In India! The original word for “chess” is the Sanskrit chaturanga, meaning “four members of an army”—which were mostly likely elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers.
“Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits”
— Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (via 94jusqua)
“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
[…]At the sound of the sacristy bell, the priests (Maffei and Stefano) snatched their daggers from their robes. Inexpertly, Maffei placed his hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder, as though to steady himself or to make sure of his aim. As Lorenzo turned, he felt the dagger’s point against his neck. Maffei lunged forward, and the tip of the dagger cut into the tensed flesh. Lorenzo leapt away, tearing off his cloak as he did so and wrapping it around his arm as a shield. He drew his sword, slashed at the two priests, who unnerved by his fast reaction, were beaten back without difficulty. Then he vaulted over the altar rail and dashed headlong for the new sacristy.
Giuliano’s mutilated body was already on the floor. At the sound of the sacristy bell he had dutifully lowered his head, and Baroncelli, crying out, ‘Take that, traitor!’, had brought his dagger down in a ferocious blow that almost split his skull in two. Francesco de’ Pazzi thereupon stabbed him with such frenzy, plunging the blade time and again into the unresisting body, that he even drove the point of the dagger through his own thigh. Giuliano fell to his knees while his two assailants continued to rain savage blows upon him, slashing and stabbing until the corpse was rent by nineteen wounds.
As Giuliano’s blood poured over the floor, Baroncelli leapt over the body and made for the new sacristy, but before he could reach the heavy bronze doors of the sacristy, Lorenzo had dashed through them, and Poliziano with some other of his friends, had managed to get them shut. ‘Giuliano? Is he safe?’ Lorenzo kept asking; but no one answered him.
The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, Christopher Hibbert.
Glube Fics 