Long-dead timelines line the library walls, stacked in glowing glyphs and coiled memorystrands. They hum softly in Cobalt's ears—mountains of information, all filed away inside him. He trails his fingers along a shelf, the memorystrands brushing his skin with flickers of static—someone else's grief, someone else's final breath, all etched into the thin film.
Something had consolidated in his mind during his fight with Ira. It solidified the moment he saw her changing—when her talons curled, when her teeth sharpened, when her eyes burned that impossible red.
He'd known for sure then.
But the heat between them in that moment had displaced logical thought. In that moment, he couldn't have focused on it even if he tried.
The truth was, he'd had his suspicions it from the very beginning—when she first appeared at the Gates of Hell.
The memory sparks again now, vivid as fire.
The Gates were still that day—silent, as always, under his watch. He was walking the threshold alone, lost in the hum of the void, when the air twisted. Bent inward.
And then—her.
She appeared in a flash of red and shadow, eyes wide, stumbling in on her hands and knees as if she'd tripped through the fabric of reality. Her sneakers squelched on the wet clay. Her scent—mortal, electric, alive—hit him like lightning. A ripple tore through the Gate itself, as if it had never been meant to open in her direction.
Something shifted the moment she crossed the threshold—raw, luminous, wrong. Every cell in Cobalt's body vibrated with it. And yet she had no idea what she'd done. No clue what rules she'd broken. She just arrived—accidental, extraordinary.
He didn't speak. Not right away. He only stared, frozen in his own skin, while she stood there.
No living being had ever arrived at the Gates uninvited.
Certainly not a Kludde. Which is what he knew—for certain now—that she was. An ancient demon of Hell, not seen since Satan still ruled as King. The word alone carried weight in his mind. What did it mean, her arriving there? What was the significance of her very existence?
In the moment of her arrival, he was just as shocked as she was, but he didn't let it show. Cobalt had learned, within his short and strange life, that vulnerability was a wound no magic could seal. So he'd stayed quiet. Kept his distance. Smiled with careful eyes. He didn't lie. But he didn't tell her the truth, either.
Now, pacing the halls of memory, the weight of that choice presses down. A pang of guilt shoots through his chest. So many secrets. So much he's kept from her.
And she'd has shown him everything. Ira—fiery, wild, real—wore her heart on her sleeve. She'd let him see her, raw and hurting, assuming he'd been returning the favour.
But he wasn't.
He couldn't.
Cobalt walks deeper into the library. It's a sprawling, cavernous labyrinth carved into the bones of Hell—its walls lined with shelves that spiral up into shadow, stacked with memorystrands, glyph-etched tomes, and crumbling books bound in materials long forgotten. Some shelves are crooked, warped by time or heat or magic. Others float midair, rotating slowly, as if turning themselves to be read.
The air is thick with memory—sweet with old parchment, sharp with metal, alive with latent power. The kind of silence that listens. Dust motes drift like stars through the warm glow of floating orbs that hover at regular intervals, their golden light never flickering.
Sometimes the library rearranges itself. Shelves move when he wasn't looking. Corridors stretch longer than they should. Occasionally, books whisper—not in voices, but in feelings. Melancholy, longing, heat.
Nestled in the nooks of the shelves and between stacks of knowledge, sleek silver-furred rats scurry and squeak, their eyes glinting with uncanny intelligence. They know better than to chew the bindings. Most of them are older than the bindings themselves.
Cobalt treats them like old friends—offering crumbs of dried fruit, bits of tea biscuit, murmuring to them in languages no longer spoken. They respond with affection, climbing his arms, tugging at pages, sometimes curling up on his shoulders while he reads. In this sanctuary of memory and quiet companionship, he finds a strange peace—even among the wreckage of a thousand dead timelines.
Usually bold, the smallest rat today sits still on the edge of a thick, dust-laced spine, his silver fur twitching ever so slightly. He blinks at Cobalt—once, twice—as if reading his thoughts from the outside in.
"What?" Cobalt asks, pausing mid-step, voice quiet. He knows this look.
The rat—whom he affectionately calls Tome—shrugs with the smallest lift of his shoulders, claws clicking gently against the leather binding beneath him.
"You seem different today," Tome says.
Cobalt exhales through his nose, almost a laugh, almost a sigh. "Do I?"
"You're pacing," Tome replies, sniffing the air as if trying to identify the emotion. "And not like you usually do. You've got that doom-thought spiral look again."
"I do not have a doom-thought spiral look."
"You do," Tome says, firmly. "You're pacing like you're trying to out-walk your own brain."
Cobalt says nothing.
"You're thinking about her again," Tome adds after a beat. "The girl."
"Her name is Ira."
"Yes, yes. Ira. With the claws and the temper and the eyes that glow like…how did you describe them again? Dying suns?"
Cobalt smiles despite himself. "She's… changing."
"She's always been changing. That's what mortals do. What's got your threads in a tangle now?"
One of Cobalt's abilities—of which there are many—is the ability to speak every language in existence. Animal, human, plant, even the murmurings of stones and earth if he listens long enough. A born communicator, fluent in everything but belonging. A diplomat stranded in a place without diplomacy. A translator with no one left to mediate. Trapped here in Hell with nothing but timelines, ghosts, and the occasional rodent who bothers to listen.
He turns his head, eyes drifting up toward the shelves that disappear into the dark above.
"She's a Kludde, Tome," he says finally.
The rat freezes. "Are you sure?"
Cobalt nods. "The signs are all there. The transformation is accelerating. And… the Gates let her through. That's never happened before."
"Well, now," Tome mutters, licking his paw. "That explains the existential brooding."
"I'm not brooding."
"You are brooding. You're pacing, muttering to yourself, and communing with memorystrands like you want them to solve your feelings for you."
Cobalt lets out a quiet huff. "I think I've made a mistake."
Tome tilts his head. "You mean not telling her what she is?"
"I didn't know for sure. And even now, I— it's not just about her species, Tome. It's what she means. Her presence here changes everything. She breaks the rules by existing."
"Or maybe she rewrites them," Tome says, voice gentler now. "Maybe that's what Kluddes are meant to do."
The silence stretches between them, warm and ancient. Cobalt's gaze returns to the nearest memorystrand, still humming softly.
"What if I've already lost her?" he asks.
"You can't lose something that was never yours," Tome says. "But you can be brave enough to meet her where she's going."
Cobalt closes his eyes. The hum of the library swells around him.
A thousand dead timelines. A thousand chances not taken.
And just one—one impossibly living girl—who stepped across the Gates without permission, as if destiny had forgotten to warn her.
Perhaps that's what hope looks like, in the end. A breach in protocol. A spark in the dark.
A name whispered by a rat, sitting on a book, in the belly of Hell.