-1PROLOUGE
It was Dominick's job now to mind the strange chart that had been hanging on his living room wall all his life. Of course, it had been years since he actually needed it. Some things in life, after all, are predictable. He kept it there, mostly, in memory of his mother.
He could remember the way she fretted over it, studying it and murmuring, especially when it began to glow. She never could go without looking at it, even when she had memorized the cycle. Nervous habit, he thought, when he began to understand what it all meant.
Dominik did not know then, could not have known then, that the first sign of something seriously wrong occurred when he was only five. He had drawn his mother a picture of the forest at night, and proudly came into the kitchen.
She had smiled at him sweetly as she took it from his little hands. But as she stared down at it, a horrible expression came over her pretty face. "What is this supposed to be?" she asked quietly.
"A forest," Dominik answered uncertainly.
"How could this be, Dominik? How?" Her voice was rising steadily. "How could a star be in the crescent of the moon like this? DON'T YOU KNOW IT'S ONLY IN SHADOW?" And in a fit of rage she tore the paper into shreds and threw it down on him.
They had both cried for a good long time after that, though neither ever mentioned it again to the other.
His mother's strange preoccupation with the glowing chart and his father's frequent absences, along with other more subtle hints, all crashed down on him his second year at Durmstrang Institute. He had vomited right in the middle of class.
Dominik could recall every word he'd written in the letter to his parents that night. It was all at once a terrified and angry interrogation. He had refused to come home; he said he was spending the winter holiday with Sasha, his best friend from school.
The reply shocked him. It came back in English, and though he struggled through reading it, he had felt instantly guilty. One line particularly got to him then and hurt even more now that he was older: You don't know what you're doing to your mother.