InsaneJournal

As Ariadne stepped into the meadow, she had to wonder, am I going to be murdered?

She didn’t feel like she was going to be murdered. The sun was shining, the clouds in the sky were a brilliant white, the grass a youthful fresh green. All across the meadow were young lovers picnicking and making out, there was a group of young men playing extreme frisbee not far away, others heading toward the baseball pitches, and mothers walking across the grass with children heading toward the playground.

She’d been told by friends over and over again that she was too trusting, and over and over her heart had been wounded for it. She believed in people so quickly, because when you believed in people completely they could blossom into beautiful and astounding creatures. Or they could fuck you and abandon you to die on an island…

You just had to take your chances.

Asterion had the strength to kill her, and since she’d been instrumental in his death, he had the motivation as well. But he’d asked her if she was happy, he’d told her he wanted her to be happy, and Ariadne’s heart wouldn’t let it go.

He was not born a monster; he was born a baby, and the world (their father) had made him into one. And since? What had the twenty first century made of him? What had all the centuries that came before made of him? Something masculine, animalistic, violent? Something else?

She could imagine horrors all she liked, but she couldn’t forget that he’d asked about her happiness.

She couldn’t forget her own guilt, either. He’d suffered beneath her feet while she’d lived as a princess. He’d died in the dark while she sailed away into the sun over the wine-bright sea with a fresh and hopeful love at her side.

She couldn’t forget the past, couldn’t imagine the future.

Ariadne looked down at her feet.

They were clad in brown faux-leather boots, knee high over her jeans, with barely a heel. There were some things the body did not forget, things the body carried with it through all the long years of its life. She stepped forward with her shoulders rolled back, and spun her whole body, hair whirling out beside her, as her feet pointed her left.

The first turn in the labyrinth had been left.

Deep beneath the palace, Daedalus had built Minos a labyrinth to keep his son, where up on the surface, Daedalus had built Minos’ daughter a dancing-place. On Crete, where the art of dance was born, Ariadne learned how to move, ritual dances that spun across the floor like the stars spun across the sky. She learned the dances to farewell the dead and welcome love, dances to tell stories and dances to loose herself in. She learned everything from the frantic reveling of the sikinnis, the dance of the satyrs, to the fast paced pyrrhic war dance (though not while her father was watching). She found freedom in dance when she was young – she found freedom in dance still, and it was when lost in the beat and the movement of the dance that she’d felt most holy, most connected to what made her human and what would eventually make her divine.

The path through the labyrinth had been a dance as well. A series of turns she made so often that even now her body remembered the rhythm and the ritual of it. She’d tried to teach Theseus, that night, took his hips in her hands and with her mouth at his ear whispered the steps, but the dance was too long, too complex, his only chance of survival had been her red yarn in the end.

Ariadne danced through the meadow, spinning around couples and families and lone readers in headphones while she waited for the brother she hadn’t seen since she betrayed him to his death, since she betrayed her father and betrayed her country. Since she saved Theseus’ life, and the lives of the other young Athenians, and the lives of all the young Athenians who would have come after, year after year. She danced and felt the years fall away. It was the same sun that touched her now, after all. A different land beneath her feet but the same sun, her grandfather, their grandfather, Helios.

She smiled at the touch of his rays on her face and outstretched arms, and when she closed her eyes she could imagine him. And beyond, invisible against his bright light, she knew the stars were there that had been her wedding diadem, thrown into the heavens by Dionysus, immortalised before she was. She felt her heart point toward him like a compass, at home to the east where she knew he was watching his phone, waiting to hear if she was safe. Though she dressed in jeans from an op-shop in Baltimore and a blouse stolen from Dionysus under a vest she’d tailored herself, as she danced she felt the weight and the sway of the silk and linen she’d worn on Crete. She felt all her years of playing mortal peel away, as the goddess inside her took to the stage.

And then she felt him, unmistakable, and Ariadne opened her eyes as she turned in the meadow and saw him watching her. He was so tall. He had a human face, and he was so tall.

She stumbled a little, un-goddess-like, un-Cretan, and put her hand against her chest where her heart was racing from activity, anticipation. Her heartbeat felt mortal.

Whatever else she felt, her heartbeat always felt mortal.