MYTHOS: MINOTAURS

Cave-dwelling monsters with the heads of bulls and the bodies of men, minotaurs are among Tiresia’s most iconic dangers. Though they are most commonly found in the Underground beneath their birthplace, Bluewater Island, time--and their prodigious virility--has seen them spread all across the underbelly of Tiresia, such that they can be found almost anywhere in the Underground.

Origins

Long before it sank beneath the waves and then rose anew, Bluewater Island was once home to a thriving city of humans; the very first, if their legends are to be believed. Known then as Merrecliff, it was presided over by a long and illustrious line of kings and queens--including the star-blessed Bó Anne, Queen of the Long Night--and though the natural barrier of the sea shielded its shores, it was no stranger to the woes of war. It was on the tides of one such conflict that Bó Anne, newly wedded to her favoured husband, offered up a prayer to bear a son who would lead his men unerringly to victory in the years to come.

The wish of a godling is a powerful thing indeed; especially so when one’s divine parentage stems from the line of Cassiopeia Oraia, who holds dominion over wishes and desires of all kinds. In dedicating her wish to her own divine ancestor, Bó Anne hoped to privilege it above the wishes of all those who resided on the mainland--the knights of Lancelot, the necromancers of Tar Duine, the corsairs of Kamagon, and all the warlords who held the lands between--but in doing so, she made a fatal error. Though the realm of wishes belonged to almighty Cassiopeia, a wish for a son who would win every war placed before him could be granted by no other than the Goddess of Power.

And so when Macha Bó Anne made her misbegotten prayer to the stars, it was not her ancestor Cassiopeia Oraia who heard it; it was Gimel Gargantua, Queen of the First Hell, Slayer of the Twin Titans and Bearer of the Jovian Mantle. And she was livid.

An Aside: Gimel Gargantua

The divine germ that seeded the minotaur race, Gimel Gargantua is perhaps the least-worshipped of the Nine Sisters among the mortals of Tiresia: certainly in the modern era, and almost certainly when one tallies out the sum total of worship given across the entirety of Tiresia’s history.

In some ways, this is an inescapable consequence of Gimel's domain as a goddess. As the Goddess of Power, her driving interest is in promoting the cultivation of personal power: of the agency to do as one likes, and live as one likes, irrespective of the world around them. This is the Gehennan pillar of perfection, the ideological bedrock on which every other aspect of Gimel’s philosophy stands. One necessary precondition to a life in accordance with this pillar is the principle of self-sufficiency. After all, if you rely on an external source to sustain your existence, then your actions are fettered by that very reliance. If you need farmland to eat, then whoever controls that farmland can starve you if you fail to accede to their wishes, giving them power over you. If you need money to buy access to that farmland, or the fruits that it produces, then you are a slave to whatever means you have to procure money. The only way to be truly free--to embody that pillar of perfection--is to rely solely on your own abilities to feed yourself, and clothe yourself, and shelter yourself from the world’s hardships.

From this, it can be derived that civilization as a whole is anathema to Gimel’s philosophy of strength. From money (which decouples the process of labouring for products from the outcomes of that labour), to codes of law (which leave the burden of deciding what is just and what is evil in the hands of a state external to the self), to the very concept of working together (which produces outcomes that one could never have achieved alone--who can claim a wall that nine men worked equally to build?)... the existence of civilization is steeped in self-negating paradoxes. Work that is done for you, justice that is prevailed upon you, food that is grown for you--any true Gehennan rejects the edifice entirely.

And therein lies the cause. Religions are, at their core, codes of values shared by many people: and to share a code of values with even one other person requires some base level of organisation, even if that is just an agreement between two people to listen to one another for a few minutes. A true Gehennan rejects any level of cooperation. Teachings imparted to you by another mind are no different from foodstuffs given to you by another person’s work; they indenture you to your teacher, make you a slave to their worldview, teaches you only what it is to do as they like, to live as they like. As one guru once noted, the only sincere teaching a Gehennan would offer you is the pillar of perfection--and even then, they would only expect you to accept it because it is fundamentally the same thing as no teaching, just the way we would all live if we were unfettered by the trappings of other people.

This means that Gehennans have never been very common among the mortals of Tiresia, even in times of strife, when civilization falters. Though this is a direct consequence of Gimel’s own edicts, and one could even go so far as to speculate that this in-built ‘stress test’ of the religion as a whole must, on some level, appeal to Gimel’s survivalist aspect… that has never made her immune to efforts to sway the world in her favour… or to the rage that millennia of being spurned in favour of her eight Sisters can stoke.

