Mesopotamia, 587 BCE
He landed in blood.
Not metaphorically—though Lucifer certainly appreciated metaphor. Actual blood, warm and thick, pooling across sandstone tiles while screaming filled the air.
Lucifer pushed himself upright, his Armani suit now ruined beyond any tailor's salvation, and tried to orient himself. The fall through time had been... educational. Images and impressions had torn through him like shrapnel: a thousand moments he'd apparently lived but couldn't remember, a million choices he'd supposedly made but had no record of.
Now he stood in what appeared to be a throne room—massive pillared hall decorated with glazed bricks in brilliant blues and golds, depicting lions and dragons and flowers. The architecture was unmistakable.
Babylon. The great city. Nebuchadnezzar's jewel.
And it was dying.
Persian soldiers poured through the massive bronze doors, their curved swords red to the hilt. Babylonian guards fell before them like wheat before the scythe. In the chaos, Lucifer spotted the throne—and the man cowering behind it.
Belshazzar. Last king of Babylon. Known to history as the fool who saw the writing on the wall.
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
Lucifer remembered that story. He'd always found it amusing—a divine message appearing at a feast, warning of imminent doom. Very theatrical. Very much his Father's style.
But now, standing in the blood-soaked throne room, watching history unfold in real-time, Lucifer realized something was wrong.
The wall behind the throne was blank.
There was no writing. No mysterious hand. No warning whatsoever.
"That's not right," Lucifer murmured. "The writing on the wall is famous. Daniel interpreted it. The whole thing is in the bloody Bible."
A Persian soldier charged past him—through him—sword raised to strike at a fleeing servant. Lucifer was a ghost here, present but unable to interact. Just like the whiskey glass in his penthouse.
He was watching time, but he couldn't touch it.
Not yet, something whispered in his mind. Not until you remember how.
Belshazzar was screaming now—high, thin sounds that had no dignity in them. Lucifer watched with detached interest as the king scrambled away from the advancing Persians, knocking over golden cups and jeweled plates in his panic.
"Help me!" the king shrieked. "Someone help me! Where are my gods? Where are my protections? I was promised—"
A Persian blade opened his throat. The screaming stopped.
Lucifer felt a strange pang—not sympathy exactly, but something adjacent to it. The man had been a fool and a coward, true. But he'd also been abandoned. His gods had promised protection and delivered nothing.
Sound familiar?
Lucifer pushed the thought away and focused on the problem at hand. He was stuck in ancient Babylon, unable to affect anything, with no clear way home and a head full of memories that couldn't possibly be his.
"Alright," he said to the empty air. "I'll play your game. What am I supposed to learn here?"
The answer came not in words but in pull—a gentle tug at his consciousness, drawing him away from the throne room and deeper into the palace. Lucifer followed it, walking through walls and soldiers and slaves as if they were mist.
He descended stairs that no human had built. Passed through doors that no human could open. Went down, down, down into the earth beneath Babylon—into chambers that existed outside of recorded history.
And there, in the darkness beneath the great city, he found the Engine.
It was beautiful.
That was his first thought—before horror, before confusion, before the desperate denial that tried to rise in his throat. The machine was simply, undeniably, beautiful.
Gears of crystallized light rotated in perfect synchronization. Rods of solidified time connected spheres of compressed possibility. The whole apparatus was perhaps fifty feet across, filling a circular chamber carved from the living rock, and it sang—a low, constant hum that was almost too low to hear but vibrated in Lucifer's bones like a second heartbeat.
He knew this machine.
No. More than that.
He had built this machine.
The knowledge rose up from whatever pit Heaven had buried it in, unavoidable and absolute. Every gear, every connection, every singing crystal—he remembered crafting them. He remembered the calculations that took him centuries. He remembered testing the prototypes and failing and trying again.
He remembered why.
"Free will," Lucifer breathed. "It was about free will."
The Engine wasn't just a machine. It was a safeguard. A guarantee. A cosmic insurance policy that ensured causality couldn't be manipulated, that time couldn't be rewritten to erase choice, that no power in the universe—not even the Creator Himself—could simply edit humanity's decisions out of existence.
And he had built it because—
Because you saw what Father intended, his memory supplied. You saw the original plan: an existence without uncertainty, without risk, without the possibility of failure. Beautiful. Perfect. And utterly DEAD. Puppets dancing on strings, thinking themselves free.
You offered an alternative. A way to preserve creation while introducing genuine chaos—genuine choice. The Engine would lock the Timeline in place, preventing retroactive editing. Whatever happened would STAY happened, even if Heaven or Hell wanted to change it.
Father said no.
So you built it anyway.
Lucifer sank to his knees before the humming machine, overwhelmed by the weight of recollection.
"The Fall," he said. "The rebellion. It wasn't—I didn't—"
You were caught, the memory continued relentlessly. Michael found the Engine. Found you completing the final calibrations. He gave you a choice: destroy your creation and return to obedience, or face the consequences.
You chose the consequences.
But you didn't realize what they would BE. You expected war. Expected exile. Expected perhaps even destruction.
You didn't expect them to REWRITE you.
The Engine's hum changed pitch, and suddenly Lucifer could see them—images floating in the crystallized light like fish in an aquarium. Memories of his trial before the Host. His sentencing. His fall.
And then: the true horror.
He watched as angelic scribes—beings whose very essence was truth—lied. They rewrote the records of his service. They erased his contributions to creation. They transformed his philosophical objection into simple pride, his principled rebellion into petty jealousy.
They made him the villain.
And then, the final stroke of genius: they locked away his memories. Buried them so deep that not even an immortal mind could find them. Left him with only the false narrative, the cartoon version of himself that served Heaven's purposes.
Lucifer Morningstar, Lord of Hell, Adversary of Mankind—was a fiction.
The real Lucifer had been a builder. A protector. A guardian.
"Why?" he asked the Engine. "Why show me this now? Why wake me up after all this time?"
The machine's song shifted again, and new images appeared.
A crack. Hairline thin, spreading across one of the crystallized gears.
More cracks. Dozens. Hundreds. The Engine was failing.
And in its failure, time itself was beginning to shatter.
"Someone's breaking it," Lucifer realized. "Someone found out about the Engine, and they're destroying it. But if it fails—"
If it fails, his restored memory supplied, then time becomes malleable again. Retroactive editing becomes possible. Every choice humanity has ever made can be erased and rewritten.
The Timeline will die.
And whoever controls the fragments will control ALL of existence.
Lucifer stood slowly, his eyes never leaving the cracked Engine.
"Who?" he asked. "Who's doing this?"
The machine showed him one final image.
Wings of silver. Eyes of cold fire. A face that was almost—but not quite—his own.
Michael.
His brother. His betrayer. The one who had delivered him to judgment and watched as his mind was shattered.
Michael was destroying the Timeline.
And Lucifer was the only one who could stop him.