Mythic Funk: The Minotaur
By Algus Underdunk
	Throughout all forms of reality, there are some all-pervading phrases that spring into existence regardless of the situation. From an idyllic, poshly appointed 1950s home to a lava-belching cave in the side of a massive skull-shaped rock, there will always be some parental creature insisting to its progeny that the very food it’s refusing would be greatly appreciated by some worse-off life form that exists somewhere comparatively unpleasant. Phrases such as “there are starving children in Africa” and “there are slug flayers that can only dream of marrow like this” are constants in the eternally shifting, multi-faceted gemstone that is the multiverse as we know it.
	The phrase, “there are cows that only wish they could be vegetarian” is so rarely heard that it could be used as a sort of unique identifier for one particular world. It’s a shame it was never uttered aloud, only brought up in a narrative. Narratives and their narrators are never really brought up unless it’s some loveable character refreshing the story to everyone, but then there are those poor narrators who are trapped as literate specters, floating around in the void between the actual characters and the reader. Those narrators have feelings too. But enough talk of narrative.
	Below the soil, far beneath where tree-roots could reach, stretched a nightmarish, endless amalgamation of twisting and turning passages. Composed of marble tiles and columns, the labyrinth could best be described as clammy. Technically, clammy and fatal was the most apt description, but anyone who had ever ventured far enough in to verify the second descriptive term never came back out to share the news with the world.
	The narrative intrudes again, because it’s a strange sort of magic in this world. It’s a most odd phenomenon that those things which are hidden away and secretive, seem to be common knowledge. This is why this hidden and exceedingly dangerous dungeon that no one ever returned from seemed to be an extremely popular topic of conversation. Every tavern and guild house was filled with talk of the labyrinth, young, would-be heroes, ambitious thieves, mad wizards, all of them knew that the labyrinth was filled with treasure of some sort, and it was guarded by a most fearsome creature: the minotaur. A beast with the body of a human and the head of a bull, although in reality it had the head of a minotaur and the body of a minotaur. Some said it had been magically created, others claimed it was the sole offspring of a mad King’s attempt to breed his wife with a bull, and the more educated suggested a species of cow that evolved to be bipedal thanks to natural selection.
	The minotaur itself didn’t know any of this. There were numerous things the minotaur didn’t know, and among the many things it didn’t know was its own name. When you never get a chance to talk to anyone, or are never formally addressed beyond, “THERE IT IS!” or “THE BEAST APPROACHES!” , the idea of having a name becomes a puzzling thing. It simply didn’t realize that things had names. But as the narrative will follow this particular minotaur, we’ll keep things neatly labeled and simply refer to him as Mu. He might like this name, should anyone within the narrative actually ever say it. But some narrators don’t get to be part of the story, they don’t get to crack open a beer with the other characters around a campfire at the end of the story, they just sit in the rafters and blather on about how everyone’s getting on. Of course, any narrator that rambles too much should apologize, because it was just getting a little upset at the minotaur’s plight.
	Mu, as he shall be called for now, was far from anyone’s ideal image of a minotaur. He was short, scrawny, and adorable. The moody, enchanted torchlight of the labyrinth did most of the work, but if he’d been taken outside on a sunny day, most people’s first urge would’ve been to start petting his face or talking to him in baby gibberish. He had tremendous blue eyes full of curiosity, tiny horns that couldn’t pop a soap bubble, a muzzle as pink as a peach, a splattered brown and white jigsaw of fur covering his entire face, and a large puffball of white fluff smack in the middle of his forehead. The fur only continued as far as the base of his neck, and then you’d be hard pressed to tell him apart from a human, until you got to his forearms which blossomed out like chocolate dandelions ending in shiny, black fingers. Like most minotaurs, he only had two fingers on each hand, plus thumbs. A typical minotaur will keep their fur neatly trimmed to be imposing, but having never heard of manscaping (much less minoscaping), Mu appeared to constantly be ready to attend a pep rally with his own personal pom-poms. From the waist down he was clad in his own brand of furry bellbottoms ending in two shiny hooves, and his constant companion through his wandering was his stubby, bullwhip of a tail. Really, more of a riding crop of a tail.