Birth of the First Minotaur

Despite her reputation as the goddess of brutish, illiterate barbarians, Lady Gimel was by no means a dullard herself: even in the wildfire of her own rage, she knew better than to turn away a godling’s wish, not with Cassiopeia’s watchful eyes upon it.

So she granted it.

Reaching up from the depths of Gehenna, home of proud beasts and warriors that fought for their own interest, not the lofty ideals of the heavens, she seized control of starry-eyed Bó Anne’s very body, and--puppeting each of her graceful tendons and sinews--directed her to her palace stables, where a snow-white bull was being kept by the palace clergy, another offering that Gimel would never have seen. She had Bó Anne dismiss the guards and priest attending to the bull, had them stand at the doorway to the stables, under orders to execute anyone who attempted to get past them on pain of death… and had Bó Anne crawl under the bull’s massive, heaving body, and… service it.

It was a long, gruelling ordeal, if the records of that fateful night that have survived to this day are any indication. Bó Anne may have been under that bull until dawn, discovering for herself firsthand--per Gimel’s principle of self-sufficiency--that the bull had indeed been left intact, per the palace doctrine that governed sacrificial offerings. We do know that her cries became audible at about midnight, suggesting that Lady Gimel started with a long bout of fellatio before moving on to the primary event--all the better to acquaint Bó Anne with the sheer length and girth of the manhood that (in some tellings) would not just impregnate her with her first child, but deflower her.

However it happened, the next morning, Bó Anne was pregnant with that bull’s son… and the next evening, she was back in the stable again, and her cries once again echoed throughout the palace, her own men forced to prevent any interference once more. And so it happened again… and again… and again… until every soul in the palace, most of all its king, was intimately familiar with the sound of its queen having rough, unbridled, emphatically pregnant sex with a mindless animal.

And then, in due time, Macha Bó Anne gave birth to a baby boy--one with her swarthy, tide-woman skin from the neck down… and her bull’s snowy white fur upon his bull head. Though accounts uniformly detail all the other onlookers’ reactions as disgusted, at best (a few mention her midwife throwing up into a chamber pot as the child crowned between her queen's spread legs, and some claim the king ran screaming from the royal chambers, never to be seen again, when he saw the child in his wife’s perfect arms), the precise opposite is true of Bó Anne’s. She is alternately said to have wept with joy, or clutched him to her breast, or planted a loving kiss upon his white forehead, or any number of combinations of the three… and certainly the name she gave him soon afterwards, Rialta (star in Old Human), implies only positive feelings from a descendant of those stars.

The Bull Prince of Merrecliff

Though the people of the wider city were just as leery of the palace’s new inhabitant as the inhabitants of the palace, Bó Anne doted on her son like almost no other queen in recorded history, spoiling him with gifts and the milk from her own full breasts, which some sources claim she kept bared at all times from the moment of his birth, ready for him to suckle from at his leisure. It is known that he grew quickly: at just three years of age, he was deemed ready to begin training in swordplay, and by the age of six, he had already graduated to a metal broadsword. By the age of seven, he was routinely besting trained warriors three times in his age; and by the age of eight, he was easily twice as tall, and three times as broad in the shoulder, as the very largest soldier in Merrecliff’s great army.

And he was not just gifted in brawn, either. The very first inklings that Prince Rialta was, indeed, the son that Bó Anne had beseeched the heavens for came in his study of kingsmen, that timeless game of strategy played all across Tiresia. From the moment he had a board placed in front of him, he displayed an uncanny knack for playing it; famously, no opponent he faced, no matter how storied or how skilled, ever managed to defeat him. Indeed, it seemed fair to say that, in spite of his brutish appearance, Prince Rialta had the power to lead the men on his side of the board unerringly to victory.

To crown it all, it was not just victory in battle and on the kingsboard that Rialta found easy to come by; he was also overwhelmingly victorious on the battlefield of love. Accounts are evasive on which of his qualities it was, precisely, that drew the women of Merrecliff into his preponderous arms, though speculation after the fact abounds. His strength, his intellect, his resolute nature, the princely bearing that he had learned from his doting mother--whatever it was, it was plainly more than enough to help the young prince find his way past the breeches of practically half the eligible young bachelorettes in the city. And, by some accounts… half of the married women, too. Some even maintain that he claimed his own mother in time; and certainly, the way she is said to have fawned over him, he would have had precious little time to engage in any of his sexual exploits without at least being in her vicinity.

And so it was that by the day of his eighteenth birthday, when his mother eagerly stepped aside to allow him to claim the throne, as was his right as her firstborn--that women all across Merrecliff were breastfeeding beastly, swiftly-growing, snowy-headed minotaur young of their own.

