Chapter Text
The crack of the bridge was too loud to be anything but fatal.
One heartbeat they were crossing the temporary bridge, a routine sweep with Adolin two paces ahead, talking animatedly to the members of bridge four ahead of him about waistcoats and cravats, and the next, the world dropped out from under them with a bone deep snap. Wood splintered, stone groaned, and Kaladin lunged forward, too slow.
He saw the exact moment Adolin’s footing vanished. His blue eyes flashing to Kaladin as he plummeted, mouth open in a silent scream.
Then Kaladin’s own boots were slipping down the falling bridge, and everything became noise and wind and falling, as gravity slammed into his spine and dragged him down like a hooked beast.
The steep walls of the chasm blurred on either side, dark streaks of stone and crem and impossible depth, voices shouting indistinctly from above as he tried to orient himself in the fall.
Like a drowning man struggling toward the surface, Kaladin thrashed for Stormlight. He would not die this way! Would not let Adolin die broken at the bottom of this cavern. The sky was his! The winds were his!. The chasms were his!
He reached out desperately, trying to lash the still falling Adolin up, but felt nothing, and watched in horror as Adolin slammed into the cavern walls once, twice, three times.
No! He reached again for stormlight, defiance thrumming through his core.
Syl screamed, a terrified, painful sound that vibrated Kaladin’s very bones. In that moment, he inhaled a breath of Stormlight, life itself.
Then he crashed into the ground at the bottom of the chasm and all went black.
***
Kaladin woke up to a dull grey strip of sky far above. The walls of the chasm loomed around him, and rockbuds peeked tentatively out of the crevices in the stone. Kaladin sat up, dazed.
Alive. He was alive.
Pain radiated from his side, but nothing was broken, not seriously. He tested his limbs. Bruised, winded, but otherwise intact, that last gasp of stormlight healing whatever undoubtedly fatal damage he had amassed on impact in an instant.
He reached out tentatively for his bond with Syl. He felt nothing.The distance between them that had been growing since his conversation with Moash was replaced by total vacancy. His soul ached at the loss. Kaladin lost everyone eventually, Tien, his men under Amaram, the slaves he helped escape, the members of bridge four he couldn’t protect from the Parshendi arrows, Kaladin had never been strong enough to protect them. But he had never lost someone due to his own lack of honor.
He rolled to his knees, coughing, and suddenly remembering that he had not fallen down the chasm alone.
“Adolin?” he shouted hoarsely. Not him too. If Kaladin had to drag the highprince’s broken body out of this chasm, he might as well lay down and die alongside him. He wouldn’t be able to face Dalinar, not after failing to keep his son and heir protected. With Syl gone, and Bridge Four adjusting to the Kholin camp just fine, Kaladin didn’t see much reason to climb out of this storms-damned chasm.
It was coming back again. That darkness that plagued him at his lowest.
There was no answer to his call.
Kaladin scrambled to his feet. Mud sucked at his boots, still damp from the drainage of the last highstorm.
“Adolin!” he shouted again, panic lacing his voice. “Answer me!”
Then; a weak groan.
Kaladin turned, squinting in the lowlight. There, half-buried under the remnants of the shattered bridge, a mass of tangled limbs in cracked shardplate.
Kaladin ran.
He dropped to his knees beside the man, heart hammering. Adolin was motionless save for a small twitch of his fingers. “Hey. Hey, Adolin, are you with me?”
Adolin’s eyes cracked open. The faceplate of his helmet had cracked clean off, and his face underneath was pale, streaked with dirt and a thick rivulet of blood originating above his left eyebrow. One of his arms was twisted underneath him at a bad angle, and his breathing was shallow and strained.
“Get it off of me-” Adolin wheezed. The hand not trapped underneath him reached up to scramble at his chestplate, completely depleted of stormlight, with a heavy crack down the middle. “Get it off, please, get it.”
Kaladin scrambled to free Adolin from under the pieces of bridge debris. The lighteyed man struggled to keep his breathing even as the remnants of the bridge and dead plate sat heavily on his chest.
