Minos

In the poem he is the judge who examines every sin at the entrance and girds himself with his tail as many times as the circle a soul must go down to; in the game he is a customs post with a slab of stone in front of it, and the count of the tail is something you watch turn. He does not condemn: he measures. He squats on a plinth set against the wall, just short of the mouth of the landslide, because the line puts him where you go down and not where you arrive.

Being counted costs you one held breath. He never looks at you, so what distracts him is not your face but the trace a living body leaves where he stands: smell it too long and he lets the tail fall and starts again from nothing. Lay a damned man’s name on the slab and he counts one coil less, and that name leaves your book for good; but the shortcut that opens under him goes down one floor less. The discount is paid back in walking.

The game adds something the poem has not got: it is his tail that digs the shaft you use to move between circles without walking the ramp again, one floor at a time and only once that floor has been counted. The shortcut always opens from the wrong end, which is to say after you have been there on foot. What the game says when you look at him: Minos, a just king in the myth and a customs post here. He does not condemn, he counts; he girds himself with his tail as many times as the circles owed to you, and the number is the sentence. He never looks at you, and that is exactly why your breath on him makes him lose the count and begin again.