The Ariadne Connection

THE STONE PILLAR BURSTS into flames. A fiery torrent plunges her down into the dark heart of the mountain that swallows the brief blaze of light. Falling, Ariadne spins spreadeagled into the vortex, black cataclysm tossing her like a straw in a meltemi wind. A rock tunnel spins around her, the stones shearing, screaming—

Ariadne screamed soundlessly, falling. A hard beat drove the spinning, faster and faster, as flickering lights sparked the tunnel in an infinite crystalline mandala of shifting facets and colors. She knew there was a pattern, but as she tried to grasp it the colors dissolved into nothingness.

She groped inward for escape, searching vainly for the orderly lattice of light. It was broken, shattered by the collision of clashing forces. Stone walls closed in, squeezing her, bursting her cells into thin streaming filaments, pressing out her blood and memories and distilling them into an alien essence.

Panic shrilled. The stone walls cracked as another roar shook the earth. Ariadne clawed her way through a crevice—upward, outward, anywhere to escape. Somewhere far above she glimpsed the night sky, and she scrambled toward it.

With a desperate thrust, she plunged up against a glassy black membrane, shattering it in a burst of pain. Sharp obsidian fragments spun around her. No, they were dark filigreed wings, birds swooping and darting in a dense flock. Somewhere a voice was chanting, “The birds, the birds, this is where they were hiding,” but she shook her head in confusion, flinching as the lacy wings plunged and beat against her face. They swarmed around her, hundreds of tiny claws gripping her flesh, flying her higher.

The earth spun far below, dwindling away to a dimly glowing, cloudy blue marble. But its gravity, its twisting fetters of auroral fire, its pulsing beats of pain and imbalance still pulled downward at her. She hung taut, stretched and racked between the earth and the distantly glimmering heavens.

Ariadne remembered her crystal then—the serpentine pattern of the double helix she had etched on it. She searched for the sun and summoned its light through the interwoven carved channels. Fire blossomed on her breast, the white and the black winged serpents of her nightmare springing out from the blazing crystal, coiling around her. They writhed like the tormented auroras, twisting, spitting sparks, sharp fangs piercing her in a tangle of white coils fighting black.

“Stop!” She grasped at the burning pendant. Her palms scorched as she damped the flow of light, blocked the etched channel of the black serpent and hurled its negative energy back into darkness. She freed the luminous positive power of the white serpent, and it swelled before her, uncoiling, soaking up the light as it grew.

Just as Ariadne was catching a breath in relief, the white serpent turned on her, still swelling and swelling as it sucked up the light, until it dwarfed her, opening its immense jaws. The cavernous mouth swallowed her whole. Inside, the filigreed birds dipped and plunged. Ariadne staggered, and they were on her—swarming, ripping her flesh with their sharp beaks. They flayed the skin of her arms and legs, clawed her face into bloody shreds.

“Stop! Please. . . .” Their merciless beaks tore open her breast and sliced away at her, tore loose her connections of flesh and bone. Her awareness scrambled in shock to escape, but she was flung down onto the earth, slamming into mud dense with the stink of her own rotted corpse.

Ariadne flailed through scattered leg and rib bones. She came up short, gasping and retching, before her own empty skull.

Curling out of the eye sockets, wraiths of smoke. A sapling sprang up between the grinning jaws, then swelled into a leafy young olive tree as the smoke solidified into the twin winged serpents coiling about it. The tree withered into the crone’s wood staff carved with an ancient healing caduceus. It burst into fire, and within the tempering flames a crystal glowed like an ember, fiery etched lines spiralled around its lattice. The double helix.

Ariadne blinked. She was inside the crimson lattice.

Light danced in the facets, and the designs of twining serpents, flying fish, and bull horns came to life. Music shimmered crystal-bright all around her, inside her. No, she was inside the music. Shifting mirrors of lights and tones, looking out through glittering angles, looking out through the magic. And the music telling her how, where. Something sprang open in a rich outpouring flood and she was tracing the secret geometry of dazzling light-gem-music deep inside the crystal, treading its tilting dazzling paths, fearless, into the hidden ways of the maze.