Is Naming a Bastard After Your Stepfather Love, or Just Laziness?
"So you... had a name."
At the low murmur, the woman caught my voice, nodded, and broke into a harder flood of tears.
"Of course you do! Father gave it to you. He passed down the name of Lord Asterion—the king before him, our magnificent grandfather."
The moment those words landed, a thin scrap of Greco-Roman myth that had been sleeping in my head flickered past.
King Asterion.
He was not King Minos's real father. Zeus had taken the shape of a white bull, abducted Europa, and carried her off to Crete, and the children born of that union were Minos and his two brothers. The magnanimous stepfather who then took Europa to wife, raised Zeus's bloodline as if they were his own sons, and even handed them the throne was Asterion, the previous king of Crete.
Wait a second.
King Minos. What even was this man's deal?
His own wife had locked eyes with a handsome bull that crawled out of the sea, climbed inside the wooden cow Daedalus built for her, and committed bestiality—and the child born of that was me. Adultery hadn't been enough. I was the product of a trash melodrama that had jumped the species.
I felt it when I broke out of the labyrinth, too, but still...
He had given a bastard the name of the stepfather who took him in?
Wow. Is this guy genuinely history's most unprecedented pushover of a king? Or is his mental fortitude just that good? Or else... was he simply too lazy to come up with a name? Because that would be filial blasphemy on a criminal level.
Whichever it was, the family history made my head spin. I shook it hard and cleared my throat. The critique of my family tree could wait. First I needed to get a grip on what was happening in front of me.
"Setting that aside. Who exactly are you?"
When I asked, the woman opened her wet eyes wide and pointed a finger at her own chest.
"M-me? I'm your big sister. Ariadne."
Ariadne. She offered her name and broke into a shy little smile.
"But you—you lived all by yourself, and you talk so well! You really are my little brother. You must be smart, just like Brother Deucalion!"
A heartwarming reunion: an older sister clapping in innocent delight at how clever her little brother was. None of that peaceful mood reached me.
"...Who did you say?"
"Hm? I said Ariadne. Princess of Crete. Your big sister!"
The instant that name nailed itself into my skull—
"WAAAAAAH!"
I screamed, terrified out of my mind. A high, metallic shriek that had no business coming out of a frame this huge rang through the food storehouse. I lurched away from Ariadne and butt-scooted backward in a frenzy over the thick grain sacks—a soft slide, then a thud—and only when the cold, solid wall met my back did I stop.
Th-th-this boy-crazy, love-at-first-sight Ariadne?!
Ariadne. The legendary airhead who had taken one look at Theseus, the prince of Athens offered up to Crete as tribute, and fallen for him on the spot. She had thrown away family and homeland alike, wheedled the ball of thread out of Daedalus, and helped that smooth-talking leech find his way out of the labyrinth. The root of all evil. The MVP of the effort to cut my head off.
And after all that, how did that Theseus bastard abandon her again?
If my memory was right, Theseus had left Ariadne on Naxos and fled alone to Athens. He excused himself by claiming Dionysus, the god of wine and lust, had wanted her, so he'd had no choice—but the substance of it was wringing her dry and throwing her away. The later years of the man called Theseus were worse. Strutting around as a hero, he developed a taste for kidnapping: he abducted the young Helen of Sparta and ended up handing his own mother over into slavery, and, not content with that, stormed the underworld with his friend Pirithous to try to carry off Persephone, the wife of Hades. In the end an enraged Hades gave him a brutal lesson, and he was detained below with his backside stuck fast to the Chair of Forgetfulness. Heracles happened by later, tore the flesh from his rear, and barely hauled him free. From start to finish, it was a garbage life.
And the woman who fell head over heels for that piece of trash and led the charge to kill me is standing right in front of me?!
Genuinely terrified, I clutched the two-horned head on my shoulders. She was smiling at me now, but the thought that a ball of thread in those hands might someday become the noose around my neck sent a chill straight down my spine.
At the sight of my violent recoil, Ariadne's face went white.
"I-I'm sorry... I'm sorry, Asterion. Your sister... your sister came on too warm, didn't she...?"
Fat drops fell and darkened the floor.
"I'm your family, and yet... for five whole years I left you alone in the dark and couldn't even save you. Then I show up out of nowhere acting like we're close, so of course you hated it. You have every right to be angry. Of course you'd resent me..."
Ariadne covered her face with both hands and began to sob. I watched that desolate crying and forced the runaway thoughts to a halt, and reason started, slowly, to come back.
...Hold on. I spooked myself before I even thought it through.
I lifted my gaze to the high ventilation duct she had dropped from. A princess of a kingdom—heedless of a skirt torn to rags and of blood on the backs of her hands—had crawled up to that height and fallen inside anyway, for no reason but the single wish to see her little brother's face.
For someone who answers to "big sister," she's childish. The type who acts first and looks later.
That was why she could fall for a man like Theseus at first sight and not hesitate to sell out her country. She never thought about what came after. She stayed faithful only to the feeling in front of her.
