PROLOGUE: PART ONE

The Island of Naxos, Eastern Mediterranean

Confused, numbed, her mind refusing to accept what Theseus demanded, Ariadne stumbled in the sand, sinking to her knees with a sound that was half sigh, half sob.

“It is best this way,” Theseus said as he had already said a score of times this morning, bending to offer Ariadne his arm. “It is clear to me that you cannot continue with the fleet.”

Ariadne managed to gain her feet. She placed one hand on her bulging belly, and stared at her lover with eyes stripped of all the romantic delusion that had consumed her for this past year. “This is your child! How can you abandon it? And me?”

Yet even as she asked that question, Ariadne knew the answer. Beyond Theseus lay a stretch of beach, blindingly white in the late morning sun. Where sand met water waited a small boat and its oarsmen. Beyond that small boat, bobbing lazily at anchor in the bay, lay Theseus’ flag ship, a great oared war vessel.

And in the prow of that ship, her vermillion robes fluttering and pressing against her sweet, lithe body, stood Ariadne’s younger sister, Phaedre.

Waiting for her lover to return to the ship, and sail her in triumph to Athens.

Theseus carefully masked his face with bland reason. “Your child is due in but a few days. You cannot give birth at sea —”

“I can! I can!”

“— and thus it is best I leave you here, where the villagers have midwives to assist. It is my decision, Ariadne.”

“It is her decision!” Ariadne flung a hand towards the moored ship.

“When the baby is born, and you and she recovered, then I will return, and bring you home to Athens.”

“You will not,” Ariadne whispered. “This is as close to Athens as ever I will achieve. I am the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and we only ever bear daughters — what use have we for sons? But you have no use for daughters. So Phaedre shall be your queen, not I. She will give you sons, not I.”

He did not reply, lowering his gaze to the sand, and in his discomfort she could read the truth of her words.

“What have I done to deserve this, Theseus?” she asked.

Still he did not reply.

She drew herself up as straight as her pregnancy would allow, squared her shoulders, and tossed her head with some of her old easy arrogance. “What has the Mistress of the Labyrinth done to deserve this, my love?”

He lifted his head, and looked her full in the face, and in that movement Ariadne had all the answer she needed.

“Ah,” she said softly. “To the betrayer comes the betrayal, eh?” A shadow fell over her face as clouds blew across the sun. “I betrayed my father so you could have your victory. I whispered to you the secrets which allowed you to best the Labyrinth and to murder my brother. I betrayed everything I stand for as the Mistress. All this I did for you. All this betrayal worked for the blind folly of love.”

The clouds suddenly thickened, blanketing the sun, and the beach at Theseus’ back turned grey and old.

“The gods told me to abandon you,” Theseus said, and Ariadne blanched at the blatant lie. This had nothing to do with the gods, and everything to do with his lusts. “They came to me in a vision, and demanded that I set you here on this island. It is their decision, Ariadne. Not mine.”

Ariadne gave a short, bitter laugh. Lie or not, it made no difference to her. “Then I curse the gods along with you, Theseus. If you abandon me at their behest, and that of your new and prettier lover, then they shall share their fate, Theseus. Irrelevance. Decay. Death.” Her mouth twisted in hate. “Catastrophe.”

Above them the clouds roiled, thick and black, and lightening arced down to strike in the low hills of the island.

“What think you, Theseus?” she suddenly yelled, making him flinch. “What think you? No one can afford to betray the Mistress of the Labyrinth!”

“No?” he said, meeting her furious eyes evenly. “Are you that sure of your power?”

“Leave me here and you doom your entire world. Throw me aside for my sluttish sister and what you think her womb can give you and you and your kind will —”

He hit her cheek, not hard, but enough to snap off the flow of her words. “And who was it showed Phaedre the art of sluttishness, Ariadne?”

Stricken with such cruelty, Ariadne could find no words to answer.

Theseus nodded. “You have served your purpose,” he said.

He focussed on something behind her, and Ariadne turned her head very slightly.

