"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

A game of… Queens?

You might be familiar with the fact that in the original versions of chess — the Persian hatranj and the Indian chaturanga — the overpowered omnipotent Queen was respectively the ferz, the counsellor, and the mantri, the general. Go figure, you might think.
What you might be less familiar with is that originally all the queens we didn’t have in chess were poured into checkers.

It’s what we’re looking at today on my Patreon, as two of my main characters are playing this game back in 1522.

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