Instead of a thousand possibilities

A chess king piece fell to the ground. Ray Hall bent down, picked it up, and placed it back on the board sitting on the table.

Ray was eight years old, and his mother was teaching him how to play chess. He was pretty upset that he wasn't very good at it, but every day after school, he and his mom would sit down for at least two games together.

In less than a year, Ray beat her for the first time. He worried she might be sad about it — the same way he had felt when he thought he'd never learn — but he was wrong. His mother smiled brightly, full of pride.

"I'm so happy you've learned," she said.

Ray looked at her and said, "Me too, Mom."

Over the next days, Ray began teaching his classmates at school how to play chess. He never gave up his games with his mom — in fact, he wanted to keep getting better.

Ray became so obsessed with chess that sometimes it felt like the whole world was one giant chessboard, where hope and fear took turns, and sometimes you won, but sometimes you lost.

It wasn’t enough for him to master just one kind of chess — there were over two thousand chess variants, and Ray wanted to learn them all.

He started with Spell Chess, which he played with his mother on their phones. At school, he played Four-Player Chess with friends, and with the more advanced players, he tried chaturaji — teaching them as he went.

At home, Ray and his mom explored games like Amazon Jungle, Duck Chess, Chess with Checkers, Atomic Chess, Horde Chess, No Castling, and many others.

By the time Ray was sixteen, he had mastered over two hundred chess variants. He traveled around the world, competing in tournaments, while his mother beamed with pride.

He never forgot the game where he first beat her — no matter how many victories came later — and he never forgot his mother either.

When Ray was thirty-four and competing in a Chaturanga tournament in India, he received a phone call. It was deeply unsettling.

He couldn't believe it — doctors had found a tumor in his mother's brain. It was already far too late. Complications had set in quickly, and she passed away.

Ray returned home to America, where his mother's body awaited burial. At her funeral, he gave a short but heartbreaking eulogy — not because he had little to say, but because it was hard to speak through the tears.

When he got home, he took the chessboard they used to play on out of his safe. He laid it on the table and whispered,

"This is your chessboard. Now you'll be here with me more than you would if I left it locked away."

The chessboard sat untouched on the table for some time.

After a few months, Ray slowly began to heal — but the board remained.

One day, as he passed by, he accidentally knocked the king piece off the table. It rolled across the floor and disappeared into a small hole in the wall — a mouse hole.

"My most precious memory of Mom!" Ray cried out, panicking. He rushed to the wall, but the hole was too small to even fit his hand through.

The king meant so much to him that he was willing to tear the whole house apart if he had to.

He grabbed a hammer and smashed a hole in the wall. Reaching inside, he felt around until he found the chess king and gently pulled it out.

But then the floor beneath him gave way — the wall crumbled, and Ray tumbled inside.

It turned out the wall was built like a hollow block.

Through the remaining solid part of the wall, Ray noticed something strange — blue and golden sunlight was shining through.

It was odd, because it was nighttime outside — the moonlight the only thing illuminating the yard — and on the other side of the wall was just the pantry, a windowless room that should have been pitch dark.

Maybe someone was in there with a weird kind of lamp?

Ray climbed back out, placed the chess king carefully back onto the board, grabbed the hammer again, and headed toward the pantry.

He shouted, "Whoever's in there better come out now!"

No one answered.

Ray called again, "Alright, you had your chance to escape. Now it's too late!"

He grabbed the doorknob and slowly turned it, bracing himself for whoever might be on the other side.

But there was no one there. Total darkness.

He figured maybe the intruder had extinguished the light and was hiding.

Ray switched on the pantry light — and a couple of mice squeaked and scurried past his feet.

No people. Just mice.

There was only one place left to hide: a box under the shelf where Ray kept bags of dried fruit.

He opened it — nothing.

While he was at it, he grabbed a bag of dried blueberries and left the pantry, still puzzled.

Where had that mysterious light come from?

Ray set down the hammer and walked past the chessboard.

Another mouse darted by, but this time it was even creepier. The mouse leapt onto the table, ran across the chessboard, and knocked over a bishop and a knight.

Ray picked up the pieces and straightened the board again.

The mouse ran into the kitchen, scrambled across the counter toward a slice of salami, and began nibbling.

Disgusted, Ray chased it out the door and tossed the half-eaten salami in the trash.

Again, he straightened the chessboard.

And again — he heard something.

Not a mouse this time.

It came from the wall.

From the place where the strange light had shone through.

Ray felt sure he needed to check it out.

But he was more afraid now than when he thought it was just an intruder's lantern.

Now, he had the awful sense that he might find death itself waiting for him.

He grabbed the hammer once more, crawled into the hollow part of the wall, and aimed to break through the opposite side.

As he swung the hammer back, a chilling shadow entered the house — a giant silhouette of a chess king — and the room flooded with brilliant golden-blue light.

Lightning seemed to flash around him, but Ray completed the swing.

He broke through.

The light poured into the house, intense and blinding.

A fierce wind rushed in, nearly knocking the chess pieces off the table.

Ray stared ahead.

Beyond the wall was an entirely different world — a world where the sun burned golden and blue, and black gravel stretched in jagged cliffs just beyond the broken wall.

Driven by pure curiosity, Ray stepped out onto the rocky ground.

A strange magic seemed to hum through the air — like the spells from the Spell Chess variant he had played so often.

The wind scattered the gravel around his feet, and Ray realized he was standing in a world straight out of a fantasy story.

He walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down.

Below, thick clouds blanketed the ground, and through them, he could barely make out a giant chess king statue, from which bright golden lava poured — burning everything in its path.

The sight was both breathtaking and terrifying.

Even with his lifelong love of chess, Ray knew this was a world to fear.

It was time to leave.

But when he turned around — the way back was gone.

No wall, no hole, no doorway.

The wall had acted like a portal — and once he crossed through, it had vanished.

Ray was stranded, utterly alone.

In a strange world he didn’t understand.

If he wanted to survive — if he wanted to find his way home — he would have to figure this world out.

He thought about climbing down the cliff, but it looked impossible — though maybe he could jump.

The question was: what would he find down there?

Whatever it was, one thing was certain — danger waited at every turn.

A FEW WORDS FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear readers

You may have noticed that, unlike the short story Dragon Wasteland, there are no supplementary chess-related details about the story here. This is also tied to the fact that the story remains open-ended. Additional chess-related information will appear only at the end of the story, along with a more detailed supplementary section—a few words from the author.  

However, it is possible that this information may be missing at the end of the story. In that case, I would consider creating a separate supplementary article. I apologize, but I haven’t made a decision yet.  

Oh, and one more thing — just like with the story Dragon Wasteland, the English translation here was done by artificial intelligence. I hope you won't judge me for that. If you're interested in reading the story in its original language (Czech), you can find it here as a PDF.

If you have any questions about the story or would like to provide feedback on it (even though the story hasn’t concluded yet), let me know in the comments.