I live in sin.” The winged boy’s eyes hadturned downwards, his soft mouth setting grimly with despair. “To kill myself I live. No longer my life my own, but sin’s; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

Sun-brushed hands trailed circles on his wings, opening new ways to touch the sky. The dance is the dalliance of the whispers, unsaid desires brighter than eternal suns. His teeth of flint and steel, the sun boy’s lips like ichor.

Some would say that the winged boy loved the sun, loved him with his very own soul and every fibre in his body. His father had warned him: Don’t fly too close to the sun, boy, you know better. But who was he to listen?

Daedalus’s blood ran cold. “No?” he shook off his son’s arm. “For once you have tasted flight …” His voice was desperate now. “…you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

Love is not weakness, father: it is strength. Love is what taught my skin to feel and my eyes to see. Love is not a weapon: it is light.

There was something beautiful about his scars, something lovely about his fallibility.

No.” The word burned in his mouth and sizzled on his tongue. “A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand.” His last words were with finality, his eyes no longer sparked. “I think, I too have knownautumn too long.

Love is weakness, Icarus, the man had said, grim, 'It is Man’s deadliest weapon, greater than the sword and mightier than the axe—because it can destroy you with a single breath.