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Fate/Defiance
Chapter 38 - Melancholy
More months had passed. Summer had burned itself out quietly, and Autumn had arrived with inevitability.
The earlier phases of the ritual were finished now—Blood, and Yellow Bile. Under Asclepius' relentless supervision, the worst instabilities had passed.
Atalanta was also a great help during the yellow bile-phase correlating with summer. Training together, hunting together, painting together—those simple, physical interactions had stabilized his emotional responses when his yellow bile threatened to spike.
The emotional stability she aided with helped ground him and allowed Icarus to smoothly finish his second phase of preparation.
Although he still wasn't done, not even close, he no longer felt as fragile as he once did.
However, now the work had steadily shifted. From repair and reinforcement, to a higher focus on improvement.
The Black Bile phase was unlike the previous phases, because it was a lot different from Blood and Yellow Bile, as the other two humors were less… conceptual.
Black Bile was generally seen as the most detrimental of the humors and believed to be opposed to blood, the most natural and beneficial of the four humors.
It was considered an elusive liquid hidden in the spleen, and its excess was the source of depression. Even the direct translation of the word Black Bile, Melaina chole, was the origin of the word melancholy.
There was a good reason that too much Black Bile seemed to break men from within. However, it was worth noting that a measured amount sharpened them like a whetstone instead.
That line between was where the danger lay. His Black Bile was low in proportion to his dual mind physicality. This was something he had already sought to fix. His current pace in this phase would increase it enough to compensate for his unique condition. The final steps of this phase would also tie into the Phlegm phase, which corresponded to the brain.
Finally, the preparation for his final ritual involved strengthening his body's—for a lack of a better word—foundation, which would allow him to improve his constitution and metaphysical strength or "weight" enough to withstand the requirements of that future ritual.
ᨳ✶ଓ
Icarus sat cross-legged on the stone floor of his workshop's inner chamber. He was bare to the waist, and kept his breathing at a slow and deliberate pace. The hearth he lit at the center of his workshop burned low beside him, with its flame restrained but warm.
Asclepius watched him carefully from across the room with an analytical gleam in his eyes. However, the nervous tension and constantly hovering vigilance that plagued his state and defined the Blood and Yellow Bile phases finally seemed to settle.
"Begin the count again," Asclepius instructed strictly.
Icarus nodded silently at his words, eyes half-lidded.
He inhaled, internally tracking his breaths inside his thoughts. His breathing settled deep, below his chest, and into the abdomen.
The rhythm was slow. Purposefully so, as black bile did not respond well to force. His meditative trance had to be calm and composed.
Unlike blood, which could be stimulated and circulated, or yellow bile, which could be burned off through exertion, black bile accumulated through reflection.
Through inward focus.
Those who warned against it still noted its connection to philosophers, scholars, and those who thought too deeply for their own good. It was dangerous without release.
Which made it the most dangerous humor for a sort of person like Icarus.
Asclepius shifted his weight, an inked reed scratching lightly against primitive paper as he made a note. "Your baseline is stabilizing. Slowly. Too quickly would have been worse, but this pace is… acceptable."
"High praise," Icarus murmured dryly, eyes still closed.
"It wasn't praise. It was an observation." Asclepius didn't look up from his notes. "You're the most interesting case study I've had. Don't ruin it by dying."
After another cycle of breathing, Icarus spoke again. "How far off am I?"
Asclepius didn't answer immediately. "…Further than you'd like. Yet closer than anyone else could have gotten you. However, that's a given," he continued. "You're under-expressed. Black Bile accumulates when thought loops inward—when ideas stagnate, ferment."
Icarus exhaled slowly. "So?"
Asclepius' eyes sharpened. "You have to add more black bile to compensate for your dual-mind nature. Use emotion to create more—but, these feelings need depth."
"…You want me to brood?" Icarus summarized.
"Yes," Asclepius said without irony. "But correctly."
Icarus nodded sagely. "Brooding is an old friend."
Asclepius ignored his remark as he pinched his chin in thought. "This phase is not just emotional in the conventional sense. Black bile isn't sadness—it's density. It is the capacity to hold contradictory thoughts without resolving them."
He stepped closer, kneeling across from Icarus.
"Black bile grants depth of will. Without it, your improvements would remain superficial—if even successful at that—they would be enhancements unable to bear themselves."
Icarus really didn't like these vague, emotional terms. He was a craftsman, and inward reflection and meditation was an unenjoyable task. He wanted to create—build, have his thoughts and hands in a thousand different places at once!
Asclepius rose, gathering his notes. "Again tomorrow. Don't skip."
But alas, he deferred to the expert opinion.
ᨳ✶ଓ
Deep thoughts, huh?
