The Engine's chamber began to shake.
Dust rained from the ceiling—which was wrong, because this place existed outside normal reality, which meant the shaking was coming from inside time itself. Cracks were spreading faster now, racing across the crystallized gears like frost on a winter window.
Lucifer pressed his hand against the machine's casing and felt it recognize him. Warmth spread from the contact point, and suddenly he was no longer a ghost. He was here—present and solid and capable of affecting reality.
The Engine had restored his connection to the Timeline.
"Lovely," Lucifer muttered. "Now tell me how to fix you."
More images flooded his mind—not memories this time, but instructions. The Engine had been damaged at seven points across history. Seven moments where someone had carefully, surgically removed key events from the Timeline. Each removal had weakened the structure, created paradoxes, opened gaps that were spreading like cancer.
To repair the Engine, Lucifer would have to visit each moment and restore what had been erased.
But there was a catch.
The edits are guarded, the Engine informed him. Michael has placed Sentinels at each breach—angels modified to exist outside time, loyal only to him. They will try to stop you.
"Of course they will," Lucifer said. "Heaven forbid anything be simple. Where's the first breach?"
The Engine showed him: a desert at night, a mountain of smoke and fire, a man climbing with tablets of stone in his arms.
Sinai. Moses. The moment the Law was given to humanity.
"They edited the Ten Commandments?" Lucifer asked incredulously. "Which ones? 'Thou shalt not covet' always struck me as a bit unrealistic, but—"
Not the Commandments, the Engine corrected. What came BEFORE. What Moses asked for—and what he was denied.
Lucifer's blood ran cold.
He knew this moment. Every angel did. It was the pivot point of human history—the instant when the Creator's relationship with His creations was codified into law. What Moses had received on that mountain had shaped four thousand years of human civilization.
But apparently, something had been removed.
"Show me," Lucifer commanded.
The Engine obeyed.
Lucifer saw Moses climbing the sacred mountain, his face set with determination. He saw the smoke and fire that concealed the summit. He saw the prophet fall to his knees before a Presence that had no form but filled the entire sky.
And he heard Moses speak:
"Lord, your people are slaves to their own weakness. The Law you offer will guide them, yes—but they will break it. Again and again, they will break it. What then? What becomes of them when they fail to meet your standard?"
The Presence responded, but the Engine's image flickered—corrupted by the edit that had been made. Lucifer could see that something was supposed to come next, but it was gone. Erased. Cut from the Timeline as cleanly as a surgeon removing a tumor.
"What came after that question?" Lucifer asked.
The Engine struggled to show him. Static. Distortion. A glimpse of Moses weeping with joy. A fragment of sound: "—forgiveness without limit—"
Then nothing.
"Someone removed God's answer," Lucifer realized. "Moses asked about mercy for human failure, and Father responded... but that response was erased from history."
The implications were staggering.
For four thousand years, humanity had labored under a Law that demanded perfection without—apparently—the full context of divine grace that was meant to accompany it. Religions had fractured over the question of salvation. Wars had been fought. Inquisitions held. Millions had lived and died believing themselves damned for failures that were supposed to have been addressed at the very moment the Law was given.
And someone had deliberately removed that assurance.
"Michael," Lucifer growled. "This was you, wasn't it? You removed the mercy to keep them afraid. Fear is control. Fear is obedience. Fear is everything you ever wanted from Father's creation."
The Engine pulsed in agreement.
"Right then." Lucifer rolled his shoulders, feeling the old power stir in his bones. "Time to have a conversation with my brother. How do I get to Sinai?"
The machine's song rose to a crescendo. Light wrapped around Lucifer like a cocoon, and he felt the familiar sensation of falling through time—but controlled now, directed, purposeful.
He was the Guardian again.
And he had work to do.
Sinai Peninsula, 1446 BCE
The desert was trying to kill him.
Not metaphorically—the heat was like a physical weight, pressing down on his shoulders, squeezing moisture from every pore. Lucifer had manifested his ethereal body with appropriate clothing for the era (rough-spun wool, sandals, a head covering), but he'd underestimated how deeply unpleasant this particular corner of the ancient world could be.
"Right," he gasped, already sweating through his robes. "Note for the future: pack water."
The mountain loomed before him—not particularly impressive by modern standards, but charged with such concentrated divine energy that even looking at it directly made his eyes water. Somewhere up there, hidden in supernatural smoke and fire, Moses was receiving the Law.
And somewhere up there, a Sentinel was guarding the edit that had changed everything.
Lucifer began to climb.
The first hour was merely miserable. The second was torturous. By the third, he was seriously reconsidering his commitment to saving the Timeline.
"Couldn't have put the Engine in Hawaii," he muttered, grabbing a rock ledge and hauling himself higher. "Couldn't have built it beneath a nice Tuscan vineyard. No, it had to be Babylon, and the first breach had to be on a bloody mountain in the bloody desert—"
"You talk to yourself," observed a voice from above. "You always did."
Lucifer froze.
A figure sat on a boulder perhaps twenty feet ahead—humanoid in shape but wrong in proportion, its limbs too long, its joints bending at angles that made no anatomical sense. It wore armor that seemed to be made of frozen time itself: moments compressed into metal, seconds hammered into plate.
Its face was the worst part.
Where features should have been, there was only static—the visual equivalent of white noise, constantly shifting and reforming into almost-shapes that vanished before they could be recognized.
"You're the Sentinel," Lucifer said, climbing the last few feet to stand on level ground. "Michael's little guard dog."
The creature tilted its head, and the static shifted into something that might have been a smile.
