Episode 1: The Man Who Had Forgotten

Morning arrived at St. Helene University the way it always did. Slowly, reverently, as though the old campus preferred to wake by memory rather than by time.

Sunlight filtered through towering acacia trees, spilling fractured gold across stone walkways polished smooth by generations of hurried footsteps. Somewhere beyond the Humanities Building, church bells tolled the hour, their echoes drifting lazily over red-tiled roofs and ivy-covered walls.

Students emerged from every direction, balancing coffee cups, unfinished assignments, and the impossible confidence of youth.

For most, the semester was just beginning.

For Professor Apollyon Ramos, it felt as though it had never truly ended.

He stood alone inside Room H-301, sleeves rolled to his forearms, staring at a blank whiteboard.

The marker rested uncapped in his hand.

He had already forgotten what he intended to write.

"...Mesopotamia," he murmured to himself.

No.

Not Mesopotamia.

Today's lecture was on the Austronesian migrations.

He frowned.

His memory had become peculiar over the past two years.

Not weak.

Selective.

Names escaped him. Appointments slipped through the cracks. Birthdays vanished entirely.

Yet ask him about the funerary customs of the Xia Dynasty, the naval routes of the Srivijaya Empire, or the ritual significance of gold death masks among pre-colonial Visayan datus, and the answers arrived whole, complete, as though someone else had spent lifetimes collecting them.

He no longer questioned it.

Dr. Mercado called it compensatory memory reconstruction.

The human brain, she explained, possessed an astonishing ability to build new identities from surviving fragments.

It was easier to believe her than to wonder why he occasionally dreamed in languages no historian had ever successfully translated.

The classroom door swung open.

"Morning, sir!"

A chorus answered before he could respond.

Students flooded into the room with the familiar chaos unique to the first lecture of the week.

Someone nearly dropped an iced coffee.

Someone else apologized to a chair after tripping over it.

Apollyon smiled despite himself.

There was comfort in ordinary things.

Ordinary things asked nothing of him except to show up.

He uncapped the marker again.

In careful block letters, he wrote across the board.

HISTORY204
MYTH, MEMORY, AND THE MAKING OF CIVILIZATIONS

The title lingered before him longer than it should have.

Memory.

An uncomfortable word.

One that carried the weight of rooms he could never enter.

He had no childhood.

No parents he could remember.

No first heartbreak.

No graduation.

No photographs before the age of thirty-two.

His life began beside a brook behind the old Illustre Estate, where José and Luisa Ramos had found him half-submerged beneath tangled roots, broken almost beyond recognition.

Three fractured ribs.

A collapsed lung.

Dozens of cuts that looked less like wounds and more like... burns.

The police suspected attempted murder.

The doctors suspected prolonged exposure.

The neurologists suspected catastrophic trauma.

None of them could explain why the man who eventually opened his eyes possessed absolutely no memory of who he had been.

Not his name.

Not his family.

Not even the language he first spoke.

The name Apollyon Ramos came after police released a missing person notice and the Dean of Helene University responded.

The given name Apollyon suited him Luisa once said when he argued that the name did not appeal to him at all.

"You fought death itself," Luisa had said while spoon-feeding him arroz caldo during his first week home from the hospital.

"So, we'll call you after a destroyer who failed."

José had scolded her for the joke.

Apollyon had laughed anyway.

It was easier than admitting the name unsettled him.

He had searched its meaning only once.

Destroyer.

The word had followed him into his dreams for weeks.

"Professor?"

A young woman in the front row raised her hand.

He blinked.

"I'm sorry?"

"You've been staring at the board."

The classroom had gone quiet.

Heat crept into his cheeks. "My apologies." He cleared his throat.

"I was trying to decide whether history is simply memory..."

He paused. "...or whether memory is merely the story we tell ourselves to survive."

Silence settled over the room, but not the uncomfortable kind.

The attentive kind.

Pens lowered.

Phones disappeared beneath desks.

Without realizing it, Apollyon had begun walking.

"The oldest civilizations understood something we often forget," he continued. "Memory isn't a vault. It's a ritual. Every culture chooses what deserves remembering and, perhaps more importantly, what must be forgotten."

His words flowed effortlessly now, gathering momentum like a river finding its course.

Apollyon spoke of oral traditions passed across generations, of civilizations that buried kings beneath mountains so future empires would remember their names, of forgotten languages that lingered in prayers long after the people themselves had vanished.

The lecture unfolded with effortless precision.

