He plucked the lyre string. Then he plucked another, then another and then another until a basic tune began emanating from the instruments' tense strings.

It was a sad tune made up of plucky, misfitted and jumbled sounds that didn't really fit together, but as Icarus continued to play them, his mind conditioned them to work and convinced him that they, in fact, did when it was obvious to any other person that they didn't.

Well, it was good that Icarus was alone then, wasn't it? It was good no one was there to hear his tuneless cries for help, for escape, for freedom. Or so he thought, because no one is ever truly alone, are they?

Icarus most certainly felt like he was, even if he really wasn't. There was no voice for him to hear, to respond to and to call out to. It felt like there was just a distant whisper on the wind that was never meant for his ears, yet somehow reached them. As if he were invading someone else's privacy without doing anything but being alone.

He put the lyre down. He'd gotten bored of its' lacklustre, deepening tones, just as he had gotten bored of his existence in Minos' tower. The feeling made him curse Minos under his breath with the same venom as the snakes that slid through the vineyards.

His mother had been put to work in the vineyards that morning, and it was a lovely day for it. Icarus was watching her work with around ten other slaves as the sun shone on their heads and burnt their backs in its' scorching rays, because regardless of the suns' beauty and warmth, it was also painful and unforgiving, just as everything else was.

She had promised to give him the grapes that she could spare, and he hoped she could spare many.

He yawned.

He was tried from the night before, only having gotten to bed a few hours before the sun had risen and woken him up again. Like most days, his father's bed across the room was empty and already made, meaning he'd never come back and after seeing this, all Icarus could do was sigh. He was going to spend all day alone again.

He didn't know how much of that he could bare.

He'd been surrounded by copious amounts of company the night before, but somehow, the whole night he'd managed to feel incredibly lonely and lost. He was being ignored most of the time and was only acknowledged when someone wanted something from him. To those higher up the weighted social ladder, Icarus was nameless, nothing more than a means to a desire, and he despised it. Icarus despised being anything less than the person he was, and deserved to be.

That was why the company of Abbas was so dear to him. As another slave, another nameless being, Abbas understood his frustration and somehow managed to mask him own, knowing that his service could possibly buy him his freedom.

The few minutes of interaction Icarus experienced with the mysterious guest that night were a blessing as well. He could feel some sort of understanding from them, as if he knew their agony, but a man dripping in so much gold could never. Icarus had felt waves of unnatural warmth radiating from them, from the tips of his fingers to the wet footprints he left behind, they were warm, comforting and welcoming, as if he were opening his arms to Icarus amd telling him to follow me. But of course, such a thought was nothing more than a childlike, irritable fantasy he felt himself being unable to shake.

Icarus sighed, hitting his head on the brick harder than he intended to. He cursed himself for his stupidity, then looked towards his familiar friend and smiled.

If there was nothing out there for him in this world, at least the sun sat by his side.

As time passed, the sun disappeared from his side, almost begrudgingly, and begin to slip behind the small waves that broke along the coast. It reflected almost magically on the surface, and it made him want to run his fingers over it, and feel whether it was warm or not, whether it carried the same feeling as the midday sun did. The same feeling that the strange guest had radiated, as if it were normal thing to have. An aura that radiated warmth as easy as a raging inferno did.

Icarus's mother had come by not too long ago; she'd managed to not quite spare him some grapes, but rather she had managed to steal a few bunches from under the nose of her enslaved peers. When Icarus had inquired about the punishment she'd face if she were found out, she just smiled as sadly as she always did, ran her hand across his cheek as she always did, and said "You are worth any punishment, my poulí." before leaving abruptly.

Icarus didn't like that sentiment. He didn't want her to get in trouble for his sake.

Anyhow, before she left she'd placed a small bowl of a few grape bunches by the window sill. They looked nice, and so over the course of the next few hours, he'd been helping himself to one every now and again.

The sun had long since disappeared behind the waves by the time Icarus's father came to bed. It was the first time Icarus had seen him in days, and had he not said anything to him, it was likely he would've ignored Icarus's presence altogether and headed straight to his bed without so much as a word. But Icarus couldn't let him do that.

"Hello father." Icarus said as his fiddled with a grape-less grapevine branch. "How are you?"

"Tired." Daedalus replied nonchalantly, almost irritatedly. "I haven't stopped working in days."

"I know." He sighed.

