Page 145 of Monsters in Love

BLOODED LABYRINTH

S.J. SANDERS

Asterion was cursed by the gods. He didn’t need to be told to know this. His entire existence was unending carnage. Those who were lost in his labyrinth were sacrificed to his monstrous appetite. An appetite that ever hungered and could not be appeased. Nothing slaked the need that burned continuously within him. Nothing save for the love of a mother who flaunted the gods themselves to see him fed rather than wasting away in Minos’ prison, and a sister who comforted him whenever she came to spend a few hours in his company.

But his mother had joined the shades long ago and Ariadne, too, was no more, her lovely long limbs and sweet face nothing more than dust.

Although he knew his mother’s love for her monstrous son, he knew that his existence was traded for her complete obedience to Minos. His boyhood memories of her had long since faded. But not so of Ariadne. She was the only one who descended into his shadowy realm between worlds to pass time in his company. She had been the only light in his dark life. In her company, he could find rest.

Love was cruel to have taken her from him.

It was love that persuaded her to save the Athenian sentenced to feed Asterion. It was that love that betrayed him and nearly destroyed him if the gods had not been so cruel as to preserve his life. Locked away in solitude. The terrible cruelty that had been birthed with his enslavement to the labyrinth had not ended with the Kingdom of Minos. The heart of the labyrinth was beyond the boundaries of the mortal world, and so there he remained. Starving, raving, lost in madness until even that became background noise that he learned to ignore so that he could, for a time, find some small measure of peace.

In the gloom of his labyrinth, the shrines erected within the corridors that had once been painted with the blood of his victims were festooned with flowers that grew in the boundaries of his world, offered up with his prayers for relief from his cursed existence.

The end he begged for never came.

But then something changed.

The worlds shifted, and once again prey was finding its way into the dark stone corridors as the labyrinth found new routes to the world of the living. Humans once again stumbled into his world, one at a time or in pairs. Every time he tried to resist the hunger. But it never ended.

He couldn’t stop the hunger.

Blood once again was running through the labyrinth, drawing ravenous spirits back to his abode to feast on the entrails of his kills and drink from the rivers of blood.

He was cursed by the gods.

Vicky was lost. Oh, fuck, was she ever. Her heart plummeted as she skimmed her dim surroundings. Nothing looked familiar. Worse, the deep shadows of the forest seemed to take on an alien life of their own. She stifled a startled yelp as something moved, a darker form slinking among those that surrounded her before disappearing once again.

Nearby, an animal let out a shriek that made the fine hair on her arms stand on end, the flesh pebbling with a chill of terror. She swallowed back bile that rose up into her throat as she waited, listening intently. Her heartbeat thumped loudly in her ears, but otherwise an unnatural silence had settled once more around her, broken only by the soft whisper of leaves in the wind.

She hoped it was just the wind, at least.

Keeping her footsteps as light as possible, Vicky blazed a path through the brush, intent on getting as far away from the site where some poor creature had met its end. With every step, she cringed at the sound of the brush rustling around her and the faint snap beneath her feet. She was sure it was sending out some of sort of beacon to every predator in the area, alerting them to the easy meal walking through their territory.

Fuck. She never should have set foot inside the forest.

It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of warnings to keep fools from doing just that. Although she was newer to the area, tales of the strange forests popping up everywhere had reached her long before she had arrived. She had even seen them from a distance as she wandered, vast forests appearing out of nowhere overnight where there had once been cleared farmland or brush. The sight of them had inspired a trickle of unease that had only worsened when she heard stories among the haphazard settlements that she passed through. Tales of the tricks that the forests played on unsuspecting people who wandered too far into their depths had been enough to make her avoid the creeping woods wherever possible.

Until it was not.

Vicky shivered, pulling her coat tighter, pretending that it was only due to the chill of the spring air. She stared into the deep hues of brush and leaves, illuminated only by the meager light that managed to get through the canopy.

She should have stayed at the last settlement. Although practically a ghost town, the small group of families would have at very least offered some safety. If she could have dealt with the suspicious way that they eyed her, she could have taken residence in one of the houses on the fringe of the settlement. Centered around the square of what had once probably been a quaint little southern town, there had been plenty of abandoned homes in good enough condition to make into a home. If she had been able to ignore the stony way the residents watched, all conversation falling silent, their mouths pressed in flat lines of displeasure at her mere presence. Those who had not glowered at her watched her with an open interest that made her skin crawl.

Suspicion was the norm now following the Ravening, but the unwelcoming atmosphere had been so oppressive that she had moved on again after just a scant few days of rest.

Even the trade had been miserable.

Post-Ravening, wandering through the barrens—the stretches of wild, inhospitable land between the settlements—and scavenging had become a way of life for Vicky. Typically, a few weeks of work could buy her a couple months with a comfortable bed to sleep in and a full stomach. But this time, she left the settlement with a pack of food that she doubted would last longer than a month, and a new set of clothes and boots to replace her worn items.

She had been angry, fueled by bitterness, when she had struck out in the early hours the day before. Perhaps if she had not been, she would have noticed that she had entered too far into the forest as she traveled along its edge, taking shelter beneath the trees. If she had, she would not have awoken in the depths of the ever-moving woods.

It had been a mistake. She wanted to scream that into the uncaring forest, and only just managed to stop herself by biting her tongue. Although she had not intended to enter the forest itself, she knew that even the innocent act of going near the wooded area, even its outskirts, looking for edible greens and flowers to supplement the fare traded to her, had been her downfall. Worse that she had chosen to take shelter beneath a little cluster of trees to escape an evening rain shower.

Every decision had paved her way to that moment. There was no escaping that fact, even though it seemed unfair that her misstep had landed her in a place of her nightmares.

Her fingers twisted the ribbon knotted around her neck, the small charm sliding between her fingers. The coin pendant had been a gift from her father when he returned from a business trip to Greece. Supposedly a replica of a coin from the famed city of Knossos in Crete, pressed on one side with the face of Hera and the labyrinth on the reverse, it had been the perfect gift for a ten-year-old obsessed with mythology. Back then, she spent hours dreaming up stories about where it had come from, who might have once touched it. That life, and that little girl, had disappeared with the Ravening. Her mother and siblings died in the aftermath, leaving her and her father alone in the world until he too was taken from her. Now, it was a comforting piece of her past and all that she had left from that life before.

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