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Aeon Trespass: Odyssey – Cycle I: The Labyrinthauros (Part 1, the Lore)
🕑 Added 2023-05-26 09:00:02 +0000 UTC
What lies beneath the surface?
We continue our series of deep dives into Aeon Trespass: Odyssey's (ATO's) content with a holistic overview of the second main timeline Primordial, the Labyrinthauros. A Primordial who's name I have had to add to my word processor's dictionary so that it will stop screaming at me with wiggly red lines every single time I write out its name in full. I wonder if writing the name of the Labyrinthauros will be one of the twelve labours of Heracles, I guess probably not because it's a lot to ask of anyone, even if you are of divine conception. We'll start out with the mythological tales that this beast is based upon, then look at the historical origins before getting into what it is like to fight this primordial and what base strategies are helpful.
Just a quick warning on the Mythology section; it's Grecian, and those people were absolutely wild with their tales, I am not going to be graphic about it, but I will still give you content warning about a pretty unsavoury pairing between a woman and something else. You're not going to like it, I certainly don't.
The Mythology
Our base mythological tale for the Labyrinthauros is Theseus and the Minotaur; this tale is a Greek one about the Minoan civilisation on Crete; I'll get into the Minoans in the historical section of this piece as it is very interesting in its own right.
Our tale starts with King Minos of Crete; the son of everyone's favourite philanderer Zeus and Europa; Minos was one of three brothers, the other two being Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon. This was in itself one of those classic Zeus moments where he turned himself into a white bull in order to kidnap Princess Europa and then ran across the Mediterranean sea with her until he got to Crete where they had three sons.
Between these three men there was an unclear line of succession; one which Minos wanted cleared up because he just could not wait to be king. So he did what any reasonable island dwelling Mediterranean based person would in this situation, he went to Poseidon and asked for a favour. It went exactly like this:
“Hey Posey, I want to be king like and my bros are being mean about it. So, I thought maybe you could, well, you know, umm, send me a blessing? I don't know perhaps a cool bull like the one my pops turned himself into in order to abduct my mom.
You know how it is, first you get the bull, then you get the seat, then you get the crown. Make it happen dude, also can I get some rad waves for my surfing today.”
“Here I'm loaning you this magical white bull I'm going to make, I want it back after you've got your crown.” replied Poseidon.
So Poseidon agreed to this on the condition that afterwards the bull would be sacrificed to the god after Minos gets the throne. Which seems pretty reasonable, though I do find it a little daft when you think about the logic of Poseidon creating a bull as a sign of the god's favour and then demanding it back via sacrifice. I guess Poseidon was testing Minos' loyalty and faith, either that or he really wanted steak for dinner. Surf and Turf.
That perfectly reasonable request was the start of things going wrong for Minos, because when he met the White Bull he was so blown over by it that he just couldn't bring himself to sacrifice it, instead he wanted to keep it as breeding stock for his herd. In its place Minos sacrificed another bull, which did not go down well with Poseidon, not at all.
The Greek Gods are in most ways giant angry children and crossing them is almost always a real bad move if you're not backed up by a different god. Posedion does not take this situation well and goes to Aphrodite, the goddess of love (who was probably cheating on her husband Hephaestus with Aries again). He tells Aphrodite about the situation and hatches a plan for revenge on Minos.
Aphrodite makes Pasiphaë fall in love with the White Bull and she desperately wants to be with it in every way possible, but the Bull is understandably not interested in Pasiphaë, he's happy with his own kind. So Pasiphaë goes to Daedalus and asks him to help her; Daedalus is going to appear a lot both in this story and in the background of ATO in general.
Daedalus hits upon the idea of creating a wooden cow covered in the skin of a cow. The inside of this bull would be hollow and Pasiphaë could wait inside it. Externally this cow would be as attractive as possible for bulls, dressed up in the sexiest cow clothing one could imagine and doused with lots of cow pheromones and perfume. It works and skipping past all of that we end up with a pregnant Pasiphaë. I hate that I have had to write this paragraph, but it exists and I blame the ancient Greeks for it.