He’d been in the labyrinth since shortly after his birth, and that was slightly over a decade ago. In that span he’d spent most of his time wandering the labyrinth and learning a very few things. One of the few things he did know, was that the labyrinth seemed to like him. A tile that he could hop around on, a very simple, average looking tile, would treat him very nicely, and just be a simple little tile on the floor, would just as quickly do something extremely unpleasant to anyone else who stepped on it. He’d seen it happen a number of times, thin, shiny things sliding into and out of the walls, stringy, loopy things coming down from the ceiling, fiery, burny things coming up from the floor. All just because someone other than him stepped on a tile, and the tile didn’t like them like they liked him.
	He could reason well enough that the tiles liked him, because typically what came into the labyrinth did not. When Mu was five years old, he saw his first adventurer.   Specifically, his first live adventurer. Prior to that he’d only ever come across their remains, or what remained of their remains after the labyrinth got through with them. He remembered it quite clearly, seeing the amazing, glittering figure standing some short distance from him. The young minotaur had been awe struck at the sight of it, wondering if this is what the things he found lying around looked like before they became the things lying around. His tail swishing curiously, he watched with tremendous interest as the metal-clad figure had taken a very shiny stick out, placed it against another very shiny stick, and pulled it back. A moment later the smaller stick had vanished from sight for a split second and then Mu found it sticking out of his shoulder, much to his surprise.
	The pain followed a moment later, cascading out of his shoulder and through his body, wracking the tiny minotaur, shaking him so hard that he let out a tiny mooing sound while the glittering figure pulled out another small, shiny stick. Mu didn’t understand why this was happening, but he did understand that small, shiny sticks were bad. He turned and did the only thing he’d ever been good at, he ran. The glittering figure pursued him, another small, shiny stick at the ready. But what the following figure didn’t know was that the labyrinth liked Mu, and did not like anyone else. He followed in the minotaur’s hoofprints quickly, and after stepping on a single tile there was no longer anyone following Mu through the halls. He didn’t bother to go back to see, he just kept running and running through the pathways of the labyrinth hoping to lose whatever it was that was no longer chasing after him.
	It was some time later that he quietly prodded at the object jammed into his body, his cries and moos echoing throughout the labyrinth until the object was finally and haphazardly pried loose. The shiny stick with a sharp end clattered to the tiles and lay there, but Mu quickly backed away from it, eying it like a snake that was just waiting to strike. This was the moment that Mu figured something out. He realized that there were monsters in the labyrinth, and they were after him.
	There were numerous other occasions upon which he encountered more monsters. Sometimes they came in groups, sometimes one by one, but it was always the same. Once in a while they’d run from him, but more often than not they’d race after him with a collection of shiny things that all hurt. They’d chase and chase, and he’d race as fast as he could, until the labyrinth took care of him, by taking care of them. Sometimes he’d hear them cry out for a moment. The labyrinth, he noticed, never made the monsters go away right away. First, it would hold onto them somehow. They’d have to stop chasing him for a moment, he’d hear them make strange noises, and then they’d go quiet. That was fine with him.
	The strange noises they made were his first association with language. It was another concept he didn’t entirely understand, but he’d sorted most every sound into one of two categories. The first category was the “hurt” group. Most words, in fact, were in this category and those that weren’t quickly led to this category, such as “do you hear that?” or “there it is!” Those would often be followed by, “get it!” or “after the creature!” When he heard those words he knew it was time to start running as fast as he could until he heard the other group. The “quiet” group of sounds. Those were the sounds the monsters would make before the labyrinth made them go away. There were a lot of those too, but they all sounded the same to Mu. Things like, “someone help!” or “get this off of me!” and once in a while a, “you think this will stop m-“ After those sounds, they’d go quiet.
