Daughter of the Lost Moon

A Rebirth LitRPG Romance Novel

Chapter 1 - The Thread Severed

By Gail Rose Landers

System Quest Series

Daughter of the Lost Moon Copyright © 2025 by Gail Rose Landers. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: The Thread Severed

The rain had finally stopped by the time Jamie pushed open the bar’s glass door, but the city still gleamed like it hadn’t decided whether to drown or shine.

Cold air hit her first, the lingering smell of fryer oil and spilled beer giving way to wet pavement and exhaust. Neon bled into puddles along the sidewalk—pink and electric blue rippling under her boots as she stepped out. Her reflection fractured there: a tall woman in a thrift‑store pea coat the color of storm clouds, cheap but carefully chosen; a knee‑length black skirt swaying around her legs; tights with a faint ladder near her left knee that she’d pretended not to notice in the restroom mirror.

The gold hoops in her ears—the ones Elaine had called “perfectly dramatic”—caught a streetlamp’s light. Jamie’s hand rose to touch one, fingertips lingering like she could still feel Elaine’s warm laughter across the table.

“Those are gorgeous, Jamie. They suit you.”

The memory sat on her shoulders like a borrowed shawl—light, fragile, shockingly warm.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, the ends still damp from the drizzle. Six months on hormones had softened the edges of her face, blurred jaw into cheek. The bar’s bathroom mirror had been unkind under fluorescent light, but tonight, with the city smudged and glowing, she could almost believe the outline matched the girl she held inside.

Almost.

She adjusted her purse strap—fake leather, worn at the corners—and started down the block. The heels of her ankle boots made a small, determined sound on the wet concrete. Not quite a click, not quite a thud. Something in between.

The office tower she’d left behind rose like a dark monolith at her back, windows mostly dead except for a few rectangles of light on the upper floors. Someone was probably still arguing about quarterly projections up there. Tonight, she’d chosen elsewhere.

At the bar, they’d said her name without hesitation.

Jamie, over here!
Jamie, your turn at darts.
Jamie, you have to try these fries.

Her name. Not a stumble, not a correction, not a smirk disguised as a joke. Just… Jamie.

Her phone buzzed in her purse. She dug for it with cold fingers, pulling it free long enough to see the group chat’s latest messages.

Elaine: You get home safe, okay? Text me when you’re in.

Another coworker had added a string of rainbow hearts. She watched the messages blur slightly as her breath fogged in the chill, then typed with thumbs gone clumsy from the cold.

On my way. You’re all the best. :)

She hesitated over the emoji, then hit send anyway.

A bus roared past, spraying her calves with a fine mist. She flinched instinctively, then laughed under her breath at herself. City nights weren’t gentle; they never had been. But they were hers now in a way they hadn’t been before. The skirt against her thighs, the weight of her purse, the ghost of eyeliner smudged at the edges of her vision—small things, ridiculous things, but real.

At the corner, she passed the old stone church with its heavy wooden doors shut tight for the evening. A single stained‑glass window glowed faintly, an angel in cobalt and gold pouring out light onto the sidewalk. Water pooled below it, catching the colors and throwing them back in distorted ripples.

Jamie slowed without meaning to. The angel’s face was kind in that generic, beatific way sacred art tended to be. A plaque near the steps announced service times and a charity drive.

She’d once stood on these steps at sixteen, shoulders hunched in her father’s too‑big jacket, listening to a pastor talk about “order” and “design” and “living in truth.” Back then, she’d thought truth meant swallowing herself until she disappeared.

Now, she watched the window’s colors flicker in the water and thought, If there’s a god up there, she’s got terrible taste in allies.

A gust of wind cut down the street, tugging at her coat. She shivered, hugging it closer. Somewhere above the low clouds, the moon had to be watching. It always had.

If it cared, it didn’t say.

She crossed against a blinking red hand as traffic slept. A lone car idled at the light, bass thumping faintly. The driver didn’t look at her. That felt like a blessing.

By the time she turned onto her street—narrow, lined with brick row houses that wore their age like shrugging shoulders—her shoulders had loosened. The smell shifted to wet dirt and laundry venting from basement windows. Her building loomed three doors down, paint peeling, mailbox slots taped with names no one bothered to update.

Jamie’s boots slowed.

She wasn’t thinking about danger. Not yet. The worry in her chest was smaller, pettier: a landlord’s voicemail about rent due next week, an upcoming HR meeting about insurance coverage she’d spent days rehearsing replies for. Her hand slipped into her coat pocket, fingertips worrying the folded index card where she’d written questions about coverage, about name changes on forms that refused to update.

