In a reverse harem world ruled by beast men, where women are near extinct...
Sloane Everhart wakes in the body of the Duchess of the North. Once feared, now forgotten, the fallen Alpha lives in the forest in drunken poverty and disgrace. The only thing keeping her alive is a beautiful bunny beast man who calls himself her husband, but only in name. He hates her, and she doesn't blame him.
Sloane knows survival better than anyone else. She's done it before in her past, and she'll do it again. This time, she'll fight not just to live, but to pay back her new mate. Word spreads when the North stirs with success. Six beast men come prowling for her scent. Powerful, ruthless, and so damn deadly.
A proud merchant.
A dead general.
A cultist priest.
An ex-fiancée.
An enemy king.
And a feral monster.
They say that she's theirs. They say that they're fated mates, soulmates. They want her. They want in. But Sloane isn't just here for love. She's here to survive. And anyone who underestimates her will regret it.
[Seven Beasts for Sloane is a steamy Omegaverse reverse harem, enemies to lovers, rags to riches story with seven fated soulmates]
A/N:
I was totally inspired by Chinese farming rebirth romance novels/ the beast-men world manhuas like "Beauty and the Beasts". I thought I'd write something a tad more rural, a bit more slice of life with all my favourite reverse harem action going on.
Chapter 1 part 1-
Death had been sweet.
Sloane's last memory was of the desert, the graveyard of civilisation, the ashes of humanity. A merciless sun that bore a bone-deep heat into endless dunes. The burn should have been enough to garner a dribble of sweat, and yet nothing puddled upon Sloane's flesh, crusted with salty brine. Her body did not have the fluids to produce even a single drop. And her mouth felt as if it were filled with sand, parched lips cracking with sluggish blood.
The taste of rust on her tongue was enough to give her another boost towards the mirage.
What a fool, she thought. She was a fucking idiot for hoping for more in this dead world where everything burned, and living sucked. But she had to try. It didn't matter that the goddamn sun was awful, desperate to kill her before she could reach her final destination. Sloane had to get there.
It was her last fucking chance for survival.
The final spot on the map.
Her feet dragged, determination etched in her brow. The soles of her boots had melted days ago, and what remained were the rags that clung to her flesh, soaked in old sweat and blood. Dust cracked in the molars of her teeth, clung to the back of her throat, and scratched at the corners of her eyes.
It had been days of sand and heat.
There were no tears to chase it away, for her body was giving out quickly, flesh sunken from dehydration. But she continued for the shimmer on the horizon, the slippery quiver of a lie.
The mirage of water.
Fifteen years ago, food had been abundant, luscious and divine. It hung on trees, grew in the grass. It was everywhere as long as one looked, as long as one pressed their hands into the Earth.
Water, so miraculously clean, fell freely from the sky, spluttered fresh from the ground. Fifteen years ago, Sloane didn't give a fuck about food. She grabbed packets of dehydrated, unhealthy noodles from the store, chugged chilled cans of energy from the fridge. Like an idiot, she ate from leftovers while studying late nights, skipped meals for a test without knowing the luxury she was going to lose.
Then the rain stopped coming, the water wars began, and nuclear fire exploded the world.
And it was all because of a shitty president who would not back down and cooperate with the rest of the goddamn world. She snorted at that, a low curse on her tongue. Those power-mongering idiots blew up everything and left the scraps to the people.
For years, all Sloane had were cans and dried rations. The hideous dust of stale biscuits, the rusty remains of old beans, the funky bottles of water. And eventually, even that dwindled into nothing. The dusty shelves were cleared out, the stores growing emptier.
Eventually, the mutated beasts became an option. The bugs with black shells that skittered in the sand, the wild game that oozed with rot. The dead strands of grass in the hills. The tar-like crust on the trees.
Everything was disgusting: no variety, no vitamins; it was all just belly-filling waste. People became hollowed by hunger, by grief, and by the desperation of survival. The fittest lived through a mutating strength. She lived thanks to the goddamn radiation that poisoned the world.
But it did not take long for humanity to descend into hell.
Cannibalism became commonplace for the freshest protein, the best meat.
Sloane's lips curled then into a sneer. But that was not the worst of it all. It was the water. The sweet, generous splashing, the endless stormy seas lapping at the shoreline. It was all polluted, all disgustingly acidic. No drinkable drop lay in the thick sludge that they now called fool's gold. It didn't matter if they tried to twist and sieve water from the air, even that was so poisoned it could kill.
Everything was gone.
Polluted.
