T he Dude disappears into a storm of snow, as the wind begins to swirl all around me. It’s a sudden and extreme change in the weather as if unseen forces in the universe want to prevent me from reading the note.
I duck on all fours and clamp the note, trying to read it under the safety of my orange hood, still faintly hearing the Pillar’s pain. There is hardly anything I can do about it now, but I wish the wind would weaken the giant’s punches.
Underneath the protective hood, I begin reading the note. There are two separate parts, actually, and even under the hood, they are still hard to read in any detail.
The first note is written in old English. It almost has the tone of fairy tales or formal old English letters.
Skimming through, it talks about an eternal war between black and white. The black calling themselves Black Chess; the white, the Inklings. The note mentions it as a prediction, since at the time of writing—probably a long, long time ago—the two forces had no names.
The two forces are said to originate in Elfland, which a man by the name of Lewis Carroll may change into Wonderland. The forces have no boundaries. They will kill and fight for as long it takes until they find the Six Impossible Keys.
The wind throws me off balance. I tense my knees and then fall on my stomach, waiting for it to leave me alone. Even flattened on the ground I arch my back a little and keep reading using the weak light of my phone.
The note later mentions the Six Impossible Keys are used to unlock something, but not a door, nor is it a box. It unlocks the one thing no man can unlock—whatever that means.
But then it gets weirder—or clearer; I am not sure. The note talks about the Six Impossible Keys being useless without the Looking Glass.
This tells of the Looking Glass again but fails to mention why it’s important—unless it’s simply a mirror and I am reading too much into things.
Another howl of wind attacks me. I can still hear the Pillar struggling with the giant in the distance.
I bite the second note, clinging to it with my teeth, as I am about to finish reading the first one.
Only two paragraphs left.
The next sentences talk about a crucial point in the journey to unlock the Six Keys. One milestone is when a third force, neither black nor white, threatens to end the world before the Wonderland Wars begin. That one is called the Chessmaster, who is almost invincible. He is a monster of pain, created by accident, out of an unholy spell used by two irresponsible Wonderlanders.
I shrug, reading this, trying to put two and two together, but nothing comes to mind. It’s all too vague to comprehend, still.
Only the last two sentences show me what’s in store. The first explains that the Chessmaster needs to find a “missing piece”—I assume it’s the chess pieces we’re collecting now—to protect himself.
Protect himself? The Chessmaster is doing all this to protect himself? How can that be? Protect himself from what?
The revelation comes as a shock in the last sentence.
The Chessmaster desperately needs the chess piece of a knight, made from Lewis Carroll’s bone, so he can play the last chess game in mankind’s history. A game that will either protect him from a great evil or initiate the apocalypse.
I am at a loss for words, hardly imagining what kind of chess game the note means. I can accept the idea of a final chess game that will end the world—in a most Wonderlastic nonsensical way, of course. But what does the Chessmaster want to protect himself from?
Between the terrible wind kicking at my arched back and the Pillar’s struggles below, I part my teeth and let the second note fall into my hands. This one tells the story of who the Chessmaster really is.