Because this was it.
The line between devotion and devastation. If he showed her the truth and she ran, if shedied, it would break him. Because out of everything he endured, he couldn’t face that again.
Yet there Alora didn’t waver. Her heartbeat beat steadily, ready.
So Rune took a breath and let go.
Every layer of his glamor fell away.
It started at his hands, shifting, warping, stripping him bare.
Alora went utterly still.
Her lips parted, breath caught somewhere between awe and shock. For a heartbeat, she did not move. Did not flee. Nor reach for him either. She only stared in silence, her gaze slowly roaming over him. He could not read her reaction from her features.
But he couldn’t bear not knowing.
So, he slipped deep into the bond and the world shifted as he saw himself from Alora’s eyes.
He was massive compared her, towering at seven feet.
Large horns curved from his brow like a crown of night, long black hair falling around his face. His wings were enormous, hooks at each crest, leathery and torn at the edges, stretched wide as if the night itself clung to him, veined with embers of red. His skin was like ink bleeding into water, giving way to black basalt. Glowing red paths surfaced along his arms and neck, forming like molten fissures of lava, pulsing with ancient symbols. Shadows breathed from his form, coiling and uncoiling like living smoke.
Her eyes widened slightly when they lowered to the powerful tail unfurling behind him. It was long and sinuous, thick at the base and tapering to a cruel, barbed tip. Obsidian scales overlapped in armored ridges, catching a hint of crimson in what little light there was. It twitched around his clawed feet withunease. The barbs at its end were curved and jagged, shaped less for balance and more for eviscerating.
Then her gaze lifted to his eyes. They had blackened completely to an unholy void where light once lived. Red irises burned with eternal flame, slitted with draconic pupils.
Rune didn’t move. Didn’t dare.
He was the terror that lurked in the dark, yet he terrified to lose everything once more.
But Alora only smiled, and that action hit harder than any blow.
Rune slipped out of the bond as she walked around him slowly, taking in his demonic form, her fingers trailing over every detail, the sharp edges, the holy markings, the curve of his wings.
Then she stopped behind him.
He flinched when her hand lightly traced the four scars on his lower back. Four deep, symmetrical grooves beneath where others had once been.
Her voice came soft. Heartbreaking. “You were not born a demon, were you?”
Rune closed his eyes. His voice echoed in the silence like a confession dragged from eternity. “I was born in the Heavens.”
Alora stilled.
“My life was once music and light,” he confessed. “Endless perfection in divinity. I was pure. I wasperfect. As glorious as a morning star.” He couldn’t disguise the bitterness lacing through his words and he clenched his jaw. “And such vanity cost me.”
Alora fell quiet a moment, her fingers pausing on his scars. “What happened?”
His teeth hurt from how hard he clenched them.
“My wings were taken from me,” Rune said simply.
Alora’s shock thrummed in his chest, humming down the bond.
Her arms wrapped around his torso and her forehead rested on his spine. The gentleness in her embrace made the back of his throat clench.
Alora’s voice wavered when she asked, “Why?”
