Atrocious Empress Bad End -final- -sexecute- -

Lysandra’s body convulsed. She vomited a torrent of black roses—thorny, blood-streaked, impossible. The roses writhed on the marble like dying eels.

She saw herself. Not the regal tyrant, but a pale, twitching woman with cracked lips and eyes full of animal terror. A strand of drool slipped from the corner of her mouth.

He gestured. Two masked figures emerged from the shadows, dragging a third—a man Lysandra barely recognized: the Royal Alchemist, her last loyal servant. His hands were gone, replaced by smoking stumps. He sobbed. Atrocious Empress BAD END -Final- -Sexecute-

But he did not raise it.

The crowd below held its breath. Even the rats in the walls fell silent. Lysandra’s body convulsed

“The Atrocious Empress is dead,” he said. “Long live the memory of what she stole.”

The air in the throne room was thick—not with incense, but with the metallic reek of blood and the sweeter, cloying rot of spilled wine. Lysandra, the Atrocious Empress, sat slumped upon her obsidian throne, her crown of jagged onyx resting askew on her brow. Ten years of terror had ended not with a bang, but with the slow, agonizing trickle of poison in her morning chalice. She saw herself

But her eyes remained open. And for one more hour, the throne room was filled with a low, keening sound—not a scream, but the noise of a soul being slowly, meticulously, unmade from the inside.

With the last strength in her poisoned body, she nodded once.