Rialtimarus the First

Just ten short years after Rialta took his mother’s throne, being crowned Rialtamarus--the Great Star--the state of Merrecliff had been transformed completely. Each human family had its own minotaur master, either one of Rialta’s thousands of illegitimate sons, or one of their thousands of illegitimate grandsons. The city’s wives were reserved for them; those few human men who tried to fight against this new policy swiftly fell afoul of Rialta’s divine gift, that his men--his sons, his kin, his soldiers--would arrive unerringly at victory, and were summarily retrained to better support their new ruling class in their divinely appointed mission. Feminization was a key aspect of this ‘retraining;’ though… most sources are clear that these rebels never became capable of bearing minotaur young themselves, they were nevertheless primed to submit to their rulers sexually, pleasuring them both orally and anally on the occasions that their female counterparts were otherwise indisposed. (Some maintain that this was the ultimate fate of Bó Anne’s vanished husband.)

As to the former Macha herself, Bó Anne’s public appearances in this period all detail how blatantly pregnant she was on each occasion, though--again--sources differ as to whether these were the work of her own son, or by his animal father. What is agreed upon is that each of the sons she bore in this time was another minotaur--and that she bore no daughters. Indeed, no woman on the whole island did, through Rialtimarus’s entire reign; it seemed that minotaurs could only be male, and that any union between a minotaur male and a human bride could only produce a minotaur. Also of note were the lasting effects of pregnancy with a minotaur child--it seemed to permanently change the mother’s body, leaving her breasts and hips far fuller than before, and causing her to lactate perpetually, especially when in close proximity to a minotaur.

In just ten years, the whole island had become the slaves of minotaurs--and that was only the beginning of Rialtamarus’ grand campaign. Bolstered by Gimel’s blessing, perhaps aware on some level that he could not lose, he led his men to the mainland, ready to spread the reign of the minotaurs all across the nameless heart of Tiresia.

The Minoan Wars

When the minotaurs of Merrecliff first reached the shores of the Continent, they seemed an unstoppable tide. Blessed with monstrous strength, and led by a strategist with a mind so keen as to beggar mortal understanding, they struck the battling morass of factions already vying for control in that region without any hint of remorse or hesitation. Those that fought were slaughtered; those that surrendered were ruthlessly ground under the minotaurs’ heel, their women converted into breeding stock and their men converted into slavish, and often feminised, assistants. In their first ten years, Merrecliff spread its claim from a single island off the Continent’s coast to almost the entire Subernal coast, reaching as far as the mouth of the River Samson on its western border, and the mouth of the River Nemesis on its northern one.

However, this endless wave of victory ebbed as quickly as it flowed. As word of this sudden new player spread across the Continent, and Rialtamarus set his beady eyes on far more established powers than the dross he had bested so far, he came into conflict with the dragonborn city-state of Solomon Praxis, the longest-lived continuous peoples outside of elven lands; and not only did they have experience in handling matters of divine ordainment, they had a goddess of their own on their side. Solomon’s own blessing meant that rushing the city in the fashion that they had rushed so many others would be suicide; any attempt to seize the city itself by force would be met with its second sun’s killing light. As if aware that the minotaur king’s blessing only guaranteed him victory, stipulating nothing about the extent or the terms of that victory, the dragonborn army took to a defensive strategy, avoiding frontal conflict and staggering their overall retreat in a series of dozens of minor, petty defeats. And souring those victories all the while was the mighty golden dragon Archalors Solomon, charged by Solomon’s patron goddess with the city’s defence; from outside the range of Merrecliff’s trebuchets and catapults he belched thunderous attacks, wearing away at both Rialtamarus’ manpower and--worse--the supply lines between his new colonies and the front line. Though his advance could not be stopped, the constant need to retreat back to the few lands he had claimed in Solomon’s vicinity, to feed his surviving men and replace his lost, slowed it drastically.

Eventually, Rialtamarus grew desperate. Perhaps he worried that his prolonged presence on the Sunlit front would open up the lands he’d already conquered to attacks from northern states he knew little about; perhaps he feared that being stalled any longer ran the risk of one of the dragon’s wide-area, indiscriminate attacks eventually landing on his tent, killing him out of the confines of battle that he’d learned he thrived in; or perhaps the sting of this protracted campaign was too much for a pride buoyed by decades of victories that came so easily to him to bear. In any case, the outcome was the same--Rialtamarus rallied his tremendous horde and, in a fit of hubris, decided to test the power that the Sisters had blessed him and his men with against the power that they had blessed the city of Solomon Praxis with.

And then--as if to reward him for this hubris--his power prevailed.

