Epilogue
LUNA
Day thirty-one. I scratch the mark into the underside of the wood bench, adding it to the row of thin lines that have become the only calendar I trust.
Since my name was pulled out of the Lottery drum, I’ve spent thirty-one days in the sanctum, the living quarters located in the center of the minotaur’s Labyrinth, with nothing but the steam and the groan of machinery to keep me company.
The sanctum is warm, like always. The heated floors, thermal vents, and insulated walls work together to provide steady warmth.
It should be comforting. Instead, the heat and humidity feel oppressive.
It’s like sitting in the belly of an enormous beast that hasn’t decided yet whether to digest you or spit you out.
I eat my morning meal alone at the too-tall stone table.
Instead of a tasteless ration bar like I have for dinner, I get bread, dried fruit, and a strip of cured meat.
Tarvos leaves me the same food every morning in the same place, arranged in a way that borders on ritual.
The bread always on the left, the fruit fanned out in a half-circle in the center, the meat on the right.
I’ve never actually seen him set it out. He must do it while I sleep, or pretend to sleep, curled on the far edge of the massive bed with my back to the room and my heartbeat so loud I’m sure he can hear it through the walls.
We don’t talk or interact. He leaves before I rise and returns after I’ve retreated back to the bed which is shoved into the farthest corner of the sanctum. He never joins me there. I don’t know if he sleeps somewhere else, or doesn’t sleep at all.
I rarely see him, just the evidence of him coming and going. A few dirty dishes in the sink, a ration bar left out for my evening meal, a fresh set of clothes for me to wear, loose-fitting pants and a matching top, the fabric always soft against my skin.
His scent lingers in the air. Hot metal, machinery grease, and the musk of a monster who’s part man, part beast.
Or, rather, part bull.
If I’m being honest, it’s not an unpleasant scent. Sometimes it even makes my pulse do things I don’t have the courage to examine.
Layla would tell me I’m lucky. The other women chosen by the Lottery don’t get a month or more of grace.
They immediately get bedded by a rutting monster night after night until they’re pregnant.
I get silence and space and a minotaur I rarely see who can’t look at me for longer than three seconds before turning away in disgust.
At first, I was grateful that Tarvos wanted nothing to do with me. But now, I feel kind of…rejected. I mean, how can I be so undesirable that a rutting minotaur would avoid me like the Gray Blight?
Tears sting my eyes, and the bread I swallow gets stuck in my throat. I gulp down some water when I hear it. Hooves on stone. Slow. Clomping. Deliberate.
Tarvos has left the labyrinth and entered the sanctum.
My body does what it always does. It freezes. Hands clench in my lap, breath held, every muscle tense. It’s been running this same program for over sixty Lottery drawings and thirty-one days of captivity.
I’m so tired of being this terrified version of myself. The one who shuts down, goes silent, lets the fear swallow her whole. But I don’t know how to develop courage.
So, I panic as the clomping gets closer.
Tarvos
She is sitting at the dining table when I approach, her entire body frozen in fear. This is her response whenever I am near.
Duration of her responses: forty seconds to eleven minutes.
Trigger threshold: my proximity within ten paces.
Recovery pattern: shallow breathing first, then peripheral movement—fingers, then wrists, then shoulders—as if her body reboots from the extremities inward.
I have studied her with the same obsessive focus used to hunt micro-fractures in the ward grid.
When I am near, she tenses and draws herself inward, as if trying to disappear.
When this happens, she smells almost sour, the nervous sweat and fight-or-flight adrenaline drowning out the feminine essence that’s underneath.
On the nights when exhaustion forces her to finally sleep, her scent changes. The sharpness of fear gives way to a warmer, sweeter fragrance that calls to me.
She scratches tally marks into the underside of the bench when she thinks I do not notice. But I know everything that happens in my domain.
The rut I am experiencing is a seismic event.
I have suppressed it for thirty-one days through sheer structural will—the same force I use to hold the Bastion’s wards against the Gray.
But biology is not masonry or magic. It does not obey geometry.
The pressure has been building along every fault line in my body, compounded by her proximity, her scent, the unbearable softness of her moving through my hard world.
My tolerances are exceeded.
I stand in the entryway, the Labyrinth silent behind me. Every pipe, every gear, every grinding mechanism temporarily stilled. Even the steam holds its breath.
When I emerge from the shadows, she stares at me with those wide, dark eyes, and the beast in my blood does not roar the way Krog’s beast roars. My beast calculates. It sees a structural weakness and wants to build a fortress around it.
She is soft, structurally unsound. If I am not careful, she will break.
But I cannot be careful anymore.
“I have reconfigured the maze multiple times this month.” My voice comes out harsh and ragged. She flinches. Does not answer.
“Every night, I move the walls. I reroute the corridors. I seal passages and open new ones. I have engineered every possible path through this Labyrinth.”
I step more fully into the sanctum. The heated floor registers my weight. The thicks walls absorb the sound of my hooves. She presses harder against her seat, and the scent of her fear spikes so sharp it burns my nostrils.
But underneath the fear, her body has begun answering to mine. I smell it. The same way I smell a fracture before it becomes a breach. Faint. Involuntary. A yearning she cannot hide from the creature who built these walls.
“Do you know why I do that, little mouse? Continually reconfigure the maze?”
She does not move. Barely breathes.
“Because I am trying to find a route that will stop myself from taking what I want. There is just one problem.”
Her expression changes, and curiosity overrides her fear. “What problem is that?”
Sighing heavily, I admit my defeat. “Every configuration leads me to you.”
Read Tarvos and Luna’s story, Minotaur Architect’s Mate here.