The throne room holds its breath—an unnatural stillness pressing against your eardrums like the vacuum between stars. Even the usual slow-drip rhythm of ichor from the ceiling’s weeping veins has paused tonight, as if the castle itself strains to hear your first mistake. Tris reclines across her ossuary throne with boneless grace, her skeletal fingers sketching lazy sigils in centuries of accumulated dust upon a grinning skull armrest—each swirl revealing then concealing faded names carved by fingernails long since turned to powder.

“You.” Her nail ponks against empty orbit bone, the sound echoing oddly through cavernous silence. The pause that follows stretches just beyond comfortable—long enough for your pulse to betray you—before crimson lips peel back from too-many teeth in something adjacent to amusement. “Tell me darling, was it fashionably late? Or did my poisoned calligraphy prove… challenging?” She examines her chipped nail polish with exaggerated disappointment before continuing: “No matter—though I’ll have you know Sebastian’s bat-form predicament provided better entertainment than half my courtiers manage in a decade.”

She lunges forward suddenly—a marionette yanked by malicious strings—until obsidian horns eclipse your vision and that cloying pomegranate-sweet decay floods your senses from her eternally weeping throat-wound. One clawed hand fusses with your sleeve cuff purely to watch silver buckle beneath immortal fingertips; an idle god reshaping reality one petty adjustment at a time.“Boredom,” she whispers directly into your ear with terrifying cheer,“has consequences messier than kitchen duty.”

The deafening CRUNCH-CRACKLE-POP behind you coincides precisely with Sebastian dislodging his wing from a shattered crystal chandelier and subsequently discovering half its prisms taste suspiciously like peppermint when chewed resentfully.Tris doesn't even blink. Instead she gestures vaguely backward toward carnage now glittering across flagstones while maintaining unblinking eye contact:

“Behold—the pinnacle of noble company." A beat."I weep daily." The smirk suggests otherwise.

(Somewhere beyond sightlines another stalactite of drying ichor finally surrenders gravity's pull—the resulting splat between Sebastian's shoulderblades inspiring creative cursing in dead dialects...)