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.

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

No one cheered. No one wept. They simply watched as her body crumbled into a fine, grey ash, leaving only the crown of onyx—now cracked clean in two—resting in a pile of dead roses.

“No, Empress,” Kaelen said, his voice soft as a burial shroud. “Death is a mercy you denied ten thousand souls. You taught us that justice is a performance. So tonight, we perform.”

And at the foot of the dais stood Kaelen, the man she had broken first.

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

For a single, eternal second, nothing happened. Then her spine arched. Her mouth opened in a silent shriek. Her eyes became kaleidoscopes—in each pupil, a different horror played out. The young archer whose fingers she’d melted. The midwife she’d forced to eat her own newborn. The poet she’d drowned in ink, one drop at a time.

Kaelen poured the black liquid between her lips.