One Move From Gone

“I was asleep. It’s one in the morning.”
“I know. I need you to let me in.”
Wren was fine. Wren’s apartment was fine. Mara sat on her sister’s couch and explained everything. Wren listened with the particular expression she reserved for Mara’s worst anxiety spirals — careful, slightly worried, trying not to dismiss.
“Someone is messing with you,” Wren said. “A coworker? Someone from the building?”
“Maybe.”
“Stay here tonight. You can take the couch.”
Mara almost said yes. Then she thought about the board. About her piece already moved by someone else. About the six other names she hadn’t recognized.
She drove back to her building at two in the morning.
The basement was exactly as she had left it. Her piece sat on the red circle. The other pieces had not moved. She exhaled.
Then she looked at the piece in the far corner again. Wren’s piece.
It was no longer on the street near the Hawthorne Bridge. It had moved four squares. Toward the edge of the board. Toward a square marked with a small black X she had not noticed before.
Mara reached out to move Wren’s piece back. The notecard had said: do not move any other piece. But the notecard had also said the consequence was real, and Wren’s piece was moving on its own, and Wren was asleep across the river, and none of this made sense unless —
Unless someone was playing this game seriously. Unless the board was not a prop but a map. Unless moving the pieces was not symbolic but instructional.
She did not touch Wren’s piece.
Instead, she called Wren again. Wren answered this time, still annoyed, still half-asleep. “Mara, I’m fine.”
“Lock your door. Lock your windows. Don’t open either until morning.”
A pause. “You’re scaring me.”
“Good. Do it.”
Mara sat on the cold basement floor and watched the board until dawn began to grey the single window near the ceiling. The other pieces did not move again. Wren’s piece stayed where it was, four squares from the black X.
At six-fifteen, a new notecard appeared under the basement door. She did not see a hand slide it. She only heard the faint whisper of paper on concrete and turned to find it there.
It read: “Round One complete. You followed most of the rules. The consequence for the unauthorized move has been noted. Round Two begins when you least expect it.”
Mara read it twice. Then she looked at the board one final time.
Her piece was no longer on the red circle. It had been moved back to her block. Back to the start.
And the piece labeled WREN was gone entirely.
She called her sister. Wren answered on the first ring, safe, confused, already making coffee.
But as Mara listened to her sister’s voice, she stared at the empty space on the board where Wren’s piece had been, and she understood something that the rules had never actually said: the game did not end when you reached the safe square. The game ended when someone decided it did.
And whoever that was, they were already choosing the pieces for Round Two.

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About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

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July 22, 2026

10min-stories