He knew he'd let her down.
He had seen it in her face—that raw, stunned betrayal. And still, he'd left. Still, he'd vanished through the wall.
Now he sits in his library, in the one place that still feels steady beneath him. The walls stretch endlessly upward, packed with books that hum softly with magic and memory. Endless tiers, winding staircases, candlelit alcoves that go deeper than the eye can see. The Library of Hell is not just a sanctuary—it is his only true home. Far more than the one he was born into.
Cobalt leans over a long oak table worn smooth by centuries of scholars before him, the idea of whom keeps him company in his long stretches of solitude. Open books are scattered across its surface, their pages full of languages no longer spoken. He's not reading. Not really. His long fingers turn the pages absently, his mind elsewhere.
How could he explain it to her? Everything he was, everything he knew—everything he carried. Their worlds were too different. Hers steeped in concrete, rain, and survival. His built on bloodlines and legacy and illusion. What words could ever make her understand?
Maybe none. And maybe that was just… what it was.
Still, he hoped.
Hoped that one day, she'd see past the lie. That she'd understand it wasn't malice. It was fear. Fear that prevented him from telling her all that he could do. Who he really was.
He exhales, long and slow. The air in the library smells of old parchment and his chair creaks softly as he shifts, pushing a heavy volume aside. The truth was heavier than any of the tomes around him.
He was born into a royal family—the royal family of Hell—a lineage once feared and reviled. But the throne had long since crumbled. His family had mysteriously scattered. Disappeared from their palace. A vanishing act that had spared the realm… and orphaned him. He didn't remember what life was like during the reign of his family. Had only grown as a young man into a world that had downright blossomed without the domination of its ruling class.
"I'm a prince," he whispers aloud, the words tasting foreign. "But a prince of what?"
No one in Hell knew who he was. They didn't care. Just assumed he was a passionate scholar, or a recluse. He preferred it that way.
No one needed a king here. Hell had done just fine without one. Much better, even.
He'd seen it with his own eyes—how life had flourished in the absence of power. How people had found ways to laugh again. To grow. To be free.
And he'd sworn not to disrupt what had bloomed. No matter how many times Dorian reappeared to check in on the city like it was his to reclaim.
His duty, Cobalt had decided, wasn't to restore the monarchy. It was to protect what had emerged from its absence. To guard the joy that had risen from the ashes of the crown. To do nothing, if nothing was the best he could offer.
As for the teleportation, he can't remember even living without it. The ability had simply been there for as long as he could remember. Like instinct. Or inheritance. Clearly his family had a knack for disappearing. It wasn't something he practiced; it was something he was. A relic of the bloodline.
The abandonment yawns in his chest like an open wound. Something about it feels wrong. Unresolved. Like a story with the last page missing. He cannot justify it—not fully. Because even though things are fine, even though the people are happy, something in him burns. A need to know. To understand.
To find the truth buried beneath the silence.
And when Ira had appeared at the gates of Hell—the first from Earth ever to do so, and with a ring to match his family inheritance—he'd thought maybe he was closer to finding out.
And still he'd lied to her.
Because even with her, he hadn't known how to tell the truth. Not the whole of it.
Cobalt leans back and closes his eyes, the weight of it all pressing down.
He doesn't want power.
He just wants to know who he is. Where he came from.
And he wants Ira to forgive him.
But tonight, both feel impossibly far away.
And so he reads on.
The feeling will pass.
It always does.