CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE #2
But it’s not me – not in my entirety. The grey figures are not me swearing my wedding vows or placing that grape tiara on my head or spinning around a dance floor. This is no version of me he would miss. It is me vulnerable, hurt and desperate.
‘You feel guilty,’ I say, turning to him. ‘That’s what this is.’
‘Of course I feel guilty! If it weren’t for my mere existence, how many people would still be alive? Selene never would have taken any notice of Ampelos and Hera wouldn’t have had to avenge herself and –’
‘You are not responsible for their actions!’
‘I told you. Their powers are bound up with their reputations, they have to –’
‘Do the people they killed understand? How can you excuse them and not yourself?’
‘Because! Because look at me, Ariadne!’ His voice slices through the air, crackling with all the power of the pantheon – an immortal life laden with pain. The versions of myself fade to pure mist, and the grey haze swarms around us, pushing us closer. ‘I am not worth any of this!’
‘You are worth everything,’ I snarl.
The ground below begins to tremble.
‘I am misery where I step and destruction where I lie. All this time trying to spread a little more joy, and for what? Like it could make up for anything I’ve done – I can’t even remember half of it!’
‘You are making the world a better place.’ I grab his hands and place them on my chest, like he could feel my heart pound and find the truth of something there. ‘And you don’t get to feel guilty about me. Any aspect. They are my choices. My consequences. You don’t get to take them from me.’
‘I feel a dozen things more ardently than guilt when it comes to you.’ His eyes lock on to mine – radiant and damning, like he would raze everything to the ground just to build it back up again.
Truer. Without the hurt. ‘And you’re here with me now – I understand that.
I understand all that you’re saying. But you walking this path beside me won’t change the fact that we – I – am still in this cursed labyrinth.
And I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to find the exit. ’
I blink, quickly – but it’s true. Medea herself told me this was not a cure.
My caring for him doesn’t heal him.
‘Maybe,’ I admit. ‘Maybe one day I’ll find the way out of this too, or Medea might brew the right potion or one of Silen’s theories will come to fruition.
But I think it far more likely that you will do it.
You’ll endure and with time it might lift.
Or you’ll craft until the voices cease or you’ll shock yourself out of it or you’ll do any other number of things that you with your experience of all this have found to help.
Because you’re fighting, Dionysus. Every single day while you’re in this episode you are fighting. ’
His eyes flutter shut. ‘I’m not fighting; I’m clinging on. That’s the worst part of this – the powerlessness. All this time spent grappling for power – and I’m not even in control of my own mind.’
I move closer, pushing his hair from his face, and he leans into my hand and the comfort of the touch.
‘This didn’t happen to you because you weren’t fighting hard enough – I don’t mean to imply that.
But if my power manifests a mind that can be traversed, then no one knows yours as well as you.
Can’t you feel the layers beneath us shifting with every memory?
So if all you can do is cling on, then keep clinging. Because it’s working.’
Those small changes, magnified. Not a cure, no. But maybe with whatever strange magic is at work here and the unravelling of the past and Dionysus’s own preparations for this impending spiral – maybe with all of that combined, then here in the labyrinth we might do something.
‘Alright.’ He takes a breath and nods. ‘Alright,’ he says again. Then his jaw tightens. ‘If this is my mind then I am tired of being beholden to it. Of following its winding, spiralling path.’
He tilts his head, concentrating – and at once something in the labyrinth changes.
The tiles beneath us tremble and dust crumbles from the walls.
Echoing down the halls, I hear laughter, music, cheers. Dionysus opens his eyes just as figures flit past us – grey misty beings, amongst them those I know. The people Dionysus has saved. The joy he has brought.
And at their end, me again. But this time I am rendered as he must see me, because I …
well, I don’t shine like that. I am more defined than those around me – more precise, more intentional, like he has memorized each detail.
And even as I try to look at the others, my gaze keeps flicking to me – her – like within his mind it is impossible to look away – and she is dancing and vibrant and happy.
Dionysus smiles – and it is alight, roguish and downright Dionysian.
Excitement sparks – and dread too, a combination I am all too familiar with in response to that thrill in his eyes.
‘Please don’t plunge us into the ocean again,’ I say.
He tuts. ‘Is it not enough to find an exit? Now you want a specific sort. Any other requests?’
‘Showmanship?’ He arches a brow and then, unable to resist, I add: ‘Are you a god or not?’
He chuckles, his arm curling around my waist to draw me closer. The walls are shaking too now, no longer dust but bricks and rock crumbling down. He brushes ash from my hair, and that haze surrounding him simmers with a radiant glow.
‘Well, darling, that is the question, isn’t it?’ he whispers, soft against the echoing crash of the labyrinth walls.
The ground shudders and we collide, lips against one another, desperate and aching and pleading. Our kiss is its own sort of determination – adamant and stubborn. Unshifting. Ignoring the dozens of reasons we should not, or why this might not work, and deciding to press on anyway.
‘I’m clinging on,’ he murmurs, his hand on the small of my back. My own arms wrap around his neck and I think of the fear around every corner in Knossos and waking bound on Perseus’s ship and bearing each of Theseus’s slights and how even just the thought of Dionysus made it bearable.
And maybe I’ve been clinging on too.
His lips are a firm, urgent press and mine are a desperate, fervent grasp and all around us light blazes.
Beneath us, seven pinpricks of light flare through the tiles. Precise points, staggered, one higher than the other, seven amethysts to seven stars, stretching and cracking until the floor beneath us gives way, shattering entirely.
A way out, not in the direction we thought to look.
We fall without letting go.