"Do you hear it?" Maris asked.
"A choice?" The Empress stood. The weeping willow wires around her throne sparked with golden light. "I am the Final Empress. I do not choose. I endure. I watch the empire crumble while the world sleeps." sleepless nocturne final empress link
"Will you help?" she asked.
They called her Empress because the throne bore her name and the walled city obeyed when she spoke; they called her Final because no elder remembered a successor, only the long, brittle list of decrees she had issued to hold the city together. To some she was an icon, to others a necessary cruelty. To the dead she was a lighthouse, though a lighthouse that never blinked. "Do you hear it