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 [i]that[/i]!

"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 [i]hurt[/i] 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 [i]Frey[/i], 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."