Page 45 of Of Monsters and Mazes

Chapter 22

The red-haired fox walked slightly ahead of me, effortlessly navigating the Green Sector of the maze. Each split in the road, he’d sniff the air and pick a direction based on some indiscernible thing he was theoretically smelling, and I just followed along, not really knowing any better. I took special care not to get anywhere near the hungry vines, and Alessi was quick to cut, maul, and hack away at any wandering plant life whenever I did. It was nice to not be in charge for once. As much as I valued my leadership role, sometimes I didn’t want to have to be the brave and fearless general in my life.

Sometimes I just wanted a break.

Alessi seemed reliable and generally kind. I didn’t have any reason to doubt him, honestly. But it felt odd traversing the Labyrinth without Theron. I guess I’d started to get used to his presence, and I felt unexplainably safe when he was around. I didn’t know him from anyone else, but the Labyrinth had heavily humbled me in thinking I could always do everything myself.

Having to ask others to keep me safe or help me get something done was my personal hell, but then, this whole place was literal hell, so that shouldn’t surprise me. This was par for the course, really. My best course of action now was to just depend on the one thing I could control—my judgment.

“So you and Theron go back a ways, I gather?” I made easy conversation as we traversed each turn. I still didn’t truly believe Theron wasn’t on my side, but I was hoping to get some more information about, well, all of these men, really. Theron, Jericho, Alessi, and Rai had all left a strong first impression, to say the least. I had a feeling I wasn’t done with any of them. But more than that, they all seemed to have fairly complicated relationships among each other, and I didn’t even know how to start approaching that whole thing.

He nodded idly, while continuing to pick new directions. “As he mentioned, I’m not from Tartarus. Something like…” He paused and started counting on his fingers. After about twenty rotations, he shrugged, “… I don’t know how many centuries ago, because it all runs together at this point, but quite a ways back, during the war, I was sent to Tartarus as a spy to try to find the weaknesses of the devil soldiers. Jericho has never successfully gotten his hands on me, so I was quite successful at it.”

“And that was when you met Theron?”

“That was when I met Theron.” He confirmed with a hint of melancholy. “It was a chaotic time, really. Olympus and Tartarus were destroying each other, blowing up some of the realms’ most beautiful artwork and landscapes—which I had a very difficult time supporting from either side. The King’s wife had fallen pregnant with the bull’s son, and the gods were calling upon the Titans for reinforcement. Considering the Titans had wanted to fell Olympus since the dawn of its existence, asking for their aid meant we were putting our realm at risk of being destroyed from both the Devils and the Titans, and Tartarus was reaching new heights of tension and violence—it was quite a mess. Very stressful.”

I blinked several times, processing all of that, but mostly one very important and glossed over point in particular. “Wait, back up. What was that part about the King’s wife?” I was struggling to wrap my head around that whole sentence. The rest was basically a normal Tuesday by comparison.

“Oh, are you jealous? Yes, the King was married before. Pasiphae is impressively dead now though, so don’t worry, he’s single. He’s not some creep who preys on women while he has a wife at home.”

My expression flattened. “Yes, his marital status was absolutely what I was worried about.” Though that was, admittedly, a plus in Jericho’s book. If his current fuckability score was negative nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine, it was now negative nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-eight. The bar was in hell, but so was I.

“Understandable.” He nodded along, and I sighed, loud and aggravated.

“I was being sarcastic. I don’t care if he is or was married. What’s the part about her getting pregnant by a bull? Like… an actual bull? Meaning a man-cow?” The fuck.

“Oh, yeah, that.” He scratched himself behind his ear like a nervous tick. “Before the war started, diplomacy and civility was a constant tight rope of small offerings. We would send them food or livestock, they would send us fine jewels or building materials. We remained harmonious on the thin line of mutual benefit.” The way he avoided eye contact as he recanted this little tale did not go unnoticed. “One year, Olympus sent the finest bull we’d ever produced: a champion among breeding stock. We’d thought we’d secured good fortune and favor for years and years to come. But it turned out that Pasiphae, the King’s wife, had a… problem, you could say. She became obsessed with this champion sire, and snuck out of Jericho’s bed for a romp in the barn. Or so the legend goes.” Alessi said it all so casually and not at all with the weight and shock that such a statement deserved. “She got pregnant with the bull’s child—when she’d never produced an heir for the Devil King himself—and Jericho immediately placed blame on Olympus, accusing the heavens of conspiracy and enchanting our gift with a seduction spell to humiliate him. I can’t with absolute certainty say he was wrong, but whether he was or not is irrelevant, because naturally a war started.”

