Skan, personally, thinks this is a significant improvement! 

Ma'ar doesn't appear to notice much one way or another. He doesn't seem troubled by the boredom, either; he walks, occasionally pauses and glances at his surroundings and then slightly adjusts course.

Eventually the sun is low in the sky and they reach the watering-hole Skan picked out. 

Aza drinks the last of her water and fills up her bottle and does the water-sanitizing spell to it.

Ma'ar does the same, and then leads the way a bit further, out of sight of it, and gets out the tent-artifact. He's fairly quiet the whole time. 

"I'd like to cook some of the pig in case Skan can't finish it but I don't see anywhere we could get firewood, just a lot of tinder-y plants. What'd people do in your clan for fire, Ma'ar?"

"Dung. From the cattle. We don't have any." Shrug. "I can do a heat-spell." 

"Hot enough to cook with? Okay."

She does not exactly know how to carve up a pig but she can hack at a bit of it till what she has looks approximately like raw pork of the kind she'd get at the butcher's and get it sizzling in her camp pot.

Ma'ar has gotten pretty good at targeted heat spells and can do one that cooks the pork-chop efficiently.

Gryphons, it turns out, are messy eaters! Skan hasn't eaten in front of Azabel before. 

He makes short order of the remaining pig carcass, though; it was just a little pig, a juvenile or maybe just very underfed. 

Pork for dinner! It's pretty good. This part is more what she expected, hanging out with her friends in the middle of nowhere camping out. She takes her shoes off and rubs the soles of her feet, which ache.

Skan chatters for a while about various random things and eventually runs out of chatter and switches to practicing pouncing at imaginary prey.

Being back on the Plains seems to have put Ma'ar into a pensive mood. He stares at the horizon, absently picking dust out from under his nails. 

"I'm sorry this part is so boring," he says finally. 

"It's not like you made it boring. I have been trying to invent word games or something we can play while we walk but I don't have anything good yet."

"We could play a math puzzle game. There was this one I read in a book where the letters in the alphabet are numbered and you take turns saying a number and then the other person sees how many words they can think of where the letters add up to that number..." 

"That sounds annoying do without being able to write."

"I think the point is that it's trickier to do it in your head? We could think of something less tricky though." 

"I was thinking along the lines of you pick a topic like fruit or something and have to come up with examples starting with the last letter of the last example but I'm not sure that's a good game by itself."

"I mean, we could try it for a while and see if it's too easy, and then add more constraints..." He yawns. "Maybe tomorrow, I'm tired." 

"Me too, that was a long walk."

Ma'ar gets up and starts setting up the tent artifact for them. "Skan, will you be comfortable just out here?" 

"Yess, I have featherss to keep warm." 

Yawn. "Good, I'll just do an illusion on you then." 

Ma'ar does this and then sits on top of the canvas sheet he brought to go under the tent-barrier, between them and the grass, and unrolls his blanket. He waits for Azabel to come in as well before raising the barrier. 

In she goes. She sets up her bedding insofar as she has any and pillows her head on her arm.

And they go to sleep. 

...Ma'ar has nightmares much less frequently, nowadays, but still sometimes, and it turns out that sleeping out in the open, exposed, in a place he's not used to and in a context that has all the associations of never-being-safe of his childhood, is not great for this. He doesn't actually wake up screaming, but he does toss and turn and whimper a lot, and occasionally startles awake and needs to spend a while calming down. 

Aza sleeps pretty soundly. When he wakes up he can calm down to the sound of her murmuring things like "Oats. Rainbow. Vinegar. Ball. Parade."