Villagers were walking slowly down the path to the beach, their eyes cast anxiously at the god-damned skies above them.

“They will care for you and your daughter,” Theseus said, and turned to go.

“I have served my purpose, Theseus?” Ariadne said. “You have no idea what my purpose is, and whether it is served out … or only just beginning. Here. In this sand. In this betrayal.”

His shoulders stiffened, and his step hesitated, but then Theseus was gone, striding down the beach to the waiting boat.

The sky roared, and the clouds opened, drenching Ariadne as she watched her lover desert her.

She turned her face upwards, and shook a fist at the sky and the gods laughing merrily behind it.

“No one abandons the Mistress of the Labyrinth!” she hissed. “Not you, nor any part of your world!”

She dropped her face. Theseus was in the boat now, standing in its stem, his gaze set towards the ship where awaited Ariadne’s sister.

“And not you, nor any part of your world, either,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “No one abandons me, and thinks that in so doing they can ignore the Game. You think that the Game will protect you.”

She hissed, demented with love and betrayal.

“But you forget that it is I who controls the Game.”

---

PROLOGUE: PART TWO

Death came for Ariadne during the final stages of a labour that had stretched over three gruelling, pain-filled days and nights.

She felt the Death Crone’s gentle hand on her shoulder as she squatted on her birthing mat, her sweat-drenched face clenched in agony, the village midwives squabbling in a huddle on the far side of the dim, over-heated room.

“They have decided to cut the child from you,” the Crone said, her voice low and melodious, a comforting counterpoint to her words. “They think that Theseus, not wanting you, will nevertheless be grateful for his child. See, now they hand about knives, trying to decide which would be the sharpest. The fastest.”

“No!” Ariadne growled, twisting her head to stare at the Crone who now stood so close to her shoulder. “No. I will not.”

“You must,” said the Crone. “It is your time.”

“And I say it is not,” Ariadne said, screwing up her face and moaning as another crippling contraction gripped her.

“You must —” the Crone said again, but stopped as Ariadne half turned and gripped the death’s claw resting on her shoulder.

“I will make a bargain,” Ariadne said. She glanced at the huddle of midwives. They were bent into a close circle, their attention all on the four or five knives they passed between themselves. First this one was held up to catch the flickering light from the single oil lamp in the room, now that, each blade’s cutting edge assessed for its worth.

Being simple women, untutored in the mysteries, they were unaware that the Death Crone stood so close among them, nor that Ariadne conversed with her.

“A bargain?” said the Crone. “But I want you. You. What could you give me to assuage my grief at leaving you behind?”

“I think we can come to a most singular arrangement,” Ariadne said, her words jerking out in her agony. “I can make you the best proposition you’ve had in aeons.”

The Crone was silent a long moment, her bright eyes resting unblinking on Ariadne as the woman twisted and moaned once more.

“I shall want far than just ‘a singular arrangement’,” the Crone said. “Far more. What can you give me, Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth?”

The midwives had selected their knife now, and one of them, a woman called Meriam, had drawn out a whetstone and was sharpening the blade with long, deliberate strokes.

The frightful sound of metal against stone grated about the chamber, and Ariadne’s eyes glinted.

She spoke, very low and very fast, and the Crone gave a great gasp and stood back. “You would go that far?” she hissed.

“Will you not accept my bargain?” Ariadne said.

“Oh, aye, I accept. But you will destroy yourself, surely, along with —”

“You will have me one day, Crone, but it shall be on my terms, not yours. But, if you want what I offer, then I beg two favours from you.”

The Crone laughed shortly. “And I thought you were to be doing all the giving.”

“I will need to see Asterion.”

“Asterion? The brother you helped murder? You would dare?”

“Aye. I dare. Tell me, is he in Hades’ realm?”

“Nay. Hades would not have him. You know this.” The Crone paused, her eyes on the midwives who were now slowly rising, their voices murmuring bitterly about the effort this Ariadne put them to. “Very well,” said the Crone. “I agree. I can send Asterion to you. And the second favour?”

