I’m the King but it’s Chess.

Bishop at D seven, blocking the queen from punishing my knight if it got to that happy spot at C seven.

Knight platinum would need to move to B five. B five threatened by the bishop.

Was that why the Panther of the deepest shadow had moved there?

Well let’s see if he, he would be the king no? The queen didn’t move, she had too much power to begin with. To give her the board as well would be cosmically unfair…

No a rival in a man was about as much as I could bear.

Let’s see if he was ready to play without any bishops.

I moved knight platinum to B five. Knowing my own bishop, the irreverent pontifex, could cover. And it would threaten C six if it ever came to moves. I wondered as to the distances of the land below. Was a day or two of survey really so seldom that I didn’t know?

It seemed so easy just to hike up the mountain. Well… if you ignore bandits.

Shame I couldn’t meet the pieces of the mirror realm.

I stood up and looked down at Dove.

Already sleeping. Magic must be no joke.

I observed the board one more time, as if I could take back a move. As if looking at it I would see some critical mistake I made this day.

I walked briefly up the mountain, gaining twenty five feet in altitude that took me four times as long yesterday.

Big rough hand on a delicate piece of metal, some things were the same as they always were. I turned the scopes and focused them manually, pleasantly surprised by the firmness by which I could fix them upon the land in the valley.

Fata Morgana brought slowly one side of the kingdom up to the horizon. Heh… it didn’t look like I needed it. The mountains far away folded as origami floating upon a pond before my eyes under a slick sickly sheen of high altitude clouds.

My Queen was showing off, the kingdom wasn’t big enough to need this kind of optical enhancement.

I looked upon the clay tablet.

I didn’t know what language this was but I could read it, interpret it.

Syllables at a time.

Melodic yet harsh.

Like English? I guess I should listen to some Dutch to imagine what it sounded like without understanding.

Not that I could anymore.

The Dove was sleeping upon a Little Rock. Next to the log I had found last night. An empty bag we used for food her pillow.

I wondered if she would remain soft and beautiful if she slept on rocks often.

The telescope rendered the square upon a little map she had given me.

A chessboard.

I should look at the most recent moves. Could the pontifex teleport?

But the pontifex could not for I had not moved them.

I turned the scope to view what the queen’s marks indicated was C three

It was so close… I switched to the smaller scope.

That wasn’t enough…

Collapsed looking smudges and curls of smoke indicated fires had been there among the rugged terrain spotted with stony thatched buildings.

Sheep, I wondered what kind of dogs guarded them. And what kind of beasts ate them…

I could go for sheep right about now. Only… how many miles away.

Distance and divide by eight was the distance they appeared in the scope.

Focus…! I am an animal with an undisciplined mind.

Pan slowly to B Five

I did, over a placid farmland, a lush forest, then upon another plain. Dust already rising. The earth had fallen away from me and I considered upgrading my scope.

But for now i was content to see the signs of thundering dust and what appeared to be a few large fires recently lit.

I hoped they weren’t burning anything important down there.

And what of the quartermaster?

I turned the scope to E seven.

Little dots on the side of a mountain. Flickering glints just below them.

I needed a better look.

I reoriented the bigger scope and took a second look blinking at the fuzzy image.

An inverted triangle surrounded by mirrors…

Oh…

That was an X, that was a Cross, that was an upside down cross.

Well I guess I didn’t have to worry too much about my men being taken prisoner. It appeared to be defeated by the enemy was to be staked up and sun-dried like a raisin.

Though if I was a diplomatic mercenary who expected that my work would be observed… or a noble prince who wanted to fake my death…

No that was, I looked at the chessboard beside my dubiously innocent queen.

Yes the work of the Black queen. Presumably another ideologically driven and computationally gifted magical girl.

Crucifixes surrounded by mirrors that would roast you.

Blurry though the image was, it was forty times closer. I couldn’t imagine what else I was looking at.

Did that make death quicker? Did that make death more painful?

Despite myself I wanted to know.

What was that? Only twenty miles away? The way the queen talked about shallow viewing angles I would have expected hundreds of miles.

Suppose it made sense the mirror was a notable item prized by the black queen.

I looked at the soft clay tablet, it was all standardized farm sizes and a key to estimate the sizes of trees, to estimate timber harvests. Indications of which towns needed churches and which ones were forbidden castles. Nothing directly about war.

If I lose this war perhaps I could serve the Panther as an accountant. Shurly that wouldn’t be so bad, he was supposed to be my brother after all.

Dutifully I filled out the clay tablets while my wife slept.

The uncanny clouds no doubt revealed to this entire literate valley kingdom exactly what my queen and I were doing.

I rather feel envious of the illiterate, I wonder if they even know there are kings observing them. Perhaps to them my queen’s magic really is magic.

Could a king retire and become illiterate?

Never.

Could a king eliminate his kingdom?

Not if he didn’t want to be a monster.

But to be a monster was to be free.

My mouth was dry and I was thirsty, the sun was rising to it’s zenith. And the Dove’s beautiful body was sitting out here to burn.

Did we have shade?

We had tent poles.

I staked three into the ground and stretched and tied one of our bed-sheets over the top of all three over the rock and log we had sat at.

We had shade now, The Dove would not burn.

I sat under them, reminded a little of building a fort out of pillows and blankets as a child.

I looked at the clay tablets, reading them.

Some carried data from past surveys. Our count of grown horses was now estimated to have risen over ten percent since the last survey. If my queen’s metrics were to be believed.

Who had taught her these things?

Her last body was… twenty five - twenty seven years old?

It had been that awkward age where estimated age begins to blur.

She could have been a healthy looking thirty, or a mature looking early twenties I hadn’t asked.

But she could swap bodies… and seemed not to worry about the process.

I looked at her again, back in the early twenties, at oldest.

There was no telling how old she was. These metrics, and her language gave me the impression of someone over fifty.

I guess we were a match for each other, I had always been an old soul.

Does innocent teenage love exist? Will I see it when I die and move on to the next world? I guess I was closer to whatever that was in this horrifying world than the last.

My mind slipped over the smudgy grim shapes I had seen at E seven and I suppressed a chuckle.

That’s not the sort of thing you see in a better world. But at least I had a skin full of fresh mountain spring water… We had found another one just this morning.

But I hadn’t really thought I was all that evil in the last life, maybe it was a sin of inaction, or sloth, or a lack of kindness, or one of those odd sins like envy or pride that doesn’t appear to destroy so directly.

My point is that I must have been evil because I got the grim gritty deconstruction isekai instead of the straight harem of cute adoring slice of life anime girls.

There were no goblins to slaughter. No XP to grind. No masterwork swords to collect. I had seen the fire rising over a chessboard. I breathed deeply and put a hand on the dove’s leather clad thigh. The leather was felted and soft. Warm… which meant my hand was cold.

And I felt sorry for the thing, that unknowable wizard, because it was in a cute body.

Many people call this mercy and attraction to the wicked the sin of lust, or sloth. But really it is a form of kindness, temperance, charity afforded and directed by the divine that holds the scale of beauty in hands unseen.

Sometimes, in times like this I worry the virtues are even more destructive than sin.