In the morning, Toren found him sitting on the eastern wall, looking out at the Hollow Fields.
The younger man said nothing about the bandages on Kaelen's hands, or the shadows under his eyes, or the way his gaze seemed fixed on something far beyond the horizon. He simply sat beside him, as he had done a hundred times before, and waited.
"Something happened last night," Kaelen said finally. "With the Binding."
Toren was quiet for a moment. "Are you still you?"
It was a question that would have seemed strange once, in the time before the Rot. Now it was the only question that mattered.
"I don't know," Kaelen said. "I think so. But I don't know how long that will last."
He turned to look at his friend. Toren's face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but there was something steady in his gaze that Kaelen had always relied on. Something that held him to the world when the Whisperer tried to pull him away.
"There's something I need to tell you," Kaelen said. "About the North. About what I found there. About what I did."
He took a breath. The words were hard, heavier than any sword he had ever carried.
"I didn't just survive the expedition. I caused it. The Rot, the Unmade, the twilight—it started because I reached out and touched something I shouldn't have. Something that had been waiting for someone to open the door."
He expected Toren to pull away. To look at him with fear, with disgust, with the same expression Ren had worn when his eyes went dark and his skin began to slough.
Instead, Toren reached out and gripped his shoulder. The same gesture he had made on the battlefield, the same wordless support he had always offered.
"I know," Toren said quietly.
Kaelen stared at him. "What?"
"I've known for years. Since the night you came back from the North, talking in your sleep, screaming about the door and the darkness and the thing that was waiting." His grip tightened. "I didn't care then. I don't care now. Whatever you did, whatever you touched, you're still my captain. You're still the man who pulled me out of the mud when I was too young to hold a sword. You're still the one who holds the line when everyone else wants to run."
Kaelen's throat tightened. He looked away, out at the twilight sky, at the horizon where the North lay hidden in shadow.
"I might not be able to stop it," he said. "The Binding. The thing inside me. It's getting stronger."
"Then we stop it together," Toren said simply. "Whatever it takes. Whatever you need."
They sat in silence, watching the sun that would not rise, and Kaelen let himself believe, for just a moment, that there was still something in the world worth fighting for.