Prologue
Welcome to the bride market! Monsters bid, you choose.
This is a spin-off series toArranged 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.
As for the unwise few who seek to hunt its power… Their fate is always to drift in the dark waters of Lake Acheron.
From the Weavers’ Chronicle
In the Old World, they called us the Fates.
We saw everything. The lives of gods and mortals alike, every thread from its first bright spin to its final unraveling. Priests and peasants. Conquerors and the conquered. We wove them all without preference, without intervention. A hero was only a thread like any other.
There was one such hero, once, whose story we remember above the countless others. Not because he was exceptional. Becauseshewas.
He sought a prize beyond his reach and found a woman with power enough to deliver it. A sorceress. A king’s daughter. She burned her world to ash for him — family, home, country, the life she had been born into — and laid the ruin at his feet like a gift.He took everything she offered. And when she had given him all there was to give, he discarded her for a more convenient match and called himself the injured party.
The story does not remember her kindly. It remembers her as a warning. A word for women who love too completely, who use their power without apology, who refuse to be quietly diminished.
It was one tale among the thousands we tended. Ordinary, in its way. Betrayal is the oldest thread in the Weave.
But patterns do not die. They travel. They arrive in new soil, take new root, and grow into something the Old World never permitted them to become.
A story that ended in ruin can, given different ground, end differently.
We have seen this pattern emerge on Alia Terra.
This time, we intend to let it finish.
1
The Captive’s Choice
Medea
The air in the tavern of Colchis smelled of spilled ale, unwashed wool, and the cloying rot of the surrounding marshes. To the satyrs and nymphs drinking by the hearth, it carried the scent of a rowdy afternoon in a border-town dive. To me, it smelled of my cage.
