The minotaur is alone. His tribe has been wiped out and he has suspected for quite some time that he may be the last of his kind.
He picks up a fallen sword and notes its design is human. He drops the weapon in the bloodstain dirt and as the early summer sunsets, he walks a ways from his still smoldering village.
He finds a secluded area and says a prayer to Poseidon.
He thanks the God of the sea for forcing Pasiphae, the queen of Crete, to fall in love with a bull.
That love affair yielded centuries of culture, but now that is over.
He will honor those traditions.
With a mournful cry he swings his pick. It bites into the soil and he pulls free a clump of grass and roots.
He swings again and again until he reaches bedrock.
Then the hard work begins. Small chips of rock hit him as he inches his way forward. He scraps and chisels. He carves. He makes turns and dead ends.
The seasons come and go. Maybe years. Maybe decades. Time means nothing any longer.
As he finishes a large chamber that marks the end of the labyrinth he lays his exhausted bleeding and broken body on the smooth stone floor.
In the end he shaped a looping maze that if viewed from above would look like a blooming oak tree.
But his work is not done.
It takes three hundred trips to bring the remains of his people into Labyrinth. He lays them in a cylindrical pattern on the floor.
As a farewell he wishes them luck in the afterlife and exits.
He steps into deep snow with no intention of ever returning to the land he has known since he was a calf. But before his journey can begin he fills in the hole he dug. He piles the large chunks of bedrock against the opening to the maze and fills in the fifty hands high hole with dirt.
He finishes by replanting the now frozen and browned clumps of grass and roots.
He taps down the sod and with one final cry to the winter moon turns his back on his work deciding no human is safe as long as breath fills his lungs.
Stories 