So many years had passed since Father last hugged me that I almost forgot how warm his arms felt. The lack of flesh on his bones hardly changed that. Every part of his body radiated something that I rarely received.

Love.

“I am so glad to see you again, Iztac,” Father said upon squeezing me tightly. “Though I wish it were under better circumstances.”

My spine stiffened. “You know?”

“Your mother told me that the Nightlords chose you as this year’s emperor. This news devastated me.” Father’s hands moved to firmly grab my shoulders and he looked at me right in the eyes. “I swear we’ll find a way to spare you the altar. There has to be a solution.”

“There is one,” I reassured him. Namely, destroying the Nightlords and their wicked empire of death. “Worry not, Father. The vampires shall have neither my blood nor my soul.”

“You have grown so much, Iztac,” Father whispered. My resolve impressed him. “When we last met, you barely reached up to my chest and feared your own shadow. The person in front of me has become a man.”

“Nearly five years have passed since your death, Father,” I replied with a warm chuckle. The last few months felt like a decade’s worth of trouble. “You’ve missed my growth spurt.”

“And many other things, no doubt,” Itzili complained with a sad sigh. “Death is truly cruel to take us without appointments.”

Mother allowed herself to smile. “Our son has grown into a handsome young man, Itzili. He’s your spitting image.”

Did she just compliment me? That alone startled me.

“He inherited his best traits from his mother,” Father replied as he pulled away from me, much to his wife’s amusement. She swiftly kissed him on his skull, and I saw her sharp and strict expression soften in a way it never did with me.

Mother showed more emotion for that brief instant than she ever did in all of our time together in the Underworld. I caught a glimpse of something other than ambition and bitterness. A purer feeling that transcended Mother’s greed and selfishness.

A spark of deep affection.

Mother looked happy.

That moment was painfully brief, but it struck me with more force than any arrow. None, not even the late Sigrun, could fake something so pure and genuine. For all of her faults, my mother did love my father.

Her shriveled heart might look bigger than I thought.

“And who might you be?” Father asked the skull in my hands. “Another of my wife’s scholarly guests?”

Guests? The word immediately caused me to scowl at Mother, who ignored me. My brief moment of sympathy for her evaporated in an instant. Of course she would deceive him too.

“We are the Parliament of Skulls,” my predecessors replied. “The past emperors that preceded your son on Yohuachanca’s throne. This skull is the medium through which we advise our successor.”

“Oh! My apologies, Your Majesties, I meant no disrespect.” Father immediately offered the Parliament a formal bow. “I thank you for guiding my son, great emperors of the past. I’m told that he has greatly benefited from your wisdom.”

“The pleasure is ours,” my predecessors replied. Unlike the coldness and distrust that they had shown Mother before, the emperors answered my father’s gratefulness with courtesy. “Our successor is a brave and talented young man, Lord Itzili. You should feel proud of his achievements.”

“I am proud, though I wish I could do more than congratulate him.” Father lowered his head to better show his deference. “I do not deserve the title of lord either, though my wife commands this domain. I am as baseborn as they come.”

“You fathered an emperor and a Tlacatecolotl nonetheless,” the Parliament replied. “We shall address you with the respect that you deserve.”

‘The kind that your wife will not receive,’ was left unsaid.

Father had always been the humblest and kindest man I ever knew; though I might only feel that way because he was the only one to show me unconditional love until Eztli entered my life. The fact that my predecessors immediately seemed to take a liking to him reassured me greatly.

“Make yourself at home, Iztac,” Father said after inviting us to sit near the hearth. “You must tell me everything I’ve missed over these last few years.”

“I will let the two of you catch up for now,” Mother replied.

Father didn’t hide his disappointment. “You won’t stay with us, my love?”

“I must continue my research for now. The sooner I can complete it, the better.” Mother kissed Father on his forehead again and then did the same for me with my cheek. Her lips felt warm on my skin. “We will continue your training after I’ve finished my work, my son. Enjoy yourself until then.”

A very small part of me wished to skip straight to spellcasting, but the rest of my heart couldn’t care less. I’d wanted to visit my father since the moment I stepped foot in the Underworld. I had so much to tell him.

