"Checkmate." That in itself was a small victory, but also an impressive accomplishment. Carmine smiled across the table at his son. He couldn't contain the swell of pride that must have showed. His son grinned back at him and relaxed in his chair.

The black king was tucked into the corner of the chess board. The white queen sat parallel to it, protected by the rook beside it. "Well done," said the mercenary. That was a large victory. Carmine had never spoken an encouraging or complimentary word before. Those two few words were also an admission of defeat, but also a statement of respect. Salvador knew, because he had gained the ability to say so many things in as few words as possible from his father. Some might have argued that he got that trait from his mother as well, but it was different. There were no additional words passed between eh and his father through any metaphysical means. Carmine was impressed. He was proud, and that was obvious.

"Gracias, Papá," said the boy. He felt the grin on his face and realized he must have come across as cocky. He was proud of himself as well. Hearing pride in his father's voice only intensified the feeling. "I've been practicing," he admitted.

"Have you?" Carmine began resetting the pieces on the board out of habit.

"Sí." Salvador had been practicing the game over the past several weeks, nearly months now, but not as most people do. He lifted a hand and tapped a finger against his temple. "In here," he said.

Carmine looked at his son and raised a brow. "You have been practicing in your head?" He did not sound convinced of the concept.

Salvador chuckled. "Sí, Papá. In my head." He reached to pick up the black king from the other side of the board. He turned the piece idly between his fingertips, examining the details of the object absently. The little cross on the king's head was a particular fascination. He wondered why his father chose such a traditional chess set considering his dislike of most other traditional things. Particularly the religion that little cross represented.

There was silence between them for a moment, longer than the boy actually realized. Time meant nothing to Salvador. At times (how funny), he didn't even register its existence. When his father took the black king out of his hand, he remembered time's existence again. "How did you grow so fast?"

That question confused him; it had been an out of the blue inquiry that was completely unrelated to the previous topic. "Qué?"

"Just now," Carmine said. He set the black king on its starting square where it belonged. The board was reset again in preparation for a new game. "When I look at you sometimes, I see the curious and innocent boy I found in Madrid. Other times I see a grown man who could be a stranger to me if his face did not look so much like my own reflection."

One corner of the boy's lips began to twitch up into a smile, but the other corner fought against it in an attempt to frown. Salvador crossed his arms and drew in a long breath through his nostrils. He held that breath, looked aside, and considered his father's words. "No sé," he murmured. The mere mention of Madrid conjured up memories that he would have preferred to have forgotten by now.

Carmine must have noticed the shadow on his son's face. The boy could be very easy to read at times. Easier for the mercenary to read than for most. After all, they were flesh and blood, father and son. They were so alike. "What happened in Madrid?"

Salvador hadn't spoken of it to anyone as of yet. Like Orlando, it was a series of events he wished he could undo. Images of fleeting memories began to dance before his very eyes the moment that question was voiced by his father. The boy closed his eyes with a dismal sigh and whispered an echo of a distant past. "...the evening and the morning were the first day."

The mercenary raised a brow. He knew the scriptures well enough. metaphorical histories that his own father had engraved into his brain once upon a time. It was both puzzling and disturbing to hear his own son utter such a phrase. Fragments of false and shattered memories still lingered. In the lie, Salvador had been raised in a church. But they both knew all of that was false. There was something about his son's demeanor and expression, however, that cautioned him not to interrupt. "Genesis 1:5," he murmured.

"I don't want to go to school today," he told Mara that morning.

She tilted her head and looked at him with imploring dark eyes. He didn't know the color. He wish he did. Only now he found himself wondering to ask. "Why no'?" she asked, tugging on her blazer.

"But I did go to school that day," Salvador said quietly.

Carmine was puzzled. His brows knitted low, but he listened intently and patiently. He wasn't privy to his son's memories as they were relived. All he could do was wait and hope that the boy filled him in on the missing details.

