The Unveiled Hunger: Chronicle of the Relic Prince
Chapter 3: The Weight of Silence
Rogan Hale did not speak.
Not on the first day.
Not on the tenth.
Not in the entire first year.
He simply arrived each dawn, took Kael from the nursery, and carried him down through the palace's lesser-used corridors to an abandoned courtyard in the outer ring.
The place had once been a training ground for the palace guard, but decades of neglect had left it overgrown with tough grass and ringed by cracked stone walls.
There Rogan set the boy on his feet and began.
No instructions.
No demonstrations.
No praise.
He would throw a punch—slow, deliberate—at Kael's chest.
Kael would fall.
Rogan would wait until the boy stood again.
Then he would throw another.
By the end of the first week, Kael stopped falling as far.
By the end of the first month, he stopped falling at all.
He never blocked.
He never dodged in the way the instructors taught the noble children—graceful sidesteps laced with Aura.
He simply shifted his weight at the last possible moment, letting the blow graze past.
Rogan's scarred face never changed expression, but he began throwing harder.
The palace servants noticed changes in the fourth prince.
His limbs grew longer, heavier.
The soft roundness of early childhood melted away into dense muscle that seemed to appear overnight.
When he slept—which he did for long, unmoving stretches after every session—his breathing was deep enough to rattle the nursery windows.
And still, he spoke only when hungry.
"Meat."
The word became a ritual.
Mira—or whichever nursemaid was on duty—would bring a platter.
Kael would eat until it was gone.
Then he would sleep.
Then Rogan would come again.
Princess Elira watched from a distance.
She was nine years old now, slender and sharp-eyed, already fluent in the language of court smiles and hidden knives.
Their father had tasked her, quietly, with "observing her youngest brother."
She told herself it was duty.
In truth, she was fascinated.
One spring afternoon, she followed Rogan and Kael to the forgotten courtyard.
She hid behind a crumbling archway and watched.
Rogan held the child-sized wooden sword out at arm's length.
Kael stared at it.
Then at Rogan.
Then back at the sword.
He took it.
Rogan drew his own blade—a real one, edged steel longer than Kael was tall—and settled into a low stance.
Elira's breath caught.
She half-rose, ready to call for guards.
Rogan attacked.
The blade came down in a clean vertical cut that would have split a grown man to the sternum.
Kael did not move until the steel was already falling.
Then he stepped forward—into the arc—and lifted the wooden sword.
The weapons met with a sharp crack.
Rogan's blade stopped an inch from Kael's forehead.
The wooden sword had not broken.
Kael looked up at the hunter with the same blank expression he wore when staring at an empty plate.
Rogan withdrew the blade, sheathed it, and nodded once.
Training ended for the day.
Elira slipped away before they noticed her, heart hammering.
That evening, she went to the king's private study.
King Aurelion sat at his desk, reviewing reports from the northern border.
Ether lamps floated above him, casting steady light on maps marked with Aura legion positions.
Elira bowed.
"Father."
He did not look up.
"Report."
"Kael stopped a real sword today. With a wooden one."
Aurelion's quill paused.
"Rogan's doing?"
"Yes."
The king set the quill down.
"Continue observing. Tell no one else."
Elira hesitated.
"Is he… dangerous?"
Aurelion met her eyes for the first time.
"Everything new is dangerous, Elira. That is why we watch."
She left unsatisfied.
In the forgotten courtyard the next morning, Rogan began throwing two punches at once.
Kael fell once.
Then never again.
By the end of his seventh year, the palace had quietly accepted a new truth: the fourth prince was strong.
Not in the bright, visible way of Aura.
Not in the subtle, humming way of Ether.
Strong in the way a mountain is strong—silent, immovable, and indifferent to whether anyone noticed.
Servants stopped meeting his eyes when delivering meals.
The kitchens roasted three lambs a day now, and still ran short.
Crown Prince Cassian, training in the main yards with the elite Aura cadets, heard the whispers.
He watched once, from a high balcony, as Rogan hurled a boulder the size of a warhorse at the small figure in the grass.
Kael did not brace.
He did not dodge.
He simply shifted his stance, caught the boulder against his shoulder, and let its momentum carry it past him into the wall.
Stone cracked.
Cassian's knuckles whitened on the balcony rail.
Prince Varen, quieter and more scholarly, spent evenings in the royal library poring over ancient texts about bloodline anomalies.
He found nothing.
Only one person still looked at Kael without fear.
Elira began visiting the nursery in the evenings, bringing books she thought a normal child might like—tales of heroes with glowing swords and wise Ether sages.
Kael ignored the books.
He sat on the floor and watched her with the same intensity he watched food.
One night, she brought a small plate of honeyed pork.
Kael ate it in four bites.
Then he did something no one had ever seen.
He reached out and touched her sleeve—lightly, curiously, as though testing whether she was real.
Elira froze.
Kael withdrew his hand and looked at the empty plate.
"More," he said.
His voice was deeper now, rough from disuse.
Elira smiled, small and careful.
"Tomorrow," she promised.
Outside the palace, in the shadowed halls beneath the great temple of Piera, a different kind of observation was taking place.
A woman in plain scholar's robes stood before a circle of hooded figures.
On the stone table between them lay a single parchment—an unauthorized copy of the fourth prince's birth record.
The woman spoke softly.
"The null child lives.
He grows.
He eats.
And he does not bend to the Veil."
The circle was silent for a long moment.
Then one of the hooded figures—an old man with a voice like dry leaves—replied.
"Then we must begin the watching in earnest.
Before the world notices what it has allowed to exist."