“Push this child from my body that I may live long enough to play my part in this our arrangement.”

“As you wish, Ariadne. But do not fail in your part of our agreement. I would be most disappointed should you —”

“I will not fail. Now, push this child from me … ah!”

The midwives stepped close to the straining woman on the birthing mat, Meriam at their fore, a large knife in her hand.

But as Meriam leaned down to push Ariadne to her back, the better to expose her huge belly to the knife, Ariadne screamed, and there was a rush of blood-stained fluid between her legs, and then the baby, hitherto unshiftable, slithered free.

Meriam stopped dead, her mouth hanging open.

Ariadne had sunk to her haunches, and now she looked up from her daughter kicking feebly between her legs to the gaggle of midwives.

“You may be sure that I will repay you well for your aid,” she said.

Ariadne rested during that day, and when the sun settled below the horizon, she dismissed the woman who sat with her, saying that she wished to be alone during the night with her daughter.

Once the woman had gone, Ariadne put her daughter to her breast and fed her, and then rocked her gently and sung to her softly, so that she would sleep through the coming hours.

As soon as the infant slept soundly, Ariadne placed her in a small oval wicker basket, covered her well with blankets, then placed the basket in a dark corner of the room.

She did not want Asterion to notice the child and perhaps to maim or murder her in his ill-humour.

Once her daughter was attended to, Ariadne washed herself carefully, wincing at the deep hurt which still assailed her body, then reached into the chest of her clothes that Theseus had caused to be tossed onto the beach. She drew forth a deep red flounced skirt which she bound as tightly as she could about her still thickened and soft belly, then slipped her arms into a golden jacket which she tied loosely about her waist, leaving it unbuttoned so that her full breasts remained exposed.

Having attended her body, Ariadne now carefully painted her face. She powdered her face to a smooth, rich cream mask, then lined her eyes with black and her mouth with a vivid red that matched her skirt. When that was done, Ariadne dressed her hair. For the finest effect she needed a maid to do it for her, but there was no one to help, and so she did the best she could, finally managing to bind and braid her glossy black tresses into an elaborate design that cascaded from the crown of her head to the nape of her neck.

She was still studying her face and hair in her hand-held mirror when she felt the shift in the air behind her.

Ariadne put down the mirror with deliberate slowness, calmly rose from her stool, and turned to face her murdered half-brother Asterion.

For an instant she thought him more shadow than substance, but then he took a single step forwards, and she saw that his flesh was solid and real … as was his anger.

“You betrayed me,” he said in his thick, guttural, familiar voice. “See.” He waved a hand down his body. “See what your lover did to me.”

She looked, for she owed him this at least.

Theseus’ sword had cut into Asterion’s body in eight or nine places: across his thickly muscled black throat, his shoulder, his chest, both his flanks, laying open his belly. The wounds were now bloodless lips of flesh, opening and closing as Asterion’s chest rose and fell in breath (and why did he need to breathe at all, thought Ariadne, now that he is dead?), revealing a rope of bowel here, a lung there, the yellowed cord of a tendon elsewhere.

Ariadne swallowed, then very slowly lifted her eyes back to Asterion’s magnificent head.

It was undamaged, and for that she was profoundly grateful. The beautiful liquid black eyes still regarded her clearly and steadily from the bold countenance of the bull, and his graceful horns still curved unbroken about his broad brow.

Her eyes softened, and at that he snarled, deliberately vicious, spraying her beautiful face with thick spittle.

“You betrayed me!”

She had not flinched. “Aye, I did. I did it for Theseus, for I thought he loved me. I was wrong. Deluded with love I betrayed you, and for that I am most sorry.”

He snorted in laughter, and she turned aside her head very slightly. “Most sorry?” He stepped forward, close enough to run prying fingers over her breasts and her belly. She stiffened at his touch, but did not move away. “You have given birth to his child.”

Her eyes flew back to his. “You shall not harm her!”

“Why not?”