Her stunted speech was absolutely adorable. Others might have made fun of her or constantly asked her what she was saying. Salvador knew. He understood her perfectly. Everything about his broken, winged girl was adorable to him. He loved her. He sighed dismally and dropped onto the desk chair. "It's my birthday," he said, not at all pleasantly. He remembered his birthday last year. He remembered a haze of unstoppable violence. He expected nothing but the same this year.

"So?" she asked. She grinned at him and turned her back to him. Lifting one foot to tie the laces of specially fitted shoes, she propped her foot on the bed and let her tail sway tauntingly for him to see.

Salvador grinned wickedly. It was nearly impossible for him to resist her, and it took a great deal of effort for him to resign himself to suffer with an ache for the rest of the day. They were late to school. Any later and they'd suffer detention. He chose the greater of two evils this time around. Detention was boring. "So," he said, "I hate my birthday. It's nothing but trouble." He was in a bad mood to begin with. There was always a calm before the storm, and that troubled him. Just like last year, he felt nothing at all. But he was willing to bet it had a lot to do with the house. The house they shared was a void, far removed from everything that effected him in the outside world.

He actively put the memory on pause and looked over at his father. "Do you remember last year?" he asked. Carmine nodded and Salvador mirrored him in that expression. How could either of them forget last year? The boy tilted his head and looked aside again, staring at an empty point in the middle of the room while the memory replayed. "It was quiet," he said. "Just like last year..."

Mara looked over her shoulder at him and raised a brow in pause. Then she switched out one leg for the other in her balance and laced her other shoe. "Why do' i' bo'er 'oo, 'over?"

"Last year," he explained, "it was a mess. There was a war. There was blood in the air." He closed his eyes and stirred up the memories. "People, innocent people, were screaming for justice. For vengeance. I couldn't resist it. I killed ... so many."

She dropped her foot to the floor heavily and turned to look at him. She stood with her torso angled, one hip jutting out more than the other, and arms akimbo. "Ki'ing hash never bo'ered 'oo be'ore."

He turned up his eyes to look in her eyes. They were so dark, so beautiful. He found himself switching the subject without even realizing it. He tilted his head to one side and furrowed his brows, puzzled. "What color are your eyes?" He'd never asked her that before. Why now?

A faint smile settled on his lips, and he closed his eyes. Brown, he thought. Her eyes are brown. He'd never forget that.

"And...?" Carmine had learned that tactic from his own lover. The mercenary had a bad habit of not going into details when discussing things, of getting lost in his thoughts. He was not surprised to see his son suffering the same afflictions. Nor was he really surprised with how easily he echoed Dris by interrupting the boy's thoughts. The realization actually amused him slightly, but it barely even showed.

Salvador blinked, shook his head, and looked back at his father with a crooked grin. "Sorry." Where had he been? He had been telling his father that this year his birthday had been similar to last year. "I went to school," he said. "Not long before lunch, when I was in English class, the silence was ... broken."

The boy certainly had a strange way of explaining things. Half of his thoughts were disjointed. Carmine's brows knitted again. He only fixed his son with a level stare, looking particularly puzzled.

"Ah..." He wasn't quite sure how to explain it any better than he had. "Profesor Bradfield was teaching class. I barely heard him. Marcia Danbury and Clarissa Fogel were giggling under their breath. I was staring out the window. Then everything went black and bloody. In my eyes. All I saw was red. All I heard was static. Like ... bad tuning on a radio. Like ... Orlando."

"Madness again?" They had discussed some of the intricacies together during their biweekly chess games together. Carmine only asked as much as was necessary to get a general idea of what warning signs to keep a lookout for. They had decided together that it would be best to be prepared, so Salvador had told his father as much as he could without getting into too much detail. Too much detail, he thought, would have only made his father uneasy.

Salvador shook his head. "No. Not ... exactly like Orlando. The static was constant there. This was only ... a split second in time. There was static, and then suddenly the channel was clear and ... loud. Very loud. Thousands of whispers came pouring in all of a sudden. I couldn't make them all out. I felt hot. Very hot. Like my skin was on fire. And sick to my stomach. I had to leave."

"And you did," Carmine said, daring to interrupt him that time.

