[NOTE: THIS IS CURRENTLY POSTED ON THE SITE. NO FURTHER CRITIQUE IS NECESSARY.]
Love creates life. This is true in the most euphemistic sense, of course, but it extends past that. To love something in the period of its creation is to imbue it with a soul of sorts, a patchwork, needy thing that is used to being adored.
One such thing was created by a human inventor at the behest of an inhumane king, in order to contain a half-human prince. In carving its endless corridors and rooms, the inventor couldn't help but find joy in his work. And so the labyrinth was born with a soul that craved touch and adoration.
That wasn't so much of a problem in the beginning. The labyrinth's permanent habitant was nothing if not adoring. It grazed at the moss and sparse grasses growing in the labyrinth's corridors and napped in the light that fell from far above. Other residents appeared periodically to show a different kind of love. Young men and women would enter and sing in loud voices and dance wildly through before eventually lying down to sleep against the labyrinth's warm walls, their flesh tightening in repose.
The empty times came with one such young man. Quieter than the others, he carried a sharpness and a sinuous thing that caught in the hallways. As the labyrinth retched and twisted and danced to rid itself of the persistent thread, the quiet man found the permanent resident and put it to sleep before leaving the labyrinth in the silence he had brought with him.
No more young men and women came. No more love came. The labyrinth did its best to wake up its current residents, of course. It crashed and slammed together, but the noise did not wake them. It shook them until they came apart, but what was left of their eyes stayed closed.
After a time, even its permanent resident was dust and bleached bone. The labyrinth's attention was drawn to the black-shelled creatures that had torn flesh from its habitants. The creatures dug labyrinths of their own and gave them the love so craved. That was the key, then, the labyrinth decided. Instead of wrenching love from those within it, it would copy the little creatures and become a place that could be loved. Then the people would come back down to sing once more.
It started with structures it saw within the little sand labyrinths; egg chambers, food storage, and even a vast hall for the largest member of its future colony. But none came. Over the millennia, it collected whatever scraps fell from above into its recesses and stored them in the rooms meant to hold life and love. Most of it was useless even to the labyrinth, yes, but every once and a while a leaf of text or images would float down.
The pictures ushered in a new plan. Great metallic structures. Gleaming windows. Furniture intricately carved out of unknown materials. Sweeping fabrics. This was the key! Of course the people weren't coming to it, the labyrinth realized, when they had such marvels above!
And so it set to work. It twisted itself to new heights and new depths until it stretched for miles, its movements mimicking the twisted dances that once had filled its corridors. It ripped ores from its own walls and crushed them into fine metals and bright shapes. It built theaters without actors and highways without cars, each one a cloying plea for what it was missing.
There's no real end to this story, I'm afraid, except perhaps in a request. If you ever find yourself on the island of Crete and happen upon a chasm that echoes with an odd, inhuman longing, go ahead and toss down a magazine or something. Maybe you'll provide the vast, empty city below with the hint it needs to finally draw down its populace and feel them dance within it once more.
"We had reached a state of desperation," KexobakVerkok wrote in his seminal English-language memoir A New Home for My People: The Founding of DuaTemoa:
Despite myself, I was not immune to the growing xmopko among my people. How else could an Areian such as myself react to the dwindling number of voices in my heart each day? And so the situation worsened itself.
At the time, I disagreed with the grdaxotedo as to the Human role in our suffering. The Humans did not wrest us from our red nests. The Humans did not force us across the cold expanse. The Humans simply built insular lives in their ahabgek towers to the measures of their own comforts. How were they to know that their lives and customs and constructions would be hostile to our very beings?
I digress. I mean to speak of happier moments.
In the Human year 2149, I was part of a delegation invited to the island of Crete by the Greek government. The dxrvudek of the time declared the invitation an attempt at 'softening us up' (to use a rather silly idiom) in order to learn any secrets we may have brought with us. It was obvious to me that this was not the case. The Areian need for ayoek was common knowledge among Humans at that time. It was pure kindness that crafted our invite to the site of one of the oldest ruins in Europe. After all, love over time can bring life much as what we refer to as "creation adoration" does.
It is this point in my story that has been somewhat mythologized. I was not possessed by the padeapexegubva of my species, nor did I sense a soul crying out. The disappointing truth is that I was a victim of my own curiosity. While my yuoxeduk accepted the well-meaning regards of the Tylissian people, I excused myself to walk among the town's ruins. While crouched in a sedimentation basin looking into what I thought was a drain of some sort, I was struck by the xmopko and lost consciousness. Down I went.
I awoke to love. The kind of love that crackles against skin, love you cannot help but reciprocate; after all, what is more worthy of adoration that something that adores in kind? There was no light, of course, but there didn't need to be. When I came to upon the warm stone floor, I could follow the pulsing emotion across the walls and ceilings like Terran echolocation.
I am not so calloused as to be believe in ujgaovedoa; and yet, according to my yuoxeduk, I fluoresced when I emerged from under ground. If anything could drive me to that state, it would be the hours I spent in those hallways, feeling the joy vibrate from unseen heights to unimaginable depths. There were buildings below us, I told them, with ayoek unseen since home. They pulled away from me in disbelief, but I persisted, pulling them into the corridor that had opened up at my behest. I had the pleasure of watching them feel what I felt. And so the news spread.
In later chapters, I will delve into the minutae of how this adoring ruin became DuaTemoa. I promise to leave out no detail, however slight. But before we speak of land treaties and construction, please dwell with me for a moment on the first glimmer of hope we had since arriving here. Picture, if you will, the group of us running with joy through the halls of our new home, beating out a rhythm against the walls whose reciprocity we felt with every step.
“The minotaur was just a boy,”
He said, our guide to this event,
Six fingers pressed against the wall.
“Our nation never lies. It can’t.
“That’s what it means to be in love.”
We passed a group of worshipers.
Their limbs were splayed across the floor.
“Oh, do you see them?” mother asked,
her whisper joyful to its core.
“They’re feeling nothing but its love.”
The bones are not out on display.
They’re buried in the endless deep.
They do not wish him back alive,
But rather that he rest in sleep.
And that’s a different kind of love.
We stopped to pay our due regards
Where, they say, the boy was slain.
They lined the stone with bits of hay
and kernels of some unknown grain.
Foods, they say, that he would love.
My mother bought me a small stone
Hawked near by some old Martian skink.
“Squeeze it tight and think your thoughts,”
He sold us tourists with a wink.
“The labyrinth will feel your love.”
That chunk of wall from ancient lore
Became my simple paperweight.
It holds down words and petty things,
Those sent to me from distant straits
By people I may grow to love.
Apparently I’m older now
Than he was when he breathed his last.
And so I hold tight that small rock
And let my thoughts move free and fast
To learn to give the kind of love
That he always deserved.
