Prologue
Alia Terra
Welcometothebridemarket! 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.
For most, Asphodelia is a dark legend. For a desperate few, it is the only destination left.
Chapter 1
The Trial
Callista
“Barrenwitch!Howdareyou deceive us?”
A rotten tomato landed on my cheek, and I flinched. Not because of the disgusting smell and taste of the fruit, but because I knew I was far more disgusting.
They’d bound me to a stake in the middle of the clearing near Agrion, and the tight rope around my wrists sliced into my flesh. It hurt, but I barely registered the pain. It couldn’t compare to the crushing weight threatening to tear my heart out of my chest.
Three years. Three years of careful lies, of dawn trips to gather herbs, of choking down bitter tea every morning. All destroyed by one satyr’s nose. I couldn’t even say I didn’t deserve it.
Syagros paced around me like a predator, his polished horns catching the sunlight. “Look at her!” he snarled. “This cursed woman’s presence among us brought death to our doorstep!”
He was still favoring his left side, every step he took lacking a satyr’s usual grace. My stomach plummeted. I’d always known he’d mention the recent massacre, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear.
Just a week ago, the Korinos Wilds that were our home had been struck by the anniversary of the Shift. For lucky settlements, that day meant nothing but a distant memory of the cataclysm that had torn the world apart. But we lived in the shadow of the Blighted Lands, the terrible place where the Shift had struck hardest.
Every year, its plague seemed to expand further. Finally, Syagros had made the call. He’d gathered the strongest from multiple villages, hoping to contain the contamination. Only a handful had returned, wounded, lost, and terrified.
I’d tried to help them, bringing them into my cottage and tending their wounds. That was when he’d leaned close enough to catch my scent. And he’d known.
Just like that day, Syagros pointed an accusing finger at me. “The Blighted Ones came for us because of her! Her curse drew the Blighted Ones like flies to rot!”
The villagers sneered at me, their faces contorted with hatred. A woman in the crowd let out a wail. “My husband is dead because of you! The monsters tore him apart!”
I couldn’t breathe under the weight of their blame. They believed my barren womb had somehow called those creatures from the Blighted Lands, that my very existence had painted a target on their ceremony. How could I make them see otherwise, when I myself didn’t know what I’d done?
