The night came.
The Palace of Death sank into its usual velvet quiet, the screaming-skull candelabras burning with their cold blue flames that no longer tasted like punishment. Outside, the kingdom of Noctiflora had finally gone to sleep: thousands of restored women moving between their small black-stone homes in the soft violet moonlight, their fully human bodies marked with the same permanent dark drip-spots that would never fade, laughing quietly as they tended black roses and washed in crystal streams. Inside the palace, the corridors felt longer, the black marble floors colder, the ancient tapestries whispering of seven hundred years of broken queens.