Mother vanished deeper into her home and Father pulled two seats near the hearth: one for me and one for the Parliament. He put their skull atop a pile of cushions, which I found strangely amusing.

“Is this comfortable enough, Your Majesties?” Father asked the emperors with all the awkwardness of a peasant receiving a noble’s surprise inspection.

“Worry not,” my predecessors replied, their empty eyes staring at the fire. “We find the sight quite pleasing.”

“Unfortunately, we do not possess much in terms of accommodations here,” Father apologized. “I spend my days reading, cleaning, cooking, and watching the fire.”

“Cooking?” I raised an eyebrow. The dead lacked the need and desire for sustenance. “Can you eat food, Dad?”

“I wish!” Father replied with a chuckle. “Alas, no crops grow in this layer and none of us here require food anyway. I’ve been trying my hand at alchemy and metallurgy instead. Mixing substances together, combining some alloys… cooking with metal and powders, in short.” He scratched his skull in embarrassment. “I’ve set your mother’s laboratory on fire more times than I can count.”

His new hobby didn’t surprise me all that much. Father had always been very curious and hoped to travel beyond Acampa to see the world one day. He was the first to put the idea of becoming a merchant in my head all these years ago.

I proceeded to take my own seat and rested on the soft leather. I found it quite comfortable after all of the deadly trials I went through.

“Do you like the seat, my son?” Father asked me with delight in his voice. “I built it myself.”

“I could sleep in it,” I replied. Father’s work paled before the luxuries I enjoyed in the emperor’s palace, but I enjoyed this seat more than any throne. I hadn’t been able to relax in the Underworld since I left Mictlan and welcomed this brief change of pace.

“Manual work helps me fight off the monotony.” Father rested his head on his hand and stared at the hearth’s fire. “Time seems to stretch on forever when you can no longer fill it with idleness, my son. I used to wish that I could forsake sleep in life, only to miss it in death.”

“We do not appreciate the little things until they slip through our fingers,” the Parliament of Skulls commented. “Regrets are the wages of wasted lives.”

“Indeed, but enough with the gloom!” Father said upon turning his head in my direction. “How have you been since my death, Iztac? Did you make new friends?”

My jaw clenched on its own. Father looked at me with the candid hope that I’d somehow managed to find happiness after his passing. Instead, I’d been adopted by a woman who threw stones at me for looking at her daughter the wrong way and suffered from greater loneliness than ever before.

Telling him the truth would crush him, but unlike Mother, I didn’t have the heart to lie to him.

“No, I did not,” I said with some awkwardness. Come to think of it, I could count the number of people I trusted on one hand. “It’s… it’s been hard ever since you left, Father.”

Father listened in crestfallen silence as I told him how Guatemoc and Necahual took me in after his death. I told him of the struggles that followed; the mockeries at school, the stones my mother-in-law threw at me, the isolation I’d felt… To put it bluntly, Eztli had been the only good thing to come out of this period.

“I am so sorry, Iztac,” Father apologized. His voice brimmed with true grief, as if he had gone through the same hardships I did. “I thought Necahual and her husband would prove to be good guardians. She always appeared well-disposed towards me.”

“She was.” From Father’s tone, he never learned of Necahual’s feelings towards him. “Her goodwill simply did not extend to me. No one treated me kindly except for Eztli.”

“I’d hoped Acampa’s people would accept you with time. That they would see past their superstitions and judge you on your merits. How naive of me.” Father clenched his skeletal fingers. “I should have left that village when I had the chance. Dyed your hair with coal and started anew somewhere else.”

“The red-eyed priests would never have allowed it,” the Parliament retorted. “Whether or not they already considered your son an emperor candidate, they constantly collect Nahualli for their mistresses.”

Father didn’t look convinced. “Even so, maybe I could have left Iztac with his mother. She would have taught him witchcraft and kept him away from trouble.”

I scoffed. “I’m thankful that you did not, Father. She would have thrown me in a pit to lighten her load.”

To my astonishment, Father’s jaw dropped in shock. “That isn’t funny, Iztac.”

“I am not joking.” I turned to look at the hearth, whose ghostly flames reminded me of my own blaze. “She abandoned us once, remember?”

“She did not, Iztac. The Nightlords forced her to flee.”

“Yet she never checked on me until after I died.”

