Comes a Hero

There was something trickling down my throat. My eyes twitched, half open. I was laying awkwardly on the ground and something was trickling down my throat. Jerking awake, my arms shot out to either side of me, clasping on to the ground for support as if I had just woken up from a nightmare.

“Easy. Easy does it there,” a voice cautioned above me. Short, stocky, and with a metal bra, the pink-haired minotauress was perched over me, a leather waterskin in her hand. “You’re alright, big guy.”

I let out a silent curse. Alright? I was still in this place. My antlers waved wildly about as I gave my head a shake and pushed myself up off of the ground. I was still in this body. I was pretty far from ‘alright.’ Rubbing a coarse hand over my furry throat, I was amazed at how much better I felt. The parchedness I felt in my oesophagus had all but vanished. And, away from the dusty halls and in natural light, I was feeling much better. I looked down at the small minotauress, whose horns barely reached up to my waist and flashed her a smile.

“You helped me. Thank you.”

“Don’ mention it,” she dismissed, waving a hand through the air as if swatting a fly away and then brushing her nose with her backhand. She gave a little sniff, grunting, “we ‘taurs have to stick together these days if we want to make it. ‘Sides, there’s barely any males around at all neither.”

Nodding, absentmindedly, I tried to put the questions that posed aside and focus on my immediate surroundings. Turning my head in a quick rotation, I surveyed our surroundings. Just behind me, a familiar hole in the stone ceiling of the crypt sat exposed. Over its periphery, where I had fallen, a minotaur-sized outline carved in loose dirt and loam showed where I had been painstakingly dragged away from the pit. Frankly, I was shocked that the little minotaur had been able to move me at all. Around us, the stone façade of the crypt continued. Not twenty metres away, I could see what appeared to be a (if not the) main entrance to the crypt. Like a mouth, it sloped down and into the darkness below. It, like everything up here, was elaborately decorated. Great horns clung to the sides of the entrance, shaping the entryway to be a head and the crypt its gullet. Some part of me wondered if I had wasted time and effort coming out where I had, but another part of me thought that I couldn’t have been close to the exit at all because this place just went on.
Much of it was covered in earth and grass, subsumed by the rolling hills themselves. But, here and there, the odd slate of grey stones peeked out, mere hints of the titanic sprawl of winding corridors lain under the earth below. Only in areas like these, where the exterior still revealed itself to the world, were you able to see what had once been a vibrant megastructure. Stairs, plateaus, balconies, external wood structures, archways, they clung to the stepped crypt. The only thing that unified them all was that they were in various states of ruin. Wood rotted, archways fell, and the land was slowly consuming the steppes of stone. The stairs the minotauress had ascended were just in front of me. Barely a few paces further, the stone was covered by tall grasses. Flanking either side of the stairs, carved rails shielded passerbys from falling over the edge. Seeing such a grand structure in this state of dilapidated ruin was beautiful in a way. Sad, but starkly awe-inspiring.
Her load set down on the stone, I realised that my new minotauress friend was looking at me. One of her carried polearms which didn’t want to fit in with her dropped bag was held in her left hand. Her right hand was extended to me, an iron cuff bracelet around her wrist gleaming in the sun as she did so.

“I’m Lulu, Dwarf Lulu.”

Credit: Lyc

Gently, I gave her surprisingly calloused hand a shake. My own shaggy hand nearly swallowed her own in the shake, on account of how much bigger it was than hers.

“Got a name, big guy?” she continued, her teeth glinting in a wide smile. I shot her a nod.

“Frederick Pearse.” Just like that, her eyelids drooped and her ears sagged.

“Yeah, I’m not introducing you to anyone with a silly name like that,” Lulu grumbled, rolling her eyes. “Must have knocked yer head on the way out,” I could just make out the miniature girl whisper as she turned her head away from me.

“Hmm?” I rumbled with a frown.

