30. Continuo

continuō ~āre ~āuī ~ātum, tr.

1. to join, connect

2. to continue, persist

there was a chessboard in the Lithroi manse.

It sat on a small whitewood table by the fireplace in the main sitting room. Synali stared at it as she achingly pulled on her rider’s suit for the second day of training. She wasn’t sure what the pieces meant. They looked intricate and important—except the ugly little pieces in the front—but she never learned chess. She used to see a handful of old men playing it in hawker alley on her way to church, backs bent over the tin boards and half-rusted cybernetic arms moving the pieces in quiet contemplation. But like all good things in Low Ward, it didn’t last. The guards broke it up under the guise of a “dust raid,” and she never saw them again.

Dravik’s board was not made of tin—it was made of silver. Silver and lapis lazuli.

“White moves first,” Dravik said, walking up from behind her. She jumped, scattering the pieces to the floor. He bent to one knee—his bad knee—and began to pick up her mess. She knelt, too, putting each piece back on the board. Her hand froze around one of the plain pieces.

“Why does this one look so mundane?”

“It’s really quite powerful.”

“How powerful can it be when there’s so many of them? There’s only one queen on each side. Two horses.”

“Knights,” he corrected. “The horses are called knights. And you’d do well to give more respect to the pawn.”

She scoffed. “Give me one good reason, then.”

He carefully assembled the pieces she’d put on the board, two lines on each side facing each other in rigid formation. His finger lingered on the last black pawn as he looked up at her with those hidden eyes of steel.

“The pawn is the only piece that refuses to move backward.”