“Princess Asti!”

As Latifa knelt and bowed her head towards her as she came out after class, she bounced out and hugged Latifa tightly with her chubby arms.

“Latifa! I heard you told stories to Taskan!”

Asti, who was clinging tightly to her waist while rubbing her chubby cheeks, was so cute.

At that moment, a few nosy girls gathered in front of Asti next to them, bowing their heads with bright smiles.

“Princess, you must come with Taskan tomorrow too! I can’t wait for tomorrow’s class! Actually, I’m just waiting for break time!”

At those words, Asti cleared her throat and gracefully raised her hand, but her tone sounded really excited.

“Alright, all of you. See you tomorrow!”

“Oh, Princess! Tomorrow, it would be nice to bring snacks and share them with the children while listening to stories.”

“For Taskan too!”

Taskan fluttered up beside her and said to Asti.

Princess Asti leapt back into Latifa’s arms, giggling with delight for some reason.

Latifa couldn’t help but smile at the sight, as cute as a perfectly roasted marshmallow.

“It’s the first time the children at the madrasa have spoken to me first. It’s all thanks to you. It’s thanks to you. Latifa, is there anything you want?! Candy? Gold coins? Jewels?! I’ll tell my father and mother and get you everything! I’ll make you pretty clothes too!”

“It’s alright, Princess. What Frau wants is only one thing. Just the happiness of her master.”

Latifa smiled gently as she looked at the gold bracelet on her wrist.

**

“I hear the elder is ill again today.”

Hades glared at the servants of the Makali Company with his arms folded.

“Yes, yes. Elder Makali is unwell and is not receiving visitors.”

Hades snorted as he looked at the empty walnut tree shelves, where just a few days ago there had been elaborate statues decorating the surroundings.

It seemed they had prepared in advance for Hades deliberately breaking decorations last time.

“How cute. A mad dog knows how to play well on its own.”

Hades lay down on the prepared sofa and raised one of his heavy feet, placing it with a thud on the refreshment table right in front of him.

The refreshment table, carved from hardwood and carefully gilded, creaked and split, revealing its fragile interior.

“My, my. Why are Makali’s things so weak? The elder is too sick to show his face, and everything here breaks when I move. Surely some unlucky thing must be caught in here.”

Hades stood up, adjusting his navy blue robe, and spoke to the servants again.

“Tell Elder Makali to check his abacus carefully. Or tell that empty-headed and empty-loined Shirak.”

“Wh-what should we relay to him?”

“Tell him to closely examine the actual loading rate of the fabric warehouse. It should be leaking by now. Even if you pile up more, it won’t be enough for Mercatus. So why didn’t you listen to me?”

Feeling an inexplicable sense of foreboding at Hades’ words, the servants just looked at each other’s faces.

“From the beginning, if I speak nicely, you don’t listen at all, so is it my personality that’s twisted, or is this Grand Bazaar twisted? You, can you tell who exactly is twisted? Can you answer that?”

Before Hades’ big sigh could end, the frightened servants quickly left the room, leaving only Hades in the reception room.

Hades laughed loudly, shouting towards where the servants had disappeared.

“Add the cost of this broken table to Caleb’s private property too! Hahaha!”

Before leaving, Hades meaningfully looked at the sophisticated bronze engraving hanging on the wall of the company’s reception room.

It was a dynamic picture of several horses pulling a large fabric cart.

Hades traced the curving lines of the engraving with his finger. After running his hand over the silk, cotton, and linen that the Makali Company boasted of, he slowly moved his fingers forward.

His fingertips now rested on the unfamiliar muscles of the horses pulling the loaded goods.

“The cart is quite heavy, isn’t it? I shall lighten that load for you.”

Whether it should be called vicious or playful.

A large smile of indeterminate nature was on his lips.

**

After finishing tomorrow’s hero story for Taskan and even feeding the desert fox, Latifa quietly climbed onto the bed in her quarters and rested her chin on the windowsill.

“There are so many stars. They’re so dense, it looks like they might pour down.”

In this Grand Bazaar where it never rains or snows, when you look up at the sky after sunset on a cloudless, clear night, you can see countless stars that seem about to pour down right in front of you.

Seeing these tens of thousands of stars twinkling individually, one could understand why the desert people didn’t treat Calende, the moon goddess, so well.

“Even without the moon, there are so many twinkling things at night.”

During the day, there was only one sun.

‘It fits so desolately well. Hades the General is Ignis the sun god, the one being that many people pay attention to and fear. And Calende the moon goddess, just one of those countless twinkling things. That’s me.’

Of course, he brought her because of her special ability to talk to animals, but thinking about it, it didn’t seem like General Hades had particularly benefited from her ability.

Rather, she seemed to have gained more.

If she hadn’t caught Hades’ eye, she would have surely been begging for food in the empire or living a destitute life wandering around.

She could have become a prisoner slave and been taken somewhere else to do hard labor like drawing water or doing laundry.

Thanks to Hades, Latifa learned more about her abilities, even became the moon goddess, and was able to receive such careful treatment in the palace like this.

‘But why does he want to get me back so badly?’

