Chapter [XI]

THERE WAS a silence inside the carriage now, the kind that didn't quite settle comfortably. It lingered in the corners, filled the spaces between breaths, and pressed against the walls like a presence of its own. No one spoke. The quiet wasn't tense, exactly, but awkward in the way things often were after something too raw had passed between people. It was the kind of quiet that didn't know where to rest its eyes. And then the light shifted.

It was morning. Or at least the closest thing to it beneath the river. Outside the carriage windows, faint hues of filtered gold began to cut through the water, faint and murky, like sunlight strained through years of grief. The glow did not brighten things. It revealed them.

Agta stirred. He leaned slightly forward, his webbed fingers resting on the sill of the window as he stared out into the shifting gloom. His expression was difficult to read, but something deep and hollow stirred behind his eyes. He did not smile. Instead, he nodded faintly, almost to himself, as if some internal clock had reached its hour. "We're now in the Laguna de Bay," he said, and his voice, though steady, carried the weight of mourning.

Gray blinked. At first, he didn't react. But then he followed Agta's gaze and turned his eyes toward the outside. What he saw made his throat tighten, breath catching in a soundless gasp that bordered on a choke.

The water beyond the glass had changed. It was no longer the green-tinted calm of the riverbed, nor the strange, sacred depths they had passed through earlier. What surrounded them now was murk-choked, clouded, and thick with decay. It looked like a graveyard of forgotten things. Sunlight pierced the surface above in jagged, broken shafts, only to be swallowed by drifting clouds of detritus that resembled drowned fog. Sludge hung in lazy curls, heavy and slow, clinging to everything it touched.

Everywhere he looked, there was movement, but not the kind born of life. Plastic bottles, their labels faded and wrinkled, rolled along the silt. Torn sacks fluttered like ghostfish in the currents, their threads tangled with clumps of weed and nylon. A shoe drifted past the window, its rubber sole half-eaten by rot, spinning slowly as if it were trying to remember the foot that once wore it. Beneath it, entire carpets of sunken trash formed makeshift reefs-old wrappers, broken toys, rusted cans-all fused together in a weightless burial mound.

The fish here were different, smaller, and paler. Many had open wounds or missing fins, and some floated aimlessly, as if unsure whether they were still alive. A bloated catfish swam by with what looked like a shard of glass embedded in its gill. Algae coated the rocks in a sickly yellow fuzz, thick and unnatural, as if the lake had grown mold across its lungs. Even the air inside the carriage began to feel heavier despite the wards. It wasn't stinking, but stale. Like breath held for too long.

Beyond the drifting trash and wounded lifeforms, the skeletal ruins of old structures jutted out from the deeper muck. They might have once been shanty stilts or floating fish pens, but now they were warped by rot, leaning sideways and broken by storms and time. Their outlines barely held shape, dissolving slowly into the bottom sludge, forgotten by both water and sky.

Gray didn't say a word. He just stared, his face blank with quiet horror. The sheer scale of the damage made the lake feel endless. Not endless in majesty, but in loss. What should have been a sacred body of water looked like a dying lung. It was still breathing, but with a rattle.

Agta did not look away from the view. His voice came again, quieter this time, as if speaking too loudly might wake something that should stay buried. "This was once a sacred passage," he said. "A place the sirenas used to sing to. Now, only the silent things remain."

Gray didn't answer. He couldn't. There were no words for what he was seeing. The worst part of it wasn't just the rot. It was how normal it clearly had become. The fish still swam. The water still moved. Life continued, but not healed. It had merely adjusted.

The carriage rocked gently as Lamad swam forward. The debris slid past them like a funeral procession, slow and endless. And beneath the low hum of the current, the only sound left in the cabin was the soft, persistent creaking of wood. It sounded like the carriage, too, was in mourning.

And outside, the lake watched them pass. It did not watch as a guardian. It watched like a ghost.

Agta sat by the window, his gaze lingering on the poisoned waters as if searching for something beneath the surface, perhaps a memory, or a fragment of the past still clinging on. His face bore the calmness of one who had seen far too much, but his eyes carried sorrow, the kind that deepened with age rather than faded.

"The ancient men of the archipelago were never like this," he said at last, still looking outside with silent sadness. His voice was soft but full, and when it came, it seemed to gather the silence and reshape it. "We never thought of ourselves as rulers of the world. Back then, the world wasn't something to be ruled. We didn't dominate nature. We were part of it."

