The Shadow's Edge
[A Private War]
The royal tent was a sanctuary of silk and silence, yet it felt smaller than a cage. I sat on a campaign stool, the weight of the crown—not the physical gold, but the invisible iron of it—pressing into my temples.
Hephaestion stood by the entrance. He wasn't guarding the door from the outside; he was guarding himself from me. For the first time in twenty years, there was a distance between us that a horse couldn't gallop across.
"The men are calling you 'The Son of Ammon' again," Hephaestion said, his voice flat. He was polishing his bracers, the rhythmic scritch-scritch of leather against cloth sounding like a countdown. "They don't say it as a prayer anymore, Alexander. They say it as a diagnosis."