Before the story of his greed was woven into the tapestry of the myths of old for all to see, he was something else. Something less grand than the paintings of him that now haunt humanity, he was not created of words and sketches strung together in an effort to create a moral for mankind.
Before he was a part of history, Icarus was a boy.
And it is not surprising that a boy disobeyed his father's orders to stay away from the sun, no matter how important these orders appear to later readers of his frightful fate. For, in that first and only flight, Icarus fell in love for the first time. Not a romantic love, of course, as that is not what one feels for a heavenly body. No, Icarus loved the sun much more deeply than one could ever love another person. He loved her beauty and her warmth and the freedom she represented, a feeling he had never experienced in the dark labyrinth of his life. The boy loved more deeply than he ever had as his wax wings caught the wind and he longed to be just a little bit closer, just a little bit warmer.
And if his wings hadn't burned, Icarus surely would have as he spiraled higher and higher into the clear blue sky, ignoring the trepidation in his father's voice as there was none in his own heart.
Icarus was a boy, just a boy, and he did not understand how much he had to lose in his error.
Higher and higher, he rose, and louder and louder his father called for him to come back, but it was of no use. In the top of the sky as his appendages softened and dripped into the dark blue ripples below, Icarus found his place among the planets and stars. Oh, how bright the sun looked from this vantage point, how beautiful, and Icarus was warm, warmer than he had ever been before. He had lost sight of his father, not that he bothered to search for the small figure when he had eyes only for the sun herself. The child was so close now, so close to what Icarus imagined was paradise. And as he reached out for something that he could never grab, Icarus made a mistake. He was just a boy, and he longed to touch the sun so badly, that he forgot.
The sun was never his to have.
And Icarus was falling… falling… falling.
But wasn't falling just another way to fly?
As Icarus's eyes alight on the beautiful sun he adored so greatly, he was unafraid. The wind carried away his father's screams and all the child heard as he so famously sank back to earth was the crashing of the waves. His gaze never wavered, not once, as he plunged into the water, from the celestial bodies above him, and some say that he smiled just slightly as he met his tragic demise.
As he sank beneath the surface of the cold ocean, beneath the wax remains of what had once been his glory, Icarus was no longer a boy of flesh of blood. He was stardust and moon and he was somehow more than human as his lungs filled with water instead of the air which had caused him to fall so far from grace. Though his heart stopped beating, the boy was not simply gone from this world. He was immortalized forever in the tragedy of his great mistake.
The sun was never his to hold for she was free and wild and not the plaything of a small boy with dreams larger than himself. But somehow, in that freefall to earth, the fallen child became something much, much bigger than even the sun herself.
Icarus was legend.
For all her life, Essa had fancied herself to be an Icarus.
It did not matter that he was nothing more than a story, a fictional creation to inspire a lesson to children who thought of disobeying their parent's wishes. No, to Essa, Icarus was so much more than some scraps of pages copied down sloppily in a book she had taken from the palace archives. He was real to her, really truly real, and she was not interested in rereading the story of his fall from grace.
No, what most intrigued Essa was his flight. It was always his flight, the one subject that always hovered just out of reach. For as far as Icarus had fallen, he'd first have had to fly. No one who could recall the old myth seemed to remember that part of the story, the part about the sun warming his back and his wings fluttering and dancing to a rhythm no one but he seemed to hear. Of what the instruments were made of, as the story was never that specific as to how one would go about crafting a pair.
For all her life, Essa had longed to fly.
But flight, for her, was impossible. Flight was something for birds, who were free to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they pleased. Flight was for Icarus, the boy who had lost so much more than his life as he sunk beneath the waves. Flight was made of feathers and freedom, an escape to the skies that was not a luxury that someone like she had. Though she collected the former, it was hard to capture liberties in her hands, as difficult as growing wings itself.
Oh, how she envied the birds.
