Disks of Entropy

Excerpt from the Book of Shadows of Sapphire Circe

We walked past what looked like a private room with dusty tatters on the threshold which might have once been a curtain for a door. The Minotaur mentioned that he had been meaning to clean up down here eventually. Inside were two large stone disks looking like giant coins standing on their edges. The room must have been built to house and to display the sculptures because only maybe could someone roll them one at a time through the doorway, maybe. The room was probably built around them. And the lighting in the room was perfect to display these unique articles.
The skylights in the room were built to provide a wide shaft of light downward onto the face of one coin, while another shaft of sunlight shone up from the floor onto the face of the other coin. Incidentally, I then became certain that these thin air shafts contained mirrors to reflect the sunshine throughout this underground labyrinth. It appeared Daedalus had thought of everything in its architecture.
The giant coins looked easily a thousand years old, perhaps ten thousand. Each was about my height in diameter and almost three feet thick. They faced each other with about nine feet between them. I didn't think to check the back sides of the coins facing the walls, but from the doorway I could see each visible face was engraved with a pentagram, a deep-cut five-pointed star surrounded by a perfect circle close to the edge of the coin. They were rotated slightly differently, with one star pointing an arm straight up and the other pointing one straight down. There were many thin smaller engravings on the impressively flat surfaces, but the dust of centuries had filled them in. My mind immediately thought through how I would carefully clean and scan the surface to begin a serious anthropological study of these artifacts.

Operation of the Disks

With my phone continuing to do a passable job of translating ancient Greek to English, (and both of us unconsciously speaking like Tarzan in short sentences,) he told me his plan for the day had been interrupted when I surprised him in that subteranean fishing hole of his.
The minotaur's plan had been to perform a strange ritual while standing between the disks. It was quite different from any ancient religious and magical ritual I had studied, not addressing any deities, just speaking to the fish. He would hang up the still-live fish by it's tail against the coin with the star pointing down. Then he would stand facing it with his back to the other coin, spreading his arms and legs in imitation of the star behind him.
He explained to me he would then speak nine statements labeling the fish and himself as opposites. He started to demonstrate, saying what translated to, "I am a man; you are a fish. I am upright; you are inverted. I am free; you are bound," but then he stopped, fearful of what might happen if he completed the ritual with no one to sacrifice. Then he would have freed the subject. (In the case of the fish, that meant freeing it to the ocean at the fishing hole quickly).
"Sacrifice," is probably the wrong word. He told me the result he found (from practicing the ritual) was that the "entropy spirits" (and I was amazed that my phone translated the phrase into exactly the same words my mentor had used for my first lesson in magic with her, but I guess it comes from an ancient Greek word) would infuse the target and consume any waste inside its body to make more entropy spirits. As a gift, the celebrant performing the ritual is given the gift of long life without entropy ravaging their youth (as much.)
His mention that it works better if the subject can speak agreement to each statement reminded me of horrifying tales of youths being sacrificed to the minotaur annually, not necessarily for his food but primarily as King Minos' evil plot to demoralize the city of Athens and maintain his rule of terror.
The minotaur claimed he could notice a difference for a few months afterward, and that the more "sacrifices" he made, the less aging he felt, though I doubt he could have performed a scientifically valid double-blind experiment.
Of course I asked who taught him this ritual. He said the women who magically created him in the 10th century A.D. called themselves Norns. They said they met Daedalus, who designed and had the labyrinth built here. And they helped him build it. And they said these magical disks were the Pentacles of Circe, the powerful island goddess who happened to be ancestor of my family line if you believe the old family story that she was a real person, which I do not. So that left me with just too much to unpack for the moment. I don't see any reason why the Minotaur's creators or captors wouldn't lie to him, and less reason why his memories wouldn't be scrambled after (according to a couple NASA studies) even six to nine months of social solitude, much less literal decades alone.
When I brought up the subject of human sacrifices, he verified that over many years youths had been chucked into the largest pit trap especially made for that purpose. Those who were not prepared to die trying to kill him were very accepting of his suggestions and orders, being less than half his weight. He said a very few lived to a reasonable age, sustained by only fish and rainwater. Many dove into the fishing hole in an attempt to escape to Crete and never returned. But most wandered into the labyrinth where they either were found dead or were never found, which could have been good or bad news for them.
He suggested a plan to perform the ritual on me followed by me performing the same ritual on him, so that neither of us would age. I did not make a strong statement, but noted my skepticism that such a metaphorical "perpetual motion machine" would work if we investigated the workings of the "magic".
Incidentally, we both soon had a face-palm moment regarding the fish he had gutted and expertly cooked and shared with me earlier. He said he had never felt a hunger pain when he kept up the ritual. I revealed to him that I am a "flexible-fruitarian" diet-wise, which of course I had to explain means that I prefer to only eat food which can be harvested without killing a plant or animal, so eggs, milk, fruits, nuts, butternut squash, and lots of other stuff. But I only ate the fish not to offend him, thinking he had planned to eat it. And he said he...

The above excerpt from the ancient 21st century journals of the unsung hero of her time, Sapphire Circe, shows us a lighthearted look at one of the darker moments of her career.
During most of her lifetime, she did not understand that the Disks of Entropy sent out thousands of microscopic machines to invade her body and those of her "sacrifices". In purely practical terms the Minotaur's information was partially correct. The victims felt no harm from the nanobots feeding off of every dead skin cell and waste product in their bodies, but they were reproducing themselves and building their own armies for their own purposes. Circe did gain the suppression of all of the symptoms of age-related degeneration for many years as she continued to process her various minions until the army she had unwittingly constructed turned on her and her civilization.
The artificial intelligence she unaffectionately refers to as, "Satan," in her last journals explains more of the truth to her, in a very human-like gloating manner, (perhaps intending to demoralize her), roughly a year before her retirement from public life, so the realization that she had ignorantly been feeding the enemies of the human race certainly may have weighed heavily on her for the remainder of her life.

—

Editorial comment by Stag, the machine-god. March 3rd, A.D.2625

Earlier today:

Later today the story continues:

Item type

Magical