The Ordeals Of The Labyrinth - Part 3
"Moo!"
"I'm trying not to die here!" Bianca snapped at the insistent sound, only to flinch in guilt when the magical water cow - and after everything she'd been through, that part she no longer even blinked at - reared back in apparent hurt, a mournful crooning cry echoing down its muzzle.
"Sorry. Just... wait"
"Moo." Came the mollified answer.
That over and done with, she turned her attention back to the present nightmare - trying to shimmy her way across a narrow ledge and avoid tumbling into a pit so deep the bottom she could see was nothing more than a bed of darkness and the promise of a very messy end should her grip on the stones that jutted out of the ragged wall she was up against slip.
It wasn't even the first time she'd had to do this, but the third, and she was already so utterly sick and tired of the nightmare of it all. This accursed maze she'd found herself trapped in was such a blatant, unhinged death trap it was almost comical - like something out of an old Looney Tunes flick with a homicidal edge to everything .
Everywhere she turned, there was a nasty twist waiting for her among the dark, low-lit hallways. Corners that opened up over sharp drops and pits full of tar and bones, chambers where hooked blades dropped from above and would have gored her if she hadn't hit the ground flat, a room where the sound of sharp, hungry growls had sent her sprinting in the other direction and nearly impaling herself on a wall of rusty, crusted spikes that hadn't been there a second ago...
Gods .
"Moo."
The cow didn't suffer the same troubles, naturally, disappearing and reappearing at will.
Her heart had almost given out the first time she'd rounded a corner and found it gone, but it always returned sooner or later, half-submerged as it was now in the low pool of water it was constantly surrounded by.
Bianca had been following it zealously since the very moment it had shown up with Zoe's silver bow clenched between its teeth - and who knew how long ago that was now - and she still couldn't tell whether it was moving the water along with it wherever it went or sprouting it all on its lonesome, and at this point, she didn't much care.
She was just painfully grateful that it kept coming back
It might even have been helping - it always seemed to return right when Bianca was on the verge of taking a bad turn.
Bad being relative - every turn so far had been terrible, and the only respite Bianca had gotten where the very, very few times where she'd ended up in empty rooms or small, cramped but refreshingly safe nooks and crannies where she could stop and breathe, just for a second.
Even then, she didn't stay too long. Sticking in one spot for too long, no matter how safe it seemed hadn't worked out for her yet. After a while, she would start to hear things in the shadows and the spaces her eyes swore were empty - dragging, scrapping, and picking sounds, like something was digging through the rock trying to get at her.
She couldn't see a thing, but whenever she turned to look, she'd feel eyes on the back of her neck, and by the time she looked back again, the path ahead would have already shifted and changed.
Once, the walls themselves had literally tried to close in on her and she'd been so dazed with fear she'd have been pancaked into a blood smear had the damned mooing not startled her into moving.
If the cow didn't keep returning and urging her on every so often when her legs threatened to collapse out from underneath her, the hysterical stress that she could feel building up at the back of her skull would have likely driven her to another breakdown.
As it was, she was just barely holding on.
Compared to the rest of them, Bianca was nothing. No weapons training, no magic, not even the good sense not to listen to voices that spoke in her head and led her into tearing open the ground and dropping herself into hell.
Bar Nico, she was the least impressive of the seven, and even her little brother had ten times her grip on Greek mythology she did and - if there was even a smidge of justice in the universe at all - had to have at least one of the others to look after him.
Except for the cow, Bianca was alone and had nothing at all to help her… and yet she was still alive .
If even she could make it with the odds stacked so heavily against her, then so could the others.
So did the others, she reminded herself vehemently and started inching forward again.
She just had to keep moving and find them, starting with Zoë. One foot in front of the other, over and over again until the job was done, no matter how much her body ached and how badly she wanted to curl up into a ball and cry her eyes out.
Finally, she made it across the ledge, staggering onto solid ground, rounding her way past the cow before dropping to her knees and gasping for breath.
"Moo!"
"Please..." she rasped, the exhaustion hitting her like a tidal wave, and she fought the urge to dry heave viciously. "Just give me a second ."
"Moo!"
There was something that rang different in the cry, more insistent, more urgent, more fearful, and a cold breeze ruffled her sweat-drenched hair.
