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That sheer numbers could tip the balance.

They were wrong.

At first, it had been a slow war—skirmishes along the borders, traps laid in forests and mountains, cities enforcing brutal crackdowns onany supernatural presence. There were shifters skinned and left just outside the territories; children stolen from their mothers. But humans had underestimated what it meant to fight those who had spent their existence living as predators.

The shifters had hunted the enemies down in the night, one by one—silent, relentless.

The magical ones had burned their machines with a flick of their wrists, shattered steel and circuits with a whispered word.

And so, the war had dragged on, with human desperation growing by the year. Until, finally, they had begun to realize the truth:

As their numbers dwindled to a fraction of what it used to be, even with all their machines, they were going to lose.

It was then that the truce was declared.

A truce built on necessity, not trust—when the human leaders, once proud and unbending, finally saw that they stood on the edge of extermination.

They had retreated into their cities, abandoning vast expanses of land, leaving the wild places—the forests, the mountains, the open fields—for the shifters and the magical ones to claim as their own.

Now, those lands belonged to them.

The shifters ran free, their territories vast. The magical ones built their hidden villages, their covens woven into the very fabric of nature itself.

And the humans?

They were confined to their towering cities, their glass and steel prisons, where they depended on trade to survive.

For though they had kept their machines, their laboratories, their data networks—they had lost the one thing they had never learned to control.

The land itself.

Now, it was the shifters and the magical ones who tended the farmlands, who protected the great forests, who held dominion over the rivers and the beasts.

And in return, the humans offered what they still had to give—technology, medicine, and advancements in engineering.

It was an uneasy alliance.

Neither side truly trusted the other.

Neither side had forgotten the war.

Draken wondered, not for the first time, how long the peace would last.

But not all humans had been the enemy.

There had been those who had fought alongside the shifters, those who had hidden witches, warlocks, and shifters alike, at great risk to themselves. Some of them had become allies, tolerated within the territories, and welcomed in certain neutral territories where humans, shifters, and magical folk coexisted under watchful eyes.

And just as some humans had found a place among the supernatural, so too had some of the supernatural embedded themselves among humans.

It had started as a necessity—a way to ensure the war would never come again. But over time, it had become something else.

Shifters and magical ones now lived in human cities; their presence was unknown to most.

They worked in their police forces, their governments, their intelligence agencies.

Some were traders, overseeing the flow of food and medicine between the supernatural territories and human settlements. Others were watchers, keeping an eye on signs of unrest, signs of rebellion.

Because while the truce had held for decades, there were whispers in the cities.