The Nadir of the Labyrinth

by Christopher DeRosa

Table of Contents

Part 4: From the Unnamed Man to the Cave of Nephele’s Crystals

Adrian finished his story and took up his father’s knife, rusted though it was. “So that’s why I’m here. I’m here to get revenge for my father. I’ll kill the king’s beast or die here with my father.” He tore off another strip of cloth from his sleeve and bound a makeshift sheath for the knife.

We were silent for a moment.

“Well, that explains why you didn’t seem interested in escaping,” Penelope said softly.

“Aye, that’s why. I’m not interested in leaving. I’m here to kill my father’s killer, nothing more. It’s just how I was taught.” Adrian’s voice returned to his gruff rumble.

“I’ll be beside you then,” I said. The group turned to look at me. “I’m here to kill the Minotaur as well.” My words echoed back to me across the room.

Sophia was opening her mouth to speak when our fifth companion broke his silence with a shrill scream. The noise shattered the quiet of the cavern; it felt as though it could tear the stalagmites free from the ground.

His cry was answered by a low roar. Something massive lurched from one of the side passages. It swayed on all fours, and dozens of horns protruded from its head. It turned towards us and stamped the ground with cloven hooves. I looked into its blue, bloodshot eyes, and it looked back into mine. The Minotaur shrieked with a noise so tremendous that it threatened to bring the entire mountain down on top of us.

Penelope doused the mage light. In that last instant of illumination, I saw Adrian rise. He tore the rusted knife from its cloth sheath. Sophia lurched back. Penelope grabbed her and dove behind the fallen stalagmites. Our fifth companion was already running, screaming through the forest of bladed stone.

I stood there, staring at the Minotaur as the darkness rushed in to envelop everything. Shrieks, growls and the sound of crashing stone filled the air. The frenzied sound of hoof on stone echoed through the chamber.

I waited for death to rush to me at any moment. To find myself gored through on dozens of jagged horns. To be trampled under the thing’s hooves with my flesh and bones pulped to jelly. To feel its teeth tear into me, rip me apart. To feel my lifeblood run out of me. These moments did not come. The frantic roars began to grow faint, down another passage.

It was many long moments before Penelope spoke. “Is it gone?” she whispered.

“I think so,” I responded.

Sophia whimpered softly from behind the mound of stalagmites. The mage fire was lit; it sent a cautious glow across the room to reveal a scene of devastation. Like a ravaged army, the pointed rocks had been toppled all across the room in the Minotaur’s frenzied path.

Something dark arose amidst the piles of shattered stone spears. Adrian approached us slowly, favoring his left leg. A stream of blood ran down his face from a deep cut on his cheek that would one day add to his collection of scars. “It went right by me, knocked me down and damn near broke my leg, but it didn’t finish me. I couldn’t see it, but I heard it up close. Something drove it into a frenzy, maybe the light.” He leaned against the wall, keeping his weight off his injured leg.

“Are you going to be all right?” Sophia asked.

“I damn well better be!” Adrian grit his teeth as he tested his weight on the leg.

“Where’s the quiet one?” I asked. The young man was nowhere to be seen.

“I’ll help you look. The two of you stay here and keep quiet in case it comes back.” Penelope led the way in the direction we had last seen the silent man. Adrian grumbled but stayed behind with Sophia to nurse his leg.

“Did you ever get anything out of him?” Penelope asked as we combed our way through the jagged rocks, her mage fire cast pointed shadows up the walls.

“I never got his name. He would only say how afraid he was of all this,” I replied.

“Ah, shame. I truly did not know what to make of... oh.” We saw it at the same time. The snapped stalagmites at the edge of a steep ledge. The drop was a short one, only a few feet, but the floor below was lined with spear-like stones.

The silent man lay there, run through in four place and impaled on a dozen others. Blood ran in thin rivulets up from the tips of the rocks up towards the ceiling where it was beginning to pool into a black puddle. A stalagmite had emerged from the back of his neck, nearly beheading him.

I turned away, covered my mouth to staunch the bile that rose in my throat. The mage light dimmed and, beside me, Penelope steadied herself on my shoulder. Even in the dim light, I could see her face was very pale.

Adrian bowed his head at the news.

Sophia slumped backwards against the wall. “I never spoke to him but—”

Adrian finished for her: “But you were with him through difficult times. It still hurts of lose a part of the group. After all my years of fighting, it has never lessened.”

“Should we do anything?” I asked. “We can’t preform any burial rites.” My mind drifted back to the lavish funerals for the nobility I had been forced to sit through as a child.

“We can only wish he can bargain with the other souls on the shores of the Styx for a spare coin for the ferryman,” Penelope murmured.

