studiobondurri Chapter 127: Forming lies
Chapter 127: Forming lies
A black circle opened on the floor and he rose from it with the same unhurried quality that the descent had carried, his feet finding the familiar boards of his room, the ordinary afternoon light coming through the window, the small space exactly as he had left it.
Kael pushed off his shoulder immediately.
He launched upward and began his circuits — the happy, energetic loops that expressed themselves differently from his composed performance gliding, faster and less deliberate, the movement of a creature that had too much good feeling to hold still.
He made a tight circle near the ceiling, banked around the corner of the wardrobe, dipped under the low beam, and came back around without slowing.
The joy was coming through the link clearly.
Not the performed satisfaction of a dragon announcing its own greatness — genuine joy, the specific warmth of a creature that had accomplished something it had wanted to accomplish and was still feeling the warmth of that in its body.
He had shown Noah what he could do. All of it — the black fire, the spatial portals, the dark slash, the Dragon’s Order, the dark balls and spikes, the core extraction. Each ability witnessed, each one producing the reaction he had been hoping for.
His master had been impressed!
That was what was circling the room with him, carried in every wing stroke. The knowledge of it, simple and complete, more satisfying than any of the individual moments that had produced it.
Noah watched him for a moment from the edge of the bed, something quiet and warm in his expression.
Then he collapsed backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling.
"Mom and sis aren’t back yet," he muttered.
Apart from him and Kael, he could tell there was no one else in the house.
He lay there for a moment, the ceiling holding his gaze while the thing he had been carrying around the edges of his thinking for the last hour moved back toward the center where it had to be dealt with.
The plan for his mother and sister — the financial relief he had decided he owed them, the cover story that would need to accompany it, the conversation that had to happen before any of it could be put in motion.
He had been building the words for it since the decision had solidified. Running variations, testing how different framings sounded in his own mind before committing to any of them.
He sat up.
"Hey, mom," he said to the empty room, his voice taking on the careful, slightly too-casual tone of a rehearsal. "So... there’s this very powerful magus."
He paused.
"Who saved me from the brink of death some days back." Another pause. "And took me in as his disciple."
The words sat in the air of his empty room and he listened to them with the critical ear of someone assessing whether they would hold up under actual conditions.
Kael completed a circuit overhead and glanced down at him mid-flight with an expression that suggested the dragon had opinions about the rehearsal but was choosing, for the moment, not to share them.
Noah looked at the ceiling again.
The story wasn’t bad. It had the advantage of being partially true — a powerful magus, a disciple, the framework of an established connection that explained future changes without requiring the full explanation underneath them.
It was the kind of story that could be believed by people who had no reason to disbelieve it, told by someone they trusted, about circumstances that were unusual but not impossible.
The problem was his mother.
She was not a person who accepted the surface of things when the surface felt like it had more underneath it.
She had raised him, which meant she had spent years reading him with the particular accuracy of someone who had both the motivation and the practice to do it well.
The story would need to be delivered well — not just true enough to stand up to logic, but comfortable enough in his own body that she didn’t feel the edges of the discomfort around it.
He needed to practice more.
Noah grabbed his head.
’No,’ he thought, the word arriving with the flat certainty of someone who had just heard something that wasn’t going to work and knew it immediately. ’Not like that.’
He sat with it for a second, exhaled, and tried again.
"He..." he started, his voice finding the careful tone of a second attempt. "He wears a mask. But trust me, he’s not a shady person."
He paused, listening to what he was saying. "Because he’s actually... me?"
The last two words arrived with an upward inflection that hadn’t been planned and didn’t help anything.
He clicked his tongue.
Then he fell backward onto the bed again, the same unceremonious collapse as before, his arms loose at his sides and his eyes returning to the ceiling with the expression of a man who had just confirmed something he had been trying not to confirm.
"Perhaps," he mumbled, "I didn’t really think this through."
The ceiling offered nothing useful in response.
He hissed — a short, sharp exhale through his teeth — as the full shape of the problem made itself clear in a way that earlier optimism had been gently obscuring.
There was no clean version of this. He had been turning it over since the decision to tell them something had solidified, approaching it from different angles, looking for the framing that would let the story land without producing exactly the reaction he was trying to avoid.
But the framing didn’t exist.
He couldn’t exactly tell them the truth— I am Mr. White, I have been living a second life, I have an S-rank adventurer card and a million gold and a dragon that lives in my shadow.
"Well," he said, the word carrying the resigned energy of someone closing a door they had been trying to leave open, "I’ll just figure it out somehow."
Kael descended.
He dropped from his circuit and came to hover directly above Noah’s face, close enough that his wings produced a faint movement in the air.
He looked down at Noah.
"You’re overthinking this, master," he said, his tone sitting in the register between confidence and reassurance — not dismissive of the problem, but genuinely unbothered by it.
"I think it should go well." He tilted his head slightly. "Arch magi are known to be quite mysterious. Your mother shouldn’t have a problem with Mr. White’s mask."
Noah looked up at him from his horizontal position.
"Is that what you think?"
The question came out quieter than he had intended, and the quietness changed its quality — less rhetorical, more genuine. He held Kael’s gaze for a moment, and then something shifted in his expression.
The composure that he maintained as a default, the steady and unreadable surface that had become so practiced it mostly ran on its own — it softened. Not completely, not in a way that turned into something dramatic, but enough that what was underneath it became visible in the way things became visible when the layer above them thinned.
He looked sad.
"It’s weird though," he said, the words coming out slowly, each one placed with a care that had nothing to do with performance. "I’m literally sitting here making a plan on how to lie to them." A pause. "To deceive my own family."
The words sat in the room.
Kael went still above him, the wings continuing their movement but the rest of him quiet in the way he went quiet when the link was carrying something that warranted it.
Noah stared at the ceiling.
It wasn’t a new feeling — he had been aware of the gap between his two lives since the moment the second one had started taking shape.
But awareness and the full weight of it sitting on your chest were different experiences, and the weight was heavier in the specific context of rehearsing how to mislead the people who had never lied to him.
His mother had worked every day of his memory. Had held things together with the specific, sustained determination of someone who didn’t have the option of putting them down.
Had never, in all of that, made him feel like the difficulty was something he had caused or something she resented him for.
She had simply continued, day after day, and the continuity of it had been its own kind of love.
And he was lying in his bed constructing a story to tell her.
Not because he wanted to. Not because the deception was something he had chosen for its own sake or because the truth didn’t matter to him.
But because the truth — the full truth, the system, the second identity, the dragon, all of it — came with consequences he hadn’t finished understanding yet, and those consequences had the potential to reach people he wasn’t willing to put at risk.
That was the honest justification.
It was a real one. It held up under examination.
But it didn’t make the sad feeling go away, because the sad feeling wasn’t responding to the justification.
It was responding to the simple fact of the distance — the gap that the secret created between him and the people who had never put a gap between themselves and him.