The world no longer looked like something heaven had made.
Lucipher stood at the edge of a city that never slept, its towers clawing at the sky like defiance itself. Neon lights replaced stars. Engines roared where choirs once echoed. Humanity had learned to create its own false suns—and in their glow, they forgot the darkness they carried inside.
He walked among them unnoticed.
That was the curse's cruelest design: not exile, but proximity. He could hear their laughter, feel their warmth, witness their fragile loves bloom and die—yet never fully belong.
Time did not touch him the way it touched them.
Faces aged. Hands wrinkled. Voices weakened. Lucipher remained unchanged, locked forever at the moment of his fall. To survive, he learned to move. New names. New places. New lives abandoned before questions grew sharp.
Tonight, he was called Luke.
A coat hung heavy on his shoulders as rain slid down glass and concrete. He felt it all—the cold, the wet, the ache of existence—but never grew used to it. Sensation was a reminder: this body was a cage.
He passed a couple sheltering under a broken umbrella. Their fingers were entwined, imperfect, trembling. The woman laughed as rain soaked her shoes. The man looked at her as though the world had narrowed into a single, precious thing.
Lucipher felt the familiar pain tighten in his chest.
Love.
So easily given. So easily broken.
He had seen it all before—lovers swearing forever beneath moons that would outlive them, promises whispered with certainty and shattered by fear. True love, the kind demanded by his sentence, was not passion. It was not obsession. It was not worship.
It was choice.
And choice terrified humanity.
Lucipher entered a small café glowing warmly against the night. Inside, people gathered to escape the storm—students, strangers, the lonely pretending not to be. He sat in the corner, untouched tea cooling before him, watching reflections move across the window.
Mirrors hated him.
They showed a man with tired eyes, dark hair, and a face that carried too much memory. No wings. No fire. No glory. Just the faintest shimmer buried deep within—his stolen light, pulsing like a wound that never healed.
Sometimes, late at night, he wondered if the curse was a lie.
What if true love no longer existed? What if humanity had forgotten how to give it freely? Eternity stretched before him like a sentence with no ending.
Then—
She entered.
There was nothing extraordinary about her at first. No radiance. No thunder. She shook rain from her coat, apologizing softly as she bumped into a chair. Her smile was small, unguarded. Human.
And yet, something ancient stirred inside Lucipher's chest.
Not hope.
Recognition.
She did not look at him the way others did. There was no fear, no reverence, no inexplicable hatred. When her eyes met his, they lingered—not searching, not judging—simply seeing.
Lucipher looked away first.
The curse tightened, warning him. Love was dangerous. Attachment was agony. He had learned this lesson across centuries of loss—friends buried, lovers forgotten, names erased by time.
Still, when she sat at the table beside his, the air felt different. He could hear her heartbeat. Fast. Nervous. Alive.
She smiled again.
"Long night?" she asked.
Lucipher hesitated.
It had been a long eternity.
"Yes," he said quietly. "You could say that."
Outside, the rain softened.
And for the first time in centuries, Lucipher wondered if earth—his prison—had finally begun to crack.