Only the strongest remained crawling on their knees for another's blood, another's flesh, another ounce of sustenance. Another day. And for what? A smile stretched across Sloane's lips, more blood oozing from cracked lips.
A world crushed by greed.
A world dominated by violence.
At this point, she supposed it might be better to give up. There were barely any women left, and those who lived had to be stronger, faster and a thousand times more brutal than the men. Sloane's glare deepened, muscles aching from old wounds, from awful experiences, from fucking assholes that took everything and did not give.
She survived by sinking her teeth into their flesh, with a toe to their balls and a knife straight through their jugular. She survived on the hope of an oasis, a dream of a green place that still thrived. And her final destination, the last goddamn place on her map, just had to be the one.
It had to be.
For the family that died, hoping for her survival, for the friends who pushed her along the way. Their faces were as murky in her brain as the sway of heat. For her mind had slowed, and it felt as if chains had sunk hooks into her brain to drag her down. But there had to be some kind of salvation in this goddamn world.
Or else what would be the fucking point?
She stumbled towards what had once been a reservoir, standing at its edge with a growing sense of doom. It used to be an oasis; she was sure of it. But it was now an awful, bloody gorge splattered with rust and bones, crusted with mineral scars.
And at the very bottom of this pool was the acidic bubble of so much undrinkable water, it physically hurt for her to look at it. God, she felt like she could go mad. The waves were mere fantasy, for the pool steamed and hissed in the ravine, a split in the Earth that revealed an unforgiving hell.
Her smile stretched, twinged with pain, a prick of tears burned in her eyes.
Another failure.
Her final failure.
Fuck.
Her disappointment was thicker than she anticipated it to be, weighing upon her shoulders like stone. Hoping for change was useless. Dreaming was fucking useless. There were no signs of a better future. No sign of water, of life, of green.
She stood with a hollow ache in her belly, the pangs of hunger barely staved off by the mud solidifying in her belly. Nothing could end the pain. Not the rot she forced down, not the fleshy bark from the trees, not the sand she consumed in pure desperation, not the unidentifiable rotting meat she had found on the road.
Hunger never left her.
And they were all shells of themselves, all wraiths of the past.
Sloane was dying. She had been praying to see fresh water, to see one sweet spot of fresh grass. A symbol of hope, of food. And there was none. This world was dead, as dead as her loved ones, as dead as her heart. And perhaps, it was the retribution of the world for all that she had done to live. That had a grin of despair stretching across her face.
Her breath was metallic, her inner cheek tasted scorched.
The Earth was going up in flames, and they would all go with it.
Something howled in the distance, and her body stilled, settled into a position she could have only learnt from the wastelands. Her fingers closed around the handle behind her back, jerked the weapon free for a final parlay. Her blade shivered, jagged, old, and rusted from blood, chipped from a crash against bone.
There was nothing left to eat or drink in this world but the dying and the almost dead.
And Sloane was almost dead.
She could not hope for more, having spent years searching for good places and good people. And there was none, not even a glitter of survival. Even the rich in their bunkers were as dead and as plundered as the corpses on the street.
Sloane survived this long because she did not want to die, had stubbornly hoped that things would get better. The fucked up world had blown up her dreams to be rich, happy and in love. It had made all her suffering, all her sacrifices, absolutely meaningless again and again.
Surely there was a reason for it all?
Surely, she had survived this long for something more?
She tightened her grip, bones cracking, spine screaming in utter protest. A final dying spark kindled in her chest. In the shimmering haze, monsters moved. Human or mutated animals, she did not know. But there were too many legs, too many mouths. They were all here to attack unsuspecting prey that came begging for the last waterhole in the world.
They wanted her flesh, her liquid blood.
Her hands moved, pulling her blade close to her heart. No family grazed her final thoughts, no lover. They were long gone from the horrors of the world, and her memories were muted by hunger, by survival. Her heart slowed from its race, dropped into a primal rhythm that was as familiar as death.
She was going to die fighting, not begging, not crawling. Not fucking giving up.
She was going to die surviving.
A scream wrenched from her lips, a final stupid roar.
God, she wanted to be fat, full, and rich. She was so fucking desperate for family, for happiness, and for the wealth of needing nothing. She wanted someone to hold her, someone to love her. And more importantly, Sloane let out a bark of laughter at that thought, how much she just wanted to just eat a fuck ton of grass.
Just grass.
The freshest, juiciest fucking grass she could find.
And so she died, lonely, desperate, and hungry. But genuinely at peace for the first time in months in the gentle hands of nothing.