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Chapter Twelve: Ludo
...she found, in silence, a sort of angelic peace, which would never show its face when she was surrounded by companions. But, somehow, she yearned to be accompanied in her solitude, a ghostlike presence hovering just beneath her shoulder, a touch on her neck, something to distract her from her own inadequacies— anything—
Left on her own, Sarah walked on.
The sudden silence, apart from her own breathing and her pattering footsteps on the flagstone path, unnerved her. Already upset at the conversation with Erik, she began to feel tears gathering behind her eyes. A lump rose in her throat and her lips twisted downwards as she fought off crying.
What was she going to do?
Only what she could, she thought. The only thing to do was to keep going. To get to the castle and save her baby brother.
She pushed herself on, breathing a little easier now as panic left, though she felt slightly drained from the excess of emotion. Her tears left her gradually, though she still had an ineffable sense of sadness and loss.
It was at this point that she first heard the roar of the beast.
It was loud, and ragged, and furious and feral. Sarah thought she had gotten over being afraid. This was a bad moment to find out she was wrong. Even as she started, and stepped back a few paces, however, she knew that she had to go on— had to find out what was going on.
There was more than rage and wildness in that roar— there was pain, and despair, and a plea for help.
She squared her shoulders and took a quavering step forward.
"I am not afraid— I am not afraid—"
She repeated the phrase out loud to herself, hoping against hope that if she said it often enough, eventually she would begin to believe it. Self-deception is not as easy as we might think.
She pressed herself into a run, before she could change her mind.
As she rounded the corner, the sight that met her eyes startled her immensely.
It was a beast, indeed— fully seven feet tall, covered in thick black hair, a single horn in the middle of its forehead, with great big teeth and a long, furry tail. Currently, it was caught in a trap, held upside down. The ropes were silver, and as she looked at them, they slithered about the beast's body, snickering to themselves and tightening as they wished.
Another roar came, as they cut deep into the bundle of hair and flesh they contained.
Before she could stop herself, she rushed forward.
"Hang on! I'll help you!"
The beast twisted awkwardly, turning to look at her despite the fact that the ropes obviously cut deeper every time it moved. Sarah said, frantically, "Hold still! I'll figure out something."
The beast made a slow, heavy noise. It took Sarah a moment to realize it was talking.
It said, with a great deal of effort and a savagely furrowed brow as it spoke, "Hurry!"
"I will!" Sarah promised rashly, and began to search for something with which to cut the ropes. She dug through a patch of dirt and located a rock; she struck it repeatedly against the flagstones till half of it sheared off into splinters. The half she had left in her hand was relatively sharp, and with a smile of triumph, she advanced on the ropes, holding it out threateningly.
They laughed at her like snakes— "Snnnhsnnhhssnhh—" and an eye cracked open in the midst of the silver. It winked at her.
She stood for a moment, baffled, and the snakelike chuckle came again. Goaded on by this, she lunged at the eye with the rock, and stabbed as hard as she could.
There was a scream from the creature, and it dropped off the beast, and undulated off as quickly as it could, disappearing beneath the shrubbery in front of her. The beast, released from its confines, had fallen to the ground, landing on its head, with a grunt of pain.
Sarah rushed to it, and nearly went to help it up before she remembered that the denizens of the Labyrinth weren't all harmless. She backed off a few nervous paces as the beast laboriously pushed itself up to its feet, grunting in the process.
"Are you— are you a nice beast?" she asked, timidly.
It swung a heart-pierced gaze at her, and sniffled.
"Don't cry!" she said, alarmed. "I didn't mean to insult you! Look— don't cry, its alright—"
But it wasn't, suddenly, because as she spoke the beast began to shudder, and to her surprise and quite a lot of disgust, the hair began to slough off the beast's body. There were several bodily changes that it went through, each more disturbing than the last, and finally Sarah couldn't take it any more and simply turned away from it, hiding her eyes and trying not to hear anything that was going on, either.
When the noises stopped, she dared to turn around again.
Before her, in the middle of a pile of sloughed hair and skin, stood a heartbreakingly-handsome man, likely in his late thirties, with a head of shaggy dark hair, a sweet mouth, a horn on his forehead, and an almost entirely naked body. He wore a loincloth of some dark, unidentifiable fabric, and a singularly dazed expression.
He held up a finger.
Sarah stared at him.
His mouth moved and he appeared to be about to speak.
Sarah took a few steps toward him, mesmerized by the perfection of his face.
Finally, his frantic mouthings gave fruit to a single syllable—
"Uh—" he said, and collapsed on his own hair.
"My name is Sarah."
The man looked at her, shuddering slightly. Evidently he was cold. Sarah looked at the ground.
"Ludo," said the man. His voice was deep, and surprisingly sweet— like chocolate, she thought, or the way her father sounded when she was little and curled up in his lap, her ear against his heartbeat, hearing his voice rumble from deep inside. Sarah couldn't help taking to him.
"Ludo— is that your name?"
A nod of the shaggy dark head.
She smiled slightly, warmly. "You seem like such a nice—"
Man?
Beast?
Thing?
"—Ludo," she finished lamely, but he treated it as if this were the only possible thing to say; as, indeed, it may have been. She stood up straight and tried not to talk to him as she would to a child— even though he was now a man, and not a beast, it was difficult to avoid it. She found herself trying to simplify things automatically.
"I'd like to be your friend," she said. It came out rather timidly; well, she thought, he was a beast part of the time, and even as a man, if he decided he didn't like her, things could go from bad to worse very quickly. She held out her hand a little, encouragingly.
He considered it for a moment, and then took her fingers delicately— then, as though released from constraint, he caught her hand in both of his huge palms, grasping them tightly.
"Friend," he agreed, and shook his hair forward over his face.
She smiled and tried to detach her hand before it got crushed. "Do you know the way through the Labyrinth?"
This took a while to compute. Ludo frowned, scratched his head, wrinkled his brow, gazed into space, stared at the sun, rapped on the wall, shuffled his feet, and finally looked at her and sighed.
He shook his head.
Sarah sighed as well.
"Me neither," she said, with a beginning of hopelessness.