ariadne (labyrinthial) wrote in nevermore_past, @ 2017-05-23 02:35:00 |
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Like every seventh year since the subjugation of Athens, summer brought the tributes to the shores Crete and her city is giddy with excitement. Their ascent up the white sand banks and through the gently sloping streets of Heraklion was a divine procession, accompanied by eunuch's bearing horn of plenty spilling fruit and flowers and pipers shepherding long-tailed birds and garlanded fawns with thin golden collars. It was easy to forget, under the searing bright grin of the sun sparking off the fountains in the courtyard of Knossos, that these bejeweled young women and handsome men were sacrifices for her father's bloody altar; her brother's monstrosity.
Night fell and darkness came down like black lions to the shore, but above cold stars lit Nyx's velvet throat and in the palace below, as always, many lights were burning bright. Minos received the Athenians like welcome guests, feasting them in his hall and looking out across the year's bounty with vicious pleasure. 'They say', her handmaid had breathed as she wove a string of greenish pearls through Ariadne's dark hair 'that there is one among them who is the son of Poseidon'. It wasn't hard to pick out the gods-son. Legend has it that Bellerophon, the last celebrated son of the sea god had been red haired and beautiful, and when he fell from the skies, struck by Zeus's wrath, men had mistaken him for a falling star. No comet, this man. He was a storm cloud. A nocturnal wind with eyes like the sea soaked in Selene's light. Ariadne stared in spite of herself; cut herself on his beauty until a murmur from Alcippe drew her gaze away---
"He's so handsome."
She glanced at the serving girl and again then at the god's son, the thicket of her lashes fallen in almost poetic irony to the deep sweetened red of wine that’s cradled in one thin hand. "If you want him, claim him quickly. Atropos has his thread between her hands." What did it matter how much ichor ran through him? He would die in the Labyrinth like the rest of his countrymen; meat for the Minotaur. She owed no sympathy to these Athenians, but Minos' cruelty made her sick all the same. Somewhere in the depth of Daedalus' magnum opus, her bull headed brother was being starved to sharpen his hunger for human flesh.
Ariadne too had taken nothing but drink that night. Now, she tips that prettied colored back and empty of its delicate holding with graceless fervor that she knew would draw her father's ire had attention to spare from his sacrificial lambs to watch her. To see her slip from the hall on inexorable at feet and escape out into the cool darkness of the outer cloister garden.