The following poem was found in the pocket of noted programmer and chess master, Hex. He was found dead in a bohemian junkheap along with an assortment of homeless people, stray dogs, and one inexplicable parrot.
It can be found at the Museum of Science and Technology in Alba City.
Checkmate
Pawn takes Rook
And the game ended.
King to D1
Even the lowest of servants
Can end the world.
Queen takes Queen
Age was the detriment to youth
Youth was cleverer than age
Youth won the game.
Queen to G6
The Queen betrayed him in the end.
He was too foolish to see all the angles and schemes.
He didn’t even see the revolution coming
Until it was too late.
Bishop to A4
She had fallen in love with the enemy.
They eloped to a new land beyond the cruelty of the cage.
The King was trapped
But he couldn’t see the bars
Until they ate him whole.
Rook takes Knight
There are times when religion is the detriment of life.
It tells people who to fight, who to kill,
Who to love.
It can blind us to the world around us for the sole purpose of giving the cruel and cowardly power.
But there is a rose inside all the cruelty and hatred.
We can pluck it out without killing it.
Knight takes Knight
Anyone can fight against the powerful.
To do so successfully requires, among other things, a belief in one’s self.
A willingness to listen to those the systems of cruelty
Have told you it’s wrong to love.
The powerful have rarely earned their power, often given it by birth.
Overthrowing such power is quite difficult,
But not impossible.
Pawn to C8
The story of war is that of soldiers being told to kill other soldiers.
Sometimes, those who aren’t soldiers are forced to kill soldiers
Because those who speak for God told them to
Because those with power said it was the right thing to do
Because love made them blind in their devotion.
Those in power rarely fight.
More often than not, you will die
For their pointless, bitter war
Queen to B1
Movement in life is quite difficult.
At every corner, there’s someone waiting to kill you
Even those who think single mindedly and straightforwardly can do it.
The stories we tell our children teach them as much.
Power is for the powerful.
They’re allowed to love those we cannot
Because they say they can.
It takes critical thinking to out maneuver their system,
But, ultimately, it’s worth it in the end.
Bishop to D4
The base assumption of chess is that, should the monarchy fall, all would descend into chaos.
The pawns would simply wander aimlessly without a sense of direction,
The knights would kill each other indiscriminately,
Even slaughter and be slaughtered by those they claim to protect.
Not even faith would be enough to keep the world at peace.
But that’s not true. That’s not true at all.
The game of monarchy is one of constant backstabbing and betrayal
One that ultimately has no point other than keeping the monarchs in power.
When freed from the base assumption and allowed to live their lives,
Even a pawn can enact material social progress.
Pawn to A4
Life is a series of movements on a chess board without any players.
You move through the motions, day in, day out.
You are told that the game is kill or be killed.
That to be strong is the best way to approach any given situation
Because some higher power, somewhere, somehow
Is in complete control.
But that’s a load of bupkis. The powerful are just as in control as you are
Just as bound to the rules of the game, even as they cheat at it (for it is their role to cheat and they love it so), as you are
It’s funny, the only winning move in the game of life
Is to smash the board.
The game was complex and strange.
It started when a servant walked into a room she wasn’t allowed into. It wasn’t intentional, mind you. The room was typically open to the public, even to someone as lowly as her.
But that was the day the church was baptizing the new king. There was to be complete privacy, lest their god be angered by the infidelity. So they claimed.
In truth, the Queen wanted control of the kingdom for a very long time. She saw this as the perfect moment to strike, to escape from a loveless marriage and rule the kingdom the way it ought to be ruled.
Any witnesses to what would transpire would need to be silenced. Which is why, quite unfortunately, the servant entered the room. She saw all that they were doing, all they had done. The king was dead. And there was but one loose end to tie.
The Queen’s Knight tried to slay the servant, as many a knight has done. One could say part of the job of being a knight is silencing those who would speak poorly of those in power. Even those close to them.
But tragedy befell the knight as, in his attempts to kill the servant, he loosened a stone from the castle’s walls. The stone held a pillar, which held a roof. With the pillar loosened, the roof shattered, if only slightly. It was enough to smother him.
The bishop tried to escape from the room, destroying itself in the wake of a pointless and cruel power grab. So the story goes, he was able to escape. But then, stories have a tendency of lying about their truth. If only to keep the bishops in their place.
The Queen, likewise, tried to escape. The stories tend to confirm her failure to escape. She was crushed, quite unceremoniously, under the weight of her kingdom’s stones.
For in the end, the story is one with the moral: don’t let the ambitions of women have sway in the affairs of men, lest they destroy the kingdom. The queen may have power, but if not tempered by the cool head of the king, all will be lost.
It is a cruel and awful story. One that exists to control the narrative of the world in favor of kings. Indeed, the story expands to further cruelty, as all defenses of the monarchy do. For how else did the kingdom fall but for one servant to not know her place. Were she to have known where she was meant to be, to be where her masters wished her to be rather than in the place her stupid mind thought she was meant to be, the kingdom would still be standing.
Of course, as with all stories, there are always escape hatches, even unintentional ones. For the stories, the ones not told in the halls of church and state, offer a different moral, a different lesson. The focus is place, in their telling’s, on the servant, not the monarch. The servant escapes from the collapse of the world. The intentions were clear and understandable. She planned to be in the wrong place, baited the knight to strike at that spot, and slew the vicious monarch. She was mistreated by those in power, those who saw her as disposable. So she played the game her way, and down, down, down the monarchy fell.
Checkmate…
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