Level_5 — Roleplayer Guild

As Frey pulled away from him in the tent, Asbel sat up and turned to face him -- just in time to see the young prince cough up a mouthful of blood into his cupped hands. Disgust turned his stomach, and Asbel recoiled with a wordless exclamation of horror. What was this? No nightmare would do that!

"What are you--" The phoenix began, but his concern was cut short as the prince dashed from the tent, and Asbel followed before he realized he'd moved, forgetting proper clothes or protection from the rain in his haste to follow. Nightmares he understood all too well. He'd had them, too, of course: dreams that threw him into the frigid darkness of the abyss between one incarnation and the next -- that dead-black emptiness all that he ever remembered of his lives before. But whatever happened to Frey was not just a bad dream: Asbel had seen the blind panic in the prince's eyes. Something had hurt him.

The rain beyond the protective shell of the tent struck Asbel like pellets of ice, but through the gloom the phoenix managed to see the prince only a few steps away. He started to call out, to call the prince back inside, but Frey began to scream that chilled him in a way that the rain could not, and then there was no shadow of the young men in sight, only the thrash of torn branches and sodden grass as the prince fled.

Asbel threw himself after him, following the sounds of the half-conscious prince even as shouts rose from the other tent: a confused and alarmed Augustine calling his brother's name. But Asbel couldn't speak, so focused did he have to stay on following Frey through the near-blackness of the forest, and he was not so mercifully spared the myriad attacks on his body: he stumbled through the woods, clothes cut, face and bare chest and bare ankles bleeding from scratching branches, hair caught and pulled with every other step, bare feet frozen and cut by underbrush so like blades and so different from the soft carpets of home.

Another cry disrupted the crashing ahead, and the phoenix nearly tumbled down the same hill, so close was he at last on Frey's heels. He scrambled down the steep, soaked hill and -- without no thought but one -- waded into the rain-gorged stream into which the prince had fallen. Trembling with the cold and the pain of a thousand stinging cuts and with the effort of finding his breath and with the effort of finding Frey, Asbel slid his arms around Frey's chest, hooked beneath the young man's arms, and slipped on the stream bed in his efforts to haul his delirious companion back to less dangerous ground. He could hear, faraway, the clamor of Augustine and Cassius coming in search of them.

His glow was weak, hardly there at all after the onslaught of the rain, and he was panting so hard he nearly couldn't speak, though he tried all the same. "Your Highness -- get up, please get up."

The most difficult part of falling asleep beside a strange, Asbel decided, was dealing with the invasive presence of their very breath. The phoenix, alone at night since shortly after hatching, had kept company in the evenings with summer breezes and the occasional fall of rain. The rustling breath of another person beside him was almost too loud, too unfamiliar to fall asleep to.

Exhaustion had stolen him into sleep long enough, but Frey's midnight panic woke Asbel in an instant, and the phoenix froze, dizzy with a similar alarm. Were they in danger? He lay stiff and silent in the near-darkness, lit again, but with his back to Frey, Asbel could not (and would not turn to) see what harried the prince. A nightmare -- that was all. If the brat had a bad dream tonight, so be it: after his attitude, the young man deserved nothing else.

Asbel closed his eyes to force himself to sleep again when arms coiled around his waist -- and every nerve in his body lanced alarm through his body. He did not flare, did not burn, but did not dare to breathe, either. Frey was still asleep, apparently, and what was presumably his face was pressed against Asbel's bare shoulder and left dampness there: tears in the dark.

"Your Highness," he whispered, half-hoping Frey would wake up, half-hoping he would stay asleep. The phoenix squirmed, trying to dislodge the arms around his waist and steady his own racing pulse. "Your Highness, let go. You are in no danger."

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