The Heartstone Saga by Archibald Bradford (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📗

This time Baron actually snorted out a laugh.

“Alright, I think I have the gist of it. You focus on the heartstones. We’ll focus on the prospective buyers.”

With a rough understanding of their respective roles, they arrived at their destination.

Chapter 19:At Auction

The auction house was an enormous circular building with multiple stories, the stone and wooden structure painted in joyous shades of yellow and green, while the emblem of the Aegis proudly displayed on large banners to either side of the main entrance marked it as an officially sanctioned house.

Baron nodded as he looked up at the building.

“That must be the pl-”

“Yeah, that’s it!” Ginger interrupted; “It’s just like the one where I met Celeste! Wow, it’s really busy though huh?”

It was something of an understatement as the place was swarming with hopeful monsters and equally hopeful tamers.

Many monster girls had flocked to the city in the hopes of finding safety in numbers, not to mention a potential bond-mate, so the auction houses were all bustling.

The interior was a spacious crescent around a raised stage where the bolder girls could show off their attributes in a bid to catch a buyer’s attention, while an upstairs catwalk surrounded the high ceilinged central chamber, with wooden railings and access to a number of small rooms for… taming purposes.

Though it was faint, even over the chaos inside they could hear cries of ecstasy coming from the private rooms.

On top of that though, it was chaos inside.

The monster girls in the crowded auction house ranged from bawdy to bashful in temperament as they sought owners for their precious hearts, while the tamers there likewise ran the gambit from keen-eyed and cautious to downright lascivious.

A particularly energetic water spirit had taken to the stage just as they entered and collapsed into a puddle only to reform a moment later, beaming hugely to the enthusiastic applause of the onlookers.

“Naiads are so cool!” Ginger enthused, clapping her hands together excitedly.

Nameless and Baron were a bit more reserved, both maintaining their professional decorum, but the excitement was contagious and both of their girls loosened up as they joined in the clapping at the water spirit’s antics.

It took them a few minutes but eventually they located the worn out Aegis moderator, whose face lit up when he realized that help had arrived.

They then spent an hour running over everything that Theo had told them with their senior, and then another hour more with him observing them quietly while they performed their duties.

Every sale that happened in a sanctioned auction house had to be approved by a representative of the Aegis, this meant that every seller and buyer had to have their paperwork checked and every monster girl had to sit down for an interview and a heartstone inspection in one of the little cubicles pressed against the walls all around the first floor.

The buying and selling of heartstones was actually a remnant of the system used by the Divine Republic, but where they employed it as nothing more than a means of acquiring and exchanging slaves, the modern world viewed it as a good way for monster girls to meet as many different people as possible who they might then bond with.

To the average human the bond was just as sacred as it was to monster girls, and the Aegis was steadfast in its resolve to see it remained that way. It was a bizarre setup, but in the thousand years since the war, no one had bothered to come up with an alternative, so deeply was it ingrained into their culture.

For an ordinary Aegis operative conducting heartstone checks and interviews with the monster girls coming through the house would be a challenge, they’d have to rely on their training and intuition to ensure that the girls were happy with her situation.

For an Empath sick to death of paperwork, it was both an easy task and an oft-times delightful one to be working with monsters directly again; all it took for him was a couple minutes of holding a girl’s stone and a few well-thought out questions to know whether or not everything was in order.

But even though it was a fruitful day where he and the other probationary Aegis operatives approved the sale of nearly three dozen girls, he still felt that faint twinge in his stomach that told him he didn’t believe he was doing enough.

He was still working at a desk.

__________

“Tora, why?!” Kriss cried out in an uncharacteristic wail.

The Ogre was currently sitting in the middle of what used to be a storage shed for the watermill in the abandoned village the two of them were staying in, though it would be more accurate and less kind to say that they were squatting in it.

“Wanted for to get higher to see what for smoke was come from!” Tora whined.

She had climbed up on top of the shed, but her weight had proven to be too much for the thin wooden panels of the roof and she had promptly flattened it.

Now the massive blue girl was covered from the bottom of her breasts to her calves in partially milled flour.

“But why are you naked?!” Kriss demanded.

With the Trog’s help Tora scrambled out of the ruined shed, spreading broken boards and dusty flour everywhere as she did, then shrugged as she sought to explain her logic.

“In case fall into water, didn’t want for to get clothings wet.”

At that point Kriss gave up trying to follow the other girl’s thinking; the shed was easily thirty feet from the water and even if the Ogre fell off the very top of it she would have remained perfectly dry.

“Just… come on, you’re going to have to go into the water now.”

It had been several days since they had met outside Greyhaven and