CHAPTER 1 — LUSHII
A long time ago, in the distant future… before the dream ends.
Lucy Liana woke like a rumor: quiet, unnoticed, and yet impossible to ignore. The city exhaled around her, a tangle of light and shadow, glass towers bending the dawn like molten crystal, sky-rails humming their low, godlike songs. Artificial clouds hung lazily above the spires, drifting in invisible currents written by people whose names had dissolved centuries ago. And somewhere in the hum of it all, Lucy felt the first stirrings of something she didn't remember wanting—but had always known.
She loved mornings. Not for the sun, not for the air, not even for the world itself. She loved that fragile moment where nothing yet demanded her, where existence hadn't yet remembered her name. The domed skyline fractured the early light into impossible colors—greens that tasted of metal, blues that left a trace of memory on the skin, reds that made the city itself shiver. The rain had already fallen hours ago, recycled, filtered, reborn, leaving the streets smelling like ozone and quiet mistakes.
Her room was small, impossibly small for someone seventeen and supposedly ordinary. But it was hers. The walls were crowded with relics of another life, a life she hadn't lived—posters of pixel saints, old music idols whose voices had long since gone brittle, abstract void-art that made the corners of her mind itch with longing she couldn't name. The black curtains were half-drawn. Clothes sprawled in deliberate chaos, a mirror leaned crooked against the wall, reflecting a girl who looked impossibly real: short black hair, pale skin like porcelain carved from the remnants of a dream, and eyes that held a strange depth, blue as if borrowed from some secret ocean she had never swum in.
Lucy ran her fingers over the scars that ran down her forearms, ugly and stubborn, a map of a past life she could not remember but somehow haunted her.
Six months ago Lucy found herself in this world confused and lost. She'd committed suicide by slitting her wrists. When the world grew dark and black she awakened here in a new body.
In a new world called the Twin Galaxy a world ran by powerful mages and strange beings much more different from her own mundane world, though she could barely remember who she was.
All she knew now is that she was Lucy Liana and that's all that mattered.
The scars were the last remnants of her old self—a girl who had once tried to vanish from the world in a quiet, bloody rebellion, leaving herself behind like a discarded costume. Nobody here could have known; nobody would suspect. She had crossed into this body fully, seamlessly, the memories of Liana now her own, every joy, every terror, every mundane thrill. Yet beneath it all, those scars whispered faintly, like old ghosts scratching at a locked door.
Her bones cracked as she stretched, a soft symphony in the quiet room. Seventeen years old. Alive. Still ordinary. At least, that's what she had trained herself to believe. Ordinary was safe. Ordinary was armor. Ordinary let you breathe without anyone noticing.
The low murmur of her father's movements echoed through the hall. A mug clinked against ceramic. A news feed whispered about mana tariffs and patrol zones of the Golden Moon. He had not spoken much in years, not since the woman whose name she dared not say had died delivering her into the world. Lucy had never asked, and he had never volunteered. Some absences, she understood, were permanent.
She dressed in her usual civilian clothes—oversized jacket, dark leggings, boots laced like traps for anyone daring enough to approach. Goth e-girl, Abbie called her once, teasing. Lucy had pretended indignation, secretly liking the label, liking that her identity could be worn like armor, protecting her from being seen too closely.
Outside, the transit gate hummed. Abbie Kadra waited, leaning like she owned the air around her. Red curls untamed, green eyes sharp and amused, dangerous. "You're late," she said, voice low, dangerous, teasing.
"I'm exactly on time," Lucy said, checking her chrono.
Abbie snorted, a sound that carried old grudges and unfinished fights. "That's late in my culture."
They stepped onto the sliding platform together. The city moved around them: students of lesser Houses, non-practicing mages, half-bloods, ghosts of families once powerful, now barely remembered. The academy loomed ahead, mana-neutral architecture designed to strangle anomaly-level magic in its cradle. Lucy liked it. She liked places where nothing happened, where the world could pretend to be ordinary.
The lectures crawled by. Ethics debates over anomaly-level sorcerers, holo-texts about restriction devices and mercy, a slow bleed of knowledge she could almost sleep through. She doodled crowns in the margins of her notebook, inverted shapes, upside-down halos, shapes that felt alive under her pen. She felt it then: a pressure at the back of her skull, subtle but insistent. Not pain—attention. Something vast peering at her from the shadows of existence, probing.
He appeared as if summoned by the thought: Adam Cerimona. Tall, lean, brown hair swept back, gray eyes restless, like he had been waiting for her across centuries. A weak mustache clung awkwardly to his face, an attempt at age that had not yet rooted. Old Earth noble blood, abandoned sorcery to court the Golden Moon, a name everyone knew, even she. And yet he looked terrified, as if knowing something she could not.
When their eyes met, he flinched, then squared his shoulders, as if forcing years of hesitation into a single decision.
"Lucy Liana," he said, voice careful, like breaking the wrong note might fracture reality.
"That's my name," she replied, teasing lightly. "Do I get a prize?"
A twitch of his lips—fear, masquerading as calm.
"They're watching you," he said.
Her laugh was sharp, automatic, wrong. "Yeah? They watch everyone."
"No," he said. "You."
Abbie stepped closer, eyes narrowing, all predatory instinct. "You got five seconds to explain before I decide you're either insane or dangerous."
Adam's glance flicked to the students flowing past, oblivious, and the humming wards of the academy. "Not here. You need to leave the city tonight."
Her pulse thundered, matching a heartbeat she couldn't remember making. "Why?"
He leaned in, voice dropping lower than she expected, colder than she could place. "Because you're the ninth Moonborn."
The words struck wrong, like a dissonant chord that should not exist.
"That's not a thing," she said, automatically.
"It is," he said. "And they know."
Abbie laughed, sharp, humorless. "Oh, this is good. Next: she's secretly a Vell?"
Adam's gaze didn't soften. The pressure at her back intensified. Something vast, watching, deciding. Her stomach knotted.
"My mother died giving birth to me," Lucy said quietly. "If I were special, someone would've noticed."
"They did," Adam whispered.
The silence after that wasn't empty. It was filled with the weight of inevitabilities, with futures bending around her like smoke, with ancient things stirring just beyond the edges of perception.
Abbie crossed her arms, jaw tight. "Alright, mystery boy. Hypothetically, we believe you. What's next?"
"There's a cave," he said. "Outside the city limits. Old. Wrong. You'll find a golden apple there."
Lucy's frown was immediate. "You expect me to eat a fruit some stranger tells me about in a cursed cave?"
"Yes."
Abbie blinked. "Bold strategy."
Adam met Lucy's gaze, desperation simmering beneath composure. "That apple will wake you. Give you the power to survive what's coming."
"And if I don't?"
Adam hesitated, the ghost of a shudder crossing his features.
"Then the Golden Moon will put a crown on your head," he said, "and you'll never be free again."
The bell rang. Life resumed its march. Classes, students, mundane chaos. Nothing had happened. Yet Lucy knew everything had changed.
The lie she was living was about to be shattered.
She glanced at Abbie. Abbie's green eyes were sharp, dangerous, alive with the knowledge that ordinary had fled.
And above the city, far beyond sight, beyond wards, beyond even the fragile laws of nature, something stirred. Something that had slept while stars died and civilizations rose and fell. Something that remembered her before she remembered herself. Something that had waited through centuries of human folly and now leaned its vast attention toward Lucy Liana.
And smiled.
The kind of smile that could tear worlds in half.
The kind of smile that meant: welcome back, child. Your sidequest begins.