Not the twilight that hung over Valerion now, but something worse. The colors shifted, bled into each other, purple and green and colors that had no names. The ground was soft, too soft, like walking on flesh instead of earth.
"Captain." That was Ren, his second then, before Toren. "Captain, we should turn back. This place—"
"We have orders."
"Orders don't matter if we're dead."
Kaelen had kept walking. He had been young then, younger than Toren was now, still believing that duty and courage were enough. That the world made sense. That there were answers to be found if you were willing to look hard enough.
They found the Breach at the end of three days.
It was not a hole in the ground, not a crack in reality. It was a wound. A tear in the world that bled darkness, that pulsed with a rhythm that was almost like a heartbeat, that whispered in voices that were almost like words.
"What is that?" someone had asked.
And the Whisperer had answered, for the first time:
"It is the door."
Kaelen had not known where the voice came from. He had not known it was inside his head, had not known that from that moment forward, he would never be alone again.
"Don't touch it," Ren had said. "Captain, don't—"
But Kaelen had reached out.
The darkness had reached back.
He remembered the cold. The cold that was not cold, that was the absence of warmth, the absence of light, the absence of everything that made a life worth living. He remembered the screams of his men as the darkness poured into them, as their skin began to slough and their eyes began to change and their mouths stretched into smiles that were too wide, too knowing.
He remembered Ren, looking at him with eyes that were already gone, already wrong, and saying:
"You did this."
And then there was only the Whisperer, and the Binding, and the long walk south through a world that was already dying.
Kaelen opened his eyes.
Alaric was pale. His hands were clenched at his sides, his knuckles white.
"You touched it," the prince said. His voice was steady, but only barely. "The source. You touched it, and you survived."
"I survived," Kaelen agreed. "But something came back with me. Something that lives in my head, that speaks to me, that offers me power I shouldn't have. The Binding—it's not a tool. It's a connection. To them. To whatever is on the other side of that door."
Alaric was silent for a long moment.
"The Church says the Binding is corruption," he said finally. "A poison that turns men into monsters. They say those who use it are already lost."
"The Church says a lot of things."
"Do they know? About what you touched? About what you brought back?"
Kaelen shook his head. "They know I use the Binding. They know I survived the North. They don't know about the Whisperer. About the Breach. About what I did."
He did not say the rest. He did not say that sometimes, in the dark, he wondered if the Church was right. If the Binding was already changing him, already making him into something that was not quite human. If the line between Kaelen the captain and Kaelen the monster was thinner than he wanted to believe.
"You need to rest," Alaric said. He was retreating behind his prince's mask, the mask that let him make decisions that cost lives, that let him send men to die while he stood safe behind the walls. "The Church will want to speak with you. The High Inquisitor has been asking questions."
"Let them ask."
"Kaelen." Alaric's voice was sharp. "They know about the Binding. They know you use it. And they have been waiting for you to fall. If they decide you're a threat—"
"Then I'll deal with them."
He turned to leave, but Alaric's hand caught his arm. The grip was firm, almost desperate.
"If there comes a time," the prince said quietly, "when you feel yourself slipping. When the Binding begins to take you. I need you to tell me. Before it's too late. Before you become something I have to stop."
Kaelen looked at the hand on his arm. Then he looked at Alaric's face, at the fear and the loyalty and the terrible weight of responsibility that the prince carried every day.
"You'll know," he said. "When it happens. You'll know."
He walked out of the throne room, and he did not look back.