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#106: An Excerpt from Morkaggon’s Maze

Hello dear readers!

At the time you are receiving this, I will be away from the office, visiting friends and family for the holiday season.
December is a busy month for me this year, with quite a lot of travel preventing me from making much in the way of art.

However, I would still like to share a little something I have made with you.
As I’ve been having so much fun writing it, I thought it might be nice to share the opening chapter from the book I’ve been working on for the past month.
Here is an excerpt from Morkaggon’s Maze, first (hopefully) in the series of books featuring Mirona the minotaur.
I hope you enjoy!

Morkaggon’s Maze: Chapter One

Even as I write these words, I am not sure whom they are for.

The dozen or so pages preceding this are not my doing – as if the difference in penmanship were not enough of a clue. I found this journal buried amongst the gnawed skeletal remains of, I can only assume, the previous owner.

Despite my efforts I cannot understand what they wrote, as I do not recognise the language. There are some similarities, I think, with the script used by the peoples living in and around the southern city-states, but too few for me to attempt a translation. Perhaps you, whoever you are, can decipher it.

The first few entries are written in a controlled, almost calm hand. The lines are neat and straight, hinting at a precise and methodical nature. Perhaps the author was a scholar of some kind? As you turn the pages, however, those neat straight lines start to wobble. The letters and words begin slanting at odd angles, sprawling and scattering across the page as if in a mad rush to escape it. All sense of composure is lost by the final entry: a mess of scribbles, spattered with flecks of dried blood. I can almost picture the author perishing with the pen still clutched in their hand. Not that uncommon an end here in the Maze, I imagine. I hope that it will not be my end as well.

I almost did not keep this journal. It is small, battered and smells of decay.

Here in the Maze you take whatever trinkets you can find, but only keep what you think will trade. I would be lucky to get half a slice of stale bread for this thing. It was actually Raspian who convinced me not only to hold on to it, but also use it.

Raspian was once one the folk who call themselves humans, and who my people call olmari. Humans are hardly rare, but in case you have never come across one, they are in essence, mostly hairless apes. Flat, almost featureless faces – save for when they grow beards – and no horns. Dextrous, five-fingered hands and flap-like feet. They vary in stature, shape and colour as much as any other folk in the world that I have seen.

Raspian was – and he argues still is – a holy knight of the Lady Hogany. I am not familiar with that order. He has been clattering around the Maze in his rusted armour for almost a hundred years, or so he says. The brief glimpses I have caught of his face under his helmet’s visor might indicate he has been here even longer. Raspian was the first other prisoner I met in the Maze and the closest thing I have to a friend here. Despite the fact that every time we meet, he tries to kill me. In a way my relationship with that reanimated corpse is a sad testament to how accustomed I have become to the horrors of this place.

When I first saw him – as I scrambled around in the gloom, my face still wet with tears – I was breathless with terror. The unnatural shambling gate, the exposed portions of rotting flesh and yellowing bone, the stench of death.

It all bombarded my senses until I finally found my voice again, and screamed so hard my lungs ached. What happened next, I can only half-remember. His sword-blow, awkward and sluggish, missed me by a good few paces. As he wrestled to hoist the blade back up again, I think I punched or shoved him backwards and ran down the nearest passage, headlong into darkness.

Over the past three years, I have met far stranger and viler things than Raspian roaming the Maze.

I have had to do far worse than punching and shoving to survive this long. I have learned how to fight and –
though it pains me to admit it – I have killed.
So now, whenever the poor wretch shuffles towards me, I find the sight almost comical. Despite me having bested him easily who knows how many times, he still pursues me. “Beware, horned beast!” he will roar as he lumbers on, sword raised, “By the Lady, I shall smite thee!” Most times, I do not even need to lift a fist, let alone my spiked mace. I simply duck, or step to the side, as poor Raspian crashes into a wall, or stumbles over a rock.

Two days ago, when I was rifling through the dusty belongings of this journal’s former author, it was his own feet that undid Raspian’s latest attempt to destroy me. One had somehow got snagged on a crack in the ground, and broke off with a hideous crunching sound as he wrenched himself forwards. He let out a series of expletives that I doubt his Lady of Hogany would have approved of. As has become our custom, we spoke a while, as he dragged himself across the floor and ineffectually flailed at me.
“Whose wretched remains are you defiling today, beast?” he demanded, seeing the body and my threadbare satchel nearby. His voice is surprisingly deep for one with so little substance left to him. I showed him the journal, along with the few other meagre possessions I had found. Some writing implements, a few candles, an empty water flask.
“Alas, to perish in such abysmal anonymity!” Raspian cried, now slumped against a tunnel wall, clumsily trying to reattach his foot. “Were this poor soul still alive I would have them chronicle my deeds. I fear nothing, save the thought of dying in this unholy maze without leaving a record of my life and accomplishments…”
I was ready to point out that it might be a little late to worry about such things. However, by now his foot was back on and his body upright, so I bid him farewell and strode briskly down the tunnel in the opposite direction.

Raspian’s words lingered with me, long after I had left him.

I had not let myself think of home and the people I was taken from for too long. I was forcing myself to forget who I am and where I come from for the sake of survival. If I were to die here, no-one who cared would know. There would be no-one to grieve my passing, save perhaps for Raspian.

I remembered the wake of my grandmother, and the words of my mother. With the uninhibited honesty of a five-year-old, I had told my mother all the chants and songs and offerings were silly, because grandmother was dead and she was not there to see or hear any of it. Some of my aunts and uncles had snorted disapprovingly at that, but my mother had just smiled and said “You are right, my treasure. Grandmother is not here to see it, but all of us are. We all loved her and will miss her. These things we do, they help. They help if you believe grandmother is still watching over us, and they help if you don’t. They are for the dead, but even more for the living they leave behind.”

It was then that I decided, I would continue the journal.

I am writing, as Raspian would say, a chronicle of my deeds. Not for fame, or some misguided attempt at immortality on paper. What I write now, I write in the hope that someone from home will find this and know what happened to me. They will know I did not just disappear, that I did not give in. My name is Mirona. I am an ukeran of the Rock Meadow Clan, and I will not let this Maze defeat me.

Traditionally hand-drawn and digitally coloured illustration of Mirona the minotaur. She has orange-brown fur, dark red hair and light blue horns. She is wearing padded and quilted fabric armour in shades of green and purple. is sitting down and writing in her journal.

Pictured above: Mirona writing in her journal. If you’d like to watch me draw this illustration – as well as talk more about my writing journey so far – check out the video below!

Media Spotlight!

That’s all for this week!

As always, thank you so much for reading.

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Until next time,

– Penflower

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