Rocky walls completely surround a circular open space. The sky is splotchy and dark and the ground is smooth and flat, covered in uniform green grass. A thick, wide bridge cuts through the diameter. Each end of the bridge connects into a tunnel that was bored through the rock. The railing of the bridge only reaches up to my knee and is made of simple blocks.

Above the middle of the bridge is a circular platform with a similar railing going around it. It is supported by four legs that connect to the bridge.

On this raised platform, twelve chess pawns are etched into the ground at similar intervals to a clock and all face the center. The rest of the platform is covered in a waist high hedge maze.

Each pawn is coloured to represent an element of nature such as water and fire. Each element has a power limit and is used to power a barrier that encapsulates the area. About half of the elements sit at a constant sixty to one hundred percent usage. One such element, Flame, is used to keep the freezing winter outside, Gaia is used to dig tunnels to the outside and so on.

Each element also corresponds to and is utilised by a person. Every one of us is biologically immortal and physically more capable than the average human. I represent Flame and my looks reflect this. I am a girl dressed in red clothes and armour inspired by ancient Greece, my head is also adorned by a flaming laurel wreath and flames trail my every move.

Nine of us stand atop our respective pawns, the others stay empty. They stay empty since there is no one to represent them, but one. The pawn for Umbra should have someone standing there but unfortunately they have run off for reasons none of us know. We gathered here to search for them. The person that embodies Umbra is a girl, her body is entirely silhouetted in almost perfect blackness so we don't have a good idea of what she actually looks like. Only her body is silhouetted and her clothes and other possessions are normal.

We are paired up with each other, one going in a group of three, and go our separate ways to search for the Umbra pawn. We are paired up by the pawns themselves, highlighted lines run across the ground and connect to the person we will be working with. I wish to be paired with the girl that represents Gale but I am instead paired with Frost. Both Gale and Frost dress similarly, stand next to each other and have very similar personalities. They dress in black and white fancy clothing with light blue highlights and stand three and four pawns to my left.

…

I walk through the many crisscrossing bridges with Frost to my right, keeping pace with each other. A thin fog obscures us from seeing anything more than twenty metres around us. During our entire walk I keep my flames burning to keep me warm and leave footprints scorched into the ground as a breadcrumb trail back to our home. Frost is completely unaffected by the cold.

We each carry a weapon to defend ourselves from anything, like monsters, that may try to kill us. Frost carries a lance and circular shield and I wield nothing, I instead use my flames to make weapons similar to sunlight javelins.

After some time searching we come across a blanket crumpled against the blocky railing. The blanket has some pure black stains on it and black spherical particles float around. We know we are getting close and continue further in.

…

Long before we started searching for Umbra, long before I was the Flame pawn, I was new. I knew nothing about anything and had only recently encountered the others. After first being found I was kept in a cell. The room was circular with an extruded part opposite the entrance, both sides had a single long cell built into them.

Just above the entrance door hung a clock and in the small extruded part sat Frost on a beanbag, on the other side outside the cell Gale leaned against the bars. They had a wooden bowl that they would use to hand me food but I would not eat it. I would not eat anything they would hand me whether it be made of meat or plant unless it was big in size.

After a few years I was still sitting in the cell and they were still trying to convince me to eat things of reasonable size. I didn't have a good grasp of the language but I had learned enough to interpret them. They didn't properly teach me the language or explain the meaning of words but they did make an effort to talk more around me so I could pick up on it.

At one point Frost decided it was time to build up my venom resistance and try to make me eat normal sized foods at the same time. He took the skull of a giant snake, placed it in the bowl, and crushed it with his foot. The skull turned into a bright green venomous liquid after a few stomps and then he poured it over a cornucopia of fruit before handing it to me to eat.

They would also try to teach me mathematics, specifically this time multiplication. They had a schedule and would wait for the clock to start ringing to start the lesson. Frost was overly excited for these lessons. He yelled ‘ring ring, ring ring!.’ just before the clock started ringing and cheered when it did.

After the ringing stopped he took out approximately a dozen big eggs, all had been cracked in half and emptied. He then took five slightly smaller eggs that were still intact and placed them inside the empty cracked ones.

For some reason I had found the image of an egg inside another egg absolutely hilarious and started giggling. I found giggling at something so stupid funny as well and started laughing. I laughed longer than really was necessary and both Frost and Gale found my laugh contagious so they started laughing as well.