Fowlhunter [GL]

Ying flapped her wings, tearing through the cerulean sky. A cloud of shrieking Beasts soared after her, hot on her vapour trail.

Her rider, Asha, squinted at the landscape blurring below them. In the past day, promontries of rock and towns sculpted around mountainous valleys had crawled away, replaced by flat stretches of desert. Ying grunted whenever they flew through a particularly dusty patch of air. Then, the sand started to give way to little splotches of buildings, tiny villages and settlements. Up ahead, the metropolis of Archizoun emerged in the distance, angular peaks of infrastructure dotting the horizon.

“Did you find it? Did you find it?” Ying rasped desperately at the scout.

“We’re almost there,” Asha squeaked.

“Can we be almost there faster?” Ying strained her wings.

“Almost there! For real! We’re getting close,” Asha promised. She narrowed her saffron eyes some more. “A little to the left—”

Ying dropped her altitude. “Where?”

“See that hole in the ground?”

The pixiu dove for a circular pit at the foot of an elaborate manor.

“No, not that one. That’s some rich noble’s swimming pool. It’s further out into the desert—you want something that looks like a deep tunnel.”

Ying swerved, and began to home in on a dark opening in the sand, a set of earthen stairs leading down. But as they got closer, a gaggle of humans began walking out from the stairs, carrying glasses of wine.

“No, that’s an underground bar!” Asha yelped. “Pull up!”

Roaring, Ying changed her trajectory sharply, shooting into the sky. Soon they came across another hole, this one surrounded by blazing torches. As they got closer, they smelled the particles of heady incense. The sounds of groaning reached their ears. The cries of the agonised, perhaps?

“This one?”

“No. That’s… uh…” Asha trailed off.

They reached closer. They watched as a sinuous hand reached out from the tunnel… and tossed a bundle of red lace onto the sand. It glistened in the sunlight.

The makara grimaced. “Uh. I’d rather not know what that is.”

They flew onward.

“I think it’s further in front,” Asha said.

“Are you sure??!?” snapped Ying. Hippogriffs, harpies and pegasi howled behind them. It would be too soon before they caught up.

“No,” Asha responded. She couldn’t see it, but it was as if she could feel Ying’s glare: “What? It wouldn’t be a legendary labyrinth if it was easy to find!”

Heaving a sigh, Ying scanned the terrain the terrain harder, brown eyes narrowed in concentration. Then, as the pixiu began to descend over the dunes, they both saw it.

A sprawling chasm loomed ahead in the sand. It was squarish, descending downwards into an interminable gloom. The entire structure was made of faded, weathered concrete, reflecting the yellows and greys of the sand that swathed its perimeter like a great big blanket. A staircase began from one corner of the chasm, ran along one side of the square, then turned ninety-degrees. It continued down in concentric squares, so far down and so perfectly dark it looked truly bottomless.

Without a doubt, that was it: the Cretan Labryinth.

Ying slowed the flap of her wings. They ploughed into the dirt at the edge, spilling crumbling sand over and into the blackness below. Climbing off, Asha walked to the perimeter and squatted down, pulling out a set of binoculars to get a better look. Even a makara’s eyes, designed for the night, would need the help in such incredible darkness.

Framed by the staired walls of the chasm was the centre: an aerial view of walls. So many walls, so tightly clustered together they looked like someone had meticulously covered every centimetre of the base of the pit with a thin, crisscrossing web of dead millipedes. It made Asha’s and Ying’s heads swim just gazing down at the maze: like they were worms that would come alive any second now, writhing and wriggling.

“This is a mad plan,” Ying shook out her scruff and remarked, staring into the veritable abyss. “Doesn’t the tale go that no one who goes in ever comes out?”

“Bah! Stories are just stories,” Asha scoffed, pocketing her binoculars. “And legends are prone to exaggeration, for shock value. I bet it’s merely a very difficult maze. Don’t worry. Yours truly has a photographic memory. I promise you that I’ll be able to remember the first… mmm… fifty turns.”

“For real?”

“Just don’t go beyond that,” Asha said. “Besides, this is our only option. You’re clearly too tired to go further than this. Plus, the standard trick to losing pursuers is navigating convoluted terrain, but out of all the Beasts behind us, there’s bound to be some flyers experienced in whatever terrain we choose, possibly more so than us. So, obviously, the only way is to choose a terrain that’s familiar to no one.”

“Ah, yes,” Ying nodded gravely. “Your plan to lose them is for us to get lost ourselves.”

“Not for fifty turns,” Asha emphasised. She glanced back to see the shadows of their pursuers emerging from the clouds, their screeches reverberating through the sky. “Let’s hope those stupid enough to follow us have the smarts to give up before then.”

Ying sighed and shrugged her haunches. “Well, none of your plans have killed us yet. Other than Jemi, you’re just about the only person I’d trust with something like this. Hop on again.”

They took off just a split second before a Beast slammed into the dirt behind them. The hippogriff let out a cawing shriek, the tips of its claws just grazing the fur of Ying’s tail.

“Unknowable abyss, here we coooooome!” Asha crowed as they dove straight down.

Beasts were strong and fast, but not famously known for being intelligent—ones with the intellect to match a human’s, like Ying and Asha, were few and far between. The sinister aura of the Cretan Labryinth was enough to ward off the majority of the Beasts following them, but a good crowd still soared after them as they blurred past the flights of stairs. Their hisses and howls were loud in their ears, but they didn’t echo far, swallowed up by the sheer magnitude of the cavern around them. Ying’s feathered wings beat the air with barely a whistle. As they got nearer to the base of the pit, the air also grew staler, thicker with plumes of limestone dust. Asha buried her nose in Ying’s scruff, hacking. Growling, Ying tried to beat the dust out of their path with her wings.

An eternity of this passed… but eventually, they reached the top of the walls. Each wall of the labyrinth was incredibly tall, the paths between them cramped, narrow and unlit, such that an aerial viewer wouldn’t be able to tell where someone was in the maze. A perfect hiding spot. Suppressing a cough, Asha urged the pixiu onward, making for the western end of the labyrinth.

The entrance of the Cretan Labryinth was flanked simply by two columns of white, chipping marble, just as lengthy as any of the other walls of the maze: towering several stories above the ground. For each column there was a ceremonial-looking torch, a fire blazing within their golden basins—it must’ve been the only light in the entire chasm. Gazing upward, you couldn’t see the sky at all, even though they had only descended vertically. Had they had travelled for so long night had fallen, or did some other sort of fog prevent light from reaching down below?

Even the fire provoked apprehension rather than comfort. After all, there was no sign of guards keeping watch at the entrance, or anyone who could’ve had a reason to keep a light on down here. Who knew how long these flames had been burning for, as if to carve the shadow of the maze’s front border into the dirt before it.

There was no time left to lose. Ying sprang forward into the maze.