The chess world did not simply react—it reeled.
For days after Alexei's tournament debut of the newly-forged forbidden variation, the community buzzed with a feverish energy. Grandmasters, analysts, streamers, and coaches flooded online forums and television panels, trying to make sense of what they had just witnessed.
"Brilliance or madness?" one commentator asked during a post-game analysis. "Is this the resurrection of Tal's ghost?" another whispered, voice half-joking, half-unnerved. "He played like he was possessed," said the grandmaster who'd suffered the stunning loss. "Like the pieces were telling him what to do."
Clips of the game went viral—Alexei calmly executing sacrifice after sacrifice in a sequence so bizarre and counterintuitive that even advanced engines took minutes to understand the depth. The line had been considered unplayable. A relic. A cursed remnant of Tal's aggressive style that had long been buried in notebooks and stories. Until now.
It was raining outside. Thunder rolled in distant sheets as Alexei sat at his desk, staring at the board. The same board—the one from the antique shop. The one that started everything.
The lamp above cast soft golden light on the chess pieces. But tonight, they felt different. Lighter. As though they, too, had noticed the shift.
He had won the tournament.
But he hadn't felt peace.
The forbidden line now had a pulse. And like blood through veins, it was flowing through the games of others. Young players began experimenting with it in online blitz. Analysts tried to decode it, to tame it. Coaches warned against it, claiming it was unsound, a trap. But the results were undeniable. Those who embraced it—some flourished, others fell apart.
What unsettled Alexei most wasn't the success or even the backlash. It was the way the line seemed… to evolve. Almost as if it were alive. The moment he'd played it publicly, it took on a will of its own.
And sometimes… it fought back.
Three days after the tournament, he was invited to a closed-door roundtable with several elite Russian coaches and titled players. He was the youngest in the room by far. The atmosphere was tense.
"You understand what you've done?" a stern-faced IM asked.
"I played a line," Alexei said, tone guarded.
"No. You resurrected something dangerous. That line—Tal abandoned it. Not because it didn't work, but because it cost him."
Alexei's hands clenched under the table. "Cost him what?"
"Everything."
They showed him old records, notes, and scribbled variations—some matching what he had played. Others diverging into bizarre, almost supernatural ideas. One page had a scrawled warning in faded ink:
"To see it clearly, one must lose sight of sanity."
He felt his throat dry.
That night, the shadow returned.
Alexei had been lying on his bed, chessboard beside him, the position from his last game replayed over and over in his mind. He sensed the chill before he saw the flicker in the room's corner. Darkness gathered, condensed like breath on glass, and the shadow figure emerged—calm, imposing, familiar.
"You were watching," Alexei said without fear.
The figure nodded. "You opened the door. Now the echoes will follow."
Alexei swallowed. "Was it wrong?"
The figure didn't answer directly. "What you played was brilliance. But brilliance always draws shadows. Be ready."
"Why does this line scare people?"
A pause.
"Because it was never finished," the shadow said slowly. "Tal stopped not because he couldn't win with it—but because it threatened to unravel everything else. His style. His health. His grip on what was real and what was illusion."
Alexei looked down at the board. "But I'm seeing new paths. Variations even Tal didn't play."
"Then you've stepped deeper than he did."
He looked up. "Am I in danger?"
The figure smiled faintly. "You're in history."
Over the next few weeks, the ripples intensified. A rising French prodigy attempted the variation and lost in seventeen moves. A Ukrainian master tried it and broke into tears after the match. An American YouTuber streamed it live and rage-quit halfway, declaring it "a game for madmen."
Meanwhile, Alexei stayed quiet. Focused. The line whispered to him at night. It showed him ideas, sacrifices, traps within traps. It wasn't just a sequence of moves anymore—it was a philosophy. An entity that challenged logic itself.
Even Tal's notes began to make sense. Scribbles that once seemed cryptic now shone like signposts.
And yet…
Doubt clawed at him.
What if he was just playing into madness?
At a quiet café near his home, a journalist approached him. Her name was Lera. Mid-twenties, with sharp eyes and a soft voice. She'd written for a chess magazine, mostly covering forgotten legends.
"I want to do a piece on the variation," she said. "The Forbidden Line. You've made it famous again."
Alexei hesitated. "It's not just a line. It's… something else."
She smiled. "You sound like Tal."
That was the first time he didn't know whether it was a compliment or a warning.
Back home, he sat before the board again. The forbidden variation, in all its beauty and chaos, stared back.
He whispered, "Is this really what you wanted, Tal?"
The board didn't answer. But in the silence, a move occurred to him—deep in the line, far beyond what had been played.
He made it.
Another. Then another.
The line was shifting again.
And somewhere in the dark corner of the room, the shadow moved… watching, waiting.
To Be Continued...(Next Chapter)