Burn Away My Virtues

It appeared to Icarus that it all had happened from one moment to the next - he'd been minding his own business (more or less) and then, without warning, or at least without any warning he'd chosen to heed, he was falling. The fall was his world. In panic, he spread his wings, only to find them melting away like those of his namesake after barely a moment's respite, leaving his feathers to flutter away in the breeze. The fall sucked his breath out of him, and his heart was beating so hard in his chest out of primal fear that he thought it might give out any moment. If he'd been able to get even one good lungful of air in, he would have screamed in wordless terror.

Then his fall slowed, little by little, as feathers not his own brushed against and supported his trembling bulk. Hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny bodies supported him, and though they did not possess the strength to return him to his rightful home - the name of it was slipping his mind already, he just knew it wasn't here, nor in the place gravity was mercilessly drawing him toward despite the birds' assistance - it was some comfort that they'd come to his aid. The scream that he'd previously been unable to give voice to now came out as a tormented whinny, a desperate plea to all the things he'd lost and was still losing, as every foot of height lost was another memory muddled out of his conscious mind.

He mourned the loss of something he could no longer put a name on, something he no longer had the words to describe, something he'd now lost the ability to clearly picture. All that was left of his former home, his former life, was an agonizing hole in his heart, a burning-hot feeling that he wasn't where he should be, and that he might never again see the place he could no longer recall.

Darkness fell with him, blanketing the ground beneath them with a cover of seemingly-nothingness. By the time the birds left the trembling, sweat-soaked shell of his former self on a grassy hill, each leaving a feather stuck to his hide as a reminder that he wasn't alone in this new, unknown world, Eos's dawn was licking at the horizon, though at present the Goddess's name escaped his mind. With the first slivers of new light, bringing a glitter to the grass around Icarus's feet, he could see, all around him, slabs of stone stood at attention, set into the ground in neat rows and columns like unmoving, voiceless soldiers. Their presence comforted him, and he started walking, slowly, down a row chosen at random. He wasn't home, and he was too disorientated to have a feel for what direction his home might be in, so any direction was as good as another, far as he was concerned.

A building rose before him as he crested one of the cemetary's rolling hills, square and dead and unfamiliar, and for a moment he paused, ears flattened, considering this new development. It appeared to be a dwelling, but something about it seemed off, as though there was some aspect of design lacking for it to quite match his vague idea of what a home looked like. Gradually, his apprehension wore off as the world around him remained still, silent, and eventually he progressed, slowly, towards the nearest door, knowing without knowing how he knew that it would be his way inside. And in there... he could feel the draw of something familiar, something comforting... maybe the answers he sought would be in there?

The door might have been locked, but the lock was cheap and Icarus, even being only a shadow of his former glorious self, was still a stallion in his prime. It didn't take much effort to force the door open, and he wasn't much concerned about the sound of splintering wood or the fact that inward wasn't the way it was supposed to open. If whoever had constructed this dwelling hadn't wanted the door to open inward, they should have kick-proofed it better.

Passing through the door he found himself in a narrow corridor, claustrophobic around his large frame, but the call of that undefined something urged him on, guiding him to another door, one that opened with merely a nudge of his great big nose. There, on a table, surrounded by flowers that were starting to look a bit tired (and when he sampled them, they tasted no better than they looked - those were not flowers fed on sunlight and clean, cool rain!), stood a curious wooden box, much longer than it was wide or tall, with long handles along the sides. When he sniffed it, the strongest odor was that of chemicals that stung in his nostrils, but underneath that...

Death. Death, he knew. Death was comfortingly familiar. It never occurred to him that feeling that way might be unusual for a horse, or that it wasn't completely natural to speak with the dead - it was as much part of him as the blood in his veins or the hunger starting to gnaw at his gut.
 
"What happened?" he asked, nudging around the edges of the casket's top half to try to open it.

"I didn't see the car in time..." the voice of the dead wheezed, and Icarus paused in puzzlement, ears twitching.

"What's a car? What do you mean you didn't see it? Did YOU cause me to fall?" The terror of his recent fall ripped through him again, its breath fuelling the confused fear of being lost and alone in the world and fanning it into bright-hot anger. "How DARE you!?"

"I didn't see the car," the dead repeated. "Suddenly it was there, and then I was... like this. It's really quite restful."

"Oh." Icarus snorted. They didn't make dead like they used to. "I don't much care what happened to you. Why am I here?"

"I suppose you might've been hit by a car, too." The voice, still wheezy, was pondering. "Who are you?"

"I don't even know what a car is," the stallion snorted, nudging the casket harder. All that accomplished was moving it maybe half an inch on the table and knocking some of the flowers to the floor. "Why don't you know what's going on?"

Something about the spirit's voice gave the impression of a shrug. "I'm not God."

Frustrated, Icarus shook his mane and started pacing the small room. He'd never known the dead to make this little sense, he didn't think, and not once did he consider that he might be asking the wrong questions. After all, to know the right questions, he'd probably need to still have those flighty memories intact, the very same memories he was hoping for the dead to help him seize as they floated out of reach just before he could quite recall them.

One such memory tickled his mind, wrapped around it and sank in, as he spotted a small box in one corner, pieces of paper and bright coins glittering behind what looked like solid pieces of air. "Did they give you fare for Charon?"

"What?"

Icarus rolled his eyes. "The Ferryman. Did they give you a coin for him, in that blasted box of yours?"

"Wh-no, I suppose not." Icarus's near-useless conversation partner sounded flabbergasted; he assumed taken aback by the neglect of the people about to conduct the burial.

