From this section, it was actually the Minotaur himself that caught my interest. I like the idea of a monstrous kid locked away in a monstrous place because of his parent's sins, and might play around with that angle, possibly with a darker Secret Garden edge.
In this story, it was the idea of a couple of people fated to die together, or just at the same time, that intrigued me. If I end up using it for my story, I would change the context and background and characters of the story, plus the dynamic between the two people. But I would keep the idea of the death pact, whether it's more intentional or just some type of curse or something else binding them, and see what I could make out of it.
This time around, I was inspired by the nature of Erysichthon’s curse: he's desperately hungry, dying for any scrap of food—but "always by eating he creates an empty void." If I were to use this story to build my own, I might use that concept for the basis of it, or at least for the core of the main character: somebody who needs something to survive, but is in turn destroyed by that something, a nasty but unavoidable cycle.
That said, I also completely love the idea of his daughter, Mestra, selling herself as a slave to make money—and then, because she can shift shape, promptly disguising herself as someone else and escaping with the cash. A magical father-daughter con story could be a ton of fun, and it's something I want to look into.
The fight in this story reminded me almost of a high school fight, so if I found an interesting hook for that (mixing the fantasy element with the everyday high school element), I could potentially be interested in that. But in reading about the god Achelous and the then-mortal Hercules both showing up as rivals for a girl's hand in marriage, it struck me that I find the interactions between the gods and mortals in these stories very interesting. A lot of the time, instead of being aloft and revered, the gods intermingle so much with the mortals that (if anything) they seem to belong to different social classes instead of different species. Again, my ideas for that angle are still pretty hazy, but the story has got me thinking about it.
In this story, it was the process of Hercules's death and rebirth that sparked my interest: the idea of someone dying, only for their true form to rise out of the proverbial ashes (Herc "shed[s] his mortal body" and becomes "his better part" like a snake shedding its scales). Though I love the idea the way it played out in this tale, for a short-form story, it might work better if that true form isn't necessarily a pleasant thing, and the protagonist has to deal with the repercussions of that.
Image Credit: "Deianeira and the dying centaur Nessus" by Howard Pyle. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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