Prologue
Welcome to the bride market! Monsters bid, you choose.
This is a spin-off series to Arranged Monster Mates. We’re back on Alia Terra with steamy stories told by your favorite paranormal romance authors: Eva Brandt, Lia Frost, Cara Wylde, and Ava York.
No one remembers the world before the Shift. It was thousands of years ago, all lost, all forgotten. Scientists and historians say that before, the world was better, brighter, and our planet belonged to us, humans. There were proud countries and bustling cities, and technology was at its peak.
We can hardly imagine all that. There is no proof, no written texts, no pictures of Alia Terra before the Shift. All we know is the face of Alia Terra now. The land haphazardly divided into territories, the walled cities, the poor living on the fringes, barely surviving.
The monsters.
The temples where young maidens can take a DNA test and be matched to one of them. Being owned by a monster is often the only way a woman can save herself or give her family a chance to not starve.
But for women who are not maidens, or whose blood never found a match, there is another path. The bride market offers a desperate chance. Here, women pay a small sum to enter a public auction. Monsters bid, but in the end, it is the bride’s choice. Will she go with the highest bidder, or will she choose the less monstrous?
This is Alia Terra. Their world, more than ours.
In the aftermath of the Shift, when the pyres of the old world burned out, the sheer weight of death settled upon the land. In the territory that might have once been called Greece, the world itself tore open. A wound in reality bled pure death energy,forming a dark lake and a toxic ring of land around it. The Blighted Lands.
It is said the deity Thanatos heard the echo of so many endings, and he answered. A divine trade was struck. The price was the immeasurable energy from all those Shift deaths. In exchange for this price, a new existence was granted his blessing.
From the world before, they came. The Moirae, three ancient weavers of fate, and Charon, the silent ferryman. Upon an island in the lake, the Moirae set up their Loom. They created a city of dark stone and memory. They lined its streets with ghostly asphodel flowers and named the city Asphodelia in their honor. They wove new forms of life, monstrous beings born not of flesh, but of this new form of energy.
It is a city where death is not an end, but the very source of life, a reality sustained by a divine artifact. It is a place where ordinary, mortal life cannot survive. Only the death-touched, those humans already marked by a final tragedy, can find a true home there.
But the city offers more than just a strange sanctuary. It is whispered that for those burdened by more than just circumstance, the ancient ferryman offers an impossible trade. A chance to bargain away a piece of one’s very self for the promise of peace. For these souls, Asphodelia is not just the only destination left. It is the only hope.
From the Weavers’ Chronicle
The Seer
In the Old World, we were Time itself. From our Loom, all threads of existence were spun. The birth of stars, the reign of gods, the brief, bright lives of mortals. We were the Weave, and every destiny flowed through our hands, a symphony of creation and destruction that we conducted in perfect harmony.
But the Shift tore that tapestry asunder, and we are in the Old World no longer. Now, on Alia Terra, our duty is smaller. More focused. Our work no longer touches the fleeting lives of mortals. Their threads are spun from the flesh of the Korinos Wilds. It is a frantic, temporary weave of birth and decay, one that unravels unseen and untouched by our hands. We watch this transient world as one might watch a distant, flickering fire, knowing it is not ours to tend.
Only the Death-Touched are welcome to embrace our path. Cast out by the living world as barren and cursed, they come to us willingly. Their threads are a quiet, valued addition to our family, a bridge between the two realms. They rarely see the Weave.
But there are other exceptions. Those born with a splinter of the old power, a curse that allows them to glimpse the machinery of fate without understanding.
The Seers.
They do not walk our path. They stumble across it, blind and screaming, and their chaotic passage can tear the Weave in ways even we cannot predict. They are the most dangerous of all.
In the silent heart of the Weavers’ Hall, the timeless song of creation had faltered. The great Loom stood inert, its rhythmic hum absent, leaving a tense, expectant stillness in its place. Threads of pure death energy, meant for a new child of Thanatos, hung limp and lifeless within the colossal frame.
“The Loom is restless today,” Lachesis said, her fingers pausing on a strand of dark energy that felt brittle and dead to her touch. “The threads pull against our hands.”
“The death energy is thin,” Clotho murmured, furrowing her brow. “Stretched.”
“It is not the energy.” Atropos’s dark eyes fixed upon the empty space at the center of the Loom. “A stray thread approaches the Weave.”
As she spoke, a searing, alien light erupted before them. A brilliant silver thread snapped into existence, vibrating with a raw energy that was anathema to their ordered, sacred work.
A seer. She stood in a simple, mortal cottage yard, her hair blood-crimson. Her hands were rough and calloused from a life of labor. A human, fragile and fleeting, utterly unaware of the cosmic threshold she had just crossed.
“As we expected,” Lachesis mused. “Though, perhaps, not as we hoped.”
The mortal woman’s eyes rolled back in her head. Every muscle in her body pulled taut, locking her limbs as rigid as stone. She collapsed like a felled tree, her head striking the hard wood of the fence post with a sickening crack.
