It was baffling. It couldn't be real. It couldn't be real, because it was the same goddamned skeleton she saw in her dreams. And Selene never prided herself as someone with prophetic dreams. Even the last few she had, she basically considered to be just figments patched together into nonsensical tapestries. Instead, here was an identical dead man staring back at her.

"How...why are you real?" Selene whispered, slowly advancing down the stairs and holding the flickering torch in front of her like a weapon.

The skeleton didn't respond. It couldn't. It was dead.

Selene was now inches away from the corpse. It smelled dead. It smelled like rot - worse than in the dream. She bumped into the body with the torch - only briefly - waiting for the jumpscare that would be expected in any story by this point.

But the corpse stayed dead. As it probably should, since adhering to the natural laws is normal. She sighed. "Wow. Now that I expect everyone and everything to talk, you won't?"

The corpse only smiled with its fleshless jaws.

"I thought you said you had something...right. You were 'supposed' to have something for me if I met you again." Selene knelt in front of the corpse, ramming the torch into a crevice in the wall above it. "...if the jury saw me now...that'd be 'suspect seen searching corpses' added to the list."

She regarded the corpse with a surgically cold stare. If she ignored her moral compass really, really hard, she could convince herself that she was just looking at a piece of spoiled meat. But that would be really, really hard and currently Selene had to try equally hard to not throw up. Despite that, the body was mostly preserved due to the thin salty shell that covered most of it.

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The corpse was wearing the same clothes as when she saw him in the dream, though now the details weren't so hazy. The soldier uniform was old. Ancient old. Selene couldn't quite recognise why it was familiar - it was like looking at an imitation of an imitation. Perhaps it could've belonged to a hero sent from the mainland, sent to slay the minotaur. But that would make both this corpse and the minotaur ancient too. And this body didn't look a day over...well Selene didn't know how many… but years was too long for anything to be preserved this well. And the Minotaur didn't have salt on him.

She shook the thoughts away, looking over the corpse again. He wore a leather belt that was miraculously still holding on - until Selene touched it and the belt tore into a useless stripe.

Something fell and pinged on the ground. She took it, carefully plucking it up. And it was a good call. She held a knife.

Knife wasn't the correct terminology to use for the weapon. It was more akin to a warrior's dagger. But what was truly a marvel was that it hadn't disintegrated like everything else down here. Even the rust seemed to only affect the upper layer of the blade and even with minimal care, it was miles better than the sharp stone that she held onto in her pocket.

"...Is this the ‘something’?" She asked the corpse. The corpse stayed quiet. But there was nothing else down here. Nothing except the smell of death, mold and the sea. Selene bowed her head. "Thank you."

She covered the blade in fabric and took the torch. Then, she glanced over her shoulder one last time, thinking about the man who had laid here without a place to rest.

'I'll come back.' , Selene promised in her head. She had to.

⁓Ψ⁓

She felt marginally safer now that she had a weapon. And daggers weren't that far from a kitchen knife. Small blade is a small blade and who was Selene to complain.

Careful steps led her up the stairs once again and she held a hand to her hip at all times, ready to grab the dagger if she had to. The minotaur had already crept up on her twice. She wasn't about to make it three OR two-in-one night for that matter. And so, after optimally confusing anyone who would try to track her down by going in circles, Selene found a house with a roof that could be considered 'stable enough'. It probably was a stable. A very empty one, because it lacked anything a good stable should have - like animals and hay. She thoroughly investigated the interior and then decided to hit the absent hay, curling up in one of the corners.

But for some reason she couldn’t sleep. She woke up again and again, inconvenient, ruminating thoughts filling her mind.

She realized soon that she was worried about who’d visit her in a dream this time.