Father flinched, yet still attempted to defend her. “The Nightlords would have used us as hostages if she had shown any interest. They would have killed one of us and threatened to slay the other if she did not surrender to them.”

It said something about the Nightlords that Father underestimated their cruelty. I suspected that they would have done worse than simply kill us. Nonetheless, fear for her own safety didn’t excuse Mother’s behavior. I would have risked life and limb for her if our roles had been reversed.

Blood was blood.

“Every day I struggle to hide my powers from the Nightlords,” I said, my fists clenching on the armrests. “Should I fail to destroy them, my soul will join my predecessors in torment. Yet Mother would rather watch from the sidelines rather than intervene directly.”

“She brought you here to teach you witchcraft, did she not?” Father touched the ghostfire in the hearth with a poker. It was a pointless gesture since magic fueled the flames. I supposed he simply carried through the motions of life, just as Mictlan’s inhabitants did. “I’ve heard of what happened on Smoke Mountain. Your mother was here that night, biting her nails. She could hardly focus on anything on the days that preceded its eruption because she worried for your safety.”

“Mine or her own?” I retorted. The thought of Mother showing concern for my safety sounded laughable. “The sun nearly died on that mountain, and she just watched.”

“I thought she helped you set up the counter-ritual? Or so she told me.”

By providing corpses to curse, I thought, though I didn’t have the heart to tell Father that detail. I gave the order and Mother carried it out.

“Your mother was incredibly relieved to see you fly away to safety,” Father insisted. “Call me naive, Iztac, but I’m convinced that she will come to rescue you should you truly need her assistance. She cares for you more than you think.”

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“Not enough to risk her life,” I replied with skepticism.

“Mark my word, my son. If your mother finds herself in a situation where she must decide which life to save at the expense of the other… she will choose yours over her own. Though I’ll admit she’ll probably try every other alternative first.” Father watched the fire. “Ichtaca does not always mean what she says, even to herself. She’s a… complicated person.”

“You are allowed to say selfish and difficult,” I countered.

I expected Father to scold me. Instead, he joined his hands together and leaned in closer to the fire. “Did your mother tell you how she first gained her powers?”

I scowled at Father. “Someone tried to strangle her when she was six.”

“Not just anyone,” he replied with a sorrowful sigh. “Her own mother. Her father tried to drown her one year later, after blaming her for the death of his crops.”

Father’s words hit me like a mace to the face. I always thought that Mother’s loathing for non-Nahualli was born from rejection in her youth. To have her own parents betray her in such a cruel way explained so much.

If Father had tried to slay me… the idea alone was unthinkable to me. Of all the horrors that my mind could conjure, that situation alone appeared impossible.

Mother never knew love until Father came along. For all of the distrust and contempt I held for her, I couldn’t help but pity her. I doubted anyone would have been able to trust other people after suffering so cruel a betrayal.

“Such is the fate of most Nahualli,” the Parliament commented with a hint of sympathy in their voice. “It is a terrible thing to be born different among the intolerant.”

“It is,” Father replied with sorrow. “Since she had only been shown hatred for most of her life, Ichtaca’s heart turned to ice early. She was almost half-feral the first time I met her, living in a forest hut and shunning other humans the way we avoid wild beasts. It took me years of effort to earn her trust.”

I blinked in surprise. “You never told me this.”

“You were too young to understand when last we… when last we met.” Father shook his head, as if to banish the thought of his own death from his mind. “The way she looked when I first met her, all suspicious and angry and bitter… I’ll never forget it.”

“Your wife’s suffering does not justify her current behavior,” the Parliament argued. “We sympathize with her pain, but she treats the living and the dead with the same coldness as our own captors.”

“Pain is senseless, Your Majesties,” Father argued. “When faced with suffering, we humans try to assign it meaning to make it more bearable. My wife drew the wrong conclusion from her difficult life: that it toughened her spirit and gave her the strength to survive. This mindset shapes all of her decisions.”

“Are you looking for explanations, Father?” I asked him as I sank in my chair out of unease. “Or excuses?”

