"The ears of the mind.
When you remember or think of a sound so distinctly that you can actually 'hear' it in your mind."
"The eyes of the mind.
When you visualize something so clearly you can actually 'see' it within your mind."
Concepts by: Moses the Madman.
*
Kakaroth
The board is a rectangular square with 16 blocks on one column and 14 rows on the other. The design on each square block such that a triangle within the board funnels the pieces towards the middle with each ksuccessive movie before each player can leave his/her territory.
The design is curved into a strange wooden material that is deceptive to the eye depending from where you look at it from. From the top the board seems flat like any chess board would. Only with a triangle centered at its middle that separates the board into four equal triangles.
From the side the 3 dimensional nature of the board is visible as stairs that the pieces rest on. Getting lower the closer to the middle the pieces get.
Once a piece gets to the middle it can go in any one of three routes. Two of these routes can be defended by the opponent in his next move at all times if he so chooses. The 12 pieces of each player used to their maximum capacity.
I move the mundane forward to cover for the coming attack, they being the most immediately disposable pieces at this point in the game. I use them to delay my opponents soarers from reaching my territory on the board.
The soarers are the fasted moving pieces on the board and the ones with the most range. My opponent, Bellatrix, moves his ace to counter my counter.
The point of the game is fluid, changing every twenty moves in a clairvoyant sequence designed to for-shadow how actual events would proceed.
From capture your opponents king, to destroy his castles. A way of playing only possible through the use of the spirit summoning circle designed into the board and enchanted to activate as a game begins.
Arthur suddenly appears and moves forward to my left as though out of nowhere to bend and whisper into my ear.
"It is time." Is all he says and steps back as I open my third eye for the first time in an age.
An actual physical eye on my forehead glows and dims, opening slowly. Bellatrix's face twitches a few times and he frowns slightly but otherwise stays relaxed before me watching everything unfolding.
Our little sister Orionis clapping and bouncing up and down as though watching a great show. Ori is the only one of my younger half sibling I allow down here. None of my nieces and nephews have ever even met me. Well that's not technically true but my nephew Taurus only ever visits me in his dreams, or my dreams, whichever.
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Kakaroth, the primordial son/daughter of the emperor of Celestia. The androgynous child the emperor conceived over 400 years ago with what he thought was a normal woman. A woman who spent two months in his harem warming his bed and the bed of the other women that wanted her within the clutch.
A woman that was a master of dimensional travel and could walk through dimensional space as any other person walks from room to room.
She returned to the Andromeda from such a trip one day carrying a seemingly four year old child in a bundle after having been gone only two days. A child that was clearly the emperors for all Archmages and Imperiums of his power know their spawn when they see it.
It was while gazing at the daughter/son that was passed to him and he used soul detection that he began to get an inkling of his sexual partner's true form. On the child he saw a form he never hopes to see again this side of the grave.
A form infamous for its devastating wonder. A form for which the famous poem was written:
To gaze upon her is to see the stars in their entirety,
To gaze upon her is to know yourself fully,
To gaze upon her is to see The Wild hunt,
To haze upon her beauty is to break your mind.
The words of the poem almost came unbidden to him as he raised his eyes to look at the pleasant visage of his new child's mother. He knew immediately she is the creature described in the poem and many other legends of a time long gone.
The mother of Echidna, mother of monsters. The mother of the Medusa people of the naga race, the snake humanoids. Said to be older than the planet they are standing on, but already her name was going into myth, and from myths would soon be lost from the memory of the short lived.
Andromeda look back at the child and used all his skills to look closely at his child, his creature. And he saw that this child had seen the passage of eons in the spiritual realm without a physical body. And from the moment it descended into the mortal realm it was clothed in mortal flesh for the first time in its life.
The flesh of a four year old child for some reason. The emperor saw this and knew that his child was much much older than he himself was, or at least his spirit and soul were.
From that moment onwards the child grew like any other child within the menagerie of children of the emperor. He/she was normal, or at least as normal as any mortal child of Emperor Andromeda Draconis Orion ever is.
His/her only strange point being his/her fluid gender. Which was mostly female through the early years of childhood but became male for a few years when he left the empire, and became female for many years after.
Now that child stands slowly as his third eye opens, literary opens in both a physical and spiritual way. As his eye opens so does an inner part of himself he has since being gazed upon by his father kept dormant. Now it awakens, the primordial part of him that has absolutely nothing in common with humanity.
The thing that is known as Arthur that acts as the royal chamberlain is also a primordial being. Primordials, the things before things were born into the universe. But what is now Arthur is mostly harmless.
Like a court jester kept by some of the kings within the empire, it cannot be barred from entering any place the king could enter, and it can get away with mocking anyone the king could mock. Even when the king is outwardly stoic, his mood could be gazed at by glancing at the mood of the ever expressive jester.
Arthur, the primordial creature smiles as things start to get exciting.