“Look it up in the benefits portal,” HR had said last time, eyes already sliding past her.

She’d looked. The portal didn’t know what to do with someone like her either.

Her breath steamed in the air as she reached her building’s stoop. Yellow light from the vestibule spilled through frosted glass, painting a blurry rectangle on the sidewalk.

Footsteps sounded behind her.

Three sets, out of rhythm with the city’s background noise. Heavy, unhurried.

Her spine went rigid before she turned. Months of walking with keys between her fingers, of mapping streetlights automatically, of checking reflections in windows—all of it coalesced into a single, primal tightening.

“Hey, pretty boy.”

The voice came from the mouth of the alley beside her building. Casual, amused. Wrong.

Jamie turned slowly. Three shapes detached from the shadow: hoodies, denim, the glint of a chain around one neck. Their faces were ordinary. That made it worse.

“Where d’you think you’re going dressed like that?” the speaker asked. His eyes skimmed down her body and back up, snagging on her earrings.

Her purse strap creaked under her tightening grip. “Home,” Jamie said. Her voice didn’t shake. She was absurdly proud of that. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Should’ve thought of that before you decided to pretend,” another one said. There was no smirk, no joke. Just a flat certainty, like reading off a weather report. “This is our block. We don’t have to look at that.”

That.

Her heart pounded against her ribs. Somewhere distant, near the church, a siren wailed and faded. The vestibule light hummed behind her, a barrier made of thin glass and a lock that stuck half the time.

Jamie shifted her weight, just enough to angle toward the door. “I’m not hurting anyone.”

“You’re hurting the whole world,” the first man said. His hand flexed open and closed at his side. A silver crucifix glinted at his throat, catching the spill of light from the vestibule. “You people poison everything.”

Her mouth tasted like metal already, though no blow had landed. She could have argued. Could have said something about statistics, about actual harm, about who poisoned what. Instead, words caught on the image of that crucifix, on the memory of sermons about sin, about “loving correction.”

Behind the men, the alley’s darkness seemed to pool. For a heartbeat, the shadows on the brick wall twisted, forming something that wasn’t quite a shape. A suggestion of eyes without light. A prickle of cold skittered down Jamie’s spine, deeper than the November air.

Her skin crawled. She blinked. The bricks were just bricks again.

“Please,” she said. “Just let me go inside.”

They moved without speaking, the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before. One blocked the sidewalk to her left, another stepped between her and the street, the third drifting closer to the vestibule door like a careless coincidence.

Her pulse roared in her ears. Her hand, still in her coat pocket, tightened around the index card until it crumpled. HR questions seemed like props from a different play.

The first blow landed in her stomach.

Air left her in a sound she didn’t recognize. The concrete met her knees hard enough to send sparks up her thighs. Her purse slipped from her shoulder, skidding across the sidewalk; a lipstick clattered free and rolled to the curb, leaving a diagonal trail of deep red on the wet concrete.

“Look at me,” someone ordered.

She didn’t. She couldn’t. The second hit caught her at the temple, bright white exploding behind her eyes. The world tilted.

In the vestibule window, her reflection blurred—coat twisted, skirt askew, hair falling out of its careful clip. The gold hoop in her left ear flashed as her head snapped sideways.

Boots and fists became the weather: relentless, unavoidable. Pain arrived in bursts, then in waves, then in something that wasn’t quite either. Her body curled in on itself instinctively, arms wrapping around her ribs.

At the edge of her vision, the crucifix swung on its chain, pendulum‑steady.

She tried to crawl toward the steps. A foot caught her ribs and rolled her onto her back.

“Don’t,” she rasped. “Please. I just want to go home.”

One of them—she couldn’t see which anymore—leaned over her. His breath smelled like cheap beer and mint gum. “You don’t have a home. Not like this.”

The words didn’t even need the blows attached to them. They were familiar on their own.

Another kick. Somewhere in the flurry, her glasses cracked, spiderwebbing the world. Streetlights smeared into halos. The men’s faces became featureless smudges, except for their eyes and that cross.

Above them, the sky was just a dark ceiling. No stars. No moon.

The pain blurred. Distance opened. The concrete against her back became not‑quite‑solid. Each hit landed further away.

Her thoughts slipped sideways.

Not to anger. Not at first.

Not fair, she thought vaguely, like a child refusing to accept bedtime. I was just… starting.

Images rose unbidden, clear and sharp in a way the men’s features were not:
A white dress bookmarked on her phone she’d never had a reason to buy.
A nameless child’s warm weight in her arms, head tucked into her shoulder.
Elaine’s hand brushing hers in the bar when she’d laughed too hard at a joke.

