A Star in the Dark - A retelling of the Minotaur of Crete story (m. minotaur x f. character, 3rd person, Chpt. 2, sfw) (Patreon)

Thank you for the lovely feedback on the first chapter! As promised, here is the second, from Asterius' point of view this time. 

Content: mention of the practice of human sacrifice, some mention of parental grief/death of a child, and imprisonment, as well as pining, mutual attraction, (idiots) and a bit of snarky back and forth. 

Wordcount: 4972

Part One here 

For all the power in his monstrous body, Asterius couldn’t make his legs move.

The woman who had fallen into his arms from the world above, who had been prepared as a sacrifice for him — bathed, scented, oiled, and made-up as just another actor in the pageantry that was supposed to appease a god who rarely listened to the pleas of humans — who should have been terrified out of her mind down there in the dark with him, had taken her first look at the Minotaur, and called him beautiful.

Icarus had called him beautiful too, but they had grown up together, and Icarus had always been strange.

His mind churned it over while the sounds of conversation from the chamber beyond drifted past him like the chilly currents in the endless tunnels, and he sighed.

Upon a moment’s more reflection, he reasoned that this woman probably had every reason to want to flatter him, in the hopes that appealing to his ego would keep him from devouring her, and a sourness crept into his gut. She was probably reciting the kind of lines she thought would keep her alive in the farcical tragedy which her life had become of late.

And yet, something about the way her dark eyes had gone wide and her breath had caught told him her reaction had been honest.

“Asterius!” Daedalus barked from the room beyond, and he jumped a second time. “Get in here and move this amphora for me. My old back isn’t what it used to be, and I nearly put it out hauling the blasted thing all the way down here for you.”

“With respect…” Asterius rumbled as he entered and spotted Nesaea standing near the fire pit in the centre of the large, natural chamber in the rock. The fire behind her illuminated the silhouette of her figure through the thin linen of her peplos and he let himself look a second longer than was polite. She was barefoot too, he realised as he dropped his gaze, and the discovery of that unbalanced him more than the suggestion of her body had in a way he couldn’t define. “…Daedalus, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with your back, you are not an old man, and you drink twice as much as I do even though you’re half my size.”

Daedalus laughed, and the sudden sound of it made Asterius’ heart swell with joy. In the five years since his beloved son’s death, Asterius’ mentor had withered, and laughter had become a rare thing amid the crushing tide of a father’s guilt and grief.

“Don't you listen to him, young lady,” the inventor said with a shake of his head. “He’ll have you believing that I can play the lyre and the flute, while drawing your portrait with a piece of charcoal between my toes.”

“You can do that,” Asterius said flatly as he crossed to the terracotta amphora near the chamber’s other entrance and moved it much closer to the fire. The paintings on the curved surface of the vessel seemed to move like stage plays in miniature as the firelight licked across its surface, and he caught the way Nesaea’s eyes darted to the decoration, her keen gaze drinking it in along with everything else in the room. Including him, he noted, and felt his tail swish back and forth unbidden behind him.

“Come, child,” Daedalus said gently to her, holding out his hand and steering her towards a pile of rich blankets and cushions set back at a safe, comfortable distance from the fire’s light and heat. Smoke coiled away to a small, natural crevice in the ceiling that drew it out through the rock and into the night air on the cliffs to leave the atmosphere of the chamber as fresh and warm as a spring day. “You have had quite the ordeal today, I’m sure.”

“It’s… been a little different from my usual routine,” she said with a smile that twisted her lips at one corner and made her eyes glint playfully. She had a beautiful mouth, Asterius noted with a furtive, sideways look.

Again, Daedalus let out a single hoot of laughter and shook his head. His copper-brown curls, now frosted and shot through with streaks of wintry grey, coiled and writhed in the firelight, and his brownish chiton accentuated the richness of his hair and the unusual pallor of his skin. There was no mistaking the fact that he spent most of his time hunched over the workbench at the bottom of his tower, sheltered by the stone from sun and coastal wind.

