"One more. Hold still."

After seventeen years, the tug of just one more plucked feather caused hardly a stir. Asbel felt a brief, sharp sting beneath his shoulder, then little more than a dull, ticklish ache. Oftentimes, the alchemists wanted the down from his chest and sides, but their larger potions these days called for contours and primaries, and the ache of their absence irked him more than the removal of the feathers themselves.

But -- ah, to be done for the day. Asbel shook himself in a flurry of scarlet and gold and hopped onto the outstretched arm of the nearest sorcerer. With a bow, the man deposited the eagle-sized bird onto the stone tiles, and Asbel, trailing sparks, hopped awkwardly away from his keepers to tuck himself into the nest of rugs and pillows spread across a wide, low bed against the nearest wall. The stone of the floor and the walls, though a bland sandstone dun, at least tempered the heat he provided to a room so cozy. Even with open windows, the glass marbled and green, and a breeze rippling through the tapestries on the walls, the sorcerers had stripped down to bare feet and shirtsleeves.

While the alchemists bickered over the quality of the plucked feathers, the phoenix forced his body to change, felt the hitch in his chest that accompanied the shifting of his skin, the cracking of his bones. Heat burned through his bloodstream; slender spires of smoke rose from his neck and back. With one clumsy hop, Asbel rose from the floor and landed on the bed, and in a moment of overbearing heat and brief pain, twisted his shape in a miniature inferno, and then... finished. The phoenix waved away the lingering smoke with one human hand.

He did so hate the shifting back and forth. He would have preferred to remain human had the alchemists not groveled so for his feathers. And as they fed him, clothed him, worshiped him, he could hardly refuse. When he was hardly more than a sooty chick cracked from its smoking shell, these humans had sheltered him, taught him. He may have been but a trinket, a tool, but at least they kept him in pristine condition.

Yet Asbel could feel, exploring the crevice of his shoulder with one copper-colored finger, the mark left by the plucked feather. When he had been younger, bright green eyes blazing with curiosity, he had positioned himself in front of the full mirror to see the scars, but he hated to see them now -- the brown specks along his back and arms like human freckles, marks left behind by a thousand stolen feathers.

Oh, well. A single lifetime for his admirers would last as long as a lit candle; after that, he would be free to leave. This tediousness, then, would be all in his past. That he never remembered his past lives was a mercy, perhaps: to know what existed in the untouchable world beyond would have been a curse too great to bear.

With a sigh, the phoenix rolled off the bed long enough to pull on a scarlet tunic cut with citrine thread and pants to match. No shoes, of course; he despised shoes. And he would never stoop to wearing gloves, though he had a tendency to burn stripes of burnt wood into the posts of his bed when he woke startled. But one hand brushed through his burnished golden hair produced no smoke, only a subtle shift in color from gold to orange and back. With hair appropriately tousled, Asbel touched other pieces of his human body out of habit: earlobes shot through with looped earrings, a nose straight and sharp, knees and legs and toes accounted for.

All in one piece. Good. Settled, then, Asbel rocked back against the pillows heaped onto his bed and watched as the alchemists continued to bicker over their small and precious collection of newly-gathered, softly-glowing treasures.