Chapter 2: The Boy with the Mark
The waves never slept.
Even when the village did—when fishermen snored in bamboo huts and old women whispered prayers to the last moon—the ocean always moved. Always breathed. Always watched.
Anno liked that.
The sea didn't ask questions. It didn't care who he was, what he wasn't, or where he came from.
And for someone like him, that was enough.
---
They said he came from the mountain—left there as an infant, wrapped in soaked cloth, barely breathing. A hunter named Mang Berto found him that night, cradled in moss and moonlight, with storm clouds swirling above.
Mang Berto took the child in.
Built him a hut near the cliffs, just outside the village walls.
And raised him—not as a son, but as a debt to the gods. A duty.
He gave him food, taught him to fish, warned him never to trust the villagers.
But most of all, he told him:
> "You weren't born to be loved, Anno.
You were born to survive."
---
The villagers never accepted him.
They said the sea had spat him back after drowning his real parents. Said that when the moon dimmed for the first time in decades, he was the only child born that night.
They called him Anák ng Dimonyo — Son of the Devil.
A walking omen.
A child kissed by darkness.
The other kids threw rocks at him when the elders weren't looking.
The elders watched him like a storm waiting to happen.
Anno never fought back.
He just listened to the waves.
---
But on his sixteenth birthday, the silence changed.
It began with pain.
A burning sensation across his back, like salt ground into open wounds. Then to his neck. His chest. His arms.
He clawed at his skin in panic, but it only spread.
He staggered to the pond near the edge of the village, and when he looked down into the water—he gasped.
Blue markings.
Glowing faintly, like veins of lightning beneath his skin. Curving symbols. Runes he couldn't read, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.
He touched one.
The world spun.
And then—he heard it.
> "Awaken."
A voice. Not his own. Not human.
---
That night, the sky screamed.
Waves crashed violently against the cliffs with no wind, no storm, no reason. A roar of oceanic rage that shook the huts and soaked the land.
And in the eye of it all—Anno, unconscious on the beach, half-buried in sand, markings glowing beneath the moonlight.
The villagers dragged him back in silence. Only the eldest dared speak.
He knelt beside the boy's glowing body, traced the markings with a trembling hand, and whispered:
> "Bakunawa."
---
The next morning, Anno woke alone in his hut.
Mang Berto was gone—vanished three winters ago, taken by the sea or the forest, no one knew.
All that remained was the hut he left behind… and a boy who no longer recognized himself.
His clothes were damp. His skin burned.
The markings were still there—faint, but real.
He stared at his reflection in the bowl of water near his bed. One of his eyes—the right—was different now.
Not just darker.
It glowed faintly, like the deep sea under moonlight.
And then—
> FLASH.
Visions seared into his mind.
A massive serpent coiled around stars. A demon screaming as a moon cracked like glass. Fire raining from the sky. The ocean, rising like a wall.
And an eye—huge, ancient, watching him from the deep.
Anno stumbled back, gasping.
> What was that...?
---
Later that night, the village held a secret meeting.
They gathered around a fire, whispering like frightened mice.
"The boy's cursed."
"It's the serpent. He's returned."
"He must be exiled before he brings ruin to us all."
But the elder—the one who had spoken the name—shook his head.
"No. Not exiled…"
He looked to the sea, his voice hollow.
> "He must be watched."