Bought By the Manticore (Monsters’ Bride Market #16)

Prologue

Welcome to the bride market! 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 unparalleled.

We can hardly imagine such a time. There is no proof, no historical texts, no photographs 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 keep her family from starving.

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 least 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 surrounded by a toxic ring of land. 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 the countless Shift deaths. In exchange, he granted his blessing to a new existence.

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, lining its streets with ghostly asphodel flowers and naming it Asphodelia after the pale blooms. From the Loom 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. A true home, and a second chance.

There, in Asphodelia, the Agora of Echoes always opens its doors to the death-touched brides. The price is often high, but usually the only chance for the desperate, for the dying.

But even Asphodelia cannot change the ways of the world. Even Asphodelia is bound by the chains of prejudice and blindness. And sometimes, even the Blighted Ones are cursed by their own impotence.