Mirror Board

The grass was starting to wilt, the tips of leaves bowing in defeat and resignation. Some had turned yellow, some had turned brown. The trees were rotting, some had cracks running through them. Branches had fallen off, and they were brittle to the touch, they looked as if a wind would blow them away. The park, which a few weeks ago had been bustling, crowded to the brim was now empty. The animals were either crowding and crouching under shelter, shivering in their homes, trembling from miles away, or were dead and decomposing. Silence was the order of the day.

Silence. But for the clanks of stone on stone. Increasing in speed, increasing in sound. Echoing throughout the forest, bouncing off of trees, you could physically see the sound bouncing by the way it left marks - cracks - on the trees.

The men sat playing chess. They had not left those chairs for weeks now. They had begun when the first omens of gloom began clouding the skies over the world. People had rejected the omens then, ‘freak accidents’, ‘once in a lifetime accidents’. Those once in a lifetime accidents started to happen more and more, frequency going up the notch from once every few months, to once a month, to once every few weeks, to once a week, to once every few days. They became the new normal. And people adjusted. As people always do. Yet, people also started to realize how the dark days were upon them. They had no name for it. Just a darkness always clouding their thoughts. People hadnt seen unwrinkled foreheads on the faces of their loved ones in days.

The men in the park played through it all. The shadow visited them occasionally. Sometimes it would stay the nights, sometimes it would creep about during the days. Invisible, yet both of them knew it was there. It would report to the man playing black, the information also meant for the one playing white. They always played the same colors. The pieces looked worn, cracks creaking through the intricate stone figures, yet they would not break.

Thunder grumbled, always. Rain biting the ground hard. Fires smoldering in the distance.

The game went on, faster and faster, the movements almost imperceptible. Electricity was in the air, waiting. Humidity, and dryness too. It was as if they were all waiting. The games continued. 

Lightning struck some dying grass nearby. It smoked and caught fire. A burst of rain struck it out, it sizzled with anger as dying smoke spiralled upwards.

Stone hit stone. Loud. Insistent. Angry.

Chess had been around for ages, yet aside from a series of games in the first century, three hundred years before it was introduced to people as a game, and one in the sixth, no other series of games had held as much sway over the future of the human race. This was it. These would decide the future of the world.

The shadow sizzled around them, tendrils of grass caught in its sway, burning, fading into nothingness. What it was about to say, they knew. The pieces said so. It said it anyways. Just like light is the absence of darkness, so too is sound the absence of silence. The silence spoke volumes. And it spoke as it knew naturally. Not by making sounds as humans know them, but by manipulating the waves around silence. The first has fallen.