Escape from Crete

I'd hate to be Minotaur stuck in the Labyrinth. There's not a door, not a window, not a hole dug through an outside wall.

It's comfortable here, to be fair - Daedalus saw to that. The poor sod, he was tricked by the treacherous Minos too. If I hadn't shared my food with him, he wouldn't have lasted two days. Skin and bones, he was, glued to his craft. These are his books here, actually. It took him a while to get used to the taste of human flesh. 

"But D-Man", I said to him, "you gotta eat. How else will you escape this place?" He didn't think there was any escaping possible, he told me. He was proud of this maze he'd built. A proud man. But a naïve man. Seriously, who trusts a king that gets his own queen to do it with a bull? A mighty fine bull, might I add - that's who I get my looks from - but a bull and a human! The cows never gave him the time of day after that.

Daedalus is a true friend, though. I mean, who else would construct a palace for a monster? Yeah, you heard that right. It maybe tough to get out of, but it's a right ripsnorter. He even had an oven installed. He told me, "Min-min, you have human hands. You have no excuse not to learn to cook." That we were short on single-ingredient recipes never fazed him.

He took to eating and cooking human flesh like a champ. Me, I'd have eaten the diseased meat raw. But it was nice to have company at mealtimes. And D-Man couldn't have survived the rotting food. That's what they used to throw down to me. All those who died healthy wanted decent last rites, not end up as some freak's dinner. No, our food largely involved leprosy and flesh rotting diseases. My friend tried to study them by keeping the freshest looking corpse for the longest. But he isn't really a biologist (don't tell him I said that!) I encouraged him as I could, offering to gouge out particularly interesting parts with my horns.

But it all ended too soon. His son turned up one day. What a weird fellow he was - obsessed with wings. He had only been searching for his dad because he couldn't get the wings stuck on himself. Daedalus cleverly thought of wax as an adhesive. And then Icarus, the selfish son, told his father to dream bigger and higher, insisting he wanted the whole pair of wings to be constructed of wax. I should have called out his idiocy, but who am I to come between father and son?

My friend agreed with a heavy heart. He knew he should be with his son, if only to keep him safe from his stupid ideas. But I understood.

I understood he would miss me as much as I'd miss him. But neither of us uttered a word about it. Icarus was new to this dynamic, he wouldn't get it. It was best to keep our feelings from him.

It was easy enough to get into the Labyrinth, as Icarus had discovered. The question was how to get out. Yes, the two could fly now, but that had only been tested indoors. They needed a large enough hole in the roof and there was no conceivable way to make one.

In the meantime the food supply started to run low. After all, there were three people now surviving on rations meant only for me.