Earthly Realm, Year 2010 of the Second Earth

Break Water near the City gates

LUALHATI

Lualhati didn't cry after she left Luis.

She thought she might, there was certainly enough emotional debris scattered from their undefined years to merit it. But instead, there was a stillness in her as she walked the cobbled edge of Bohol's main commercial district. A strange clarity.

She had been kind, but firm. She owed him that much.

"I want to see where this will lead, being with him,"
she had said, with a quiet steadiness that made Luis blink as if she'd struck him.

He had swallowed the truth with an audible gulp.
"So you're finally choosing someone to be serious with. After all this time."
His voice cracked, just barely.

Lualhati met his gaze without flinching. "I never meant to lead you on."

"You didn't," he said, too quickly, almost reflexively.

They sat across from each other in Kapihan sa Kanto, a cozy coffee shop nestled between a bookshop and a weaving supply store. It was always their place in college. A little too quaint. A little too sentimental.
Luis stirred his drink. The ceramic spoon clinked against the sides. It was the only thing that moved between them.

"It's just..." Luis began, trailing off. "I kept waiting. Hoping you'd eventually say you were ready. That we'd finally give it a real shot."

Lualhati looked down at her fingers curled around her cup, then back up at him.

"I wasn't ready then," she said. "And now that I am. I think I want something... different."

Luis tilted his head, expression wounded but soft. "Different how?"

"And how do you do that," He added quietly, "while being in a serious relationship?"

Lualhati smiled, not cruelly, but with sad honesty. "The man I'm seeing... I think he'll let me. I think he sees me and still wants me to run. To grow."

Luis stared at her for a long time. "I thought I could be that for you."

"I understand," she said gently. "But I never thought I'd meet somebody who makes me feel understood. Not the way he does."

They didn't hug. That wasn't them. But she placed a hand on top of his for a moment, warm and steady.

"Take care of yourself, Luis."

And then she left, her silhouette framed by the fading gold light of a Bohol afternoon.

*******

ABADDON

Abaddon stayed there standing near the bookshelf the entire time, cloaked in invisibility, unseen by all. But not untouched.

He had watched every beat of that conversation. Every shift in Lualhati's expression. Every careful word. Every bruise of honesty.

And somewhere between her saying, "There's someone else," and her walking away into the sun, something fractured in him.

I thought I was protecting her.

Binding himself to her with a mortal's promise. Romance, betrothal, proximity. It was meant to shield her from the prophecy that loomed above them like a guillotine. If he stayed close, she wouldn't fall in love with anyone else. She wouldn't die because of someone else.

He thought the closeness was enough.

But now, he saw the cost.

He had claimed her without knowing the full price. He had wrapped himself around her like a fortress and didn't realize he was also becoming her cage.

You wanted to be her salvation, he told himself.
But you might become her undoing.

And yet, when Luis leaned in and spoke to her with that wounded, wistful look, Abaddon's fury flared.

He could burn Bohol to the ground. He could pull Luis Valencia into the darkest fold of the sea and let him drown in regret.

But then... he remembered her eyes.

The way they lit up when she spoke about travel. About books and museums and foreign alphabets. About becoming more than the island girl, she once was. She glowed in those moments. And Luis, for all his heartache, hadn't tried to take that from her.

He respected her light.

Abaddon could not, in good conscience, obliterate him for that.

But that didn't mean he couldn't have fun.

As Luis exited the café still dazed, still clutching his cup like a relic of a finished chapter...

A swinging glass door hit him square on the nose. 

The sharp sound of bone-on-glass echoed through the street.

Luis yelped. "Put---! Sht---!*"

Blood trickled from his nostril. He staggered. A waitress gasped.

Abaddon, still cloaked, chuckled. Low and amused.

I think I like chuckling, he mused.
I'll keep doing it.

So that’s her type, he thought bitterly. Lean. Gentle. Unremarkably kind.

He was none of those things. Not as Apollyon Ramos, and certainly not as Abaddon, King of the Abyss.

Even shrouded in earthly beauty, his Seraphic nature was a furnace of desire and darkness. Mortals would always pale next to him. But mortals could also give Lu something he couldn’t. Simplicity. Freedom. Choice.

And yet today, as she walked toward the café in a soft cream dress, hair loose, lips parted in thought, his knees nearly gave out beneath him.

I am undone, he thought, not with fear, but awe.

But seeing her lean in to listen to Luis’s words, seeing her laugh softly as she reminisced about their shared past.

That was the thing that almost undid him in a different way.

It was then when he turned his attention back to the street, Lualhati was gone.

Vanished into the golden maze of Tagbilaran.

His smile faded.

You lost her trail.

For the first time in years, the King of the Abyss felt something dangerously close to panic.

He fixed on Lualhati's presence and tried to find her. Immediately, he heard the muffled sound of her thoughts and found her by the breakwater and for a while, Abaddon kept still.