“I am looking for empathy and understanding,” Father replied calmly. “Your mother projects an image of strength, Iztac, but if you chip away at it long enough you will only find pain and loneliness underneath. She mistakes open displays of affection for weakness, and it terrifies her. I suspect that she restricts access to her knowledge because, in her mind, she is helping you grow self-sufficient. This is her way of supporting you.”

“It’s not a good one,” I replied flatly.

“No,” Father conceded. “But do not mistake her aloofness for a sign that she does not care for you. She’s simply… unused to it. Acting selflessly towards others scares and confuses her. Even now after years of marriage, she still keeps up her guard with me.”

If only he knew. Father was the only person Mother allowed herself to love, and she still refused to practice Seidr with him for fear of what he would see inside her heart.

“She keeps things hidden from you, Father,” I warned him.

“I know.” Father studied my face, his empty eyes glowing with pale light. “You don’t tell me everything either, Iztac.”

My jaw clenched on its own. I could have told Father about the lives I’d taken, the trust I had betrayed, the innocents I’d sacrificed… Yet when my guilty conscience threatened to confess, shame held back my tongue.

Father knew me better than anyone, so he could tell what was on my mind. “Nothing you can say will change the love I feel for you, Iztac. You were put in a terrible situation and I will not judge you for doing your best to escape it. I simply ask that you show the same tolerance for your mother. No matter her faults, she is the woman who brought you into this world and she does care for you in her own way. Pushing her away will only lead you to hurt one another.”

“So I should simply close my eyes?” I asked, unable to keep the disdain off my voice. “Keep my mouth shut?”

“No,” Father replied firmly, much to my surprise. “You should take a stand if you truly feel that you must. However, relationships are built on compromise. If you never give her an inch now and then, why should she?”

Compromise? Somehow the word sounded like a curse in my mind. I had compromised so much on my morals because I lacked the power to create a better path. The only reason I tolerated Mother’s Reliquary was because I needed her help. If I didn’t, I would have destroyed her pillar of skulls on the spot.

“If you give too much, you get eaten,” I argued.

“See? You are your mother’s son,” Father replied with a chuckle. “Iztac, no one likes to be judged. Would you like it if I constantly scolded you? Told you that I knew better about everything, although I have never been in your situation?”

“No,” I conceded.

“Constantly confronting your mother will only cause her to stand her ground and entrench herself in her opinions,” Father explained. “I do not ask you to tolerate everything she does; the gods know I drew a line in the sand more than once. I simply ask that you give her a chance. Focus on her good points first rather than constantly searching for her faults. Only then will she start to listen to you.”

The Parliament of Skulls let out a deep, ominous rattle. “You will not change that woman, Lord Itzili.”

“Perhaps not,” Father confirmed. “But I can help her change herself. I know because I already did it.”

“We do wonder about your courtship,” the Parliament said. “There must be an interesting story behind why you chose to romance a Nahualli hermit.”

Father shifted in his seat, his confidence turning to awkwardness. He quickly glanced at me, weighed whether or not I should learn the truth in his mind, then nodded to himself.

“I first met my wife when returning from school through the forest alongside a group of boys and girls,” Father said. “I caught sight of her spying on us from afar. I’d already heard rumors of a witch living in the woods, so I immediately grew curious.”

I almost laughed at his phrasing. “Most would have grown fearful, Father."

“I figured that if she was truly dangerous, she would have eaten us all,” Father replied with a small, nervous laugh. “Your mother fled before I could catch up to her, so I returned each day to the forest to ask her to show up. I suppose you could say that I tried to make contact. Eventually, she became so puzzled by my persistence that she answered my calls.”

“That sounds quite romantic,” I commented.

“Our first meeting did not end well,” Father confessed. “She threatened to curse me with impotence, hair loss, and a gruesome death if I refused to leave her alone. I resolved to come back the next day nonetheless.”

“Why?” the Parliament asked with genuine curiosity.

“Because I saw it in her eyes. What lay beneath the bitterness, jealousy, and resentment.” Father marked a short pause. “Sorrow, and the desire to belong.”

I avoided his gaze. Having spent my childhood shunned by others, I understood that feeling well.

“I continued to visit her each day afterward until I earned her trust,” Father continued his tale. “We began to play board games, swim by the river, read in the sunset… Over time, I convinced her to visit Acampa to meet with my parents, though it took a year of convincing. She feared I was luring her into a trap until the very last second.”

