Of Wax and Wings

Chapter 4

Stepping off the transport vessel felt to Ikaros like stepping into a fantasy book, pages and pages of impossible dreams that suddenly he was thrust into, like picking up a book and being plunged into the world it contained.

The gentle breeze that lifted Ikaros' light, fluffy hair was a feeling wholly new to him, as the only winds they ever got up on Parnaia were harsh and cold, ripping into his clothes and tangling his hair into nearly unmanageable knots. The sky was more blue at home, too, and down here the sky was a purpleish periwinkle, Ikaros noted. On Parnaia, the sky was a muted shade of blue that faded easily into nighttime. But here, here the sky was a brilliant blue-violet, like a cross between sapphires and amethyst and just as beautiful as Ikaros imagined such a combination to be. From beneath, Parnaia's clouds looked like a ball of white fluff, textured every now and again by the odd grey shadow where the fluff dipped upward toward the buildings Ikaros knew were resting on top of it. From below, the cloud did not look solid enough to support an entire city, and Ikaros knew it wasn't, but the chemical that all the building materials and his sneakers were coated in made the condensed water bind its molecules to the foundation materials, keeping the buildings of Parnaia, and all the other cloud cities like it, aloft.

The air smelled like flowers, and the grass under Ikaros' feet was soft and springy. He took step after step without knowing he was doing so, and before he realized it, Ikaros had taken off at a dead run through the park, jumping and rolling in the still dew covered grass, laughing freely. Daedalus followed his son, albeit at a slower pace. He sat down on a nearby bench, watching his eighteen year old son roll around in the grass like a much younger child. Their smiles mirrored each other, Daedalus' being softer and more gentle, more fatherly, while Ikaros' smile by comparison was beaming, a more carefree and jubilant expression than any that had graced his face in years.

"Hey Dad, do people have workshops here, too? Or do humans not have crafts of their own? I've read about them, humans and their crafts, I mean, but I've never actually seen proof of a workshop down here."

"Tell you what, son. I'll give you directions to the nearest strip of shops, and you can judge for yourself what you think about humans and their craftsmanship. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

Daedalus typed the address of the shops he had in mind into his son's phone, also giving the young man the address of the family that had hired him, sending the boy off on his way as soon as he picked himself up off of the grass and brushed off his clothes.

Following the little voice of the GPS in his phone, Ikaros walked slowly down a wide street paved with bricks. Wider than any road back where he had come from, Ikaros walked directly down the center of the road, marveling at the smallest details of the world beneath his feet. The cracks in the bricks caught his attention, and he stopped to stare at the contrast in the color of his shoes and the colors of the brick and the mortar that cracked and crunched with every step that he took.

When he looked up, Ikaros found himself standing in front of a long road of shops, the small buildings lining either side of the street. The glass windows reflected the sun off their polished surfaces, shining in Ikaros' eyes and keeping him blind to what was contained behind them. To satisfy the curiosity that had started to burn within him as soon as he saw the shops with their sun obscured windows, he began to walk towards the opposite end. As he got closer and closer to each shop, the sun on the glass began to give way, and Ikaros could see the objects displayed as they began to come into view.

The first shop had pottery on shelves, the whole front window filled with mugs and bowls. Painted brilliantly, the pieces and forms in the window were set proudly on display. Ikaros found himself mesmerized by the beautiful paintwork, bending over slightly and staring at the pieces until a series of a few loud bangs and curses came from further down the street.

Out of a building at the end of the road that proudly bore a sign denoting it as a blacksmith's shop, a girl with fiery hair came barreling at an all out run. With her hair dyed a dark red near the top of her head, fading to orange and then to yellow as it approached her lower back.

The girl was cursing as she tried frantically to throw tools into a satchel, tripping over her own feet and stumbling down the road. One of her hammers fell out of her bag as she ran by Ikaros, and the heavy metal of the hammer's head clattered and clanged down loudly on the bricks by his feet. She didn't stop to retrieve her tool, instead beginning to curse more loudly, running off after sparing only a single glance back toward her fallen hammer. After she was gone and she had vanished with a swirl of fire-colored hair, Ikaros knelt down and picked up her hammer, struggling slightly with its weight. Briefly trying to image how strong the girl must be to wield such a heavy tool, and then being staggered by the fact that he had seen even bigger hammers in her bag, Ikaros blinked confusedly in the general direction she had gone.

How he was going to return the incredibly heavy hammer to the girl from the blacksmith shop, Ikaros was unsure, so he started walking down the brick paved street again until he came to the shop the girl had appeared from, trying to pull the doors open to no avail. Left of the door, a small metal box with the words, "Business Cards" etched onto the panel in relief with acid, the curly handwriting turned black by the substance. Ikaros reached into the box, picking up the first little rectangle of cardstock that his fingers brushed against.

Fire detailing curled around the corners of the card, elegantly framing the cursive writing in the center. When Ikaros tilted the card, the black lettering glowed a bright orange, almost like there was fire tucked inside the fibers of the card. Hephaestus Lee, the card read, Metalworker, Blacksmith, Shop Owner. A phone number was listed, but when Ikaros tried to call it, he only got the answering machine in the shop he was standing in front of.

Turning the card over, the surface was entirely blank, with the exception being a short message in almost impossible to read, light grey font. The tiny message was an address, the listed place belonging to an underground Hadean city, the GPS on Ikaros' phone told him when he asked it. Deciding that the best way to get the hammer back to the girl with the fiery hair that it belonged to was to take it back to the address listed in fine print on the back of her business card, Ikaros set off, following the kindly female voice of his phone's GPS system after sending his father a quick message to let him know what he was doing.