The Wings of Icarus
The draft in this corridor goes up. You have been underground long enough to find that offensive.
Forty feet overhead the shaft narrows to a throat of dressed stone, and past the throat there is a colour you have not seen in two days. It is not torchlight. It is not gold. It is the plain, stupid blue of an afternoon.
The Way Out
The Labyrinth is roofed everywhere except where Daedalus needed air. He needed a great deal of air: forges, kilns, a brazen bull, a hundred lamps. The vent shafts are the maze's one honest weakness, and they are all too narrow to climb and too long to survive falling down.
Which is why the wings exist. They are not a metaphor and they are not a curse. They are a solved engineering problem lying half-finished on a rack in R006 Gallery of Unfinished Wings, and the man who solved it wrote down how high is too high. The party's job is to finish somebody else's work, in the dark, with the materials to hand, and then to obey the one instruction he left.
The wings carry two people per pair, badly, for about ninety seconds. That is enough — the shaft is 180 feet and the updraft does most of it.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| A wing-frame | R006 Gallery of Unfinished Wings has four on racks, two of them sound. R047 The Wax Cellar has a bench and the makings. A frame can also be improvised from a bronze bird's ribs (X20) or a tent-pole and rope at Survival DC 16 |
| Wax and feathers | R047 The Wax Cellar — barrels of wax, crates of feathers, all of it inventoried by somebody who expected to come back. R061 Nest of Rustling Feathers and R020 Cage of the Storm-Crows are the ugly alternative: harpy feathers work, and harpies object |
| A shaft with lift | R020, R086 Roost of the Ash-Winged, and the chimney above R077 Furnace of Falling Coals all run to the surface. The vent tally in R006 names which one catches the morning updraft; Investigation DC 14 reads it |
| Knowing how high is too high | The note on the rack in R006, or History DC 12 from anyone who has heard the story. Wax softens near the surface where the sun heats the stone throat. A party that climbs above the throat instead of stopping at it loses the wings |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | A single grey feather, turning end over end in a draft that is going the wrong way — upward. |
| Trace | Wax drippings hardened on a step, in a place with no candles and no lamp bracket for forty feet. |
| Sign | A tally scratched beside a vent, in cubits: three columns of heights, one column circled. Somebody measured every shaft in this maze. |
| Proof | A workshop bench with a wing-frame clamped in it, ash-wood and bronze wire, one wing skinned and one bare. |
| Path | The vent map, and the note beside it: the third shaft draws at dawn. Do not go above the throat. |
| Door | The shaft itself. Wind coming down it, sky at the top, and a ledge at forty feet with an old pair of sandals on it, side by side. |
Resolution Scene
Fifteen minutes, and the decision is who flies and how high.
The party assembles the wings at the shaft's foot. Assembly is twenty minutes of in-world time and one Sleight of Hand, Arcana, or relevant tool check at DC 14 per pair — failure means the pair is airworthy but ugly, and the flier takes a −2 on the flight check.
The flight. One Acrobatics or Athletics check at DC 13 to ride the updraft; success is the surface, failure is a ledge at 80 feet and a second attempt. Nobody dies on a failed flight check in this Resolution. The shaft is a chimney, the updraft is real, and a botched flight ends with a bruised adventurer on a ledge looking sheepish.
The three real decisions.
- Who flies. Two per pair, and the party will not have six wings. Someone goes twice, someone throws the wings back down, or two people take the fallback. Let the players solve it; it is a better scene than any ruling.
- The throat. At 160 feet the shaft narrows and the stone is warm from the sun. A flier who pushes through the warm band at speed loses feathers. Anyone who took the History or Investigation clue knows to fold and climb the last 20 feet. Anyone who did not gets one save — Dexterity DC 13 — and on a failure arrives on the surface with a ruined wing and the story of their life.
- What comes up the shaft after you. Give the harpies of R020 or the lesser furies of R086 one round of pursuit and no more. The point of the scene is the sky, not the fight.
Fallback
No wax, no feathers, or no time to build. The shaft is still the way out. It is 180 feet of chimney-climb with an updraft helping and something roosting in it.
- Cost: three Athletics checks at DC 14 with a rope relay, one encounter fought on a ledge with no room to stand, and a long rest owed at the top.
- Or: the party carries the unfinished frames out through another Resolution and Daedalus's problem stays unsolved. That is a legitimate ending and the frames are worth a fortune.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- One surviving pair of wings. Ash, bronze wire, wax, and three thousand feathers. Usable once more — one controlled descent or one 200-foot ascent in a rising draft — and then the wax is gone and they are a wall-hanging. A famous wall-hanging.
- Daedalus's vent tally. A list of every shaft in the Labyrinth and what it draws. Worth an unreasonable amount of money to anybody who intends to come back.
- The sandals on the ledge, if the party takes them. Small. A boy's. Do not explain them.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two sound frames on the rack instead of one, all DCs −2, and the throat gives a warning: the wax goes tacky before it goes. |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | One sound frame; the rest must be built. Assembly DC 16, flight DC 15, and the shaft's roost is occupied — one wave of pursuit each round for the first three rounds |
| 15 | As APL 12, plus the shaft is the maze's only remaining exit at this point in your session, and something large is climbing it from below. Run the flight as a chase with initiative |
- Do not punish the myth. Every player at the table knows Icarus fell. The instinct is to make the wings a trap, and that instinct is wrong — it turns the most famous escape in Greek myth into a gotcha. The wings work. The only way to lose them is to ignore an instruction the party was explicitly given, and even then the cost is the wings, not a character.
- The updraft is the reason this is not a climb. Say it out loud early: the air goes up, hard, and it will carry you if you have surface enough to catch it. That single fact turns the vent shafts from scenery into a plan.
- The sandals on the ledge are the image. Two of them, placed neatly, the way you leave shoes when you mean to come back for them. Let the table sit with it.
- If a player wants to fly higher, let them, and let them lose the wings and nothing else. Then let them keep the memory of having flown out of the Labyrinth of Knossos on wax wings, which is worth more than the wings.
- This Resolution pairs beautifully with X20 The Bronze Bird — same workshop, same clues, different scale of ambition. If the party finds both, let them choose, and let the choice mean something about the party.