She saw herself older, hair threaded with gray, sitting at a kitchen table in soft light, someone’s thumb smoothing a wrinkle from her forehead. It was a dream she’d visited often, fragile as spun sugar. Now it cracked.

A fist slammed into her jaw. Her teeth clicked together hard enough to taste blood and enamel. Her head snapped sideways; the world rotated ninety degrees.

She caught a final, skewed glimpse of one attacker’s face. Ordinary nose, pale stubble, a line of worry between his brows like he was working overtime. His expression wasn’t drunken rage. It was certainty. He might have been taking out the trash.

Behind him, for just a flicker, the alley’s shadows rearranged into something vast and patient. A silhouette loomed where no body stood, and dozens of thin, dark threads ran from it into the backs of the men’s necks like marionette strings.

Her breath hitched. Her fading mind struggled to make sense of it. The shadows smelled wrong for an instant—like burned paper and old resentment.

Then a boot connected with the side of her head, and everything else dropped away.

As consciousness slipped, the pain narrowed into a single, piercing ache that had nothing to do with broken ribs or swelling flesh.

I just wanted to be loved for who I am.

The thought didn’t feel like a protest. It felt like a confession.

The world went dark.

At first, she thought she’d closed her eyes and forgotten how to open them.

Then she realized she didn’t have eyes.

Jamie—whatever “Jamie” meant in this new context—floated in weightless silver mist. It curled around her in slow, luminous eddies, cool as moonlight and warm as breath. There was no up or down, no air in her lungs, yet she felt no need to gasp.

The city’s sounds were gone. No sirens, no distant traffic. Only a soft, omnipresent chime, like crystal glasses singing on the edge of hearing.

She waited for pain to catch up. It didn’t.

Am I dead?

The thought arrived without panic. She turned it over, curious, as if examining a stone in her palm.

“Yes and no,” answered a voice.

It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It slid through the mist, through her, gentle as water over skin.

“The thread of your first life has been severed,” the voice continued. “But threads can be rewoven.”

The mist parted.

She became aware of having a shape again—arms, hands, the outline of a self—and of facing someone.

The woman before her stood on nothing and everything. Her skin held the color of moonlight on water, not white, not silver, but something in between that shifted with the mist. Her hair fell in a cascade of starlight, each strand carrying faint constellations that moved as she did.

Her gown flowed around her like liquid night, studded with points of light that weren’t sewn on but embedded, as if she’d wrapped herself in a sleeve of the sky. When she moved, the stars moved with her, rearranging into unfamiliar patterns.

Jamie felt small and transparent under that gaze, but not in the way she had in HR meetings or under strangers’ scrutiny. This felt like standing near the ocean. Immense. Indifferent in scale, but not unkind.

“Who are you?” Jamie asked. Her voice sounded like herself, but clearer, as if no fear stuck to it.

“I am known by many names,” the woman said, smiling with her eyes as much as her mouth. “On your world, once, as Aphrodite. In other tongues, Venus, Ishtar. In the realm where I would take you, I am called Daya, Goddess of Love.”

Goddess of Love.

Jamie might have laughed if the word “goddess” hadn’t landed with the weight of absolute reality. The mist itself seemed to nod along.

“How did I come to your attention?” she asked instead. The practical question felt safer to hold than awe.

Daya’s gaze softened further. “As Aphrodite, I hold a small domain on your Earth,” she said. “A sanctuary called Agape Duro. You would know one of its guardians—Penelope Megalos, who once walked as Alex.”

Penelope’s face rose in memory: a TED talk Jamie had watched in secret, a story about transition told with a steadiness Jamie had envied.

“She saw your danger,” Daya continued. “She begged me to help you. But the rules there bind my hands. I am forbidden to intervene in deaths the tapestry marks as mundane.”

Jamie’s chest tightened. “So you… didn’t.”

“Not there.” No defensiveness, no apology. Just fact. “By the time she cried out, your thread had already been cut on Earth’s loom. But here—” She opened her hand.

The mist around them shimmered and resolved into images: a crystalline city under an eternal night sky, towers like facets of a gemstone catching pale luminescence; gardens of silver flowers that glowed without heat; people walking along marble paths, their bodies trailing fine gossamer strands of light behind them like comet tails.

“In my own realm, my jurisdiction is broader,” Daya said. “I am permitted to intercept threads severed by divine malice. Your death was no accident, Jamie.”

The name held in her mouth, familiar and strange in this place.

