He puts the young man back together every time he returns.
He knows he sends him on a fool's errand, practically throwing him into the maw of the beast. Every time the young man returns relatively unscathed, he can breathe a long-held sigh of relief. Yet the ecstasy is brief, for the game resumes all too soon, and it is not long before he again receives the broken, battered body of his most trusted confidant. He will tend to his wounds, staunch the blood flow and set the broken bones. What he cannot heal, she can. And what she cannot heal can only be ameliorated by a miracle.
Each time the young man returns, there is some small part of him that is missing. And when he tries to put him back together, the pieces make an incomplete whole. First, it was the color in the young man's cheeks, too little to begin with. The unhealthy paleness became a sickly, sallow tone that settled with confident bravado on a gaunt face.
Next, the flicker of life in the young man's eyes seemed to diminish. Far from warm in the first place, those obsidian pools became stagnant and lifeless, and any spark that seemed to burst forth from the ether was malevolent and cold, fueled by a deep-seated anger that had never abated.
Gradually, the young man began to lose weight, lose his sense of time, lose his grip on reality. Every shadow was a threat, every break of day a fresh torment. He carried antivenins and bezoars on his person, within the voluminous folds of his black cloak that he had begun to wear in the chill of the dungeons.
The young man is a shattered, crooked mosaic of pieces forced into some sort of accord in order to keep him moving, keep him breathing, keep him ready and able to fight through one more night. One more night of hellish torture, interrogation and debasement.
He holds the young man in his arms as he weeps, shaking from the after-effects of a torturous curse. He knows it is only a matter of time before the tenuous thread that anchors the young man to reality will be severed. And when the young man is left dangling on the precipice of his own mind, he will be the one to finally push him off of the edge, and hope that he can piece him back together at the bottom.
Yet he knows, as he wipes tears from the bruised and tear-stained face, that he cannot do what he has promised. There are some injuries he will not be able to mend, some scars he will not be able to heal.
There are some sins for which he can never atone.