Gray leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, curiosity alight behind his usual sarcasm.

"In the old days," Agta continued, "the forest had its laws. The river had its guardians. The wind, the rain, the sea-they were not ours. They were kin. We hunted, but we gave thanks. We took, but we always gave back. Nature was never a beast to be tamed. We didn't believe the forests, the rivers, the wind, and the sea were made for us. They were made with us."

Gray tilted his head, looking at him like a student who walked into the wrong class but stayed because the lecture was oddly compelling. "So wait, you're telling me people didn't want to run the world back then? No empires, no monopolies, not even one guy trying to own all the coconuts?"

Agta glanced at him, not annoyed, but faintly amused. "They shaped the land, yes. But shaping is not the same as owning. The old ones... they knew the land like kin. They grew with it. They didn't build fences to keep it in."

Gray raised a brow, still grinning. "So no landlords either, huh? Man, that's the real utopia."

Agta breathed out a laugh, a short, surprised thing. "The farmers of old sang to the ground. They spoke with the tides. They didn't need to dominate what they already belonged to."

"Okay, but when?" Gray asked, hands gesturing vaguely as if trying to locate the moment in thin air. "Was there like, one guy who said, 'You know what? I'm tired of singing to the rice. Let's turn trees into buildings and call it progress?'"

Agta looked back outside, his voice slowing. "When they began to mistake growth for greatness. When patience was replaced with hunger. And when the land became something to tame, not tend."

Gray leaned back, folding his arms with a smirk. "So basically... humanity got cocky." Gray let out a low whistle. "And all this," he said, gesturing faintly toward the window, "this garbage, the poisoned lake, the dead fish, it's not just pollution. It's forgetting."

Agta gave a slow nod. "Forgetting, yes. And betrayal. We forgot the language of trees. We stopped listening to the warnings. And when the earth screamed, we called it background noise."

Gray leaned back, arms folded, as if trying to fold up the weight of the idea. "You know," he said, staring at Agta, with an idiotic look. "You ever thought of writing a book? 'Agta's Ancient Wisdoms.' I'd buy a copy. Maybe two."

From beside him came a small, unexpected sound-a soft scoff, nearly a laugh, barely audible. He didn't turn his head, but his eyes slid sideways, catching the glimmer of a smile tugging at Amara's lips. She was still facing the window, her expression seemingly unchanged, but the smile was there. Quiet, almost invisible, but unmistakable.

That tiny moment, that flicker of warmth, settled over the carriage like sunlight breaking through a cloud. It didn't undo the heaviness of what had been said, but it added something gentler to the space between them. A silent truce between grief and grace.

Gray didn't say anything more. He didn't need to. Outside, the lake churned with its ghosts and garbage. Inside, they drifted onward. Three lives, brushing briefly against something ancient.

That was when the confusion really began to settle in Gray's brain like a fog that refused to burn off with sunlight. It was a creeping kind of bewilderment, the kind that didn't slap you all at once but quietly unpacked its luggage in the corners of your mind until you realized your entire worldview had been replaced with someone else's furniture.

He squinted. "Wait. I thought... I thought the gods divided the world into two?"

The moment he said it, he regretted it. Like, immediately. The words hadn't even finished leaving his mouth before he wanted to grab them, shove them back in, and pretend he had sneezed or something. Because now, both Agta and Amara were staring at him.

And not just staring. Staring.

Like he had just asked why the ocean was wet. Like he was the kid who raised his hand in class to ask if milk came from chickens. It was the kind of look that said, "Bless his soul, he's trying."

Gray raised both hands like a man cornered by a question he no longer wanted answered. "Alright. Fine. I see those faces. I get it. I sound like someone who just crawled out of a rock. So let me tell you my story."

He cleared his throat, gave a performative stretch of his arms, and leaned back with exaggerated gravitas.

"Yesterday-yes, yesterday I was just your average guy. I had a simple life, okay? Nothing too crazy. Beat up some thugs in a warehouse. Ate a banana. Went home. Then-bam!-creepy monster things with sexy tongue, bad breath started crawling out of alleyways like I'd unlocked some secret boss level. Next thing I know, some random people's dragging me through battles, I'm seeing things that should not be seen, and now I'm in a carriage, riding beside an old sea shaman and a girl who could probably kill me with a stare."

He threw his hands up in mock surrender. "Tell me that's normal. Please. Lie to me."

