There was a time when the sound of a Go stone being set on a board used to comfort him. Now, that was not the case. Now, it was a reminder. A reminder of what he was losing little by little each day...
For as long as he could remember, Go had been a part of his life. He'd learned to play at an age at which he was too young to remember who'd taught him, and continued learning as he'd risen in the world of Professional Go which had seemed so large to him until he ran into someone who'd never heard of him who would remind him that it was also incredibly small when compared to the rest of the world as a whole.
When his own son had been two, he had passed the game down to the boy who'd had the same fiery passion for it. A fiery passion that was restrained and hidden behind a cool exterior.
Years passed and his son grew from a boy to a young man who had watched as he retired from the professional circuit following a heart-attack and that fateful game with Sai. That young teenager grew up to be a man he could be proud of, a man who had claimed all of the titles he had taken over his career and then some before he himself finally retired to manage the Go salon that belonged to their family. The Go salon that was barely hanging on in this day and age of computer games when few if any other than the old-timers like himself touched an actual board.
It was only natural that age would catch up to him one day. Old age, which revealed its true cruelty when it started taking from him his only constant companion.
It was slow at first, one missed move here, a bit of hesitation there, forgetting whose turn it was maybe once or twice in a game. Then, it started picking up. A missed move became two, three, his son whose hair had long since gone gray offering him a handicap when they played together on the evenings he visited, a failure to see the pattern he could've spotted in an instant only weeks before...
It all slipped away from him more and more each day.
The sound of Go stones on wood used to be soothing to him, relaxing. Now, it only brought frustration as it was a reminder of what he was losing, had already lost...