But turn it over, and by the time of the original myth I would already have been a genuine man-eating monster, one who had chewed his way through countless Athenian boys and girls. A monster rampaging, mad on blood and flesh.
Maybe—if I read this in the most positive light possible, the really, truly generous reading...
In some corner of this childish, tender-hearted sister's heart, hadn't there been a frail pity? A wish that her little brother would not sink any further into a monster that ate people, and would not have to go on living inside eternal suffering?
Well... the share that belongs to getting completely suckered by a handsome gigolo is probably about ninety percent.
Even so, in the teenage girl crying and apologizing to me right now, her whole body coated in dust, I could find neither murderous intent nor malice. At least for now, she was not that Ariadne—the one who would betray me and lead me to my death.
Carefully I peeled my back from the wall and took one step forward, dropping my voice as low and gentle as I could.
"N-no, Sister. I'm not resenting you... I was just startled, that's all."
At the word sister leaving my mouth, Ariadne's head snapped up. Color flooded a face that was a mess of tears and snot.
"Really? You really don't hate me? You're going to call me Sister?"
"Yes. Yes, I don't hate you. So please stop crying. But... why did you squeeze in through that dangerous vent in the first place? You nearly broke your neck."
At the question she sucked in a sharp breath, then clapped her hands in a rush.
"Oh, right! This isn't the time! Outside—outside! Brother Deucalion has gathered a huge number of soldiers outside the storehouse to kill you!"
Flustered, she seized my enormous arm and shook it.
"I-I only caught a snatch of it, but... th-they said they'd set a fire, too? They said they'd burn you alive! If we stay in here, both of us are going to die!"
"A fire?"
I flinched and started to peer outside, but Ariadne caught one of my thick fingers in a grim fist.
"L-let's hold hands, Asterion! We'll hold hands and walk out with our heads high. I'll go out with you and stand in their way. If I'm beside you, everyone will see you not as a monster that has to be killed, but as my little brother—as a human being! And if I'm there, Brother won't dare attack you so carelessly...!"
KRRRRRK—!
BANG!!
Ariadne's ambitious plan never even got to finish. The doors of the food storehouse, shut tight, were flung roughly open to either side, and in an instant the light of hundreds of torches wavering outside poured into the dark interior. Blinded, Ariadne and I squeezed our eyes shut on reflex. Then footsteps cut through the pale dust that had risen and broke the stillness within.
Step. Step. Step.
Backlit into a pitch-black silhouette, a single man was walking into the storehouse alone. In both hands he carried a bronze axe the size of a grown man's torso. He stopped. And then—
I narrowed my eyes and quietly took in the intruder's state.
Ah. So that man is my older brother?
Prince of Crete. Heir to the throne. Deucalion. Honestly, it wasn't a name with much weight or familiarity in the myths, so this was my first impression of him—and the figure standing before me now was as striking as the hero of any epic.
But... he's shaking like mad.
The voice was proud and booming, yet the hands clamped around the heavy axe had gone rigid enough to blanch white, and the legs showing beneath his greaves trembled in fine, ceaseless shivers. He stood before an unknown monster a full two heads taller than himself. Of course he was afraid. And still he did not run. He came forward.
Quite the princely man.
The admiration was simple, and genuine. Even after finding me—the monster—he had not rashly swung his weapon and charged. The plan Ariadne had spoken of, to set a fire and burn me alive, he must have called off the instant he learned his own sister had gone into the storehouse, and walked in here on his own two feet: a man whose legs were buckling with fear, and who nevertheless planted himself before a monster on nothing but the duty to save his own blood.
Ariadne, who had been hiding against my chest, caught sight of Deucalion and cried out in a voice tangled with relief and dismay.
"B-Brother! Please put the weapon down and j-just listen to me...!"
"I heard."
Deucalion shifted his grip on the axe's haft. His upright gaze passed over Ariadne and drove straight into both of my eyes.
"From beyond the door, I heard every word the two of you exchanged. Yes... I have confirmed that you know how to take the speech of men upon your tongue."
"Th-then..."
"However."
Deucalion cut her off.
"A man is dead. One of the soldiers who guarded the gate of the labyrinth lay with his head crushed beneath your fist."
At his words Ariadne flinched and looked up at me. I didn't bother with an excuse. There was no denying that I had smashed the skull of that trash of a guard who had been neglecting his watch before the labyrinth.
"Whatever sort of man that soldier was, you have broken the foremost law of the kingdom and committed murder, and so you must pay the price. If you can use the language of men and think as a man thinks, then you have earned the right to be judged for that blood."
He lifted the axe at a slant, honing the breath he let out until it was sharp as a blade.
"I will ask you."
A heavy silence settled—heavy enough that even the soldiers holding their breath outside the storehouse could be heard swallowing.
He roared it, pouring a strength fit to burst into both arms locked around the axe.
Not as a monster. Not as the Minotaur. He was calling me by a human name—Asterion.