Daya’s expression darkened, a shadow passing over her features like an eclipse. “Alus, the God of Hate, has taken an interest in your world. He seeded those men’s hearts with fear and righteous anger, then pulled their threads at just the right moment.”

The alley’s shadows, twisting into something with too many eyes, replayed at the edge of Jamie’s awareness. The cold that had skated along her spine. The marionette glimmer of dark lines in their necks.

“A god wanted me dead?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because you represent what he most fears.” Daya stepped closer. The stars in her hair shifted color, taking on a faint rose hue. “You chose yourself. You carved a path of identity and love through a world that insisted you were wrong to exist. That kind of thread strengthens the tapestry far beyond its apparent weight.”

Jamie’s hands—her spectral, mist‑shaped hands—itched to check her hair, her earrings, anything grounding. They passed through the silver fog instead.

“I didn’t… succeed,” she said. “I was just getting started.”

“You were succeeding,” Daya corrected gently. “Every step you took toward yourself was an act of creation. That is the power Alus despises, because he cannot unmake it without breaking laws older than either of us.”

Jamie glanced at the images hovering in the mist. People in Daya’s realm moved through them, their threads bright, tangling and untangling as they met, argued, embraced. Some threads glowed more dimly. Some had dark spots like bruises.

“Why me?” she whispered. “Surely there are stronger people. Braver ones.”

Daya’s eyes seemed to hold galaxies, distant but glittering. “Strength is not measured only in victories,” she said. “You continued to reach toward love even while being denied it. You held onto a vision of yourself in the face of ridicule, bureaucracy, and danger. That tenacity is rare.”

Jamie thought of the index card in her coat pocket, now probably soaked in blood. The HR questions. The earrings. The way her coworkers had simply said her name.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“The thread of your first life remains on Earth’s tapestry,” Daya said. “It cannot be rewoven there. I cannot resurrect you back into that world; the boundaries between domains are strict.” A brief, wry smile touched her lips. “Even for a Goddess of Love.”

“But… you said threads can be rewoven.”

“In my realm.” Daya lifted her hand again.

The mist condensed into a mirror, its surface brighter than any glass Jamie had ever seen. In it, a girl of sixteen looked back: copper hair falling in soft waves to her shoulders, eyes the color of twilight between day and night, cheeks still full with youth. The bones of the face were unfamiliar and yet so precisely right that Jamie’s breath caught.

“I have a daughter,” Daya said quietly. “Born of moonlight and my own essence. She waits in my realm, incomplete, her body prepared but her thread… empty. She needs a soul whose pattern matches the fate she must weave.”

“You’d put me in her?” Jamie stepped closer to the mirror. The girl’s eyes met hers, steady and curious. Not a copy. Not an idealization. A version.

“You would be Lyria,” Daya said. “My daughter in truth, not just in name. Your soul would inhabit her from the beginning, without the misalignment you faced on Earth. Your body would match your self from your first breath. There would be no transition. No dysphoria.”

The words struck with such clarity that Jamie almost couldn’t grasp them. Her mind ran ahead to details: waking up with the right curves, the right voice, the right pronouns woven into every introduction. Clothes chosen because she liked them, not because they hid.

“What’s the cost?” she asked, the question automatic.

Daya’s smile deepened. “You keep your capacity to love. Your memories of your first life would remain, though blurred with time, like a story once read. You lose the possibility of returning to Earth, of ever seeing those you left behind in that realm while they live. And you take on a burden.”

“Burden.” Jamie tasted the word. “What sort of burden?”

“In my realm, the tapestry is fraying,” Daya said. “Alus has found ways to inject his poison even here—threads twisted by fear, by hate of the other, by resentment. I need someone who understands both rejection and self‑creation. A Thread of Fate who can, in time, see where to mend bonds without violating will.”

Jamie nodded slowly. “You want me to fight him.”

“I want you to live,” Daya said first. “To love. To build a life as Lyria, as my daughter, as yourself. From that life, I will ask much. But I will not demand your hatred. Your power will not function if you direct it from vengeance. Only unconditional love can fuel the deeper weaving.”

Jamie stared at the mirror. The girl—Lyria—raised a hand in perfect sync with her, then hesitated just off by a fraction, as if waiting for Jamie to decide.

“What about… memory?” Jamie asked. “Would I remember… dying?”

“You will remember enough to know who you were,” Daya said. “The pain will soften with time, but it will never vanish entirely. It will inform your empathy. It will also be a weight you must learn to carry without letting it drag you into hatred. That will be your trial.”

A flicker of bitterness rose. “You’re asking a lot of someone who couldn’t even survive her own city block.”

