Page 48 of The Labyrinth and the Threaded Daughter

“When I woke one gloomy morning,” she said, staring straight ahead with broken eyes. “The ship was gone.”

Corin’s jaw tightened, but he still didn’t interrupt.

She had followed him. Theseus. Not out of love at first, she admitted, but out of disbelief and betrayal. Out of fury. Out of the need to understand how someone could look at her and decide she was expendable. Her path bent back toward the one place she knew he would never willingly return.

The Labyrinth.

“I found him at the center,” she explained. “Lost. Raving. He did not recognize me at first. He thought I was another trick, I suppose.” A bitter smile touched her lips. “Perhaps I was.”

She led him then. She steadied him. She gave him water, direction, purpose—thread, most importantly. A golden thread woven by herself to get them out.

“And when we reached the threshold,” she said gently, “he smiled. He thanked me.”

Her hands trembled.

“Then he pushed me back.”

Corin felt something cold settle in his chest, and he had to clench his fists tight to stop himself from acting.

Her eyes caught sight of Corin’s fist closest to her, and she offered him a small smile. “The Labyrinth closed around me. And it did not open again. Not for me.”

Corin realized that he was likely the first to hear her story. To hear about how she had gotten trapped by the one man who she had put all of her trust in. She had not spoken like this to any other heir, and he felt truly blessed to hear the words from her lips.

She exhaled slowly, as if the truth itself weighed something physical. “At first, I thought I would die. Then I thought I would go mad. But the Labyrinth… it changed. Or perhaps I did.”

Over time, she realized the truth none of the legends ever told Corin.

Without her, the Labyrinth would unravel. Its path would grow unstable. The monsters would wander with reckless abandon. And her brother, the Minotaur, would suffer the most of all.

She had waited for him to appear. She had hoped he would, but she wasn’t quite sure of the resurgence of monsters, especially in the Labyrinth. She waited a long time for him to come back to her. And when he did, she was so happy to have a friend with her.

“So I stayed,” she ended simply. “To anchor it. To soothe him. To keep my family where they belonged. To keep my father satisfied that the balance remained.”

Corin looked at her then—really looked. Not as a legend, not a guide, not a ghost bound to stone.

A woman who had been betrayed twice and still chose endurance over destruction.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. It wasn’t much that he could offer her, but in that moment, it was all he had.

Ariadne lifted her head off of his arm to look at him. Surprise ran over her face, as if she hadn’t expected the words to be offered so easily. Then she looked away again, toward the darkness ahead. “There is no need for you to be. This place takes what it needs. It always has.”

Corin wasn't sure he believed that anymore.

“That is how the heirs started, you know,” she whispered.

He cleared his throat. “What do you mean?”

She released a sharp breath. “My father would send down new heroes to tell me to stay put. Soldiers, I assume, though I never asked after the first few. To tell me I was keeping this thing running. I would keep my brother alive, whenever he would return. Year after year they came. Until one year, many moons later, they did not. It was a while before the next hero entered the Labyrinth.”

Corin blinked. “And somehow it became a tradition?”

She nodded once. “The heroes that entered only escaped sometimes. Not enough. A few of them…” She shook her head as if to stop herself from revealing something. “It does not matter. Eventually, it morphed into an event, I suppose. The rulers decided to change their offering, and the Labyrinth was happy to accept an heir’s sacrifice instead.”

Corin didn’t know how to respond to that. He couldn’t recall the specifics of the story from his lessons, but he trusted each word that came from Ariadne’s lips. She hadn’t lied to him yet.

And he was discovering that Knossos was not entirely truthful or kind.

XVIII