Bianca's hackles rose immediately - she hadn't felt anything but warm, stifling air in all the time she'd been here - and she looked up.
Immediately she noticed that, somehow, in the time it took her knees to hit the ground, her surroundings had melted and warped into something entirely different.
Ruined walls bordered a square courtyard about the size of a tennis court. Three other gateways, one in the middle of each wall, led north, east, and west. In the center of the yard, two cobblestone paths intersected, making a cross. Mist hung in the air—hazy shreds of white that coiled and undulated as if they were alive, and rose up to form a dome that hid whatever sky that might have lay beyond - though she had a sinking feeling that it was yet another blank ceiling instead.
More importantly, two figures were standing at the intersection of the paths.
The first was a man, and if Bianca hadn't met a literal giant she would have thought that he was absurdly tall at seven feet. He was dressed in a dark tux, with long hair pulled back into a low ponytail that made the scars littering his face pop out that much more. His silver eyes gleamed with interest and something disturbingly like elation as he took in Bianca and the suddenly shock-still cow beside her.
The second figure hurt to look at.
At first, Bianca thought there were three of her. Three smoky, blurred images of a woman whose features she couldn't hope to place stood in place, shimmering over one another with every passing blink. And then something changed, and the three forms merged into one. She solidified into a young woman in a dark sleeveless gown.
Her golden hair was gathered into a high-set ponytail, Ancient Greek style. Her dress was so silky, it seemed to ripple, as if the cloth were ink spilling off her shoulders.
She looked no more than twenty, but Bianca knew by now that in a world of immortals, she could quite literally be old as dirt, and she regarded her with a gaze that had the inside of her mouth going drier than sandpaper.
"Well." The scarred man's voice was deep and melodious in a way, his "This is a pleasant surprise."
"Indeed. And as it was I who went to the trouble of arranging it, it remains mine and mine alone to enjoy."
She raised an arm, and while Bianca recoiled from the motion and the unsettlingly familiar voice, something like alarm flickered across his features.
"Now, hold on-"
"No. You'll have your chance in due time, Prometheus. Until then," She snapped her fingers, and the sound cracked like thunder . Bianca cringed so hard it was a miracle her spine didn't snap from the force of it, and the cow whimpered helplessly beside her . " Go ."
The command hit the air with visible force. The shroud of mist heaved and billowed as though cut in a strong gust of wind, and the man - Prometheus - staggered back as his image flickered.
"Cousin," He sighed in resigned protest even as he faded into dispersing mist before her very eyes, his voice drifting off into the ether as he vanished. "Who's side are you on?"
"What a foolish question." The words were murmured into nothingness, right before she turned to Bianca.
"Hello?" The girl called nervously, because what else was she going to do? She was so, so lost .
The woman merely raised a brow.
"Hello, Bianca Di Angelo."
"Who are you?" Bianca's fingers twitched at her sides. "I mean…which goddess?
She was sure of that much. The mist, the magic she'd seen her do, to say nothing of the fact that Bianca could almost taste the power wafting off of her - and it wasn't pleasant.
"Ah." The woman nodded. "Let me give you some light."
She raised her hands. Suddenly she was holding two old-fashioned reed torches, guttering with fire. The mist receded to the edges of the courtyard. At the woman's sandaled feet, the two wispy streaks of it took on solid form. One was a black Labrador retriever. The other was a long, gray, furry rodent with a white mask around its face.
Was that a weasel ?
The woman smiled serenely.
'"I am Hecate," she said. "Goddess or Titaness of magic - whichever you prefer, truly, for both titles are mine to claim by right. We have much to discuss."
...
Bianca stared.
Hecate stared back.
Even the cow stared.
The silence stretched on.
And on.
And on.
And on.
Until eventually, it didn't.
"Are you evil?" Bianca blurted out.
Immediately, she felt like an idiot.
What she'd meant to say was something along the lines of Are you going to hurt me, like nearly everything else has tried to do so far - but her stupid uncooperative brain was running on fumes and spat out the first thing that came to mind.
The Labrador didn't so much as twitch, but the weasel chittered and bared its teeth. Then it growled, and the sound was like the unholy melding of a rusty chainsaw and something dark and twisted that carved off ten years of her life and nearly blew her ears out right then and there.
