Page 23 of The Labyrinth and the Threaded Daughter

Her gaze flickered upward, then back to him. “The Labyrinth allows you to see what you want. Not what you need.”

That gave him pause.

“Do you see the field?”

Ariadne glanced up then. “Yes. Now.”

“What did you see before now?” he asked, not able to help the wonder in his tone.

She was quiet for a long moment before answering, “Darkness.”

He lowered his hand slowly, eyes still locked on the sky. Awe warred with unease in his chest. This place felt… reverent. Like a temple that had long forgotten its gods but remembered the shape of worship.

“Have you tried to leave that way?” He asked.

She pursed her lips but did not answer.

Corin turned fully towards Ariadne then. “This place,” he said, “what is it?”

Her lips pressed together tighter, hesitation flickering across her face. She studied him as if weighing a fragile thing in her hands. “A mercy, I suppose. Or it was at one point,” she answered at last.

He swallowed, standing beneath open sky and endless light, more uncertain than he had ever been—while Ariadne watched him closely, as though waiting to see whether wonder would break him or give him hope enough to keep going.

He thought back to only some hours ago when he caught his last few glimpses of the warm daylight on his skin. Gods, it had only been several hours, but the sunlight now coating his skin made him miss it even more and feel even longer than it had been.

Corin made it three steps closer to the light before his body gave up on him.

The adrenaline that had carried him from the fight ebbed all at once, leaving only pain in its wake. His injured arm throbbed viciously. His ribs screamed with every breath. The world tilted—sky and stone closing out of alignment.

He dropped to one knee. Then to both.

Ariadne was at his side instantly.

“Heir–” she caught him before his shoulder hit the stone, easing him down with surprising strength. “You should have said something sooner.”

“I did,” he muttered with a grunt. His uninjured hand reached out to grab at his injury, clearly covered with blood. “With… the bleeding.”

“I made you walk so long,” she grumbled.

“Maybe it was worth it to see the sky.”

Ariadne huffed, not unkindly, and shifted him so his back rested against the stone floor warmed by the sun above. The light painted her in soft gold as she knelt beside him, all her sharp edges softening as her dark hair slipped loose around her face.

“Stay still,” she commanded.

From a small satchel at her side—one Corin hadn’t noticed before—she drew out a stoppered vial. She uncorked it, and the scent of crushed herbs and resin bloomed in the air, sharp but clean. Corin hissed as she applied the ointment to his arm, the sting biting deep before settling into a soothing warmth.

He wondered for half a moment where she could have gotten such a vial, but he was mostly just relieved that the pain was lessening by the moment.

She quickly reached a shelf made of stone a few steps away to grab some clean linen. “You are lucky, heir,” she murmured, wrapping his arm in the linen. “Another inch and it would have taken the muscle.”

“I’ve always been precise,” he said weakly.

That earned him the faintest curve of her mouth. The first he had seen from her.

It seemed to brighten the room more than any sunlight ever could. And Corin decided he wanted to see more of it. He would do anything he could to see it light up her face again. Over and over again. All the time.

He needed to see her smile like he needed to breathe.