The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

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Wolf Who Rules, the second book in the Tinker series, makes note that "Elves may live forever, but their memories do not." They have a special ritual they perform where they reflect on particularly important memories — good or bad — to keep them fresh through the ages. Darkly intelligent and sometimes dazzling. The Minotaur is a complex and sympathetic creation, conspicuous yet socially invisible. What’s more, he’s here to stay.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sherrill is an eloquent, reflective, and subtle writer who pays close attention to detail, and to whom the words chosen matter a great deal. He is trying to do more than just entertain us. He shows us a microcosm revealing some of the more harrowing, cruel, and disgusting aspects of humanity, while simultaneously (and there’s the hard bit) showing us that there is still the possibility of redemption — or at least momentary reprieve — through acts of kindness, compassion, and love. Readers may feel a whole slew of conflicting emotions both during and after reading Minotaur, and may come away from it thinking, “What did I just read?! Am I okay with that? Should I be okay with that? Does it matter either way?” In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Triton had already been getting on in years when he first joined up with Moebius, which granted him immortality. He's a scatterbrained sort, noting that entire lifetimes practically pass him by when he blinks. He has forgotten things such as how to transform into his Moebius form, and a promise he had made to an old friend with whom he travelled to find the best recipe for the miso paste for which said friend had sacrificed his life to obtain.

Nay~ not time well-spent. I have to admit that the only reason I continued listening was because I paid for it and because the narrator was FANTASTIC. I also want to give credit where its due: Sherrill's prose, overall writing style, and wordsmithing are well honed. At times I truly enjoyed his sentence structure and descriptions... BUT~ this story didn't go anywhere. After 4 hours and 49 minutes, I had to stop. It's a dull story overall. I really don't understand where all the praise comes from. This will be the first audiobook I was unable to finish. I even made it through Amanda Ronconi's nasal-y, whiny, exaggerated Alaskan accent in How to flirt with a Naked Werewolf (not my usual book, but it was part of a girl's bookclub). Masquerade of the Red Death: Both McCann and Alicia have problems with this. More accurately, the two incredibly ancient vampires they are linked to have problems with this and it bleeds over into their mortal avatars. Khayman in Queen of the Damned suffers from this. As the third vampire ever in existence, he has spent the last 6000 years continuously active, alternatively losing and regaining his mind over the centuries, thus remembers little of his own life. It's been implied that during his periods of sanity, he engages in a game of manhunt with the Talamasca, who study the supernatural, while simultaneously writing many treaties on the origins of the vampire race as a member simply because he likes to mess with them. Averted with his contemporary Maharet, who holds on to the memories because of her connection to the numerous descendants of her human daughter, but played straight with her twin sister Mekare, who has gone insane over the millennia. Dark Souls III: The DLC The Ringed City has Lapp, an Undead who claims to have lived for millennia, but is so old that Purging Stones (which usually help restore fading memories) no longer work on him, and as such he cannot remember his past. He's telling the truth - as a matter of fact, he's Patches, meaning he's lived since the first game, uncountable ages ago.

Exceptional . . . Steven Sherrill uses M as the vehicle for a finely observed and compassionate portrayal of humanity in all its guises * * Irish Independent * * Our gentle giant, of half-man half-bull configuration, lives quietly in a sun burnt, fly-swatting trailer park of the American south. He’s lived everywhere at least once. He’s watched us all evolve and devolve. He fixes cars. He carves beef. He yearns. In Heralds of Valdemar, the character Need is an ancient spirit bound into an unbreakable sword and probably is the oldest character in the setting who's not a god. Sometimes she's conscious, but she also spends decades or centuries at a stretch 'asleep', driving people to her own ends and remembering them as dreams. She shows Skif and Elspeth memories of her time in life and the moment she put herself into the sword, which they find to be so old that they're hard to understand, but she doesn't remember her living name. It seems it's still there in her memories, as she rediscovers it while sharing more with another character, she just doesn't retain conscious access to a lot of her own experiences. Ennesby: Well, here's a new twist. I've seen the size of what's missing. She's forgotten more than what ALL of us know. All of us put together.