As he hovered awkwardly some distance away from them, Asterius noted that Nesaea had skin that seemed to have spent more time in the sun than out of it. Down in the depths of the earth, she looked almost radiantly out of place, and it made his heart ache to think that someone so obviously full of life had been consigned to such a terrible death down here. At least he could spare her that. Daedalus would see to it that she made her way out of the labyrinth with him when he left after their meal, and she could take a little fishing boat around the coast to a port where she wouldn’t be recognised, and from there she could take passage to the mainland, or to one of the hundreds of islands that gathered around it like little fish around a reef.

In the morning, she would be gone, and all her laughter and beauty with her.

A pebble bounced off his chest and he blinked and looked up, wondering if the cave ceiling was weakening, but when Daedalus chuckled and spoke his name, Asterius frowned at him. “Your mind is as far away as the stars tonight, Asterius,” he said, lowering the hand that had flicked the stone at him. “Did you not hear me? Come and join us and let us hear young Nesaea’s story.”

She snorted a laugh. “There’s not much to tell,” she said, gratefully accepting the plate of roasted meat, root vegetables, and preserved fruit that Daedalus passed her, along with a few slices of freshly-baked bread.

Asterius felt self-consciously clumsy beside the two humans; his bulk unwieldy and his thick limbs awkward. His tail swished back and forth in annoyance behind him through the little hole that Daedalus had tailored for it in the sailcloth chiton, lashing the back of his legs, and he huffed a sigh that came out a lot louder than he’d intended.

“Stop puffing like a great sea beast,” Daedalus scolded in the same voice he’d used to tell Icarus off for whistling too early in the morning. “Here,” and he thrust a heaped wooden platter out to him as well from where he sat cross-legged on the blankets beside Nesaea.

“Thank you,” Asterius mumbled as he took it, and wondered if he should sit on the stone beside his mentor or on the blanket to Nesaea’s left where a space had clearly been left for him.

He settled for the latter, reasoning that if his presence did make her uncomfortable, it would be for only a single night at least. To his shy surprise though, she beamed a smile up at him when he sank down to sit with his hooves off to one side, propping up his weight on his right arm and balancing the plate on his left thigh so he could pick at his food while he listened.

“So, my dear,” Daedalus began, popping a grape into his mouth and biting down with evident relish. “What can you tell us of yourself?”

“Not much, I suppose,” Nesaea shrugged and lowered her eyes to the plate in her lap. The flames of their campfire reflected in their mirror-dark surfaces and Asterius had to look away after only a few moments. Icarus’ eyes had been a startling greenish-blue like his father’s, his hair fair like the sun that had cost him his life. He knew from Daedalus that most of the people on the Island had dark eyes and dark hair, like his half-sister Ariadne, though Asterius could count on one hand the number of people he’d seen in his life.

“What do you like to do with your time?” Daedalus prompted with a fatherly note.

“Well… when I’m not spinning the wool from our sheep or milking the goat, or tending to the chickens and mucking out the stalls, I like — I… used to like — to go down to the shipyard. My father is a master shipwright. He builds the occasional warship for the king, but when he’s not doing that, he builds and repairs fishing boats and merchant ships. Once he let me carve the details on the figurehead of the king’s own ship though…” she added with a note of pride to warm her words.

Asterius didn’t know much about humans beyond what Daedalus and his myriad stories had taught him, but he knew that the jobs she had listed to start with were those expected of the women of the island, and it was the men who worked in the trades like sculpting and carpentry and shipbuilding. Her enjoyment of the latter and apparent resentment of the former was evident.

He kept quiet.

“You’re Lysanios’ child then?” Daedalus asked and she nodded. “I have had dealings with him in the past — before my supposed ‘incarceration’. He made some adjustments to the design of his masts after a delightful discussion we had once over a cup of wine at a harbour tavern. I forget which one. He is not the sort of man I would have suspected of sacrificing his daughter…”

“It wasn’t really his decision,” she sighed, picking at the stem of a fig on her plate and rolling the bulbous fruit around a little. “My mother overruled him, as she usually does.”