Finally dragging off the last of the wooden boards, Kaladin began to work on the armor, feeling frantically for the seams of the cracked plate, and pulling it off on the man’s chest in a large heave, falling backwards under the weight.
Adolin immediately took a deep breath, but choked on it, sputtering out heaving coughs as he tried to straighten out his plate-deadened limbs. Kaladin was back at his side at an instant, pulling off his remaining plate.
“Kaladin?”
“Yeah,” Kaladin removed the armor along his limbs. There wasn’t a drop of stormlight in the entire set of plate. Kaladin was unsure how Adoling had managed to get his arm out from under him and begin plucking at the armor on his legs. “You fell hard. Think you hit the wall once or twice.”
Adolin exhaled sharply as Kaladin pulled him fully into a sitting position. “Feels like it.”
“Let me check.” Kaladin moved with efficient calm, though his stomach was coiled in a tight knot. He brushed aside the torn fabric of Adolin’s fcoat and shirt and gently pressed along his ribcage.
Adolin sucked in a sharp breath and flinched away. “Storms!”
“Three ribs minimum on the left side. Two on the right. No compound fractures, but the tissue is going to swell like hell.”
Adolin’s eyes were glassy. “You sure you aren’t secretly a field surgeon, bridgeboy?”
“Something like that,” Kaladin said, reaching into his belt pouch for a cloth wrap. “Hold still.”
As he began binding the man’s ribs, he felt it- heat, rising off Adolin’s skin. Not just from exertion. It was… wrong. Sweat damp and feverish. His breathing was shallow and irregular, the usual color in his cheeks high and uneven.
“You’re burning up,” Kaladin muttered, laying his hand flat against the highprince’s chest, “It’s too early for infection to have set in. Could be internal bruising. Or shock.”
“I’ve had worse,” Adolin said, though it was lacking his usual bravado, “It’ll pass.”
“This isn’t really the kind of injury you walk off.”
“I don’t see how we have much of a choice.” Adolin looked up, glassy eyes, at the dull grey sky. “High storm is coming through , according to the stormwardens. We were half a day’s march from the warcamps, but that was when we were crossing directly over chasms. Navigating down here, who knows how long it will take us.”
“We should probably wait it out,” Kaladin says, “Surely, they’ll send someone.”
“They can’t have expected us to survive the fall,” Adolin was squinting and swaying gently. Head trauma? “They’ll send someone looking eventually. Not for my corpse, but at least for the plate and blade, father would want that recovered.”
He said it so matter-of-factly. Dalinar Kholin had traded a shardblade for the life and dignity of 2,000 slaves. Surely, his lighteyed son would be worth more to him than his set of shards, but Kaladin said nothing to correct the highprince. Far be it for him to make assumptions about the intricacies of lighteyes family dynamics, especially one as complicated as the Kholins.
“We could stay,” Adolin hedged, “And hope they send someone before the storm. If it were up to me, I’d say we move in our best estimation towards the warcamps. Hopefully we’ll be seen by scouts sooner rather than later.”
“You’re fevered,” Kaladin said incredulously, “Broken ribs, probably a concussion, and you're holding your left arm in a way that’s telling me there’s something not quite right there either. Can you even stand, let alone walk?”
“With help,” Adolin muttered. “The arm is fine. A fractured wrist, maybe a break, but nothing is rupturing the skin, and as you so astutely pointed out, it is my arm, not my leg, so I fail to see how that would inhibit walking. Get me on my feet?”
Storms save him from stubborn lighteyes. Kaladin got behind Adolin, wrapping his arms around his half-exposed chest and gently easing him onto his feet. Adolin was heavier than he looked. Lean, but built solid under the layers of silk and leather. His weight slumped hard against Kaladin’s shoulder. At this proximity, Kaladin could catch a whiff of Adolin’s scent.