The boy nodded and sucked in a calming breath. He was grateful for the interruption. He knew he was rambling a little. "I left," he verified. "Profesor Harada called you, no?"

"Sí. He did."

Again he nodded. "By then I was already out of town. Out of Rhy'din." He was getting ahead of himself, so he paused and shook his head, backtracked through his memories. "I don't even know how I got out of Rhy'din. A portal, maybe. A gate. Maybe a plane or a boat. I don't know. I kept hearing the susurros. I kept looking at the church. All I saw was the church, shadowed over by red, pulsing..."

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

A haze of pulsing red shadowed the landscape of church ruins. Gravestones littered the back yard, shrouded by years of overgrowth. Vines stretched up broken mortar and shattered walls. The shadow of red beat to the rhythm of a heart. Thum-thump. Thum-thump. The landscape swayed side to side as if the eyes belonged to a body saturated with far too much alcohol. Thum-thump. Thum-thump.

A woman jumped into view. She screamed...

Salvador sucked in a sharp breath and closed his eyes tight. His fingernails dug into the armrest of the chair. "Hijo," he heard a voice say. A warm hand settled on his shoulder and shook him. "Hijo. Tú bien?" He knew the voice. He recognized it after the second sound of it. The boy's eyelids fluttered open and he let out a shaken sigh.

"Sí, Papá. Sí." Focussing on his father's face again, Salvador nodded.

Carmine looked at his son skeptically, but eventually nodded just once. He then leaned back in his chair and considered what he had been told for a long moment. "So it was the same as last year," he said. "Your mother woke up. You felt the surge of energy from her. Heard the calling of your ... other half."

"And was compelled to act on it," Salvador said, finishing the thought with another singular nod. He sighed. "Souls cried out for vengeance. I heard screaming and pain from so very far away. 'Go back to the beginning,' I heard a whisper say. Many susurros said that. Over and over. 'Go back to the beginning.'" He shook his head, not knowing how else to say it.

"So that is what you meant when you said you went back to the beginning." The mercenary seemed to understand despite the disjointed explanations. He rubbed his jaw. "To where you were born. Where we found you."

"In Madrid. Sí." Salvador scratched at the back of his head and frowned. "The church isn't there anymore, Papá. It never was."

His father raised a brow at that. "I should have expected as much." He grumbled something uncomplimentary about the illusions of the fae and restrained the urge to spit by growling out a sigh instead. After a long silence between them, Carmine spoke again. "You still have not told me what happened."

"I..." Salvador stopped himself before he could say the immediate thought that came to mind. His mother was easier to discuss this subject with. Her ceaseless apathy made it easier. His father, being human, was a different matter entirely. Telling him the precise truth made the boy uncomfortable, but he couldn't keep it from the man forever. Could he? "I went to the inn that you and Dan stayed in sixteen years ago."

Carmine's brows inclined, but he didn't say anything. The boy held his attention rapt, and he patiently awaited further detail.

Salvador looked away, feeling a touch embarrassed for the first time since ... well ... ever. "I don't remember getting a room. Some part of me must have known I was tired. I needed to sleep. I dreamed of bloodshed. I dreamed of killing people. I dreamed of a woman who I once believed was my mother." He looked back at his father cautiously.

"Ema," the mercenary murmured. Salvador could see the faintest traces of nostalgia seeping into his father's expression.

She screamed. Blood sprayed from her body and painted the walls. A savage beast tore into her flesh and ripped her limbs out of their sockets. A man shouted at the monster and fired a gun at it. Bullets ricocheted off the walls. Then the man screamed. Thum-thump. Thum-thump. The man and the woman gurgled on their own blood. They both drowned in pools of searing hot red. Thum-thump...

"Padre." Guilt reflected out of his eyes. Carmine must have seen it. His own eyes widened when he looked back at his son. Salvador pressed his elbows to the chess table, knocking over several pieces, and clasped his hands together. He bowed his head against his knuckles. His voice shook when he whispered his confession. "Padre. Lo siento. I ... I killed her."

"And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."