Page 35 of The Labyrinth and the Threaded Daughter

Thirty steps. Turn. Twenty more. A downward slope. Hope had started to rise in him. A few more steps.

Ariadne’s chamber greeted him again like an unchanging truth. And she still hadn’t moved.

Corin released a sharp and humorless laugh. “You’ve got to be–”

He didn’t fully finish the thought before he was charging toward a third door. Then a fourth. Then one so small he had to duck his shoulders to fit through it.

Each time, the path felt different enough. They were longer or darker or colder than the one before. Each time, he swore he was consistently moving forward, away from Ariadne and her chamber. But each time, it ended the same way.

Open air.

Sky.

Her.

Clearly, the Labyrinth was trying to tell him something.

Ariadne had shifted away from just simply watching him. Instead, she sat on a particularly large stone, humming to herself. A few times, he noticed she was pulling on some thread from an old piece of cloth, bundling it up into a small blue ball of string.

By his tenth attempt, his patience had thinned to something brittle. Sweat dampened his hairline. His ribs ached and his feet screamed out in protest.

He nearly collapsed in the center of the chamber after another few attempts, after he had given into venturing through the same halls he had previously charged through, and turned to fully face Ariadne.

“Are you doing this?” he questioned loudly.

Ariadne met his gaze. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she shrugged—one shoulder lifting and falling slowly—and shook her head in time.

“No.”

Corin searched her face for any sense of deception and found none. Only watchfulness. Caution. A quiet kind of concern she did not seem ready to admit to. But her eyes had hardly left him between every attempt.

“Then why can’t I leave?” he demanded.

She glanced toward one of the archways he had already tried to run through, then back to him. “You keep trying to go away.”

Corin nodded slowly. “That is the point here.”

Her mouth twitched, though not quite a smile. “Is it?” Her hands shifted, gathering the end of the string and beginning to weave it together.

He huffed and turned away again, stalking toward another exit. He muttered to himself, nearly cursing her name as he passed through the arch without waiting, boots striking stone in quick, frustrated steps.

It didn’t take long for the corridor to shift beneath him. The light changed, nearly blinding him. And once again, her chamber unfolded around him like a held breath released.

Corin stopped dead.

For a heartbeat, something ugly flared in his chest—panic, sharp and sudden, clawing its way up his throat. He forced it down, planting his feet as though the stone itself might betray him if he didn’t.

“This isn’t funny,” he ground out.

Ariadne tilted her head. She had not gotten far in her weaving. “I did not say it was.”

He tried again. And again. Each attempt blurred into the next. Sometimes he ran. Sometimes he walked slowly and deliberately. He marked the cracks in the walls and tried to memorize the shape of the turns.

It didn’t seem to matter, though. The Labyrinth erased all of his efforts with indifferent precision.

Eventually, he stopped trying. He leaned his forearms against his knees and dragged in a breath, then another. And it seemed like the Labyrinth approved of this as he sensed the walls around him releasing a small pulse.

He cursed the maze another few times.