Wandering Star, Icarus (9)
As a child, Icarus hated the ground.
He hated the gravity that pinned him to the earth. He hated even more the adults who raised their voices, scrambling for one more handspan of this cramped scrap of land.
A city choked with discarded refuse.
A city so clogged with trash that no matter where you looked, there was nothing else—nowhere to open your eyes to a wide horizon. A city where simply standing still was enough to choke the breath from your lungs. That was where Icarus was born. That was where the boy grew up.
Then, around the age of ten.
Icarus climbed a cliff. Scraped by branches, tumbling again and again until he was caked in dirt, he still forced himself to the top. And there, for the first time, he faced an open landscape.
“Ah.”
Even the mountains of refuse humanity had piled up could not reach the meadows above the cliff. Across that vast plain, the sky was visible. The blue sky was hidden by nothing, blocked by nothing.
The sky was free.
It was only natural that a boy who longed for freedom would come to long for the sky. Standing before it, the boy dreamed a single dream: of soaring freely through that sky.
A spark.
Icarus recalled the dream he had dreamed as a child. His body began to move, slow and drifting. With hazy eyes he wandered through the dream.
I wanted to fly through the sky.
To fly freely through that sky and reach the stars.
And so.
He set out on an adventure. He traveled the continent with his friend. One by one, Icarus recovered the memories he had forgotten. It felt exactly like groping along the walls of a vast labyrinth, feeling his way forward.
Where am I supposed to go?
What did I do next?
Whenever those questions rose, a glittering thread of light shimmered before his eyes. Drawn by that shining thread, Icarus took another step. As long as he followed the thread, he would never lose his way even in the most tangled maze.
He dreamed.
In the dream, Icarus adventured freely.
He traveled through every kind of city. The floating cities he had longed to visit since childhood, the harbor cities, the free cities—he wandered them all and lived a thousand experiences.
“An adventurer!”
“What is that, Icarus?”
“Listen, Daedalus. Doesn’t the word ‘adventurer’ just ring perfectly? Adventure! To risk danger and explore the unknown. Aren’t adventurers the freest people in the world?”
The Star of Adventure glittered.
It was the first star Icarus ever obtained.
“My name is Icarus. The man who will one day reach the highest place in that sky. Remember my name, princess of a foreign land!”
“You’re an amusing one. Is that why you broke into my chambers?”
“No? The reason is this. Rumors fly through the kingdom that a princess dying of illness longs to fly through the sky.”
“······.”
“Do you want to fly?”
“Can you grant my wish?”
“I asked if you want to fly.”
He took the hand of the princess who nodded, and they flew. On a night when the moon shone bright, the princess finally received the wish she had so desperately wanted. While the kingdom’s knights stared up in panic, her laughter echoed across the sky.
Not long after, the princess died of her illness.
But until the day she died, she could still smile while speaking of her flight with Icarus.
Her father, a king of a nation, swore to regard Icarus as his eternal friend and benefactor. In that country they raised a statue of Icarus.
“Right—next stop, the great ruins.”
He dreamed.
“Run! Don’t look back—just run!”
“Fuck, what’s behind us?!”
“What do you think? The monster the great mage left prepared for us. And it’s hideously ugly!”
“This is completely insane.”
He dreamed, and dreamed again.
In the dream he was free.
“Time to set out on a journey.”
He could leave whenever he wished, go wherever he wished, soar as high as he wished.
The stars of Adventure, Freedom, Journey, and Flight all shone.
The boy grew into a young man. The young man grew into an adult. The boy who had become a man looked at himself. He had grown strong. Strong enough to fly higher, strong enough to sweep aside anything that blocked his path.
“······.”
The grown boy looked up at the sky.
If he wanted to fly, he could.
He felt he could fly all the way to the far horizon.
Higher than ever before······.
To fulfill the dream of his childhood, Icarus took a step. He prepared to beat his wings toward the sky. But with a heavy clank, something seized his ankle.
When he looked back, chains were there.
Countless people, countless lives—the children he had taken in, their descendants, those who shared his will—all of them were looking at him.
Dream and duty.
Weighing the two, Icarus ultimately chose to bear the responsibility. The boy who had become a man abandoned his dream.
“Ahh.”
Icarus smiled bitterly.
He already knew what would happen next.
He walked.
Toward the end that awaited a bird that had given up the life of an adventurer, cast away its dream, and lost its wings.
A soft impact.
Those he had tried to protect, those he had loved, turned blades and spears upon one another. Icarus could take neither side. Were they not all as dear to him as family? He could not cut one half away.
They died. Died and died again. From enemies without and enemies within, everything he had guarded crumbled one piece at a time.
And at the very end.
A dry crack.
By his own hand, everything he had built came crashing down.
“Is that so.”
Where his footsteps finally halted—
“······.”
—a young man stood silently watching him. A youth who shone brighter than anyone, who looked freer than anyone. Looking at him, Icarus could not help but laugh.
Because the youth resembled him.
More precisely, the him of long ago, when he was still a boy.
At the end of the road, Icarus turned his gaze forward. There a radiant star waited. It seemed close enough to touch if he only reached out.
