Brand of the Desert

The Whisper of Support

The morning sun rose sharp and cold over the central capital, filling the imperial garden with brilliant, clear light that left no shadows beneath the stone arches. The garden air was thick with the sweet, rich scent of fully bloomed plum blossoms and the damp smell of earth, while the soft rustling of leaves created a low, calm murmur that completely concealed the court’s dangerous whispers.

I was slowly walking along the gravel path in the garden’s inner chamber, listening to the heavy, structured layers of my plain hanbok softly brush over the smooth stone floor. Hyunjin had been summoned away early that morning to handle urgent administrative matters with the faction leaders, so I had been left under the watchful guard of his personal troops. But even with blades ringed tightly around me on all sides, the weight of the court’s relentless, suffocating gazes fixed on me had continued to pursue me stubbornly through this green, leafy expanse.

I stopped near the edge of the still jade-colored pond and quietly watched its rippling surface, while the sustained texture of my calm, lowered breathing pulled tight behind my throat.

"What a dazzling morning for a walk, Crown Princess." From the shadows of the stone archway, a smooth, polite voice drifted out like a soft purr.

I slowly turned my head and fixed my expression behind a mask of complete composure and calm. A tall man stepped out into the bright sunlight beyond the arch. He wore the ornate, deep-purple silk robes of a senior imperial prince, and danger and calculated confidence radiated from his bearing. He was the rival prince—the very man who had been pushed aside for the second time and forced to watch his entire faction be ignored the moment His Majesty officially named Hyunjin the crown heir. He was smiling gently, but his sharp eyes were cold, tracking my every movement like a hawk aimed at prey.

"Your performance at last night’s banquet was truly... worthy of making history." The rival prince murmured as he stepped in close enough to completely invade the space right in front of my lips, ignoring the tense movements of my guards, who stood alert with their hands on their sword hilts. As he tilted his head slightly, a taunting sharpness cut through his polite tone. "You used His Majesty’s name like a brilliant shield. But a royal decree cannot fabricate noble blood. Crown Princess, this capital is a battlefield of bloodlines, where only blood and family power matter. Once the court truly begins to split apart, even a frontier general won’t be able to protect some nameless street ghost forever."

He leaned his upper body even farther forward, and while he subtly pressured me to step back from the safe boundary of the royal guard, his enormous shadow completely blocked out the warm morning sun.

"When His Majesty’s health finally fails, in his old age, that general’s military force alone will be far too little to guarantee the succession." His eyes narrowed as he spat out the dangerous whisper fiercely. "The existence of a crown princess with no past is nothing but a fatal weakness that will drag Hyunjin straight into the mud. If you truly care about his future, then before the vipers of this court rip your nameless circumstances apart down to your toes, you’d be better off walking on your own two feet back into whatever shadow you originally belonged to."

I looked straight into his cold, calculating eyes. The lazy, self-assured smile that had pulled at the corners of my lips during last night’s banquet rose again as my hand firmly grounded itself against the hem of my silk hanbok. The vipers of the court were closing in from every side, but they had no idea they were facing the genius strategist who had completely swallowed this open basin whole.

The rival prince had probably expected me to crumble in fear under his threats, but he had completely misjudged what kind of brutal battlefield of survival I had been raised on.

A low laugh slipped between my lips. The quiet, husky rasp of my voice held a cold composure that tore through his heavy arrogance in one stroke. With my chin lifted high in the brilliant morning sunlight, I deliberately stepped one clear pace closer to him.

"A fatal weakness, Your Highness?" I whispered softly, carefully keeping my movements deliberate so he could read every single cutting word from my lips. "You speak as if bloodline were some grand shield. But your illustrious bloodline house couldn’t even seize His Majesty’s favor from a single frontier general, could it? If this court were truly a place where names and old titles held real power, then you should be the one standing where Hyunjin is now. But in reality, Your Highness, you lost that place and now hide in the garden’s shadows, whispering there, too frightened to even face him directly. So is that why you’re so pathetically begging a nameless woman to step aside on her own?"

The rival prince’s superficial smile shattered and vanished in an instant. My vicious rebuttal tore through his massive pride, twisting his entire face into an unrestrained mask of fury. As though he had crossed beyond any controllable line of defense, his eyes darkened with dangerous malice. If he could insult and provoke me here and damage my honor, the court would gain the perfect excuse to demand my forced expulsion.

He had thrown away even the last trace of imperial dignity and came at me savagely.

Before my guards could even draw their swords, his huge hand came down and struck my shoulder brutally. With rough, unyielding force, he shoved my body back hard, and my back slammed heavily into the cold, angular stone wall of the garden. The rough texture of the old vine-covered rock pushed hard through the layers of my silk formal wear and into my spine, and I swallowed a sharp cry in the back of my throat as he pinned me there and closed in, trapping me completely beneath his shadow.

"This arrogant street ghost bitch," the prince growled, grinding his teeth redly, with only a few inches between his face and mine. His fingers painfully dug into my shoulder blade to keep me pinned to the stone. "I’ll make you a clear example of what happens to slave bitches who don’t know their place in this court—"

He didn’t get to finish his threat.

The heavy, metallic crack of boots slamming viciously against the gravel echoed like a thunderclap shaking the entire courtyard. At that instant, the air in the garden froze all at once. The heavy wooden lattice door of the upper corridor flew open violently, and a tremendous, terrifying pressure swallowed the whole garden.

Hyunjin stormed in through the stone arch like a hurricane, and the raw, blinding fury radiating from his massive frame seized complete control of the space in a single heartbeat. The warm, familiar gentleness he had shown me in the inner chamber at dawn was gone without a trace, replaced instead by the fearsome, ferocious aura of the legendary commander who had once completely swallowed the basin whole.

He did not waste time on courtly etiquette. In just two lethal steps, he erased the distance between us, then slammed his huge hand down onto the rival prince’s shoulder and seized him with absolute, overwhelming force. With a single fluid, massive burst of power, Hyunjin ripped the prince out from where he was pressing into me and hurled his noble body violently across the gravel path. The prince’s body struck the stone railing wall, rolling and crashing hard.

Hyunjin immediately strode into the empty space and shielded me completely behind his broad, solid frame, protecting me so fully from the rival prince’s line of sight that I was safely held out of view. His large, warm hand rose to cradle the back of my neck tenderly, and as he pulled my face tightly against the depths of his chest to steady the trembling in my body, his sharp, dark eyes drove a fierce, unblinking gaze of rage down toward the prince, who had been thrown to the floor.

"Touch that child one more time." Hyunjin ordered sharply. His deep voice, resonating heavily through the dragon pillar and out in all directions, was lowered so deep and grand that it could make the palace’s stone columns tremble at once. He raised his hand, his fingers gripping the sword hilt with the promise of a perfect execution, with not even a single hair’s breadth of error. "Before today’s sun even reaches the roof of that garden, I’ll paint these clean stones red with your precious bloodline."