Atrocious Empress -

The Atrocious Empress ruled not with an iron fist, but with a silk glove lined with needles. Her name was Seraphine the Vexed, and she ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne at seventeen, having poisoned her three elder siblings with a dessert wine so sweet that each had smiled as they died.

And Seraphine realized, with a cold plummet in her chest, that she had not created obedience. She had created a desert. There was no one left who wanted the empire. No one who wanted revenge. No one who wanted anything at all except the small, silent act of survival.

She kept no lover, no friend, no pet. Her only companion was a clockwork nightingale that sang the same tinny note over and over. She said it reminded her of the sound of a single tear hitting a marble floor. atrocious empress

Loneliness.

Her punishments were small, personal, and therefore devastating. The baker who gave an extra roll to a hungry child lost his thumbs. The mother who sang a lullaby after the laughter tax had her tongue notched like a ledger. The boy who threw a stone at her carriage was forced to eat a bowl of identical stones, one each day, until his belly became a grave. The Atrocious Empress ruled not with an iron

She outlawed the color blue. Not because it offended her, but because the painter Jian of the Northern Hills had once refused her commission. Every blue thing—skies were ignored, for even she could not leash heaven—but every dyed cloth, every painted shutter, every kingfisher feather in a lady’s hat was burned in the Great Azure Pyre. The sea itself she ordered salted with lime, just to watch it turn a sickly green.

No one moved.

One winter, after she had executed a juggler for juggling (the act implied joy, which fell under the laughter tax’s umbrella of “unseemly levity”), Seraphine sat alone in her bone-white palace and realized she had won. There was no rebellion. No whispered plots. Her people moved like cattle through her laws, eyes down, mouths shut, hearts shriveled to raisins.