Humanity's Scream....
Villagers across Luzon fled.
They screamed prayers to gods they had long forgotten, called for help from spirits they no longer believed in. Children wailed as roofs collapsed, as walls buckled, as water swallowed hearths and homes. Elders moaned, beating chests, begging the sky for mercy.
Some tried to escape inland — but roads had vanished. Bridges collapsed into rivers. Paths turned into quicksand.
Others sought shelter in caves along the coast — only to be swallowed by landslides unleashed by Caraballo's shifting earth.
A mother held her newborn tight as floodwaters rose around her.
A father shielded his children with his body as boulders rained from above.
A child called for his friend — but the friend's voice was lost forever beneath thunder.
And all across the land — every cry, every scream, every prayer — reached the guardians.
They did not answer.
They could not.
They only held on.
They only tried to shield.
They only tried to protect.
Slowly, as all great tempests eventually do, Sarim's fury began to wane.
The winds lost their teeth.
The rain softened.
Lightning faded to distant flickers.
Thunder grew thin, then silent.
When dawn broke, Luzon lay in ruin.
Mountains wept rivers of mud.
Forests lay scattered like fallen giants.
Valleys were submerged.
Coasts had receded by hundreds of meters.
Villages had vanished — erased as though they had never existed.
The few survivors who staggered out wiped ash and silt from their faces, faces pale as ghosts. They looked around — but saw not earth, but grief.
They wept.
They did not dare to speak.
They did not dare to pray.
Because the prayers had not helped.
Not this time.
Beneath that ruined sky, the three guardians stood.
Sierra Madre's slopes were scarred beyond memory. Her ancient trees, stripped bare. Her rivers poisoned by salt and mud. Her very bones cracked in agony.
Cordillera — whose peaks had once kissed the heavens — now carried deep fissures. His edges jagged, unstable. His spine broken in places.
Caraballo — the healer — stood weak and dim. He could not mend this. Not now. Not ever.
They closed their eyes. They bowed their heads.
No words came.
Only silence.
Because what words could heal such grief?
What voice could comfort a land bleeding from its soul?
Dawn did not break gently.
It crawled — slowly, timidly — across the wreckage as though afraid to look too closely at the ruin left behind. Golden light filtered through the mist, touching broken houses, twisted trees, scattered belongings, and bodies covered in blankets of mud.
For the survivors, the sunlight felt like a lie.
"Bakit?" — The Cry of the Living
A woman knelt beside what remained of her home — a cracked slab of wood and stone. Her hands trembled as she lifted a tiny slipper, caked in brown earth.
Her daughter's slipper.
"Bakit... Diyos ko... bakit…"
Her voice broke into pieces.
She pressed the slipper to her chest, shaking so violently the mud on her clothes crumbled into dust. Around her, the ruins were silent, save for the dripping of water and the snapping of distant falling branches.
A few meters away, an old man staggered through the wreckage of his rice fields. The earth was no longer earth — just mud, water, and shredded stalks.
His entire harvest — his whole year — drowned.
He fell to his knees and screamed so hard his voice cracked.
He dug his hands into the mud as though he could squeeze life back into it.
Behind him, his wife whispered through tears,
"Tapusin na natin… wala na tayo…"
But he only shook his head and cried harder, his soul breaking in the open air.
At the foot of the mountain, in a narrow valley, a child was found sitting atop a hollow wooden trunk — the only thing floating when the flood came. Her eyes were wide, unfocused, empty.
She did not speak.
Not when rescuers wrapped her in cloth.
Not when someone asked her name.
Not when another survivor whispered, "Nasaan ang magulang mo?"
She only looked at the mountains and whispered a single question:
"Galit ba sila sa amin?"
No one could answer her.
Because in their hearts, they feared the same.
In a small barangay hall — its roof half torn off — survivors gathered, shivering from cold and shock.
A fisherman spoke first. His boat had vanished, swallowed by the sea.
"Palagi kong sinasabing pagod ang dagat…" he croaked.
"Hindi ko pinakinggan. Lagi ko pa ring pinipilit. Lagi kong sinasagad."
His hands were shaking.
He stared at his palms like they were weapons.