As she sat at her window, hands busied fiddling with her dark curls, her eyes alighted on the snow that blanketed the earth beneath it in icy frosting. Essa tutted softly, her expression molding itself into the usual scowl she wore when she was alone. Snow. Essa was sick of snow. She found there was nothing remotely pleasing about the substance, and could not for the life of her find what her cousins found so enjoyable about it. It was cold and wet and dirty, whether it was freshly fallen flakes or slush, and she hated it. In her ten years living in this secluded palace in the middle of nowhere, she had seen enough snow to last a lifetime.
Isolation can do things to a person that no one understands. Things which are unexplainable, that all reason and logic would surrender to. Essa had seen it in her cousin, first, and then herself and her siblings. She didn't understand the things she was able to do, or rather the things that happened to her. They only worked when she didn't try to control it, anyway.
That was why her cousin made her so mad. Theo, with his perfect smile and his perfect looks and his perfect personality… he already had so much. He didn't need the gift, not like she did. He didn't need what he had, yet he had it, and it was so horribly unfair that every time she thought about him, her heart threatened to freeze. Threatened simply to stop beating out of the sheer unfairness of her life, because it was just so horribly, tragically unfair.
Life was unfair to Icarus, too, but at least he had gotten to fly.
Outside her window, she noticed another tragedy taking place. Two birds, one as white as the freshly fallen snow and the other dark as night, seemed to be fighting. More exactly, Essa guessed, only the raven was fighting. The other bird, which looked like a dove from what little she understood about ornithology, was dying. It's snowy feathers were no match for the piercing claws of it's adversary and now it was falling… falling from the sky.
Like Icarus, the princess thought momentarily, but no. The boy that haunted her dreams would not have been a dove. Doves were for peace and those unwilling or unable to fight for what they believed in. No, she was much more like the raven, whose inky feathers gleamed with hatred and pride against the society that marked it a villain.
The dove was on the ground now, and Essa had to lean slightly to see its corpse. The victor flapped overhead, watching it once momentary before soaring higher and out of her sight. Indignantly, she noticed that the dove was not, in fact, dead, but simply wounded. Perhaps its wing was broken and it could no longer take to the skies after all. Momentarily, Essa felt pity for the thing, but that emotion flitted out of reach as they all did. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't… she couldn't feel.
That wasn't normal to not feel anything, and all her life she had been told she wasn't normal, and it was just so horribly, tragically unfair.
Feelings were simply emotions and emotions were simply an expression of your body and heart and were not all that important in the long wrong. She didn't understand why they mattered to everyone. Why did everyone care so much if she didn't feel, if she didn't know what it was like to feel? Of course, caring could be classified as an emotion. Essa didn't understand why anyone bothered about it. Just because not understanding feelings was a tendency of psychopaths didn't mean that she was going to go on a murderous rampage at any second.
But she would if they didn't stop trying to make her feel something that she never would.
The dove's blood turned the snow red, and Essa didn't like the color. It wasn't nice, she thought, of the dove to go and bleed on the snow. As much as she despised the cold flakes, it looked much better white than it did any color, and she could almost imagine it was as if the world was covered in frosting. The dove and its stupid, red blood was ruining her vision. She turned her back on its stupid cries for help and went back to braiding her hair.
After all, it wasn't she who had made it bleed.
The sound of her door opening caused the princess's scowl to deepen, as she was not in the mood for visitors. It grew even angrier when her sister waltzed in, unaware or not caring that her presence wasn't wanted. "I didn't say you could come in, Lyra." Essa glared daggers as the younger brunette made herself comfortable on the king sized bed, snuggling into the covers.
"You didn't say I couldn't, either." Lyra smirked, flicking her hand lazily at her sister. "Besides, there's a lot of Ava outside these doors and she won't expect me in here."
Not able to argue with that, Essa sat down on her bed and permitted her younger sister to braid her dark curls. "What's Miss Priss doing this time?"
"It's Ava, what do you think she's doing?" Even though Lyra was sitting behind her, Essa could tell that she was rolling her eyes.
