Not many even knew he existed, other than Gaia and Kokoro.
A myth endlessly wandering caves and catacombs, a half-remembered whisper, elusive memory keeper and silent archivist of time. Young, relatively speaking, but mind made ancient by tome and attunement, ever-listening to the world’s ebb and flow, heeding its deep, beating heart.
Labyrinth.
A name for the lost and unknown, both to others and to themselves. A name of tangled mazes and twisting tunnels, of no direction and every direction.
It suited him fine.
Far from the first thing he’d’ve chosen to name himself, perhaps, but he was not one to put effort where it wasn’t needed, and the name served its purpose well enough. It wasn’t an embarrassment, and so it was sufficient. Little point in dwelling upon it, really, except in these quiet hours where neither night nor day held their sway, the sun and moon equal in their hesitance, where the world held its breath in suspended silence.
The simple twilight of a fog-shrouded forest apparently predisposed him to meaningless poetry.
For all the good it did, at the very least it kept his wandering, idle thoughts from boredom, pacing through the maze of brush and bramble as though the whole world were less real than he. Or perhaps, Labyrinth was less real than the rest of the world. Howsoever one put it, if a kijikaiaku could be said to move even more ghostly than any other, the dark blue kijikaiaku with his glowing, flowing swirls felt himself a good contender. He’d yet to encounter anyone else who’d even come close to matching his gliding, almost misty stride. Labyrinth then stopped short.
The forest was too quiet.
It was the quiet not of peace, but of danger, the silent tension of fear and uncertainty. It came on the heels of peace like the cloudy transition from dream to nightmare, the borders of either indistinct and undefined. Instead of time’s pause hanging suspended in the air, life’s breath cowered in its holes and cubbies, each thing praying it be spared and waiting for this unknown threat to pass.
Labyrinth did not need the growl to react to what had sought to strike him from behind.
Bursting into motion as naught more than a blur of blue and brilliant cool glow, the kijikaiaku bolted forward as though he were a coiled spring, using but one paw upon landing as a pivot to turn and see what had attempted to strike him.
He was thoroughly unimpressed with the carnivorous black horse that stood before him, its body language more reminiscent of some canine than suited its equine features. Its eyes were wild, mane and tail torn and tattered, and its long, pointed horn was caked in drying red blood. So this blackened unicorn had killed. Labyrinth observed the creature in the scant moments before it moved to strike again, noting its harsh breathing and uneasy stance.
It was, perhaps, as much victim as villain.
Evading the creature’s poorly-thoughtout attack, the kijikaiaku didn’t bother standing still a second time. He needed not additional time to study his foe, he knew all he needed to, just as he knew his duty to the land and sky. The duty Gaia had created his kind for.
So it was, despite his lack of true combat experience, that Labyrinth engaged the unicorn, little knowing that it was but a straggler of a far greater herd. Little knowing of the pitched battle going on not half a mile from the forest’s edge.
Little knowing of the pure white terror that had lost itself in rage, of the truest danger of this spiralling war for survival.