The Taklob

Today is the day! I have roughly half of the book written, so I figured it’s time to share some excerpts so y’all know I’m not just blowing smoke up your asses about this book thing.

But also, I want to introduce you to a monster I made up!

Before all that, a brief review of Kalibayan’s magic system.

The core principle is that magic consumes memory. The stronger the memory’s emotional charge, the greater the potential spell power. Erased memories power spells but leave damage behind: gaps in identity, trauma, or corrupted echoes. Synthetic memories—like artifically implanted ones—can mimic magic but are unstable, dangerous, and pollutive to both the caster and the environment.

So, why wouldn’t people just choose to erase their most painful memories and skip off into the sunset tralala?

Because in this world, memory is power—and painful memories are often the most powerful.

The more emotionally saturated a memory is, the more magical fuel it holds. Letting go of pain may feel like relief, but it weakens the caster. Emotions are complex. Pain is often intrinsically tied to other emotions, especially love. Take nostalgia. You think of the past—a childhood memory, perhaps —and, while it contains no particular memories of pain, it still hurts to think of it.

Every spell cast by memory erasure removes part of who you are. When you sacrifice a core memory to power higher magic, you risk losing parts of yourself that you may not have intended to lose.

This is an essential caveat to Kalibayan’s magic system. Its volatility and complexity make it impossible to predict how it will behave, because its nature depends on the volatility and complexity of human nature.

This is where monsters come in.

The less harmful side effects of burning or anchoring a memory you haven’t emotionally integrated or burning too much at once are spell corruption, time/space distortion, and mild physical/mental/emotional/spiritual harm to the caster. The dangerous side effects are amped-up versions of the previously mentioned ones, and then there are monsters and hollowsinks.

The staticfall grew denser, spiraling upward instead of down. Mnemweight clung to their armor and skin. A four-second scream began to echo from somewhere deep in the hollowsink, looping again and again.

To their right, a warped building bowed inward. The awning was inverted and curtsying at the sky. The bricks folded at right angles—the building bent into a parody of dance.

Every few moments, a swarm of echo-midges gathered. They hovered close, whispering words so quiet that they sounded like waves crashing ever closer—a static wave.

Her fingers brushed something soft—then gone. A scrap of paper reappeared beneath her hand. A letter, half-written. The words shifted between ink and blood, always beginning and never ending.

She looked up.

A body hung half-out of the driver’s seat, slumped at a strange angle. It wasn’t torn or broken. It was erased. Large swaths of the visible body were a soft pixelation, like sand scattered across a glass surface. The eyes were two black holes.

—excerpt, Chapter 3, Shatter Protocol

Hollowsinks are places where psychic and magical scars form from violent memory erasures. Time, space, and identity are unstable. It’s a breeding ground for monsters and sinkrats: people destabilized by repeated exposure to hollowsinks.

Sinkrats, they were called. Officially: Mnemonic Exposure Dependents. MEDs.

There were many paths to becoming one:

Living too close to a hollowsink.

Overusing mnemtech—cheap smileshop jacks, unregulated vaultbacking.

Undergoing too many memory extractions without reintegration.

Surviving a failed spell.

Or having your memories siphoned, again and again, to power someone else’s magic.

Mostly, though, you had to be poor.

The people here drifted in states of half-self: volatile or numbed, disassociated, their identities fragmented. Hallucinations were constant. Resonance unstable. Memory bleeding without form or tether.

Hollowsinks pulled at them because the sinks were full of loose echoes—floating, fragmented memory traces waiting to snag whoever wandered close.

Problem was, catching those echoes broke you.

So the cycle went.

—excerpt, Chapter 6, Sink Work

The monsters in Kalibayan don’t just eat you. Just for funsies, they also prey on you psychologically and emotionally. Today, you get to meet the taklob.

The fountain groaned. A large crack raced along the lip, another splitting it down the middle. From that breach, something uncoiled.

A semi-humanoid quadruped wrapped in fractured mirror plates reared a head like a battering ram from below ground.

As it swung its blunt snout towards Alon, its mirrored hide did not reflect her face. Instead, it shimmered alternate versions—older, younger, more scarred, fairer, hair cropped short or curling long, but always unmistakably her.

Alon faltered. A vision overtook her, speaking lies she had never told, to people she hadn’t yet lost. The four-second scream from deep in the sink surged louder, fracturing her focus.

Deep within the beast, a molten core pulsed—amber light flickering like a heartbeat beneath the glass. It dripped snips as it moved—tiny nuisance spawn that hit the ground with wet slaps and scattered across the ground.

A tier 1 monster, the taklob tore itself free from the fountain with a shriek like horns blaring through metal. It landed hard on the rim of the fountain, mirrored armor grinding against marble.

—excerpt, Chapter 3, Shatter Protocol

Its name is literally from the Tagalog, taklób, meaning to hide or a cover or lid.

The taklob is essentially a mirror monster that reflects its victim’s most profound shame before it eats them.

They are a manifestation of buried shame, repressed truths, and psychological self-distortion. They break their victims by showing them the worst versions of themselves. Its danger lies in reflection, exposure, and identity dissonance.

The taklob is just one of many monsters that haunt Kalibayan. They all have some sort of weird emotional superpower they use to terrorize their victims. It was really fun creating them all. And I’m not even done! Can’t wait to show y’all!