Kaori Saejima -2021- 🎯 Must Try

Kaori Saejima.

Kaori was thirty-four. Once, she had been a child prodigy of the shogi circuit—the "Lioness of Kyushu," they called her after she defeated a reigning grandmaster at sixteen. But that was before the accident. Before the tremor in her left hand made it impossible to place a piece without knocking over three others. Before her mother’s funeral, which she watched through a hospital window, her jaw wired shut after a seizure sent her down a flight of concrete stairs. Kaori Saejima -2021-

The ghost countered.

As she stepped into the hallway, the light bulb above her door flickered and died. Kaori Saejima

And somewhere deep in her mind, on the immaculate 81 squares she had built to survive the silence, the silver general she had moved in her apartment that morning began to glow with a cold, impossible light. But that was before the accident

She folded the letter carefully, slid it back into the envelope, and tucked it into the folds of her gray cardigan. Then she rose, unsteady on legs that had forgotten stairs, and crossed to the window.

Kaori stepped through. The rain immediately soaked through her cardigan, but she did not shiver. Her mind was already arranging the pieces on the board of the library's foyer: marble floor (81 squares if you counted the tiles), a collapsed information desk (rook, immobilized), a staircase spiraling upward (lance, threatening).