This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.
When my brother’s name was hidden from me, mazed in doublespeak, twined in euphemism, the older one, the tragic birth, such a pity, even then I knew the stories, drank them deep with my milk. Daedalus, inventor, murderer, exile, kinslayer. How he grew so impudent, so sodden with drink and love for my mother that my father could bear it no longer and threw him and his sullen boy in the tower where they could dream away the years in gentle perversion and harmless blasphemy. How they broke free at last, how one died, how one flew on without a backward glance. O, great daring! Even my father’s magisterial fury was tempered with admiration.
He was my inmost heart, second only to the king and queen my parents; o, to have cracked wide my vasty wings and soared out over the unsettled sea! To have compassed this fairy earth! It is one thing to want a thing, and another thing indeed to know it might be done. If done once, why not again? Did we not have his notes, did we not have wealth enough? Did we not already hold every land the sun touches? Not gods, perhaps, nor their maddened, wild children, but more than human. I was born to a higher place.