tthhee oddiissee, chapter 2
Ro was at the bottom of the well. He assumed it was a well, anyway.
It was a long shaft, tiled with large gray stones leading up to an opening, closed off with iron bars. It let in the moonlight and little else. Stone steps spiraled against the walls, leading up to a solitary iron door with a wheel handle on the outside. Ro knew he had to make it there.
Ro rose out of the puddle that he was lying in, shivering with his clothing completely soaked through. It may have been a mistake to wear things he didn’t want to get ruined, but he reassured himself that there was no real way to know what he would be encountering and he had little chance to prepare properly regardless of the situation. He might as well wear his best stuff, even if he had to part with it later.
Ro was careful climbing the stairs, he had slipped enough times in the shoes he was wearing to be extra careful of what he was doing now. He was surprised at how easy it was to open the door, bet felt a little relieved knowing that wherever he was, their facilities were still in working order. The door opened to a long hallway that Ro couldn’t see to the end of, despite it being illuminated. The walls, similarly, were made of the same stones that he saw in the well, reminding Ro of some sort of medieval castle.
He made sure to shut the door tight behind him. If that really was a well he had just crawled out of, he didn’t want to be held responsible for any leakages. It wasn’t the most important thing to his survival, he reasoned, but Ro still didn’t want to risk being rude.
Ro was somewhat surprised to find that the hallway was fitted at regular intervals, not with torches as the setting would seem to call for, but by crude gas lamps: copper pipes extruded from the walls, pointing upwards with open flames coming of the top of them. It was an odd thing to see, but at least marked an attempt at modernization of a more ancient setting, making Ro think that wherever he was might actually be constructed by and for human beings as opposed to being abandoned long ago. On top of that, he was hoping that the open flames might heat him up a bit or possibly dry his clothing. He knew how dumb that thought was, but still held out a bit of hope.
Ro had found that the stone corridor stretched on to seemingly no end. He spent hours going through all of its twists turns, and changes in gradation, finding the entire experience disorienting. He didn’t know where he was before, but he couldn’t figure out where he was relative to where he had been. Ro’s mind was racing about what sort of purpose this all could serve. He thought he may have died and was in some sort of purgatory to continue down an endless corridor for eternity, but he felt a bit too alive to actually believe it, feeling all the aches and pains that went with it. It would be more fitting if he was forced to continue, but there was no reason that Ro couldn’t stop and take a break if he wanted, and he was considering it for a minute; it turns out his shoes were not as comfortable as he thought they were. But Ro was the type of person to want to get any sort of chore out of the way as quick as possible, lest it ruin his free time by hanging over his head incessantly. He did wish there was some sort of hint at an end to all this.
Ro then encountered a sharp turn, more sever than he’d come across before. Before he even realized it he was staring at a spiral staircase. The staircase was narrow, metal, and had clearly been painted red at one point, though it was coming off in chunks. The stairs were solid pieces of metal with a few holes drilled through them. Ro was slightly relieved to find a change of pace, but when he stared up through the gaps of the stairs and couldn’t see the top, he let out a heavy sigh.
It’s not like I’m going anywhere else any fucking time soon.
Ro sat down at the bottom of the staircase to rest if only for a moment. The metal stairs offered little in the way of comfort, but at least he was able to get off his feet. His clothes, he noticed, were a bit more dry than they were before, though he had a sneaking suspicion that they were going to mold if left unattended. It didn’t really matter if he was fully dry or not, the dampness of the water being substituted by his own sweat. H was still damp, but now felt a little more disgusting. Ro wanted to really sit down and figure out just what was happening in this place anyway or where he was, but he realized he had been thinking that the whole walk here and sitting down and resting for a moment had not given him much in the way of insight. He felt like he should’ve found this stranger than he did, but considering his recent living arrangements, he wasn’t shocked that he wasn’t shocked.
Ro had sat for long enough, and that knew that losing himself in thought wouldn’t help him climb the staircase any faster. The staircase, like the hallway before, seemed to stretch on indefinitely, spiraling ever upward, but there was, at least, a nice uniformity to the whole thing. There was only one direction he would be heading towards.
More hours passed, and the sound of Ro’s footsteps got more and more monotonous as he trudged upward, echoing outward into the nothingness below and above. Every now and then, Ro would look upward to try and see any hint of an ending, but there was nothing of the sort, making him all the more weary.
Weariness turned to exhaustion; and exhaustion to frustration. To put it another way: he was pissed. What was he doing this for? Where was any of this going? Who built this fucking place, anyway? Ro felt like a complete sucker, feeling as if he fell for some elaborate scam. Granted, he had no idea what this scam could possibly be or how any person could arrange it, but he felt it anyway. Ro’s anger, perhaps unknowingly, at least distracted him from how tired he was.
His head was hanging, looking straight down to his feet, dutifully monitoring every step along the way, and the sweat droplets falling on the floor. He felt like he was going his mind. It was the sort of thing he had experienced on many road trips across the plains, but he didn’t have the luxury of any music and he doubted he was going to find a convenience store any time soon. He was in a bad way, to say the least.
Ro stopped where he stood, taking a deep breaths, his fists clenched, and his jaw clenched tighter. Each exhale was sharper than the last, lifting his entire upper body with every breath. He was at the breaking point. He lifted his head up, about to let out a primal scream only to see a heavy iron door in front of him. It was both a relief and a defeat at the same time. All the air slowly escaped his body, and he felt like a deflated balloon.
The other side of the door revealed anoutcropping, with a wooden bench facing out towards the edge and a copper drinking fountain next to it. Ro made a b-line to the fountain, sucking down as much water as possible to the point where he felt like he was going to puke. He didn’t care if he did, he just needed some sort of refreshment. He then collapsed down onto the bench, thankful that whoever built this place had some courtesy for whoever was coming through here. It was when he was lying on the bench that he actually noticed what the outcropping overlooked.
Sprawling underneath him was a huge labyrinth, extending far past Ro could see. He couldn’t tell if it was entirely enclosed or if it he had actually made it outside. It was too dark and there were clouds of fog that covered a good portion of the structure. The one thing he could see was in the center: a gigantic copper statue of a Minotaur, leaning down, holding the ceiling on his back, and dominating the landscape below, It was the largest statue Ro had ever seen.
He knew, lying on the bench, that he was going to have to conquer the maze below if he wanted to find a way out of this place and resume his life. Ro also knew that at some point, he would have to come face-to-face with the Minotaur himself. He let out a sigh, more exhausted than anything else. He didn’t care about any of that at the moment and was focused on relaxing as much as possible. He slowly drifted asleep, letting out a single word.
“Shit.”