Kaladin caught himself breathing in deeper, and stopped himself, ignoring the strange flutter in his chest. It was intriguing. Adolin, as a beta, never really had much of a detectable scent. When Kaladin was younger, he had found other Alpha scents repulsive, but his years in army barracks made him mostly immune to the harsh smells of his fellow soldiers. He had never smelled Adolin before. He assumed it would be undetectable underneath the perfumes the lighteye nobility tended to favor but now with Adolin’s head leaning against his shoulder as he steadied himself against the pain, Adolin’s scent, though barely there, was hard to ignore. Complex. Spicy.
Adolin straightened himself up as best he could. The chasm seemed to stretch up a mile above them, the grey sky an ominous threat above them.
“There’s no climbing out.” Kaladin said, “You’re too injured to carve into the chasm with your blade, and with the bridge gone, our men will have a hard enough time making it back to the warcamps. Them getting back before the storm is as much of a gamble as us making it there.” It hurt to say outloud. All of Bridge Four had managed to scramble off the bridge to either side of the cavern, but with the group split, they’d have to wander around until the chasms narrowed enough to jump in order to make it back to the warcamps.
“So we walk.”
“Kaladin nodded. “We walk.”
He tightened his arm around Adolin’s back, careful of his ribs, and they limped forward into the unknown.
***
They made slow progress through the depths.
Kaladin kept his eyes on the rock and his thoughts on the terrain. Adolin had insisted on dragging the largest remaining piece of his shardplate with them, and it clattered behind them as they dragged it in a makeshift sack hastily tied out of Adolin’s ruined jacket and Kaladin’s undershirt.
Kaladin had tried to convince him to leave it, that they could come back for it later, after the storm.
“You come home with your plate, or not at all, bridgeboy,” was all Adolin had to say in response. Shardplate could be regrown, Kaladin knew. The smaller pieces they left behind would turn to dust, and if fed enough stormlight, Adolin’s plate would be good as new in a few weeks.
Adolin’s skin was growing hotter, not cooler, in the places where Kaladin’s body touched his. He trembled sometimes, even when they paused in still air. And he kept licking his lips, dry, cracked, as if thirst clawed at him more deeply than just dehydration.
“Tell me if you feel dizzy,” Kaladin said once, when Adolin stumbled.
“Just winded,” Adolin muttered, wiping sweat from his brow.
But it wasn’t just exertion. Kaladin was intimately familiar with exhaustion, both in himself, and in others. This was something else. A heat under the skin. A flush that lingered. Pupils too wide.
And there was something else.
The scent.
Kaladin didn’t notice it all at once. It wasn’t aggressive, or pungent, like an alpha going into rut, or overpowering and cloying, the way some omega heat scents were.
This was subtler. Subdued. Smoke under a silk sheet. Spice, something dark and warm, and an edge of sweetness. Vanilla. All tucked under the sharp tang of blood and pain and fear. The longer they walked, the more Kaladin noticed it. The more it seemed to pull at him, distracting him and irritating all at once.
It wasn’t anything he could name. Just Adolin, but different.
He chalked it up to adrenaline, shock, and concern.
Adolin was clearly running a fever. That had to be it.
Still, he found himself glancing down at him again and again. Watching the way the highprince’s jaw clenched in silence. The flicker of his tongue across dry lips. The faint sheen of sweat gathering at his temples.
Something was wrong.
But Kaladin didn’t know what.
***
They walked through the night. Kaladin was afraid if they stopped for too long, he wouldn’t be able to get Adolin up and moving again. Eventually the light began to shift.
It wasn’t much, just a subtle change in the way the mist glowed and the shadows deepened. But Kaladin had lived too long under open skies to miss the signs. The air pressed heavier against his lungs. Somewhere above, wind patterns shifted. He could feel it in his bones.
The highstorm was coming. They couldn’t afford to be out in the open when it hit.
Kaladin scanned the chasm walls. Slick, vertical rock, and just a shale. Slopes that would crumble if you breathed wrong, and no clear sign of a shelf wide enough to hold two bodies safely above the flood line.
“Stormfather,” he muttered.
Adolin swayed beside him. Kaladin caught him around the waist before he could collapse. “Hey. Easy.”
Adolin didn’t answer. He blinked slowly, lips parted, sweat streaking down his jawline despite the cold.