"Tell me how to open that box, and I'll help you." Unhelpful or not, leaving the poor spirit to wander the shores of the Styx was more than Icarus was willing to have on his conscience. Look at that, his good deed for the day!

Opening the collection box proved nearly as tricky as working the casket's latch with only his lips and teeth to aid him, but eventually Icarus managed to get into both (though in the interest of full disclosure, only one of them was going to be usable again after all was said and done) and picked up the largest of the silvery coins now strewn across the floor, leaning over the casket to drop it on the dead human's lips. Even death didn't look right in this strange place - the corpse looked too alive, had too much color, and hadn't been given much more than the clothes on its back for a funerary sacrifice. Maybe it just came from a poor family, maybe that was why Charon's obol was missing, as well.

"Do you know how I might get back home?" he asked the dead, mostly to fill the silence.

"Where do you live?"

"I... don't know." Icarus sighed, mindlessly snuffling among the flowers still on the table to see if any of them smelled more edible than another. They didn't. "I don't remember. I just remember falling."

"Probably had a knock on the head, then," the spirit suggested. "Concussed. It'll come back to you."

Maybe it was right. Maybe all he needed was a good meal and some sleep, and once he had those he could work out the rest.

The light filtering into the room through the curtains was brighter now, the dim dusk glow having gone through its chrysalis and emerged a perky morning sun. A dull growling outside the building caught Icarus's attention, and he raised his weary head, ears immediately perked and facing the sound. It came closer, and then, just as he was starting to contemplate how he might be able to fend off a predator of that size in his current state, fell silent. Gravel crunched under two feet, and then something slammed shut, loudly, before the crunch moved closer.

Then, suddenly, the rhythm of the crunch turned from walking to running, and with it, frantic shouting, something about a broken door. Probably the one Icarus had entered through - he really didn't care. Then, softer, he was barely able to pick up the words "break-in" and "robbery", which set his mental gears turning.

"Is this your family's home?" he asked the corpse.

"Of course not."

There was nothing of great value in the room that Icarus could see, so the obvious conclusion was that the corpse itself was what the voice outside feared would be stolen away. Maybe a warrior's corpse captured by the enemy - that would explain why there hadn't been a coin for the Ferryman in the body-box.

A split-second decision, during which he heard but didn't much care about the words "still inside" and "a voice", then the stallion was tugging at the hopelessly heavy, limp corpse, little by little moving it from its neat prone position in the casket. "I'll take you home!"

It would be a deed of heroes, to be sure, a deed not normally performed by a mere horse, and Icarus felt quite proud of himself as he finally managed to pull the corpse into place across his withers, just as some horrendous screaming approached the building. What manner of pet horrors had the stranger outside called upon?

A thunderous voice resounded, calling on him to come out with his hands above his head - how ridiculous, he had no hands to raise, and the corpse could hardly be expected to move - and he paused in the narrow corridor leading outside, to freedom, gathering courage. Then, he shot forward, hooves pounding the concrete floor hard enough to send painful jolts up his legs, eyes fixed on that narrow rectangle of light in front of him. Outside, he heard the wailing of the strange tribe's monsters, and a confused blending of voices, and then, when he broke out into fresh air, a sharp crack, like Zeus's thunder, followed by a burning pain in his shoulder. Though he tried to will himself to continue, his foreleg folded like a leaf of grass under him, sending him tumbling to the ground and the corpse flying over his head.

Even unable to stand properly, he was going to put up a fight, go down a hero if he had to. Someone called for "animal control" and he snorted in disdain, teeth bared and ears flattened. He would not be controlled! Though injured, he would fight to his last breath, and take as many of them with him as would take him on. No one would take him prisoner!

Behind him, he saw men in black armor slinking in through the door he'd exited, black tubes in their hands, shining black helmets covering their heads and black visors obscuring their features. No one seemed willing to come closer, though the voice he'd first heard, the crunch-on-gravel human, was visibly upset and gesturing towards the contorted corpse on the ground some yards from Icarus. Well, he could be upset all he liked; it had been a rescue fair and square, even if it had failed. The shrieking monsters had bright eyes in front, on either side of a grinning metal mouth, and even brighter, spinning blue eyes on top of their bodies. As he got used to their deafening wails, he managed to also pick out the same sort of growl as the one he'd first heard, before crunch-on-gravel started crunching. Maybe those wailing things were related to the growling beasts?

Then, another monster, growling but without that blinding blue top-eye or the horrible wail, pulled up, and a pair of humans opened gill flaps on the sides of its head and exited through them, before shutting them again with a sharp slam. They carried tubes like the warriors in black, but slimmer, though other than the curious weapons they didn't look much like heroes.

One of them pointed his tube at Icarus, and moments later he felt a sting in his hindquarters, like the bite of a gigantic horsefly, and kicked out with his leg in protest. A petty insect, attacking a hero? It was preposterous and humiliating! Another bite joined the first, and when he swung his head around to try to nip the pesky pests off his flank, he saw a pair of darts with a fluffy feather tail stuck into his hide. Little by little, he felt consciousness slip away, and could barely rouse himself enough to neigh in fury as someone started to carry away the fallen warrior he'd attempted to reclaim.

He didn't even like the dead human, which knew the answer to so few of his questions, but it had been his only guide in this strange world. Maybe it was a mercy that sleep whisked him away before he had more time to reflect on the injustice of it all.

And in his dreams, Hades came to him, giving him so many of the answers he'd craved, promising him retribution and restitution, and though he knew not to trust the lord of the underworld, at least Hades had not, like Zeus, let him down and cast him away, not even aiding him to restore the glory of a fallen hero, but leaving him to be taken down by dirty tricks.

By the time Zeus, too, spoke to him, his path was already chosen. He would not be cast aside twice.