Page 43 of The Labyrinth and the Threaded Daughter

They turned forward together, leaving Tartarus behind, aware that the Labyrinth still had all the cards in its hands, and Corin was unsure if he was walking into this freedom or more chaos.

XVI

It must have been an hour later when Corin’s steps slowed without meaning, each footfall echoing longer than it should have.

Ahead, the passage opened into a vast chamber.

Corin crossed the threshold and felt it immediately: a pressure like memory settling over his shoulders. The room was circular, its ceiling lost to shadow and walls scored with deep gouges that looked less like tool marks and more like the aftermath of claws and horns. The stone floor was darkened in irregular patches, worn smooth in places and cracked in others. It was as though the room itself had tried to forget what had happened here and failed.

Ariadne stopped short behind him. When he noticed, Corin turned. She stood just inside the corridor as well, fingers pulling at each other in front of her. Whatever light that filtered into the room from the veins seemed to shy away from her, leaving her half in shadow.

But her gaze. It was fixed on the chamber, at the walls, without truly looking at it. It was as if her mind had completely curled in on itself to run away from a memory.

He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he felt a strong urge to protect her from this place. “You don’t have to come in.”

The words seemed to spook her out of her state, but she didn’t answer right away. She ran her eyes over the walls quickly. “This is where it happened.”

Corin wasn’t sure what she meant, but he watched her take a step inside the corridor, tentative and light.

“This is where those that intended to harm him had entered,” she explained. When Corin blinked in confusion, she continued, “This is where my brother was killed. The first time.” Her voice was steady, but there was something brittle behind it, like glass under strain. “By him.”

Understanding raced through him as he observed the room in front of him. He tried to imagine it as it must have been—alive with movement and chaos, the air ringing with breath and fury, blood hot and fresh instead of long soaked into stone.

When Ariadne had entered the Labyrinth to chase down Theseus, she surely would have seen this room in the near aftermath of chaos. The evidence of pain had been long washed away through the ages, but he could imagine how painful it was while she waited for the Minotaur to come back to the Labyrinth so that she wouldn’t be alone—if she even knew he would.

What had happened then was a mere memory haunting the walls and the woman he was journeying with.

The thought made his skin prickle.

“This room…” Ariadne shook her head once. “I tend to avoid it if I can.”

“Why?” he asked, though he had a strong feeling he understood her reasons.

The chamber seemed to listen to them, more than the maze had previously if that were even possible. The silence around them stretched thickly, a sense of expectation surrounding them. Corin felt the Labyrinth’s attention sharpen as if to thank him for something.

He stepped back toward Ariadne, stopping just short of touching her. “Then we won’t stay.”

It was then that he noticed the redness of her eyes. He wished he could resolve her pain, strike away any bad memory that had ever plagued her. To see the hurt lacing through her features nearly killed him.

She offered him a silent thanks as they began moving quickly through the chamber.

They had taken no more than a few steps before the Labyrinth rebelled.

The air thickened suddenly, fog bleeding up from the cracks in the stone like breath from something buried too deep. Corin’s skin prickled as the chamber dimmed even more, the shadows stretching and folding in on themselves.

It was a mist appearing as if intending to attack. It raced around the two, enveloping them in a cool yet damp cloak. Corin watched as his feet were completely covered in the mist before it raced up his body, swirling and curling around him but never staying in one place too long.

Slowly, it transformed. The mist moved from coiling around them to barging into one mass. It twisted and released a sharp hissing sound before forming something difficult to define. An outline, at first. Then, more details emerging. Broad shoulders. A crown.

It was a human—a man.

A man that seemed familiar to Corin, though he wasn’t sure how. He had never seen this figure before, his features unrecognizable entirely, but he was recognizable enough. Yet still, Corin could not place him.

Ariadne, though, gasped and staggered backward as if she had been struck.

“No,” she whispered.

An older man was standing before them, solid as a memory but still clearly built of mist. His deep brown, almost black, eyes were sharp and disappointed and unbearably real as he kept his steady gaze marked on Ariadne.