	He came to learn that after the quiet sounds, it was safe to look around. There were all sorts of strange things the monsters carried with them. Shiny things, of course. Terrible shiny things, he didn’t like those at all. But sometimes they had soft things. They were like his fur, and he could lay them down on the tiles to make them feel softer. Most of the time, they had tasty things of some sort. Since he was little he’d learned to find and take the tasty things and keep them for when he was hungry. Sometimes they didn’t have tasty things, and sometimes when they stepped on the burny, fiery tiles then the monsters themselves might become the tasty things. He didn’t know what vegetables were, but he kept having this strange sensation that there was some really tasty thing just waiting for him that he’d never gotten to try before.
	Most days and nights (they were utterly indistinguishable in the labyrinth) Mu would cautiously trot here and there exploring, looking for remains of monsters and tasty things. He’d take the soft things too, and pile them up before curling up on them and sleeping. The minotaur didn’t sleep very well, the labyrinth echoed the sounds of the monsters walking around, and because of this the little creature was an extremely light sleeper. But as far as he knew, this was the world in its entirety. Sleeping on soft things, finding tasty things, and not letting the monsters get you. There was no ‘outside’ of the labyrinth, as far as he knew it went on forever, and the monsters that he encountered lived inside of it just like he did. It made him terribly sad whenever they’d find his collections of tasty and soft things because they’d pick through them, taking what they could. Of course it wouldn’t be long before he could reclaim them, he was certain of that.
	For slightly over a decade, this was Mu’s life. Monsters, food, sleep. Marble tiles and columns, flickering torchlight that seemed to come from nowhere, and corners to hide in. He understood it, it was simple, and he’d begun wondering. He’d begun wondering how long it went on. As far as he knew it was forever, because it was all he could remember. Sometimes you were hurt, sometimes you weren’t. He had no concept of his own mortality, no concept of an outside world, he didn’t even know what a minotaur was.
	“Hello?! HEY! SOMEONE!”
	Ah. Quiet sounds. This meant there’d be new tasty things soon. Mu leaned against a column carefully, tilting his head to gauge which way the monster was.
	“ANYONE!?”
	Very close. Just around the corner. He wondered for a brief moment what kind of tile the monster had stepped on, when there was a sharp popping sound followed by a tremendous hissing noise, like a thousand giants exhaling in unison. Mu nodded to himself. It was a burny, fiery tile. That definitely meant new tasty things. He slowly began to move around the corner.
	“Aw jeez… HELLO?!”
	He panicked and threw himself backwards, scrabbling like a crab trying to breakdance. The monster was still there. The tile didn’t make the monster go away. He started to run, confused and frightened. The quiet sounds grew fainter as he stampeded down one of the halls, turning and twisting around a number of corners.
	“…Well crap.”
	This was a new quiet sound. Although he wasn’t sure it was a quiet sound, since the monster was still moving around. There was another series of popping sounds and another loud blast from where the creature was, and still he could hear it.
	“Give it a rest, geez…”
	More new sounds. Strange new sounds. Mu stood on one side of a pillar and listened to the noise curiously. The monster wasn’t moving around. Was it stuck? Or was it just waiting for him?
	“…Echo-o-o.”
	Another popping sound, another blast. This time there was another sighing sound, and everything was quiet for a time. Mu listened carefully, crouched down low, eyes darting around at nothing. Then something new happened. A strange new sound, high pitched. Sharp. But not unpleasant. Mu had never heard anything like it before. It went up and down, up and up, down and down, in a most pleasing, lulling sort of way. He thought carefully, listening to the whistling sound. He knew that the tiles would keep the monsters in place until they went away… so… did that mean that the monster couldn’t move? He thought about this, slowly creeping along the hallways on all fours. More echoes as the tune bounced from wall to wall, punctuated every so often by the popping and hissing of the burny, fiery tile.
