Page 31 of The Labyrinth and the Threaded Daughter

No sword. No dagger. A borrowed blade. A stone disc that shouldn’t have existed here.

And a maze demanding a sacrifice.

Corin met Ariadne’s gaze one last time. “I’ll come back,” he said, though he wasn’t sure why. Promise or reassurance—he didn’t know who it was for.

She didn’t answer. She only watched him go, her expression unreadable, as he stepped into the next corridor and let the maze swallow him whole once more.

But before he took too many steps, he could have sworn he heard her say. “I only wish that were true.”

XI

The moment Corin stepped beyond the threshold of Ariadne’s chamber, the Labyrinth appeared angry.

The air quickened around him, almost as if the stone itself had decided to breathe shallowly. Then the light receded. The golden veins that had threaded the walls seconds before—faint as they may have been—thinned and dimmed until they vanished altogether. What remained was a darkness that felt deliberate.

Purposeful.

And horrifying.

The light was dimmer now than when he had first entered the Labyrinth. He considered this being a trick of his eyes as they adjusted from the bright opening in the ceiling to the lack of light in the tunnels, but it remained too dark for too long for that to be the case.

Corin hesitated, glancing back to see the open room behind him once more. He contemplated going back to Ariadne; maybe there was another exit he could have gone through instead of the one he chose. Another exit that was more illuminated. Or maybe she could give him a torch he could use to light the way.

But the opening behind him had already narrowed so much that the stones were perfectly smooth, as if they never parted in the first place.

Ariadne was completely gone from his sight, swallowed up behind the stone without a sound. He wondered for a brief moment if she was watching him—or the stone where he had been.

The Labyrinth was a strange place, he decided.

He exhaled slowly and continued forward.

The stone was cold and slick with condensation that beaded beneath his fingers as he attempted to guide himself through the halls with the slightest touch of the walls. But the path soon twisted under his feet in ways he didn’t understand.

Sometimes the floor sloped gently downward, causing him to stumble. Sometimes it rose without warning, forcing him to brace both hands against the wall.

He released the borrowed blade from his side, hoping that the light of the veins could reflect off the metal. It certainly felt heavier than it should have in his hand, though he half suspected that was his arm still protesting the earlier fight rather than any fault of the new weapon. It had seemed solid enough. Balanced enough.

Yet his innovative thinking did not provide any additional light. In fact, Corin realized, it appeared as if the veins seemed to hide more once his new blade was revealed.

Frustration clawed at his throat, but he kept moving. Eventually, he had to sheath his blade as it continued to feel heavier and heavier in his palm.

Time quickly lost its edges as he moved.

He walked, and then he walked some more. He could not have guessed how long it had been since he had left Ariadne—minutes, hours, something in between. His thoughts had begun to repeat themselves, looping back like the empty corridors he passed through.

Ariadne’s voice. The Minotaur’s roar. Bristles… noises. Taleon’s familiarity. The weight of the stone disc tucked securely into his pocket.

Occasionally, the Labyrinth shifted around him, halting his movements entirely. A passage would narrow just as he reached it, forcing him to turn aside. A wall would groan and slide, not blocking his way entirely, but nudging him—subtly, insistently—toward another route. It felt less like guidance and more like testing. The Labyrinth seemed to want to know whether or not he could persist without spectacle.

He stumbled once, catching himself hard against the wall. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs, and for a heartbeat, he stayed there with his forehead pressed to stone, listening to the echo of his own pulse and wondering what in Hades he was meant to do now.

“You want something,” he muttered into the void. “Why won’t you just tell me what you want from me?”

The Labyrinth did not respond. Not in any way he could recognize.

His vision strained uselessly ahead. Without the golden veins to light his way, there was truly no sense of scale. The corridors felt tighter than ever before, the ceilings lower, the turns sharper.

He moved by instinct more than sight, counting steps and measuring space by touch. His boots scuffed against debris—broken stone, ancient fragments, things left behind and forgotten.