“You survived twenty‑nine years in a hostile world,” Daya said. “You faced down family, institutions, and strangers to reach the point of that alley. Surviving longer is not always the same as being stronger.”

Jamie’s gaze dropped to her not‑quite hands. Silver light traced the outlines of fingers she couldn’t fully feel.

“What happens if I say no?” she asked.

“Then you drift beyond my reach,” Daya said simply. “To whatever awaits souls of your world when they pass beyond all domains. I do not rule that place. I would grieve, but I would not follow. Your choice must be free, or the weave will not hold.”

The mist around them pulsed gently, like a held breath.

Jamie imagined letting go. Drifting into something quiet, without echoes of slurs, without HR portals or bathroom mirrors or the ache when a stranger’s pronoun sliced sideways. No more reaching. No more wanting.

The thought sat in her chest like a stone.

Then another image rose to meet it: Amorphous, not yet tied to reality. A child’s laugh that hadn’t happened. A hand reaching back for hers—the small weight of a palm trusting her. A voice saying “Mom” like it was the most natural thing in the world.

On Earth, that had always been a hypothetical, blocked by legal forms, by hostile judges, by the fragility of her own safety. Here…

Her eyes lifted to the mirror. Lyria’s eyes. Her eyes.

“Would she—would I—be able to have a family?” Jamie asked. “Love, the kind that builds… home?”

Daya’s expression warmed in a way that made the mist brighten. “If you choose that path,” she said, “yes. My realm has its own dangers, its own politics, its own cruelties. But there will be space for that. For partners. For children. For chosen family. For the kind of love that was denied you.”

The ache in Jamie’s chest changed shape. It no longer pressed down; it pulled.

She thought of Penelope on that glowing stage, talking about building a life you deserved even when the world insisted you did not. Of Elaine’s fingers brushing her earrings. Of the bar’s noise, her name tossed back and forth so easily.

“I don’t know how to be what you need,” Jamie said, honesty stripping the words bare. “I don’t know how to be a goddess’s daughter, or a Thread of Fate, or… anything but trying.”

Daya stepped closer until they were almost touching. The mist around them settled into a hush.

“That is all I ask,” she said. “That you try. That you love. That you learn when to mend and when to leave a thread alone. You will fail sometimes. You will hurt. You will also heal. I can guide you. I cannot live it for you.”

Jamie reached for the mirror. Her hand met cool resistance at first, then sank through the surface like dipping into still water. On the other side, warm fingers—Lyria’s—curled around hers.

The contact jolted something deep in her soul. A sense of rightness she had never felt in her own skin. Not even on the best hormone days. Not even in the most flattering selfie.

Her throat—or whatever passed for it here—tightened.

“I accept,” she said, the words steady. “I choose to become Lyria.”

Daya’s smile unfurled like a sunrise. “Then the thread begins anew.”

The silver mist surged.

Warmth wrapped around Jamie, bright and encompassing. Her awareness stretched—not dissolving into nothing but expanding, threads radiating from her like spokes. Threads of memory (a cracked subway seat, a company lanyard, a rented room with thin walls). Threads of potential (moonlit towers, unfamiliar faces, a child’s hand in hers).

Somewhere beyond, she sensed other weavers: Daya, vast and steady, fingers already in motion; a distant darkness coiling, watching, its tendrils tangling with unsuspecting lives.

As her consciousness poured toward the waiting vessel that was Lyria, Daya’s voice followed, weaving words into the very fibers of her being.

“Know this, my daughter: only you and I can see the threads as they are. Only we can sense where they twist by choice and where they have been violated. Alus has begun to commit crimes against the tapestry even here. I cannot be everywhere. You will learn to read what others are blind to.”

Light intensified. The outline of a new body formed around her—a smaller frame, a different center of gravity, a heartbeat syncing to an unfamiliar rhythm.

“You will not be able to mend your own thread,” Daya’s voice continued, a steady loom‑beat beneath the brightness. “You will always risk yourself when you mend others. There will be those who resent you for what you can do and those who would use you for it. Remember: love freely given, not demanded, is your only true power.”

The warmth turned almost too much to bear, like stepping from winter into a blazing noon. Jamie—Lyria—felt a chest rise for the first time, lungs drawing breath into actual air.

The mist fell away.

Her last impression in that between‑space was of threads stretching out in all directions, some bright, some frayed, some blackened where Alus had sunk his teeth.

Somewhere along those strands, something waited. Not a quiet destiny, but a tangle of love, danger, and choice.

“The thread begins anew,” Daya whispered, her voice now echoing from somewhere above and within.

Darkness blinked.

Lyria’s eyelids fluttered.

And the new world rushed in.