Daedalus steered the conversation away from the rocks before the topic grew too morose. “You must have some talent then, if your father let you take a chisel to the king’s ship…”

Again, she shrugged, and picked the fig up between her fingers to bite into it. Asterius couldn't look away from the sight of her eating it. There was nothing deliberately provocative about the way her lips moved or her teeth bit into the soft, purple flesh, or how her fingertips pinched it, but the unexpected intimacy of watching a woman eat awoke appetites that had lain dormant in him for years. He wrenched his gaze away and stared into the fire, trying to breathe away the tension creeping into his loins before it became obvious. It wasn’t her fault that the beast in him had stirred at the sight of fig seeds spilling over her fingertips and the merest flicker of her tongue against her lower lip.

He missed what she said next but his attention was jerked back to the present when Daedalus called his name across the small, hot fire. He blinked and looked up, his long, dark eyelashes catching the firelight at the edges of his vision, and hummed. “Mmm?”

“Dear Gods, boy,” Daedalus chortled into his wine cup. “You are out of sorts. Surely the presence of a beautiful young lady in our heretofore isolated company has not upset the balance of your heart so?”

If Asterius could have blushed, his face would have been aflame. As it was, he felt his ears pull right back, and his nostrils pinched tight around the warm ring of gold that had nestled there all his life, replaced by a larger one of Daedalus’ own craftsmanship as he had grown. “I apologise,” he said without dignifying Daedalus’ teasing with an answer. “What did you say?”

“I asked young Nesaea here if she would show us a little of her skill, and wondered if you could tell me where you keep your tools.”

“Oh. I’ll… I’ll get them,” he said, inordinately grateful for the chance to slip away and compose his roiling thoughts, but Daedalus put pay to that idea.

“No, boy,” he scolded. “Not now. Not while we’re eating. How many times did I tell you and Icarus that you never eat in the workshop, and you never bring your work to the dinner table?”

“I lost count by the time I was twelve,” he said dryly.

“So many times, and yet it never sank in,” Daedalus bemoaned with a theatrical sigh towards Nesaea.

“I have got a very thick skull, didáskalos,” said Asterius.

“And a viper-fast wit,” Daedalus shot back with a grin. “Watch yourself with this one, my dear,” he added with a significant look at Nesaea. “It is not his sharp horns —”

“— horn,” Asterius corrected, tilting his head to the right and feeling the lopsided distribution of weight that was now as familiar to him as any other part of his monstrous body.

Daedalus narrowed his sea-green eyes. “Horn. Nor is it those powerful muscles that you need fear, but that mind of his. If he’d become the prince his royal mother birthed, he could have ruled nations. As it is, he helps an old man with failing eyesight and shaky hands with his inventions, and hones his come-backs in private like a soldier hones a knife.”

“Daedalus, with your eyesight, you could probably make out the difference between Nesaea's carving and her father’s on that figurehead… from the clifftop.”

Nesaea watched the two of them sparring across the fire with a grin on her face that made his stomach swoop, and his scant appetite fled.

Perhaps sensing the shift in his mood, she turned instead to Daedalus and asked the question that was always guaranteed to distract his beloved mentor. “What are you working on at the moment?”

Asterius sat back, his plate largely untouched, and let Daedalus’ wispy tenor wash over him. Nesaea, instead of growing bored with the topic of a new dockside crane that could lift the weight of an entire ship right out of the water, peppered him with questions about the mathematics of it, and by the time Daedalus had talked himself truly hoarse, the two of them had puzzled out a theoretical prototype of the locking gears that Daedalus had been mulling over for a while. They had even used the abandoned poultry bones as stand-ins for some of the timbers and trusses.

“That’s quite brilliant, my dear,” he whispered, staring at their ad-hoc little model on the platter between them.

