“Refuse,” Kaelen said, “and we sew your eyes open and play the recordings of your victims’ final pleas for you, on loop, until your heart gives out from shame. It would take days.”
Lysandra’s eyes widened. She remembered the game. She would lock a prisoner in a room with a single, sharp object and a single, sweet poison. Then she would whisper to them for hours—about their failures, their shames, their secret desires—until they either slit their own throat or drank the poison. Most chose both. Atrocious Empress BAD END -Final- -Sexecute-
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. “Refuse,” Kaelen said, “and we sew your eyes
But he did not raise it.
With the last strength in her poisoned body, she nodded once. She would lock a prisoner in a room