Icarus

An awakened human who saw the war was manufactured, said so, and was called a traitor before he had raised a hand against anyone.

He narrates Acts 2 and 3's opening in the first person.

What he saw

That the fear arrived too fast and too evenly to be real.

Nobody asked why the monsters had lived peacefully beside us for centuries. Nobody wondered why the fear came so suddenly, so completely, so uniformly across every human settlement on Earth. Nobody except the deserters. (ch. 24)

ICR: The fear isn't real! It's manufactured! Planted! Fed to us like poison until it grew into something we couldn't distinguish from truth!

He told his family, his friends, and his commanding officers. "They called me traitor before I ever picked up arms against them. So I became what they named me."

What he knows that the war denies

The balance of power runs the opposite way to the propaganda.

An average monster could take down ten average humans [...] But an awakened human, one whose soul had fully manifested its power, could slaughter dozens of awakened monsters without breaking a sweat.

ICR: We were never the prey. We were always the predators. The fear just gave us permission to hunt. (ch. 24)

His father

The centre of ch. 24, and the thing the volume is built on.

His old unit finds the deserters, led by a field commander wearing silver insignia: the man who taught him to hold a sword, who read him bedtime stories about heroes and monsters.

ICR: How is mother and little brother?

The question comes out before he can stop it, "a son's question, not a soldier's". Recognition flickers and the fear closes over it.

They fight with the patterns his father drilled into him. His blade shatters. He drives the broken hilt up through the ribs and finds the heart.

His sword fell from nerveless fingers. He looked down at the wound, then up at me, and for just a moment the fear lifted. For just a moment, he saw me clearly. His son. His student. His greatest failure.

He waits beside the body for last words that never come.

The fear had claimed him so completely that even in death, he couldn't remember love.

His own verdict on the day:

Sometimes being right doesn't make you righteous. Sometimes seeing clearly just means watching the world burn with perfect vision.

His mother and his brother

This entry once recorded them as asked after once and never mentioned again. That is wrong. They are the reason the volume happens.

Ch. 24 has him ask his father, "How is mother and little brother?", one exchange before he kills him. Ch. 27 tells him where they are, and it is his own answer to why he will hit the camps: "My mother is in one of those camps. Her little brother. People who never chose this war."

Ch. 40 is the reunion. He finds her in a second-floor dormitory, thinner, greyer, "but her eyes were still the same warm brown that had comforted me through childhood nightmares". She carries only the tag ELN, and the prose never gives her name.

That tag belongs to somebody else as well. ELN is used again in ch. 72 for Elena, Neru's mother, through a whole chapter. The two women are unrelated and appear thirty-two chapters apart.

The saga reuses short tags, and this is the second case the archive has found after AST in ch. 13. Reading the tag as a name would make Icarus's mother Elena, and she is not. See rogen-thorne.md.

Her first words are about the other one:

ELN: Your brother - he's in the men's dormitory. Building five. Icarus, they separated us when we arrived. Said it was for our own safety, but- NLH: It's a control mechanism. Easier to manage people when they're isolated from their support systems.

The brother is named Ian, and he is fourteen, "somehow taller than me despite the months of captivity". He is held with twenty other male relatives of deserters.

What he says is what the camps were for:

IAN: They told us you were dead. Said the monsters had killed you. ICR: I'm very much alive. And I'm not the one who put you in a cage.

They are pulled out of the compound mid-evacuation, "like invisible hands reaching through reality itself", and land in Aldric's throne room. See aldric-thorne.md.

Nilah

Fifteen years his best friend, and the only human who looked at the fear spreading through their species and said "That's not real". They left together. See nilah.md.

The wings

Ch. 53. Akumu pulls him close to devour him slowly, and their eyes meet, "mortal blue against cosmic void".

ICR: You think you know what I am. You think I'm just another mortal to break.

He gets his hands around what passes for its throat and holds on while its flesh burns his palms. Then wings of light open out of his back.