Icarus had tried to keep himself from deep thoughts for some time now. Ever since he had left his father Daedalus, and had embarked on this journey of his own.
Athens always felt somewhat like a gilded cage to him. So unfamiliar yet still uniquely beautiful—a legendary city in its mythological prime. There was truly nothing he could compare it to during his own time.
To see the famed Acropolis and Parthenon, not as some damaged ancient relic—but as a lived-in, breathing and majestic monument! There was more, such as the golden and ivory encrusted statue of Athena, a legendary artwork long lost in his own time.
He could only imagine what else was out there. Could he even see things unrecorded and completely unknown in modern times—meet creatures unknown in classical mythology?
…Who else could ever have that opportunity?
Yet even so, it hurt having no one to share it with. No one to relate to and mutually understand.
Home was where the heart was, and there was always something telling his heart that it didn't belong here—that Daedalus' casual mannerisms were off, that the commonly accepted exploitation of slaves and children was horrific, that the hedonism of the Greek Pantheon was unacceptable.
That he just didn't feel quite right in his own skin.
The earliest years were the greatest struggle. He felt so unequivocally lost and confused, and there were always so many questions on his mind.
Why was he here? Who brought him here?
Was any of it real? Or, was he under some kind of psychotic fugue state and only one off-putting lamp away from full-scale insanity?
How could he be Icarus? Instead of some unknown random child, why was he a named character from Greek myth?
How could it be a coincidence?! Was it from some unknown intelligent design? Or, some infinitesimally small cosmic fluke?
…He didn't think he would ever find the answers. But he could accept that, eventually. He was nothing if not adaptable.
He could accept that he was lost and may never find his way home—that all that he loved was a universe away in another timeline… or plane of existence.
That reaching into the future was ultimately pointless, as what he truly valued would never really be there. He could accept it.
Even though it hurt like hell.
Icarus' breathing remained steady, but his thoughts no longer drifted. They sank.
He remembered the nights in Athens when sleep refused to come, when he would lie staring at the ceiling while the distant sounds of the city carried through the bounded field of Daedalus' home. Loud laughter and cheerful music. The casual cruelty of normalcy. All of it felt wrong to him, even then.
He remembered watching his father work.
The brilliance in his eyes—and the obsession behind them. The way Daedalus could create wonders capable of reshaping the world, yet still be so profoundly broken inside.
Icarus had left him, abandoned him to his fate, but he didn't regret that choice. But regret was not the absence of loss. No matter how Icarus thought of him, Daedalus was his father in this life, and someone that time had long made familiar—the one constant in such a foreign world.
But now, even that was gone.
…What if he never truly belonged anywhere?
The thought settled, unpleasant but undeniable.
He had knowledge of a future that would never truly be his. Memories of a time that no longer existed, and people who would never know him. Even if he succeeded—became something greater than mortal—what then?
Become a Heroic Spirit, and be placed on the Throne of Heroes?
Live as a defense tool kept by the Counter Force only to be copied and deployed—or commanded as some arrogant magus' personal servant?
A servant that wasn't even really him, but just an echo of himself shaped and altered by belief he had no control over? The idea always frightened him, as it was the worst sort of thought.
An undeniable truth.
He always tried to ignore it, to shut it in a box called hope. Now though, it simply sat there open, cold and solid.
Icarus felt his jaw tighten.
For the first time since he arrived in this world, he allowed himself to acknowledge a quiet belief that he had long avoided.
He was afraid of being forgotten.
Not plummeting from the sky, or falling to the sea.
But being unremembered. Not as the Icarus who flew to the sun… but as the nameless person who became Icarus, only to never amount to anything different.
That his quiet struggle against fate would go unknown, or have never even mattered at all.
He felt the weight of his thoughts and started to understand what Asclepius meant: black bile did not ask questions—it held them.
His dual minds—once so quick to partition, to categorize—found less room to maneuver. The thoughts lingered instead, heavy and unresolved.
ᨳ✶ଓ
Pollux spied Icarus curiously as he gazed into the unending distance dramatically, occasionally looking down before staring back at the sun with a purposely sharp jaw.
"...What are you doing?" she asked, unable to help questioning his latest antic.
"Brooding," he responded wistfully with a sigh.
He felt like Luke Skywalker, looking out into the sunset with a dramatic theme bellowing behind him.
"Why?" Pollux replied with a deadpan face.
"Mostly for the sake of it." His voice changed to a more casual tone, one that she was more familiar with, as he glanced at her with a smirk.
Pollux tilted her head in greater confusion. "But, why?"
Icarus turned towards her with a blank stare. "…That's a good question," before he promptly continued his distant gaze into the horizon.
Pollux felt her hand clench into a fist.
"...So, why?"
"I don't know. Gimme some time to brood over it more."