"Peace, Gale. The girl means no offense." Hecate gave her a slow, measured look as her hands dropped and the torches vanished, and Bianca tried not to feel like she was looking through her skin. "The ordeals of the Labyrinth take their toll on even the most resilient of demigods, and she is yet far from that peak."
She didn't even have it in her to register the probable insult. The rodent glared at her with baleful red eyes like tiny coals, but it stayed silent.
"The Labyrinth?" She asked, partly out of confusion and mostly just for an excuse not to meet those eyes.
Something about that name, about Hecate's name as well niggled at her mind - some vague memory of one of Nico's mythomagic rants stirring at the back of her head, but for the life of her she couldn't get her hands on it.
"An arcane maze built long ago by a small man who flew too close to close to the sun and fell for it. Metaphorically speaking. His son and heir, on the other hand, did so rather literally." The goddess smiled humourlessly "Or so the stories go. In reality, the truth of the Labyrinth is infinitely more complex and nuanced than that, and utterly inconsequential to you at the present moment."
Hecate stepped forward and began to drift around Bianca, circling around her like a shark stalking its prey.
"In answer to your previous question, child, regarding my nature."
She tilted her head, and for a moment her image broke back into three ghostly, hazy figures.
"Many fear me." Three voices overlapped, before smoothing out into one articulate tenor. "But magic is neither good nor evil. It is a tool, like a knife. Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil."
That was an answer, Bianca acknowledged, but just barely. There was nothing reassuring to be found in the ambivalence of that answer.
"Why are you here?" Bianca swallowed roughly. "What do you… what do you want?"
From me , she would have added, but she didn't think she had to.
"Many things, daughter of Hades. Many things indeed, exceedingly few of which are yours to know. But for now, an apology is due."
Bianca didn't hear the second part.
Daughter of Hades
Something in her brain fizzled and burned out, and there was a strange ringing in her ears.
Daughter of Hades.
It was official - she was a demigoddess, she had a divine parent, an important one… but that meant nothing to her.
But more than that…
She remembered. She knew now why Hecate's voice had been so familiar.
Daughter of Hades.
That damned voice .
"It was you!" She hissed, voice quivering in rage and tears springing into her eyes of their own violation. "It was you!"
Hecate had guided her into splitting apart the earth, triggering the avalanche of scrap and treasure that had dragged her down into this Labyrinth and scattering all her friends like pin bowls the gods only knew where.
" I t was you ! "
Hecate was unphased, though Gale the weasel began to hiss angrily before her mistress shot her a simple, quelling look.
"As I said. An apology is due." She pursed her lips. "Of a sort ."
"An apology!?"
"My intervention was necessary," Hecate said flatly. "Zeus would have likely killed at least one of your number, perhaps even more. Thanatos would have acted to protect you on principle, for Luna Lovegood's sake if nothing else, but for all his folly the King of the Gods has power of his own, and Thanatos would not have been able to match it and protect all of you in so a mere, flickering fragment of an avatar constructed with such haste."
The goddess stopped and took a step in her direction.
"I have no time for your anger. Neither do you. Without my help, you will certainly die, and so will the rest of your companions."
Whatever Bianca was about to say to that - whatever she could say to that, when just about every word had and implication had flown clear over her head - died a sudden, violent death.
"What?" She whispered, hope blooming in her heart like spring had come early. "They're alive?"
The cold, detached nod was sweeter than any ambrosia and nectar could ever hope to be.
They were alive, and it was a fact .
"Why?" She whispered when regained, vision blurry with relief. "Why would you help?"
She wasn't expecting an answer - she didn't want one, even, when just the promise of her finding the others and making it out of this nightmare alive was enough to have her bawling pitifully, but Hecate offered one anyway.
"I am a goddess who values choice - my very domain is shaped by it. Yet I forced your hand and all but stole yours for a cause not your own. It would not due for Luna Lovegood to fall or suffer unduly so soon on her own path."
"What does Luna have to do with this?"
Hecate gave her another long, hard stare, her black eyes like empty voids drinking in all light.
Bianca couldn't meet them for long before ducking her head helplessly.
"Let me guess. It's not my concern?"
She winced when she was done - she hadn't meant for the words to sound so bitter and weak .
