Daedalian Escape

Everything seemed so small. Even smaller than what he had prepared himself to expect. He knew that things would look differently from above, but he was still taken aback by how insignificant it all looked. What was once a monstrous prison was nothing more than a smudge on the seascape canvas below him. His freedom did not come without risk, not without a terrible price, but like a bird finally able to escape its cage, the idea of freedom had consumed him. If not for himself, at least for his son.

The wind against his skin was a welcomed harshness. At first it was a sting that left his eyes watering and his bones chilled, but after a while he learned how to embrace the wind, bend it to help him instead of hurt him. Finding the rhythms of the breeze and the drafts that rose off the seawater below, he was able to keep pace with the birds that flew beside him. Watching, learning the delicate intricacies of flight, he studied the way that the birds used their wings to rise and fall. He analyzed the ways that they dove towards air currents only to be lifted to soaring heights. He understood the mechanics of flight long before he took his leap of faith, but experiencing flight first hand was vastly different than reading about it in books and observing it through a telescope.

It had taken him far longer than he had anticipated before he was confident enough in his ability to fly, but the painstaking weeks of preparations seemed to be paying off. It wasn’t enough to simply understand the fundamentals of flying, he had to believe it would work. He had to believe with every fiber of his being because it was the only option he had left. The only option he had in order to save his son.

But now, with the rays of the morning sun rising about the swelling waves, the painstaking preparations paid off. He was finally free. The muscles in his arms pumped the makeshift wings up and down. The steady rhythm of the work became a monotonous motion, perpetually pushing him forward. While he was focused on the objective at hand, his son had truly embraced the spirit and freedom of flight. Watching his son pumping his small arms faster and faster so that he would rise into the air only to tuck his arms in and dive towards the sea left his heart in his throat. When his son, at the last second, would open his arms and let the drafts gently glide him back towards safety he could feel himself unclench his jaw, nervous that the boy wasn’t being careful. His son was lost in the playful joviality of his newfound avian friends and he had forgotten his stern warnings. He had forgotten the danger.

As dawn turned to midday, the sun mercilessly beat down on him and his son. The exposed skin on his arms and back was hot and stiff as it began to change from pink to a deep red, burned by the rays of the sun. He called to his son, pointing off into the distance as a mass seemed to emerge out of the nothingness of the horizon. Land. Their new home. Their freedom. With cries of joy both father and son steeled their resolve. With their destination in sight, their journey almost to a close, the ache of their tired muscles and the pain of the elements against their skin seemed trivial. Each pump of their makeshift wings brought them closer to their new life.

As he made his way towards that distant spot on the horizon, he noticed something silvery flash in the light as it fell towards the sea. Looking up, he realized that his greatest nightmare was becoming a dark reality. From above, feathers began falling from his son’s wings. Coming out in small clumps, feathers danced their way down out of the sky. His son, oblivious that his carefree flying was pushing the limits of his precarious survival, continued higher into the sky, preparing for his biggest dive yet. Flapping furiously, he tried to ascend to reach his son, but the distance between them was too great. As he desperately flapped his wings he realized that he was beginning to lose his own feathers as well. Still he climbed. Losing sight of his son in the blinding rays of light being cast upon him, he could tell that he was closing the distance by the growing sounds of frantic flapping.

“ICARUS!” he screamed, watching as his son’s flailing body plummeted past him towards the sea. Feathers flying every direction, the heat of the sun melting the delicate wax that had held them securely in place. Tucking his arms to his side, he dove after his son, desperate to catch him, desperate to save him. The panic and terror etched on his son’s screaming face forever seared into the deepest corners of his mind. With a fateful, bone-shattering crash, his son’s body hit the sea as if it were falling on concrete. He watched in horror as the lifeless body sank beneath the waves, lost forever in the vast depths of the Aegean.

A daring escape in the hopes of freedom became nothing more than a drawn out funeral procession. He stopped himself from joining his son beneath the waves, not out of fear, but out of love. It was love for his son that forced him onward. It was love for his son that pushed every aching muscle in his body to reach land. It was love for his son that inspired his greatest creations. He constructed magnificent monuments in his son’s honor that stretched towards the heavens to forever immortalize Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun.