The Wizard of Elsewhere

1.12 - All The Fell Shadows

...This is a game of stacks and flats and stones and taks.

        Of shattered walls and woeful falls.

Of hard-won feats,

        and cunning deceits....

— Witch Aleinna The Forthright and Forewarned

* * *

And so they played, the Wizard and the Fae.

They played as no Wizard, Witch, man, woman or child had played in less then an age. More.

The forest around the glade was still. The crickets and the night birds waited and watched, and, above it all the full, white moon glowed pale and cold in the sky, larger and closer than it should have been.

Time stretched incrementally.

The fire crackled and the wind wove fragrant aroma of fresh jasmine and orange tea through the air.

Two children huddled close. They stayed away from The Forerunner, and crouched close to Leinan on the side where the Wizard sat.

They watched the board intently, though with little understanding, holding each other's hands and barely fidgeting.

They understood in a round about way that their lives were tied to the game on the board. The game the Wizard played with The Forerunner.

And what a game it was!

Stones, like shattered masonry littered the board, but each piece polished to shine like satin and no masonry had ever shattered with such rounded corners and flat edges.

White stones spread this way and that haphazardly, fanning out and piling on top of one another. Black stones harried them, cutting through paths and enveloping patterns.

Stones stacked to make spires. And those spires grew like empires and stalked across the board like armies, and then they dispersed to make new, smaller towers which also grew and spread and were overthrown or dispersed in turn.

Walls went up and were struck down and eons seemed to pass as the cartography of the board changed.

And through it all the players had eyes for nothing else. They sat in trances as the towers grew and charged and fell.

One stroked his beard meditatively and muttered inaudibly to his Hat which also — somehow — looked meditative.

The other had hair the color of starlight-dappled snow which curled above her shoulder blades just so, and lips redder than the reddest berry. She sat as still as an ice sculpture and watched and waited and did not move as the Wizard lifted one black stone piece high above the board and carefully placed it on the board with the solid thonk of shifting destiny.

* * *

The board they played on was six squares across and six squares wide, thirty-six identical squares in total. When the digits were added together, they became nine.

Three was also the second prime, and six devolved into two threes. Therefore, thirty-six, when devolved to primes, became two, two, and two, which was, of course, six. UNLESS you added in the number of instances using the Neebler Method — which was a contentious paradigm among many wizards — in which case the six, now became a nine.

Back to nine.

Nine was a factor of thirty-six and partnered with four. Nine plus four was thirteen, a highly inauspicious number, but if you continued straight passed that blindly, and gritted your teeth, then the Billiadbarnum Paradox came into play and three plus one made four, which was auspicious because it factored into a pair of two's. Two represented Sacred Duality, and there were two twos here, so that became a very sacred quadruple... which when recursive logic was applied, continued to devolve into ever increasing sacredety... forever.