I am but a pawn floating in a checkered pool. The night taunts me, and I can’t castle to safety. 

For, there it lurks, just beneath me, a menace with daring teeth and sickly eyes. It follows me, stalks me; there is no running. Not when my feet begin to sink, useless and floundering. 

I then begin my descent, my demise toward the lurking line. 

It’s a rebellious strike of charcoal on the pearly floor. Void of light, void of promise, there it lies, spewing faulty stories of malice. It can’t bring me any harm. Yet, it taunts as so.

It draws a candle before my eyes, flickering far too close. The flames lap up the air from my lungs. I remain hollow and withered, bare as the line itself.

Curling deceptively, the smoke tinges my senses. The dark—a harbinger of my fall and fateful descent into its forever-enrapturing hypnosis—surrounds, omnipresent. My eyes train, impervious to all else, on the cold presence before me. 

The light filters into shadows, and they’re all I can see—everywhere. All that is good dilutes and decomposes. A murky fade of dust falls about, in and around. The sun is clouded. The rainbow doesn’t show. The stars hide away. Nothing of jubilation meets my gaze. I am blind to every flake of elation.

And so, I stumble and bumble haphazardly in the dark as fear shivers through me. 

And so, I am evermore in the numbing trance of panic.

And so, I further shower sand into my eyes and darken my own vision.

I fall and I fall and I find myself at the end. The end of the shadows.

Not the end of the light, of ecstasy, of every fiber of good. There it exists, the end of the shadows. 

The line lies, sure and steady; the air is sweet and friendly beyond. The pieces fall into place. A mere pawn of my own game, I am at the cliff above the light. I can see at last, and the crown is bestowed upon me. I rise with this revelation, peering over what I couldn’t look up to see. 

I no longer need a castle. The night passes, and I am queen.