Frey's latest shouts of irritation woke Asbel from a restful sleep, and the phoenix rolled onto his face with a groan. Even with his myriad of minute scratches healed, he still felt sore from the adventures of the night before, and he was in no mood to walk in company now. Nothing had changed, no matter what had happened the night before. Frey was, from the sound of it, back to being as bratty as he had been before the midnight incident, and Asbel wanted nothing to do with him. Frey would be mouthy, Cassius would be closed-off, and Augustine would be... far too nice.

With the stiff movements of a clockwork mechanism, Asbel dragged himself upright and squirmed into the clothes he had abandoned the night before. Everything was, as hoped, fully dry, and even the boots were not as tight and uncomfortable as they had been the day before. But his hair, oh, his hair... The phoenix ran a hand through the tangled mess and bit his lower lip. He had not thought to bring a brush, and he could not go outside with such a snarled mess.

He left the tent with his small pack and, with only the barest of nods toward Augustine, crouched at the edge of the campsite with the nearly-useless needle of a dagger he'd brought from his spare belongings under his bed. While the general and Cassius pulled down the one remaining tent, the phoenix gathered long strands of once-lustrous golden hair in his hands and hacked them off. The knots and tangles gathered in a pathetic heap on the dirt until the phoenix sported an untidy crop of short hair, a spray of new feathers.

Thankful, at least, for new tidiness -- and for the absence of rain -- Asbel returned to the other three and accepted his share of the supplies without a word. Augustine's concerned morning greetings he responded to with a shadow of a smile, and as the day's march began, trailed behind the other three with his eyes on the terrain underfoot.