“Do not harm her, Asterion. I beg this of you.”

He merely wrinkled his black brow in that peculiar manner of his that demonstrated mild curiosity. “And why not? Why not? Why should her death not be my vengeance for what you did to me?”

“I will give you vengeance enough, Asterion. For you and for me.”

He slid his hand in the waistband of her skirt, jerking her towards him, smiling at the wince on her face. “What nonsense. I am capable enough of taking my vengeance here and now.”

Their heads were very close now, her aristocratic beauty almost completely overshadowed by his dark and powerful countenance.

“I want you —” she began.

He smiled, horribly, and his hand drew her yet closer.

“— to teach me your darkcraft.”

Surprised, his grip loosened a little.

“You are the only one who has ever learned to manipulate the power in the dark heart of the Labyrinth. Now I want you to teach me that darkcraft. I will use it to destroy Theseus, I will use it to destroy his entire world. Every place that Theseus lays foot, everything he touches, every part of his world, everything will fall to decay, and death. And yet even that is not all. I will combine your darkcraft with my powers as Mistress of the Labyrinth, Asterion, to free you completely.” She paused, using her brief silence for emphasis. “I will combine our powers together, beloved brother, to tear apart the Game once and for all. Never again will it ensnare you. That will be my recompense to you for my stupidity in betraying you to Theseus and my payment to you for giving me the power to tear apart Theseus and all he stands for.”

He held her eyes steady, looking for deception. “You would destroy the Game? Free me completely so that I may be reborn into life as I will?”

“Yes! This is something that only I can do, you know that … but you must also know I need the use of your darkcraft to do it. Teach it to me, I beg you.”

“If you lie —”

“I do not!”

“If you do not destroy the Game —”

“I will!”

He gazed at her, unsure, unwilling to believe her. “If I give to you the darkcraft,” he said, “and you misuse it in any manner — to trick me or trap me — then I will destroy you.”

She started to speak, but he hushed her. “I will, for there is one thing else that I shall demand of you Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

“Yes?”

“That in return for teaching you the darkcraft, for opening to you completely the dark heart of the Labyrinth, you shall not only destroy the Game forever, but you will allow me to become your ruler. Your lord. Call it what you want, but know that if you ever attempt to betray me again, if you do not destroy the Game completely, I demand that you shall fall to the ground before me, and become my creature entirely.”

“Of course!”

His expression did not change. ““Of course!”? With not even a breath to consider? How quickly you agree.”

“I will not betray you again, Asterion. Teach me the darkcraft and I swear — on the life of my daughter! — that I will use it to destroy the Game utterly. It shall never entrap you again.”

He nodded, very slowly, holding her eyes the entire time. On the life of her daughter? No Mistress of the Labyrinth ever used the name of her daughter lightly. Yes … yes, she was being honest with him.

As honest as Ariadne could be.

He smiled, tight and hard. “Your hatred of Theseus must be great indeed to arrange such dark bargains with first the Crone, and then with me.”

She inclined her head. “He thought to cast me aside,” she said. “No one does that to the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

“Very well,” he said. “I accept. The bargain is concluded.” His hand tightened once more in the waistband of her skirt, but this time far more cruelly. “You shall have the darkcraft, but I shall take my pleasure in it. Pain, for the pain you inflicted on me. Pain, to seal the bargain made between us.”

He buried his other hand in her elaborately braided hair and, with all the strength of the bull that was his, he lifted her up and hurled her down to the bed.

That night was agonisingly long, and she emerged from it barely alive, but at the end of it Ariadne had what she wanted.

Two days later, stiff, sore, her badly damaged body protesting at every step, Ariadne made her way into the village’s herb garden. In her arms she carried the wicker basket, and in that basket rested her sleeping daughter.

Behind Ariadne two of the village midwives who had attended the birth of her daughter watched uneasily from the shadowed doorway of the house Ariadne had left.