He thanked her absentmindedly as she sloshed more wine into his cup and a little into her own. Asterius hadn’t touched his, but she still gave it a glance to check.

“And I could use the same thing in miniature in one of my mechanical statues…” he added. “Have you seen those?” he asked. “The King had them paraded through the town last summer. I’m quite proud of them, if I say so myself…”

Asterius looked across at Nesaea and found true joy in her expression, but when she bit back a yawn and fought to keep her eyes open for the fifth or sixth time that hour, he cleared his throat significantly and both of them looked up at him, blinking like owls caught off-guard by the dawn. “Forgive me,” he said awkwardly, “But it is late, and Nesaea has had a long day. Perhaps… Perhaps when she leaves in the morning, you might show her your workshop first?”

“Leaves?” she repeated, her eyes suddenly bright and wide again. “I thought…”

“You don’t have to stay here,” he said. “You’re not a prisoner.” I am not your jailer.

“I… Where would I go?” she asked, looking sharply from Asterius to Daedalus and seeming genuinely frightened for the first time since she’d plunged down into the labyrinth and landed in the arms of a monster.

Daedalus, though a little blurry around the edges from the wine, fixed her with an incisive look. “Listen,” he said, and his eyes narrowed further as if to help focus his gaze on her face. “I have a lot of work, and I’m not getting any younger. True, I can make the journey down here to run ideas past Asterius any time I like, but he is more of an artist than an architect. If you want something creative, he’s the one to talk to, but I need a more analytical mind. Not that he’s not intelligent, of course — far from it — but I need one that works like yours,” he said and he sipped from his cup to wet his throat before continuing.

Nesaea swallowed and a light kindled in her dark eyes while she waited, every line in her body tense, expectant, even hopeful.

“Would you perhaps care to join me in the tower? You may have the room that belonged to Icarus, and I will teach you what you do not yet know. We will, of course, have to keep your presence there a secret from the king and from the people who deliver food and supplies to my door, since dear Asterius here is supposed to have consumed you by now —” he wafted his wine cup in Asterius’ direction and a little sloshed over the side onto the blanket, but he didn’t notice.

Asterius’ stomach lurched along with the liquid in the cup and he looked away, sickened.

Nesaea looked up at him and said, “I can’t believe anyone has ever thought you capable of something like that.”

The quiet certainty and abject revulsion in her tone brought a wash of emotion up his throat and he choked and blinked, vision swimming. He wished his insides would stop churning like the harbour water in a storm.

Distantly he heard Daedalus speak again. “Most people never gave him the chance, my dear. Now, what do you say? Would you like to become my apprentice? You could live down here or with me in the tower.”

“I think I’d like that very much,” she said with quiet certainty in her voice. “And… here is fine. At least… for now. You can show me the tower in the morning?”

Out of the corner of his eye Asterius caught her looking at him again and he drew in a long, steadying breath. “I’ll —” he began, but his deep voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “I’ll show you where you can sleep, and I’ll walk you back to the workshop afterwards, Daedalus. You’ve had more to drink tonight than you usually do, and I don’t trust you not to go wandering off.”

“Nonsense, I built this place, you insolent calf!” Daedalus chuckled. “I couldn’t get lost down here if I tried!”

“Mmhmmn,” smiled Asterius. “And where did I find you two weeks ago?”

“Oh shush,” the older man said with a roll of his eyes as he set his cup down and stood up carefully. He didn’t sway, but Asterius suspected that was more through stubborn willpower than sobriety. “Very well. I would appreciate your company, Asterius, if not your navigational skills.” To Nesaea, he said, “I will see you soon, but do take your time to adjust after everything you’ve been through. And make sure Asterius shows you the hot springs.”

“Hot springs?” she asked, looking from Daedalus to Asterius.

Unbidden, the image of her standing completely naked in the centre of the natural hot spring that Daedalus had discovered while building the labyrinth crashed across Asterius’ mind and he closed his eyes briefly. “Do you wish to bathe now?” he asked with what he thought was admirable calm in his placid voice.

