3-player chess on a symmetric 127-cell hex board. Three armies — Gold, Azure, Crimson — compete in a game that chess engines cannot solve.
A river has been dry for three years. No one knows why. If the fourth winter comes without water, no one survives to spring. In a three-sided hall that has not been used in twenty years, a sphere floats — older than language, older than the first eyes that ever saw it. When three strangers receive the same summons, they come. They sit. The sphere unfolds into a hexagonal board. You are one of the three. Over nine years you will play nine matches against two others you have never met — Morven the Aggressor, Ilion the Patient, Vara the Broker. Between matches, letters arrive. Some pieces fall and never write again. The drought deepens. The sphere cracks. Choose your seat. Choose your philosophy. Win, endure, or broker — each path leads to a different end, and every ending is final. The table will lose meaning. The only question is how.