Fowlhunter [GL]

Deep in the Cretan Labryinth, Asha followed in the footsteps of the mysterious black-haired lady named Ariadne, their footsteps echoing through the golden hallways. She still had no clue where her friend Ying was—according to their captor, the pixiu was still under the influence of spidervenom, hallucinating somewhere in this dark, twisted maze.

There was nothing that Asha could do about that for now. No, she wasn’t giving up. Asha didn’t like giving up. In the past, if she put her mind to a puzzle, it would only be a matter of time until she solved it. Unless, of course, the puzzle was proven to be logically, mathematically impossible.

The Cretan Labryinth was yet to be that—proven impossible.

There’s a lot to be learned from these walls, you know. The Cretan Labryinth is an old place. Older than the moon, older than the sun. As old as the world itself.

So first, Asha would do what she did best: gathering information. It was just taking… awfully… long.

“Are you actually going anywhere, or are you just leading us in circles?” she demanded.

“Patience, patience,” Ariadne said, sibilant. “We’re getting there. Prometheus, the young ones are so anxious these days.”

Asha scowled, but as spiders scuttled past on the walls, clicking, she didn’t dare argue too much with the woman who could control them. To relieve the tedium, she put her mind back to work at creating a mental map of the Labryinth’s Heart. Not knowing about Ying’s situation was also making her more on edge than usual. But she was a scout, and a crocodile before that, and used to working alone. She could focus if she tried.

She became so absorbed in her thoughts that when they reached Ariadne’s destination, she only realised it when the walls around them went dark.

They had entered some sort of chamber. It was circular, with a domed ceiling. With a smile, the black-haired lady closed the door behind them, plunging them into darkness. Asha blinked her crocodilian eyes—to her surprise, unlike how it had been in the outer maze, her night vision worked, and she quickly regained sight.

-Though there was no need for that.

…Tap.

With a rickety, clattering noise, the dome of the chamber came alight with a breathtaking expanse of glittering light. Glowing rivers, made up of infinitesimal pinpricks, pierced through the canvas of darkness that enveloped them. More still swam under their feet, shifting and twinkling, giving the impression that one was floating in the middle of this galactical space. Asha’s eyes reflected the milky wash of the constellations orbiting around them, the vermillion of them turning almost peony. For moments, enveloped in this hauntingly silent beauty, the Beast forgot how to speak, how to think.

She glimpsed the other woman in the space with her. The light painted Ariadne’s black hair silvery, her pale face like a translucent shell, which reflected the cosmos around them in a bruising mess of colour. Ariadne had her hands on an elaborate gold contraption in the middle of the room. As a lens rotated around the machine, whirring and flashing brightly, Asha realised that the landscape was a projection.

“You like it?” Ariadne’s silky voice asked. “It’s called a planetarium. I made it myself.”

“I didn’t know you could do that with spider webbing.” Asha glanced at the obviously metal contraption.

Ariadne giggled. “You’re right. You can’t. It was already here when I got here.” She spun the wheel of the machine around, causing the flowing constellations to abruptly change directions, whirling around them in dazzling brilliance. Logically, Asha knew that she was standing on solid ground, but she still felt dizzy just watching it. “Tell me, young Beast: do you know what you’re looking at?”

“...Stars,” Asha frowned. “But why are you showing me this? I asked you to teach me about the Kraken.”

“Yes, and I’m doing just that,” Ariadne huffed. “Did you think I would simply spoonfeed you the answers?”

“Well, yeah?”

“No, child, you have to answer my questions first,” Ariadne wagged her finger. “That’s how teaching works. In schools, they call it active learning.”

“When I said I wanted to go to school, I didn’t mean this,” Asha grumbled, crossing her arms.

“It’s evidence-backed pedagogy,” the woman trilled. “So, tell me. What do you know about stars?”

“They’re like… bits of luminous rock, very high up in the sky?”

“Mmmm… no,” Ariadne said. “Seems like this civilisation is still backward. In another era, humans came a bit closer. They theorised that stars were balls of burning gas. Now, for my next question. What do you know about magic?”

Magic now? “There’s Soleki, from the sun… and Lunaki from the moon. Well, it’s not technically from the moon, because it’s just a reflection of the sun.”

Ariadne raised her brow. “You truly believe that?”

“I… don’t know,” Asha admitted. “That’s just what we were told. The sun is the source of all magic.”

“It is a source of magic,” Ariadne corrected. “Lunaki is modelled partially based on Soleki, but it is its own magic. And magic is much more diverse than what sunlight or moonlight can achieve. In this world, there are people who are inhumanly strong… those who can see the future, who can hear the voices of ghosts… but these are dismissed as exaggeration and superstition. Miracles, too—people who lived where they should have died, died where they should have lived. Well, all of it is magic. And all magic… starts with a wish.”