Kaladine eased him down onto a relatively flat patch of stone. The contact sent another sharp flare of heat through his palm, and he drew his hand back, frowning.
“You’re getting worse.”
Adolin gave a sluggish shrug. “Iis-like you said,” he slurred, “pr’bly internal bruising.”
“Your fever is up.”
Adolin leaned his head back against the stone wall and closed his eyes. “You sure it’s not just your glowing personality warming me up?”
Kaladin didn’t smile. “This isn’t good, Adolin. You’ve been sweating for hours, your pulse is irregular and your coordination is slipping.”
“And we are about to drown in a highstorm,” Adolin said, irritation in his voice, “That seems a little more pressing. I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m fine enough,” Adolin said, cracking one eye open and looking at him with a weary defiance, “I have to be. Storms, I’ve fought through worse before.”
“Sure,” Kaladin said, “But that was before you fell hundreds of feet and your body started cooking you from the inside out!”
Adolin didn’t dignify that with an answer, breathing too shallowly again to muster a response.
Kaladin stood and moved a few paces away, pretending to survey the rock wall, as he clenched, and unclenched his hands, mind racing.
He’d lose him. Another person he was meant to protect would die, and Kaladin could do nothing about it. Not a good enough surgeon to heal him, and not a strong enough soldier to get them out of this storms-damned cavern. Adolin would die, either from the fever wracking his body, or from the coming highstorm. Kaladin wasn’t sure which would be worse, but he knew, undoubtedly, whatever option took Adolin from this plane, Kaladin would survive. He always did. He would live to tell Dalinar about the last pain-filled moments of his eldest son, and live to have yet another death on his conscience. No wonder Syl had left.
It was Adolin who pulled himself up from the small rock shelf he was resting on, and clapped a heavy hand on Kaladin’s shoulder. The heat was so strong it nearly burned him through his jacket.
“Let’s go, bridgeboy,” Adolin said, voice stiff, clear and controlled, “Places to be.”
They walked on.
***
An hour passed, maybe two. They hadn’t found shelter yet, just more winding corridors and dead ends. The wind at the top was rising, Kaladin could hear it echoing down the narrowing chasms.
The chasm would floor when the storm hit. The water would rise, fast, slamming through the low ground. He remembered the bloated, waterlogged corpses he and Bridge Four had looted through while in Sadeas’ camp, washed all the way from the frontlines to the warcamps.
If they didn’t find shelter soon, they’d be among them.
Kaladin turned back to Adolin, who had fallen behind, curled in on himself. One arm clutched at his side, the other pressed against the stone wall of the chasm as if trying to hold himself up by sheer force of will.
“Hey,” Kaladin crouched beside him, easing him into a sitting position. “You with me?”
Adolin’s eyes opened, glassy and unfocused.
“Where?” the blond man croaked.
“We’re still in the chasm.”
Adolin winced. “Hot.”
“I know.”
Kaladin pressed the back of his hand into Adolin’s forehead. It felt like touching a forge stone. Every instinct in his body screamed that this was wrong. Fevers didn’t behave like this. Not from broken ribs. Not without infection, and Kaladin has seen no rotspren, or any wound deep enough to be festering.
The sky overhead cracked with white-blue lighting, flashing between the rock walls. The storm wasn’t here yet, but it was close enough to taste. Ozone, damp air, and something else.
Kaladin felt it in his chest. A low thrum of dread.
Then the chasm floor beneath them shook.
No sound. Just a tremble. Stone settling beneath mud. Water trembling in a shallow pool. That was the only warning.
Kaladin turned just in time to see the hulking mass of the chasmfiend rise like some ancient god from the depths of the stone. Massive. Slick. Carapace gleaming in the refracted light.
It shrieked. Kaladin barely had time to shove Adolin behind a rise of rock before the creature lunged.
He dodged, instinct firing, and shouted over his shoulder at Adolin, “Run!”
But Adolin didn’t run.
10 heartbeats. That’s how long it took to summon a shardblade. And Adolin’s heart had been drumming in a too-rapid pulse since the fever hit hours ago.
