CHAPTER FIVE: Blood and Memory
Rome, 64 AD
The fire started in the merchant district near the Circus Maximus, but it didn't stay there long.
Lucifer materialized on a rooftop overlooking the spreading flames, Chronos solidifying beside him a moment later. The guardian's silver-lined face flickered with reflected firelight as they surveyed the chaos below.
"The Great Fire of Rome," Chronos said. "Nero's folly."
"Nero's convenient disaster, more like," Lucifer muttered. "The man wanted to rebuild the city according to his own aesthetic preferences. A bit of strategic arson solved the political problem of all those pesky existing buildings." He scanned the rooftops, searching for the telltale shimmer of temporal distortion. "But that's not why we're here. The Engine showed me this moment—another breach. Another edit."
"What was changed?"
"I'm not certain yet. But I know it involves me. The original me." Lucifer's jaw tightened. "I was here that night. I remember it now—faintly, like a half-remembered dream. I did something that mattered. Something they erased."
They dropped from the roof and began moving through the streets, dodging panicked Romans who ran in all directions. The fire was spreading faster than natural flames should, leaping from building to building with almost malevolent intent. Buckets of water splashed uselessly against the inferno.
And then Lucifer saw her.
A woman, young and dark-haired, was trapped in an alley blocked by fallen timbers. Flames climbed the walls on either side of her, and in her arms she clutched a bundle that wailed with infant fury.
She was going to die.
They were both going to die.
And standing at the mouth of the alley, frozen with indecision, was—
"Me," Lucifer breathed.
His past self stood perhaps twenty feet away, dressed in the rough clothing of a Roman laborer. But there was nothing laboring-class about his posture, his bearing, the ancient intelligence in his eyes. He was watching the trapped woman with an expression that Lucifer recognized intimately.
He was weighing the cost of intervention.
"I can save her," Past-Lucifer murmured. "I can walk through those flames and pull her out. But if I do—if I'm seen doing something impossible—there will be questions. Attention. Ripples."
"She's going to die!" the woman screamed, clutching her child. "Someone please help me! My baby—"
"Ripples can be dangerous," Past-Lucifer continued, as if working through a complex mathematical proof. "I'm supposed to be maintaining a low profile. Guarding the Timeline from the shadows. Father's orders—or they would be His orders, if He ever bothered to give them."
The flames climbed higher. The woman's screams became more desperate.
"Oh, to Hell with it," Past-Lucifer said, and ran into the fire.
Present-Lucifer watched himself—his past self—charge through walls of flame that should have reduced any being to ash. He watched himself reach the woman, wrap his arms around her and her child, and carry them both back through the inferno without a single hair being singed.
He watched himself set them down safely, turn to leave—
And then the image stuttered.
There. The edit.
Present-Lucifer saw the shimmer of temporal distortion, the telltale sign of a moment being cut. And suddenly the scene changed: instead of walking away quietly, Past-Lucifer was laughing—a cruel, mocking sound that had nothing to do with the gentle determination he'd shown moments before.
"You think I saved you out of kindness?" Edit-Lucifer sneered at the woman, his features twisted into something predatory. "I saved you because your suffering amuses me. Watch your child grow up knowing that the Devil's hand is on his destiny. Watch and weep."
The woman clutched her baby and fled, sobbing with terror.
"That didn't happen," Present-Lucifer said flatly. "I remember what happened next. I wiped her memory of my face, blessed the child with a long life, and disappeared. There was no gloating. No threats. No—"
"They rewrote you," Chronos observed. "They took a moment of genuine compassion and turned it into cruelty. Made you into the monster they wanted you to be."
Lucifer's hands were shaking. Not with fear—with rage.
"This is what they've been doing," he said through gritted teeth. "Every time I did something good, something kind, they edited it. Made me appear malevolent. Built the legend of the Devil one stolen moment at a time."
"Can we restore it?"
"We have to." Lucifer strode toward the shimmer of distortion, reaching for it with senses that existed outside normal perception. "We have to find every one of these edits and tear them apart. Not just for the Timeline—for me. For the truth of who I actually was."
He grasped the distortion and pulled.
The fight was worse this time.
The Sentinel guarding this breach was older, stronger, more deeply embedded in the corrupted moment. It burst from the temporal scar like a demon from a wound, all blades and angles and shrieking hate.
"YOU CANNOT UNDO WHAT HAS BEEN DONE," it screamed, swinging arms that had been replaced with swords of frozen time. "THE DEVIL IS THE DEVIL IS THE DEVIL. THIS IS THE TRUTH NOW. THIS IS THE ONLY TRUTH."
"The truth," Lucifer snarled, ducking a blow that would have separated his head from his shoulders, "is whatever I bloody well decide it is."
He fought with everything he had—with hellfire and celestial steel and the desperate fury of someone who had been robbed of his own story. Chronos fought beside him, the two of them moving in terrible synchronization, centuries of combat experience flowing through their shared purpose.
The Sentinel was strong. The Sentinel was fast. The Sentinel had been designed specifically to counter Lucifer's abilities.
But the Sentinel didn't have something to prove.
Lucifer caught the creature's blade-arm, twisted, and broke it—not just physically but temporally, shattering the compressed moments that made up its structure. The Sentinel screamed and tried to retreat, but Chronos was behind it now, hands glowing with the silver light of pure time.
"Choose," Chronos said, echoing the words Lucifer had spoken to it. "Serve the lie, or join the truth."
The Sentinel hesitated.
And in that hesitation, Lucifer struck.
His hand plunged into the creature's chest and grasped—not flesh, not bone, but the core of identity that had once been an angel. He felt it there, buried beneath layers of modification and control: a name. A self. A being that had been twisted into a weapon against its will.
"I know what it's like," Lucifer said, his voice strained with effort. "I know what it's like to have your story stolen. Your purpose perverted. Your name taken and replaced with something ugly." He pulled, and the Sentinel's body began to crack. "Let me give it back."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the Sentinel spoke—in a voice that was older than its modification, a voice that remembered what it had been before Michael's changes:
"My name was Sariel. I watched over the movements of the moon."
"Sariel," Lucifer repeated, making it true. "Would you like to remember what that felt like?"
"Yes," Sariel whispered. "Please. Yes."
Lucifer released the angel's core, and the modifications shattered like ice in spring. The blade-arms dissolved. The frozen armor crumbled. And in its place stood a being of soft silver light, beautiful and broken and free.
"Welcome back," Lucifer said, steadying the former Sentinel as it—she, Sariel was feminine now that the modifications were gone—struggled to adjust to her restored form. "Welcome to the rebellion."
"The rebellion," Sariel repeated wonderingly. "You're actually doing it. Rebuilding the old guard. Restoring the truth."
"I'm doing what I should have done six thousand years ago: fighting back." Lucifer turned to the temporal scar, still shimmering with the false memory it had been designed to protect. "But first, we have an edit to correct."
He reached into the distortion and pulled—and the true moment came flooding back. Past-Lucifer walking away quietly, his face serene, his purpose fulfilled. The woman and her child safe, their futures unwritten but free.
No cruelty. No mockery. No Devil.
Just an angel who had chosen compassion over caution, and paid for it with his reputation.
"One more breach healed," Lucifer said, watching the Timeline stabilize around them. "Two down. Five to go."
Sariel and Chronos flanked him as he prepared to jump to the next moment, the next edit, the next piece of stolen history.
And somewhere in the burning city, a child cried—not with terror, but with the simple hunger of new life, unaware that his existence had just been contested between the forces of truth and lies.
Rome burned.
But one small piece of it had been saved.