Not the gentle glow of divine blessing that priests spoke of in hushed whispers. [...] These were wings of war, of vengeance, of righteous fury given form.

They weren't just bright, they were truth given form, justice made manifest, hope weaponized into something that could cut through the darkest void.

Akumu screams, "with a voice that had never known fear until this moment".

AKU: Get off me! You can't kill me!

The name

He notes it himself, gently, at the worst moment: his father "loved a little boy named Icarus who'd dreamed of flying". His last chapter in the volume is "Icarus Of The Freedom", ch. 53.

Ch. 53: the wings, and what they do to everyone else

Akumu's mistake is intimacy. It pulls him close "perhaps intending to devour him slowly, to savor his despair", their eyes meet, and the battle goes quiet.

ICR: You think you know what I am. [...] You think I'm just another mortal to break.

He gets his hands round its throat, and it burns them, and he holds on.

And then - impossibly - wings of pure light erupted from his back.

The chapter is careful that they are not benediction: "Not the gentle glow of divine blessing [...] These were wings of war, of vengeance, of righteous fury given form", and later "truth given form, justice made manifest, hope weaponized".

Akumu screams, and the narration insists on the word:

Not roar. Not shriek. Scream - with a voice that had never known fear until this moment. The ancient horror that had devoured civilizations [...] was experiencing something entirely foreign to its existence: genuine terror.

The thing that manufactured a war out of fear meets it for the first time in its existence, from a man it was holding.

Everyone else's power stops mattering. Not defeated, outclassed:

• Nilah's flames gutter, "not extinguished but simply made irrelevant by the greater fire that burned within Icarus".
• Neru's ice sublimates "without heat".
• Fenris's claws feel light in his own hands.
• Matta's prey-sense flattens her ears, screaming about "power that transcended the natural order".

The narrator watching from the heavens gives up on describing it: "I fumbled for words that didn't exist."

Where the wings come from is still not stated. Ch. 53 shows them arriving and what they do, and nothing before or after explains them.

He dies

Ch. 53 is the death itself. He carries Akumu into the sun, and the narrator of that chapter, watching from the heavens, gives him the name in the same breath: "He's the first and only apostle of Freedom." See ../lore/the-incarnate.md.

Ch. 54 is the world finding out, and it is told entirely by strangers.

The chapter has no plot. It is a run of unnamed first-person witnesses, each given a paragraph, each describing the same instant from somewhere different: a sixty-three year old mending nets, a starving child who had been deciding whether the day was worth living, a widow twenty-seven years into her grief, a painter with a lit match held to their own canvases.

What each of them reports is the same, and it is not rescue. The circumstance does not change. The despair attached to it lifts.

The grief is still there [...] But the poison in it

The paintings are still imperfect [...] But the certainty that my imperfection makes me worthless [...] that poison has been drawn

That is the correct ending for a war fought by a thing that fed on fear. Akumu never made anyone's life worse. It made the weight of it unbearable. Killing it gives nobody their dead back.

Then the volume's last claim:

And all the wars in the world stopped, all the blades dropped to the ground and the looks of killing intent turned into warm embraces as the humans and monsters once again bore peace in their souls.

Ch. 55 refers to "the grand sacrifice of the Apostle of Freedom", and the peace that follows is built on it.

Apostle of Freedom is his title, set against Akumu's Apostle of Fear. The volume that kills him is named for his enemy and he is named for what he answered it with.

By Acts 4 and 5 he has a statue in the Hall of Heroes, "with his golden wings spread wide", and a father lifts his daughter so she can touch its marble hand generations later (ch. 122). Bloom Valley is described as "the world Icarus had dreamed of when he flew into the sun".

Ch. 147 gives a second reading of his death

Forty years later, the narrator watching Nilah fight offers an account of why Icarus died that the volume of his death does not:

Icarus grasped this before the end - I felt the moment he made peace with his limitations, accepted that he'd done what he could and the rest belonged to those who came after. That acceptance killed him as surely as any blade, let him die in that heat because he'd given himself permission to rest.