There was a sharp crack of the summoning, and Adolin stood, swaying but tall, his shardblade falling into his hands in a flare.
Kaladin’s breath caught.
“Don’t be an idiot!” he shouted.
Adolin didn’t answer. His mouth was a grim line. His stance was off, favorin ghis side, legs braced too wide, but his hands were steady on the grip.
The chasmfiend struck.
Adolin ducked, rolling sideways and bringing the blade down on one of its forelimbs. A thunk as the dead flesh hit the chasm, limb attached but collapsing under the large beast.
Kaladin grabbed his fallen spear from the mud and dove into the fight. He couldn’t do much damage, not like Adolin, but he could distract it. He jabbed for its eyes, its belly, anything soft and vulnerable.
Together they drove it back.
Kaladin’s shoulder ached from a glancing blow. The monster was bleeding now, limping slightly, but it was angry.
It came for Adolin, again.
He met the charge with a shout, pivoting on his heel and swinging wide, blade cleaving deep into the chasmfiend’s side. The creature roared, crashing forward.
Its last pincer struck hard.
Kaladin saw Adolin take the hit square in the chest and fly. He hit the rock wall with a sickening crunch and slid to the ground, blade vanishing from his hands.
“Adolin!”
Kaladin ran, ignoring the monster’s final death spasms behind him. He dropped to his knees behind the man’s crumpled body, heart thundering.
Adolin was breathing, shallow, staccato breaths that rattled in his injured chest. His shirt had torn further where the pincer had hit, bruises were already blooming beneath pale skin, and blood was seeping through his left sleeve.
Kaladin’s hand trembled as he rolled up Adolin’s shirt sleeve, looking at the man’s injured arm that had turned into a compound fracture with the last hit, pale white bone poking ominously out of his forearm. Kaladin reached into his belt pouch for the last of their clean bandages to wrap and immobilize the arm. He was glad Adolin wasn't unconscious, but the man still spasmed as Kaladin clicked the bone back into place, and wrapped it tight, snapping a section off the handle of his spear to splint and immobalize it. Then, as he was pulling the injured limb up to Adolin’s chest, he saw it.
A delicate golden wristlet with a cracked gemstone at its center. The casing had splintered through, shattered.
Kaladin stared.
A heat suppression fabrial.
Kaladin has seen only one before, in his father’s office. It was to be used to stave off heat for omegas with injuries too serious to risk a full cycle, to allow for recovery before their body would be wracked with heat symptoms.
Temporary use only, Lirin had told him. Skipping to many cycles was detrimental to omega’s health, could leave them unable to bond, unable to have regular cycles, and delayed heats tended to come back with a vengeance, wracking up in intensity the longer they were put off.
“Storms,” Kaladin whispered. “You lied.”
Not just to him. To everyone.
Adolin Kholin, first son of the Blackthorn, dueling golden boy, commander on the shattered plains– was an omega. And he had hidden it his entire adult life.
Kaladin sat back on his heels, shaking.
The chasm boomed with thunder, echoing from far above. The storm was nearly on them, but it barely registered over the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears.
He looked down at the man again, fevered, unconscious, vulnerable.
And beneath the sick-sweet tang of pain and adrenaline, that scent again; smoke, vanilla, something sharp and ruinously warm.
The wing picked up, and he knew they had minutes left before the sky cracked open.
“Stormfather help me,” Kaladin muttered. “We have to move.”
“Kaladin?”
The voice was hoarse. Barely audible over the rising wind, but it snapped Kaladin out of his haze.
Adolin stirred against the rock, head rolling to one side, breathing sharp and fast. His eyes were unfocused at first, pupils blown wide, skin pale and flushed all at once, but locked onto Kaladin’s face with sudden, starling clarity.
“You took a hit to the ribs,” Kaladin said, kneeling beside him, “Again.”
‘No kidding.” His voice was weary, dry. “Did I get him?”
“Dead.”
“Good.” Adolin shifted, biting back a noise of pain. “We need to move.”
