Dear friend. It would have been a boon from any other phoenix. He had been so long without any other of his kind around him. Sabev's appearance just as he'd given up on living... she'd been his salvation in more ways than one. She couldn't have guessed it, but it was true. In the small hut of that healer, he'd regained more than strength and vitality. He'd regained a will to survive that he'd given up to the blackened seas of the Breaking. But he did not want friendship from her, not mere friendship alone.
It would have to suffice. He returned her smile, though more gently than he would have preferred to show her. "I'm well enough," he said, standing from the ground where he'd been crouching. He offered her his hand to help her up. "There doesn't seem to be any other sentient life forms around us," he observed, scanning the splay of trees in front of them. "It may be that our captors have wearied of us. They typically place us with others that they've captured."
He hated being separated by the forces constantly driving them forward into other foreign places. They always found each other again; it seemed that it was their first order of the day, once they woke. Find the other. But today - today was different.