Hades would suddenly kiss Latifa and touch her hair or face hotly, but she didn’t dare think of it as love.

Hades himself said so with his own mouth.

Moreover, don’t men whisper love even to women they don’t love under the excuse of instinct?

Latifa’s mother also joined with her father, who was the emperor, and gave birth to Latifa.

‘If the emperor had loved our mother, he wouldn’t have abandoned her like that. Men are different from women. They have thousands of rooms in their hearts, but women don’t.’

Her mother always said that the biggest mistake in life was ‘meeting Emperor Tania’.

Latifa quietly took out the jewelry box that Hades had brought.

The jewelry box, finished with dark cherry wood and ivory, had a large aquamarine embedded in the center, which was crafted in the shape of a shield, and in the right corner, there was a detailed silver engraving of what looked like a beast’s claw mark.

It was the emblem of the Glacia Viscount family where Latifa’s mother had been.

Latifa’s eyes reddened as she recalled her mother proudly saying it was the family that protected the empire like a shield.

Thinking about what she had preciously kept in this jewelry box made her even more sorrowful.

A decorative golden key. The reason it was sad was because the golden key was ceremonially given to the imperial princesses of the empire.

It wasn’t particularly stamped with the imperial family’s emblem, and she didn’t know what meaning it had, but it was the first and last gift Latifa received from the emperor on the day she entered the imperial palace, and it was proof that she was a princess.

However, ordinary imperial citizens didn’t even know such a key existed, and Latifa didn’t particularly cherish it, but she valued it because she thought gold was more valuable than jewels during wartime.

She stroked the aquamarine shield attached to the lid of the jewelry box and murmured.

“What is this blue shield on the jewelry box trying to protect now?”

Judging by its heavy weight, it was clear that Hades had filled it with something.

Only then did she open the ring lock and slowly open it to find it full of small scent pouches.

“It’s jasmine.”

White, small star-shaped petals, dried just right for making potpourri, were packed tightly inside the black scent pouches, looking almost pitiful.

She picked one up and held it to her nose, and a fresh and subtle but somehow heavy coziness began to envelop her body.

Suddenly thinking it resembled the scent he often used, Latifa inhaled the jasmine scent a little deeper.

“He really likes a flower that doesn’t suit him at all.”

Latifa couldn’t help but smile, thinking of his huge body.

“Huh? Paper?”

At the very bottom of the scent pouches, the golden key was wrapped in cream-colored paper. Latifa unwrapped it.

On the outside of the paper, a man’s large and powerful handwriting was written in an elegant script.

−Jasmine is most fragrant in the dark night, also called ‘moonlight in the forest’. So I offer it to the moon goddess of Caleb.

“Ahahahaha. What is this?”

Latifa ended up laughing out loud for a while.

As she smelled the fragrant jasmine scent, her body felt languidly relaxed, so Latifa untied the linen sunshade tied to the windowsill and lay down on the bed.

Then she gently rubbed one of the black scent pouches she had taken out of the jewelry box against the gold bracelet he had given her, and smelled it again.

Somehow, along with the scent of hot desert sand and the man’s scent, a faint jasmine smell seemed to emerge, similar to the scent of Hades’ skin.

The desert people used so many fragrances that everyone they met exuded a different scent, but among the intense scents, this was the only smell that wasn’t unfamiliar to her.

‘It’s not that I miss him.’

I just want to go back quickly.

To the Caleb estate where this nostalgic scent comes from.

Latifa quietly closed her eyes and fell asleep in a peaceful state of mind for the first time in a long while.

**

Late at night in the harem palace, Iota couldn’t sleep.

It was because of pure anger towards Hades.

Ruhan was born of the legitimate queen, but the queen had passed away long ago, and he was such a weak prince that he seemed barely half as feeble as her own son Tarek.

No matter that she was a commoner concubine, she was the niece of the current Ferma minister who assisted the sultan, and she was by no means of lowly birth.

Tarek was also a proper man with legitimate rights to succeed the throne, and given the desert people’s characteristic of worshipping strength, there was no small faction supporting Tarek.

Under her and Minister Ferma’s command, quite decent forces were supporting Tarek, while Ruhan only had his precious lineage and the mad dog of the Grand Bazaar.

But the people of the Grand Bazaar loved such a Ruhan to death.

For the sole reason that he held the leash of Hades, the mad dog that no one could tame, people worshipped Ruhan like a god, and that became one of his strong support bases.

“Of course, he’s smarter than Prince Tarek. I’ll admit that much.”

Iota tossed and turned, pressing her forehead as if her head hurt.

“That Hades’ Frau wench is no ordinary woman either. She deliberately acted with Hades. They made her shoulder injured in the same way to gain the Sultan’s sympathy. What a vicious wench!”

Iota strongly believed in the claim that Latifa had colluded with Hades to stab herself in the shoulder with the pole arm.

Hades had picked up and thrown the pole arm so quickly that no one could have anticipated it, and even people beside him didn’t notice, so there was no way Latifa, who was a bit far away, could have noticed.

“Yes, that wench, they said she’s receiving Hades’ favor.”

Iota suddenly got up from her bed and headed somewhere.