Pasiphaë gives birth to a half-man half-bull that we now know as the Minotaur. This shameful, twisted creation of an unholy union is violent and carnivorous. Minos is unsure what to do about it, having the child killed seems cruel, so instead he contracts Daedalus to construct a labyrinth where the bull step child Asterius can stay. It's just the humane option, to stuff this awful thing deep below Crete in a maze. Minos then goes to war with and demands a tribute from Greece after they upset him by killing his son Androgenus for winning every contest during an event held in Athens by Aegeas. Greece agrees to his peace terms and now seven young men and seven virgin maidens must be sent from Greece to Crete every year, they will be sent into the labyrinth to suffer an awful fate as tribute for the Minotaur. I am not going to dwell on what kind of a fate faced them.
Daedalus for his labours received a reward in the form of imprisonment (along with his son Icarus); this was not for Daedalus' part in the conception of the Minotaur, but instead it was to hide the truth of who the Minotaur really was. We'll get back to this in the future, but most of you will already know the mythological story of what happened to Daedalus and his son Icarus.
This situation continued until Theseus (of the Ship of Theseus) turned up. Minos' daughter Ariadne, who was hopelessly enamoured with Thesus, gave him a ball of twine that would allow him to navigate the labyrinth and get back out. This twine appears in Arkham Horror and it's a really busted card. Theseus succeeded in dealing with the crime against humanity that dwelled beneath the island via decapitation and then he then leaves, rewarding Ariadne by spurning her in favour of her younger sister Phaedra; leaving Ariadne stranded on the island of Naxos because in Greek mythology almost everyone is a real dirtbag. Ariadne would be rescued by the god of wine Dionysus and she would get to have her happy ending with that big old drunk party chad.
The Brazen Bull
I really love the design of the Wild Assent version of the Labyrinthauros, giving us a look at what the Primordial may have looked like if it was more "natural" in its design. This version could easily be an automaton or even a bull in brass armor.
We also have a second source for the Labyrinthauros' design, it is based in design on the legend of the Brazen Bull. Which was constructed by Perillos of Athens as a new method of execution; he proposed it to Phalaris of Akragas and explained how a criminal would be placed inside and then slowly burned to death. The dying screams of the person trapped inside would be transformed into the sounds of a bull bellowing. Once constructed Phalaris shoved Perillos inside it, which honestly Perillos kind of deserved for creating this construct, before apparently taking him out of it then throwing the horribly burned, dying man off a cliff. Later on karma would come for Phalaris also as he would be killed by the same method of execution.
This story is of course not confirmed to be true and like many instruments of torture may have been made up rather than actually employed. The concept of the brazen bull's appearance however is a core part of the Labyrinthauros' design, in ATO it may have been constructed by a different person for a different use, but it certainly calls out to these particular Greek tales in its aesthetic and design.
The History of Crete and the Minotaur
I am not a historian, so I will not get into this in a huge amount of precise detail here, especially because the Minoan civilisation was only discovered to exist in 1900 and we still can't understand their written language. What we do know comes from either artefacts recovered from Crete (I wonder how many the English have squirrelled away in their museums) or the Greek mythologies like the one described above about the Minotaur.
Now the reason that King Minos and the other inhabitants of Crete are painted in such a terrible light, with accusations of an unholy coupling, demanding tribute for sacrifice of so many men and women every year and having to get a Greek in to solve their unwanted guest is a case of Propaganda against the Minoan's who it seems like to engage in piracy against the Greeks to a degree that they ended up getting really heavily painted as an awful bunch of people. Even the Minotaur's appearance seems to be an exclusively Greek creation; there are no depictions of it by the Minoans they have a lot of bulls in their recovered art, but no half bull versions of the Minotaur. They did seem to possibly reference a creature known as the Minotaur, but whatever their version of the legend was has been lost through time. If the minotaur sounds gross and awful and the Minoans also sound like terrible people; that's because the Ancient Greeks got to write the "history" about them and oh boy did those Greeks despise the Minoans.
The concept of the labyrinth and a beast trapped beneath it has a very real world origin, Crete is sat on the Aefean Block, a piece of oceanic crust that is sliding over the top of the Nubian Block. This means that Crete is right at the tip of a geographical formation known as subduction zone; a place where two plates are colliding and causing that wonderful experience known as an Earthquake.
