Fiction: The Myth For Our Times

 By Elizabeth Olson

 

The sun did not melt the wings.

They were engineered too well for that– feathers stitched with linen, sealed in resin, reinforced with the genius of a father who had learned the cost of failure. The heat pressed against Icarus’s skin, yes, and the light blurred the horizon into gold, but the wings held. They always had.

 

What failed was everything else.

 

At first, flight felt like forgiveness. The sea shrank into a sheet of hammered silver below him, and the island fell away as if it had never mattered. Daedalus’s warnings thinned in the wind until they sounded less like instructions and more like fear. Icarus laughed, because laughter was lighter than caution, and he wanted to see how light he could become. 

 

He rose higher.

 

The air changed. It thinned, sharpened. Each breath arrived late, incomplete like a promise half-kept. His heart hammered harder than his wings, and still he climbed, not because he wanted the sun, but because he wanted the silence above everything that had ever trapped him.

 

That was when the wings began to whisper. 

 

It was subtle at first– a tug, a suggestion. The higher he flew, the easier it became to let the wings carry him instead of the other way around. His muscles burned, his vision dimmed, and the thought of control felt suddenly unnecessary. Why fight something built to fly?

 

He loosened his grip. The wings did not betray him; they obeyed their nature. They tilted, searching for currents that were no longer there. His body lagged behind his intention, slow and clumsy, suddenly too human for the height he had claimed. 

 

Panic rushed in where air could not. 

 

He tried to descend, but altitude is not a thing you can reason with. The wings, flawless and intact, caught nothing. They needed resistance, density, a world that would push back. Instead, there was only emptiness and the distant glimmer of the sea. 

 

As he fell, the sun blazed on, indifferent. It had never reached for him. It had never promised anything.

 

The water rose quickly, then all at once. 

 

When Daedalus found the wings days later, they were perfect– unmelted, unbroken, still beautiful. He wept over them, unable to understand how something so well-made could have failed. 

 

He never considered that it hadn’t.

 

Icarus had not flown too close to the sun.

 

He had flown too far from the earth.

 

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Olson is a university student majoring in Political Science and Communications with a minor in English. She is registered at the University of Montana but is spending the 2025-26 year at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia. She enjoys myth, historical fiction, and dystopian literature, and misses her dog very much.