And earlier in the same chapter, on what Vazroth took from Nilah: "Vazroth took Icarus from you - not directly, not with blade or power, but through the slow erosion of hope that killed him from the inside out. Let him die believing himself a failure, flying into the sun."

This is not how ch. 53 and ch. 54 present it. There it is a sacrifice that lifts despair off the whole world, and four strangers report the moment as release. Ch. 147 reads the same act as a man who had run out of reasons to keep standing.

The archive records both. They are not incompatible, and the second one is spoken by somebody who was watching from above and says he felt it happen.

Ch. 147 also says the generation upstairs expected him to be the protagonist, "the Blade of Dawn [...] He was the sun, and the rest of you were his light reflected", and were surprised when Nilah became the remembered one instead.

Ch. 119: Nilah says it first

The entry records ch. 147's reading, from a narrator watching from above, that Icarus was let to "die believing himself a failure". Ch. 119 has Nilah say the same thing twenty-eight chapters earlier, as a person who was there:

NLH: calling him hero when he died thinking himself a failure.

NLH: He spent his last moments wondering if we did enough. If the peace we bought was worth the price we paid. If the things we became in order to win were things that deserved to survive the war.

So the ch. 147 account is not a late reinterpretation the saga springs on the reader. His closest friend has been carrying it since Act 6, and it is why she would not stand in front of his statue.

Ch. 92: Nilah remembers it differently

Three years on, she recalls the death, and her version does not match the chapter it happened in.

Ch. 53. Akumu is in his grasp. He carries it up. "The wings carried him higher and higher, a blazing comet ascending toward the sun. Akumu struggled in his grasp [...] the grip of those burning hands was unbreakable." He takes it into the corona with him. The sun is the weapon.

Ch. 92. Akumu was going for the sun itself, and he intercepted:

The embodiment of fear had tried to possess the sun itself, to turn the source of all light and warmth into an instrument of terror. Someone had to stop it, and Icarus had been the only one who could fly high enough, fast enough.

Those are different events. In one he chooses the sun as the place to end a thing he is already holding. In the other the sun is the target and he is defending it.

The archive records both without deciding. Ch. 53 is narrated by somebody watching from the heavens as it happens. Ch. 92 is a grieving woman on an empty plain three years later, and the chapter is about how she carries him rather than about what happened.

Ch. 92 also supplies his last words to her, which appear nowhere else:

Take care of them for me, Nil. Take care of everyone.

And the detail she has built a habit out of. She presses Celosia flowers because they are the colour his wings were. See nilah.md.

The wings stay visible

Ch. 53 ends on the bracket "You can faintly see the suns' wings." Ch. 92 has Nilah see them still there three years later, "spread across the solar disk like shadows cast by clouds that weren't there", and flexing.

The chapter stops short of confirming him alive in it. It has the sun hold still for her, "neither rising nor setting", and gives her no answer.

Ch. 42: the man he would have been

Korren's mist gives him the version of himself who never deserted, a royal guard captain wearing the uniform, with the same blade "polished to a mirror shine. No nicks, no bloodstains."

The difference between them is one night: that self killed his father rather than walking away.

The double argues from results, and shows the world he would have made, "the camps expanded, made more efficient, more permanent [...] systematic, bureaucratic extermination", and calls it leadership: "A few suffer so many can live."

Icarus's reply, with the double's sword already between his ribs:

ICR: at least I'll die as myself, not as someone else's idea of who I should be.

And the argument he wins on, which is the saga's thesis in his mouth:

ICR: One man's principles? No. But one man's choice to stand up, to refuse to accept the world as it is, to believe in something better - that can inspire others to make the same choice.

He takes the blade in his bare hands and pulls himself forward along it.

Open questions

• His soul trait, which is never named. He is repeatedly called awakened, and what finally manifests in ch. 53 is wings of light that arrive from nowhere the story has prepared.
• His mother's name. She carries the dialogue tag ELN and is never named in the prose.