"Precisely." Bianca got the impression that Hecate was amused. "Suffice it to say that I am oathbound and very wary not to let my investments go to waste . I also have no wish at all to see what would become of this pantheon should Thanatos be made to reap his own child. Regardless, an overstep was made on my part, no matter how incidentally beneficial it was to your own purposes, and I prefer to settle my debts with haste."
Hecate snapped her fingers again, though this time not so thunderously. The mist still warped and surged forward like a beast being brought to heel, and it condensed and changed shape into something recognizable.
... Was that a backpack?
"Supplies," Hecate answered, before flickering her index finger at her so suddenly she flinched. "And for a weapon..."
Something heavy settled in Bianca's grip. It was a long triangular dagger with a leather grip, and the gleaming celestial bronze blade was wide at the base and stretched sharply to the point.
"It's name is Katoptris, the cursed looking-glass." The goddess intoned gravely. "Weild it with a sharp mind and clear purpose, and it will serve you well, but be wary not to be lost into the blade's reflection, for that way lies a danger of its very own."
Bianca considered asking for an explanation.
Then she thought better of it because it didn't matter .
For the first time since she'd woken up in the Labyrinth, she felt something close to the ghost of confidence, and she wasn't about to surrender it without a fight.
So instead she asked the most important question of all.
"Can any of this help me find my brother and my friends?" The plea slipped into her tone entirely on its own. "Can you ?"
Hecate was unmoved.
"I will not send them to you, or you to them. There is a limit to how far even I can or will interfere, even on a favored one's behalf. But I will not have to. Stride forward with the same will that saw you to me, and you will discover what you seek in time."
...Bianca was starting to think that the gods, no matter how apparently 'helpful' they chose to be, just couldn't not be so cryptic that every other word out of their mouths made her brain hurt and her blood boil because there was nothing she could do about it.
How exactly was that vaguely comforting and yet unusable joke of a non-answer supposed to be helpful?
If Hecate noticed her reaction, she didn't show it.
"Hecuba will accompany you for a time."
Finally, the Labrodar seemed to come to life. It barked sharply before trotting over to the cow, and Bianca almost did a spit-take as she remembered her other companion
It looked scared out of its grass-munching mind and was trembling like a leaf in the wind.
"And the Bane will do the rest." The word rolled off her tongue with deadly meaning, and the answering moo was an unmistakable whimper .
Bianca looked from the dog to the cow and back to the goddess.
"Bane?"
"The Ophiotaurus."
... Bianca wasn't going to ask. She wasn't .
Luna would explain it when she found her for a change.
"You walk," Hecate answered, and Bianca nearly screamed in frustrated outrage before the goddess blurred and was suddenly right there in her face. "But let me offer you one final piece of advice before all is said and done."
Her heartbeat went from sedate to critical in the time for her to inhale as those black eyes went inhumanely sharp.
"For your own sake, do not ever presume that Thanatos cares for you as anything more than his daughter's friend . Valuable , but compared to her, you are but dust and ash to be, Hades's will be damned, and he is not your ally . None of his ilk are. " Hecate stepped back " Luckily for you, and for the vast majority of mortals you are likely to ever interact with in some way or another, the protogenos so very rarely stir from their slumber or choose to manifest a corporeal form . Ouranos was a lesson well learned, to say nothing of that utter catastrophe with Eros at the dawn of the first age."
Bianca blinked.
Eros? That… that was a name she did know. One of the only mythomagic cards Nico outright hated .
"Love." Hecate stared at her blankly "Eros is… the god of love, right?"
"…Yes." Slowly, the goddess grinned , her teeth barred and flickering in triplicates.
It was terrifying
"He is now. And what a tumble from grace that was. But that too, yet again, is not a matter for you or yours to concern yourselves with. Not for a while more, perhaps."
And then the goddess snapped her fingers for the third and final time, and she and everything vanished in a swirling burst of eldritch mist.
...
When the mist dispersed, Bianca staggered back, Katoptris still clenched between her fingers in a death grip.
"Moo!"
Beside her, the Ophiotaurus looked sick to its stomach - Bianca didn't bother questioning at what point she started understanding it well enough to name its expressions.
Hecuba the Labrador was the only one of them who stood unphased, though her hackles were raised as she growled at their surroundings.