“Naturally.” Dumbfounded. I was absolutely dumbfounded. “Was this guy a ‘bull’ like you’re a ‘fox’?” I made exaggerated finger quotes, and Alessi raised a brow at me.

“Are you implying I’m not a fox, or are you asking if the bull could shift into a man?”

Both. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “The second one.”

“Oh. Well, yes, of course. All creatures of the realms have human forms.” He teetered his head back and forth for a moment as he contemplated that statement. “Some more, some less. But human-ish for sure.” Okay, well that was slightly less disturbing than the idea that she was getting on all fours and taking giant cow dick.

“I see.” I muttered, still in disbelief.

“I couldn’t say which form she preferred though.” He added with a shrug. And I tried to push that from my mind immediately.

Either way though, that did, admittedly, give me slightly more sympathy for Jericho. It’s a special kind of shame to have your last committed relationship end because they cheated on you in favor of the livestock. How bad was he in bed that the literal beef was more appealing than his crusty old cock?

“How did she pass away? Was she a casualty of the war?” I poked next, because something told me this was significant. Specifically because I already had the knowledge that everyone in this realm was supposed to be immortal, and the event that would null that gift had to be quite brutal and quite intentional.

Alessi shook his head. “No, Tartarus won the war with no casualties, as we had no clue how to kill the devils. Even with the Titans on our side, we simply couldn’t make any headway. Jericho even managed to enslave some of the Titans, and we had even less power to defeat them.” He spoke so matter-of-factly, I was starting to enjoy Labyrinth History Story Time. “Long story short, once the child was born with the bull’s horns and the ability to shift, opposed to the king’s curled horns that were built into his skull like a proper devil, that was the final confirmation he needed to prove her infidelity. She and her affair partner were imprisoned until the war was won, which took something like two or three hundred years, then they were executed by their own son, who hunted them down in this very maze. Jericho had done a good job of raising their child in his image over those centuries, and the Minotaur became extremely loyal to the king, even at the expense of his own parents.”

The Minotaur. So it was Rai he was referring to? I was fairly certain that was what Theron had called him. “I thought devils could only be killed by having their own horns shoved through their hearts?” I asked with the little knowledge I’d had imparted to me by my last companion. I assumed Alessi already knew this if he had been a successful war time spy.

“I’m surprised you know that, but yes, that’s generally the case. Offspring count as an extension of oneself, however, so he was able to gore his mother and perform a successful execution. Conversely, his father, being technically of angel blood, was strung up at a celebratory dinner and essentially used as a living piñata, up until he was… a less living piñata.”

I nodded, following yet making an active point to not picture any of this. “But you lost the war because you couldn’t kill the devils? As a spy, you must have known how to kill them before the war ended, right? You didn’t report that information to Olympus?”

Alessi stopped walking, and he took a moment to run a hand through his hair. His ears shifted into furry fox ears that twitched before he spoke. “At the time, I’d found someone I didn’t want to risk losing by revealing that information.” He mumbled very quietly, to the point I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to hear him at all.

“Theron.” I guessed, based on the obvious. “You fell in love with Theron?”

“That’s maybe a bit of an extreme assumption.” He tried to dismiss the notion, but his nerves were obvious by the slight shake in his voice and the knit of his brows. “But he was more or less my undoing. I’ll just say I got too close to the sun, and once my wings melted, the King of Olympus threatened to turn me to stone if I returned, having ‘defiled’ myself with the enemy. I was left with the option to kill the Dream Weaver and report the methodology to my superiors in proof of my loyalty to the gods, or be banished from Olympus for the rest of time.” He swallowed before he concluded, “So I stayed in Tartarus, and I still have no desire to go home. It’s much less strict here anyway. You’d think a tyrant like Jericho would run an oppressive nation with an iron fist, but he’s pretty hands off a majority of the year. Killing tributes seems to be his primary vice.”