Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
He is not a human being.
The thought circled in my head like a shark, predatory and impossible to ignore. I sat frozen, my chai latte forgotten, as Rion settled his massive form into the booth across from me.
“You have the ladder specifications?” His voice rumbled, deep and resonant, with an unusual accent I couldn’t quite place—something ancient beneath modern English.
“I—yes. Yes, I do.” My own voice sounded distant, as if someone else was speaking. I fumbled with the folder on the table, nearly knocking over my drink in the process. “They’re right here.”
As I pushed the folder across the table, his massive hand reached for it, and I noticed what had seemed off before. His fingers were thicker than human proportions would allow, ending in neatly trimmed but unmistakably claw-like nails. Not grotesque, but decidedly not human.
My eyes darted upwards, seeking his face beneath the shadow of his hat. The café’s dim lighting worked in his favor, obscuring details, but I could make out a strong jawline and what appeared to be unusually textured skin.
I leaned forward slightly, curiosity momentarily overriding fear.
That’s when it happened.
As Rion bent to examine my diagrams, the wide-brimmed hat shifted. Just an inch. Just enough.
The unmistakable curve of a horn emerged from the shadow—polished, amber-brown, arching upwards from his forehead with deliberate, elegant purpose.
I blinked, certain I was hallucinating. But when I opened my eyes, not only was the first horn still visible, but the hat had slipped further, revealing its twin on the other side.
Horns. Actual, literal horns. Growing from his head.
My lungs seemed to forget their function.
My breath caught, trapped somewhere between my chest and throat, refusing to move in either direction.
The café around us blurred at the edges, my vision tunneling to focus solely on those horns—their smooth curve, their solid reality in a world where such things should not, could not exist.
Rion must have noticed my expression, because he quickly reached up to adjust his hat. But it was too late. We both knew what I’d seen.
“Shit,” he muttered, the first colloquialism I’d heard from him. He glanced around the café, but no one else was paying attention to our corner.
My mind raced, frantically trying to process what my eyes were telling it.
Horns. He has horns. People don’t have horns. Some animals have horns. Mythological creatures have horns. Mythological creatures aren’t real.
But he’s sitting right across from me.
This isn’t possible.
But it’s happening.
Am I having a mental breakdown? Did someone drug my chai? Is this an elaborate prank?
Those horns looked very, very real.
Rion sighed, a sound like wind through ancient ruins. “I apologize for the…surprise.” He spoke the word as if it were a gross understatement, which it absolutely was. “I should have perhaps been more forthcoming about my nature.”
“Your… nature,” I repeated, the words mechanical.
He shifted uncomfortably, and I noticed how the booth seemed almost comically small for his frame. “Yes. It tends to complicate matters.”
My brain finally managed to push past its initial blue-screen-of-death moment and form a coherent thought. I’m sitting across from a minotaur.
Not a man with an unusual medical condition. Not an elaborate costume. A minotaur. A creature from Greek mythology. Half man, half bull. The monster of the labyrinth.
Except he didn’t look like a monster. Imposing, yes. Frightening in his difference, perhaps. But sitting there, awkwardly trying to fit his massive body into a standard café booth, avoiding eye contact as he waited for my reaction… he looked more embarrassed than threatening.
That realization somehow helped me find my voice. “You’re… not human.”
Brilliant observation, Clara. Really insightful.
His mouth twitched, almost a smile. “No. I am not.”
He opened his coat slightly, revealing more of his neck and upper chest. What I’d initially taken for an unusually textured shirt was actually short, dense fur—brown-black and sleek, covering what appeared to be powerfully muscled shoulders.
The fur grew thicker around his neck, forming what looked almost like a mane.
Heat radiated from him, perceptible even across the table, like sitting near a hearth on a winter night. It was oddly comforting, that warmth, despite everything else being utterly terrifying.
“You’re a minotaur,” I whispered, the word feeling strange on my tongue. A word I’d read thousands of times in books but never expected to speak as a literal description.
He nodded once, the movement careful, as if he was concerned his horns might knock something over if he moved too vigorously. “Yes.”
The simplicity of his confirmation broke something loose in my brain. My librarian’s mind—the part that cataloged, cross-referenced, and analyzed—suddenly kicked into high gear, like a defense mechanism against the impossibility sitting across from me.