Students scribbled furiously to keep pace.

Apollyon scarcely noticed.

He had long ago stopped questioning why history came to him not as facts to be recalled, but as memories waiting to be spoken.

Near the back of the room, a young man slowly raised his hand.

"Sir?"

"Yes, Mr...." The name escaped him.

The student smiled sympathetically. "Villanueva."

"Right. Mr. Villanueva."

"You said civilizations choose what to forget."

"I did."

"What happens..." The student's expression grew oddly serious. "...when the one doing the forgetting isn't human?"

The room chuckled.

Someone muttered, "Too much horror anime."

But Apollyon didn't laugh.

For a single, impossible heartbeat, the question felt less hypothetical than remembered.

A pressure gathered behind his eyes.

Darkness.

A bridge of black stone suspended over an endless abyss.

A throne carved from obsidian.

Thousands, no…Millions of voices calling unto him in reverent terror.

He staggered.

The marker slipped from his fingers.

It struck the floor with a hollow crack.

The vision vanished and only the classroom remained.

Twenty-eight confused students stared back at him.

Apollyon forced a smile.

"I think," he said, his voice rougher than before, "that is an excellent place to end today's lecture."

Outside, unnoticed by anyone inside Room H-301, a murder of crows erupted from the acacia trees all at once.

They circled the Humanities Building in frantic, widening spirals.

As though something ancient had stirred beneath its foundations.

*******

The crows had vanished by the time Apollyon stepped out of the Humanities Building.

If not for the scattered black feathers drifting lazily across the quadrangle, he might have convinced himself they had never been there at all.

Students hurried past him, laughing over unfinished projects and weekend plans.

Someone called his name. "Professor Ramos!"

He turned.

Professor Diana Masala crossed the courtyard with the easy confidence of someone accustomed to being admired without ever asking for it.

She was carrying two paper cups of coffee.

Even from a distance, she drew attention. Heads turned not because she encouraged it, but because beauty like hers possessed an effortless gravity. Her dark curls bounced against the shoulders of her cream blouse, and the morning sun seemed determined to find her before it found anyone else.

Two years had passed since she transferred to St. Helene University from the University of the Philippines.

Students still whispered whenever she walked into a room.

Apollyon still wondered how she could possibly have chosen him.

"You forgot your lunch again." She held up a paper bag.

He blinked. "I... did?"

She smiled. "You left it in the faculty refrigerator."

"Oh."

"You've been doing that a lot lately."

He accepted the bag with an embarrassed chuckle.

"I've been distracted."

"You've been exhausted."

"That too."

She brushed invisible chalk dust from the sleeve of his blazer before slipping her hand into his.

The gesture was so practiced that Apollyon barely noticed it anymore.

"I have faculty senate in twenty minutes," Diana said.

"You'll survive."

"I always do."

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

It was brief.

Comfortable.

Affectionate.

Students pretended not to stare.

"You'll come over tonight?"

"If José doesn't need anything."

She tilted her head. "You visit them almost every evening."

"They looked after me."

"I know."

"No..." His smile softened. "They gave me a life."

Something flickered across Diana's face.

Not jealousy.

Not annoyance.

Something quieter.

Almost... concern. "You know they'll understand if you miss a day."

"I know…But I won't."

She squeezed his hand. "I'll see you tonight."

As she disappeared into the Administration Building, Apollyon found himself smiling.

He loved her…Didn't he?

The question arrived so suddenly that it stopped him mid-step.

Of course he did. He enjoyed her company and admired her brilliance.

She made him laugh.

She remembered things he forgot, and reminded him to eat.

To sleep.

To take his medication after particularly difficult therapy sessions.

She loved him…Didn't she?

Then why...Why did loving her sometimes feel less like standing beside someone...

...and more like leaning on them?

The thought unsettled him enough that he pushed it aside.

Dr. Mercado often warned him against overanalyzing healthy attachments.

Trauma survivors, she explained, frequently mistook dependence for vulnerability and vulnerability for weakness.

Perhaps this was normal.

Perhaps everyone questioned love in quiet moments.

Perhaps.

*******

That evening, rain arrived without warning.

By the time Apollyon parked outside the Ramos home, the gravel driveway shimmered beneath silver sheets of water.

The modest ancestral house stood exactly as it always had.

Wooden walls.

Clay roof.

A wide porch where José insisted every important conversation ought to happen.

The smell of ginger, garlic, and simmering beef drifted through the open windows.

