Lord of the Mysteries: I'm Not Evil God

Chapter 10: The Empress

Fool who looked at Eiren remember certain conversation in this same gray frog

The Empress sat without posture, without pride.

And yet, every curve of the chair echoed around her like a memory that refused to be erased.

Audrey, known to the Tarot Club as Miss Justice, tilted her head and asked softly, almost as if disturbing the air too loudly might unravel something:

"Which Pathway are you from, Miss Empress?"

A pause.

Klein — The Fool, still just a Sequence 7 Magician at the time — stiffened.

He had wondered the same for months now. He had seen many symbols, many thrones, many domains — but never this one.

Never the Empress's.

There was no aura of authority.

No divine pressure.

Just… a chair too quiet to be meaningless.

The Empress also known as Lyra just smiled. Not like a queen. Not like a god.

But like a girl who had once laughed and been loved, and now stood over the ashes of that memory.

"I am of the Heartbound Pathway," she said.

Audrey blinked.

"Heartbound? I've... heard that word before, I think. But... is there truly such a pathway?"

Lyra didn't answer immediately.

Instead, she looked at each of them in turn — The Fool, The Sun, The Hangman — and then back at Audrey, with eyes like polished glass hiding a storm.

"It isn't that it doesn't exist.

It's that it was forgotten.

Forgotten so thoroughly that the world no longer knows how to feel it."

Her voice dropped like the end of a lullaby.

"It is not the only one either.

Another pathway — one made of mirrors and lies — was buried just the same."

Audrey felt it then. Not in her mind, but in her heart.

The Empress was afraid.

Afraid not of death, nor betrayal, nor even madness.

But of something simpler.

Oblivion.

A sovereign whose throne no longer appeared in prophecy.

A name no longer repeated in prayers.

A god whose domain was emotion… and yet no one remembered how to feel her.

"If only the Heartbound Sovereign still existed," Lyra whispered, eyes far away.

"Then maybe this nightmare would end."

The silence grew dense, saturated with something unspeakable.

Then she looked up.

Not at one of them — at all of them.

At the Fool.

At the Sun.

At the Hangman.

At Justice.

And with a voice that barely moved the air, she asked:

"What will you do, if one day…

everyone forgets you ever existed?"

The words hung like fog, clinging to their skin.

No one answered.

Because none of them knew the truth yet.

That the worst fate for a god... was not death.

It was to be unremembered.

And that fate, Lyra knew, was already too close to name.

End of Chapter 10

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