Kaladin hesitated. “Adolin-” he hesitated, and Adolin’s expression went sharp, guarded.
“What?” The word was dripping in exhaustion.
“I found the bracelet.” Something flickered in Adolin’s eyes. Shame, Kaladin thought, or maybe dread. “I know, Adolin.”
Adolin wouldn’t look at him. “We don’t have time for this.”
“We have to talk about it-”
“No,” Adolin snapped. Then softer: “Not now. Not here. What good will talking about it do if we are washed away by the highstorm?”
He tried to push himself up. Kaladin caught him by the arm before he could collapse again. “You can barely stand!”
“We don’t have a choice.”
Adolin looked at him and smiled. The kind of smile that came befor yous stepped into a duel you had no right to win.
“Pray for me, bridgeboy,” he said, holding out his hand. 10 heartbeats, too fast, a testament to Adolin’s rapid, erratic pulse, and Adolin’s blade once again bled into the world.
Adolin grunted, every movement stiff and shaking and he staggered to the rock wall and raised the blade one handed.
The swings were clumsy, the cuts not clean. He braced his body wrong at first, overcorrecting for his ribs, but adjusted fast. Somehow, impossibly, he began to climb.
Step by step, he carved stairs into the wall, shardblade passing through rock like smoke, leaving smooth-edged hollows behind. Every foot he gained lifted them closer to salvation, closer to the narrow ledge Kaladin had spotted high above that might keep them safe from the coming flood.
Kaladin didn’t speak, just followed, half in awe, as Adolin continued to work.
He was shivering, and sweating, shoulder trembling every time he raised his blade. More than once he paused with his blade lowered, breathing hard, knuckles white, and Kaladin was sure that he would drop, that his body would give in.
But Adolin kept moving.
Wind whipped through the chasm, a rising wail that bounced off of the stone and rattled Kaladin’s teeth. They reached the narrow ledge and the highstorm was on them.
Adolin stood, pressing one hand flat against the rock for balance, the other clenched along the hilt of his shard blade as he carved away the final piece of their refuge. The last piece of rock fell, clattering to the chasm floor beneath them, and Kaladin caught Adolin as he swayed, blade disappearing, and carried the man the last few steps into the hollow.
They tumbled into the space together. The alcove was barely large enough for one man, let alone two. Stone closed around them on all sides- raw, uneven, still how in places where the blade had passed. Kaladin’s shoulder scraped the back wall. His knee knocked against Adolin’s thigh. There was no way to shift without brushing skin.
Then, outside, the world broke.
The stormwall hit like a titan’s fist, wind slamming into the rock face with a roar that devoured every other sound. Debris tore past the mouth of the alcove in a blur. The light was gone. Only chaos remained.
Kaladin held still. Held on.
Adolin was pressed fully against him, head tucked underneath Kaladin’s jaw. His body radiated heat, too much heat. Kaladain could feel it through the wet cloth of his uniform. Adolin wasn’t warm, he was burning. His breath ghosted shallowly against Kaladin’s throat, each exhale uneven and sharp.
And the scent.
The same notes Kaladin had notices before, smoke and spice and vanilla, earthy and heady, had changed. It was still there, but now something had twisted through it, something sour and rancid at the edges like milk gone bad in a spice cabinet. It curled in Kaladin’s nose and stuck in his throat.
He swallowed hard. Felt his own heartbeat against his ribs.
“You’re an omega,” Kaladin said.
Adolin didn’t answer.
Kaladin didn’t need him to.
His voice was hoarse when he spoke again. “The bracelet, it was a suppressant?”
A nod. Small. Barely there.
Kaladin let the silence stretch, filled only with the roar of the storm and the ache in his chest.
“How long?” he asked.
Adolin shifted slightly, enough for Kaladin to feel the tremble in his limbs. His voice, when it came, was raw and stripped of its usual polish.
“Since I presented. I was thirteen.”
Kaladin’s eyes widened.
“That was over a decade ago,” he said. “You’ve been suppressing your heats for ten years?”
Adolin exhaled slowly. “Eleven.”
