Your move
(( ref: http://asherrean.tumblr.com/post/142808470418/piano-man by @mewkeere ))
Asherrean arrived home disheveled but whole. He sat before a chessboard in the loft he rented.
A solitary pawn plucked from before it’s mistress. The piece was held in a hand which had blood caked under the nails. This was a thing, he noted, that had not happened in some years. The grey haired man reflected on the night as his hands busied themselves with passing pawn back and forth.
A gig at the Broken Heart’s club down in the city. The trek into the backroom up the stairs.
“We didn’t just hire you for your music Asherrean”
A large man bleeding out on the table. So much blood…. so much wasted time.
They had tried. Oh, how they had tried. The gauze and towels thrown about the room, once pure, now sanguine; These were testament to their trials.
Bullet wounds are nasty things. There is no such thing as a ‘safe’ gun round, despite what the stories say. ‘Nothing vital has been hit’ was said. Yet still, three holes had bored through the man.
He had barked orders at those he did not know. Large men. Dangerous men. Those with an all too earthy scent about them. They balked, but they complied. The more battered of the two taking charge of the other; the one with a smith’s arms.
In the eventual still of the room, once the others had gone, he has called on his arts. Magics of a time he’d distanced himself from.
A subtle art compared to the sounds of the club below. Blueish white light suffused the room. The words he had chanted were an ironic soft staccato thing compared to the backdrop of such a lively and raucous swing piece echoing up the stairs.
Flesh was forced to knit together. Bone once cracked made to bind together once more. There was no gentle mothers touch in Asherrean’s work; no care to stifle the pain. With how the vessel he worked on jerked and twitched under his ministrations, it was just as well he was unconscious this evening.
The others returned as the body’s torso was being wrapped in gauze and bandage. He could not recall where he procured the linen from. It was cleaner than anything else in that place. Asherrean ignored them and their banter… or was it yelling as they set up their retrieved IV to replenish their comrade’s blood. He hadn’t a mind for it then and could not recall now.
Asherrean had left as the subject of his night’s work awoke with a broken scream. The others had been too tied up in their comrade to notice his passing.
A phrase had flashed through his mind as he left the club.
“We didn’t just hire you for your music Asherrean”
They had known. He had not spoken or practiced the art in at least six years. He had tried to leave that part of himself behind. But they had known.
Someone remembered and they knew.
It gave him pause as he made his escape. Pause enough to leave a message in the form of a ‘bill’ with the doorman.
Asherrean set the piece down as memory ran its course. The written bill, it’s meaning and message though cryptic still fresh in his mind.
“Queen’s pawn to Queen’s pawn four. ~ Koth”
Grey haired man looked at the board, wondering if it would be answered and how. The corner of his mouth tugged upwards at this thought and another. The songstress would be home soon. He wondered, as well, what she would make of the night’s events.
