Whitefish River We are receiving numerous reports that books have stopped working

Making an assumption on his location based on this thread, please correct me if I'm wrong! All welcome but preferably family. I would like this one kept to a faster pace if possible since it's my only relevant thread atm! Backdated to approx. July 21st.

Upon falling from the mountain, Dragomir's spirit seemed to peel away from his body. He felt like he was floating above his mortal skin, watching it bounce brokenly down the slope without suffering the sensations himself. He watched as a day and a night passed before his body was found. Lucky, that; a curious brown bear had passed horrifically close to him and his assailants from the day prior were still prowling the vicinity. It may have meant the end of him if either located him first. When at last Vercingetorix and Aurëwen found him, Dragomir's breath was a feeble stir in his chest, while the greater part of him surrendered to his fate.

In that strange spaceless place where he felt his spirit was floating, he was surrounded by images of his past lives, a thousand-thousand reminders that he had lived and died many times before this. Death was not frightening. Death was warmth and the soothing of all his worldly pains, the erasure of all his emotional turmoils. Death was like coming home after a long time away and being greeted by all your loved ones and your favourite meal, piping hot on the table. Death was an old friend's embrace. Dragomir did not fear death in the end; he floated in blessed memories he could not hope to recollect in any life, peaceful and whole.

But his death frightened the living. His death frightened Vercingetorix and Aurëwen, who both were making silent bargains and pleas with whatever gods they knew, or maybe those they don't, that he would live. His death frightened the tireless healer who instructed them to take him to the caves, where she would work her craft to stave off its shadow from him. In the quiet of that space within his mind where his spirit had fled to escape the agony of living, Dragomir heard them calling him. They need you. And he knew he must not let go as he so badly yearned, and so he fought for his life, slipping in and out of consciousness without registering much of what was going on around him for several days.

When his eyes rolled beneath his eyelids that day, the absence of sensation lifted. He no longer seemed to watch himself from afar, but was back in his own body. The pain slammed into him with the force of a whale; he scarcely could draw a breath before it hissed back out in an agonized wheeze. The simple fact of existing hurt more than anything he had ever experienced. It was enough that he wanted to flee back to the silent haven in his head where he was safe and warm, and he would do that soon, but first he laboured to open his eyes.

Dark. A slant of light through an opening, out of sight. The glimmer of wet rock. These images, identical to the ones he had seen last before falling, identical to the cave he had been tortured in, lanced through his brain with such poignant pain and fear that, in spite of hardly having the energy to breathe, Dragomir screamed.