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So it turns out I had another rivals to lovers scenario in the barrel in case anyone hated the combat-forward premise but was interested in the setting! ✨

This one involves marriage fraud and some Regency era vibes. 

[h2][color=#d5bcba]❧ SOMETHING BORROWED[/color][/h2]
[quote][i]A marriage is a contract, and contracts can be forged. Theirs is: two signatures, two parties who cannot stand the sight of each other, and a single year to convince the most vicious court in the Old World they are besotted. The only rule that matters is the one nobody writes down: do not, on any account, fall in love.[/i][/quote]
Hautnoir keeps up appearances the way it keeps its faith: out of habit, and a little out of dread. A generation ago the Academy reasoned the gods out of the sky, and the rites survive anyway, said by people who no longer mean a word of them. The season feeds on the same thing. It is the marriage market of a dying aristocracy, all balls and drawing rooms and gossip-columns that can unmake a name by breakfast, while the great houses keep up the performance on rents that no longer pay. Factory money and the colonial trade have outgrown the old order, and one house at a time, the new buys what the old can no longer hold.

For generations one such house held a hereditary charter for the New World trade and flew it themselves, a monopoly on the airship routes between the old continent and the new. Then an upstart's faster fleet and deeper pockets out-built them and took the freight whole. The family was left with the manners, the debts, and the single asset the rival could not buy: the charter itself, which passes only by blood or marriage. So the wreck holds the right to a trade it no longer runs, and the rival runs a trade they have no right to. There is exactly one way to fix that, and it takes a wedding ring.

So they strike a bargain, and shake on the half that can never be written down. In public, ordinary marriage articles: the charter provided for, a sum settled on the ruined spouse. In private, an expiry date. Hold the marriage a year, long enough for the charter to vest and the city to lose interest, and then part. The upstart walks away with the charter and a foothold they will defend for the rest of their life. The aristocrat walks away with the name and, for the first time, the money to stop performing it.

All they have to do, for one year, is convince Hautnoir that two people who would each happily watch the other drown last season are now hopelessly in love. The season is the gauntlet, every eye on the unlikely match and the board that grants the charter taking its first hard look. Survive it and the scrutiny cools, but the year runs on, and proximity is its own slow danger. The contempt wears thin. The wrong people start asking who is about to inherit what. And the clean exit they shook on starts, against all sense, to look less clean.

You are one of them. Your spouse is the other. The contract already names the day you part. The only question is whether, by then, either of you still wants to.
[h2][color=#d5bcba]❧ THE MATCH[/color][/h2]
[b]The Name.[/b] The last heir of the gutted house, all brittle charm and pawned silver, dreading the day the legacy dies on their watch. They bring the bloodline, the invitations, and the charter no one else can hold; they need a fortune by season's end, or the creditors finish what the rival began.

[b]The Means.[/b] The new money that broke that house and can buy anything in Hautnoir except a welcome. They bring the fortune, the ships, and the operation the grant was made for; they need an old name to make it legal, and this is the last way in.
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