The oldest princess guessed with an evil smirk playing on her face, but which never quite reached her eyes. "Knowing our darling sister, I'm going to guess that she was being a bitch?"
"That, or whatever the seven-year-old equivalent is. She was going off at me for flirting with the new guard earlier. Luckily she didn't come in a few minutes earlier, or the kid would have had a very different sort of lesson…"
It was Essa's turn to roll her eyes. At 16, Lyra was always trying to prove how mature she was. She claimed she did a lot more than what was legal at her age, but she wasn't entirely sure she doubted Lyra's stories. People went to great lengths to prove they could feel love.
She wondered what it felt like to be in love.
The door opened again and Avalon flounced through in all her glory. Her blue eyes gave a wide, doey look fit for a baby angel, but her sneer was something of a demon. "Hello, everyone. How are you today?"
Lyra huffed. "No one wants you here, Ava."
Blinking her eyes, the young girl placed a hand on her heart. "What?" Her blue sapphires filled with tears. "How could you say something like that? I'm just a wittle girl." She suddenly stopped her tears and broke into a devilish grin. "I'm telling Father!"
"No one likes a snitch, Ava." Lyra returned her focus to her older sister's hair. "Then again, no one likes you, so go ahead and tattle." Essa had to work hard to keep from giggling and their baby sister's face crumpled into a death glare.
"I'm telling Father that too!" She cried and ran from the room as fast her little legs could take her.
Both the older sisters exchanged a smirk. Their youngest sister had inherited nothing but awful qualities, and her biggest fault was the way she had both parents wrapped around her little finger. No one could stand her, especially them.
"Irony is lost on her, isn't it?" Lyra hopped of the bed, and leaned on the wooden door frame. "Oh, and by the way, Mom and Dad are talking out your birthday present downstairs. You're getting a bunch of hot guys?"
An eyebrow raised on the oldest girl's face.
"I believe the politically correct term is a Selection." Lyra strutted from the room in a perfect mimic of Ava. "And I'm telling Mother if you say you don't want it… so she can give it to me!" she laughed.
If Essa could feel, she would be horrified. Life was so tragically unfair sometimes. She wished she could spread her wings and fly away from this all. All she needed was a chance to fail in front of many eligible bachelors before they realized she was incapable of feeling love.
And now it felt like her blood turning the snowy ground red.
Essa was an Icarus, alright.
She had plummeted back to the ground, and all she had left of the sky was a story.
The world was blue and Theo had no way of changing it.
Not that this fact bothered him, so to speak. He was as fond as the color blue as most people were, and he quite thought it fit the Earth that humans inhabited, from the sky to the ocean depths. Of course, being a man of science, Theo was well aware of the fact that the color of the ocean was nothing more than a reflection of the sky above it. That endless space that people looked into and imagined was somehow romantic, which the prince had never quite understood. The sky was simply more air, until it wasn't anymore and it became space. Space you couldn't breathe in, an endless sea of blackness and nothing but the colors of stars as they exploded. Sometimes blue. Everything was always blue, from his vantage point.
Not what Theo considered to be entirely romantic, though he had never been in a relationship before, so perhaps that would change his thoughts. He had heard that people changed in relationships, though in the secluded life he lived, he had yet to see it. Not that he doubted it, of course. As a man of science, though, he was obligated to show some doubt towards things not proven by evidence in front of his eyes.
Not that relationships occupied the majority of his thoughts, of course.
As he walked, his boots sank just slightly into the freshly fallen snow, making crevices that looked a little bit like crescent moons if one had an active imagination. He would have asked Verra, who gripped his arm daintily as she walked along, but Theo wasn't in the mood for a confused look. Even though she didn't speak, the child had no problem getting her message across clearly. He locked away his thoughts in his heart like a million other things he wish he could unload on someone and thought no more of it.
His thoughts switched to the small creature walking besides him, now pulling on his arm in an attempt to get his attention. At 11, she was 10 years his junior, yet she was the only family member he had ever truly connected with. Both his parents had died before he'd ever met them, his father by suicide and his mother in labor. Verra didn't even know who her father was and her mother had simply vanished years ago. No one had seen her since. That was the same time the child had stopped speaking.
