Raise an Ancient King to Be My Boyfriend

Elena Moro's parents are dead, her aunt Carmen has taken the house, and her ex has already moved on. She is broke and alone when a strange chalice comes into her hands. She treats it as a wine glass until the wine disappears. She throws it away, but the cup comes back. After it steals Poppy's bone too, she starts throwing in whatever she has—garbage, expired cans, expired pizza, frozen steak, bread, a beer.

In another time, King Varik watches his capital die. The water has been poisoned, the food is gone, and three hundred thousand enemies wait outside the walls. His soldiers beg to break through, but he refuses to abandon his people. When the enemy offers clean water in exchange for the king's head, he makes the offer no king should have to make: "Take my head and let my people drink."

Then water arrives. It comes without warning, enough for the whole city. The people call it sacred, a gift from the gods. King Varik does not understand, but he kneels and asks for more. Elena, meanwhile, keeps throwing food into the chalice, and every time, the ancient world receives it. Bread, meat, pasta, wine. The starving city begins to eat.

Elena starts to see glimpses of a wounded man with broad shoulders. She thinks she is dreaming, then suspects the cup is linked to another time. Across the divide, King Varik prays to a goddess he cannot see. His people cling to the food she sends. A mother offers her own body so her granddaughter can live. Varik calls himself a king of nothing, but he still begs the goddess for mercy.

That is how Elena Moro becomes a goddess to an ancient kingdom. But she is not a goddess. She is a woman falling for a king who exists three thousand years away, and the chalice that connects them may not be enough to bridge the distance.