Black Blood

I don’t know whether to praise my father for his well thought out plan or to call him crazy. We say as magicians that being damned to human is worse than death. Knowing what magic was like, being able to remember how it felt, but not being able to get it back. It is the highest punishment you can receive as a magician and the one most feared by all. It is what drove many a mage to madness. It was this fear that drove Yin and Yang into madness. One of the reasons why war arose between the people and the mages.

23 years before my birth, the war of moonlight ended. Humans felt inferior and treated unjustly. They rebelled, storming the villages and cities of various creatures. With the help of some extreme mages, they exterminated two peoples. The cheeaths and the dragons. Cheeaths were half-man half-cheetah shapeshifters. Cheeaths were creatures that preferred to live alone or in small groups of four. This made them an easy target for war. It is said that they all perished at the hands of man. The dragons on the other side were poisoned. All the cattle they ate carried a curse that took away their lives. Only the Nazu survived because of their immortality.

The war ended when the elves sided with the mages after ten years. With armies of hundreds of elves they defeated the armies of the humans. My father came to power at that time. He took a harder line on the war than my grandfather. It set the tone for his form of government, gave him his feared title. It was a bloodbath that the people barely survived. The bond between the two camps has never fully healed and to this day there are those who would rather see the mages come than go.

It is a story that my father often told me out of pride. It was his first war, his hallmark. It showed what he was capable of.

I might have expected the man to be cunning and clever when it comes to warfare. I could have expected the deaths of Nora and Tristan not to be dumb luck or a good shot. However, I was too naive to think that my father had thought this up. The worst crime in our world, the worst punishment and the biggest reason for so much misery. Even in time of war, this is something that everyone will disapprove of. He is not the man who told me stories as a child about how beautiful magic was. He is a monster.

‘What happens if the Night Riders all die?’, I ask as I continue to walk back and forth across the room. Alisha slowly closes the book.

‘No one knows,’ she replies softly. I let my eye fall on the withered bunch of flowers. If my father has thought this through, he must know what will happen to the world when we are gone. My father is a magician himself so the implication that all magic will disappear is off the table. The Night Riders were created to protect the lifelines from black magic. When the Night Riders are dead, my father has free reign on the lifelines. Every being is connected to at least one. That’s the thought that makes me realize it.

‘My father wants the underworld gone. When we are gone he has free reign on the lifelines. That gives him the freedom to damage the lifelines until they die out. All beings connected to that line die out. That is his plan, that is how he is going to eradicate the underworld.’ I was already in an increasing hurry to get to the Blood Mountain and find Viko, that hurry has now quadrupled. If something is not done soon, more than half of the mage world will die out.

‘Nalu and the king must know this. They were the ones who stopped the war of moonlight,’ says Alisha cheerfully after a while. She is right. There’s no way me and Viko, if I find him in time, are going to win this by two. Especially now that we’re weakened. I grab my apron from the chair, slam it on as quickly as possible and run for the door. I look at Alisha for one last time.

‘Go,’ is the last thing she says before I run out of the house. I don’t know how fast I should run back to the big building. My head is working overtime, my heart is pounding in my throat and my hands are sweating. Why didn’t I realise this before?

I pull open the back entrance and run without thinking out of the storeroom to the door of Nalu’s suite. I seem to have flouted all the rules I set earlier. I don’t care about the chance of execution or punishment. If the elves won’t listen it will be their downfall. I pull open the door of Nalu’s suite and run inside. What I did not expect to find is sitting in front of me in the living room. Nalu is sitting at the dining table with a chessboard in front of her. All the pieces are in the right place, untouched.

‘Celeste, I’ve been expecting you. Sit down,’ she says, totally ignoring my panicky attitude.

‘Excuse me Highness I have an important announcement. My father...’

‘Celeste sit down,’ she interrupted my rattling.

‘No highness my father wants...’.

‘Sit, now,’ she instructs me. Her posture serves no purpose. I stand a metre away from her in contradiction. She has to listen to me for her own good but seems to have no intention of letting me tell her anything. The fear of punishment or execution flows back into my body. I slowly walk to the chair opposite her and take a seat on the black side of the board. She picks up the white pawn on B2 and moves it one square forward.

‘You have played chess before, I presume?’ I look from her to the board, confused.

‘Yes, but I have something important to tell you. My father...’, I try again.

‘Move a piece Celeste,’ she interrupts me again. I look at the board and move the pawn on H7.

‘Who taught you to play chess?’ she asks as she moves her pawn to A2. I move my pawn to A7.

‘My father,’ I reply. When I was young, my father explained his whole technique to me. We did it a lot in my younger years and it’s something I missed when I became a parent. She moves her pawn from D2 to D3. She just nods at my answer.

A few moves go by and the reason I am playing chess with the elf queen has completely slipped my mind. I haven’t dared mention my nose and for now I’ll postpone it until after the game.

‘You play aggressively,’ remarks Nalu. I’m doing well so far. If you count the pieces on the board I am ahead. My father’s technique has always worked so this is no exception. I answer her observation with a nod of approval and move my horse. We move a few pieces in silence. Slowly I begin to lose more and more pieces. I look at the board in confusion and am surprised to see that I am falling further and further behind.

‘You move your king more than your queen,’ is Nalu’s new observation.

‘The king is more important than the queen,’ I reply, moving a pawn backwards. My move makes no sense. With Nalu’s next move, I lose that pawn.

‘It’s not the king that makes the game but the queen.’ I look at her, confused. My father always told me that the king is your most important piece that should always be in motion. The queen was never an important piece.

‘Without the king you lose the game. The queen is nothing without the king,’ I defend my strategy. Nalu gets a smile on her lips as she dismounts from my horse.

‘True. You’re just overlooking an important detail. It is not the king who has the most aggressive and strategic moves. It is the queen who can make the biggest and most important moves. The king is nothing without his queen.’ I sit back in my chair and realise that this conversation is no longer just about chess.

‘The queen has to listen to the king, he makes the rules,’ I say. Nalu starts laughing.

‘The queen has the power to play the king, to make him make moves that were unexpected even for him. The queen only needs to know the art of the game or how to control the entire board. The king then becomes just one of many pieces on a full board.’ With these words she put her queen in front of my king.

‘Checkmate.’