Patreon Exlusive Fiction: All the Labyrinths by Danai Christopoulou

All the Labyrinths

By Danai Christopoulou

Out of all the labyrinths in all the world she steps into yours.

 You eat her.

 You’re the monster.

 By the time her softest bits—an earlobe, a pinky toe, a mouth that could be stretched into a smile or a scream—have melted on your tongue, you believe this is the way things will always go. Cyclical. Fleshy. Only a little crunchy in the end.

You will sleep after your feast, self-assured and at ease, and won’t wake up to gleaming white, accusing bones, pointing at you with parts of cartilage attached.

 You won’t hear the whispers of the wind as it traverses the strophalos of your domain, round and round and round again, picking up errant spirits of now nameless victims of your teeth. You will sleep, until it’s time for your next meal.

 It won’t always be that simple.

 * * *

 In time, she learns not to scream.

This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of your meal, not much, not at first. Still, you have to wonder, as you tear her limb from silent limb, the squelch of bloodied flesh the only sound accompanying your feast, whether it wouldn’t be more fun if she tried to resist a bit.

If she wasn’t brought to you, every few months or years as a tribute to devour, as your king-named right.

Couldn’t she put some more effort into it? Curse the gods who doomed her here, use the twists and turns of your enormous labyrinth to hide from you, make you come out of your den to seek her? You deserve that respect, that commitment to your dance.

After all, aren’t you still the monster?

She does run, eventually, and you give chase, and in the shadows of your bowel-like halls her screams turn serpentine, elongated, eerily sounding like laughter.
 

* * *

Next time you see her, she holds a long red thread and calls you brother.

She claims you’re kin, a princeling wrongfully imprisoned for the crime of looking different. This amuses you enough that you decide to humor her; to stomp your hooves in joyous greeting as the errant rays of light make their ephemeral appearance from above, the only slice of sky you ever see. She can see all of you, you reckon, in that moment: both horns and human hands, both man and monster. But she averts her eyes, and instead sets about her task, softly humming, a well-masked shaking of the shoulders. She takes the measure of your den, wrapping that thread of hers around a column, twisting it through the empty sockets of a skull you could have sworn was hers. It can’t be hers, you know that much, but time is but a blunt labrys and the skull might still be hers, by the time all this is said and done. Beautiful bloody embroidery now stands amid the archeology of your past meals, and you’re not sure whether this image makes you hungry or sad, or just in need of some more chewy company.

You eat her all the same, but the red thread gets stuck between your teeth, like stubborn sinew.

 * * *

It takes a long, long time until your next meal.

To pass the hours, the months, the years, you throw dry vertebrae like dice, reading the future in the way the bones are landing on the marble floors. You ponder the shape of power, the unspoken rules that have you locked inside the labyrinth, both horror and hostage. You contemplate the porosity of sunshine, whether these small dust beams traveling down to your domain are changed by their katabasis; whether you’re changed by seeing them. When your stomach starts to gurgle loud enough to scare your ghosts away, you pop a spondyl in your mouth, melting it slowly in the acid of your hunger, sucking on ancient myths and marrow.

You find yourself annoyed; you are a princeling, after all, didn’t she say so? Someone should surely stop by soon, give you your due.

When the waters come instead, smelling like ash and corpses, pieces of paintings and palatial structures floating like fish, you know your divination was correct. Knossos has fallen—and what will rise in its stead will be a weak-boned imitation. A palace with no sacred space for monsters.

What kind of world is that?

You consider letting the waters take you, but all they do is clean away your masticated mess, your chronic carnage, your meager remnants of her.
 

* * *

You wake up ravenous and wretched, amid the debris.

As you rise, shaking off shards of your past prison, you hear the screams. The sun is in your eyes, and there is so much sun to take in, so much cerulean blues and yolk-bright yellows that you don’t have time to notice them. The insolent people screaming “monster!” accosting you with arrows.

Your hide is strong, but your pride is wounded. “I am your princeling,” you try to say, but what comes out of your mouth is more bovine than you’d expect.

So you run, begrudgingly, skewer a couple of them with your horns and look for somewhere more inviting to settle for your first al fresco meal.

You find a sandy beach, craggy and smelling like her hair, like sun-dried herbs and tears. You satisfy your hunger on these worthless peasant husks, casting forlorn glances at the waves, hoping she’ll ride one back to you. Hoping she’s somehow still alive.

You’ll do better by her, you promise, next time. You’ll only eat her if she leaves you with no other option.

Just bring her back, you pray to any god who listens, and you can learn to be a gentler monster. Take smaller bites.

You take the sharpest peasant bone and carve a sigil in the sand, a labyrinth of earth and water. You place yourself in the center, safe, contained, waiting.

* * *

When you wake up again, your horns and hooves are gone and the sea has washed away your sigil. You don the attire of your previous meal—you ate the last one slower, taking care to unwrap him first—and start walking, the waves a chorus for your labored breath, in and out, in and out, and she’s not here, she’s not here.
 

* * *

The eons pass, and so do definitions.

What is a monster but a mirror for our shame? What is a labyrinth but an allegory for loss and heroism, for time and choices?

And if you’re hungry every now and then, you’ve learned to mask that well. You take your tributes where you can, in shady alleys and abandoned buildings, settling for flesh that’s dried up from the drugs, for bones that spell no future. No one will miss them, you rationalize. Princelings need to feed, you argue. Your voice sounds human now, though you barely use it—apart from ordering a drink from time to time, in speakeasies that remind you of your childhood, that require getting a bit lost to find them.

You sink onto a stool, belly still full from earlier but heart unsatisfied, and ask the barman to refill your glass. You swirl the amber liquid thoughtfully, thinking about how time ferments us all, how it still burns and soothes at every turn, how you cannot escape the self that was once chained under a palace, feeding on offered youth.

The barman whistles, drawing your attention, forcing you to follow their infatuated gaze to the entrance.

There at the door she stands, a vision of red thread and glossy flesh, of fragrant hair smelling like home. She sees you, and stops in her tracks.

“Brother,” she says.

“Sister,” you say, finally able to converse with her, to explain. “Where have you been? I’m hungry.”