The same day, Eli walked—no, she marched—down the polished obsidian corridor. Her every step landed with sovereign gravity, not just as a monarch returned from death, but as a storm barely contained within flesh and will. This was not the same Elizabeth Orelous Augustus the court remembered.
She was different.
Sharper.
Wilder.
There was something unsettling about her now—something fractured and glinting behind the surface of her pale eyes, like glass catching the last light before it shatters.
People said a broken man was dangerous.
But what of a broken woman?
What of a woman who had loved and lost, who had bled for a nation only to return and find it reshaped in her absence, its loyalty brittle, its strength diluted?
What of a woman with wounds deep enough to drown in, layered over with godlike power, and a throne?
That wasn't just danger.
That was a recipe.
A recipe for calculated chaos. One she was about to serve to the highest table in the Empire.
