The tunnels gave way to silence as the group traveled through the night. Mira led the others ahead with their maps, Ryn guarding the rear, while Jane found herself walking at Levi's side. The air was cold, the earth damp, and every few steps Jane's arm ached—the phantom pain digging in like claws.
She winced, pressing her metal hand against her ribs.
Levi's golden eyes shifted toward her. "The pain lingers."
Jane managed a weak smile. "You noticed."
Levi stopped walking. The others moved on ahead, unaware. She reached out, her long fingers curling gently around Jane's metal wrist. At her touch, warmth spread through the runes etched in the plating. Dark mist pulsed faintly from Levi's palm, seeping into the machinery, threading into the cracks where steel met flesh.
Jane stiffened, her breath catching. The phantom ache—the searing, gnawing emptiness where her hand had been—began to ease. For the first time since the surgery, she felt whole.
She looked up, stunned. "What did you—?"
"Not healing," Levi said softly. Her hair shimmered in the dim light, almost catching fire at the edges. "I cannot return what was lost. But I can dull the wound. Share my strength."
Jane's throat tightened. "Why? Why help me like this?"
Levi's gaze lingered on her, deep and unyielding. "Because you deserve the truth."
They sat together on a stone outcrop, the others far enough ahead to give them privacy. Levi's wings unfurled slightly, black feathers brushing the damp air. She looked not like a monster, but like a figure carved from sorrow and fire.
"My true name is Leviathan," she began, her voice low, heavy with memory. "Long ago, I ruled a kingdom of demons. But unlike the stories you've heard, my people were not conquerors. We were guardians. We welcomed witches, shifters, even humans into our cities. All who came with respect found it in return."
Jane's breath caught. "That's… not what the history books say."
Levi's eyes darkened. "Because General Shax made certain it would not be. He ruled the dragons with greed, hungering for land, for power. When I refused to bow, he struck. War consumed us. My people fought bravely, but we were outnumbered."
Her voice faltered, just slightly. Her hair shimmered red for a heartbeat before returning to black.
"I tried to hold the kingdom together. I failed. My armies fell, my cities burned. Shax wanted me alive—to break me, to claim me. I fled, not to abandon my people, but to lure him away. They never saw it that way. To them, I was a coward. A traitor."
Jane's chest ached. She had studied history her whole life, trusted the old records, and yet sitting here, hearing the tremor in Levi's voice, she knew the truth when she heard it.
"They thought you betrayed them," Jane whispered. "And he made sure the world believed it."
Levi nodded, her horns gleaming faintly in the moonlight filtering through cracks in the stone. "For eighteen centuries, I have been remembered as a monster. And perhaps… perhaps I became one, in my grief. But the truth—that I bled for them, that I chose exile so they might live—that truth was buried."
Silence stretched between them, broken only by the distant drip of water in the tunnel.
Jane reached out with her new hand. Metal fingers brushed against Levi's warm skin, awkward but steady. "I believe you."
Levi's eyes softened, her wings folding closer around them like a shelter. For the first time, her proud, sharp expression cracked, revealing the weight of a queen who had carried centuries of sorrow.
"Then you are the first in a thousand years," Levi whispered.
Jane swallowed hard, her chest tight with something she could not name. Pain, trust, something warmer beneath it.
For a fleeting moment, in the dark, they weren't witch and demon queen. They were two women carrying scars the world could not see.
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Thank you all for reading my novel