Rome, 64 CE. The night Nero's city burned.
Damien stood at the edge of the Palatine Hill, watching fire consume the skyline. History would blame the emperor. But Damien knew better.
He'd returned here chasing a signal—temporal static encoded in the ruins of a future Vatican script. Lyra had left it, taunting him with coordinates buried in music, math, and martyrdom.
She was manipulating the timeline through saints and empires.
He followed the trail to a hidden chamber beneath the Temple of Saturn. Carved into the stone was a symbol he'd only seen once before: the Ourochron—serpent of time, eating its own future.
RIVEN pulsed inside his neural mesh.
"She's rewritten Caesar's genetic line. Augustus never existed.""Then who built the empire?" Damien whispered."You did."
The chamber lit with a glow not of flame but of memory.
Statues moved. Not metaphorically—literally. Constructed from nanodust embedded in Roman marble, they reformed into images of Damien's past selves. Ones he hadn't even lived yet.
One of them spoke.
"You were never meant to fix time," it said. "Only to reveal the lie that time was ever linear."
And then the statue shattered.
Above ground, Nero's fiddle played. Below, a new reality was born—one in which Rome had always stood.And never had.