Ariadne pointed upwards, at the scintillating electric-blue. “A wish upon a star.”

“...Sounds like something out of a fairytale,” Asha said sceptically.

“And are you not a living example of one, makara?”

“That doesn’t prove anything you’re saying,” Asha said. “If it’s true, then heeeeyyy! Stars! I wish that I was outside of the Cretan Labryinth right now!” Her voice echoed within the chamber as the stars continued strobing around them. “See?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Ariadne said. “It is the stars’ choice whether or not they want to grant your wish. Often, there are rules and conditions you have to fulfill. But ultimately, usually, the stars just want to be entertained. They are very old beings, after all. They have seen much, and thus seek the novel.”

“You mean the bits of rock…” the grey-haired girl shook her head. “Gas balls, whatever. They can think?”

“The stars are neither stone nor vapour. They are pure magic. And for every star, there is a god,” said Ariadne. “Out of the billions of them out there, most of them leave our world alone. But there’s still a great many that watch over this world from afar, taking care of things big and small: from the weather, to the course a river takes to the way a single leaf grows—the mundane and the miraculous. As for the proof that you desire… you already have it.”

“Emperor Prometheus…” Asha muttered quietly. “He’s one of these gods.”

Three thousand years ago, the world became too cold to sustain life. All species upon its plane were on the brink of extinction. It was only when Prometheus descended from sky, carrying the sun on his back, that the world blazed back into colour.

“Could it be that the sun, was actually a star? His star?”

“Precisely,” confirmed the woman. “Although some humans would’ve branded a heretic for suggesting such a thing. And more still would’ve burned you at the stake, if you told them the truth: that what Prometheus did was a mistake.”

“How so?”

Ariadne’s fingers brushed over the lever of the planetarium. The whirr died away, and so did the projection. She opened the door of the chamber, and they walked back out into the golden hallways. Asha mentally prepared herself for another tortuously winding walk, but this time, it didn’t take long before Ariadne stopped once again.

They stood at a curved entrance. Here the golden hallways finally ended. Beyond it were tall, looming walls, stretching upwards interminably. This was the dark maze that Asha had travelled in together with Ying, the sprawling exterior outside of the Heart.

Pulling a web-woven torch off the wall, Ariadne stepped outside. Asha, considerably more wary of the spider infestation, opted for a flashlight from her pack. She could’ve summoned a Lunaki beam, but she could feel her Lunaki reserve running thin, and wanted to save some of it for emergencies. She didn’t know when would be the next time she could get a refuel, after all. She snapped it on and cast its feeble beam out as she followed the other woman.

“If you wanted more evidence, here it is,” Ariadne said. When she held up her torch close to the wall, etchings in the wall became visible. Asha found that she could actually read these. “Prometheus wasn’t the only god to have come down from the nebulae. This Labryinth was the work of one named Daedalus.”

Asha’s head whirled with questions. But what she eventually asked was: “So… it wasn’t King Minos who built it?”

“No,” Ariadne answered. There it was again—that look: a twist that wormed across her face, creasing her fine features. But she continued to speak. “It was built long before Minos’ time. The god Daedalus created this Labryinth shortly after Prometheus’ descent. It was not a labyrinth, back then. It was meant as an archive. Using his celestial magic, Daedalus scribed millennia of natural history into these walls, and purposely made the maze impervious to Soleki—so that Prometheus would never find out what was hidden within it.”

“Ah,” Asha exhaled. “So that myth’s a myth?”

“Not entirely,” Ariadne said smoothly. “King Minos did not create the Labryinth, but he did entrap his son the Minotaur within it. Too ashamed to lay his eyes upon his own child, yet too afraid to attempt killing it, his Royal Majesty decided to trick the child into going on a quest. The King told the Minotaur that if it succeeded in finding the heart of the Labryinth, he would accept the bullchild for who it was, and ordain it as part of the royal family once more. Of course, foolish as it was, desperate as it was for recognition, the child ventured within the maze. Naturally, it got lost, doomed to wander the hallways for all eternity..”

“But then… where is the Minotaur now?”

Ariadne folded silky hair over her shoulder. The looming walls of the maze threatened to swallow the flickering light of her spiderwebbed torch, but it didn’t quite succeed. The fraying edges of this glow cast over the skin of her face, marble-white: forehead, cheekbones, jawline. Beautiful features, but etched deeply with resentment.

“Right here,” Ariadne said, as the light shadowed her face. “I am the Minotaur.”