I didn’t wake up. Azazel had gone quiet somewhere below me, and this time it was my turn to fall.
The body’s pain faded into something distant and grey, and the world I knew slipped away from underneath me.
There was a long stretch of nothing. I drifted in it.
Then a scene resolved out of the dark, piece by piece, with the same slow assembly a room makes when your eyes finally adjust to it.
The body at the centre of it was far too small to be anyone I recognised yet.
Small hands lifted, clumsy, with scarred palms too young to have earned scars this early, and none of them mine. I understood, watching them shake in the cold air, that I had no part in this one at all. I was only watching it happen.
The scene pulled back to show a stone crib.
Two winged figures stood over it, heavy horned crowns catching a violet light that never seemed to come from anywhere. Neither of them radiated anything close to warmth, not that I could see from here.
They didn’t hold him. Instructors surrounded the crib instead.
They began drilling Umbra into that tiny body before it could walk.
Umbra runs cold. Violently cold, the kind that freezes a person from somewhere behind the ribs outward. They forced it into his undeveloped core every single day, stretching his capacity early, guaranteeing a result nobody had asked him whether he wanted.
The infant screamed. Neither crowned parent flinched. They stood beside the crib and wrote his tolerance down on a parchment scroll, logging the yield of something they were still deciding whether to keep.
He learned quickly that crying only made the sessions run longer.
He learned to be silent instead.
The years folded forward, quick and merciless, memory compressing what it doesn’t want to keep in full.
The nursery became a training yard under a sky that never once turned a colour that wasn’t bruised violet. There were no rest days. His wardens kept him apart from every other child in the palace, narrowing his entire schedule down to drills and simulated battle.
An armoured caretaker stood over him in that yard more times than I could count.
“Again,” the caretaker said.
Small arms lifted a wooden blade. The exhaustion in his torn muscle was visible, but the body moved anyway, because stopping had never once been an option offered to him.
The caretaker stepped inside his guard and struck him across the ribs. He hit the stone floor hard enough to lose the air from his lungs.
The pain was nothing beside the cold. His instructors demanded he keep cycling the Umbra without pause, every hour he was conscious, freezing him from the inside out on a schedule.
“Get up,” the caretaker said. No anger in it. “Cycle it again.”
He dragged himself upright. His feet found their place on pure instinct.
The scene moved to a palace corridor with a narrow window looking down on a garden. Other children ran through it below, laughing, faint enough that the sound barely reached the glass. Something lurched in him, visible even from here, before he’d taken half a step toward it.
A heavy gauntlet dropped onto his shoulder.
“That isn’t for you,” the caretaker said. “You have your drills to finish. Look away.”
He looked away. I watched him take that wanting and fold it down small enough to bury it under everything else the cold had put there.
Arrogance became the armour, because it was the only kind the cold couldn’t get through. He became sharp-tongued and snide, a boy nobody could get a straight answer or a soft feeling out of. It was the only version of himself they let him keep.
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One day the armour cracked all the way through.
He was perhaps five, in a body that measured that young. The forced Umbra had finally outpaced what his small core could carry, and his nervous system began shutting itself down mid-drill, his legs simply refusing to hold him.
He collapsed on the freezing stone. The wooden sword clattered from his bleeding hands. He tried to push himself up, but his arms gave out under him.
Nobody offered a hand. Nobody called for a healer.
“A defective weapon was sent to be corrected,” the instructor said.
Two guards dragged him by his small arms down a spiral staircase into the deepest part of the palace, throwing him into a cell built to smother Umbra completely.
The stone itself stripped away the only thing he had ever been given. The door slammed behind him, the lock turning with a sound that meant something final.
They left him in total darkness for two full days.
Fear took hold of him for the first time since the crib, and I watched it happen with no way to reach in and stop it. The arrogant little mask came apart. There was only a child left, small and freezing, wings wrapped around his own shaking body because there was nothing else in that room warm enough to hold onto.
He cried all day, believing that he was going to die down there, and that he deserved it because he could no longer swing the sword.
Someone had to come, eventually. He waited.
Nobody did, for the first day and most of the second.
Then the door opened on a thin line of warm torchlight. It wasn’t a crowned parent, and it wasn’t a caretaker who came to drag him back to the yard.
A knight stepped into the cell. Heavy silver plate and a deep blue cape, holding a torch in one hand that she let fall the moment she saw him. She had the same black wings as the boy, and long red hair.
She crossed the freezing stone on her knees and pulled the small, shaking body against her chest plate, wrapping her wings around him like a wall between him and the cold.
He went rigid. Nothing living had ever held him before, and he didn’t have the first idea what to do with it.
She reached into a pouch at her belt and pressed something small and crumbling into his scarred palm. A stolen sugar cookie. He stared at it with no idea what it was, assuming it must be some new kind of ration.
“Eat it,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “It’s sweet.”
He took a small bite. Sweetness hit his tongue for the first time in his entire life, and it was the first pleasant thing his body had ever felt.
More tears came, different ones this time. He ate the rest in desperate little bites, choking on the crumbs while he sobbed into her shoulder.
She didn’t tell him to stop crying. Instead, she told him he was brave, running her fingers through his hair, and something settled into that dark cell that the cold would never fully reach again.
✦ ✦ ✦
Her name was Zariel. She became the closest thing to a sister he would ever have.
The soldiers of her detail became the closest thing to a family. They slipped him extra rations and smiled at him when the wardens looked away. They taught him what it sounded like when someone spoke to you and wanted nothing back for it.
She told him stories of the outside world in the quiet after training: green oceans, and mountains that scraped the sky; ordinary cities where people laughed out loud in the street and nobody was afraid.
He memorised every word. He had nothing else to hold.
He learned, finally, the difference between two things that had looked identical to him before. The court demanded obedience and got it through fear. Zariel and her soldiers gave him loyalty freely, and it cost them nothing he had to take from anyone else to earn it.
The years went on. The wooden sword became real steel, and the wings grew heavy enough to fold a growing body inside them.
His own body eventually looked like an older child’s in human terms. The court declared him ready and sent him out to clear his first war.
He came back from it three days later than expected, with every soldier he’d been given still alive behind him.
Word of that spread through the ranks before he’d even finished his own report. A boy, barely into his growth, walking out of a collapsed world with a company’s worth of kills behind him and none of his own dead to answer for.
Someone in the officer’s mess started calling him the Dark Prince before he’d even had the chance to object to it. It stuck immediately, as true names do.
He hated it the first time he heard it. Zariel told him quietly that hating it wouldn’t make it go away, and that there were worse things to be called by people who feared you than something that was at least accurate.
He spent five years earning it after that, one hostile nation after another. Zariel’s soldiers marched beside him through every one of them. He learned to command them, and commanded them well. He never lost a single one.
The capital stopped treating him like a defective experiment somewhere in those years. Caretakers who had once documented his screaming now bowed when he passed. The same cold voice that had once said, "Don't embarrass the house," began sending him out with full honours instead.
The Dark Prince, stitched into the banner they raised for him, without ever asking whether he wanted it there.
He became everything they had built him to be: feared across a dozen lands. A name enemies learned to dread before they ever saw his wings; a name his own soldiers said with something closer to pride than fear, which was the only version of it he ever let himself enjoy.
He was the finest weapon the court had ever forged.
He was also, underneath all of it, still the boy in the cell, and almost nobody alive knew it. The only people who ever did were the soldiers who loved him, and the sister who had first brought warmth into the dark to find him.
That was the Dark Prince Azazel, at the very height of everything he would ever become.
I didn’t yet know what came next.