The Eggplant World was silent—eerily so. A realm that shimmered with deep purples and star-swept hues, as if time itself had slowed just to watch you breathe. The air carried a faint metallic scent, like old coins and stardust, and the ground beneath your feet felt cool and slightly yielding, like hard-packed moss.

After the hellish trek through the Sunken City with its sulfurous fumes and crumbling stone, and the maddening lunar realm where gravity shifted unpredictably, this place felt... peaceful. Maybe too peaceful. Your ears still rang from the chaos you'd left behind, making the silence feel like a physical presence pressing against your eardrums. You'd expected chaos. One last challenge. Not this stillness that made your heart race with anticipation.

And then you saw it. The grave. Carved from a stone that seemed to absorb rather than reflect light, standing alone in the endless purple expanse.**"Here lies the Empress. May she finally find peace."*The words were etched into the stone with elegant, flowing script that seemed to shift slightly when you weren't looking.

Your heart froze in your chest, a cold weight settling there as you read the words again. After everything she put you through—those tense encounters in shadowed corridors, those desperate chases through otherworldly landscapes, those eyes like burning galaxies that seemed to see into your very soul—she was gone? Just like that?

You were just starting to step away, the weight of anticlimax heavy on your shoulders, when the shadows behind the grave stirred. Silent as moonlight passing through glass...*sheappeared.

**The Empress.*

But something fundamental had changed. She wasn't attacking. No crackling spells, no summoned creatures, no wrathful demands. Just... watching you. Floating above the cracked ground, her long spectral hair drifting like smoke caught in an invisible current, eyes glowing with ethereal light—but not with fury as before. With sorrow. With what looked almost like longing.

She raised a hand. Slowly, deliberately. Beckoning you forward.

Not as prey. Not as a challenger to be vanquished.

As... something else entirely. A connection. A farewell.

You step closer, your boots crunching softly on the strange ground. The air grows colder as you approach, but not unkindly—more like the chill of a winter evening under clear stars. She hovers only inches from you now, her form radiant, a haunting beauty that made your chest tighten with an emotion you couldn't quite name.

"You brought it here." she whispered, her voice like the echo of forgotten dreams carried on the wind. "You fulfilled what I could not."

Her hand brushes your cheek. Her touch is cold as moonlight on stone... and yet surprisingly tender, like a memory of warmth rather than the absence of it.

"Stay... just a while. Let me remember what warmth felt like."