“No,” she said. “They scrubbed me almost raw before I came down here. Guess they thought you wouldn’t like the taste of the docks on me or something.”

The thought of putting his mouth on her in an entirely different context, of tasting her, of hearing her gasp and feeling her writhe with pleasure put pay to all his recent efforts and he felt his cock stir beneath the linen of his chiton. The last person he had been intimate with was Icarus, and since his friend and lover’s death, he’d hardly felt the need to take care of himself at all. Now, in the space of one evening, he was coming undone with all the graceless ardour of a teenager all over again.

Nesaea was still looking at him, and he mustered a weak smile. “Tomorrow then,” he croaked. “This way,” and he gestured with his head towards the tunnel through which they had entered earlier that night. “Daedalus, you stay put. I’ll be back in just a moment.”

His mentor swatted a hand dismissively at him, and turned to Nesaea. “Rest well, my dear. I look forward to having you in the workshop when you have acclimatised to your new situation. No rush.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she took a step towards him as if she were going to hug him. She didn’t, and instead took up one of his hands in both of hers and squeezed. “Truly,” she went on and included Asterius with her wide, dark eyes. “I thought… Earlier tonight I thought I was going to my death, but you’re not at all what I was expecting to find. Thank you for being so —” she fixed Asterius to the spot as she looked right at him “— kind.”

She let go of Daedalus, looking a little embarrassed by her outburst, and then crossed the fire-lit space to stand beside Asterius.

With one last look across the fire at his mentor, who stood watching the two of them with an inscrutable expression, one eyebrow ever so slightly raised, Asterius picked up a torch and lit it in their fading campfire. He led her away from the large chamber and back up the tunnel. The only had a few yards to go in the dark, and they were shrouded by the leaping light of the torch, but he felt her slide her fingers into his arm again all the same, and his heart skipped a beat at the touch.

“Do you mind?” she asked, glancing up at him.

“No,” he breathed. “Of course not.”

“Is it far?”

“No. Turn right here,” he added, and she stuck out her right hand to feel the tunnel branch out into the shadows.

“I wouldn’t even have noticed that,” she said with a slight giggle. “Even with the torch…”

“You’ll get used to it.” The gods knew, he had.

“I suppose you did,” she said quietly, echoing his own thoughts so closely it almost made him miss a step in the dark.

He nodded and reached for the wooden handle of a door at the end of the corridor. Pushing it open, he stepped into the small, square room beyond.

Oil lamps sat cold in the alcoves, and he took his torch around the room, slowly and carefully igniting them until two points of light flared in the recesses on each of the walls. On their left, the low, wooden bed with its deep, woollen mattress and pillows was draped with soft linen sheets and thick blankets woven with a warm, wine-red and black pattern, and a bronze washstand with fresh water glinted in one corner, while a heavy, wood and bronze chest doubled as both storage and seating at the end of the bed.

A low shelf had been cut into the rock all the way around the room to form a continuous bench that jutted out from the walls by about a foot or so, and it was dotted with numerous cushions and rugs to stave off the constant, seeping cold of the rock. A colossal, polished bronze mirror that Asterius himself had helped Daedalus to cast had been ground to a perfect shine and hung on the wall opposite the bed, and the pock-marked, carved walls had been lime-rendered over white. The lower third of the wall was painted with curling waves in lapis blue and verdigris green and the upper portion had clouds and a few seabirds picked out in painstakingly realistic detail.

Nesaea’s breath caught when she spotted a painted dolphin spinning joyously in the space between the two niches on the opposite side of the room, and she darted forward to inspect it. As her bare feet touched the woven rug on the ground though, she looked down and then turned back to look up at him. “It’s —” she began, but her eyes filled with tears and she covered her mouth to keep from crying. “It’s beautiful,” she said, swallowing thickly. “Did you paint this?”

He nodded. “It’s been waiting for you for a long time.”

