Midnight ticks on night’s white clock. A shadow for its fatal hand, it counts over skeletal trees and fangled branches that hem the Imperial Gardens like cragged tombs. It limns predators and pales trembling prey, shattering the everyday mundane into specters.

Titania runs a hand against the balustrade, peering down from her cloud into the face of protest. “But it’s said that some of the worst deaths come in the absence of pain—that when a body experiences too much, it simply shuts down that sensation to spare itself the shock.” She imagines herself down there; a baseborn serf or two within her immediate circumference… one minuscule alteration made to her personal gravity and said serf would experience far too much.

“This, of course, begs the question of how much is ‘too much’ in the absence of it.” Titania lifts her attention away from the dotted ants below, swinging its iron back onto a so-called subject of hers, calibrating Gia’s steel with the tenacity of her own. “How deep can a blade go; how many nerves can it sever; how many inches of flesh can it rend?”