Of Beasts and Offerings I

Athenea has no real name here. Only a title: the goddess-offering.
When she chooses to undergo the Labyrinth's rite -a secret community where the sacred and the profane merge into a single path-, she knows exactly what she's accepting: four trials designed to strip away everything she thinks she knows about her own body, and return something she never knew she was missing. It isn't innocence the Labyrinth promises. It's another kind of purity. The kind that burns.
But no one warned her about the Custodian.
He is boundary. Limit. The one person in the Labyrinth who will never touch her. And yet his presence consumes her more than any ritual: the blank mask concealing a desire as obvious as her own, the impossible stillness of a man who watches her burn and won't allow himself to move.
Through the Circle of Desires, the Lake of the Dryads, the Threshold of Skins, and the Hall of Mirrors, Athenea learns that the true labyrinth is not made of stone. It's made of what one is capable of holding inside.
And at the end of that path, the Guardian waits.
What comes after the Labyrinth, no one told her.

+18 · Adult content