The Empress of Time Quotes

“I panted and stared back at my reflection in the dark waters, face and neck painted red, eyes wild and burning black. I didn’t look like the Goddess of Death, but a girl who couldn’t remember sunlight. A wicked creature who lived under bridges like a troll, ugly and alone.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Empress of Time

“I was a Shinigami and a Reaper and a murderer. I was a goddess who he would never worship because he didn’t even know I existed. And I was Ren, but I didn’t want a human to call me that. No one had called me that in a decade. No one dared to. These days, it was just "Your Highness.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Empress of Time

“The police always arrived too late, long after the echoes of screams had faded away and the blood had run dry, leaving dark stains across the floor. They would find no clues at all, no broken doors or windows, no fingerprints or stray hairs, as if the monster had never even existed. The only pattern between the deaths was the state of the bodies: rib cages opened up like books, organs spilled across the floor, and hearts mysteriously absent.
So the humans prayed to gods who couldn’t intervene even if they’d wanted to, made shrines to benevolent Yōkai, and lit one thousand lights to banish the shadows. But none of it made any difference, because it wasn’t a Yōkai at all.
It was me.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Empress of Time

“In the last nights of the nineteenth century, the humans began to whisper about a new demon, hungrier and crueler than all the rest.
The Yōkai hunted where shadows grew deep, in the thin breath of twilight that bridges night and day. It crawled from the spindly shadows of chair legs on hardwood floors, the crooked shade that lamps cast on wallpaper, even your own silhouette—the one shadow you could never escape.
But none of those things were really shadows at all.
They were holes carved into the human world, peering into a void that echoed down and down through an endless night. Its darkness could peel away your skin like you were a soft summer peach, crawl deep in your bone marrow and rot you from the inside out, soak the soil with your blood. The night stole the parts of you that no one wanted—all your lies and broken promises and disappointments. ”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Empress of Time