Lady in red, but Marvin also thinking of the Oracle.
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*****
Outside, another bird was quiet. The place was dark except for the lights of the houses stepping down the side, and the wet smell of August in London — eucalyptus and dust and the faint chemical sweetness of the chaparral after a long wet summer — moved through the open window and settled around the edges of the room.
Marvin closed the notebook. He turned off the terminal. He went to bed.
September was coming.
---
The morning of September 1st broke over the English countryside with crisp, golden clarity.
The rain had finally passed, leaving the sprawling gardens of the estate smelling of wet earth and blooming roses.
The Bentley idled quietly in the gravel driveway, Gordon standing stoically by the open rear door.
Standing on the stone portico, Marvin turned to face Diana.
The transformation in the Princess was staggering. The dark, exhausted bags beneath her eyes were entirely gone. Her skin glowed with radiant, genuine health. She wore a vibrant, light-blue sweater and crisp white trousers, looking completely energized alive, and in incredibly high spirits. The four-day sanctuary had worked a miracle; her time with the little man had profoundly healed her.
Marvin stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her into a tight, lingering hug. Diana held him fiercely, resting her chin on the top of his golden-brown hair, breathing in his scent one last time.
"I have to go, sister," Marvin murmured into her shoulder, his voice thick with genuine reluctance.
They separated slowly, but Marvin kept his hands firmly resting on her arms, his nebula-blue eyes locking onto hers with intensity.
"Remember our pact," Marvin commanded, his tone dropping all boyish pretense, ensuring the gravity of the moment was permanently drilled into her psyche. "You promised me. You remain within the walls of this house, or at the very least, out of the public eye, until the end of September. You always keep your safety at the forefront of your mind."
He squeezed her arms slightly. "You make certain your drivers are completely sober before you even think about stepping into a vehicle. You always wear your seatbelt in the backseat. And you explicitly order your security team never, ever to let the driver speed up to outrun the paparazzi. No matter how many of those vultures are on your tail. Let them take the photos. A photograph cannot kill you. A concrete pillar can. Do you understand me?"
Diana looked into his desperately protective eyes. The lingering fear from his nightmare prophecy still echoed in his voice, and it touched her deeply.
A radiant, beautiful, and slightly mischievous smile broke across her face. "Of course, my little knight," Diana said jokingly, reaching up to affectionately cup his cheek. "I will follow your royal decrees to the letter. After all, I know that whenever this Princess finds herself in trouble, you will come running down from the heavens to rescue me. Won't you?"
Marvin offered a sweeping, highly dramatic bow, his trench coat fluttering in the morning breeze. He looked up at her with a devastatingly handsome, dimpled smirk.
"Of course, my lady. Is that even a question that requires asking?" Marvin declared, his voice ringing with theatrical, yet entirely sincere. "You can count on it. Even if I had to swim the seven seas and fight a legion of dragons to rescue you, I would do it in a heartbeat."
Diana burst into a bright, musical laugh, her heart soaring.
She had wanted to accompany him to Heathrow Airport to see him off properly, but Marvin had been adamant in his refusal. He knew the paparazzi swarmed the international terminals like blood-starved locusts. He did not want to risk a high-speed chase on the M4 motorway. He refused to let this perfect, radiant English Rose be lost in blood and twisted metal.
With a final, lingering squeeze of her hand, Marvin turned and stepped into the back of the Bentley.
Diana stood on the portico, waving brightly as the vehicle crunched over the gravel, turning out of the gates and disappearing down the winding country road.
---
Inside the quiet, leather-scented cocoon of the Bentley, Marvin sat back against the plush seats. The iron gates of Wormleighton Manor vanished from the rearview mirror.
Marvin lifted his left wrist, pulling back the cuff of his tailored shirt to reveal a watch.
The date window on the dial read: **SEP 1**.
A long, and ragged sigh escaped Marvin's lips. He let his head fall back against the headrest, staring up at the suede ceiling of the car. The invisible anvil that had been resting on his chest since he landed in London finally, completely shattered.
He had done it.
He had successfully, forcefully diverted the river of time. The tragic, world-shattering death of the People's Princess—the event that was permanently etched into the history books of his previous life as occurring on the night of August 31, 1997—had been completely erased.
While he had been cooking pasta, laughing by the fire, and playing Elton John on the grand piano earlier that night, he had laid the groundwork. But the true victory had been won in the agonizing, silent hours of the previous night.
He closed his eyes, vividly recalling the midnight vigil.
As soon as Diana had finally succumbed to exhaustion on the night of August 31st, her mind completely at peace and her body safe within the walls of the manor, Marvin had not retired to his own guest chambers. Instead, the Incubus had moved soundlessly through the moonlit corridors, slipping into her bedroom like a guardian shadow.
He had pulled a chair to the very edge of her bed, sitting completely motionless in the dark. For eight agonizing hours, he did not sleep. He did not do anything. He did not blink. He kept his eyes locked intensely on her sleeping form, his supernatural senses stretched to their limits.
He had known that keeping her out of Paris was only half the battle. Time was a jealous current at least in his world of Gods and Demons. He had been consumed by a paranoid terror that the universe might attempt to course-correct the anomaly.
If the Grim Reaper was denied a catastrophic car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel, would the cosmos demand its toll in blood through a sudden, fatal heart attack? A ruptured brain aneurysm? A freak, impossible accident within the safety of her own bedroom?
Marvin had sat there, listening to the rhythmic, steady thumping of her heartbeat, his magical mana coiled and ready to strike. If the universe had dared to stop her heart in the middle of the night, the demon was fully prepared to forcefully restart it. He was ready to physically tear her soul back from the abyss, defying whatever cosmic laws governed this dimension.
