Ennead: Tales of Hell

Limbo

Wandering was my curse. Searching was my goal.

I quickly realized it was impossible to do the latter while the first stood in my way. How could I have direction if I knew nothing of what lay behind one break in the obsidian wall versus the other? Darkness always greeted me on the other side, no matter which way I turned, and the weight of it tried to crush me from the infinite black sky above.

Light did not exist, yet somehow I could always see a few paces ahead of me, just enough to keep walking - or, sometimes, running. 

Impossible monsters lived in every corner, every false turn, and every choice I made. I faced tiny ones like scorpions with ragged pincers and a bulb full of something golden meant to tempt me. They quite liked the tiny cracks in the walls so they were unavoidable, yet I always managed to just barely outrun them. I was always a step ahead, and I knew it was no coincidence.

The most monstrous of them all could not decide what I deserved beyond being lost to this masterpiece of a maze. He kept me alive, but only barely, and in a place where it was supposed to be impossible to hope, I felt a shimmer of it glowing under my skin.

At first, I hadn't believed it. What did scorpions and hope prove other than some form of torture? I would not have put it past the minotaur to make me think I could escape, only to crush it into some form of misery right at the very end as my soul winked out of existence. What better form of vengeance was there?

But I faced misery many times over, from the great lions with wicked smiles that enjoyed trampling me just to turn around and do it again to the eyeless hawks that dove down and pecked holes into my skin from time to time. My misery did not grow as these attacks continued, nor did my life end. I could have been killed under a lion paw and been just as hopeless had I died under a hawk beak. No, I knew the minotaur was keeping me alive.

He wanted to face me one last time.

Perhaps it was symbolic that I was a mirrored match to him. The monstrosity that coated him, that had made the world fear him, was tucked away inside of me, in my soul rather than on my skin. It was far less noticeable, but I was proud of it. Monsters were powerful and strong. It was a disappointment that the minotaur did not realize either.

I'd hoped he would. All I ever wanted was for him to wear his beastliness proudly, but he had not changed the labyrinth at all. He had not made it any more horrible. It remained as I had created it.

Finally, after days or months or years of being alive but not living, the darkness started to rumble. I didn't know where in the labyrinth I was - I had made that impossible. This place was meant to create insanity from weathered souls, but there was no doubt in me that the minotaur had done everything he could to guide them out of it.

His red eyes appeared above me, so bright that I was momentarily blinded. When next I could see, there was a glow around him. He was as hideous and terrifying as he had always been.

"Icarus," he said, though his voice was more felt than heard. It surrounded me like static. 

"Minotaur," I spat. "You spared me."

"Only to get one simple answer from you." He grew smaller until he was no longer standing on the tops of the walls, but in front of me. He filled up the entire space, his muscles just as prominent as they had been when he was big, but his brown eyes changed. There was no more rage - only pain. "Why?"

"You know the answer, beast." I marched up to him, unafraid of so weak a monster that he could not be monstrous, not even in front of his greatest enemy. "King Midas offered gold. If imprisoning me meant riches beyond belief, you would have done the exact same thing."

"No," he rumbled, "you're wrong. I would have known better, that no amount of gold would have filled the hole of wrongful imprisonment. After all, it was not enough for you, the boy who flew into the sun to catch a glimpse of a god."

"Wrongful imprisonment?" I laughed. "You were a monster among men! I did King Midas's people a favor - they were terrified of you." The minotaur flinched, and never before had I felt such disgust for such weakness. 

"No," he said, shaking his great horned head. "I lived among many of them peacefully for years before I'd even known the word monster. It was boys like you who chose to see me as a terror, who made up rumors of evil so they could be rid of one unlike them. It was you who was a monster among men." He paused. "I spared you in hopes that you had changed, but I sense now that you have not."

"I embraced who I am! I hoped after years had passed that you had, too. We are monsters, Minotaur. We are strong and powerful and ruthless. We can take anything!" I clasped him on the shoulder with a smile. "Even our freedom."

That became my goal the moment I set foot in my own creation that I had never thought I would see again. I wanted him to realize who he was, and it was there, flickering in his eyes and in the twitch of his nostrils. He was so close, all because I had offered him escape.

"I am not powerful enough to break out of this place." He narrowed his eyes. "You made it so."

"I, in fact, didn't." The minotaur straightened. "This place will fade away from your memory and you will return to the mortal world. All you must do for that to happen is doom every soul that enters, no matter how innocent, to wander until the day before eternity. Doom them to lose hope, to think they died and found the golden fields only to wake up again at the beginning of the labyrinth. Leave your ghost behind to haunt them, and create more terrifying creatures to roam this place - I'll wait while you do. Then, and only then, will we both be allowed to leave."

"I won't," he said. "I will find another way."

"I rigged this place, Minotaur. I left one loose end when I passed it on to you - the only uncertain part of my creation. If I command it to, it will swallow up escape. You will never have another chance to set yourself free. This is your one and only."

He shut his eyes and scrunched up his nose. I knew then, in those few seconds before I was sent to my doom of eternal hell elsewhere, what his answer was, and I spoke the words that made the labyrinth inescapable.

Forever would be a long time for the minotaur to regret, and that knowledge was the very last thing to make me smile.