He did not expect it to be cold. The cold was a separate thing from height - it had no interest in him, no cruelty. It was simply what air was, when it had never held a body before and didn't know how to.
Beneath him, the island had become a theory. Daedalus, a smaller thing than he'd thought possible.
He thought: I should feel afraid.
He felt nothing like fear.
The light up here wasn't light. It was the source of light. The difference mattered. He knew this. He was the kind of person who would know this.
He was trying to remember what kind of person he was.
The cold.
The view.
Something else that had no name for it.
He could see everything.
He watched his son's wings go strange.
Not faltering. Icarus was still flying - the wings still worked, the wax still held. That was the trouble. He was still flying as though someone else had told him to, and that someone was no longer there.
Daedalus had named every layer of the sky.
He'd had to, to build the wings.
You had to know what you were asking them to cross.
There are three skies. Aer: the low air, the air of breathing, the air that carries birds and weather and the smoke of sacrifice. Above that, Aether: the pure atmosphere, the glittering stuff of the gods, the sphere where nothing human had ever held its shape longer than an instant. And above that -
He had not studied what was above that. It hadn't seemed relevant, for men.
There are things the gods do not need to do. They need not reach down and strike. They need only let you see.
Below, the small shape of his son made one more long impossible arc through the air - purposeless, patient, like a leaf - and then was not there.