Since her daughter’s birth, the midwives — indeed, everyone in the village — had become aware that Ariadne was highly dangerous. Yet they could not clearly define the why of that awareness. Ariadne had not said or done anything which could have made the villagers so deeply afraid of her, and yet there seemed to hover about the mother and her newborn child a sense of danger so terrible, so imminent, that few people could bear to spend more than a moment or two in her company.

The entire community wanted Ariadne gone. Gone from the village. Gone from the island. Gone so completely that all sense of danger vanished with her. Gone, taking her daughter and her hatred (and neither woman knew which one Ariadne loved and nurtured the more) with her.

Ariadne, although aware of the women and their nervous watchfulness behind her, paid them no heed. She moved step by careful step along the gravelled path between the raised beds of fragrant herbs and flowers. The basket which contained her daughter she carried with infinite care, and as she walked, she rocked the basket gently to and fro, singing to her child in a slow, rhythmic, almost hypnotic voice.

She sang no lullaby, but the secret whisperings of the exotic darkcraft that she had so recently learned, twisting it together with her own power as Mistress of the Labyrinth.

Most infants would have woken screaming in nightmare at her dark and twisted song, but Ariadne’s daughter slept soundly to its meanderings.

Eventually Ariadne’s singing drew to a close, and she halted, gazing on her daughter with great tenderness.

“Your father will die,” she said, “as all that he touches will die, and as all that declares its love for him will die, and as all that surrounds him will die. Everything. Everything. Everything.”

Ariadne raised her head, and looked before her. She had come to a halt before a large shrub that delineated the carefully tended herb garden from the wilds beyond it. The shrub’s dense grey-green foliage was broken here and there by large white, open-petalled flowers.

Ariadne reached out a hand and touched very gently one of the flowers.

They trembled at her contact.

Around the Aegean, in their hidden, mysterious places, so also trembled the flower gate sorceries that guarded the entrances to the founding labyrinths of several score of cities.

“Such dear flowers,” said Ariadne. Then, with an abrupt, savage movement, she twisted the flower free from the shrub.

“Thera,” she said, “who shall be the first.”

She held the flower in the palm of her hand for a moment, smiling at it with almost as much tenderness as she bestowed on her daughter, and then, resuming her strange, low singing, she wound the flower into the wickerwork of her daughter’s basket.

So Ariadne continued, her voice growing stronger, the words she sang darker. Flower after flower she snapped, pausing in her singing only long enough to bestow upon each flower the name of a city in which she knew lurked a labyrinth, a city which depended for its well being on the labyrinth within its foundations. Eventually, as Ariadne plucked flower after flower from the shrub, her child was surrounded by a ribbon of woven flowers about the top of the basket.

Ariadne’s thread. The filament that either saves, or destroys.

When she had finished, and her darkcraft was woven, Ariadne cradled the flowered basket in her arms and smiled at her daughter.

“Soon,” she whispered. “Soon, my darling.”

She looked back to the shrub. It was denuded of all flowers save one, and at the sight of that remaining flower Ariadne’s mouth curled in secret delight.

That labyrinth was particularly well-hidden in a city extraordinarily undistinguished, and she doubted Asterion knew of its existence. If it survived its influence would be minimal, her brother would never sense its presence, and it would not serve to hold him.

But it would be enough for her purpose, when it was time.

When she was safe.

When she was strong enough to dare.

---

PROLOGUE: PART THREE

Irrelevance. Decay. Death. Catastrophe. Every place that Theseus lay foot, everything he touched, every part of his world. This was Ariadne’s curse.

And with it, in gratitude to Asterion for teaching her the darkcraft, Ariadne did what only she had the power to do.

She unwound the Game — that great and ancient sorcery which underpinned and protected the entire Aegean world.

It began nine days after Ariadne twined the flowers into the basket that cradled her daughter. Meriam, the midwife who had thought to cut Ariadne open to save her child, was standing in the central village open space, the beach where Theseus had abandoned Ariadne a bare two weeks previously some sixty paces distant to the south. It was dawn, the air chill, only the faintest of pink staining the eastern sky, the birds in their trees chirping quietly to start the day.

