Check out the update to The Eyes of God:

“Am I mad? Has reason abandoned me that I now consort with fowl? Perhaps I still within the knotted roots of death, in those final throes, envision your black pinions, or better yet alive, not well, wander about in perpetual insanity. You take me from my path, Oraculi, but where do you lead?”

“To the Mountain.”

“Yet how can I trust my eyes once touched by madness? I’ve seen the madness in others, and I knew myself mad.” Gazing once more into the canyon, I search for the body, the bugs, for any sign of the danger I flew. Empty, dusty waste, the dry riverbed lays barren of all life. “How should I know if I was at the Mountain, or still dying somewhere alone?”

I felt the tickling of Oraculi’s feathers against my ear as he puffed himself, then a sharp pain as he pinched my lobe within his beak. Swatting at him, I cupped my hand over the now bleeding ear.

“You’ve made me bleed,” I accused him.

Hopping from my shoulder, he glided to the ground in front of me. Picking up his taloned legs in that strange gait of birds, leaning from one side to the next, he wandered to my foot.

“Is this not real,” said he pecking at the ribbon torn from my shirt, “the bandaged you’ve tied about your ankle? Is that not a dark stain bleeding through? Are you not here, did you not climb out of that pit?” Spreading his wings, he flapping uplifted the dried dust of drought in a brown cloud. About my eyes the dirt gathered, and blinking I tried to clear them. “What good is it,” I hear him say, “imagining that closing your eyes makes the world disappear?”

Opening my eyes, I find my companion, a black, beady eye shining in the sun like a bit of glass locked onto me.