Prologue
Once upon a supposed time, a pilot has gravely miscalculated the odds of his luck. Flying the skies over Batangas, his banged-up airplane was riddled with bullets. Sputtering smoke, losing fuel and altitude, it was the end of the road for this pilot. His plane was a dead stick. It just wants to give up and crash.
An instant before the inevitable, the pilot’s head rang with a cruel thought, You’re not supposed to die today… you have so much stuff to do.
It was like a kick to the groin.
It was Christmas time. If he wasn’t on this plane, he should’ve been grilling and eating Lechon. He promised his daughter to make her the best-looking paper lantern ever. He should’ve been anywhere but here.
But life is a train where no passengers want to get off.
And death is always an unscheduled stop.
The pilot looked across the shattered glass of his monoplane, a green and brown Boeing P-26 Peashooter, streaking across an otherwise blue morning sky. Beneath him, he could see trees and the rolling hills of what might be the town of Mataas na Kahoy.
You’re not supposed to die today, his head rang again.
Several tapping noises rained across his wings, causing a loud pop and a brief explosion. Maybe he got sprayed on by another round of bullets. He didn’t know anymore. The plane shook violently and started to spin. The pilot let go of his grip on the stick. Flames had burst around him and now his plane dove into the thick forest below like a meteor. The trees seemed to have unclenched themselves, welcoming him to its dark corners and cold embrace. He hovered above his seat, along with all the items he had strapped on his cockpit: a photograph of his wife and child, a baseball, and a gem-encrusted amulet tied on a string his wife gave him. Apparently, it’s a talisman that failed to bring him luck.
With nothing else to do, the pilot stretched out his arms.
Time slowed down to a crawl.
His world has come to an end. Just like that. He is thrown away, regardless of how much you value yourself. Still, the world will forget. It will move on.
As the pilot found himself plunging into the fire, all he could do was think how he’s leaving a perfectly normal life; how he, Joaquim Dela Cruz, a pilot in the Philippine Constabulary Air Corps, believed he could get past this conflict; that they could pull off a miracle and turn the tide; that he could spend another Christmas with his family.
He thought he was going to see her daughter grow up.
Instead, he will go out from this world in a bang, riding an old dumpster of a plane.
Yet sometimes—in the rarest occasions—the universe harbors a secret plan for someone. It doesn’t care for the reasons behind it, it just makes it so. And on this particular moment, for this particular soul, it did not want Joaquim’s story to end. For as the plane and the man burned and enveloped itself in a billow of black smoke, it just so happened that something or someone had performed a silly magic trick. With a few sparks here and a few spritely specks of dust there, the pilot felt fire in his skin feel like a warm bath with a cold mountain breeze. He woke up. Out of the chaos of the crash was supposed to be a wreck and his burnt corpse. He instead found himself shrunk to a size of a soup can.
He’s become five inches tall—give or take. It doesn’t matter what he turned out to be. When people would see him—if they see him—they would see a dwende.
So I’m really not supposed to die today, huh.
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