Meriam had no thought for the beauty of the beach, the dawn light or even for the sweet melodies of the birds.

Instead, she stared frowning at the empty wicker basket lying at her feet. Flowers, withered and colourless, still wound about its rim.

“Why didn’t she take it with her?” Meriam muttered, then bent to pick up the basket.

In the instant before her fingers touched the basket, one of the flowers slid free from the wickerwork and fell to the earth.

The instant it hit, the chorus of the birds turned from melody to a frightful, fractured screaming.

Instinctively Meriam straightened and looked about her, her heart thudding. Birds rose in chaotic clouds from the trees surrounding the village, milled briefly in the air, then turned to fly north.

Their screams sounded like the shriek of a blade on a whetstone.

Meriam put her hands over her ears and half-crouched, panicked, but not knowing what to do.

She wanted to run, but she did not know what to run from, or where to run to.

About her, men, women and children were stumbling from doorways, pulling clothes about them, shouting in confusion.

Something terrible was about to happen, Meriam knew it, just as certainly as she knew that whatever was going to happen was as a result of Ariadne.

“Why?” Meriam whispered. “Why hate us this much?”

Then … everything went still. The birds had gone, their panic and their screeching gone with them. The villagers who had tumbled from their beds into the village open place now stood, their voices quiet, looking south over the beach to the calm sea.

It was south. Whatever was so very wrong was south.

A dog whined, then another, and Meriam had the thought that the cacophony of the birds was about to be replaced by an equally frightful shrieking of the village dogs.

It never happened.

At the very moment that thought crossed Meriam’s mind, there was a blinding flash of light far to the south. The light, first white then a terrible orange, reflected both in the thin haze of clouds and in the sea, magnifying its effects a hundred-fold.

Meriam, as all who stood transfixed with her, barely had time to gasp before they first felt their eardrums swell and burst, and then were lifted far off their feet by a pressure blast of such magnitude and heat that most were dead before they hit the ground.

Those who were not killed in that initial blast died when the molten rock rained from the sky or when, just as the sun finally crested the flaming horizon, the first of six successive tidal waves washed over the low-lying lands of Naxos.

By the time the sun had reached its noon peak the Aegean world had turned grey and black. Dense clouds of ash, pulverised rock, deadly gasses and steam had mushroomed twenty miles into the sky and spread over the entire eastern Mediterranean region; thick, choking poisonous ash drifted down to layer corpses and ruins alike with, eventually, two hundred feet of death.

The island of Thera, which sat almost halfway between Crete and Naxos and which contained in its harbour the glorious shining city of Atlantis, had exploded with such force that the entire island — save for a thin, sorry rim of smoking rock — vanished beneath the waves.

In its dying, Thera poisoned every land and every city within four days’ sailing.

Thera was only the first, but admittedly the most spectacular, step in Ariadne’s curse. Thera’s eruption not only largely destroyed Naxos, but also the northern coastline of Crete. Tidal waves and the murderous rain of molten rock and ash inundated villages, harbours and the Great Founding Labyrinth which lay partway between the coast and the city of Knossos which lay almost two miles inland.

Thera, Naxos, and Crete — as well a score of smaller islands within reach of either the initial cataclysmic blast or the tidal waves — were devastated. Further distant, to the north and south in the lands of Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt, the effects were not so initially devastating, but crept more secretly upon the peoples of the region.

Crops failed for years afterwards, and any man or woman who had breathed too deeply of the ash that continued to trickle out of the sky for months after the initial explosion often succumbed to terrible growths in their lungs in later life. Wells were poisoned, and livestock and children alike sickened and died. People rebelled and overthrew governments and societies and abandoned their gods; in Egypt a man called Moses used the death that rained down from Thera to force the Pharaoh to set his people free.

In Athens, Theseus watched as his queen, Phaedre, died in an agonising childbed, calling out her sister’s name. In sorrow, he comforted himself with a young virgin called Helen, before he set off on many wandering adventures about the Aegean looking for his own revenge on the woman who had cursed him.

