ཞི་བདེ

Just having some fun because there was a scene in my head demanding to be written.

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A threadbare square of red fabric, liberated from its bonds by a wild gust, fluttered below him and revealed the flow of the wind as it gently danced in the currents.

Atlas watched it twirl for a moment before folding his wings to descend. He sought to pluck it from the air, but soon found that the air disturbance from his own movements had set the scrap on an erratic course as he closed in, and he overshot it completely. While a master of manipulating the wind, he was not a particularly agile creature across short distances. The ossifrage could not make the rapid micro-adjustments that enabled his smaller kin to be such successful predators, but nor did he need to.

Undeterred, Atlas circled back and recovered his altitude with a few languid wingbeats and slowly approached it from below. The prayer flag swirled just out of reach, and he climbed steeply upwards, fanning his primaries to initiate a stall and rolling belly-up to snatch it out of the air above him with his talons. Righting himself, he allowed himself a quiet congratulatory twitter and transferred it to his bill. Then, as quickly as he had seized his prize, he tossed his head back and released it into the wind.

Twice more, he repeated this game, and on his third attempt he had retrieved the piece of fabric within a matter of seconds. A younger Atlas would have taken it home as a decoration for his eyrie, but that was not the way. Possession and attachment were discouraged, and it was a sacred object meant to fly and dissolve into the wind, not clutter the dusty corner of a cave.

This time, upon releasing the flag, he did not spiral after it, and watched it drift along and capture the attention of a playful family of choughs. Soon even they were little more than black specks, and he coasted along, at peace.

+2 Discovery Points

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the staff team luvs u