THE NAMES WE BURRY

📖 CHAPTER FOUR: The Names We Bury

POV: Ron

The eastern road was dust and fog and too damn quiet.

They’d been walking for hours. The sun was low behind the clouds, bleeding pale gold through the trees. Somewhere far behind them, the inn, the village, the last bit of comfort either of them might ever know—was gone.

Ron adjusted the pack on his shoulder, trying not to glance at Kael too often. The mage walked like a shadow—deliberate, graceful, always a step ahead but never too far. As if he didn’t trust Ron to walk behind him.

Which... fair enough.

He had lied to him.

And eventually, that truth was going to burn.

Ron sighed and said the words anyway. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Kael didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. “Is this where you admit you snore like a dying ox?”

“No,” Ron said, voice dropping. “It’s where I admit I’m not who I said I was.”

Now Kael stopped.

Dead in the path. Slowly turned. “Go on.”

Ron took a breath. “I’m not just an exiled knight. Or a soldier who broke his oath.”

Kael’s eyes narrowed, cold and calculating.

“I’m the crown prince of Valedorn.”

Silence. Not the normal kind. The heavy kind—where even the wind holds its breath.

“You’re joking,” Kael said flatly.

“I wish I were.”

Kael’s jaw clenched. “So the man I’ve been traveling with—the man I saved from freezing, fed, shared a fire with—lied to me from the beginning.”

Ron looked down. “Yeah. I did.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’d known who I was,” Ron said quietly, “you wouldn’t have saved me.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Kael’s mouth was a tight line. “You think you’re the first prince to lie about who he is?”

“I think I’m the only one who left the crown behind on purpose.”

Kael said nothing. Just turned, cloak whipping behind him, and kept walking.

Ron followed, of course. He always did.

---

The path narrowed as they entered the thicker forest, and the sky turned slate above them. The birds were gone. Even the insects were silent.

“What are we looking for in the East, anyway?” Ron asked, trying to break the fog between them.

Kael didn’t look at him. “A place. A person. A truth. I don’t know yet.”

“That’s comforting.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

They walked in silence again, but something had shifted. Not just because Ron’s title was no longer a secret—but because Kael was hiding something too, and Ron was starting to notice.

The way Kael’s eyes flicked toward shadows that weren’t there.

The way his magic sparked—unintentionally, unconsciously—when he touched something old.

And most of all, the way the air around him would bend when he was angry.

Not normal magic. Not learned magic.

Something else.

“You’re not just some hedge mage, are you?” Ron asked, not bothering to soften the question.

Kael’s hand tightened at his side. “No.”

Ron waited. No explanation came.

“Are you going to tell me what you are?”

Kael looked over his shoulder, face unreadable.

“Not yet.”

---

That night, they camped beneath an old stone arch carved with runes too worn to read. Kael refused to sleep near it. Said it made his teeth ache. Ron didn’t argue.

He just watched him as the fire crackled.

Kael sat across from him, wrapped in silence. And despite everything—despite the lies, the secrets, the fire under Kael’s skin and the blood in Ron’s name—they didn’t feel like enemies anymore.

Just two men trying to outrun who they used to be.

And maybe, just maybe, finding something else along the way.

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