Kaori Saejima -2021- 📢

Kaori stepped through. The rain immediately soaked through her cardigan, but she did not shiver. Her mind was already arranging the pieces on the board of the library's foyer: marble floor (81 squares if you counted the tiles), a collapsed information desk (rook, immobilized), a staircase spiraling upward (lance, threatening).

As she stepped into the hallway, the light bulb above her door flickered and died.

Outside, a delivery scooter splashed through a puddle. The sound was a lance through her concentration. Kaori exhaled slowly, reset her internal clock, and opened her eyes. Kaori Saejima -2021-

She did not sit. Not immediately. She stood there, dripping rainwater onto the marble floor, her useless left hand hanging, her right hand trembling at her side. The board waited. The ghost waited.

"You came," the figure said. The voice was neither male nor female. It was old and young at once. Tired. Kaori stepped through

The gold general from 2014. Her abandoned pawn. It sat in the center of the board's edge, placed precisely on the 8th square of the first rank, like a marker on a grave.

She pulled on her coat. It was too large—her mother's, from a decade ago, the wool frayed at the cuffs. She did not own an umbrella. She did not own a phone that worked. As she stepped into the hallway, the light

—The Caretaker

"Sit, Kaori Saejima. Let's finish the game you started in 2014."

The old prefectural library stood at the edge of the abandoned tram line, a granite mausoleum of a building with gargoyles that had eroded into featureless blobs. The chains on the gate had been cut. Not recently—the rust on the fresh break was already orange—but cut nonetheless. The gate swung inward with a sigh.

"Did you?" The figure stepped forward, hat tilting back just enough to reveal a chin, a mouth that smiled without warmth. "Or did you simply forget that when a master plays alone for long enough, the ghost learns to play back?"