Day after day I stared into the vast calypso blue waters of the Mediterranean. One day I wanted to be a man everyone talked about from outposts in Troy and Sparta to Athens, and everywhere in between. I clamored to be the protagonist of a tale passed on by immortal voices from Mount Olympus to the land beyond the River Styx. I dreamt of escaping this island to be liberated, to fly free as a bird, to appreciate the independence my mother never had the privilege to gain. I spent weeks grappling with her loss until I accepted my future. My father would never acknowledge my feelings and expected me to operate with emotions as stone-cold as Medusa’s victims.  

I often wonder if he would have been better suited as a commander in Sparta rather than an artisan working on our small island. He raised me as a drill sergeant would raise his warriors. He always felt I should bow down to him as my liberator and savior, not my father. He snatched me from my mother, rightfully sparing me from slavery, but he kept that action in his pocket as the ultimate good samaritan deed to be weaponized in any argument.  

My eyes refocused from the pink blossoming tamarisk to my dad's sturdy cluttered oak workbench. The smell of the freshly branded scorched chestnut reminded me of my childhood spent sprawled across this very floor staring up at my father, cooled by his shadow. Seeing as it was a comfortable place to cool off and sit, I appreciated his shade, but as I grew older and bigger, so did my ambition. I wanted to escape that shadow.  

I had to be careful in challenging my father's position as a beloved Greek by the Olympians. He is known to be impulsive and will spare nothing to protect his reputation as a revered craftsman. Last year he took my noble and bright cousin Perdix under his wing in the shop. Many onlookers thought I’d be jealous that my father preferred to pass down his knowledge to Perdix rather than me. However, to be frank, I preferred it. Perdix soaked up most of my father's attention which came in tandem with his fits of rage, anger, and frustration. It gave me more time to sneak off and explore the neighboring lands. I traversed across rickety wooden bridges, on crumbling screes across the rigid hills, and through the bountiful olive groves. The land of Crete had truly been a blessing of the Gods not of the pompous King Minos or his heirs.  

After my brief frolics through the countryside and adventures to neighboring lands, I would return to the cramped musky workshop. My father had delegated to me the most mundane and simple tasks, ever since Perdix had arrived. But today was different. I returned to my father’s cave of solace to hear shouting and yelling. Perdix stormed up the stairs with my father hot on his heels. I followed them from afar until my father had cornered him on the edge of the tower. My father exclaimed, “If you think you're so smart with those wax wings you made, fly with them!” Perdix replied in a muffle “They are ready yet. They need to be laced with cloth.” Then my father pushed him and he dropped quickly, like a drachma coin thrown to its eternal destination at the bottom of the River Styx’s obsidian basin. His youthful body feebly crashed over the dolomite rocks and shattered into the white cascading sea foam. A waste of a fine young mind with potential greater than any other, destroyed all because of a weak ego trapped in the shell of a proud man.  

The ensuing day was strange; my father spent his days locked away in his shop studying the blueprints from Perdix’s wings. He obsessed over every nuance of the spheroid bones made of wax, the alignment of the feathers, and the delicate seams of cloth. He stared with disdain at the walls and at Peridx’s creations. I always felt he lacked guilt. Instead, he just felt disappointment for the wasted potential. He would always carry with him the fact that he wasn’t the best craftsman on the island, let alone in his family.  

We worked tirelessly over the weeks that followed, and throughout that time I determined that I needed to be the one to burst through the clouds flying as no mortal man had before. It just wasn’t right for my father to be the one to fly to great heights alone. It seemed spiteful to kill a man, send him to the depths of this world, and then fly high above at levels near the gods, mocking them with man's greatest invention. I had always wanted an opportunity to finally be known as more than just Daedalus’ slave son. I wanted to be known as Icarus, as my own man who earned a plethora of accolades that were mine not a result of nepotism. I aspired to be greater than my father but to also be far different. I wanted to be kind and fair, not prideful and jealous. I wanted to be known as bold and innovative, not simply measured, and wise. I wanted to be the underdog who prevailed, the story that young kids could relate to. I wanted to be the hero to the kids that needed it. However, to be that story, to be the man I wanted to be, I could not just slip out of my father’s unrelenting shadow. I had to shatter it and emerge flying high as a new man, no longer my father’s charity case boy. I arose with the chickens that next morning and began to run the second my feet hit my leather sandals. It is mentally draining to sprint when the distance is unknown, however, once you discover a destination it becomes easier. I waited with my bow clutched tight to my side. I paid no attention to the Bearded

Vultures or Eurasian Griffins, for it was the Bonelli’s eagle I sought. Then I saw it, a Golden Eagle swooped high and then it dived for the pool of onyx water next to me. I hesitated but then remembered my mission. With a shot as pure as Philoctetes, my arrow sprung through the noble bird's skull. I retrieved the carcass and wings, and throughout the day I settled for Bonelli’s eagles as the Golden was a mythical rarity. 

