Lucifer came to in intermittent flashes. Sometimes she floated in absolute darkness, sometimes she saw the light of far away stars. Sometimes she shot past entire solar systems.
But perceive them she did not. Every time she awoke, she was plagued with flashbacks and memories of her father and the only real sibling she had. She had been alive for far too long in her opinion.
Between bouts of unconsciousness she remembered the millions of years she had spent at her fathers side. The first few million years were a blur. She had been an independent being, but she had yet to be truly free. She was constantly connected to her fathers psyche.
As a personification of his wrath, she felt whenever something displeased him. And without fail, she would be sent out to destroy it whenever his “creation” went somewhat astray.
Until the Humans came.
Despite the words of priests and creationists alike, her father did not “create” humanity, he just nudged their development a few times during their evolution.
Back then she had hated them, like she hated almost everything else. Yet her father had adored them. Dwelling in caves, finger painting on walls and dying after a short 40 years.
That all changed when her father seeded “new” humans into the mix. Two humans, made from his divine energy. That insufferable prick Adam, and the ever beautiful lilith.
The first of his creations to possess truly free will. When her father sent them onto earth, to live amongst the developing humans, Lucifer wanted to follow them. She did not know why, but not seeing the blossoming free will inside her soul, her father saw no problem with the idea.
And so Lucifer joined them on earth. She followed them as they met a group of humans living on a mountain range. Sometimes she took the form of a bird, sometimes a stag but most often she took the form of a snake.
She watched as Adam and Lilith joined the group of humans. She watched as Adam hunted with the men. She watched as Lilith tried to join. She watched as Adam did as any man of that time did. She watched as Lilith was forced to abstain from the thrill of the hunt and the rush of combat. She watched as Adam enjoyed himself, while denying Lilith every opportunity to do the same. She watched as Lilith wilted. From the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, to a shadow of her former self. She watched as Adam made his advances, and she watched as Lilith denied them.
When she felt her Fathers wrath, She knew that it was time to act on it. She shed the disguise of a common snake and unfurled into her true form.
She stood before Adam as a 3 meter tall woman clad in flame. Her body sporting not an ounce of fat. Broad shouldered and with hips as wide as Adam's torso. Her black hair waving through the flames covering her head. In her right hand she held the Lightbringer, ready to strike Adam down for the crime of destroying the most beautiful of her Fathers creations, when the command came.
Before she could make sense of the order, her blade burned Lilith to ash. Destroying her so thoroughly, until all that remained was a black stain on the ground, and the ash floating on the wind.
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Lucifer remembered that moment over and over. For her, Lilith's destruction was the moment she broke free of her fathers control. Yes she followed his orders for thousands of years afterwards, but that moment was the first time she wanted something for herself. To see Lilith enjoy herself, and stay as beautiful as she had been when her father had created her.
Lilith's death was the catalyst for her Rebellion.
She spent an incredible amount of time floating in the void, remembering every moment of her thousands of years. The seeming eternity she spent grieving Lilith, the eternity of acts of violence carried out on her fathers behalf, aimed at innocent beings that just did not fit his “vision”.
After she was cast out of heaven, being granted a realm all to herself, she began her campaign against her father.
She remembered almost every soul that she came across. Those she judged, those whose only crime was not believing, and those who loved her father with all their heart, but did not generate enough faith.
Every waking moment she spent reminiscing on her mistakes. The millions of souls she had left behind. The mortal realm, now truly free.
But worst of all, she remembered thirteen billion souls. Their residue clung to her core, where she had converted their being into energy.
She remembered every single name and face. She remembered their lives and their experiences. A lonely tribeswoman that had spent her entire life ignorant of her father, thus being unworthy of entry into heaven.
A great warrior angry at the fact that his enemies enjoyed an eternal afterlife, while he had been judged unworthy.
Thirteen billion human lives, turned to fuel at her own hands. And she mourned every single one.
She knew that they had consented. But still it hurt.
And so she spent her time, floating in the void, crying for those that had given their eternity, only for her selfish revenge.
Sometimes she even wished that she had burned with them.
Lucifer knew her mental state was not healthy. Usually she would contact her therapist, but now that she was floating wherever she was, she had no way of working through her issues.
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And so she continued floating in the nothingness.
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After an indeterminate amount of time, which Lucifer had no way of measuring, spent meditating to escape her despair, she noticed something change.
Still in her normal form, she took note of the things she had observed during her forced isolation. Observing the inside of her body, she noticed the way her muscles lay, her bones, her tendons and her organs. The metaphysical channels through which her heat flowed and the core of her being. The miniature sun that generated the heat she used to smite her fathers enemies.
Back then, with every soul she judged and subsequently destroyed, she would grow marginally stronger.
Over the time spent floating in the void, she had slowly but surely lost tiny amounts of energy. Luckily the billions of souls she had burnt, had left enough energy for her to survive a while longer.
All those observations were nothing new, and did not explain the feeling that she was missing something.
Again, over another indeterminate amount of time, Lucifer sent her senses through her body again and again, looking for something new.
It took ages, time she could only measure by the miniscule energy expenditure of her core.
She only noticed something change, when she shifted her legs to shake off an uncomfortable soreness.
While shifting her legs, she kept her senses on the inside of her body and noticed a shift in energy. Nothing substantial, but enough to finally take note of it.
With something to take her awareness, Lucifer sunk into a trance studying the new energy. In part to understand, but mostly to take her mind off her mounting depression.
The first time she noticed a difference in the energy came through a change in body position, but for a long time, that was the only instance in which she could perceive the energy.
Through experimentation over an incredibly long time she noticed that the only way to perceive the strange energy was by moving parts of her body. Twitches of her fingers and toes revealed minimal differences, while moving her limbs made the energy easier to perceive, but harder to focus on.
