The Vloren Matrimony Incident

Great-Aunt Hespa’s dying wish was simple: for Tamshen to finally marry, thus protecting her younger sister Linni from the Vloren village matchmakers - a terrifying cartel of grandmothers wielding ration-book sanctions and unsolicited knitting. Intensely shy but immensely stubborn, Tamshen refuses to marry the boisterous village butcher. Instead, she is saved by a five-year-old bureaucratic loophole. She discovers that her younger, bolder self deliberately pre-filed a marriage voucher to a disgraced academic, leaving it to activate right when she needed it most. Enter Stellor Hant. Once a prestigious researcher at the Grand Athenaeum, he was exiled for an absurdly disastrous thesis and now lives in a leaky shed, desperate for winter heating rations. Told in alternating perspectives, what starts as a purely tactical alliance soon shifts into a hilariously awkward domestic life. Between aggressively polite stand-offs over who gets the single unbruised half of their daily potato, and dodging the suspicious matrons, a warm, undeniable affection begins to brew between the two introverts. But when the matchmakers demand proof of a genuine union, can these practical souls admit they never want their temporary fix to end?