Atrocious | Empress

So she announced a game. “I will walk through the capital, unarmed and unguarded,” she declared, her voice echoing through the brass tubes that snaked through every district. “Any subject may attempt to kill me. If you succeed, the empire is yours. If you fail, I will kill your entire family line—backward to your grandparents and forward to your unborn great-grandchildren.”

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. atrocious empress

Her first decree was that all mirrors in the empire be covered in black gauze. Not because she feared her own reflection—she was, by all accounts, breathtaking—but because she wanted every citizen to wake up and see only a blurred, ghostly version of themselves. “To remind you,” she announced from the Onyx Balcony, “that you are never quite real to me.” So she announced a game