InsaneJournal

Imagine growing up in the island of Crete, a princess, loved and protected and safe. It’s a beautiful place, and a strong place too; the naval superpower of the world as far as you know it. Your father is Minos, a son of Zeus, and you mother Pasiphae is a daughter of Helios. She's a witch, besides, but if you’ve inherited any of her magic its only in the bewitching warmth of your smile.

Imagine knowing that under your feat, your monstrous half-brother Asterios is trapped in a labyrinth. Imaging knowing that Athens is obliged to choose seven maidens and seven youths and send them over to your island to be sacrificed to the monster. Fourteen young people, every year of your life. You tell yourself over and over that this is how things are, that yes it’s terrible, it breaks your heart, brings you nightmares of guilt and grief and horror, and that there’s nothing that you, king’s daughter, can do to stop it.

Because you know your father, Minos, defied the gods. You know Poseidon sent him a bull from the sea as a sign that he blessed Minos’s rule, and you know that your father tried to keep the bull to stud his own herd instead of sacrificing it to Poseidon as he’d promised. You know how your mother suffered for it, cursed to lust after the wild animal. You know how your half-brother was conceived. (You live in a palace all your life, you hear things, even things a kings daughter is not supposed to hear.)

So, you may hate the status quo, but you must accept that this is the way things are, however much it hurts.

And then one year, one of the young men catches your eye, and you catch his. He’s a prince, and his heart is brave and he’s so, so stupid to be brave. The Minotaur has resided in the labyrinth for years, he knows every pitfall and every twist and every, quite literal, dead end. The gorgeous Theseus doesn’t stand a chance, and so... you step in.

You can’t stop the monster or the sacrifices yourself, you know this, but this has been your life for a long time and it is not an easy life, and you... you’ve imagined things.

Even though your head decided against it, your heart still dreamed. You’ve put yourself in the place of those young women and men coming to Crete to die. In your mind you’ve walked into that labyrinth to find your half-brother and take him by the horns, look him in the eyes, and talk to him, like you can’t talk to any other member of your family because not a one of them ever honestly acknowledges the terrible truth of this place.

Maybe that’s why you fall in love with Theseus, because he looks you in the eyes, and it’s been a long, long time since anyone did that. Your mother turns her eyes away and your father looks right through you. But Theseus, he sees you, and you see him. And love, you discover, is stronger than fear. So you take him a ball of red twine, the night before his ordeal, and you explain how he should use it, and you give him a sword – no explanation required there – and you give up on thoughts of looking your half-brother in the eye and send this beautiful young man off to end it.

And you wait. You are good at waiting. You’ve lived your whole life waiting for the next cohort of young Athenians sent to your home to die. You know how to do this.

And you hope. You are good at hope, despite the despair that’s haunted your life, even though so few of your hopes have ever come to fruition. It is as though hope is the essence of you, the very thing that makes you Ariande.

You hope he finds his way out of the labyrinth, hope he can help you find your way out of yours.

You wait and you hope, and he wins.

And your whole world is changed, and things are brighter and more hopeful than they have ever been before. Your Theseus takes you in his arms and kisses you, and you didn’t know that this is what fulfilled hope tastes like.

So when Theseus leaves Crete, you leave at his side, your whole future spread out bright as the sun on the Aegean sea.


Its only days before he abandons you.


Later, you hear several sides of the story. Different tales of Theseus’s motivation, different explanations... none of which explain anything at all to your wounded heart. All you know is that as the sun sank, you were making love to your husband-to-be, and when you wake, he’s gone.

And then you know other things: grief and heartbreak and utter disbelief. You’re lost and confused, on an island far from home, so when Dionysus steps forward to dry your tears, you let him. You are honoured, and a little afraid, but he comforts you, and he makes you promises, and he takes the crown from your head and turns the jewels into stars, and you think maybe here is a man whose romantic heart will speak to yours.

He’s devoted, you’ll give him that. Later, you’ll find out all the other things he can be, but in the early days, all you see is a god enthralled by you. When he takes your mortality from you, and he gives you a divinity of your own, you can’t refuse.

Just as you couldn’t refuse those Athenian sacrifices.

Now, of course, you’ve recognised the uneasiness in your chest for what it is: he never asked. You were never given a choice. You don’t know what you would have chosen, back then, but you were never allowed the chance to find out. That uneasiness never goes away, and you carry it around in your heart through all the long years of your life. You love your husband, you love your children, you do love your other gods, most of them, but you never learn how to let go of the thought that he never asked.

But your life is other things now, too. In this vast and distant land you’ve cultivated a good, solid, practical life. You have dedicated yourself to your masters degree in psychology, you have a small, tidy shared flat in Brooklyn, you have nearly a thousand hours of clinical practice under your belt, nearly two thirds of the way to becoming a licensed therapist. It’s a way to help, you think, a way to give other people the tools to find their way out of their own labyrinth. You’ve done work like this in the past, but the world changes quickly and a degree from thirty years ago won’t suffice today. Besides, you enjoy university. You’ve enjoyed university several times over, taking different classes for different careers, ever since they first allowed in women.

Also, when your life among the gods becomes too much, there’s no better place to run to than a campus across the other side of the country. Some days you feel as trapped in America as you felt trapped in Crete, trapped on Olympus, but being surrounded by young mortals, young enough to believe they are immortal still, that’s what saves you, over and over again.

You see in the faces of your classmates all the young Athenians you were never able to save, and... it saves you, over and over again.