Kaelen found Toren sitting on the eastern wall, looking out at the Hollow Fields.
The younger man's armor was still dark with blood, his face pale beneath the grime. He had a flask in his hand—not wine, Kaelen knew, but something stronger. Something that helped men sleep when sleep would not come on its own.
"You should rest," Kaelen said, lowering himself to sit beside him.
Toren did not look at him. "Can't. Every time I close my eyes, I see them stopping. All those things, hundreds of them, just... stopping. Looking at you." He took a long drink from the flask. "What was that, Kaelen? What did it want?"
Kaelen was quiet for a moment. Below them, the fields stretched out into darkness, the bodies of the dead already being gathered for burning. The smoke from the pyres would rise for days, staining the twilight even darker than it already was.
"I don't know," he said.
It was not a lie. He did not know what the Tall One wanted. But he knew what the Whisperer had told him, in the cold hours after the battle, when the Binding had pressed against his mind and offered him its terrible gifts.
"They are waiting," the Whisperer had said. "They have been waiting for you to come back. To finish what you started."
Toren finally looked at him. In the dim light, his eyes were dark, older than they should have been.
"I've been with you for six years," he said. "Since before the expedition. Since before..." He gestured vaguely at the sky, the fields, everything. "I know you don't talk about it. What happened up there. What you saw. But something changed in you when you came back. Something that isn't quite—"
He stopped, as if afraid to finish the sentence.
Kaelen waited.
"I'm not asking you to tell me everything," Toren said finally. "I'm asking you to tell me if I should be afraid. Of you. Of what you're becoming."
The words hung in the air between them, heavy as the twilight sky.
Kaelen thought about the Binding. About the way it whispered to him in the dark, promising strength, promising power, promising to make him more than human. About the cold place behind his eyes where something waited, something that had been there since the North, something that had a voice and a will and a patience that terrified him more than any Unmade ever could.
"You should be afraid," he said quietly. "But not of me. Not yet."
He stood, his joints aching, his muscles screaming from the battle. In the distance, the first pyres were being lit, their flames casting long shadows across the fields.
"Prince Alaric has summoned me," he said. "I'll speak with you in the morning."
He did not wait for Toren to respond. He walked along the wall, past the exhausted soldiers who nodded or saluted or simply stared, and descended into the city.
The streets of Valerion were quiet at this hour, the curfew enforced by guards who were too tired to do more than nod as he passed. The buildings pressed close together, their windows dark, their doors barred. Once, these streets had been filled with light and laughter, with merchants shouting their wares and children running between the stalls. Now they were silent except for the wind, which carried always the faint smell of ash.
Kaelen walked alone, his footsteps echoing on the cobblestones.
And behind him, in the shadows of an alley, something watched.
It was not an Unmade. It was something older, something that had been in Valerion long before the Rot began. It wore the shape of a woman, but its eyes were wrong—too deep, too knowing, too full of a light that should not exist in a world without sun.
It watched Kaelen walk toward the palace.
And it smiled.
"Soon," it whispered, its voice a rustle of dead leaves, a crackle of distant flames. "Soon he will remember. And then we will all remember what he did."
In the palace, Kaelen stopped.
For a moment, he thought he heard something—a whisper, a name, a word that he should have known but could not quite grasp.
Then it was gone, and he was alone again, standing in the shadow of the throne of Valerion, waiting to tell the prince of a dying kingdom about a truth he had spent four years trying to forget.