The blue pill, or the red pill?

The sound of her answer, neither the troubled note upon which those few syllables leaned nor reference beneath its generalised notion, were lost to the great attentive eagle and his bright eyes turned back to view her with softness—and concern. There was a visible air about him, confidence and acceptance, that the suffering dove shared not; the lines of fatigue, stress and hunger loomed like shadowed trenches against the elegant features of her small dished face, and he knew too, that she was missing Miette. His thick crest curled harshly as the plush of his whiskered lips narrowed a gentle kiss upon her bared brow-line. The priority was to find shelter in this callous, unpredictable land of extremes, a base perhaps because all the wandering in the world had created a path to nothing but painful insecurity. This hell was not like Helovia, nor the other places they had briefed, there was no defined exit—and the gods only knew how they’d arrived here in the first place. The sound of something sinister—unmistakably so—brought a fresh waltz of prickles to his spine, and his heavy skull lifted as the dove sidled nervously nearer. The wind shook the leave at their tail savagely, though Noah was not foolish enough to presume it was the weather alone; not here. Drawing a long breath, eyes still fixed upon the forest her suggested, “have you the strength to travel by air?” The evening was coming on heavily now, descending across their chilled shoulders like an ominous curtain and drowning their capacity to judge their surroundings, with any sort of intelligence. He wasn’t a fan of wind anyway, but the gale buffeting their bodies camouflaged the treacherous tune around them; as though to emphasise a point of urgency, the eagle’s golden wings began to unfurl beneath her touch, and his broadened nostrils lifted, tasting the biting frost in the air.

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@Nora