The world around him was dark and cold. He felt chilled through and through and it was a kind of chill that he thought he could never be rid of. He was surrounded by pockets of emotion that floated like bubbles of soap. They warbled as he breathed and they drifted all about.
Within each sphere he could see the emotion take form. In a bubble of happiness, he saw the days his siblings were born and the times they spent playing together. In joy, he saw flashes of his life spent growing up with Tomli and the others, though Tomli had always been his closest friend. In a ball of anger, he saw himself pouncing onto the prince, arms flailing wildly. Seeing it from this detached perspective, he felt foolish, for it was obvious that the prince was a much more skilled fighter. A globe of disappointment showed him the distant fire of Arvion as it burned, with him too far away to help. It also showed him the arrow flying through the air and sinking into his back, piercing him and ending his life.
Garinor stared at that recollection in horror. If he was dead, then what was this limbo? He looked around at the spheres of emotion and noticed they were rising up. This instilled him with a sense of panic, for these were his emotions, his memories. He couldn’t let them escape.
He jumped, twisted, rolled, and even tried to fly in order to reclaim all the fragments of himself that floated away. Each time he touched one, he was sated with its emotion, which made it hard to concentrate on reclaiming the others. The spheres of anger, pain, and disappointment were all difficult to accept back inside of him. And though he wished he could have let them stay in this odd place, they were part of him, part of his reason for living, and he knew he had to take them, too.
At last he captured all the orbs around him and the light they gave vanished at last. He sat again in total darkness.
A burning sensation awoke in him as he sat there. It was centered on his thigh and he looked there as if he expected to see another arrow sticking out of him, but there was nothing. He reached his hand down and into his pocket and there he removed the stone he had found in the rocky enclave. It wasn’t glowing, but he could see it just the same. As he held it, its searing heat ran through him head to toe. He couldn’t drop the rock, nor did he exactly want to. It was an awkward sensation, but he had an inkling that it wasn’t going to hurt him. He scoffed at that thought, for he had already died.
The heat spiraled through him, centering now on the arrow wound in his back, burning away the shaft. The heat grew intense as it gathered there and Garinor barely noticed that the stone was shedding layer after layer of dust. Eventually it was fully consumed, and his body was completely healed.
He cracked open his eyes and saw that everything was exactly as he had last seen it. The prince scrambled to his feet, horn to his lips and bleating out the call to retreat. The grass was up at his eyes and a woman was pounding her way to him up the hill. The prince mounted his horse and dashed off before he even realized that Garinor was still alive.
Garinor risked a glance down the hill to the archer who had attacked him, hoping the man was distracted and wouldn’t see that Garinor still lived. In fact, the man was distracted, but when Garinor saw what he was doing, he felt a pang of regret. The bowman fit another arrow to his bow and even though the ceasefire was called, he let loose one more arrow. It struck the woman who was coming up to Garinor’s aid, felling her instantly.
Stricken, Garinor sat there with tears in his eyes. The woman hadn’t even seen it coming and, based on the other happenings in the field below, the arrow shot was beyond the laws of warfare. The man shouldn’t have loosed the arrow, especially with the prince having gotten himself away.
The two warring parties claimed their wounded and their dead and started their way back to their respective camps. The prince’s army headed west and the other warriors headed to the east.
His attack on the prince had been disastrous and he knew if he was spotted in their camp, his life was forfeit. He could either follow the warriors to the east or sit there and be claimed by sorrow, which wasn’t much of an option at all.