“Bringing down the walls around her heart must have required an immense well of patience,” the Parliament commented. “We are truly impressed.”

“Thank you,” Father replied nervously. “Afterward, I… I invited her to stay with me and…” He turned to me. “We chose to have you and settle down.”

The hateful balefire of my soul wavered for an instant as a wave of pure warmth coursed through my veins.

They chose to have me. Part of me always wondered if I had been the result of an accident—children at my old school certainly mocked me about it. I was desired.

“My wife’s wounds run deep,” Father said. “I can soothe them, but they will never fully heal. The best I can do is to help dull her edge. I’ve had some success with it.”

“Did you convince her to trap these scholars in a dream?” I asked him. Somehow, I struggled to imagine someone as selfish as Mother granting non-Nahualli this small kindness. Father probably inspired it.

“I admit I do not fully understand this magic of yours,” Father replied. “From what I gathered, your mother’s guests exist in a plane of existence that I cannot access. A shared dream.”

“Her guests?” I snorted. “These people are not guests. They are her prisoners.”

Father scratched his skull. His strange calm greatly bothered me. Didn’t he see the problem? “I was under the impression that these scholars joined willingly.”

“Under false pretenses.” Their situation hit me at my core because it was so similar to my own. “They aren’t free.”

Father marked a short pause before asking me, “What makes you think that people want to be free, Iztac?”

I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

Father’s question cut deeper than he thought. I remembered asking it myself after Smoke Mountain erupted. I thought that its destruction would wake up Yohuachanca’s masses from their idleness, and that the disasters that followed would finally destroy the Nightlords’ illusion of power. I had prayed for revolts, riots, and revolutions.

Instead, I received silence.

“You have seen Mictlan for yourself on your journey,” Father said. “It is a peaceful existence, but a pale reflection of the glory of life. I suspect many among the dead would like to dream of it again, even though they know it to be a lie.”

“Your father has a point, our successor,” the Parliament whispered in their seat, their eyes turned at the hearth’s fire. “Huehuecoyotl warned you that a Veil works because its victims want to believe in it. We assume a few among those scholars could wake up if they truly wished to.”

I recalled very well how I first learned the Veil spell. Huehuecoyotl used it to scam the dead and pretend that he could contact the living. A laughable plot, considering his already terrible reputation… and yet he never failed to find clients. The dead wanted to buy into his lies.

Just as my empire’s citizens wished to believe in the Nightlords.

Slaves chose to close their eyes on their masters’ cruelty because it benefited them. Foreigners bore the brunt of the Nightkin’s cruel tributes and a single emperor suffered each year. Most farmers could expect to live full lives with food and lodging, then return home to their loving wives and raise their children. And when their turn came to die on the altar, they found it easier to see it as the will of the gods rather than the result of their own inaction.

Most would sell away the freedom to starve in the wild for steady food inside a pen.

“Your people are a quiet and devout lot, Your Majesty,” Tayatzin told me once. He should have added “docile.”

If I shattered Mother’s false reliquary, would its victims feel any gratitude? Or would they condemn me for robbing them of their happiness?

“I am sorry, Iztac,” Father apologized upon seeing my crestfallen expression. “I didn’t mean to sadden you.”

“You did not,” I replied. Yohuachanca’s citizens did that on their own. “She won’t let those souls leave, Father. You know that.”

“I cannot, since this situation has yet to happen.” Father took my hand into his own. “You have my word that I will convince your mother to return those souls to Mictlan, should they wish for it. Our marriage survived my death, so I can obtain a few concessions.”

He spoke these words with such conviction that I almost believed him on the spot. These words were not lies spoken to a child to assuage his doubts. Father truly wanted to see the best in his wife and hoped that she would make the right decision with his gentle support; and to his credit Mother clearly cared enough for him to abide by his wishes.

I understood my parents better now. Through immense patience and effort, Father managed to bring down the walls around Mother’s heart. Enough to convince her to give humanity another chance until the Nightlords ruined it. He thought, no, believed that she could change. That we could become a good influence on her.

They do love each other. I had seen the signs before—Father never remarried after Mother left us and she plotted for the three of us to become gods rather than be separated again—but it was another to feel it. For better or worse.

