For ten years, Prince Jackson Velcrest has refused every marriage proposal placed before him. The kingdom believes he is stubborn. The nobility believes he is irresponsible. His father, King Marcus, believes he is unworthy of the throne. Already burdened by the political scrutiny that comes with being the kingdom's first openly transgender heir, Jackson has spent years fighting to prove that his identity does not define his ability to rule. But when Marcus revives the ancient tradition of The Marriage Auction, Jackson is given an impossible choice: secure a politically advantageous spouse - or lose his place as Crown Prince to his younger sister, Avery. As royal heirs from across the continent arrive to compete for his hand, every conversation becomes a performance, every dance a political statement, and every decision another test of whether he deserves the crown. Then, amid the chaos, a new Headguard emerges from the Royal Guard Trials. She bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman Jackson loved - and lost - a decade ago. The woman who vanished with a letter. As court rivalries deepen, dangerous secrets begin surfacing, and the line between loyalty and betrayal blurs, Jackson must decide whether he will sacrifice his heart for the kingdom... or risk everything for the truth. Because some crowns are won through duty. Others are earned by refusing to surrender who you are. In a kingdom where love is political and power is inherited, the greatest act of defiance may be choosing both.

In a neon-drenched inner-city sprawl where interdimensional trade hides beneath nightlife, survival depends on controlling identity before someone else defines it for you. Artic, a shapeshifting cybernetic alien who has escaped containment systems across collapsing realities, survives by becoming unclassifiable. By night, they perform at the Velvet Circuit-a club that doubles as sanctuary and marketplace for anomalies-where every performance is a shifting archive of borrowed selves and rewritten histories. Everything changes when Oliver arrives under the guise of a behavioral scientist studying anomalous cognition in entertainment environments. He is precise, controlled, and observant in a way that signals training rather than curiosity. A hunter, or something built to behave like one. But as Artic tests him through performance and deception, the dynamic shifts: Oliver doesn't reduce what he sees-he learns it. What begins as surveillance becomes recognition, and recognition becomes destabilization. Artic discovers Oliver is tied to a containment system designed to strip anomalies of identity and reduce them to usable data. Worse, Oliver may be part of that system in a more fundamental way than even he understands. When Artic stops running and allows controlled capture, the experiment reverses. Memories fracture the logic of containment. Identity resists classification. And both Artic and Oliver begin to realize the system cannot hold if its definitions stop meaning anything at all. In the collapse that follows, hunter and specimen cease to apply. What remains is not escape, but transformation-two entities leaving behind a world that can no longer successfully name them.

How these came to be, TW : Experimentation, needles, blood, cringe graphic dscriptions, etc. #8 in oil 3/19/22 #1 How they met 3/19/22