But as the hours crawled by, her breathing remained deep and even.
And when the first, pale rays of the September sun finally breached the heavy curtains, bathing Diana's peaceful, sleeping face in warm, golden light, a earth-shattering realization had crystallized within Marvin's mind.
She opened her eyes, smiled sleepily at the boy sitting dutifully by her bed, and breathed in the air of a new month.
In that exact, crystalline moment, Marvin knew the absolute truth: *Destiny was a fragile myth.*
Fate was a lie invented by the weak to justify their own powerlessness. There was no grand, unalterable Book of Destiny in this universe.
Nothing was set in stone. His existence in this timeline carried more weight, more terrifying authority, than the very architects of the cosmos. He had proven to himself that he didn't just possess the power to alter stock markets and pop culture; he possessed the divine sovereignty to overrule Death itself. He could break the chains of predetermined tragedy.
August 31st had come and gone, and Diana Spencer was currently sitting in her English manor, completely safe, drinking a cup of morning tea.
The Demon had robbed the Grim Reaper.
As the Bentley merged onto the motorway, heading back toward London, Marvin's mind began to rapidly process the apocalyptic implications of what he had just done.
This wasn't a minor change. This wasn't buying a tech stock early or recycling a hit song. He had just executed a catastrophic disruption to a fixed point in human history. The butterfly effect he had just unleashed upon the 20th and 21st centuries was staggering, rippling outward with the destructive force of a temporal shockwave.
*If Diana lives...* Marvin calculated, his blue eyes narrowing as he stared out the tinted window.
The implications were entirely unfathomable.
The British Monarchy would never experience the massive period of public reckoning that her death had originally upon them. The Queen would not face the unprecedented backlash of remaining at Balmoral; the traditional, rigid architecture of the royal institution would not be forced to suddenly modernize to survive the grief of the masses.
William and Harry would not be forced to walk behind their mother's coffin in front of a billion weeping television viewers. They would not grow up with the deep, festering trauma that would later fracture the royal family. They would grow into men with their mother guiding them, protecting them, and advocating for their emotional independence.
The global media landscape would be irrevocably altered. The paparazzi, who in the original timeline were briefly shamed into reforming their aggressive tactics following her fatal crash, would receive no such reality check. They would remain entirely ruthless.
But the most fascinating, volatile variable of all was Diana herself.
She was no longer a tragic martyr frozen in time, forever young and forever victimized. She was a living, breathing, incredibly gorgeous woman entering the second act of her life. She would continue her crusade against landmines.
She would continue to command the global spotlight with more inherent gravity than the Queen herself. With Marvin's shadow protection and her newly restored mental fortitude, Diana would inevitably grow into a global humanitarian titan, completely independent of the Windsor machinery.
Marvin had no idea what this new future looked like. The historical cheat sheet he possessed from his previous life was officially, entirely useless regarding the British Crown. He had ripped the pages out and burned them.
And as the Incubus sat in the back of the speeding car, calculating the uncharted chaos he had just injected into the geopolitical timeline... a slow, dark, and impossibly beautiful smirk spread across his face.
He loved it.
He hadn't transmigrated into this world simply to follow a pre-written script. He had come to conquer it. He had come to reshape reality in his own image. If playing God meant the future was completely unpredictable, then so be it.
He closed his eyes, the memory of Diana's radiant, tear-free smile warming the dark, predatory core of his soul. Let the timeline fracture. The Demon was ready to build a new world from the shards.
---
September arrived in the Asian financial markets with grim mechanics. The theatrics of July — the baht float, the sudden announcements, the cascading panic that had the quality of something happening for the first time — had been replaced by something less dramatic and more corrosive: the daily, incremental confirmation that the pessimistic scenario was, if anything, less pessimistic than the reality.
Bank Indonesia's September monthly reserve statement, published on September 3rd, showed usable reserves of approximately 12.3 billion dollars, down from 14.1 billion in August and down from 20.3 billion before the crisis began. The rupiah had closed August at 3,035 to the dollar — a forty-five percent depreciation from the pre-crisis level of approximately 2,100 — and had opened September under continued selling pressure. Bank Indonesia was no longer conducting sustained direct market intervention; the August experience of spending two billion dollars in reserves to achieve a currency stabilisation that lasted approximately four trading days had convinced whoever needed convincing within the central bank that direct intervention was a finite-horizon game with a predetermined outcome.
The rupiah's fall in September was therefore less fought and faster. By September 10th, the spot rate was 3,240. By September 18th, it was 3,475. The directionality was now unambiguous and the magnitude of the eventual correction was being revised upward by the consensus with each passing week, as the analysts who had initially called for a fifteen to twenty percent depreciation revised their targets to thirty percent, and the analysts who had called for thirty percent revised to forty-five percent, and the few who had called for fifty percent held their targets and received the particular satisfaction of being correct in the range that most of their colleagues had dismissed as extreme.
---
The morning of September 4, 1997, broke over Houston, Texas, with a heavy, humid heat that promised a stifling afternoon. But inside the Knowles household, the air conditioning was humming, and the atmosphere was thick with a very different kind of tension.
Sitting at the edge of the kitchen island, a plate of half-eaten breakfast resting in front of her, Beyoncé was officially sixteen years old.
She was wearing a simple oversized t-shirt and athletic shorts, her hair pulled back into a messy bun. But her eyes were not focused on her food, nor were they looking at her family bustling around the kitchen. Her gaze was completely locked onto the beige, wall-mounted landline phone hanging just a few feet away.
*****
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