A soft sweep.
But Icarus lowered the hand he had raised. That star was not his, and it was not the star he had once sought to reach.
“A magnificent star.”
“Is it?”
“Truly. Magnificent enough that I, who had forgotten my dream for nearly a thousand years, could remember it again.”
Icarus smiled bitterly.
“May I ask a name?”
“The name of that star?”
“I would like to hear that too—but I would also like to hear yours.”
“Najin. And the star’s name is Dirge.”
Icarus rolled the name Najin across his tongue and looked down at his own body. From the moment the memories returned, Icarus’s body had been crumbling.
A soft crumbling sound.
His fingertips dissolved into drifting powder. Perhaps it was only natural. This body had already become that of the undead centuries ago. The moment shattered vessel was filled with memory and starlight, Icarus’s flesh could not endure the power.
Facing the approaching annihilation, Icarus fell silent.
Having recalled every memory, he looked at the chain driven through his heart. The chain stretched far away, bound to the ancient fortress of Helios. It was the chain he had never managed to unfasten, even at the end.
A hard grip.
Icarus seized the chain.
“What is your dream?”
At Icarus’s question, Najin blinked once. It was not a question he had expected. After a brief silence, Najin answered.
“To carve a star into the highest place.”
“The highest place? Higher even than King Arthur’s star?”
Najin nodded, and—
“Hahahahaha!”
—Icarus burst into laughter. Still laughing, he swept his hair back and gave a great, decisive nod.
“Dreams ought to be large. I once dreamed a dream like that myself. Though I never reached it.”
The Wandering Star, Icarus.
He was the first transcendent to appear after King Arthur vanished into Kamran, the first hero to guide the age after Arthur’s disappearance, and the one who, across the last thousand years, had drawn closer to Arthur than any other living soul.
The transcendent who had flown highest of all.
And the human who had, in the end, fallen.
He looked at his junior. As a senior who had walked the same road one step ahead, what words should he leave for the one who followed? Icarus opened his mouth, then closed it again. The youth before him was already shining more brightly than he ever had.
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
He simply asked.
“With a sword like that in your hand, killing me would have been far simpler and cleaner.”
“It would have been easier, yes.”
“Then why?”
“Where’s the romance in that?”
Najin gave a short laugh and snapped his fingers.
The Star of Laughter glittered.
“Besides, it wouldn’t have made for anything we could talk about while smiling.”
It was a trivial reason. Yet everything begins from the trivial. Hearing Najin speak exactly as his younger self once had, Icarus could not help laughing again.
“A thoroughly convincing reason.”
“So.”
Najin pointed at Icarus.
“What do you intend to do now?”
In place of an answer, Icarus turned and looked behind him.
A nation that had fallen into ruin, the tragedy of destroying with his own hands everything he had protected, the centuries of wandering with no memory······.
Icarus did not look away from any of that past. He faced what he had done, squarely. And so Icarus found his answer. A smile spread across his lips.
With a hard grip he clenched the chain even tighter.
Instead of breaking it, he pulled.
“I used to think it was too heavy to fly with.”
That was what he had believed.
“But right now, this weight is exactly right.”
The chains binding him no longer held any meaning. Everything he had tried to protect had already collapsed. Helios had fallen, and every one of his people was dead. No responsibility remained for Icarus any longer.
Even so, Icarus did not release the chains.
To cast them away would have been to deny half his life. He would not deny himself.
“The name of that star—you said it was Dirge?”
“Yes. Dirge.”
Pointing at the star that still allowed him to keep his sanity and that slowed the erosion, Icarus spoke.
“Come to think of it, I never held a proper funeral for my nation. I never managed a true ending. That hardly makes for a good story.”
Icarus crooked the corner of his mouth upward.
“Will you help me?”
“Of course.”
Najin snapped his fingers. As the Star of Dirge blazed more fiercely, Icarus drew a long breath.
He had decided how he would meet his end.
To the youth before him, and to the friend who had left him a gift even at the last, and to everything that had brought him here—Icarus gave his gratitude and lifted his face to the sky.
A star that had crumbled and eroded, yet still shone.
Just one more time, at the very end.
Icarus made his star shine.
"Mansangdaehae"
⟨ Sea of All Phenomena ⟩
The Wandering Star blazed.
In his final moment, the Wandering Star reclaimed himself.
He recovered every memory he had forgotten.
His flesh was crumbling, yet for one last time he could wield power equal to his prime.
Icarus decided how he would use that power.
All ten of his stars began to shatter. Wringing every last drop of starlight remaining in them, Icarus unfolded his stage. He had always considered himself an adventurer and a navigator, and he believed he could sail freely to any horizon.
Therefore, to him, the world was a sea.
Mansangdaehae—the Sea of All Phenomena.
In the midst of a world that had become nothing but ocean, Icarus spread the five fingers of his hand wide.
A ten-star constellation.
The man who had once drawn closer to Arthur than anyone else.
A torrent of power utterly different in scale from the Icarus Najin had been facing until moments ago surged outward. The entire world heaved violently. Not only the greatest whale, but every whale scattered across the battlefield far and wide thrashed their vast bodies.
