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Althea listened quietly as her father, a simple ploughman, recounted the marvelous events of that day. He told her of the gods whom he had seen flying high above the earth, and the terrible fall of one. Althea listened, enraptured, as her father described the way the feathers drifted slowly to the ground, starkly in contrast with the descent of the god from whose wings they had come. But the hour grew late, and her mother sent her off to bed when the sun had set far off on the horizon. As she kissed her father goodnight, he handed her a feather, caked with wax. This, he told her, had come from the wings of a god.
When sleep claimed her that night, her dreams were filled with winged gods.
The next morning, the young girl made her way down to the water where her father had seen the one god fall. Following close by her was a partridge, which twittered happily as it cavorted through the air. Accompanied by the bird alone, Althea came to the waters and looked around her at the shore.
A fisherman sat on the sand, waves lapping at his feet. His fishing rod lay ignored beside him, and he seemed to be contemplating something lost beneath the waves. He looked up at her as she approached.
“Were you here yesterday,” Althea asked innocently, “when the gods flew over this place?” He answered her with a brief nod, saying nothing, still lost in thoughts of the events of the previous day. “Did you see where the one god fell?”
He turned his eyes from the girl, focusing once more on the water. “There,” he said simply, pointing off into the distance. “There, where the waves crash against the rocks. You won’t see anything of him, though. The waves have swallowed him whole and you can see nothing from above them.”
The girl smiled and thanked the fisherman, not in the least put off by his statement. She skipped along the sandy shore, making her way to the place he had shown her. If she could not see where the god had crashed from above the water, she would see it from below.
Althea stepped into the water, shivering as she felt its chill on her feet. It soaked through her clothes, weighing her down, but she paid that no heed. As she moved deeper into the water, she felt its icy bite against her skin melt away as she grew accustomed to it. Within a few paces, the water came up to her neck as she stood on the balls of her feet on the sand that shifted beneath the waves.
Althea breathed in deeply, filling her lungs with as much life giving air as she could so that she could get as close as she could to the place. She silently asked the god Poseidon to help her, and dove beneath the waves, feeling the tug of the waves to shore lessen as they parted around her.
She swam in the direction she thought she must go, and stared in wonder at the view around her. Above her, the sun played on the waves, scattering light on the floor below her, and to either side of her swam the mysterious creatures of the sea. As she continued, Althea thought she saw a deep depression in the sandy bottom, and she dove deeper to get a closer look.
The deeper she went, though, Althea could feel the pressure building in her lungs as they screamed for air. When she thought she could bear the pain no longer, she turned and tried to swim for the surface.
She could feel a great dizziness building in her head; her lungs continued to burn. Her clothes, which she had ignored before, now pulled her down towards the bottom as she struggled desperately to go up for air. She kicked more frantically at the water, uselessly trying to continue on, but it was too late. Black tendrils of death gripped her, wrapping themselves around her senses, and she sank to the bottom.
Just before death claimed her, she saw a shape race across the water’s surface. She smiled, releasing the breath she had been holding, as she beheld the flight of the partridge. Perhaps, she thought, the mysteries of the skies were meant for the birds, and those things that the waves hid from sight were meant for the eyes of sea creatures alone.
Her family and friends mourned her for weeks on end, and all who heard her story remembered Althea as the girl who swam to depths too deep to see where Icarus, the one who had flown too high, had crashed.
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