The fevers always came at night.
SAMONO
Long after the kerosene lamp had been snuffed out, Imelda's son's skin would burn hot as embers, his breaths quickening with the shadows. By morning, he would lie limp, with eyes clouded and far away.
In their small home in Aliputos, Aklan, she prayed the way she had been taught-"Ama Namin, Sumasalangit Ka. However, her words kept returning to her like they hit an invisible wall. Each prayer made the same orbit, circling back unanswered. Although she whispered it again and again, as though God might hear better if she bled through the syllables, the fever stayed.
And so, when the church's prayers failed, Imelda turned to the mountain's ones.
In Akeanon, "pasaka" means to lift-to raise something back up that is slipping away. Among the Ati, it is used for the act of calling back a soul that has wandered too far. It is a bridge between the seen and the unseen, a prayer carried not by words, but by breath and smoke.
Imelda met the "sorhana" at dawn. The traditional healer did not ask for the name of the sickness. She looked instead at Imelda's eyes, at the child's stillness, and at the faint pulse fluttering beneath his small ribcage.
Then she nodded. The boy's soul had gone too far. He needed to be "lifted."
They laid the boy on a mat woven from pandan leaves. Around him, the sorhana moved slowly, humming a tune older than the chapel's bells. Smoke rose from a small clay bowl of "kamangyan" and twisted like a spirit trying to remember its body. Imelda clasped a rosary in one hand anda cross in the other. Her whispers of Ave Maria collided with the Ati hum, as if two faiths entwined like roots beneath the same soil.
The pasaka has begun.
In the 1500s, when Christian missionaries reached Panay, the Ati adapted faith in both spirits and saints instead of choosing one. Anthropologists writing on Akeanon believe this as syncretic continuity, that old cosmology carried forward through new symbols, not erased by them.
They kneel before the Santo Niño inside the chapel, and they also speak to the unseen in the mountains. For them, this is not a contradiction, but a survival. One God can sit above many intermediaries and the world remains whole.
Keeping this practice alive is harder now. Younger Ati leaves for work. Many rituals are no longer performed in full. Some communities report pressure to abandon what is called "superstition."
But the practice persists in quiet spaces-inside homes, at night, when illness refuses to yield-for it is knowledge that still works for the people who hold it.
The sorhana stands in that middle ground. She speaks to what cannot be measured. She knows which plants cool the body, and which words steady the soul. She finds ground for the visible and the invisible, inside a world where both remain real.
Imelda watched as the sorhana circled her son, her hands tracing the air above his chest, as if gathering something unseen. The chant grew louder, sharper, like a voice rising not against death, but toward life.
"Balika ang imo gininhawa," the healer murmured. Return your breath.
And somewhere between the smoke and the silence, the boy gasped. Just once-a shudder, a spark-then again. His eyelids fluttered, his body slick with sweat. The fever had broken.
Imelda wept, not sure if it was for joy or exhaustion. The sorhana simply bowed her head. "Nabatian kita sang kabukiran," she said. "Pati man sang Dios mo."
Days later, Imelda returned to the chapel with her son in her arms. The priest sprinkled holy water over the child, unaware that he had already been lifted once before, by hands older than his prayers. Imelda whispered a "thank you" to the Virgin, but in her heart, she also thanked the unseen ones-the spirits of her ancestors, the earth beneath her feet, and the healer who had walked the line between both worlds.
After all, faith is not a single, straight line. When the living cry out, it is not always the church that answers first. Sometimes it is the wind, or the river, or the whisper of the old ones still watching from the trees. And as long as there are mothers who care and people who remember that both God and the spirits listen, the circle will not fracture.
The circle will never break.