DIARY OF VALERIA - THE WRATH OF GAKUD

Chapter 1 - I Dreamed A Dream

In my dreams, I saw a world beneath a great mountain. I saw a tribe thriving in a dim lit dome, a world filled with life. In this underground realm there is a hearth at the middle with a fire raging without ends. It is from the center of the dome, this hearth, from which the flame rises high up to the ceiling. This tribe of men and women and children with colorful knitted abaca and banana leaves clothing are dancing around the hearth. They are in a sort of trance, moving in unison in a slow rhythmic and hypnotic cadence. With hands waving up in the air, heads thrown back, eyes half opened and feet thumping hard to the ground as they chanted their prayers to the unknown pagan gods. While the men, abnormally taller compared to the women; who are normal human size. But they have one thing in common, their heads filled with venomous snakes, some are tiny while others are huge, instead of luscious normal hair.

The alarm went off and it took me a while to reach for it and turned it off. It was a strange dream I had but it always been like that for the past months now that I was beginning to get used to it. The clock strikes 6PM, meaning, I have to get up and prepared for my night shift job. I was lucky to secure a job in a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company as a call center agent. After graduation, the plan was to get a master's degree so I could teach in the university but unfortunately that plan didn't materialize because I got stuck in the fast pace regime of the corporate world.

It sort of happened on a whim. One night I was on my bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about a lot of things. It wasn't actually the life that I expected after I graduated, I got the wrong idea that after I took the last vow and received my diploma, companies would be lining up to get me, well, that didn't happen. In reality, a diploma will not guarantee a high paying job, you have to be out there hustling and selling yourself properly to the company so they would hire you. I did nothing of that sort. I was waiting for the right time to get my master degree, but then 2 months passed and still I couldn't get myself to go back to the university to enroll. How stupid I was to think that I could do it. How stupid I was to think that I could go back. How stupid I was. So I decided to take my chance working as a customer service representative taking inbound calls for a telecommunication account based in the United States.

I was still haunted by the events that took place during the last year of my college life. You see, as a history buff, I got obsessed with what I had learned in a diary I found in the old Filipiniana Library at the university. The diary was originally owed by an alias called Sinukuan, who happened to be one of the great national heroes Andres Bonifacio. But it wasn't the great freemason who pulled my interest into this diary, but its subject. It was a diary yes, but most of its entries were sort of love letters to a woman. A name called Valeria, the mistress of the revolution. By the Supremo's own words, he was captivated by this beautiful maiden that later on proceeded with a secret love affair with her that took place in the Spanish resistance camp. But the news of her spread like a current until it reached the ears of the mason wives. The revolutionary soldiers who fought the war against the might of Spain spoke highly of her. Her fierceness in battle, her skills in weaponry, her relationship with the Supremo, and lastly her beauty. Especially her beauty. The soldiers talked about her beauty a lot. She became an enigma to them. But the mason wives were forbidden to go to the camp and so they haven't had a glimpse of her infamous existence because of the danger of war but one of the wives wasn't fret. Gregoria de Jesus, the Supremo's wife braved the risk of war and ventured into the resistance camp in disguise as a nurse. A lot of the soldiers knew her as the wife of their leader and so she did her best to cover her face and with that she succeeded. Before midnight, she sneaked out of the nurse's camp in search for Valeria in every tent. She found her at last and finally confirmed her husband's affair with dread in her heart. Gregoria was at the back of the Supremo's tent picking, looking at the girl inside her husband's tent who was undressing herself. There was a certain sensuality in her movement as if a deadly trap of a hunter from its prey. She looked young, more of a teenage girl than a woman but Gregoria was afraid to confirm that the blather about Valeria was true. She was indeed a paragon of beauty. A beatific face with a young and gorgeous skin and a perky breasts. No wondered her husband Andres was smitten by her. Who wouldn't? Valeria was alone in Andres's tent, she was changing her battle clothing to her night gown and it seemed that she was preoccupied that she didn't notice that someone was watching her.

Gregoria felt the tears running down her face as she continued to stare at the girl who stole her man's heart. She was heart-broken. Heart-broken because he could no longer trust her husband, heart-broken because she loved him no matter what but most of all, her heart ached knowing that she could not compete with this girl standing in front of her whose name was Valeria.

Valeria, Valeria, Valeria, the whore, the mistress, the husband thief. She loathed Valeria for hurting her, for claiming Andres without her permission. Gregoria wept in silence and she allowed herself to weep but then a terrible thing happened afterwards that made Gregoria wanted to scream in terror. As she stared in pain at Valeria, watching her unwrapped carefully the piece of cloth from her head. Gregoria was stunned with what she had uncovered about her husband's mistress. She learned the dreadful truth about her secret, that she wasn't human at all. For what was hidden underneath the cloth in her head, instead of a lush and silk of a normal hair, revealed a myriad of long tiny black snakes exploding from all direction, hissing and shining and deadly.

Gregoria covered her mouth with her hand to prevent her from screaming. She staggered backward but she couldn't take her eyes of the snakes coiling and moving in Valeria's head. Gregoria was frozen in fear. Valeria is the daughter of the devil, she thought, Valeria is an abomination, a freak of nature.

Andres didn't know that he bedded the daughter of Satan. But then Gregoria willed herself to move when she saw that the snakes were shifting and the little devils were facing in her direction as if sensing her presence. Valeria then stopped moving, she was listening. Gregoria didn't wait for her disguise to be blown, she turned around hasting and ran as fast as she could without looking back.

All of what she discovered was written in the diary that I found. It was chronicled in the later pages when she secured the diary after Andres died.

I was committed to prove that the existence of Valeria was real and that she was immortal. With the help of my best friend Albert, we created a history blog to post all my theories about my subject. I also posted everything related to the Spanish Colonial Era that lasted for more than three hundred years until the Spanish-American war. Albert created a substantial and an interactive blog that we named IslaFilipinas.

I work relentlessly and Albert was there to support me through and through even though sometimes he failed to understand my point, he didn't give up on me as I to him. But Valeria's myth was starting to slip through my fingers for I was hitting walls with all of my research about her... until one morning when I received an email from her stating that she wanted to meet with me.

It's been 6 months since the last time I saw her and the creature Gakud who used to be the Ka Andres. Valeria turned him and made him into a Wah'dli, a creature with snake hair. I was the only one who saw them, Albert didn't get a chance. I didn't know her motive was or if she was a villain or a heroine or just a love-struck selfish girl who happened to be immortal. I met her and she was beyond beauty and her face was still vivid in my mind. When I thought of her I could see her clearly. I could see her smoking elegantly with her thin black cigarette. Her laugher woke me up at night when I dreamed of her. She haunted me everywhere. Everything that was happening on me after graduation, I blamed it on her but in my hearts of heart, I still longed to see her, to glimpse of that luscious lips with red lipstick. I wanted to be lure by her again and fell under her seduction.

So I settled into the dream for only in the dream I can be with her. I wanted to be entangled in her web once more. So help me god.