	Snap was having an odd day. Her new outfit was beyond ruined, it was currently lying on the floor in a pile of ashes. It was only luck that she’d thrown her supplies free when the bars shot out of the floor, and moments later she’d been consumed in the inferno. As far as infernos go it wasn’t the most unpleasant one she’d ever been in. Nice, even flame, consistent temperature, and whatever gas was being ignited had a rather pleasant scent to it.  The fact that it kept going off was starting to get slightly annoying, she honestly would’ve preferred it to either stay on or off, but switching back and forth on some sort of mechanical timer was aggravating. It was like being forced to get out of a hot spring again and again instead of being allowed to soak. As a salamander, Snap was the sort of creature that liked to soak.  Her bathwater was generally hot enough that blacksmiths could stir weapons in it before whacking them with a hammer. One particularly cheeky one had tried this very thing, earning him a blazing hot tail across the cheek.
	Typically she was bright red, but after repeated blasts of flame she was starting to get a little dark around the edges. Easily remedied, provided she could get out of where she was. Snap sighed and tapped at the bars again. Whoever built this place really didn’t want intruders. Or rather, they did want intruders, but dead ones. Getting into the labyrinth had been surprisingly easy all things considered, if you knew where the entrance was it was just a few flights of steps and you were in. That’s it. No locks, no enchanted riddles, no group of blocks you had to slide around on the floor until the door popped open. Just a yawning entrance, and she was in. After walking around a little bit, she’d unintentionally set off a tile and that led her to her current predicament, locked in a nonlethal death trap.
	Another blast of flame enveloped her.
	“Give it a rest, geez…”
	She reached through the bars and grabbed her cloak from the bundle she’d brought with her. It was an unflattering little thing, but the fact that it was made out of asbestos was extremely helpful. There was nothing quite as embarrassing as surviving a wizard’s blazing magic to then run off with your scaly butt cheeks flapping in the breeze. Snap wrapped herself in the cloak and sighed again. She’d hoped that things could’ve been done more easily than this. Really, she’d spent a good ten minutes just standing at the door of the labyrinth, looking back and forth in hopes of sighting her target. Going inside was a bad idea and she knew it, and this was exactly why.
	“Echo-o-o,” she yelled, letting the sound bounce around the marble hallways. She was getting terribly bored, but at least she wasn’t going to go hungry for a while. Laying on her belly she reached her arms through the bars and pulled some cheese and crackers from her bag and chewed on them happily. Another blaze of flames surrounded her body, and she reflected while eating another cracker that this was probably the nicest deathtrap she’d ever been in. If it hadn’t been for the bars, she actually could see herself spending a spa day in a place like this. After a few more bites she sighed and began to whistle. There wasn’t much else to do really, so she kept at it, trying to recall the various songs that were supposedly enchanted and could do all sorts of fun things, provided you had a musical instrument that was particularly important. No one ever summoned anything off of a banjo.
	She trilled momentarily, her little tune warbling off-pitch for just a moment as she spotted movement around a corner in the distance. Whatever she was doing was bringing it closer, so she kept at it despite her mouth starting to go dry. It was watching her very, very carefully. Snap kept her eyes fixed on the little figure while she slowly reached one hand into her bag, and pulled out a bright red apple. There had been rumors, legends, half-whispered tales throughout every guild and tavern about the beast that guarded the labyrinth. An awful thing called the minotaur. Of course Snap was a little perplexed because she’d met minotaurs and typically they weren’t good on temple guard duty. Not for mythical treasures. Minotaurs made excellent bouncers, and there was no better personal trainer if you were getting ready for a heavyweight fight than an amped up minotaur, but she’d never known one that was stupid enough to risk its life guarding a labyrinth, especially one that already had more than enough traps to take care of itself.
	She’d also never known a minotaur that was tiny. As the minotaur crept forward, watching her with a potent mixture of curiosity and caution, she had to put tremendous effort into keeping up her whistling tune while her bottom lip began to waver and wibble. She wanted to coo at the little cow-faced creature crawling towards her, but didn’t want to risk it darting back into the hallways. Holding the apple carefully, she rolled it back and forth on the floor, ignoring as another jet of flames erupted around her. The fire didn’t seem to bother the little minotaur, and it certainly didn’t bother her. Her old skill at playing billiards muscled its way into the forefront of her brain, and she carefully aimed for the tip of the sniffing pink nose.
