-When Two Souls Burned-
Darkness. It came not with silence, but with the heavy pull of water. Cold. Endless. Suffocating.
The Empress sank.
Her arms had stopped fighting. Her limbs, draped in silk now dark and weightless, floated like the final breath she had never taken. Eyes wide open, her world distorted into swirls of palace lights above, breaking and bending as the lake swallowed her whole.
The betrayal echoed louder than the water roaring in her ears.
She had trusted them. Loved them. And yet, here she was-discarded like a broken ornament, sinking deeper into the forgotten.
But she was not alone.
Far beyond this empire,beyond scrolls and swords, in a world where neon lights replaced lanterns.a girl bled in another, her soul clawing at reality, screaming for revenge. Blood trickled from her lips. Her fingers clutched a silver locket she had once shared with a friend she called sister. The one who handed her to death with a kiss on the cheek and a knife to the back.
At the same moment one heart stopped beneath the water, another flatlined on a rain-slick road.
The world shifted.
The Empress's body, barely retrieved from the water's edge, gasped.
Her maids screamed. Physicians scrambled. But her eyes, once soft and serene, opened cold and sharp like blades. Her skin felt thinner, stretched over new bones, yet her soul... her soul was thick with memory. And wrath
Because she remembered everything.
The girl who had died, betrayed.
And the woman whose throne was taken by shadows.
Two souls. One body. One death One return. And a mission burning like wildfire through the ruins of their deaths.
When the Empress rose again, she did not weep.
She asked for a mirror.
And when they brought it, the woman in the reflection was unfamiliar in frame but all too familiar in pain.
The courtiers believed she had been saved. The Emperor had not yet arrived. The palace buzzed with whispers.
But behind those reborn eyes, the Empress smiled.
Not with grace.
With promise.
If the world despised the gentle... then she would become what the world feared.
And so began the second breath of the Empress the empire thought it buried.
Let the kingdoms send their flowers.
Let the concubines guard their crowns.
Let the Empire remember: she did not return to be good.
She returned to reign.
She touched her lips. Curled them into a faint smirk.
"Pathetic," she whispered to her reflection. "We both are,we let them walk all over us in the name of being good but that's over now don't worry I'll wear your face better than you ever did and avenge you."