All Chapters of The Ironsmith's Mandate: Chapter 11 - Chapter 19

Legacy 1.2***I don’t know why this victory left me empty.Maybe it’s because I finally cashed the check my grandfather and Jaric asked me to.Or because whatever it was that caused me to literally smack the darkness out of North Point’s Severino Palparan had run out, leaving me standing there looking like the conquering hero, when a slight breeze could push me over.When my teammates and coaches rush the stage in embracing me in my triumph, that’s when I let go of the pretense: my arms finally start shaking, and my vision starts to sway.“You stuck it, Max!”“Knew you had it in you!”“Way to knock that sumbitch out!”As my coaches lift me into the air, I can’t help but laugh as I hear Jaric swearing.Meanwhile, Miss Salve’s dabbing at the corner of her eyes, and I caught a bit of Dr. Harry looking calculating before he continues in the celebration of my victory.Some distance away, my opponent looks just as relieved as I am… or is it him looking a bit lost, like everything that had

Legacy 5.4***The past two days left me in a bone-weary exhaustion that paid little heed whether I held my eyes open or not. Two days of being the focal point of other people’s attention tends to do that to you: all that applause can leave your ears ringing even after they’re done praising you.Friday night, I was invited to our principal’s place for the school to recognize my victory. Day after that was the formal celebration of my seventeenth birthday.Don’t get me wrong, though: neither of them turned out bad. But true to form, they were the kinds of polite excess small towns do when the lines between personal achievement and civic recognition cross.However, under the toasts, party food, and singing – oh, there is always singing – I was still left unsettled.It started Friday night. Adrenaline aftershock, that was what Dr. Harry called it: the body refilling its reserves after being exhausted causes a rebound to occur. The parties didn’t help; being recognized school-wide despite

Grief 6.1***The town church smelled of floral grief: the kind that comes dressed in the pretense of white shirts and black suits. White chrysanthemums were planted in neat rows outside. Men buttoned up their coats, what with the graying sky threatening to precipitate the day’s somber mood at any moment, while women in a mix of black dresses and white shirts clasped their hands over umbrellas in a combined gesture of condolence and anticipation of the weather. The people of San Vicente moved slowly and deliberately, in the ordered choreography of a town that knows the protocols of sorrow.Outside the church, a bench personally carved by the Maestro was an informal site of memory: it was an ordinary thing of wood and iron, but done up in such a way that it complemented the architecture of the building looming over it. The wooden parts were varnished and polished to a soft glow, inviting people to take a seat.The funeral was at 10 in the morning; Miss Salve and I had made it with secon

Grief 6.3***In the wake of my grandfather’s passing, San Vicente gradually picked up the pieces and returned to their usual tenor of everyday life, reassembling itself with the insouciance of folks who steadfastly stood with their tried and tested habits.It’s why my grandfather loved this town. To his words, “this town takes a kicking and keeps on ticking”. The Spaniards, the Americans, the Japanese, the rebels, the authoritarians, they came and went through this town and left nothing of note behind, not even wounds.Perennial underdogs with the kind of resilience to persist through everything; that’s the kind of townsfolk we have, same as the Maestro, who was laid to rest in the beloved town named after his bloodline.Wasn’t even a week until everything returned to normal: the hustle and bustle of the market back to its usual volume, vendors with their tarp stalls shouting the day’s profit in practiced cadences, the baker resetting displays as if grief had been a temporary distrac

Grief 6.5***Miss Salve and I started the holiday decoration on a Sunday, because miracles often come to small towns on days that do not conflict with the three b’s.(Yes, even in an out-of-the-way town like San Vicente, the three b’s of sports reigns with an iron fist: basketball, boxing and billiards.)She had the list of decorations memorized, having wrested the responsibility of holiday decoration from my grandfather last year. Jaric, meanwhile, insisted on being present because, according to the Cruz family, the only holiday decorating the men did would be lifting boxes, assembling Christmas lights, and climbing things to mount decorations on.Jaric already ran the risk of falling onto ornaments with two good arms, so he was content with showing up to be the moral support.The workshop had also doubled as a storage room ever since my grandfather began to plan for his passing: as we opened it to grab the boxes needed, the smell of the room lingered like a cat lounging on a nearby