I returned home still fueled by desire, now with all the necessary ingredients to craft the wings that would carry me to a new life. My father and I prepared the final meticulous touches on the wings. Minos's feud and rage with my father had been no secret since he had been confined to our tower and workshop. Curiously, Minos had always allowed me to venture out throughout the town and neighboring lands to receive provisions for my father.

However, the wings would not only allow me to shatter the cage of his shadow, but they would also grant my father freedom. For both of us, they would etch our names into the book of notable Greeks and solidify us as the first men to soar past the limitations of mortality and fly. My father had already accrued nearly every accolade known to man except for this one. I would glide above him and look Helios in the eye. The day we planned to set forth, my father constructed a brass trumpet to alert the townspeople of the history they were bound to witness. The men and women below flocked to the base of our tower as we began our preparations. My father turned to me and gave me advice that would be altered and retold for generations. “Do not fly too high or the wax will be melted by the sun. But most importantly, do not fly too low and be swept up into the waves.” He elaborated that while it was “important to never outshine the master or your superior, you must never sink beneath your potential and become just another poor man frothing in the waves.” I knew I had to shine like one of Eudoxus’s comets tearing through the heavens.  

Before we jumped, I saw a frantic side of my father I had not seen before. I could tell he saw only visions of Perdix’s body shattered by the obelisk stone below. He nodded toward me, and we jumped together to the great cheer of the people and to Minos’s dismay. Minos screamed to his archers to shoot us down, but they solely gawked in awe, arms as paralyzed as Midas’s gilded limbs. We sliced through the coarse salted air, moving as no man had before. After our initial giddy jaunt around the kingdom, we set forth across the merciless ocean that had taken so many great warriors who had conquered their enemies of battle but failed to persevere against the treacherous currents. We crossed the indigo abyss of the ocean without oars and wooden silos as seemingly archaic men of the past had. As my father continued steadily on his path, I began to rise, for the first time I felt elation as I had never had before. I continued towards the golden gates of the gods. I rose far above the greatest men of Greece. I felt the resistance from the warm zephyrs morph into the thrashing winds of Aeolus, pushing me away from the heights of Olympus and the island of Aiolia. (Atsma) When the divines didn’t deter me, my eyes began to scorch as I gazed into Helio's ethereal eyes. My father had always warned me of Helios ever since he had aided Pasiphaë in her courtship of the white bull. Helios unleashed decades of anger and an enormous frustration pent up from an eternity of ruling men and inflicted a searing blast. My wings disintegrated into nothing but feeble melted spheroid bones. I saw nothing but piercing white light in my crippled eyes.  I fell with immense speed, traveling far more swiftly than Odysseus’s finest boats, Pheidippides’s powerful legs, Poseidon’s noblest steed, or even Hermes’s winged feet. I fell with speeds only reached by the likes of Nike or the most acclaimed of Olympians. Then I shattered into entropy. While my physical self-ceased to exist, my story would be one of a man who dabbled in the realm of gods.  It would be a story basking in the light of Helio's fury, not in the darkness of my father's shadow. 

Works Cited 

Adkins, Amy, narrator. The Myth of Icarus and Daedalus. TED-Ed, 2017. 

Atsma, Aaron J. "Aeolus (Aiolos)." TheOI, 2017, www.theoi.com/Titan/Aiolos.html. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022. 

Chaliakopoulos, Antonis. "The Myth of Daedalus and Icarus: Fly Between the Extremes." The Collector, 6 Sept. 2021, www.thecollector.com/daedalus-and-icarus/. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022. 

Zelazko, Alicja, editor. "Daedalus." Britannica Original Sources, Britannica, 26 Sept. 2022, www.britannica.com/topic/Daedalus-Greek-mythology. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.