My parents were far from perfect. Mother had desired to marry my father so ardently that she viciously cursed Necahual to ensure her success; and for all of his kindness and goodwill, Father couldn’t fathom the depths at which his wife was willing to sink for power. Yet their marriage endured beyond death nonetheless.

For a brief instant, I held the hope that we could become a family, however dysfunctional. That Father would rub off on his wife enough for her to change her attitude; that I could find in myself the strength to forgive her for her crimes and coldness; and that she would learn to love me the way Necahual loved Eztli.

Like a Veil I’d cast on myself, part of me wanted to believe in this mirage.

What did I have to lose in trying to make it true? My opinion of Mother could hardly worsen. I might as well try to give her a chance as my father asked me to. It wasn’t like she could disappoint me any further.

“I will try to keep an open mind about her,” I told Father. “I cannot promise more.”

“I understand,” he replied softly. “Thank you, Iztac. That means the world to me.”

His warmth and kindness overwhelmed me like a flood. They reminded me so much of Nenetl’s gentle heart. Perhaps that was what Mother found so endearing in her husband; he helped her feel that she could tell him everything.

Unlike Nenetl though, I hadn’t betrayed my father without his knowledge.

“Iztac?” Father asked me.

“Can I…” I cleared my throat. “Can I tell you something?”

“Yes, of course. What bothers you?”

Everything.

I began by telling him how this entire trip to the Underworld began: when I turned a blade on my heart and tried to take my own life rather than serve the Nightlords. Shameful as it sounded, I found it easy to tell my own father how I killed myself. Part of me was even proud that I chose death over complicity once.

My crimes proved harder to confess. I told him how I had slain the guilty and the innocent to sabotage the New Fire Ceremony, the graves I’d filled, the lies I’d spun, how I started a war and then betrayed Nenetl’s trust…

Father didn’t say a word. If he had opened his mouth at any point, I would have stopped. His silence carried neither condemnation nor judgment. He gave me a listening ear and let me open the floodgates of my heart without fear of punishment.

Even then, I didn’t find the strength to tell him everything; I spared him the details of the Nightlords’ tortures, what happened with Necahual and how I treated her nowadays, Sigrun’s fate and so much more. One night wouldn’t be enough to tell him all of the horrors I’d survived through over the past few months. Those I’d committed myself weighed heavier on my mind.

I thought admitting my crimes to another would lessen the burden on my heart. It didn’t. The more I spoke, the louder I sobbed. All the barriers I raised around my spirit and all the strength I’d gathered deserted me. I felt like a child again, telling my father how others had picked on me at school.

Father reacted as he did back in those days. He took my hands into his own and clenched them tightly; sharing my pain and sorrow so I wouldn’t feel alone.

“I am so sorry, my son… all the awful things you’ve gone through…” Father lowered his head in shame and powerlessness. “I wish I could have done something to protect you…”

“So few care, Father…” I whispered. That was what wounded me the most. “So few care about my and my consorts’ struggle. Our people would rather take comfort in their chains than try to break them. I feel so…” My voice broke. “I feel so alone…”

“You are not,” Father consoled me. “We are here. Me, your mother, this Eztli and so many others…”

The Parliament of Skulls, who had listened in silence so far, joined in to comfort me. “We shall not abandon you, our successor. We shall weather any storm by your side.”

“No one asked the impossible of you, Iztac,” Father said. “No back is strong enough to carry all of the world’s weight. No one should have had to make the decisions you did. The gods were cruel to put you through this ordeal.”

I leaned on from my seat. Father rose from his own and took my head into his arms, letting me rest my face against his chest. I used to listen to his heartbeat in my childhood when he consoled me. His cold ribs proved rough to the touch, but his grip remained as loving as I remembered it to be.

Father slowly let go of me. “I will go grab a blanket.”

“I… would appreciate it,” I replied after wiping away my tears. Father patted me on the head just as he used to, then left the room for a moment.

“Your father is a good man,” my predecessors commented. “Nonetheless, we have seen it before.”

I squinted at them after regaining my composure. “Seen what, my predecessors?”

“Your father and mother. He tries to see the best in others, even when it is not there.” The skull’s eyes ominously glowed with ghostfire. “It will end poorly.”