Chapter 94: Ariadne, One

Theseus began to talk.

When the prince was a young boy, he played recklessly, as kids often did. He often snuck outside late at night to play with other disobedient noblechildren in the royal courtyard. One day, they’d been playing with a ball when, while it was being passed between one friend to another, the ball fell down a well. There was nothing particularly special about the ball—its loss would have harmed no one—but his friends dared him to fetch it back. So, gingerly, he scuttled down the slimy walls of the well.

Only that, when he reached the bottom of the well, ball in his hands, he found that he couldn’t climb back up. He tried climbing up the rope, but the well was too deep, and the rope slippery, and he couldn’t get up even a quarter without slipping off—even after abandoning the ball so he could grip the rope with both hands. He also didn’t want to risk falling from a taller height than that. He was thought to be a mortal boy, back then, after all.

His friends gathered around the mouth of the well, but they didn’t know how to help him. They also didn’t want to go calling for help, lest their parents find out about them sneaking out. So they abandoned him there. Shivering and scared, Theseus spent the rest of the night at the bottom of the well.

When morning came, a panicked King Aegeus sent guards out looking for his missing son. On that fateful day, however, a storm had also begun. Rain splashed down, hampering the guards’ search. And worse, the rainwater poured down into the well, pooling around the young Theseus’ boots. Then the water crawled up his knees, his waist, his chest. Theseus had only been barely over a metre tall. And, having skipped his lessons, he didn’t know how to swim properly.

“Someone, please help me!” he screamed, but his voice was drowned by the thunder. And there was no one to hear him. Before long, Theseus was flailing, gasping for air, while the ball bobbed next to him on the water’s surface. He was going to die. It was certain.

Just then, through the flashing thunder, someone yelled from above, “Theseus, I got it. Catch this!”

A thin string of thread fell down in front of Theseus’ eyes. It was absurd that it would do anything to help. But the young boy had no time to think. Reaching out, he grabbed onto the string for dear life. Surprisingly, the string held fast. The person at the mouth of the well began to reel the string in, and impossibly, the string lifted the boy’s entire weight, until he was sprawled over the edge of the well, gasping and spitting water. His rescuer gently guided him until they were sheltered under a nearby gazebo.

“There, there,” his rescuer patted his back, drying him off with a shawl.

When Theseus looked up, he realised it was one of the boys he had been playing with earlier. This one boy was the son of Minos, who was King in the past but now simply a noble clan’s leader. He was usually quiet, so Theseus hadn’t gotten to talk to him much. But out of everyone, he was the only one who had stayed. All the others had long left the courtyard.

“Asterion?” Theseus said.

The boy’s face twisted. “...Don’t call me that.”

“Why? You don’t like your name?”

Asterion tugged at his hair, which was shaggy black, left slightly long. “It sounds too boyish.”

“Hmm,” Theseus mused. “Then why not pick a different name?”

Asterion perked up. “You can change names?”

“It’s your name, of course you get to choose it, duh.” It was a funny conversation to be having, sitting in the middle of the pouring rain when the kingdom was scrambling about looking for him, having nearly died while fetching a Prometheus-damned ball. But near-death experiences made you keen on saying funny things. “Once, I got really into this book series and made the entire castle call me Duke Dragonbreath for a month.”

“When you put it like that…” Asterion thought about it. “I can’t think of one, though.”

“How about Ariadne?” Theseus said. “I like that name. I read it in a book—it means most holy… you basically saved my life, so I think it suits you.”

“...I would like that very much.”

“It’s a girl’s name, though.”

“Yeah…” smiled the other. “That’s fine.”

When asked about the origins of the mysteriously sturdy string, the strange child Ariadne said something nonsensical: that she had wished upon a star. When asked for a real explanation, she spoke no more. She left him the ball of twine, telling him to keep it. Ariadne was the first to leave the courtyard, leaving Theseus sitting there by himself until his panicked servants found him. Theseus went on to believe that perhaps Ariadne was secretly some kind of guardian saint come down from Paradise to look after him.

It was later that Ariadne would tell Theseus that she had always felt more like a girl than a boy. She kept it a secret from her parents, for fear of being disowned if they found out. Minos’ housekeepers were in charge of keeping Ariadne’s hair short, but on those nights no one was looking, she went out she wrested her black hair into a stubbed ponytail. She wrapped a curtain around her like a peplos, draping over her knee-length chiton.

Theseus thought she looked great, more like herself than she had been before. However, the other boys were less receptive towards the changed Ariadne. They made fun of her and continued to refer to her like before—only now with insults. So Ariadne left them and tried to befriend girls, but they laughed at her too, pointing out that her shoulders were too broad, her jaw too squarish. Her own sister, the real Phaedra, told Ariadne that she had the appearance of a bull trying to masquerade as human. As for Theseus, he hadn’t had the guts to defend her. The prince feared that his friends would turn against him if he took her side. Popularity was all too important to him.

One day, when they were ten years old, Ariadne stopped coming to the courtyard. In fact, she disappeared altogether. Those who were in the know thought that she had run away, or thrown herself in the ocean from the bullying.

Meanwhile, Theseus continued to grow up. He grew stronger and faster than he had ever been as a child playing in the royal courtyard, and became a skilled hunter and adventurer, accomplishing much for his age. However, when he was sixteen, while out hunting boars deep in the Fenlin jungle, he was bitten by a rare snake, which left him paralysed. Through his communication charms, the sunblood called for help. By the time the medicine men arrived, though, they found he had already recovered. When they obtained a sample of his blood anyway, they found that the snake that had bitten him was of an incredibly venomous species. The venom in his veins should have killed him within minutes.

As Theseus went and more and more dangerous missions, more similarly strange incidents continued to happen. At last, they concluded that Theseus was immortal. King Aegeus was immensely pleased, saying that all his devout praying to Prometheus had paid off. Lying there awaiting death, sometimes though, Theseus thought that he saw flashes of Ariadne’s face. Guardian saint. Thinking along these lines, one day, Theseus found the magic twine sitting in the bottom of his drawer. It was as golden as the first day he’d seen it, a single thread of light in drowning darkness. Delicately, he fashioned it into a laurel wreath to wear on his head. When he tucked in the last strand, it transformed to look like an ordinary celery wreath. From then on he wore it wherever he went.