The Battle for Solomon Praxis

At least, in the sense that Rialtimarus and his men were able (in a feat not seen in all the prior years of Solomon Praxis’s existence, nor able to be replicated in the years hence) to pass through the barrier around Solomon Praxis and survive. Though their skin smoked and their fur was singed, though the surviving members of his horde would later call the sensation of living through Solomon’s sunlit rejection the most horrible pain imaginable--they breached Solomon’s gilded walls and entered the city proper. Some believe that Gimel’s blessing, powerful as it was, was not wholly to credit in this instance; the minotaurs’ own intentions, to capture and breed the dragonborn within, joining their bloodlines to theirs rather than extinguishing them entirely, may have contributed.

However, this, too, was an eventuality that the elders of Solomon Praxis were prepared for. Though they venerated their patron Belladonna Praxis, goddess of the sun, above all her Sisters… this was still a city dedicated to all four spheres of the heavens, not just the one nearest and dearest to their mortal pursuits. The moons had long whispered of a time when even their second sun’s blessing would fail, and a dark horde would sit poised on the cusp of conquering the city, removing it from dragonborn hands for the very first time in history. With no other calamities, past or future, that could possibly threaten this city… their elders had dedicated centuries of efforts to averting this one.

As Merrecliff’s hordes ransacked the city, killing and raping all that they could reach, Rialtamarus’ unit was beset by two brave champions, both students of not Belladonna but of Cassiopeia--the same goddess to whom Bó Anne’s prayer had so foolishly been addressed. The first was Theseus, a silver paladin who derived his power to reject all arms raised against him from his boundless devotion to his bride; and the other was Ariadne, a blue witch who wove with the threads beneath reality and none other than the bride to whom Theseus owed his power.

As did their common soldiery with the horde at large, so too did Theseus and Ariadne refuse to take Rialtamarus by his proverbial horns. Though Theseus rushed into him headlong, relying only on his oath to Ariadne to guide him out of the path of each of Rialtamarus’s wild swings, not one of the thrusts of his gilded spear drew the bull’s blood. They weren’t intended to; Ariadne had layered an enchantment upon the weapon’s tip, such that each thrust stitched one of her reality-altering threads in the world around Rialtamarus, binding both men to the space where they stood without impeding their movements. Each wild swing forced Theseus further and further back, constituting a tiny victory on its own… and yet their distance from Ariadne never changed, keeping Rialtamarus from striking at the true source of Theseus’s invincibility. By the time that Rialtamarus realised that the threads existed at all, and began to strike at them rather than the endlessly evasive Theseus, it was far too late; Theseus’s swift strokes could replace the stitches faster than Rialtamarus’ ponderous battleaxe could destroy them. So long as Theseus could still fight, he was trapped in a labyrinth of space itself.

And then, seven long hours later, it transpired that Rialtamarus’s immunity to the second sun had never been total. The smoking that he had resisted for so long grew to a charring, then a smouldering, then an open flame--and then, just as Theseus’s stamina finally began to flag, the end finally in sight… Rialtamarus, and all the horde that his blessing had protected for so long died in a wave of holy flame.

Solomon Praxis had won the war.

Aftermath

With the blessing of their king scoured from the kingsboard, the minotaur hordes were once again simple monsters, with no special allegiance even to each other, let alone the far-off concept of a homeland or a kingdom. Tremendously strong and surprisingly canny, yes--but still monsters, beasts for which Solomon’s military had always specialised in extinguishing. Almost as swiftly as they had expanded outward, the minotaur threat was expunged from the Continent, alternately slaughtered or driven underground by a host of dragonborn paladins. Not even the island of Merrecliff was safe; it was cleared by Theseus and Ariadne themselves, and eventually became the site of the dragonborn city of Minopolos, whose primary attraction was a grand coliseum where dragonborn gladiators were pitted against--among other foes--captured minotaurs.

And to this day, that has largely remained the lot of the minotaur species. Though one left unchecked can still bathe enough members of a particularly small and remote village in his musk to turn it into his own personal kingdom, their lack of subtlety and inborn, Gehennan refusal to cooperate with one another for long generally keep any such endeavour from going any further; the local peacekeepers or some travelling hero always ends up catching wind of the situation and putting an end to it. The few cases where minotaurs have successfully formed clades with any degree of continuity have always been under the rule of another, whether it’s as gladiators for a minor dragonborn city-state, expendable foot soldiers for a continent-spanning empire of beastkin, or as enforcers in the soot-choked streets of the Third Hell. Having seen what they can achieve under the auspices of a born ruler, however briefly his star shone, it’s hard to say that this is a negative for the realm of Tiresia… though one is welcome to wonder what our world might look like today, if Rialtimarus had had his way after all, and managed to fulfil his vision of a Continent overrun by minotaurs and their breeding slaves.