Minotaur. Greek mythology. The offspring of Queen Pasiphae of Crete and a white bull sent by Poseidon. Kept in the Labyrinth designed by Daedalus. Slain by Theseus with the help of Ariadne’s thread.
But that was a myth. A story. Not a being who texts about ladder structural integrity and brings diagrams to café meetings.
I found myself mentally reviewing every book on mythology I’d ever shelved. Were there details I’d missed? Some footnote that suggested minotaurs were real, living among us, occasionally offering construction advice to librarians?
“In the myths,” I began, then stopped, suddenly worried about offending him. “I mean, in the stories…there was only one Minotaur. The Minotaur. Is that… Was that…?”
“A simplification,” he replied, his deep voice kept low. “There are not many of us. But more than one.”
“And you build things? In the myth—story—the Minotaur was kept in a labyrinth, not… building them.”
Something flashed in his eyes then, a fleeting expression I couldn’t quite identify. Pain? Annoyance? “Yes. Ironic, isn’t it? We were imprisoned in such structures. Now I create them.”
My mind reeled with implications. We were imprisoned. Now I create them. Past tense, present tense. History rewriting itself before my eyes.
I should have been terrified. I should have made an excuse and fled. I should have, at minimum, been concerned that I was hallucinating or experiencing some kind of breakdown.
Instead, I felt something else entirely. Fascination. Pure, undiluted fascination that pushed aside fear, leaving only a consuming need to understand.
Here was a living, breathing myth sitting across from me. Every book I’d ever read, every display I’d ever created, every lecture I’d ever attended on comparative mythology—none of it had prepared me for this moment. For him.
I couldn’t look away. The enormity of his presence—not just his physical size, though that was significant, but the historical weight he carried—was mesmerizing. Like stumbling across a dinosaur casually browsing in a bookstore, or finding Excalibur in the umbrella stand by your front door.
Reality had split open, revealing something ancient and impossible, and I was leaning forward, peering into the gap, desperate to see more.
“You’re staring,” he said, not unkindly.
“I’m sorry.” I blinked rapidly, trying to compose myself. “It’s just… you’re… real.”
He made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “Last I checked.”
The hint of humor in his voice did something strange to my insides—a little flip that had nothing to do with fear. It humanized him, which was ironic given that he was literally not human.
“How many of you are there? Are there other mythological creatures? Do you all live secretly among humans? How long have you—”
I clamped my mouth shut as I realized I was bombarding him with questions. The kind of questions that might make anyone, human or otherwise, uncomfortable in a public setting.
He glanced around the café again, more deliberately this time. “Perhaps we should focus on your ladder issue first. This is not the ideal location for a comprehensive education on my kind.”
“Right. Yes. Of course.” I nodded too vigorously, sending my hair flopping into my eyes. I pushed it back with trembling fingers. “The ladder. That’s why we’re here.”
But it wasn’t, not anymore. The ladder felt ridiculously trivial now. Who cared about library furniture when there was a minotaur sitting across from me? When everything I thought I knew about reality had just been fundamentally altered?
I tried to focus on the diagrams before us, but my eyes kept drifting back to him—to the shadow of his horns beneath the hat, to the fur visible at his neck, to his massive hands as they traced lines on the paper with unexpected delicacy.
He was terrifying and magnificent. A walking impossibility. A myth made flesh.
And all I wanted was to know everything about him.
The heat radiating from him seemed to intensify, or maybe it was just my awareness of it growing sharper.
It suffused the space between us, creating a bubble of warmth that felt oddly intimate in the cool café.
His scent reached me too—not unpleasant, but unfamiliar.
Like sun-warmed earth and old wood, and something wild I couldn’t name.
“Your existing ladder structure is fundamentally unsound,” he was saying, pointing to my sketches with one thick finger. “The support cross-beams are inadequate for the height.”
I nodded, trying to look like I was paying attention, while my brain insisted on cataloging new observations about him instead. The timbre of his voice. The careful way he turned the delicate paper pages. The strange, amber-brown color of his eyes, visible now as he looked up at me.
“Are you listening?” he asked, those eyes narrowing slightly.
“Yes. Absolutely. Unsound cross-beams. Got it.” I took a sip of my now-cold chai to hide my flustered expression.
He didn’t look convinced. “You seem… distracted.”