We stood together then and gave a moment of grief to the unnamed man, fearful to his dying breath. A moment of silence and darkness marked his passing. Eventually, Penelope snapped the silence. “We should keep following the water. We don’t want to be caught by that thing again.” She gestured towards the tunnel we had chosen.

“Aye. Next time I’ll have it on my own terms,” Adrian growled, the fire coming back into his voice.

“I guess you will, too.” He nodded to me.

“For now, we put more distance between that thing and us,” Penelope said, and Sophia nodded vigorously behind her.

* * *

We slept again in a narrow side tunnel where the Minotaur would be unable to squeeze through. I awoke in terror. I could not fully stretch my arms and legs and felt sure that the walls of the cave were closing in around me.

I thrashed for a moment in panic before I remembered the tight corridor we had camped in. Even so, the tunnels felt closer, inescapable. A full day had certainly passed by now and hunger was beginning to set in. My guts ached for something beyond the gritty water we now subsisted on. From the growls of my companions’ stomachs as they roused themselves, I could tell they were dealing with hunger pangs of their own.

“We have days yet until we need to worry about starvation,” Adrian remarked to a particularly vicious growl from his own gullet.

The rest of us could not imagine a way to answer him. Behind me came a moan and soft thump. Sophia wailed as she fell to her knees. “I hate this! I can’t take it anymore! I hate being buried down here! I wish that thing would kill me; waiting at the Styx can’t be as awful as this!” She sobbed openly, tears rolled up her face, some caught on errant strands of her hair.

Penelope was beside her at once. “Now, now, don’t say that. We’ll find our way out, we have to!” She knelt down and patted the younger girl’s shoulder.

“You don’t know that! Not really! What makes us different than any of the bodies we’ve found? I bet they all thought the same thing.” She covered her face with her hands, her tears escaped up through her fingers. “There’s no point,” she said, and she tried to push Penelope away.

I knelt beside her as well. “There is a point. I told you that I would do whatever I could to get us out. I meant that,” I said as softly as I could.

Sophia pushed me back. “You’re just here to kill your dad’s monster!” She pushed herself up, back to the edge of the circle of light. “Just leave me here,” she said as she turned her back to us.

Penelope and I moved to comfort her and Adrian spoke up from behind us. “Don’t you give up. Don’t be like me. I threw away everything, but you’ve got a life ahead of ya. Giving up doesn’t make it any better.” His words reverberated through the narrow tunnel as he turned and walked out of the light back to the larger passage.

“You all coming?” He called back. I turned to Sophia. Her eyes were still wet, yet she took a tentative step forward and Penelope and I led her out.

We continued to follow the naiad’s joke down deeper into the mountain. The stream grew thin. At times, we would have to double back and try a different tunnel, because it became impossible to follow the thin trickles of water through the crevasses of stone. At each crossroads, I wondered if maybe we had chosen the wrong path, if we had chosen incorrectly hours before and now shuffled, with empty stomachs with the walls closing in around us, towards a dead end.

I could not escape the gnawing feeling that we would never see the Minotaur again but would die like the two we had found by the door, starved to death in the dark. We rounded a corner and came face to face with another corridor of stone that stretched out into infinite blackness. But here, the stone seemed brighter, as though a faint light crept up from the other end of the tunnel.

Penelope moved ahead of the group. “This is where they found it.” She murmured. She hurried ahead, the rest of us jogged to stay within her magelight’s glow. Around a bend, then another, she briefly pulled ahead of us, and we were thrown into total darkness once again. Then, around one sharp corner, there was light. Not Penelope’s fiery magelight but a soft, pastel glow like an early sunrise in winter.

After days down in the dark, it was almost overwhelming, but this time I did not shield my eyes. The light flowed from veins of colored crystal that lined the walls of the tunnel. In some places, pointed crystal growths gave off even brighter illumination.

Penelope stood transfixed. She was holding a thin shard of yellow crystal between two fingers. “This is where Nephele found them,” she said when we approached her. “I hate to think of her down here for days, mining these terrible things.” She ran the crystal over and over between her fingers.

“I just want to see her again. There has to be a way, there just has to.” She turned to us. A part of me wanted to tell her it was impossible, but she already knew that.

We stood there a moment before she sighed and said to me, “This place seems safe, too narrow for that thing. I think we should rest here and finally hear your story, Elena.”

I nodded and we gathered around each other in a circle like friends telling stories around a campfire. I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. My stomach tightened and I could feel my heartbeat thunder in my chest as I began to speak.

Proceed to part 5...

Copyright © 2022 by Christopher DeRosa