"I was an angel once," it said. "One of the lower choirs. I don't remember my name. Michael took it from me when he made me into this. Names are anchors to time, he said. I had to be free of such limitations."
"Charming. And what exactly are you guarding?"
The Sentinel gestured toward the summit, where smoke billowed and fire danced.
"The moment. The edit. The first of seven wounds that will kill your precious Engine." It stood, unfolding its too-long limbs with a crackling sound like breaking ice. "Michael told me you would come. He told me what you really are—the Guardian, the Architect, the First Traitor."
"Traitor?" Lucifer's eyes flashed with genuine anger. "I betrayed nothing. I built the Engine to protect creation, to preserve free will, to ensure that no power could simply erase the choices that—"
"You defied the Plan," the Sentinel interrupted. "The Creator's design was perfect. Every soul, every choice, every moment—all of it was meant to flow according to His will. You introduced chaos. Error. You made it possible for humanity to fail."
"I made it possible for them to choose! There's no virtue in obedience without the option to disobey. There's no love in loyalty without the possibility of betrayal. I gave them—"
"Freedom to damn themselves," the Sentinel finished. "And damn themselves they have. Wars. Atrocities. Cruelties beyond counting. All because you wanted them to have options." It began walking toward him, armor clanking with every step. "Michael is fixing what you broke, Lightbringer. He's removing the chaos. Editing the errors. When the Engine falls, time will flow smoothly again—and humanity will finally become what the Creator intended."
"Puppets," Lucifer spat. "Slaves. Beautiful, perfect machines with no more soul than a clockwork toy."
"Safe," the Sentinel countered. "Protected. Loved. Isn't that what a Father should want for his children? Safety? Protection?"
"Not at the cost of their self."
They were close now—close enough that Lucifer could feel the cold radiating from the Sentinel's temporal armor. The creature was fast, probably strong, and definitely designed to kill him.
But Lucifer had advantages of his own.
"You know," he said conversationally, "there's something Michael forgot when he built you."
The Sentinel paused. "And what's that?"
Lucifer smiled—his true smile, the one that had nothing to do with charm and everything to do with the hungry fire at his core.
"He forgot that I'm not just the Guardian of the Timeline. I'm also still the bloody Devil."
He moved.
Not fast by angel standards—he'd lost much of his speed in the Fall. But the Sentinel wasn't expecting him to close the distance, wasn't expecting the hand that shot out and grabbed its face, fingers digging into the static where features should be.
And it definitely wasn't expecting what came next.
Lucifer had spent millennia in Hell, perfecting the art of suffering. He knew agony like a musician knows his instrument—every note, every variation, every possible combination of pain that a conscious being could experience.
He poured all of it into the Sentinel's mind.
An eternity of burning. An infinity of ice. The crushing loneliness of existence without purpose. The horror of watching everyone you love choose to leave. The knowledge that you are not evil, not truly, but that you will be REMEMBERED as evil forever, your name a curse on the lips of billions, your story a lie that outlasts every truth—
The Sentinel screamed.
It was a sound that existed outside normal acoustics—a shriek of pure temporal distortion that made the mountain shudder and the smoke above them recoil. The creature fell to its knees, clawing at its static face, its armor cracking as the compressed time within began to destabilize.
"My brother made you from moments," Lucifer said, his voice cold and steady. "But moments are fragile things. They can be broken. Reordered. Unmade."
He twisted his grip, and the Sentinel began to come apart—literally dissolving into streams of raw time that flowed around Lucifer like water around a stone. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. The creature's entire existence unraveling into its component moments.
"Please," it whispered with a mouth that was already half-gone. "I don't want to be unmade. I don't want to stop existing. I was a person once. I had a name—"
Lucifer hesitated.
The Sentinel was a weapon, a guard dog, a tool of Michael's editing. It had been created specifically to prevent him from reaching the breach. By any rational analysis, he should destroy it completely and move on.
But...
I was a person once.
Lucifer understood that feeling rather well.
"What if I gave you a choice?" he asked.
The Sentinel's dissolution paused. "What?"
"A choice. The thing my brother took from you when he made you into this." Lucifer released his grip, and the creature's form began to stabilize—still damaged, still leaking moments, but no longer actively unraveling. "I can't restore your name. That's gone forever. But I can give you a new one. And with it, a purpose that isn't servitude."
"I... I don't understand."
"You're a being of time now. That's what Michael made you. But being made of time doesn't mean you have to be a slave to the one who made you." Lucifer stepped back, giving the creature space. "The Engine needs guardians. Real ones, who understand what they're protecting and why. Michael had the right idea—he just used it for the wrong reasons."
The Sentinel stared at him with static eyes that slowly, slowly began to resolve into something more human.
"You would... trust me? After I tried to kill you?"
"I would give you the chance to earn trust. That's different." Lucifer smiled, and this time it was almost gentle. "What do you say? Would you like a name?"
The creature was silent for a long moment. Then, with a voice that shook with something that might have been hope:
"Yes. Please. Yes."
Lucifer placed his hand on the Sentinel's shoulder—a gesture of blessing, of welcome, of acceptance.
"Then I name you Chronos," he said. "The first of a new kind of guardian. My guardian. Welcome to the rebellion."
The creature—Chronos—shuddered as the name took hold, rewriting its essence from weapon to protector. The static face resolved into features: strong, androgynous, marked with lines of silver light that pulsed in time with the heartbeat of the universe.
"The breach," Chronos said, its voice steadier now. "It's in the summit. I'll take you there."
Lucifer nodded. "Lead the way."
Together, the Devil and his newest creation climbed toward the smoke and fire—toward the moment where everything had been changed.
Toward the truth that Heaven had stolen from humanity.