“Nine years,” she said, turning serious. And then her mind latched onto the fact that there had been one other sacrifice before her. “What… What happened to… her?”

Grief and regret lanced through him and he looked down, his great, cloven hoof scraping as he adjusted his weight. “She died,” he said. “I didn’t… I didn’t know what the drums meant then. It had been nine years since I was cast down here, but I didn’t know there was any significance to that. Any… pattern. I wasn’t there… when… when she fell. It was days before I found her. Before I learned what the sound of drums meant. Daedalus didn’t know either. Back then.”

“Shit,” she exhaled, and the profanity on her lips almost made him feel a little better somehow.

“Daedalus took her and gave her a proper funeral, and I swore to be there the next time I heard the drums.”

“Thank you,” she said. In the quiet, domestic intimacy of her new bedroom, Nesaea didn’t look at him like he was a monster.

In a way he was glad that her predecessor had never been given the chance to fear him, to look up at him and see the abomination she’d been promised before she’d been dropped down that shaft like discarded meat to feed a rabid, caged animal. He knew what they said about him on the surface. There was no way two people would have reacted the way Nesaea had to him; with grace and tolerance. He had expected to have to carry her, thrashing and screaming, to Daedalus before retreating into the shadows of the labyrinth with her screams echoing in his ears.

Nesaea should have been afraid of him, but as she crossed back over the rug and came to a halt right in front of him, she looked at him with soft wonder in her face, and for a moment he dared to hope they might be friends. That she truly would want to stay.

She took a little breath, then fixed him with an odd, nervous kind of smile, and before he could work out what she was about to do, she had reached out her arms and was hugging him.

His mind went completely blank at the contact for three pounding heartbeats.

The top of her head barely came past the curve of his soft paunch, but as she rested her cheek against the coarse fabric of his chiton and squeezed her arms around his middle as far as she could reach, something cracked inside him. It gave way with the same thunderclap intensity as his right horn had sheared off on the day he’d fallen into the labyrinth, and he had the strange sensation again that he was falling.

He closed his arms around her small body in awkward, halting jerks until his hand was cupping the back of her head and his other was spread across the flat plane of her shoulders. Her hair spilled down in stray tendrils over his rough fingers and he could smell the oils they’d combed into it. She tightened her grip on him even more and her breath hiccupped. With a jolt, he realised she was crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked without letting go or drawing back.

“I don’t know,” she said, half laughing and half crying. “I think… I think it’s just been… a lot… today, you know?”

“I understand. I’ll leave you to settle,” he said, though the last thing he wanted to do was tear himself away from her warm, fierce embrace. “If you need anything, go back to where we turned right to reach this room. If you go left, it’ll take you to the large chamber where we ate tonight — we call it the hall — but if you go straight across, it leads to my rooms. Don’t go anywhere else until you’ve got the measure of this place, but if you do find yourself lost, shout for me and I’ll find you.”

“I didn’t notice that was a crossroad,” she said. With a final squeeze, she stepped back and smeared the back of her hand across her eyes. It came away black with charcoal from her makeup, and she laughed. “I’ll have to see to this first,” she said.

“There’s water and soap over there,” he told her. “And another pail of drinking water just there. There’s more in the hall too in a huge stone basin that fills with spring water. Another of Daedalus’ ideas.”

She nodded.

“Goodnight.”

“’Night,” she smiled, still sniffling slightly.

He turned with a final nod, closing the door softly behind him.

His cloven hooves felt like they were floating as he made his way back to the hall to accompany Daedalus back to the tunnel beneath his tower.

When he reached the large, echoing chamber, he found that Daedalus had banked the fire and sorted the plates out to take the food-waste to the edge of the cliff for the seabirds to clean up.

He straightened and turned around at the sound of Asterius’ resonant hoofbeats, and fixed his pupil and friend with a glint-eyed look. “Well, my boy,” he said in his raspy tenor. “Wasn’t that an interesting evening?”

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