Storms.
Kaladin closed his eyes, his hands were first now, though he hadn’t realized he curled them.
“That’s not- That’s dangerous Adolin.”
“I’m aware.”
“I don’t think you are! You could’ve died! You are going to die! You are in a cave, in the middle of a highstorm after a fall and a fight and a cracked ribcage and now your body is throwing itself into its first real heat that’s 11 years overdue, and it’s going to kill you!”
“I know.” Adolin’s voice cracked, half growl, half plea. “But what was I supposed to do?”
Kaladin said nothing. His jaw ached from holding back all the things he wanted to say. The blame. The disbelief. The grief.
The man in his arms was breaking, and he had chosen it. Chosen to bear this alone for years, and hide behind a laugh, a duel, and a family name too heavy for one man to carry.
Kaladin felt Adolin shudder again, as the blond pressed closer into him, seeking heat, or safety. Maybe both.
And still, still, Kaladin could feel that scent clawing at the edges of his control. Too much. Too close.
He whispered, barely audible, “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Adolin didn’t answer. Didn’t look up.
Outside, the storm screamed.
Inside, Kaladin held him tighter. Waiting for the heat to break.
Waiting for the next impossible choice.
***
The storm didn’t end.
Minutes stretched into hours, though Kaladin had no real way of measuring them. The thunder felt endless. Wind roared just feet beyond the alcove’s mouth, hurling debris like knives. Lighting cracked so close it lit their cramped shelter in flickers of stark, unnatural white.
Kaladin tried to keep his breathing even.
Adolin was still curled up against him, unmoving, but not unconscious. Kaladin could feel the minute tremors in his body, each inhale too shallow, too fast. His pulse fluttered against Kaladin’s wrist, and sweat soaked through his shirt.
And the scent- Stormfather, the scent.
Despite the sour note of wrongness, it creeped into him, sliding into his lungs, into his blood. Not lust, not exactly, but something biological, old and dangerous. A pull he didn’t want to name.
He clenched his jaw, shifting back, trying to create even an inch of space between them, but the alcove was too small. His back was already pressed to the wall. All he could do was angle his knees to give Adolin more room to breathe.
Kaladin brushed a hand across his forehead, then pulled it back immediately. Scalding. “Storms. You’re burning up.”
Adolin made a faint sound, half cough, half groan.
“We need to cool you down.”
Kaladin reached for the waterskin, cracked the deal and tried to coax a sip between Adolin’s lips. Most of it dribbled out.
Adolin pushed weakly at his hand. “Don’t,” he whispered.
“Don’t what? Don’t keep you alive?”
Adolin’s eyes opened, barely. Bloodshot, unfocused. “You shouldn’t be this close.”
Kaladin snorted. “Where exactly should I be? You want me to wait out the storm in the chasm.”
Adolin didn’t answer. He closed his eyes again, jaw right, body shivering.
Kaladin shifted again, rucking the waterskin away. He pulled off his own damp jacket, and wadded it into a pillow of sorts, lifting Adolin’s head.
“You scent is changing again,” Kaladin said. “Fast. This is bad Adolin.”
“I know.”
“I thought suppressants were supposed to taper off, not snap like a switch.”
Adolin grimaced. “I kept the fabrial active for too long. Too many cycles skipped.”
Kaladin pressed his hand to Adolin’s check- checking breathing, counting. “How long do we have?”
Adolin didn’t answer at first.
Then, voice barely audible, “Not long, I think.”
The storm raged on.
Kaladin’s mind was moving too fast, calculating risks, exits outcomes. There was no one. No one was coming. No ledge higher than this one. Nothing to do but wait, but in the corner of his mind something was beginning to loom, dark, omnipresent and instinctual.
“We need to get your fever down,” Kaladin said.
“Won’t help,” Adolin murmured.
“We can try.”
“You don’t understand.” Adolin’s voice cracked. “It’s not just fever. It’s everything It’s… too much.”
Kaladin gripped his own thigh hard, grounding himself in pain. “Tell me what you need.”