It's really extreme in the case of Crete because the Nubian Block is connected to the African Plate; a huge formation of buoyant crust rock rock; which means that where the Nubian Block is sliding underneath Crete (located right at the tip of the Eurasian Plate) there's a lot of exceedingly violent resistance and action. Crete can literally be thrown upwards with a lot of force and regularity. In some years it can have over a thousand earthquakes of at least a 2.0 on the Richter Scale. In comparison the significantly larger California suffers only a couple of hundred of Earthquakes that exceed that magnitude and on top of that Crete has risen up to around 9m (30ft)
As such one can assume that the ancient Minoans or the Greeks who took over, were living on their rock that is prone to violently shaking and moving up and down, wanted an explanation for this and they settled on some gigantic creature trapped beneath the island as the source. In this case it was probably the Greeks who decided that the horrible Minoans that lived there before must have not only sealed a giant bull like monster underneath the island but they also demanded a sacrifice of young people from Greek instead of killing the beast. It took a real proper Greek to sort out the problem. Yeah, it was absolutely the Minoans who were the bad guys here; that's what history tells us and we can trust it because the ancient Greeks wrote it.
Many forms of mythology and folklore land on this creation of some kind of creature to explain a natural phenomenon; why does lightning happen? Who makes the sun move? And so on. It is at a minimum at least less harmful than Alchemy, which was at its heart a massive grift perpetrated by people who ended up so damaged by toxic fumes that they believed their own nonsense.
The Labyrinthauros Lore
CYCLE 1 SPOILERS AHEAD HEKATON IS HERE TO COVER IT WITH THEIR MANY HANDS. GO BELOW THIS IMAGE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I have a lot more information on this Primordial than I am going to share here; Marcin was kind enough to spill the tea on the first cycle after I completed it for a second time, here I am going to hint at various things and reveal a few pieces, but not spell it out in full (there's nothing coming which you can't work out from either the main plot or the Primordial's cards. However, there will be some spoilers here as it is impossible to write about the lore behind these wonderful Primordials without at least mentioning some parts of the story.
At the heart of this entire puzzle is of course Daedalus; he's mentioned many times in the text of ATO and given his involvement in the mythology of Crete, the Labyrinth and of cause Icarus it was just inevitable that this would happen. Daedalus was aware of a whole bunch of things that most people didn't realise, and he took a lot of actions to try and handle the coming situation – not all of them got finished, but the many Labyrinthauros and the Labyrinth itself were two of them.
These creations were built in the style of giant bulls because of a discovery that King Minos made across the ruins of the island of Crete; what that discovery was and why it was important is not something we'll discuss here in much detail, but one can at least learn that this discovery greatly affected Minos and resulted in him striking a bargain with Posedion. The crux of the matter though; is that ATO's Minos and Daedulus are involved in the genesis of these mechanical wonders and the maze beneath the island itself. That is parallel to our Grecian mythology as discussed in the points above, but I am going to leave you to try and discover the motivations of Minos and Daedalus yourselves.
As we know right at the start of the first Cycle; things did not go as planned, as the years passed something went wrong with this creation as there was an “upsidedown” or “other place” (my terms, you could also call it another dimension) where some unsavoury thing got into both the Labyrinth and its Labyrinthauros'. These thing/things dwell inside the Labyrinthauros now and as you can see when you are fighting it and have broken off the outer layer; the mollusc like creature that is cased inside the Brazen Bull shell is still connected in some deep, dimensional breaching way. Likewise the main antagonist of the first Cycle is tied to this concept and as such the Labyrinthauros are the primordials closest to the main plot. You can almost consider them to be heralds of the maze.
Once some form of protector, now the Labyrinthauros' travel Crete seeding the Labyrinth where they stomp their hooves; expanding the area and influence of the Labyrinth in the aftermath of the Eschaton. Leaving the mystery of what happened to Daedalus, Minos, the Labyrinth, the Gods, the Bulls and so much more for you as the players to discover.
In either the next post or the one after that; I'll deep dive into the mechanical fight against the Labyrinthauros itself. It's a fight I really enjoy a lot because of its maze spawning mechanics and the interplay of it charging with such a dangerous threat level!
Comments
Fen
That's one version that was added later on.
Matt B
One question though - in the story I heard, Theseus was forced to leave Ariadne on that island because Dionysus appeared and said he basically had been watching her, thought she was hot, and like, called "dibs". Is this pure slander, or is this just the nature of Greek myth that every single storyteller remixed familiar tales in a new, hyper-saucy way?
Matt B
Fantastic exploration into mythology, history, and lore. Looking forward to the mechanics deep dive. :)
