Waking up for the second time that day, Mikayla found herself in the dark. Panicking, she felt her pulse begin to rise. Emmit had mentioned a maze, so she was confused as to why she seemed to be in an underground room. She had never liked small spaces, especially underground ones, as they always reminded her of coffins. Being buried alive was something that had always scared Mikayla, even though she knew the chances of it happening were very slim, almost impossible in fact, she just couldn't shake the nagging feeling that it could, technically, happen, that she could go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning in the dark, alone, slowly running out of air as she hit the sides of her enclosure to no avail. Nobody could hear you when you were buried under six feet of dirt.
She refused to reach her arms out, not wanting to acknowledge how small the space she was in was.
"Humans," boomed a voice. The oddest part about it was that she couldn't ascertain where it was coming from; the voice seemed to be surrounding her and in her head all at once. It was male, she could figure out that much, and was used to leading, to being in power. The one word it spoke indicated it was probably one of those warlocks that Emmit had been nattering about-- the Circle of Ladrahn. Humans wouldn't address other humans by calling out 'humans'.
"You are about to find yourselves in a maze. This maze is very dangerous, but, if you can get out alive, you will be taken back to your homes and granted one wish. This wish could be whatever you want it to be, the answer to all of your human problems, and it is in your grasp! So try your best humans, and don't forget: it isn't the winning that counts, but the fun you have along the way. As you would say, good luck." The warlock sounded like he wished quite the opposite upon the humans.
That was when the darkness opened, and Mikayla wasted no time in stumbling out of the small pen.
Somebody was watching. Whipping her head around, she couldn't see them, or any cameras, but she just knew that there were eyes on her. The corridor she was standing in seemed to have been hollowed out of stone, and stretched off for a bit before coming to an end. Behind her, she noticed that the box, or whatever it had been, that she was previously in had disappeared, replaced by a stone wall. There was only one direction she could go.
Deciding to walk rather than run, Mikayla wondered why she hadn't been hungry for the duration of her imprisonment. It felt as if days had passed, and her stomach normally grumbled after just a few hours without any new food, so it was odd for that to happen. She hadn't needed to use a restroom since she had arrived either, so she figured that the warlocks must be doing something to her body.
They probably didn't want her to die of starvation-- that wouldn't be entertaining enough now, would it?
Luckily, that meant she had one thing in her favor: she didn't have to move quickly. If nobody had got out of this maze alive before, then it was probably rather large, and she wouldn't have to waste her energy on running. Although they seemed to have changed some things about how her body worked, she knew she could feel pain because she had ran into that wall, so surmised that her muscles could ache as well, something that she didn't want to happen when she needed them.
There was a turning about halfway down the corridor, to the left, and she took it.
This path seemed about the same as the one before, the narrowness ensuring that she couldn't see any of the branches off it. Mikayla briefly tried to think of a way to mark the walls, so she knew which paths she had been down, but her mind produced a blank. Knowing that it wouldn't work, she tried to scratch the rock with her nail, but it just ended up tearing her nail off.
Whatever, she thought, I can do this without those marks. Hopefully.
One method that Mikayla knew worked with simple mazes was to place a hand on one of the walls, and follow it around. She highly doubted this was a simple maze, with its low escape rate, but decided to use the technique anyway, putting her left hand on the wall and leaving her right hand free.
She continued to walk for hours, following the wall.
In her normal life, she had been an experienced walker, normally only stopping when she got hungry, but that was no longer a factor, so she carried on.
There had been nothing extraordinary about the maze so far; no people, no magic, no half sorcerer half mystical bull, just stone, stone and more stone.
What does a half sorcerer half mystical bull look like anyway? She hoped she never found out, although a small part of her was oddly curious. The description rang a bell in her head, yet she couldn't place where it came from. Maybe some story she'd read as a child, but she had a feeling it was more than that.
Giant maze that nobody had ever escaped with a half sorcerer half bull trapped inside... that reminded Mikayla of the Minotaur and his Labyrinth. That's because it is the Minotaur and his Labyrinth.
For a brief moment, she was proud of herself for finally figuring out where she was, but then she gulped and her pace quickened. She was trapped with the Minotaur.
Her brows scrunched slightly closer together as she tried to recollect everything she could about the myth. The Minotaur himself was a result of a sorceress reproducing with a bull, and had a man's torso with a bull's head. Hopefully that means he can't charge like a bull, Mikayla thought, although she wasn't entirely sure on that account. The Labyrinth had been built by Dionysus, and the only people to have ever escaped were Dionysus himself and Theseus. Dionysus managed to do so because he designed the maze, but Theseus... Theseus escaped by laying a trail of string behind him. That probably wouldn't help Mikayla though, as she was sure that the exit she was supposed to leave through was different from her entry point.
Mikayla vaguely remembered a passage about the Labyrinth saying that, if a person could make it through the middle without getting eaten, they would undoubtedly find themselves on a path that lead to the exit. Not a direct path, but still one that lead to the exit, which was better than the one she was on currently.
Now knowing that the center of the maze was where she was aiming for, she began to feel slightly more in control of the situation. Only slightly.
When something out of the ordinary finally happened, something which solidified Mikayla's belief in Emmit's words, it was many hours-- and many turns-- later.
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