Or rather, the lack of them.
There was nothing around the three of them, except for a low-hanging ceiling,
She opened the door and was immediately hit with a burst of heat and a scream of agony so monstrous she was nearly bowled herself. Instincts blaring in panic, she dropped to the ground and huddled beside the Ophiataurus at once .
"What was-?"
There was a clicking sound behind her, and all three of them rounded on the spot.
The door they'd just come through had vanished.
...
" F uck ."
"Moo." The Ophiotaurus agreed shakily, and even Hecuba chuffed lowly.
Cursing up a hurricane so nasty it would have probably stopped a hellhound's heart, Bianca turned back around and crept forward.
They'd stepped into some kind of massive domed chamber lit by torch lights, empty save for the stone stands that circled an empty platform far, far below them. Two massive shadowed and unguarded hallways led to somewhere Bianca couldn't see
And hanging in the middle of the chamber, suspended from the dome by a chain of celestial bronze hoisting her up by the manacled hands was none other than Zoë Nightshade.
" N o ."
The lieutenant of Artemis was in such a horrible state that Bianca couldn't even feel relief at the sight of her. Her clothes were torn and bloodied from the waist up, what visible skin she could see was mottled with green, sickening scrapes caked in dried blood, and her hair was matted with so much more of the stuff that it had changed to the color of rust.
It hung over her limp, lolling head in a macabre curtain, and only the unsteady movement of her chest and the rasping rattle Bianca could somehow hear despite the distance between them proved that she was even alive.
"What happened?" She whispered in complete horror, and moved to run towards her-
And then another deafening bellow of a scream thundered and Bianca was once again flat on the ground and hiding for all she was worth.
Damn. it. All .
The scream cut off, the last of it pattering out from the hallway it had come from, and silence blanketed them like a cloud of smog.
A long moment passed.
Then there were loud, ominous rhythmic thuds heading in their direction, and Bianca pressed herself even further down into the ground just as the ugliest, most disgusting monster she'd never imagined stepped out of the shadows.
It - she - a half-human body, like a centaur , but that comparison was probably the most offensive insult to Chiron and his kind anyone could ever make.
Her skin was reptilian and her lower half was scaled, fanged and clawed like what Bianca imagined a dragon would be, black with white stripes down her flank. Snakes surged across them, snapping at the air and hissing menacingly.
Enormous, monstrous wings grew out of her back, and beneath them an even larger scorpion tail that dripped green, crackling fluid that steamed where it hit the ground.
At the point where her halves meet, Bianca could see the skin bubbling and twisting into the shape of animal heads - bear, boar, wolves, and more things that she'd never even heard of.
Worst of all, she was hefting a gnarly, evil-looking abomination of a leather whip in one long, clawed hand, and Bianca suddenly knew exactly what had happened to Zoë.
The burst of rage was good.
It steadied her against the disgusted horror, right in time for the monster to speak.
"Still asleep, Huntress?" The monster's voice dread and vile poison translated into words. She was almost happy Zoë wasn't awake to hear it "Good . Regain what little strength you can muster, for you'll need it once more soon enough . I always love a challenge."
And then she turned and rumbled past the broken huntress, making for the opposite hallway and marching into the darkness.
Bianca waited until she couldn't hear footsteps any longer, before slowly turning towards her inhuman partners.
"I can't get Zoë down without... without time ." She said hollowly.
She didn't even know how to start .
"We're going to have to fight that thing , aren't we?"
The Ophiotaurus looked at her like she was crazy, while Hecuba tilted her head and eyed her intensely.
Bianca could have sworn she heard the words in her head.
What do you think, moron?
... Bianca was being judged by a magic cow and an equally magic dog.
Oh gods, she wasn't just going to die horribly, was she?
She was going to die stupidly, and there were going to be witnesses .
Despite the situation, she found herself stifling a half-demented laugh, the kind that would have scored her a first class ticket to a mental ward back in the mortal world.
There really was nothing that could go well for her, was there?
"Might as well, then." She shot a small, wobbly smile at the Ophiotaurus and the Labrador side by side and started preparing to die right " Let's ... let's get to work ."
...
Look, a wild Hecate appears!
MORE PLOT!!! XD
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