He never found her, but found everywhere the effects of her curse, and, in his very wanderings, spread the effects of Ariadne’s curse further and further.

It was why she had not killed him outright.

Having survived Thera’s massive destruction, the people of those Aegean cities left discovered, to their horror, that the Game which had protected them for countless generations was failing. The Game, a labyrine mystery of great power and sorcery, was used to entrap the evil that was always drawn to communities of wealth and contentment. Without it, cities became increasingly vulnerable to the predations of evil, of wrongdoing, of misfortune, of greed and sloth and hubris and all those mischiefs that haunt success and happiness. Cities fell to invaders from the north and west, or were consumed by earth tremors, or by fire.

Evil incarnate itself walked free. Ariadne’s destruction of the Game and of its protective sorcery meant that Asterion was reborn into life to work his malevolence and depravity where and as he pleased.

In vain did the Kingmen of the cities, those men who through birth and training worked the magic of the Game alongside their city’s Mistress of the Labyrinth, try to arrest the decline. It was pointless, because the mischief that ate at the Games’ powers had been generated by the greatest Mistress of them all, Ariadne, who had controlled the founding Game at Knossos on Crete and who had most apparently found the means to undo all the workings of lesser Mistresses about the Aegean.

And Ariadne could not be found. She could not be stopped, and her mischief (as that of her half-brother) could not be arrested.

There was worse. As the lands and cities failed, falling to mischief after mischief, so also the gods failed. Whatever Ariadne had tapped into, it was so powerful that it affected even the gods on their heights.

The cataclysmic explosion of Thera had shattered both the equanimity and the confidence of the gods. It had also seriously depleted their power and thus their means to try and undo what Ariadne had wrought. Thera’s beautiful circular harbour had contained a great island — the island within the island — upon which rose the majestic citadel of Atlantis. Centre of Aegean culture and supremacy, Atlantis had also contained the ancient and mystical God Well … the major source of succour and power for the gods.

Without it, the gods were not only ineffective, but they grew ever more so as each day passed. With the destruction of Thera and Atlantis, Ariadne had dealt a killing blow to the gods at the very start of the unwinding of her curse. At the height of their powers the gods could have stopped her; now they could do little but mouth feeble curses themselves … and succumb to the evil that stalked every part of Aegean life.

And so, as the seasons passed, and year turned into year, Ariadne’s curse wrapped the Aegean world in its malevolent web. There were meagre moments of glory, an occasional hour of laughter, but they became increasingly rare, and they passed entirely that day that the Trojan prince called Paris, enamoured of the beautiful wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, stole her back to his home city of Troy.

Menelaus’ wife was Helen, the girl who had comforted Theseus when Phaedre had died, and who had given him her virginity. Touched by Theseus, Helen was herself a walking curse. In her name all of Greece embarked upon a exhausting ten-year siege of Troy which ensnarled not only the Greeks and the Trojans, but the gods themselves. Weakened by the continuing effects of Thera’s eruption as well by the progressively worsening deterioration of the Game, Troy’s collapse dealt the final death blow to the ancient Aegean gods.

Many died amid Troy’s smoking ruins, others crept away to agonising, lonely deaths amid the rocky peaks of Olympus. A few managed to keep drawing breath: Aphrodite, who secured Aeneas’ escape from Troy, along with the magical kingship bands of the city; Hera, who, weeping, swore a revenge for Ariadne’s destruction of all that was lovely; Poseidon, who crept away to his watery haven and took no further part in the lives of mortals; and Hades who, alone among the gods, found a measure of strength within all the death.

Within a generation or two of Troy's destruction, Aphrodite had gone, murdered by her sorrow, and Poseidon was nothing more than a faint blue shadow moving slowly within the ocean’s depths.

Hades kept to his Underworld, wanting no more to do with the mortal realm.

Only Hera, crippled, dying a little more each day, was left to try and undo what Ariadne had wrought.