were never allowed to play alone after sunset. Shapeshifters who wore human faces by day, only to shed them when night fell. Creatures that split their bodies to hunt the unborn, that mimicked crying infants to lure the compassionate into their claws.
But every monster has a mother.
Once a babaylan a priestess who could heal the dying and speak with spirits. When plague consumed her village, when disease claimed her husband and children, her prayers met only silence. It was not the benevolent diwata who answered her desperate bargain, but something that had waited beneath the earth since the world's first wound.
In exchange for her family's return, she offered her very soul. What emerged was not resurrection it was corruption. Her children returned, but not as themselves anymore. They had become monsters, and from them, the curse spread like blood in water, infecting village after village until the archipelago trembled in fear.
For centuries, humanity learned to cower in their homes, emerging only when necessary, living in constant terror of neighbors who might not be human when darkness fell. Children disappeared from their beds. Entire families vanished without trace. The aswang multiplied, evolved, organized into something far more dangerous than scattered predators.
Until some chose to fight back.
They had no name at first it just those who had lost too much to fear anything anymore. Armed with blessed silver blades and burning faith, they discovered through desperate trial and bloody error that salt could burn supernatural flesh, that holy water could wound immortal souls, that prayers spoken over metal could cut through ancient curses.
And Miracle a power that could be wielded only by the strongest warriors, those capable of channeling divine essence through their mortal bodies to match the supernatural strength of their enemies.
These hunters learned to move in shadows, to identify shapeshifters among human populations, to coordinate strikes against creatures that had terrorized the islands for generations. They developed weapons that combined traditional faith with modern efficiency. They established safe houses and communication networks. They recruited from among the survivors, teaching traumatized families to transform their grief into deadly purpose.
By the modern age, they had evolved into something more organized. More deadly.
They called themselves CLEANERS.
(Clandestine League for Eliminating Aberrant Nocturnal Entities and Restoring Safety.)
Seven facilities across the archipelago. Agents armed with weapons that carried both faith and science. A secret war funded by a government that officially didn't believe in monsters, protected by bureaucracy that classified supernatural incidents as unexplained phenomena or terrorist activities.
For decades, they maintained the balance between the living and the damned. They kept the aswang population manageable, prevented mass supernatural events that would expose the truth to an unprepared world, and rescued victims from trafficking networks that spanned international borders.
But they could never kill the source.
Deep beneath Siquijor Island, in caves that predate human memory, Corazon sleeps. The Dark Mother dreams of her lost children both those she gave birth to in life and the monsters she spawned through her bargain. Her heartbeat echoes through the supernatural underground, growing stronger with each passing year.
Into this escalating darkness will step two brothers from a quiet village. Denmar and Marden Santos twins whose lives are about to shatter in ways they cannot imagine.
They are not chosen ones. They carry no prophecy. They possess no special bloodline or inherited power.
What they will become depends entirely on a single night that will change everything a night of celebration that will transform into unspeakable horror, of family bonds that will be severed by claws and teeth, of innocence that will burn away in the face of truth too terrible for the human mind to accept.
The hunt is about to begin.