Prologue: The First Death and the Unending War
The last sensation of my first life was the acrid taste of smoke, searing my lungs as the flames consumed the centuries of history I had sworn to preserve. Dr. Luis Antonio, a historian who lived amongst the ghosts of the past, was dying in a tomb of his own making, the burning National Archives.
I thought that was the end.
I was wrong.
I awoke to the scent of salt and blooming Sampaguita. To the feeling of warm, damp earth beneath my bare feet. I was standing on a pristine beach, under a sky so vast and starlit it felt like a different universe. My body was not my own, it was younger, stronger, marked with faint, elegant tattoos that felt both alien and deeply right. In the reflection of a moonlit pool, a stranger's face stared back at me: a young man named Luiso, an apprentice to the village babaylan.
The memory of my death was a fresh wound. The knowledge in my mind, of Magellan's arrival, of the 300 years of colonization to come, was a terrifying burden.
And then I saw them.
Ships. Monstrous galleons with crosses that glowed against the night, not with holy light, but with a sickly, oppressive gold. As they drew nearer, a pressure built in the air, a silent hum that made my teeth ache and the very spirit within my new body recoil. The jungle behind me seemed to hold its breath. The gentle lapping of the waves grew frantic.
This was not the history I had read. This was something else. Something worse.
I saw a Tikbalang, a majestic creature of legend, step out from the treeline, its hooves silent on the sand. It was not a monster from a horror story; it was a guardian, proud and ancient. It looked at the approaching ships, not with fear, but with defiant rage.
Then, a voice, thin and sharp as a blade, cut through the air from the lead ship. A prayer in Latin. A single, glowing cross flared.
A beam of that same sickly gold light lanced out. It did not burn. It unmade.
Where it touched the Tikbalang, the creature's form began to dissolve into shimmering motes of light, its defiant roar turning into a silent scream of agony before it was erased from existence entirely. Not a trace left on the sand.
Horror, cold and absolute, paralyzed me. This was not conquest. This was extermination.
An old, gnarled hand fell on my shoulder. My master, the village babaylan, her eyes filled with a sorrow as deep as the ocean. "They do not come for our land alone, child," she whispered, her voice trembling. "They come for our stories. For our very gods. They seek to silence the world's song and replace it with their own single, monotonous hymn."
She pressed a small, smooth stone into my hand—an ancient lingling-o pendant. "You are not of this time, yet you are of this land. The world has thrown you here for a reason. You remember what was. You must now fight for what could be."
That was eighty years ago.
The village is gone. My master, long returned to the earth. The Spanish flag flies over a stone fort where our nipa huts once stood.
But I remain.
I watched the skin on my hand, once smooth, regain its youth after a sickness that should have killed me. I learned to stand before a still pool and will the reflection to change—a sharper jaw, a broader frame, a different name. Luis. Lorenzo. Luzvimindo. A ghost walking through the decades.
The Battle of Mactan was but the first verse in a very long epic. I have traded firewood with the tattooed warriors of the Cordilleras, shared whispers with the sultans of Mindanao, and helped weave the illusions that hide the sanctuary of Biringan in the Visayas.
I have seen the same cold, geometric patterns on the rosaries of the most cruel Inquisitors. I have felt a chilling intelligence behind their conquest, a pattern that mere greed cannot explain.
This is my curse and my purpose: to be the eternal witness. The secret keeper. The thorn in the side of an empire that thinks in years, while I think in centuries.
My name was Dr. Luis Antonio. My name is Luiso. It will be many others.
And I will walk this land, from its northernmost peaks to its southernmost shores, for as long as it takes to sever the shadow that seeks to consume it.
The war for the Philippines has begun. And I am the one soldier who cannot ever afford to die.