Icarus couldn't think of anything else to say after that, so an easy silence fell between them for some time, maybe ten minutes or so, before his father spoke up again.

"It's not going to be long before I finish the Labyrinth." Daedalus said quietly. "There isn't much more left to build."

"Oh?" Icarus raised an eyebrow. Finally, he thought.

"I don't know what's going to come next. I don't know what Minos is going to do to us once I've finished, but I doubt he'll let us leave Crete alive."

He said nothing, and slowly Icarus felt his worst fears come true. His internal monologue began to make no sense to him, it was panicking just as much as the rest of him was.

He wasn't going to leave Crete. At least not alive, or any time soon.

"You promised." Icarus mumbled sadly, throwing the grapevine branch to the ground. It didn't carry as much dramatic weight as he had hoped because a gentle breeze caught it, and it floated weightlessly to the ground. "You promised we leave."

"No Icarus, I never promised." Daedalus argued back, as he sunk into his bed. "I said maybe, one day we'd leave, I never promised. I'd never make a promise I couldn't keep."

Icarus wanted to say yes you would, because his father would and had done in the past, but he chose to stay quiet. His father watched him for a few seconds, expecting those exact words to come out of his bitter mouth, but when he realised they weren't going to he sighed and laid down, making sure to face away from his son, to leave him in his own self pity and sadness.

And that is exactly what Icarus did.

He turned his away from his father's sleeping, shadowy shape and looked out the window once again, like he always did. But this time he wasn't looking at the sun, he wasn't looking to Apollo; now he was looking at the sun's contrast, now he was looking at the the moon, at Selene. And she had a great beauty all of her own.

The moon was a lot colder, it didn't radiate the same heat as the sun did, not did it radiate the same welcoming aura. The moon seemed more somber and less flippant, more indefinable and less understandable, more clairvoyant and less usual. The moon was intriguing to Icarus in that way.

It cast different shadows on the ground, it reflected different colours, it seemed to loom over him in a different way and it seemed to watch him different. The moon to Icarus felt much more like a spectator, a watcher of the sports whilst the sun is playing them, though maybe he was just paying Selene a disservice.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Icarus heard a voice say.

He looked to his father, but he was fast asleep.

"The world looks so at peace now, doesn't it? As if there is nothing to be afraid of." The voice sighed. "I wish it were like that."

Icarus found himself internally agreeing with the disembodied voice, but he stopped himself saying anything out loud, for fear of what the voice truly was, when no one else seemed to hear it and most certainly when it had no body to match it.

"Nights pass too quickly. I must ask Selene if she could make them longer, though I doubt she'd be pleased."

What?

"I'm sorry, is this nerving for you Icarus? I never intended for it to be."

Icarus turned his head and on the window sill, sat opposite him, was the guest from the other night, except he looked less ornate, though he still wore more gold than Icarus could ever hope to own. The guest smiled at him as he stretched his legs out in a way that meant they didn't entangle with Icarus's.

"It's good to see you again, Icarus." He said, still looking at him, almost longingly.

"Who are you?" Icarus replied as he sat as straight up as he could, not out of choice, but out of fear.

The guest had appeared out of nowhere, as if he'd materialised on a piece of dust that had floated in through the window, and it scared him greatly. Who was in Zeus's name was he?

"My name isn't important." The guest shrugged. "I'm no one in particular, no one important."

"I beg to differ." Icarus almost smiled. "No normal human can speak through a disembodied voice and appear out of nowhere."

He nodded. "You're right. I suppose I'm not human then. But who I am is not important."

Icarus watched the man curiously. He watched the slow fluttering of his eyelashes, the delicate way he fiddled with the gold rings on every finger, the movements of his hair in light wind. Icarus observed him, and took in every single detail. He most certainly wasn't human; he was too perfect.

The man seemed to watch Icarus too, albeit in a more subtle way. He took small, secret glances at his flittering hair, the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath his off-white chiton and the slight raising of hairs on his arms whenever a light gust of wind came through.

He was a sight to behold, the man thought. It was a pity that he was trapped on this island, in this palace and in this tower, with nowhere else to go and no one to tell him it'll all be okay.

"I know you said it wasn't important." Icarus began, as he continued to look forlornly out of the window. "But who are you?"

The man smiled. "Some call me Phoebus, or Delian, or Smintheus if they're feeling ill-willed; I have many names."

"Which one would you like me to use?"

"For you sake, as well as my own pride, call me Apollo."