Page 1 of Bought By the Manticore

Prologue

Welcome to the bride market! Monsters bid, you choose.

This is a spin-off series toArranged 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.

From the Weaver’s Chronicles

We are the Moirae. We are the hands upon the Loom, but we do not claim to hold every thread in Alia Terra.

We spin the inhabitants of this city, the monsters of Asphodelia. One by one, our children come out of our hands, always perfect, always loved.

But sometimes, a thread emerges dark and jagged. A creature burdened with a terrible secret. A terrible darkness. It is impossible for such a thread to be bound to that of another.

When such a thread is severed, it can only be a mercy.

Furthermore, we cannot weave the mortals who dwell in the wild lands beyond the Acheron. We cannot see or control the chaotic parasites that surge in their bloodlines.

But we are the Moirae, and in one world, we were known as the Fates. We know that sometimes, this universe balances its own scales in ways that lie beyond the grasp of mortal understanding.

Above all, we know that some threads will always be entwined, even if not by our hands.

1

The Satyr’s Advice

Ianthe

“I’m not leaving you, Ianthe. I’m not abandoning you to die alone.”

I leaned against the wooden headboard and scowled at the old healer. She’d been the one to raise me when my own mother died in childbirth. I refused to drag her down with me, especially when I’d known for months this was coming.

“It’s all right, Healer Fera. This is for the best. The others need you more.”

Outside the small cottage, the panicked yells of the villagers grew louder. The day before yesterday, a ragged satyr namedSilenus had come in with the terrifying news. TheBlighted Lands were expanding and would swallow our small settlement within days. There was only one solution. To pack up and leave. But that wasn’t an option, not for me.