CALDAN
The laughter came from everywhere.
It poured down the walls like water. It seeped through the cracks in the stone. It crawled into Caldan's ears and nested there — warm, familiar, wrong. Because it was his voice. His laugh. The exact pitch, the exact cadence, the exact dry edge that he heard in his own skull when something struck him as darkly, impossibly funny.
But he wasn't laughing.
Dhaelon was.
Caldan stood in the centre of the vanguard's wreckage — dead men at his feet, blood on his sword, smoke in his lungs — and listened to his own voice mock him from the throat of his twin brother.
"You look tired, brother."
The words came from the army. From a hundred mouths at once. A hundred stolen voices speaking in perfect unison, shaping Caldan's own cadence with the precision of a man who had spent twenty years listening through a cell wall.
Caldan's grip tightened on his sword.