An old woman followed, her voice barely a whisper:
"Araw-araw pinutol natin ang kagubatan… para sa uling, para sa bahay, para sa lupa. Ni minsan hindi tayo humingi ng pahintulot."
Her neighbor sobbed beside her, pressing her forehead to her knees.
"Kaya ba tayo pinarusahan?"
Others started whispering the same.
"Kaya ba kinuha ang anak ko?"
"Kaya ba nawala ang buong bayan?"
"Kaya ba kami naiiwan?"
But no storm spirit came out of the sky to answer.
The only reply was the weight of silence.
Not far away, sheltered in a sturdier home on higher ground, a group of men — loggers, traders, land-developers — sat in stunned quiet.
They had survived.
Almost all of them.
But their workers had not.
Their landslides had buried the lower camps.
Their felled slopes were the first to collapse.
Their burned clearings had become rivers of mud.
One man — the richest among them — stared at his hands, mud still under his nails.
"I… I built my fortune from those trees…" he whispered.
"Pero bakit…
bakit…
kahit isang puno, wala nang natira?"
His younger cousin, voice hoarse:
"Kuya… naalala mo ba sinabi nila?
'Magpahinga ang kagubatan.'
'Huwag natin ubusin.'
'Huwag natin saktan.'
Hindi tayo nakinig."
The eldest logger — a man hardened by years of chopping and cutting — buried his face in his arms.
His shoulders shook.
He was crying.
"For forty years…" he murmured into his trembling palms,
"I took from the mountains.
Walang paalam.
Walang pasalamat.
Walang pag-iingat."
He paused.
A sob escaped him.
"Ano'ng karapatan kong mabuhay… habang yung mga inosente ang nawala?"
No one answered.
Because no one could.
They were men who had never cried in their lives — until now, when the grief was too heavy to hold inside.
As they grieved, the land spoke in its own way.
From the broken slopes, wind whispered through shattered branches. From the muddy plains, water carried the scent of sorrow. From the cliffs, stones groaned under the weight of new fractures.
Sierra Madre's breath was faint.
Cordillera's pulse was slow.
Caraballo's rivers whispered like someone dying quietly in the dark.
For the first time in generations, the people felt the guardians' pain.
A farmer pressed his hand to the damp soil and sobbed,
"Patawad… patawad…"
A mother kissed the bark of a fallen tree and cried,
"Hindi ko alam… hindi ko alam…"
Children placed flowers on the mud and whispered,
"Pasensya na po…"
The land could not answer,
but it felt their grief.
°°°
A Small, Impossible Miracle
In the ruins of a forest, where the mud lay thick and heavy, where trees lay broken like bones, a young boy knelt beside a tiny green sprout pushing bravely through the dirt.
It was impossible.
Everything around it was ruin.
But the sprout lived.
The boy cupped it gently in his dirty hands, crying hard.
"You're alive…"
He laughed through tears.
"Buhay ka pa…"
The other survivors gathered around him.
For the first time since the storm, they smiled — only a little — but enough to feel something rise in their chests.
Hope.
A small girl whispered,
"If one tree can live…
maybe we can too."
No one contradicted her.
For even the mountains, broken as they were, seemed to exhale a little warmer in the rising sun.
----
The People's Realization — Too Late
It took days for survivors to emerge — blinking, broken, hollow.
They walked through devastation like ghosts. Children searched for parents. Parents searched for children. But found nothing, only empty silence.
In one collapsed hut by the shore, a woman found a single iron axe lying in the mud. Its blade still sharp, its handle slick with salt. She held it in her trembling hands — and for the first time, she understood.
That axe was not a tool of progress —
it was a scar on the land.
A scar that had called Sarim forth.
A man whose house had vanished stared at the mountains, where once trees had stood.
He whispered a broken apology.
Not to a god.
But to the forest.
To the rivers.
To the land that had nurtured them.
And across Luzon that day — from the flooded plains to the ruined highlands — rose a single, trembling vow:
**"We will remember.
We will never forget.
We will never cut without asking.
We will never take without giving back."**
But even as they made the vow, the mountains did not answer.
They only stood, silent in their grief, their bodies broken, their hearts heavy.