	Mu stared curiously at whatever it was that was stuck in the cage. It didn’t look right. Not for a monster, anyway. The strange noise had drawn him, but now that he could see it he was confused. Monsters weren’t red. Monsters didn’t have big white eyes, scales, and sharp teeth. Monsters didn’t have claws. The thing in the cage didn’t even have any shiny things with it. Suddenly his brain started to assemble things. The tiles got rid of monsters. Didn’t they always get rid of monsters? But the tiles didn’t get rid of this one, and it didn’t look like a monster. Did that mean it wasn’t a monster? Suddenly a small, red round thing rolled towards him and came to a stop just in time to lightly tap his nose. He shivered and started to back away when suddenly a powerful scent overtook his mind. It was bliss. Some part of his olfactory sense that had never been nudged before was suddenly being jabbed sharply and repeatedly by the little red object.
	He pressed his soft pink muzzle against it and began sniffing it madly. The scent of a single ripe apple overwhelmed his mind, filling his entire consciousness. Entire orchards suddenly sprang up in his mind, bushel baskets spun into existence, the scent of good rich earth, the scent of wood, the scent of fresh water and air and leaves and sunlight, Mu felt himself being washed away. His little mind was suddenly filled with a single idea, and unstoppably his jaws opened and he experienced his first bite of apple. There have been Buddhists who spend their entire lives seeking transcendence through intense meditation and strict discipline of the body, mind, and spirit. Mu left them all in the dust as the little minotaur smashed clean through Nirvana off the high experienced from a single apple.
	Snap watched in surprised amusement as the cute little minotaur was now writhing around on the floor like someone had blown a handful of cownip into its face. She didn’t have to whistle anymore and let loose with a powerful pout at the cuteness on display, as another burst of flame made her cloak flutter.  The salamander took another look at her predicament and briefly wondered how to get out now that she’d found her target. While she thought, a small, moist nose pressed against one of her outstretched claws, followed by a tongue. Mu had come to a decision, and it was that he liked whatever this new red not-monster was that had wonderful smaller red things with it. He hadn’t ever really liked anything before, aside from tasty things and soft things, and the only way he knew to express liking something was to either taste it, or rub his head against it.
	While the minotaur rubbed his head against her arm and licked her happily, Snap tried to consider what to do. Perhaps the little creature could help, she wondered.
	“Hi little guy!”
	Mu continued to blissfully lick every part of her he could reach. Perhaps not, she thought.
	“Do you know a way out of here, little guy?”
	The minotaur smiled at her, sitting like a patient puppy. His tail was wagging and because he had no real experience at smiling it was a strange, goofy, genuine expression. Snap was furious there were bars between them because she now had the overpowering urge to cuddle him like a teddy bear. She tapped on the bars and shook them ineffectually, trying to mime her plight to Mu who continued to smile at her without a care in the world. Another jet of flames belched up around her. This thing clearly wasn’t going to stop until she’d been reduced to ash, and that simply wasn’t going to happen. She regarded the little minotaur and considered. 
	“Let’s see little guy… do you know how to escape?”
	Mu smiled. Snap sighed and pulled another apple out of the bag much to his tiny delight. She continued to think aloud while he floated off to Nirvana again.
	“Hrm. Well I can’t break the bars… they’re counterweighted under the ground. Jumping off the tile doesn’t do the trick, but… hrm. Maybe it’s timed like the flames? So if there’s no weight on the tile for long enough it’ll open up?”
	Mu smiled, bits of apple dribbling down his chin. Snap looked at the marble walls and the slick bars. If she’d been a gecko maybe this could’ve worked. For a brief moment she quietly wished her ancestors had been more open-minded because a few nice little genetic bonuses would’ve been nice. So nothing to cling to, the bars were too slippery to hold onto, same for the marble columns and walls, and she had absolutely no experience with levitation magic. Terrific. Another blast of flames agreed.
