The Last Move Counts

Her hands were steady as she crossed the room. She studied the board for a long time. The obsidian figures that had moved were all clustered near the center, surrounding the standing one. The remaining figures near the edges were untouched — still in the positions she had left them, or close to it.
She picked up the figure with its hands raised. The surrendering one.
She held it over the board for a moment, feeling the warmth of it, the strange pulse that seemed to move through it like a slow heartbeat.
Then she placed it not on the board, but off it entirely. She set it on the table beside the board, outside the spiral, outside the grid, outside the game.
The glow died instantly. The pressure in the room released like a held breath. Her clocks all restarted at the same moment, their ticking suddenly loud and ordinary and deeply comforting.
The unknown number sent one final message: INTERESTING CHOICE.
And then the contact disappeared from her phone entirely, as if it had never existed.
Nora wrapped the board back in its brown paper. She walked three blocks to a dumpster behind a restaurant and left it there without looking back.
She slept without dreaming that night, and the night after, and the night after that.
But sometimes, in the early hours before dawn, she would wake to the faint sound of something moving on a hard surface — a small, precise sound, like a carved figure crossing a wooden board one careful space at a time.
And she would lie there in the dark, wondering if she had actually won.
Or if the game had simply moved to a board she could no longer see.

0 likes

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

Full author profile

July 16, 2026

10min-stories