Chapter — Volant and the King Who Could Fly

Volant remembers the exact moment the board got bigger — not the board, but her sense of it.

She had been a short-range king on a small 8×8 board, moving one careful diagonal square at a time, forward or back. Then she crossed onto a 10×10 International board and was crowned there, and discovered she could fly — slide the entire open length of a diagonal in a single glide, swoop down on a far-off piece, and land anywhere on the empty squares beyond it. “The first time,” she says, “I moved from one corner nearly to the other in a single turn, and I actually laughed, because the board hadn’t changed size — but suddenly it felt like it fit in the palm of my hand. Range does that. It doesn’t just let you go farther. It makes the whole thing feel closer.”

Volant grew up feeling stuck — small town, small routines, the same short walk every day. She wasn’t unhappy, exactly, but her world was the size of what she could reach on foot. Then one summer she learned to ride far, really far, and the map of her life unfolded. Places that had been “too far to matter” were suddenly an afternoon away. Nothing about the towns changed. What changed was her reach, and reach reorganizes everything — what’s near, what’s possible, what’s worth wanting.

“That’s the flying king,” she says. “A short king and a flying king follow the same rule — move along the diagonal. It’s the same idea Kingsley teaches: cross to the far side, get crowned, gain the back direction. But how far you can go isn’t a small detail. Reach is the difference between a piece that guards one corner and a piece that guards the whole diagonal. Same rule. Completely different game.”

She came to the CrownTales academy after Draughtsmith, the master, brought her in specifically to teach that the variants aren’t just “bigger boards” — they’re different worlds. On her first day the master set up a 10×10 position and asked her to show what a flying king could do that a short king couldn’t. Volant looked at the board, found a distant enemy piece with a long open diagonal leading to it, and flew — capturing it from clear across the board and choosing, from several empty landing squares beyond it, the exact one that set up her next threat. “A short king would need four turns to get here,” she said. “I got here in one — and I got to choose where I stopped, which means I didn’t just capture, I repositioned.” The master, who wanted every student to feel the jump from local to global, said quietly, “You didn’t move farther. You started thinking about the whole board at once.”

In her workshop she teaches students that range demands new eyes. A girl came in having just learned the flying king and immediately overusing it — flying everywhere, losing pieces to careless long swoops. Volant smiled with recognition. “You just got wings,” she said, “and now you want to fly on every turn. I did too.” She reset the board. “But here’s the thing reach teaches you the hard way: the farther you can go, the farther you can overextend. A short king can only get into so much trouble — it’s never far from home. A flying king can strand itself clear across the board, alone, where the enemy can trap it.” She showed a long, greedy flight that ended with the king cornered. “Range is power, but power without care is just a longer way to lose. Before you fly, ask not only ‘what can I reach?’ but ‘where will I land, and can I get home?’”

The girl practiced flying with restraint — choosing landing squares that kept her king connected to her other pieces — and learned that the wings were only worth having if she also learned when not to use them.

Later the girl asked the question. “So is the flying king just… better? Should I always want the bigger board?”

Volant considered it seriously. “Better isn’t the right word,” she said. “Different. On the small board, the game is about tight, careful fights — every square is close, every piece is in the neighborhood. On the big board, it’s about distance and vision — you have to see the whole diagonal, plan across the entire board, think globally.” She tapped the 10×10 board fondly. “Neither one is the ‘real’ game. They’re two true games that share a root — the same diagonal step, the same crowning. Learning the flying king didn’t make me better than the short king I used to be. It made me fluent in a bigger world. And the wonderful part is that once you’ve felt the long reach, you go back to the small board and see it differently too — because now you know the same rule can live at two completely different scales.” She smiled. “The rule stays. The world grows. That’s the whole magic of a variant.”

The girl went home and, that night, thought about how the same game she’d played her whole life had a version where a king could fly, and how many other familiar things might have a bigger board somewhere she just hadn’t crossed onto yet.