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Once Upon A Rotton Kingdom: Happily Never After
Paperback
Series: Happily Never After, Book 1
Publisher: Dragon Marked Ink
Published: Apr 2 2026
Pages: 284
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Once Upon a Rotten Kingdom is a dark, gothic fantasy romance about monsters, men, and the dangerous cost of being seen.
The Kingdom of Thornhaven was built on a drained swamp-a place of black water, twisted roots, and things that refuse to die. The city calls it progress. The swamp calls it betrayal.
Grendel has always belonged to the rot.
Born of a human mother and something ancient from the deep mire, he has spent his life hidden in the Fetid Mere, shunned by the very kingdom that rose on stolen land. He is too large, too strong, too monstrous to walk among men. So he lives alone, surviving in the shadows, telling himself he prefers it that way.
Until the day he saves a beautiful stranger on the eastern road.
Lucien Ashwood is everything Grendel is not-wealthy, educated, dangerously charming, and newly arrived to manage his family's merchant house in Thornhaven. He was supposed to learn responsibility. Instead, he finds himself drawn into the swamp, into the darkness, into the arms of the creature the city calls the Swamp Devil.
What begins as gratitude becomes friendship.
Friendship becomes obsession.
Obsession becomes something neither of them can survive unscarred.
As rumors spread and hunters sharpen silver-tipped bolts, the fragile space between city and swamp begins to collapse. Thornhaven demands a monster. The swamp demands loyalty. And love-raw, desperate, impossible love-demands sacrifice.
In a kingdom built on rot, nothing pure can grow without consequences.
Once Upon a Rotten Kingdom is a haunting, sensual tale of forbidden love, monstrous tenderness, and the brutal truth that being seen is the most dangerous thing of all.
What makes this story sing is that it isn't just monster romance. It's about otherness, about who gets labeled a monster and why. It interrogates civilization versus wildness, performance versus authenticity, love versus survival. That tension-between swamp and stone-is the real heartbeat.
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