"..." Pollux twitched, having to hold back from teaching him why it was never a good idea to anger a woman from Sparta.
Icarus always loved to play mind games with her. But she didn't like word games. They were unfriendly to her. She preferred saying what she meant—and it helped that she usually meant exactly one thing at a time.
Pollux shifted her weight from foot to foot, glaring at him with narrowed eyes.
"You're a strange person," she spoke at last.
"...I'm sure I am to you." Mythological Boomer, Icarus thought crudely. He wasn't strange; it was everyone else who was strange.
I'm not wrong. It's the world that's wrong!
He huffed a bit at his dramatic thought. What was he, a chūnibyō? Hell, he didn't even really know what that word meant anyways.
Pollux soon spoke up once more, "That's not what I mean," correcting her previous words, before she paused, then frowned. "…Well. That is what I mean."
Icarus just rolled his eyes in response. He could never understand the mind of a brutish Spartan woman. After all, he was an educated young boy from Athens. They were intellectually incompatible.
So he didn't respond further, and simply continued to brood with eyes glazed over in thought.
Pollux just stared at his profile for a while, until she finally realized what had caught her curiosity.
He looked sad.
The decision was made in an instant.
She leaned closer, peering at his face from the side, invading his space with the boldness of someone who didn't understand the concept of personal boundaries. "You look sad. I don't like it."
He blinked once in disbelief.
"I-I'm not sad!"
She squinted in suspicion. "You stuttered."
"I did not!"
"Liar."
"I paused, briefly—between words."
"That's the same thing."
"No, it isn't. Stuttering implies hesitation, or nervousness. Pausing doesn't… most of the time," he finished lamely.
Pollux clicked her tongue in annoyance, then abruptly placed herself in front of him—directly in his line of sight, blocking the horizon entirely, completely destroying his internal delusion of a binary sunset.
"There," she declared. "Now you can't brood at anything."
Icarus stared at her blankly. "…You're sabotaging me."
Pollux replied with the same stare. "I don't know what that means."
"…"
Icarus started pulling at his hair in frustration. "It means you're ruining—!"
"—Helping," she corrected.
He could only huff in response. "...Not really."
Pollux then leaned forward. "If you're not sad, and you're no longer brooding, then what are you doing?"
He opened his mouth dryly. "…Contemplating."
Pollux nodded, satisfied. "That's better."
"They're literally the same thing!"
She ignored him and instead scrunched her features into an exaggerated imitation of his distant expression, before standing by his side and dramatically jutting out her jaw.
Icarus winced, cringing at his own copied pose. "Do I really look like that?"
"Yes." She grinned, clearly pleased. "You look less like that when you're annoyed."
"I am annoyed."
"Good." She stood abruptly, brushing dirt from her hands. "Come on."
"Come on where?"
She shrugged. "Anywhere. Somewhere that isn't here. You brood too much here."
"That's the point."
"Brother broods too. It doesn't help him either."
Icarus tried to put up a resistance, but Pollux ignored him and grabbed his wrist, tugging, this time showing Icarus what it meant to be physically incomparable.
"I'm brooding for my ritual, Pollux! Doctor's orders!"
"Then… contemplate while walking."
"That's not—"
She pulled again, cutting off his words. "You can brood later."
Icarus hesitated for a moment, before eventually, he sighed, "…You're interfering with a delicate internal process."
She hummed wordlessly in reply, unbothered. Against his better judgment, he let her drag him along. Not that he had much of a choice anyways.
She didn't take him far, just toward the trees edging the clearing.
Pollux didn't remain silent as they walked, mostly talking about nothing in particular.
Icarus felt the cool breeze brush against his skin, along with leaves crunching faintly beneath their steps.
She spoke about something stupid Castor did earlier. About how Atalanta had been thoroughly crippling the local mouse population and how Chiron had to deal with the complaints of forest nymphs as a response.
Somewhere along the way, Icarus realized he hadn't thought about brooding for quite a while. By the time the sun dipped lower, Pollux finally ran off to bother her brother instead, and Icarus was left standing alone again.
He frowned. "…Damn it. She got me."
No wonder Athens was always fighting Sparta! he thought understandably, finally finding a way to relate to the weirdos of his hometown city-state.
"That little menace," he muttered. "She sabotaged my brooding—ruined my Black Bile gains!"
Icarus pouted.
Hours later, back in the quiet of his workshop, he sat down once more, intending to resume where he'd left off.
But he struggled to return to his previous state, and instead exhaled sharply through his nose, with irritation blooming in his chest.
The hearth crackled softly in response.
Icarus leaned back against the stone, eyes half-lidded, torn between amusement and annoyance.
Well, it was probably for the best in the end.
A whetstone sharpened a blade. But it wasn't meant to grind it away entirely.
Author's Notes:
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