Adolin laughed. Or he tried to. It came out a ragged wheeze. “I’ve never had a heat, Kaladin. I don’t know what the hell I need.”
“You-”
Adolin cut him off, voice rising. “I’ve never touched anyone. Never let anyone close enough to smell me let alone-” He broke off, gasping. “This isn’t supposed to happen. Not like this.”
Kaladin stared at him. Not once, in all his assumptions, all his anger, had he imagined that.
“You’ve never?”
“No.” Adolin’s hand fisted weakly in the front of Kaladin’s shirt. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to be a prince, a soldier, a duelist- there was no room to be anything else.”
Kaladin closed his eyes, and the scent shifted again.
The sick overlay faded, just slightly and something underneath bloomed. Rich. Overwhelming. A heat-honeyed chemical signal that flooded the alcove as sure as the storm flooded the chasm below.
Kaladin jerked back, or tried to. But Adolin was already clinging to him. Shaking. Radiating need and panic and helplessness in equal measure.
Kaladin’s hands hovered, unsure of where to go. Touch felt too dangerous. Not touching felt worse.
‘You have to let me help,” Kaladin choked out.
“No.”
“A bond could stabilize you. I don’t have to– it doesn’t have to be- just let me bite you, you’ll live.”
“I said no.” Adolin was trembling, and clinging to the front of what was left of Kaladin’s uniform, but his voice was steel. “I don’t want this. I never wanted this. If you bite me there is no going back. I would rather die than live like that.”
“Tell my father I died in the fall.” Kaladin’s heart was sinking, not again, he wouldn’t lose another one not again. “Take my blade, take my plate, throw my body into the highstorm so it’ll wash up later, just don’t tell, please, never tell.” Adolin was frantic, shivering, panting. He wan’t just suffering, he was spiraling.
“I can’t.” Kaladin was clinging back, arms wrapped around the trembling man tucking him under his chin, “Adolin- Adolin you can’t ask me to let you die.”
Adolin’s hand clawed at Kaladin’s shirt, pulling, not pushing away. “Don’t. Please. Don’t make me– don’t take this from me.”
Kaladin stared at him. Adolin’s eyes were wide now, wet at the edges. His lips were cracked a trembling.
“I didn’t want this,” he said, “I’d rather be dead. I’d rather be dead, Kaladin, then live like this. Let me keep this one thing. Let me– don’t make that choice for me.”
Kaladin felt something inside him fracture.
The part of him that had been trained to protect. To respect. The part that knew what violation meant. What it cost.
But the man in his arms was dying.
Kaladin had seen men slip away before. He knew the signs. The fever that wouldn’t break. The panic that became silence. The body that stopped fighting because it had nothing left.
Adolin was at the cliff’s edge.
Kaladin could let him fall.
Or he could shove his teeth into that perfect, pale skin and brand him forever.
“Storms,” Kaladin whispered. “Storms, i’m sorry.”
Adolin’s breath hitched, his hand slipping from Kaladin’s chest and falling limply against the stone.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t.”
His mouth found the curve of Adolin’s neck, just above the collarbone where the scent was strongest, where the skin was thin and the pulse pounded hard, and he bit.
Not cruelly, not savagely. But deep.
Adolin arched once, a soundless scream punching out of his lungs. His whole body seized.
Then he stilled.
Kaladin held him through it, hand splayed across his ribs, feeling the bond bloom like fire under his tongue. It ignited something in him, something primal, yes, but also tethering. A force as natural as gravity snapping into place.
The heat in Adolin’s body ebbed. Just slightly.
His breathing slowed. Just slightly.
But the mark was there now, and it would not fade.
Kaladin pulled back, blood on his lips, and looked at what he’d done.
Adolin’s neck was marred, bruised, bloody, already beginning to swell. And Kaladin-
Kaladin had crossed the line.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, bowing his head, forehead pressed to Adolin’s temple. The storm outside began to quiet, but inside the alcove silence screamed louder than any wind, and Kaladin was thankful for the first time that his bond with Syl was gone, for at least the spren was not there to see this stain upon his honor that could never be undone.