Three of Wands; Objectivity.
Riddick was restless.
Been on this planet for too long, he thought. Not much to do. Not much to kill.
He hadn't been bored all that long. Simple survival had taken up his attention for a while. He'd actually built a comfortable life on the way. Then he caught up on his reading. He'd been . . . content. Detached. Without strong desires. I've become a goddamn Buddhist, he thought wryly.
Now he was restless. Inchoate, unclear desires.
And dreams. One was especially vivid; he kept jumping off cliffs. Big cliffs, little cliffs, the pseudo-cliffs of skyscrapers. Most he barely remembered beyond the moment of going over the edge. One was painfully clear and regularly repeated– he dreamed he and Jack were rock climbing (rock climbing? What the fuck was that about?) and she'd gotten caught somewhere. He'd leapt off the top of the cliff and grabbed her, swinging back up on a rope that wasn't there when he started. Sometimes he pulled her from the jaws of monsters. Sometimes he saved her from fire. Sometimes he just took her, like he was one of those winged beasts from the planet. Sometimes, she was already dead.
After a while, it started to seem familiar. Jumping off cliffs . . . he'd read something about jumping off a cliff. What it meant.
Found it in an old reference text in the ship's memory. Some screwy church said that jumping off cliffs was the sign of "The Fool," starting the hero's quest.
Yeah, right. Sure. His dreams were telling him that he needed to go play hero. He chewed that thought over. Didn't much like how it tasted. His hero days were brief, unsatisfying, and over.
What he wanted, he decided, was some company. Why had he come to this planet of ice giants in the first place?
Right. To get away from people. Maybe the dream was telling him something after all. He didn't like people.
Well, that was not categorically true, he allowed. He liked some people. They just tended to get ripped apart. Irritating.
He also dreamed often of a tower luridly stabbing the sky. "Erect and sublime for one moment in time" – where the hell did those words come from? The tower of his dream could not seem to decide what to look like. Sometimes it was a brick and mortar on a sunbaked plain. Sometimes it was an underworld rock thrusting into the light. Sometimes it was a knife the size of a city. Every night, ripped apart from within or without; the hoards of hell escaping, bodies falling. Sometimes, he was the one falling. Sometimes, he was the one destroying.
Finally, he went back to the computer, looked up towers. There was one called Babel that fell once. The same folks who said fools fell off cliffs said that the destruction of the tower released trapped energies. Whatever the hell that meant. And that they showed the way out of the underworld. He sorta liked that. He was thinking about leaving the cave; blowing something up on the way sounded about right.
He was sure he was supposed to be doing something.
He sighed, frustrated. The ship had plenty of power. He could go anywhere, come back. Or not. Check out the lay of the land, figure out whether the mercs were still looking for him or if they'd finally found better things to do. Maybe look in on Jack and the Imam; see how that turned out.
Wondered if Jack remembered him. She'd be just about grown up now.
Wondered whether she had a boy friend. Now, that was a diverting thought. He let it divert him for a while.
He wondered if the Imam had ever taken his codes out of the home security system. Wondered if he'd ever noticed they were there.
King of Pentacles, King of Cups.
Within a few months, people finally started to get bored with trying to talk to her about what had happened. But Kyra knew there were stories going around, lurid stories told too earnestly. Her popularity had changed again. People tended to look at her with wondering eyes, or snigger barely within earshot, or look at her with that look again. That mixture of fascination, pity, and disgust. She started to withdraw from the world again.
She was lonely. She had friendly acquaintances, but she could count on three fingers the people she'd formed deep attachments to in her life. One was dead, one had disappeared, the other was growing increasingly distant. The Imam was kind, but she was not his blood, not his faith, and his wife was terrified she would bring the darkness that followed her into the house.
She began to think about leaving. She had started to assemble a pretty good kit; had some cash. She had some skills. She was alone anyway. She might as well be alone someplace else. Someplace she could make up a better past.
Those crazy dreams were just dreams, she'd mostly decided. Too grandiose to believe anything else. She wasn't being prepared to be the handmaiden of anything. It was all about trying to make sense of those things that had already happened. And it had been a long time since she had one of those dreams anyway.
Or what ever they were . . .
Until tonight. She was dreaming she was Ariadne, a princess in a palace. Her mother was the daughter of the Sun, they said, making her the granddaughter of a god. Sometimes, she thought she might have been more than just a princess, but now, she was just a teenage princess, in a palace, surrounded by guards and parents who tended to stop talking when ever the subject of family came up.
She had had a brother. He was killed before she was born, in a nearby nation, Athens. Her father had conquered Athens in grief.