Her thoughts eluded him now, though. Unlike before that it spoke to him, now he can only sense her feelings like they were his own...but not her thoughts. Even though he tried, it came like shumbled melodies to an old familiar song.

Knowing that she was well and safe, Abaddon left Lualhati to her own thoughts and returned to the coffee shop. A hollow space opened in his chest.

Abaddon stood still, surrounded by the gentle hum of the coffee shop, a low murmur of laughter and ceramic cups clinking against saucers. His gaze settled on a dusty shelf in the corner, an old relic that survived even as ownership passed down through generations. His eyes found a familiar spine: The Legend of Dayang’s Flame, first edition. A smirk touched the corner of his lips.

How ironic. He had partaken in the collaboration that allowed this tale into existence.

Abaddon remembered that day clearly, when time seemed to spiral in upon itself and deliver him, once again, to the edge of a path he vowed never to walk. Back when he wore a human name, posed as a reclusive literature professor, and sat across from a young, ambitious editor named Alejandro Valencia; whose family owned this very café.

Alejandro had approached him nervously, asking for guidance on a story he wanted to publish: The Legend of Dayang and the Hunter.

"A diwata gives up immortality for love?" Abaddon scoffed. "Do you truly want your career to die before it begins?"

But Alejandro's enthusiasm didn’t waiver. He leaned forward and replied, “Isn’t that what makes the story worth telling? A love strong enough to challenge even the gods?”

With a dispassionate look, Abaddon replied, “Love, especially human love, is a self-inflicted affliction. History is riddled with men who’ve burned empires for it, waged wars in its name, destroyed themselves just to feel it briefly. I’ve seen it. I’ve suffered it. And I do not care to ever suffer it again.”

He hadn’t intended to sound so bitter. But the shadow of Elyon’s betrayal still clung to his soul like dried blood.

Alejandro laughed lightly. “Have you ever even been in love, professor?”

Abaddon’s lips curled into a cold smile. “I don’t need to bleed to know a wound is fatal.”

Alejandro said nothing for a moment, just looked at him with an amused pity, the kind only young men who still believed in love could muster.

“You talk like someone who was once in love,” Alejandro said finally. “And got burned so badly, you mistook the fire for the lesson, instead of the fuel.”

The words stayed with Abaddon long after Alejandro left. Now, standing in the café decades later, he sat at the table, the same one where he'd once met Alejandro. 

The scent of fresh flowers wafted through the air, subtle and cloying, like the memory of something beautiful and dangerous. The birds in the nearby cage suddenly silenced, their small eyes fixed on something unseen. Abaddon tensed.

With a subtle wave of his hand, reality shimmered. The world stilled, not stopped, but veiled. Time did not freeze; it simply looked away.

And from the shimmer emerged Diyan Masalanta.

She took shape gently, as if the world remembered her. Her long black hair flowed like silk and shimmered with dew, adorned by delicate ylang-ylang and sampaguita chains. Her golden-brown skin radiated the warmth of rain-soaked earth. Her eyes,deep, kind, and glowing faintly met his with quiet recognition.

Her garments rippled like moonlight on water. The blush-pink and golden hues of her woven malong whispered of nurture, love, and all the softness he had denied himself for centuries. Her bangles and anklets chimed faintly, and the soft sound stirred something old and buried in Abaddon’s chest.

His voice was like ice.

“You’re meddling.”

Diyan barely had time to speak before his hand twitched. The pressure in the air thickened. She gasped, clutching her chest.

“Let me breathe first,” she said, her voice breathless but unwavering.

He allowed it.

She straightened, composure blooming once again. “I did not come to seduce you with sentiment,” she said softly. “Only to remind you that you are not as far from the fire as you believe.”

He sneered. “I am not your broken mortal, nor one of your fluttering believers. I am Abaddon, King of the Abyss.”

“And yet,” she replied gently, “you linger here, smelling flowers and watching birds. You sit where she sat. You remember a story you claimed to despise. Tell me, is that not love’s echo?”

Abaddon turned his head away, jaw tight. Her presence, it was not forceful, but persistent. Like warmth seeping through cold stone.

It made him think of Isop, the one who had risked his tribe’s safety to save him when Elyon’s betrayal left him shattered. That kind of devotion. That kind of irrationality. And now…

Now Lualhati.

He gritted his teeth. “I told myself I would never again fall into that illusion. I watched it raze kingdoms. It nearly razed me.”

Diyan only smiled, radiant and knowing.

“You say that,” she whispered, “Still, you smiled when you saw that book.”

Abaddon’s lips twitched again, unwillingly. A memory of Dayang’s story surfaced. He’d spun it from cynicism, yes. But also from something he hadn’t wanted to name.

Love had always seemed like a betrayal of logic. But now, he wasn’t sure if it was a betrayal, or a challenge.

And in the silence that followed, even the birds waited.

******