Agta chuckled, that low, cavern-deep kind of laugh that came from knowing too much and being too old to be surprised by anything anymore.

Agta began, then paused. He tilted his head slightly, as if correcting himself. "They did. Long ago, they carved the realms apart. If I remember correctly, it was the Dakilang Hiwalayan. The Sangkatauhan for mortals, the Sangkanituhan for us. That part is true."

Gray raised a brow. "So I was right?"

"Yes and no," Agta replied. "What you're thinking is a split. Like a clean crack between two lands. A border. A wall. But that's not what it is. It's more like... layers. Like a mirror placed on top of another mirror, and somewhere in between, the reflection stops behaving."

Gray squinted. "So... like a glitchy video game?"

"More like a double-exposed photograph," Agta said. "Two images living in the same frame. The Divide wasn't just a parting, it was a thinning. The world didn't just separate. It began to echo itself." He stared out the window, his voice distant. "The realms grew in tandem. One seen, one unseen. Same place. Different gravity. One belongs to the forgetting. The other remembers."

Gray tilted his head. "So you're telling me there's a whole second version of this world just... stacked underneath mine?"

"Yes," Agta said, voice low. "And you've already stepped into it."

Amara spoke then, her voice quiet but firm. "The tunnel Ishmael opened last night. It wasn't just any tunnel."

Gray blinked. Realizing, he said, "It was a path to the Sangkanituhan." He looked around and through the window. He groaned, throwing himself back against the cushion. "So let me get this straight. One minute I'm wondering whether to buy new slippers, and the next I'm a god-blooded mirror-walker who fell through the cracks of gods knows where. Fantastic."

Amara didn't respond. But the curve of her smile deepened, just a touch, and for once, she didn't look like she was carrying the world alone. And that, somehow, felt like a small win.

For a brief moment, it felt as though time itself had slowed to a crawl, and within the stillness was a rare kind of peace. The kind that comes just after laughter-fragile, tentative, a soft breath shared between strangers who'd survived the same storm. 

Gray stayed quiet after that. But his thoughts didn't.

Out of nowhere, something stirred. Uninvited and hard to ignore. A memory. No, a dream. One he had kept brushing off ever since the great reveal. It returned now like a whisper just behind his ear. Her. Always her. The girl in the dream. Her face half-shrouded, her voice never clear. Walking in places that felt ancient, speaking words he couldn't remember by the time he woke. And yet, the feeling lingered. Like something he'd lost before he even knew it was his.

He glanced at her again.

It was her. He was sure now. The girl from the dreams. And that terrified him more than anything else.

They had never met—of that, he was certain. Not in this life. Not in any life that made logical sense. So why had he seen her before in dreams he couldn't explain? Why had she already occupied space in his thoughts, in the quiet hours before dawn, when the line between real and unreal blurred?

He didn't know what to make of it. He didn't even know if he should say anything.

As he stared, debating whether to speak or stay silent, Amara suddenly turned her head. Their eyes locked. Only for a second.

Gray immediately darted his gaze sideways, suddenly very interested in the pattern on the carriage wall. His ears felt hot. Great, he thought. Smooth. Nothing screams normal like staring at someone like they just crawled out of your subconscious.

For a brief moment, it felt as though time itself had slowed to a crawl, and within the stillness was a rare kind of peace. The kind that comes just after laughter—fragile, tentative, a soft breath shared between strangers who'd survived the same storm. Gray leaned back against the carriage wall, his mind swirling with new questions, and the soft rhythm of the water lulled him into thinking, just for a second, that maybe this day wouldn't try to kill him again.

But peace, as he was beginning to understand, had a short lifespan in his new life.

Without warning, the carriage jolted and came to an abrupt stop. The lurch was sharp enough to shift the bags in the corner and make the lanterns clink against the walls. Gray shot up from his seat, instincts tightening in his gut. He looked at Agta with a brow raised.

"Is this supposed to happen?" he asked, his voice a bit too light for how quickly his heart was thudding.

Agta didn't answer. His eyes were sharp now, peeled toward something only he could sense. Without a word, he stood, moved to the carriage door, and placed a heavy hand on the latch. He opened it. And didn't take a step. Because the moment the door creaked open, a gleam of silver was already waiting for him.

A long, barbed trident thrust forward without hesitation, its cold, salt-stained tip pressed against Agta's throat.