Where the Height of Ambition Meets the Depth of the Soul
Icarus stood on the precipice and dipped his feathers in the pot of melting wax. He looked down at the old man tending the flock below.
“Old man,” Icarus said. “You think men are fixed like your mountains but I tell you they are wax. Every soul has a price. It is not always gold. Sometimes it is love or the heat of the sun. Offer a man the thing he craves most and he becomes clay. Raise the price high enough and the gentlest poet will turn butcher. For the right height anyone will let go of the earth.”
The Shepherd leaned on his crook and shook his head.
“You mistake desire for capacity,” the Shepherd replied. “You see the sky but I see the shoreline. The ocean rages but it cannot swallow the rock. In my mind every soul has a limit. It is a final shore that cannot be bribed. Pour the whole sea into a cup and the cup does not grow. It merely overflows. The cup cannot hold more than its shape allows.”
The Shepherd gestured to the wild grass.
“There are men whose limit stops at a whisper,” he said. “They might refuse to tell a lie no matter the kingdom you offer them. Their tongue is a locked gate. Yet that same man might find murder to be as light as a feather. Killing sits within his boundary but lying sits outside it.”
Icarus paused with a feather in his hand.
“Your scales are broken,” Icarus said. “Surely blood weighs more than breath. To steal the light from a man’s eyes is the ultimate theft. A lie is but a momentary fog. If a man can stomach the feast of murder surely he can swallow a crumb of deceit. Is not the greater sin the harder limit to cross?”
“You measure sin by its weight but I measure it by its nature,” the Shepherd said. “You think the soul is a ladder where murder sits at the top. But the soul is a garden. To the man we speak of violence is an honest trade. When he strikes with the sword he does so in the open sun. The act is terrible but it is true. But a lie? To him a lie is a rot that starts from the inside. He cannot bear the lie because it warps reality itself.”
The Shepherd looked up at the boy on the ledge.
“He would rather be a truthful butcher than a deceitful saint. So he kills you to your face and sleeps soundly. Yet he would break before he spoke a falsehood. For in his strange limit murder is only a crime against life but a lie is a crime against himself.”
[Read from the beginning: Chapter 1: The Wax and the Wire]