“Come to think of it, I never kept my promise to you either.”
Icarus looked at the greatest whale and smiled bitterly.
“Will you let me keep it now, even this late?”
The whale that had been frozen solid by Merlin’s magic began to shed the thin ice and rise. The deep pulse of the whale’s heartbeat rolled out. Icarus smiled.
“Yes. Let’s do that, my friend.”
He swept his spread hand toward the sky, as though hauling up a net.
And everything rose.
Every element that formed Helios, the nation called Helios itself, the greatest whale, the great and small whales that had migrated skyward in its wake, the hundreds of thousands of whales scattered across the battlefield—all of them lifted into the air.
Nothing could hold the whales down.
Standing atop the head of the greatest whale, Icarus pointed at the sky.
“It’s time to set out on a journey, my friends.”
Icarus cried out.
“Let’s fly as high as that sky will take us—anywhere at all.”
His outstretched fingertip pointed at a star.
“Until we reach the stars!”
It was Arthur’s star. Pointing toward the place he had set as his goal since childhood, Icarus unfolded his first magic.
Icarus’s Wings.
The magic that became the foundation of every flight spell that followed, humanity’s first leap toward the sky. As though replacing the broken wings of a fallen bird, enormous wings sprouted along the whale’s spine. Of course they were only shapes woven of mana, mere illusions—but that did not matter in the least.
“Icarus, the core of that wing magic you developed is telekinesis and force fields, isn’t it? Why do the wings even need to take shape? It tanks the efficiency.”
“Ha. The reason is extremely simple.”
“What is it?”
“Because it looks cooler that way!”
Icarus crooked the corner of his mouth upward.
And the whale beat its wings.
Despite its colossal bulk, the sky whale soared at astonishing speed. Its fins pushed against the world that had become a sea; the air rippled; the wind parted like currents. Icarus rose into the sky.
Altitude climbed. Everything on the ground began to shrink into tiny points. Yet Icarus did not stop.
He did not fly alone.
He rose together with his nation, his friends, his one true companion, and everything that had once bound him.
“Why is flying through the sky a great feat, something so magnificent?”
“Because gravity exists.”
“Flight is beautiful precisely because we rise while resisting that vast force that binds us and pins us to the ground.”
If he could not even bear a weight like this, how could he call himself the Wandering Star? Icarus looked upon the nation rising with him.
Helios—the nation that had once been closest to the sky.
If there was a funeral fitting for a nation called Helios, Icarus thought, it could only be this. Not water burial, not cremation. Earth burial even less so, and sky burial had never suited his tastes either.
Icarus soared.
Embracing everything, he rose.
A nation that had made the freest of adventurers its king, yet had never itself been free. Icarus hoped that, at least in the end, Helios might know freedom.
Unable to withstand the heat of the stars and the stellar pressure they generated, the city crumbled. Helios scattered into starlight. The drifting starlight became swarms of stars that clung to the fins of Icarus and the sky whales.
As though determined to stay with their king until the very last.
Star-swarms linked to the fins of hundreds of thousands of whales drew glittering trails across the heavens.
They were the meteors of the sky—the Wandering Star.
Icarus never ceased climbing. The higher he rose, the more his body crumbled. Everything that had adorned him peeled away one by one.
The crown, the royal robes, the scepter, the banners, every jewel and ornament—all of it crumbled.
When everything had crumbled away, what remained was—
—the utterly shabby coat he had worn since his days as an adventurer. The worn coat flapped as Icarus smiled. Before he knew it, he had returned to the form of a young man. He pointed at the sky and cried out.
“Higher!”
As though they had been waiting for this day alone, the sky whales bellowed.
BuoOOOOOOOOOO———.
The deep pulse of their hearts rolled through the air.
Even as starlight melted their wings, even as their bodies could not endure the pressure of the stars and began to crumble, they rose still higher.
Hundreds of thousands of whales became starlight.
Hundreds of thousands of trails embroidered the heavens. Leading hundreds of thousands of meteors, Icarus headed for the sky. This was his final flight, and his final challenge.
He knew.
In the end he would never reach the star.
He knew he would crumble beneath its pressure and heat. He was already too broken, no longer a being who could be called a hero, to reach Arthur’s star.
But that did not matter.
What mattered was that he was challenging the sky. That he was rising toward it.
A thousand years had passed since Arthur ended the age of chaos, and in all those thousand years no one had ever reached Arthur.
And the one who had flown closest of all was Icarus. He knew it was time to pass that title to another.
The youth watching him from far below.
With the aid of the starlight Najin had created, Icarus rose as high as he could still fly. Until the very moment every one of his stars shattered, Icarus could smile.
“Ahh.”
To the very end, Icarus reached toward the star.
In the end he never touched it.
But he was satisfied with this final journey toward the stars.
Together with hundreds of thousands of trails, the Wandering Star became a meteor shower.
Beneath a sky where stars fell like rain—
Najin stretched his hand toward the heavens.
With a firm catch, something settled into Najin’s palm. It was the Star Relic the Wandering Star had left him—and Najin’s eighth star.