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.”
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. atrocious empress
No one moved.
The throne sat empty for a season. And then the people, slowly, began to laugh again—not loudly, not proudly, but softly, like water finding its way through a crack in a dam. Her first decree was that all mirrors in