My Side - An Ariadne Retelling

Chapter 1

I was ten years old when Asterion was born. Well, you would have known him as the Minotour. Most only know him only as a bloodthirsty monster, an abomination, something that should have been killed as an infant - before it could do any real damage. But by the time he had been born, all the damage had already been done. The damage that mattered to me, anyway. My mother, Queen Pasiphae, was already gone. No, she wasn't physically dead, but mentally, she was... gone. Just an empty shell of the mother I used to know.

When Asterion was born, he was just like any newborn baby; loud and annoying, but cute and wonderful at the same time. For at least that's how I saw it. I didn't care that he had the head and hooves of a bull, and only ate raw meat, he was still my brother. I saw him taking his first steps, his first words (yes he could speak - I myself taught him), and he trusted me. To me, he was never a monster, but a person, just like you and me, who looked and worked a little differently. All he wanted was love, and acceptance. At least, it was that way at first. Before my father realised what he could gain from Asterion. Before he became someone I couldn't recognise.

But then again, isn't hatred just the absence of love, and evil the absence of good? Isn't it common knowledge that, if you isolate someone for too long, starve them, they forget how to be what we call human? They are reverted to animals - reduced to nothing, living just to survive. Maybe if I had protected him, stopped my father from using him, I could have saved him. Or maybe, he was always fated to become a monster.

My father, King Minos of Crete, never saw Asterion when he was born. He didn't see him until he was 3 years old. Before that, he was too 'busy' (if you could call drinking absurds, even for a King, amounts of wine busy) with "important political business" that me and my sister Phaedra "simply wouldn't understand", and buried himself in work, or what now seems more likely, chasing poor servant girls. So me and my sister were left alone, most of the time, with only Daedalus giving us any attention. It was a lonely childhood. Our other brothers, however, were lucky. Deucalion was sent away to Lycia in order to 'become a man', and Androgeos became an athlete. But I'll get on to Androgeos later.

Phaedra herself refused to look at Asterion - she had heard the rumours on why he was half man and half bull, and refused to believe them. She had only been 5 years old when Asterion was born. "Out of sight, out of mind" - that was her motto. She thought that way she could ignore the dirty rumours surrounding our family - our mother and the Cretan bull, punishment for our fathers deception to Poseidon. Yet, we could never really escape them, and they never died down. Everywhere we turned, there were some servants or nobles laughing at the absolute scandal of it, always blaming our mother, never thinking to blame the men who made her do that terrible act.

Why is it always the women who suffer when the men closest to them offends a God?

Still, up till then, my life had been mostly good and comfortable, sheltered in a way. It all went wrong on Asterion's 3rd birthday.