Reaching For the Sun (⚣)

II

Blue surrounds me, cool rushing in. I'm choking in it, and then it dissipates.

The azure is the sky. My bare feet are planted in bright grass, sharp blades bent under my weight.

Icarus

My head whips to the side in slow motion. My father stands several feet away, taller than I remember. His face is smoother, like the storm clouds have left his mind.

I blink.

The air around him is hazy. Edges blur.

I look to my feet again. They are not the right size.

My father makes his way over to me, a brilliant smile on his face.

My father does not smile.

Icarus please.

Father's lips are moving, but these are not his words. Not his voice.

I blink again.

Father is gone, and the ground beneath my feet is much more solid. I'm in our tower, with moonlight slipping through the openings of the walls in quiet greeting.

Candles flicker around the room, in a heavy circle of fire and wax. The heat is suffocating, and the wax is inching closer with each breath I take.

I collapse in the middle of the room, unworried.

I only need to wait until morning. Dawn will save me.

The moon retreats from the sky as the wax bears closer. And then golden light fills the room, spreading like great wings over myself and the growing heat.

I realise too late that the added warmth only aids in my destruction. I close my eyes and lean back, allowing my mistake to consume me in a river of hellfire.

The wax rolls over me like magma at a leisurely pace, molten and cracking.

I am aware of the pain, can feel the way it lights my nerves on fire, but the signals never reach my brain. It feels like an embrace.

Icarus.

The voice begs. Pleads. But for what?

What are they asking me for? Haven't I done enough, given enough?

Let me rest, I want to answer, but my tongue has forget how to shape the words, and my brain has lost their meaning.

The voice does not go away. Not in the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. How long must I endure. Have I reach the fields of Asphodel? Or have I been taken to the fields of Punishment for my insolence?

A groan slips past my lips, and I imagine my fingers twitching, an urge to brush away whoever is tormenting me. Let the dead rest in peace.

Perhaps the voice listens, because it tapers away in the minutesdaysyears, becoming hushed, like a prayer.

My eyes are allowed to slip shut finally, and I take comfort in the darkness that envelops me. For a moment. Until I remember that the darkness is the absence of the very thing I love. Light. Warmth.

That is when I struggle. Fighting to live for the first time in the forever of my short life.

I reach for the light, and it greets me. Blinding.

My senses are overloaded. Sunlight is choking my eyes, and my lungs heave against the intrusion. Metal rest in my mouth, thick and unyielding. My veins are filled with a sluggish fluid, churning through my body in a cold avalanche.

A strange device is stuck into the bend of my arm, a small stick of metal and plastic. I frown at the dull pain throbbing around the wound.

I reach to touch the oddity, but become entangled in strange cloth, wide panels of snow white material, softer than a king's robes. I stroke them in wonder, brows furrowed.