Her father was hailed as good king, mostly. But his love for his dead son had taken a strange turn. He demanded the conquered land regularly send seven men and seven women to die in a labyrinth under the palace. To be killed and eaten by another brother. Or, some said, half brother. Opinions differed on whether his father had been a god or a bull or the king, but they differed quietly.
She loved that brother. They'd played together as children. Until the day her father came back from the Oracle and ordered Daedelus to build that labyrinth, and locked her brother in it. Now he stalked the labyrinth with a sword in his hand.
She used to sneak down to see him. She felt sorry for him; with his bull's head and small eyes and tusks, all alone in the dark. They'd play hide and seek in the corridors. She'd sneak him food he loved. They'd wrestle.
But the longer he was down there, the less tenable his grip on humanity became. One day, he'd looked at her, and it wasn't with the eyes of a brother. Only a moment, but it chilled her to the bone. She only went back a few times after that, and after every time, she laid awake night after night. Wondering if his ebbing humanity was her father's fault, for locking him down there. Wondering if it was his destiny. She'd lay awake dreaming of freeing him from prison, taking him somewhere where they could be safe and free, brother and sister again.
But she never did. She left him down there in the dark, and she stopped visiting. It was hard to sneak away as a royal princess anyway, she told herself, especially as she was growing more . . . marriageable, as her mother said.
She did not like that word. She had often sat on the steps of her parents' thrones when near by kings and princes made offers for her. She had seen the men look at her with hard, speculative eyes. And every time she wished she had her brother with her. No one would dare look at her like that with him standing behind her, hand on his sword.
She was not a romantic. She was a royal princess, she had been a goddess once upon a time, and that bred in a certain pragmatism. Her marriage was another tool to secure her kingdom's power and security, she accepted that. But sometimes during these sessions she just wanted to run back into the labyrinth, be a child playing with her brother again. He might have been a monster, but he was her monster.
It was always uncomfortable when the boat from Athens came, with the seven men and seven women who were going to be fed, one by one, to her brother. As a princess, part of her job was to greet them, with dignity, and make their stay as comfortable as was compatible with security. Most times, she stayed close to her mother.
Then she saw him. One of the men sent to be sacrificed. Big, beautiful, strong. Nearly as big as her brother, and no one was as big as her brother. The part of her that was Ariadne knew that he was royal prince who in another world might have been there to ask for her. The part of her that was Kyra knew that this was Riddick, and the thought of him dying, imprisoned in the dark, ripped apart by a monster, broke her heart.
Then she was all Ariadne again, listening to her father. "Theseus," he hailed the big man. "The son of the king himself. I am surprised he'd send you. Tonight, we will have a feast in your honor."
"And tomorrow I die?" the big man responded sardonically. But he went along with the feast easily enough.
The festivities were a little strange, what with fourteen of the guests under a death sentence. Thirteen of them were under heavy guard. But since Riddick – Theseus, the part of her that was Ariadne reminded her – was a king's son, he was allowed to be, mostly, unguarded. A prince's word was his bond, after all.
Which is why she was able to lock eyes with him across the floor. She managed to break his gaze, to point with her eyes to a certain curtain. He nodded. They met behind it minutes later. They slipped through a hidden door into the upper portion of the labyrinth.
They only had a few minutes before one of them would be missed, and they made the most of them, kissing breathlessly. Finally, he broke it off, looked at her with solemn, adoring, eyes.
"I am here to kill your brother," he said. "Will you help me?"
She swallowed. She loved her brother. He was her monster. But he was a monster. And she believed that this man stroking her hair was what her brother could have been, if he hadn't been her brother; if he hadn't had a bull's head, roaring alone in the dark. "Yes," she breathed. And meant it with all her heart. "When they put you in, stay near the entrance. I'll find you."
In the morning, they dropped him unarmed into the darkness. He waited. When his eyes adjusted, he realized you could see down here, if you were quiet and careful.
He heard a noise up ahead. He moved silently.
The girl from the previous night. She knew about another entrance. Supposed that made sense. His informants had called her the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Weird title for a teenager.
"Here," she said, still breathless. She gave him a sword and a ball of silken thread. "Unwind the thread as you go. Otherwise, even if you do kill my – kill the Minotaur, you'll never find your way back. I've got the key to the cells where they are holding your comrades. I passed a message to your ship telling them to wait for us at a place I know. Come back, and I will save you all."
The big man was totally still. Then he started kissing her again. "You are a goddess," he whispered. "My savior."
"Go" she whispered. "It's time for you to be a hero. I'll be waiting."
He came back a few hours later with a bloodied sword and bloodied hands. He kissed her deeply, leaving brother's blood on her skin. They freed the other youths, fled the palace, and she sailed with the strangers away from her childhood.
