Icarus

The wax holds as far as the top of the climb, and not one foot further.

A pair of wings built from ranks of feathers rather than drawn — each one a shaft with a vane either side of it, lengths running along a profile from the shoulder to the longest primaries four-fifths of the way out. Scroll is the ascent: the wings open as you read, and past the point where the wax gives they come apart, outermost feathers first, tumbling and falling out of the frame. At the foot of the page there is a body and almost no wing. It is the pair to hyperion and its opposite — that one completes by arriving, this one completes by coming apart.

Integration

<link rel="stylesheet" href="anthemion.css">
<script type="module" src="anthemion.js"></script>

<anthemion-icarus count="34000" weight="42" feathers="12" melt="62" spread="60" sun="40" cursor="0" tilt="0" spin="0" drive="view"></anthemion-icarus>

Slot

A closing section on a long page, where the scroll should end in a fall rather than an arrival.

Custom properties

--cloud-ratio
--cloud-ink

Budget

One per page, and never two clouds on one screen — they read as a screensaver.
Never with a krater, an antikythera or a hyperion. It is the page's cloud.
Decorative. It reports no value a reader could act on, so it must never be given a progressbar role — ouroboros, chariot and caduceus are the page's real indicators.
It needs the scroll it is bound to to be long. On a page under about two screens the wax gives before the wings have finished opening and the whole arc is lost.
Give it a landscape box. A spread pair is far wider than it is tall, and the room under the wings is where the feathers fall through.
Keep `weight` low. The density comes from marks overlapping, not from each one being dark.
Do not put it behind the one thing on the page that must be read. It ends by scattering marks across its whole box, and body copy under falling feathers is body copy nobody finishes.
Leave `cursor` off unless the form is what a visitor is actually looking at. It is a lean, not a follow, and a page whose background reacts to every mouse movement is a page nobody reads quietly. It binds nothing on a touch device or under reduced motion.