Mummy: The Curse averts this: it's not time that induces the fog for a mummy, but various events that have eroded their identity. By discovering evidence of who they used to be, and recognising other people as more than a means to an end, a mummy can regain their identity and memory, until eventually at the highest levels they remember all of their many lives. The Belgariad: Belgarath the Sorcerer has lived for 7,000 years. He can remember sensations of his mother, but not her face. Nor does he remember exactly which God's peoples he belonged to. This has less to do with his age than the fact that his mother died when he was very young, and he was a callous youth with no interest in his village or their religious practices. Nevertheless, in his biography, he skips over centuries at a time with only a vague description of what he was doing, and of what he does put down in detail his wife and daughter claim he got a lot of it wrong. If we are going to talk about earth-bound immortality we’re going to do this right. Pouty, sassy and preening vampires a few hundred years old chasing teenage girls need not apply. Give us the Dactyls, the Potamoi, the Oceanids – give us role players, the extras, of ancient mythology and show us the hell of immortality. Give us The Minotaur.

Steven Sherrill

Some splatbooks say this also happens for liches. A lich may be so focused on his eternal pursuit of magical knowledge that it forgets its own mortal life. Sometimes the key to defeating one is learning its mortal name. In the classic version, the oldest of Immortals don't recall having ever lived as mortal beings. It's implied that they simply can't remember their mortal lives; Korotiku, for example, speculates that he might have been a planar spider. Note that one of the Immortals who recalls his mortality quite clearly happens to have begun his life as a dinosaur, so the ones who've forgotten must be considerably older than that. In the second episode of Urban Gothic, vampire Rex (played by Keith-Lee Castle) admits that he can't remember how he became a vampire.

The Madness Season has an energy-based species of creatures which are virtually immortal with this problem, and which therefore prefer to live in symbiotic relationship with physically bound creatures. In Midnight at the Well of Souls, Nathan Brazil is centuries old but only has a normal human-sized memory and has forgotten a lot of things, including his origins. When he reaches the Well of Souls, it turns out he's been there before, and the Well recognizes him and restores his old memories, including the memory of who he really is. Which he then proceeds to give several deliberately contradictory accounts of over the course of the series. This narrator does an excellent job with what could be a very monotonous story. His voices and grunts and tone were the highlight of those 4+ hours. This magic keeps me alive/ but it's making me crazy/ and I need to save you/ but who's going to save me? Crystal Singer: The Crystal Singers have this problem, though it's brought on more by long-term exposure to Ballybran crystal than actual age. Killashandra eventually finds a solution to this problem, accidentally.Cecie keeps telling him she’d like to take him home some night, husband or no. The Minotaur waits hopefully. Husband or no. A downplayed example in the Wizards series: It's suggested a couple of times that the reason the seventy-something Dean of Unseen University occasionally acts like a rebellous teenager is because he doesn't remember being a teenager the first time, and vaguely suspects he may have missed out on it altogether. Methos, the legendary Oldest Immortal, tells MacLeod that he's over 5000 years old, then explains that's when he took his first head and "before that, it all starts to blur." Methos therefore has no idea how much over 5000 years old he is; for all he knows, he could've gone for thousands of years before killing another Immortal for the first time. The bloodline known as the Agonistes, introduced in Bloodlines: The Chosen, who have devoted themselves to subverting the trope. Elders hire them when they prepare for torpor, and the Agonistes first record everything they can before using their special devotions to drive out as much of the fog as they can. They are very good at their jobs... and have received no end of persecution, as many vampires would prefer certain facts to be lost to the ages. Five thousand years after his starring role in Greek mythology The Minotaur (yes, that Minotaur - the half-man half-bull from a labyrinth in Crete) is working cash-in-hand as a chef in a greasy Southern-US steakhouse where he is known simply as ‘M’. This is the setup for Steve Sherrill’s The Minotaur takes a Cigarette Break, and it is a wonderfully inventive beginning for a thoughtful novel that ranks among my personal favorite reads.