The Well of Mimir

This week’s story was inspired by this homemade chess set some friends pointed me towards, though it took a year to find an end to the story.

They were part of a game — a strange variant of chess discovered on a secret and disturbing corner of the world-wide web — played with friends who were as repulsed and fascinated with the strange forms upon the board as I had been when I had decided upon its purchase.

I kept them under a glass case, carefully locked away every night, the strange pewter figures sprawled across a plain of unsteady blocks of black-and-white abutted by red and nameless colors that seemed to shift position when one wasn’t looking.

Read the rest of this entry »