The first island they landed on to resupply, he had his men erect a pavilion for them in the cool of a shady wood. They spent an ecstatic night.
She woke up alone. The pavilion was still there, and supplies, and presents. But no people.
Must have gone back to the ship, she thought. She went down to the sea.
They had. And they were already far away. They had left her. Alone. These people she'd left her life for. They'd left her.
She collapsed, sobbing on the sands as if pinned to them by swords.
It was almost noon when she simply ran out of tears. She struggled up to her feet, watched the black sail of the ship sinking below the horizon. She took a compulsive step into the waves, and another.
Then a young man walked out of the surf. He smiled at her, and dropped to the sands, close, but not close enough to be threatening. "Hi there," he greeted cheerfully. With his dark curly hair and dark eyes, he looked like some of his ancestors had come out of the river Ganges.
He followed her eyes to the black sail sinking off the edge of the world. "My cousin Theseus," he said wryly, shaking his head. "'The archetype of the ungrateful hero.'"
"I thought he loved me."
The young man smiled. "He might have. At least, he was grateful to you. You saved his life. So he saved yours. He brought you with him because he figured your father would kill you otherwise. You know, he's left you enough stuff here to set yourself up as a princess pretty much anywhere. That ain't so bad. You'll do okay."
She asked, wistfully, longingly, "why didn't he just take me with him?"
The young man shrugged. "Dunno. Underneath the pretty stories is the hard fact that many mythic heroes were just assholes."
She stared at him blankly.
The curly haired boy kept talking. "He's fated to kill his father. Maybe he didn't want you to see that. Oh wait, he doesn't know that yet. Or maybe he was worried that a girl who would betray her brother and father would betray him too. Maybe he didn't think you'd do well in Athens, given that your family killed so many of their kinsmen. That bringing you back with him would have made you a target. Or maybe he thought it would look like kidnapping, and didn't want to start another war. Or maybe I'm wrong that he loved you; that you were always just a means to an ends. A way to get through the labyrinth. My advice; grieve, and move on."
He stood up and walked towards her softly. He smelled like grapes on the vine. They stood ankle deep in the lapping waves.
Finally, she asked, "who are you?"
"You can call me Dionysus," he said, and kissed her hand gallantly. Then she was hardly Ariadne at all, she was almost all Kyra. On an island with yet another god. She scrambled back, furious.
"Didn't seem like much of an adventure this time. Just replaying something that hurt. Again."
He smiled at her. "The Emperor is trying to teach you something."
"He couldn't just send me the book?"
Dionysus laughed lushly, like grapes dripping with juice. "He's not big with the book learning."
"So what the hell is he trying to say?"
He shrugged. "Ariadne was a goddess of growth and fire. Maybe of spiders; I've never quite figured that out. She became a princess when her people were conquered. Eventually, she becomes something like a goddess again, after Theseus abandons her here on Naxos, and she marries a god. Me."
"So what I'm supposed to learn is that I'm supposed to marry you?" she said, curtly amused by the thought of marrying this curly haired boy, of a life tending vineyards. Not her destiny, she was sure.
"Don't be so linear. Engage your mythic consciousness. Imagine this is an object lessen in alternative universes. And anyway, what if I looked like this?" he said, and suddenly the dark curly haired god was Theseus, was Riddick. He embraced her, and without thinking she turned her face up to kiss him.
Then he was Dionysus again. She pulled away. "What the hell was that?" she exploded.
"Just proving a point."
"I just don't get the point."
He sighed. "It's not my job to explain everything to you."
She looked at him, unwound the conversation in her head. "The Emperor sent you," she finally said, slowly.
"That's a piece of it," he said with a smile.
"Not the Empress."
"No. We're chums, understand. We're both big suckers for people, for keeping the carbon cycle going. But he's the one who brought me back from the underworld, not her. I'm his man."
"So what the hell was he trying to tell me?"
He shook his head. "Give me a kiss and I'll give you another hint."
She looked at him sharply, calculating. Riddick's words – no, Set's words – rang through her heads. Gods do what they want. "Okay. Just a kiss."
He smiled and became Riddick again. Before she could protest the usurpation of the image, they were kissing on the sands, in the waves, and she almost regretted the reservation. His kisses really were like wine, like ecstatic dancing, like falling into the eyes of a god.
Finally, he broke off, and was Dionysus again. He gazed down into her eyes with more compassion than she'd ever seen, tinged with a sadness she did not understand. "He's modeling what you have to do, if you want to be a conscious hero. How to send a man after a monster. Even if you aren't sure it's the right thing to do. There aren't always good choices." And then he was gone, and she was lying in the sands, alone on an island.
When she woke up, she had the taste of butter in her mouth, and something sour in her stomach.