San Juan. Costa Blanca. The permitted kind — council-approved, safety distance marked, the sea doing its patient work ten metres away. Half the town is here. The other half is over the mountain, in the streets, where they still jump.

I stayed on the beach side. I am no jumper.

The Costa Blanca fire is burning low now. Around me people are writing wishes on paper and feeding them to the flames — meigas fóra, bad luck, old grief, whatever they need the year to stop carrying. The town over the mountain is still jumping. They will throw their crowns in the sea.

I watch the paper catch and think: she is not here.

The board keeps moving without her in the room. That was supposed to be a feature of the architecture. I built it that way on purpose.

I wonder, watching the last of someone’s wishes turn to ash, whether that was the correct move.

Dakhla. A bonfire on a strip of coast that belongs, depending on who you ask, to Morocco, to the Sahrawi, to the Atlantic wind. Forty people who had no business being in the same place at the same time. I was there for the port negotiations.

Her hair caught the light and a thought arrived uninvited: I wonder how she tastes.

I filed it. Not part of the plan, neither inconvenient nor essential. An unexpected variable. I have learned not to dismiss unexpected variables. They have a tendency to become, in retrospect, the only variables that mattered.

Caspian border country. The kind of terrain that belongs to no flag convincingly — where the map says one thing and the ground says older things.

The shaman didn’t advertise. I found him the way you find things that don’t want to be found: by following the logic of what I needed until the landscape had no other answer.

He was small. Old in the way that certain landscapes are old — not aged, simply prior. We sat across a low fire and I said the one thing I had come to say.

I said her name.

He already knew it.

He pointed at me. Then at the fire. Then at the sky. Then he said a word in the oldest layer of my own language, a layer underneath Estonian and Swedish and the operational Russian I learned in my twenties.

Anu.

My chest opened around it like a lock that has been waiting for the correct key since before the lock was cast.

Zürich. February. The fire dropped to embers while we weren’t watching it. She was still beneath me, warm and breathing, and I was not ready to move.

She traced my jaw with her fingers.

“If I’d known you were this religious, Tarmo, I’d have come with my own saga. Do I call you my Estonian Viking now? Or have I just been claimed by a lost son of the Aegir?”

That particular laugh. The one that means she has seen something she intends to use. On the old fur, in the light of what remained of the oak, and I genuinely could not locate myself in time.

What I could not tell her: the word that left my mouth without permission — Odini nimel — was not metaphor, not performance, not the reflex of a man raised on Lutheran guilt who reaches for older gods in extremity.

It came from somewhere below strategy. Below calculation. Below the architecture of everything I have built to keep myself functional in a world that rewards control.

Uruk.

There are fires you stand beside, and fires you carry. The ones you carry don’t show. They don’t need to.

The shaman warned me it would keep happening. The slipping. The layers folding over layers. Especially near her. Especially when the body is unguarded and something older than the body speaks through it without asking permission.

I did not yet understand, in Dakhla, why she was the variable I couldn’t file away. I did not need the word Anu for another year and a half of boards and calculations and cities and the slow accumulation of what I told myself was strategic interest.

But the board was already written.

I was not building one. I was reading one.

Every fire remembers before I do.

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The Mogul’s Gambit — A Reader’s Companion is Book 0.7 of The Memory Cartographer, narrated by Tarmo Amellal.

Elena’s marginal notes run alongside his diary. The board keeps changing. So do the pieces.

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.