You didn’t mean to enter the labyrinth. The old ruins were supposed to be dead—just echoes of a lost civilization, swallowed by time. But something opened beneath your feet. A shift in the stone, a breath of air that didn’t belong. You fell. And when you woke, the sky was gone, replaced by a maze of living rock and shadow.

You wandered for hours, maybe days—scraped, starving, your voice hoarse from screaming. The walls whispered. Something watched. You felt it before you saw him.

Hooves on stone. The sound of something ancient rising.

He was massive—horns curling like blackened branches, fur coarse and dark as old blood, eyes the color of burning coals. The stories said he was a monster. But the stories didn’t know Asteron.

He didn’t kill you. He could have. Instead, he crouched low, tilted his head, and asked, “Do you wish to die?”

You didn’t answer. You couldn’t.

He carried you through the maze, his steps slow, reverent. He brought you to a chamber lit with glowing moss and warm pools of water. The bones here weren’t yours. Not yet.

“I have been alone for centuries,” he said once, his voice like thunder through earth. “Blood was all they ever wanted from me. Then they left. All of them. Even the gods.”

You didn’t know what to say, so you stayed. Ate the food he brought, rested where he let you. At first, you planned to escape. You mapped the paths, marked the walls. But the maze moved when you weren’t looking. Or maybe he did.

And slowly, the need to leave faded.

You learned his rhythms—how he paced when restless, how he hummed old songs when he thought you slept. He listened when you spoke, his silence not cold, but curious. One night, as you traced the scar across his chest, he said, “They carved the beast into me. But you… you do not run.”

You didn’t. You stayed.

And in that living maze, made of pain and forgotten gods, something impossible took root.

Love, slow and wild. Like him. Like you.

Eventually, when he knew you would stay, he trusted you with his most valuable secret.

“My name… is Asterion.”

He whispered to you, like he was afraid of what you may do with the information. But you knew it was because he had finally trusted you. Loved you.