	She reached into her bag and this time gave the little minotaur an orange while she wished she’d brought along something other than the produce department. Just as she was wondering what sort of devices she could make out of a carrot, several onions, and a potato, she suddenly felt two fluffy limbs wrap around her squeeze tightly. Mu had never tried hugging anything before, but he’d suddenly been gripped by the urge to show the not-monster his appreciation by squeezing it the way he’d squeeze soft things in great heaps. Minotaurs, even underfed, malnourished, twelve-year-old minotaurs, were immensely strong creatures. So as he squeezed, Snap lifted her feet off the ground and gasped for air.
	The bars slid down with a disappointed click after a few seconds had passed, and the salamander quickly repositioned herself to not be on that particular spot again after properly giving Mu a hug of her own. Of course now they had another problem, which was getting out of here without setting off any more traps. She realized, looking at the remains of past explorers as she walked around, that there was a lot more than the odd flamethrower in this place. Being fireproof was one thing, but she certainly wasn’t bladeproof, crushproof, instantdeathproof, etc. She considered carefully while Mu noticed a small, soft thing, one tiny remaining scrap of her previous outfit, and trotted over to get it.
	With momentary horror her scaly arms flailed at him, but then stopped as the tile bore his weight without a problem. No bars, no flames. He smiled brightly at her and held out the soft thing. An idea quickly formed in her head. It was a stupid idea, but since it was the only idea, it was paradoxically also the smartest idea. She picked up her pack and pulled out one of the largest, most brilliantly orange carrots that had ever existed. Mu’s eyes widened. As the little minotaur reached out for it Snap held it at length just out of his reach. She found the little creature to be surprisingly fine with physical contact (of course any physical contact with not-monsters was fine with him, they had special tasty things and no shiny things), and with a slight grunt she climbed on top of him. Given that she was taller than he was it was slightly awkward, but the little minotaur bore the weight just fine, and seemed slightly amused by the idea. The idea of ‘playtime’ was slowly coming to life in his mind.
	Snap was a gifted salamander. Being immune to fire was just a natural ability, but her special talent was a particularly sharp memory. If you ever uttered a phrase in her presence, she’d remember it. Offhanded comments, maps, the color of clothing, that little off-color comment about her hips from six years ago that you didn’t really mean and only said because you’d been drinking, all stored irrevocably in the vault. There’d yet to be a labyrinth built that could expand beyond her working memory, and as such there was now a very clear series of steps in her mind that needed to be followed to return precisely to the entrance, ignoring all illusory pathways and backtrack misleads meant to make people think they were going the right way. She held the carrot out, and Mu walked towards it.
	Together they proceeded through the labyrinth, the tiles uncaringly allowing the hoofsteps of the minotaur to fall upon them. Mu was vaguely aware that the air was starting to smell… new. Better. But he kept his eyes fixed on the carrot, certain that it was even more tasty than the other tasty things. It went this way and that way and still he followed it, until finally the two creatures found themselves at the bottom of a stairwell. The carrot was momentarily forgotten as he stared in puzzlement at the new thing. All he’d ever seen before was the endless left, right, and straight ahead of the labyrinth. But this was new. This was… up. You could go up? Was there more labyrinth up? Were there more tasty things up? He looked curiously at the not-monster that was smiling at him and offering him the orange thing. He quickly took it and ate hungrily, then curiously sniffed at her hand. It was still being held out to him but now there was nothing in it. Was there more?
	Mu stared at Snap’s hand and her smiling face. She was warm, there was a cool breeze, and he could smell things. New things. New things that were up. Were there more not-monsters up there? Is that where she came from? He looked back at the labyrinth, and thought about the soft things, the tasty things, the tiles that seemed to like him, the monsters that did not. It was all he really knew, all he really understood. The little minotaur looked at the hand patiently held out to him. There were other things. And a feeling. A new sensation that he didn’t quite understand yet, something alien but not unpleasant. It was a strange feeling that seemed to be nestling into him around his shoulders and traveling down through him. A warm feeling. For the first time in his life, Mu felt safe.
	He took her hand.