The prince followed Verra's gaze to a small, white figure on the ground and he saw a fallen dove lying amongst the red snow. He released his cousin's arm and walked towards it, curiosity and sadness building in his heart. Picking it up, he saw life in its eyes but tragedy in its fate. Surely the bird would die, as was Mother Nature's way, as everything around it surely would in its own time. Who was he to break the cycle of life? Just because he had such a gift didn't mean he should use it.
But then he caught Verra's hard stare and thought differently.
He ran his fingers over the bird and watched its blood fade as its wings healed in front of his eyes, and Theo knew he wasn't a man of science after all. He was a boy of power and magic and if he wanted the sky lilac, he thought that he might, just might, be able to change it.
But he would keep it blue, he thought. It was a fitting color.
Essa was back at her window, but she was hiding as well, out of view of her two cousins. She watched with a scowl as Theo picked up the bird and somehow brought it back from a merciless injury. Verra was next to him, smiling her soft, sweet, sickening smile and Essa again thought how unfair her life was. If anyone deserved to have a gift like Theo's, it was her. If she wasn't going to experience emotions, she should be at least able to do something wonderful.
She watched as Theo handed the bird gently to his young cousin, and how sweetly the girl let the dove perch on her hand until it was well enough to fly away. She watched as they both stupidly waved after a bird, a bird for God's sake, before leaving the window and the bloodied red snow in their wake and continued their walk around the grounds. She watched the dove fly, a little shakily as it tested out its newly injured wing but then suddenly as graceful as an angel as it took to the sky and soared out of reach of the princess, of the world.
Essa wanted to fly more than anything in the world, but if you had to be fixed to fly, she never would. Because she was broken, and no one, not even her perfect cousin with his perfect powers that no one could explain, could put her pieces back together. She was not like a wounded bird, that once repaired could take once more to the skies. No, she had never been able to fly, and no amount of fixing her would allow her to do so.
Humans were not meant to fly. Icarus had proved that in his fateful fall, the one remembered in history books and legends, the one that proved how fanciful a notion it would have been for a person to ever believe they could soar. Humans were meant for the ground, and they were made of feelings and emotions and they didn't have broken wings because they had never had them in the first place. And Essa, with no wings and no feelings and no… defining features of either species, wasn't sure anymore what she was. But when she pressed her hand lightly to the window and it shattered into a million shards of glass, she wasn't sure she wanted to know what she was, after all. She could take a guess, but she didn't want to hear that she was a monster.
She'd heard it enough when people didn't think she could hear them.
And the shards of glass that fell outside the snow stained the snow red, and it was somehow impossible to tell her blood from that of the doves.
Chapter Song: "Colours" by Halsey and "Icarus" by Bastille.
Hello, all! Welcome to Of Flight and Feathers, the sequel to When I Fall. I'm sure many of you know that I never finished that novel and I apologize. But I tried writing that 3 years ago, when I was 13 years old, and boy was that a mistake. I hope my writing seems to have improved a lot since then. It WILL be an SYOC, both male and female, but I'm not going to open submissions until the next chapter because I'm so busy at the moment.
Before anyone asks, I WILL finish this story. I have everything planned out, with flexible changes for your characters of course, and I am hoping to do a weekly or at least a biweekly update.
There's a couple different things about this story, mainly being that it is slightly fantasy based, as there are powers. However, the ONLY people to have powers are Theo, Tessa, and a few other members of the family (I'm not saying yet).
I'll be posting a lot of info next week about the royal family. Keep in mind that this is definitely able to be read as a stand alone novel to When I Fall, and I honestly don't suggest that you go back and read that trainwreck of a novel.
Please review and tell me how you liked it! I'll be posting forms, rules, and other stuff for submitting next week at the next update. Thank you all for reading!
-Sora