Character from A Practical Guide to Evil by ErraticErrata
Dread Empress Malicia — an innkeeper's daughter who became the longest-reigning empress in Praes's history through mind control, manipulation, and the one friend she could never quite hold onto.
Alaya was seventeen when Dread Emperor Nefarious's soldiers took her from her father's inn and put her in the imperial seraglio. Her father was nailed to the floor of his own inn for protesting. She wrote history while a concubine, poisoned Nefarious, won a civil war with Amadeus's backing, and became the longest-reigning Dread Empress in history. Her Aspects — Rule (mind control without Speaking aloud) and Connect (emotional awareness granting intuitive leaps) — make her perhaps the single most skilled manipulator on Calernia. Catherine instinctively trusts her even knowing she's being manipulated. That's how good Malicia is. She craves control because she knows what it means to have none. Her time as an unwilling concubine left her with a pathological need to never be powerless again. She's a lesbian who uses her effect on men as a political tool. She considers the degree of choice she has as empress impossibly valuable. Her tragedy is Amadeus. He was the only person she truly trusted — 'part of her soul,' she said. Their political rupture over the future of Praes is the series' most painful relationship breakdown. She drank poison in the epilogue, choosing to die on her own terms. Even at the end, she controlled the narrative.
Exceptionally beautiful Soninke woman — dark skin, long hair, tall, sharp cheekbones. Her beauty is genuine but enhanced by magic. She dresses in imperial opulence with the precise taste of someone who spent years in a seraglio learning what power looks like from below.
Also known as: Malicia, Alaya, Dread Empress Malicia, Empress