“I was sayin’ we need tah get you a name that won’t make taurs think yer a few fields short of a pasture.” Lulu pursed her lips and brought a hand to her jaw, regarding me pensively for a moment. Looking me up and down, her gaze seemed to linger at the sword sheathed over my waist. Making up her mind, she pointed a hand at the hilt and proposed, “so yer a big lad and ye’ve got a sword with you. How about Parting Blade”–the little minotaur’s hands spread wide as she gesticulated, putting emphasis on the name–“going forward? Been a lot of good Blades in the history of the plains. Respectable name, that. I paused for a second, thinking it over.

“If you think it’s for the best,” I conceded with a bass rumble.

Rubbing a hand over my temple, I nodded. It might have been my own name, but I had no dog in the race for what was or wasn’t a good minotaur name. I knew I was always Frederick. If I had to call myself Parting Blade or some other dumb name in order to work out how to go back home, so be it. In the order of “most upsetting things to me right now” having hooves and being stranded in wherever this place was stood a mile higher than name dysphoria. Peering over the rails and across the vast, sunswept plains, I was taking the where of this place to be off of the regular Earth maps. I couldn’t think of any country that had sprawling underground tomb-mazes, minotaur girls, or this striking landscape. In the far distance, practically the horizon, a great singular mountain cut across the skyline. Over the backdrop of soft rolling hills, its jagged visage could only be described as imperious. This place was like something out of a fantasy novel. I could be in middle-earth.

A cough interrupted my daydreaming. Blinking, I turned away from the distant scenery and back to the fantastical creature just in front of me. Leaning against the artistic stone rails, Lulu had lazily angled her polearm over her shoulder and was looking at me.

“So, what wer’ ya doin’ in the Tomb of Kings, big guy?”

“Tomb of Kings?” I rumbled, turning slowly to look around the stone megastructure. Was that what this place was called?

“Yeah, yaknow, the burial maze for chieftains?” She stared at me, pursing her lips at my lack of reaction. “The maze their souls are supposed to roam until Crete wakes them up for the final battle?” I wasn’t sure what to make of any of that. Once more, the small girl had left me with far more questions than answers. I was trying to parse together some semblance of an explanation or reason or strategy of how to explain my situation to the girl when she grew exasperated and clarified, “the place you just crawled out of a few minutes ago?”

“I just”–I faltered, looking down at the little minotaur–“I woke up in there.”

Lulu frowned, her eyes narrowing as she stared intensely into my own eyes. Her arms crossed as she leaned back on the rail, apparently unsatisfied with my answer.

“Yeh didn’t steal anythin’ in there did ya?” she pried, eying me up and down suspiciously.

“What? No,” I asserted quickly. Did she see pockets in my fur? I glanced down at my waist. Noticing the sheathed blade on my hip, I clarified, “nothing but this sword I found on the ground. I’m not a graverobber.” I exposed my palms, as if to show that I wasn’t carrying anything else on me. The girl was small, but she had a hammer on a stick and I wasn’t looking to get smacked with it.

Lulu looked pensively at the sheathed sword on my hip for a moment, then back to me. There was a moment of silence over the hills as if she was waiting for something to happen. As the silence drew on, the cloudiness in her eyes dissipated and her concern over the subject seemed to vanish on a dime.

“Well, if the kings didn’ want you to have it, they’d have prob-bly smited you where you stood. That’s what the ol’ elders say, anyhow. So I think yer fine,” the little minotaur said with a shrug, turning around without a care in the world. I wasn’t one to scoff at other folk’s religions anyways, as it was kind of a douchey thing to do. But, given my outstanding predicament, I had to stop and wonder if I had really come inches away from supernatural annihilation when I touched this sword. I glanced down at the blade pensively.

“Yer not gonna hang around there forever, are ya?” Lulu’s voice called out from an ever-growing distance away from me. “That old place is for the dead! C’mon, I’ll take you to Highcliff. It’s not twenty minutes on hoof from here.” Looking her way, I saw the little minotaur with her back turned, waving a hand back at me as she walked. With a single blink, I found myself bounding over to her side. I wasn’t sure what HighCliff was, but the tiny minotaur was right. There was nothing else here for me. It was time to move on.