The light hit him like a blow — not gentle, not warm, but sharp and blinding after so long in the Labyrinth's breathless dark. Icarus stumbled forward, squinting into the sun-swept horizon where the sea glittered like shattered glass. The wind rushed over his skin, tugging at his tunic and salt-stiff hair, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, not from fear, but from the sheer vastness of it all. He had lived too long in walls that turned in on themselves, in stone that echoed his father’s silence and his own quiet hunger for more. Now the sky opened like a promise above him — endless, bright, terrifying. He smiled, not because he felt safe, but because he didn’t.