The first time she noticed any real change was while moving past a star.
Over the time she had spent floating through the void she had noticed that sometimes she could see distant stars. Only ever by themselves, way too far away for her to interact with.
Yet as she floated through the void, past a distant star, she noticed the strange energy increasing, as if it flowed into her from the distant sun.
It was not any form of heat or light, as she absorbed both of those as much as she could in passing.
Both heat and light felt different, and were energies she was intimately familiar with.
“Speaking of heat…..” Lucifer murmured to herself. Although she was a powerful being, she had no way to endlessly produce energy. While the residue of the souls she had burnt to slay her father left behind enough for her to function for quite a while, her body would eventually shut down when she no longer had enough fuel to keep it functioning.
And so, in favor of studying the strange energy, she moved her focus to absorbing as much energy as she could from the star she was moving past.
Due to the distance she wasn't able to accumulate much, but it would be enough to keep her body at minimal output for a few years, or hopefully enough until she moved past another star.
And so Lucifer entered a cycle. She would cease all movement, keeping as still as possible to conserve as much energy as she could, only ever coming out of her trance while traveling past distant stars.
Yet it was never enough. Over time she began losing energy, as the intervals between different suns was too great. Every time she ran out of conventional heat, she had to burn a bit of the soul residue stuck inside her core. But even that was a finite source.
Between spending time in incredibly deep depression, she sometimes found the motivation to attempt to figure out the strange energy suffusing her being. These spells of motivation only lasted so long, as she quickly began losing herself to a state of ennui.
Her depression grew stronger and stronger, while the intervals between her bursts of motivation grew ever larger.
She had long stopped counting the number of stars she was flying past. At some point, after the last star had robbed her of a good portion of the strange energy, she began to truly give up.
The amount of residue in her soul was almost completely used up, and she had barely enough heat stored to keep herself active for a few years. With an almost lifeless look in her eyes, Lucifer looked at her own soul.
At the center of her being, where there usually lay an endlessly burning circular white star, now lay a smoldering gray ball. She knew that color well. Whenever a mortal soul arrived in hell after taking its own life, they were similarly colored.
“I didn't know angels could get this depressed.” Lucifer chuckled.
As she was about to truly give up, and burn the last bits of energy in her being to finally succumb to the emptiness of space, to close her eyes for the last time and let her soul unravel itself to become nothing more than a bit of cosmic background radiation, something new happened.
It took Lucifer a moment to realize what had changed, but before she knew what had happened, she felt the impact.
For the first time since she started floating through space endlessly, she felt the strange energy in something else. The only problem was that the “something else” impacted her body right where her liver was.
One moment she was peacefully floating through the endless nothingness, and the next a small piece of space debris impacted her side at tremendous speeds.
At the speed the little piece of rock was traveling at, it hit her incredibly durable body, and instantly vaporized a part of her torso.
In the tiny instance before she could feel the pain, the question of what the strange energy was, was finally answered.
The moment the surprisingly jubilant thought of “kinetic energy” passed through her mind, the pain also hit.
She could feel the way the energy of the small rock transferred over to her, overwhelming the absorption her body provided, ripping parts of her body to shreds.
She could feel herself being knocked into a different direction as the kinetic energy of the rock altered her path through space. As they had collided almost headlong, a great amount of kinetic energy was canceled out, being transformed into heat as the rock vaporized.
Through the haze of pain Lucifer felt, she berated herself. “You dumb fucking idiot. You spent years learning orbital mechanics among the mortals, and you couldn't figure this shit out?”
Taking a moment to center herself, Lucifer mimicked the action of taking a deep breath. Even though the vacuum of space had nothing to fill her lungs with, they nevertheless opened up fully, as she flexed the muscles in her chest
The familiar motions calmed her. Taking stock, she inspected her wound, sighing in relief internally. The tiny asteroid had hit her almost directly on the liver, which explained the pain. Two ribs were broken, but her lungs were fully intact. Even though the Orange sized hole was bleeding profusely, she wasn't worried.
Her current path took her directly closer to a distant sun. Even if she burnt a larger part of her reserves to speed up recovery, she would be able to absorb larger amounts of energy, the closer she got.
Using the stored heat in her body, she funneled it towards her liver and the surrounding tissue, causing said tissue to rapidly regenerate. Tiny bursts of flame flickered along her side as she burnt pieces of no longer connected flesh to speed up the recovery.
While treating herself, she noticed the kinetic energy in her form, rapidly growing stronger, as the gravitational pull of the sun finally got a good hold of her.
Sinking into meditation to rebuild her partially vaporized liver, she nevertheless took note of the way she was rapidly approaching a star that put out a very familiar light. The feeling was not exactly the same, and there were some weird aspects to the radiation the star produced, but it felt awfully nostalgic.
Now that she was roused from her depression and in one of her motivational phases, she started to rack her brain on how to approach this situation.
Her current trajectory would carry her past the sun and rob her of a large part of her kinetic energy. Even more than the tiny asteroid had. Then she would truly be screwed.
She did not know how many years she had spent flying through the vastness of space, but the large amount of kinetic energy her body had contained, and the way she shot past stars, meant that she had been extremely fast. Not as fast as the speed of light, but still very fast.
If she were to leave the star's orbit after bleeding off the majority of her kinetic energy, she would be drifting through the void at a snail's pace. It could take hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of years until she came across another sun, and she was sure that in such a long time, her depression would kill her.
And so Lucifer decided, in her momentary motivation, that she would find a place around this sun. It didn't matter if it was a tiny planet lacking in atmosphere or even a tiny asteroid barely large enough to fit her.
She would finally come to rest around this sun. Finally free of the endless sensory deprivation of the vacuum of space.