- Jan 20
The Haribon is one of Dalikamata's animals. Its ability to travel far and wide makes it ideal for the Goddess to see what is going on that is beyond her physical sight. I've included the haribon in the prologue of this book, and is likely to reappear several more times. While doing research on the haribon, I was astounded to learn that this Philippine eagle is the third largest in the world and among the critically endangered species of its kind. It has a wingspan of nearly seven feet and a length of up to four feet from its crest to its tail. When I saw a picture of it, I just went holymotherf#*@$r.
Nobody in Manila would have mistaken Diwa Bandera for a deity. Her family name, once Vanderveen, had been changed to Bandera—meaning "flag" in Tagalog—generations ago. Adapted to make it easier for Filipinos to associate with since there is no “V” in the Philippine alphabet, it certainly made assimilation among the locals easier.
Despite that, Diwa was still pale as moonlight and prone to burning under the Manila sun; her complexion drew curious stares, though not always for the reasons one might hope. Her skin marked her as different but not exotic—not the kind of beauty celebrated in her city. Her delicate cheekbones, angular jaw, and the aquiline nose she’d inherited from her Dutch great-grandfather, alongside her own Filipino features—a wide mouth, a pert little nose—set her apart from the kind of Filipina loveliness immortalized in pageants and film.
Her friends teased her relentlessly. Alembong, they called her. Malandi. Haughty. Vain. The words were thrown casually, coated in laughter. For anyone else, they might have stuck like prickly burrs. But Diwa’s easygoing persona as one who could deflect racial insults and jabs like water off a duck’s back never let the barbs sting. It was just the Filipino way of kidding around. Kantsawan. Teasing. In friendship, there was never any harm intended.
Still, there was more to Diwa than what her friends or even she could see in the mirror. She had always known it, felt it as a small, quiet truth. From the time she was a child, her hands had been drawn to what was broken—to wounds, to sickness, to pain. She had bandaged her dolls with careful precision and stitched their imaginary injuries with whispered prayers. The gift had grown with her, though she didn’t yet call it that. By the time she entered nursing school, it was second nature. Her patients said her touch was soothing, her presence calming. But to Diwa, it was simply instinct.
That instinct had been shaped by her summers in the mountains of Madja-as, where the Ati tribe had taught her things no classroom ever could. They were her first teachers—not in formal lessons, but in the quiet wisdom of living with the land. She’d spent her childhood fishing barefoot in rivers, speaking Kinaray-a with her best friend Agila, the Datu’s son, and watching elders mix salves from wild herbs. They’d shown her how to stitch a wound with sinew and steady hands, how to hear the spirits’ guidance when all else failed.
Those summers had faded into memory by the time she started high school, replaced by trips to the Netherlands and lessons in the family business, Hebeya Brasilia, NV. The merchant marine ships her family traded with seemed like something out of a storybook, more Wendy Darling in Peter Pan than the gritty reality of life aboard a tanker ship. But sometimes, cocooned within the safety of their home in the wealthy neighborhood of Forbes Park, when the nights were quiet, she could still hear the whisper of cicadas in the mountain air or the steady rhythm of river water against her feet.
The visions, though—those were harder to explain.
The first had come in the darkest corner of a dream. Blood pooling on the floor. Her parents’ faces pale with soulless eyes, shadowed by something she couldn’t name. She had woken choking on her own breath, trembling in a room that felt too still. The next dream came months later, so vivid it stayed with her even after the sun had risen: she would live once again in a forest of towering coconut trees, banana plants growing in squat rows, and the precious rubber trees her great-grandfather had planted when he arrived in the Philippines in 1942. And much later, the strangest vision of all—a glimpse of herself rising above the clouds, wings carrying her to a far-off land. The spirits began to whisper soon after. They called her name in the stillness of her dreams, telling her of her destiny. Her gift of healing, they said, was only the beginning. She would uncover the truth of her parents’ murder, and only then could she save her people from extinction and understand the power within her.
Diwa didn’t believe the spirits at first. She didn’t know where her journey would take her, but for the first time, she began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she was meant to do more than survive the Manila sun and the words of her friends.
Maybe she was meant to rise.
If there's something about my writing process that few people know, it is that I don't write linearly. I won't always start with Chapter 1, followed by 2, then 3, and so on. I write scenes based on characters when they speak to me. Yup, they actually speak to me. So yesterday, I wrote a scene that's the start of the rescue of Diwa from the clutches of Cayetano. Ron talks Fritzso into tagging along to help him with this crazy-assed mission, and his Irish bro is none too happy.
Ron
DECEMBER 2014
EN ROUTE TO THE PHILIPPINES
_________________________________________________
In Fritzso’s book, I did what might be the most forbidden thing two bro friends could do, and I couldn’t help but add some levity to our mission.
He stares at me agape—yep, that weird word that could only describe Fritzso’s stupefaction on why the hell I extended a pinky finger toward him across the aisle of the plane while in flight to Manila offering—no, daring him—to hook his in mine.
“What the almighty fuck is that?” I didn’t have to look at him to know he was glaring, his mouth hanging to his chin and he was breathing so much fire I could feel the heat from where I was sitting. I was smiling slightly. Or maybe I was smirking.
So I turn to face him slowly. Dramatically. With a goofy smile like I’m in love with him, I say, “Yubikiri.”
He slaps his hand away from me. Hard.
“Ow,” I cry in my best girly wimpy voice, cringing and waving my hand in feigned pain.
“I know what the fuck yubikiri is, but seriously, dude? We are not two ten-year-old girls in middle school.”
“But you mean so much to me, Fritzso,” I say, batting my eyelashes.
“Keep it up and I will disembark in Manila and get on the next flight back to Hawaii and leave you to your ridiculous James Bond rescue mission.”
God, he looks so serious.
“And that will be the end of our friendship. I don’t care how much I owe you for getting me a dream job in Hawaii.”