Home.

He smiled before he even reached the front door. "I'm here."

"In the kitchen!" Luisa called.

He stepped inside and warmth embraced him instantly.

José looked up from the dining table, spectacles perched halfway down his nose.

"There he is our favorite professor."

"I'm your only professor."

José shrugged. "Exactly."

Luisa laughed as she stirred the pot. "You've lost weight."

José snorted loudly. "He most certainly has not."

"I meant in the face."

"You always mean the face."

"I do not."

"You do."

Apollyon laughed.

The sound surprised him.

It had been a while since laughter came so easily.

This house possessed that effect.

Here, he wasn't Professor Ramos.

He wasn't an amnesiac.

He wasn't Diana's boyfriend.

He was simply...their son.

Not by blood. By choice. And somehow...that felt stronger.

José slid a bowl toward him. "Eat."

"I already had lunch."

"Eat."

"I had dinner plans."

"Cancel them."

Apollyon raised an eyebrow. "Diana made reservations."

José pointed toward the steaming bowl. "This adobo loves you more."

Luisa swatted her husband with a dish towel. "Ignore him."

"He says that every week."

José grinned. "And every week I'm right."

For the first time that day, the unease inside Apollyon loosened.

Outside, thunder rolled across the mountains.

The lights flickered once. Twice.

José's smile disappeared.

He looked toward the study at the far end of the hallway.

Listening.

As though he had heard something no one else had.

The rain thickened.

Beyond the iron gates of the Illustre ancestral property, the road disappeared beneath a curtain of silver.

José remained beside the dining table for several seconds.

Listening.

The lights flickered again.

Luisa looked up.

"José?"

He didn't answer.

His eyes remained fixed on the windows.

Apollyon continued eating, unaware of the tension that had settled across the room.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

José finally smiled.

"Nothing, hijo."

But the old man's hand had already moved beneath the table.

His fingers closed around something hidden there.

A length of braided cord.

Buntot ng pagi.

The moment his skin touched it, the faintest blue-white shimmer crawled along its strands.

José stood.

"Where are you going?" Luisa asked.

"Outside."

"In this rain?"

José glanced toward the window.

"Just make sure Apo has a taste of your dessert too."

Apollyon frowned. "Are you trying to make me fatter than I already am?"

José smiled. "Exactly."

He walked toward the back door.

Before stepping outside, he looked once over his shoulder.

At Apollyon.

The professor was laughing at something Luisa had said.

Completely unaware.

Completely human.

José's expression hardened.

Then he stepped into the rain.

The door closed behind him.

Outside the walls of the Illustre ancestral home, the wards began to glow.

Not brightly.

Just enough for José to see the ancient markings carved into the stone pillars surrounding the property.

Runes.

Some older than the house itself.

Some older than the families who had once lived here.

They pulsed beneath the rain like sleeping embers.

José tightened his grip around the buntot ng pagi.

"Show yourself."

Nothing.

Only rain.

He stepped beyond the porch.

The runes brightened.

Something moved beyond the trees.

José stopped.

There.

Between two ancient acacias was a silhouette.

Massive shoulders rose nearly as high as the branches.

Smoke curled from its mouth.

A cigar glowed between thick fingers.

The creature stepped into the moonlight. A Kapre.

Its bark-like skin was darkened by rain. Long hair hung over its shoulders, dripping water onto the earth.

Its eyes burned amber.

José raised the buntot ng pagi. "You're standing on protected ground."

The Kapre stopped. "I know." Its voice was deep enough to make the windows tremble.

José's jaw tightened. "Then you know the rules."

"I do."

"Leave."

The Kapre looked toward the house.

Not at José.

Beyond him.

Toward the warm light shining through the dining-room windows.

Toward the man sitting inside...Apollyon.

The creature's expression changed to recognition.

Almost reverence.

José noticed. His grip tightened on the bunton ng Pagi. "You will not disturb him."

The Kapre slowly looked back at him. "I did not come to harm him."

"Then why are you here?"

The Kapre gave a low, almost sorrowful laugh. "Old man..." It took one step closer.

The runes surrounding the property flared.

The creature stopped immediately. “I know that your wards say this house belongs to the living."

José lifted the buntot ng pagi in preparation but was taken aback with what the Kapre did next.

It bowed, only ever so slightly, it's hand reaching towards to wher Apployon was seated by the dining table. “But my sovereign, the Abyss King, is not of the living.”

******