The nightmare came to him in pieces.
"Harry, get away!"
The voice wasn't his own—it belonged to someone who'd worn his face in another life. Abel heard the desperation in it, the kind of terror that only comes when you've already lost too much.
"Stupid fool. You wasted the chance I gave you, Reina Lance. Avada Kedavra."
Voldemort's voice. Even filtered through memory, it carried that peculiar blend of cultured menace and absolute certainty. The certainty of someone who'd never imagined being wrong.
"Reina! No! Voldemort—Expelliarmus!"
"Avada Kedavra!"
The light was blinding. Green, sharp, final.
Abel's eyes opened. His hand was already moving—reaching for the wand that should have been at his side. The motion was reflexive, born from muscle memory coming from a past life he couldn't shed.
He found nothing.
The shock of empty air broke the nightmare's hold. He was awake. He was in bed. He was in New York, not screaming across a ruined battlefield in a world that no longer existed for him. His hand dropped to the mattress, and he sat there breathing hard, feeling the last dregs of adrenaline work through his system.
Six years. It had been six years, and sometimes that still wasn't enough to make it feel real.
The original owner of this body—a kid who'd gotten unlucky with a fever at ten and never gotten the chance to grow older—had left behind an empty shell. Abel's consciousness had filled it. That consciousness had been Reina Lance, a young man of eighteen when everything ended, stumbling into a world where magic was just folklore and superheroes actually existed.
Now he was seventeen. Abel Shaw. A name that fit like borrowed clothes but was all he had.
He forced himself to breathe. The panic was old habit, not current danger. The nightmare had no teeth here.
The clock on his nightstand glowed 4:40 AM. Abel sat in the dark for another minute, just listening to the quiet of the apartment—his mother's soft snoring from the other room, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the distant sound of early morning traffic. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
He got up carefully and made his way to the kitchen, keeping his footsteps light. His mother had come home after midnight, exhausted from another brutal shift at the restaurant. The least he could do was not wake her.
The routine of mixing his lemon-honey water was grounding. Lemon, filtered water, a spoonful of honey, stir. He drank it standing at the kitchen window, watching the sky shift from black to deep blue. By the time the glass was empty, the dream had fully released its grip.
He changed into his running clothes and left the apartment.
The streets of New York at dawn had their own kind of silence. A few delivery trucks rumbled past. A taxi or two headed toward the airport. But the sidewalks themselves were nearly empty, and the air carried that peculiar freshness that only existed in those thin hours before the city fully woke.
Abel ran at an easy pace, not pushing himself, just letting his body move through the familiar route. The rhythm was meditative. Breath. Footfalls. The warming of muscles as blood pumped through them. This was when he did his best thinking—or rather, when thinking happened to him, unbidden.
He'd been prepared for violence before. Not in any formal sense—he'd never trained with a teacher in this world, never joined a martial arts club. But he had six years of muscle memory from another life. In his previous world, training hadn't been optional for anyone serious about survival. Even when you had a wand, when you understood the theory of magic, you still had to know how to move. How to fight close-quarters. How to throw a punch and take one.
That knowledge didn't vanish just because he'd transmigrated.
The few times street gangs had tried him, they'd learned quickly that he wasn't an easy mark. He moved like someone who'd spent years preparing for combat—because he had, even if the combat had been against Dark wizards rather than drug dealers looking for trouble.
But physical skill was just one tool. The real problem was the magic.
When he'd crossed over, his magical reserves had reset to zero. Complete reset. Like being a newborn wizard again, except with the weight of experience and no way to express it. It had taken six years of careful, secret training to rebuild—meditation, focusing his will, learning to channel what little power he had through a body that wasn't originally his.
The mechanics were strange here. In his old life, he'd understood magic as an extension of will—you shaped it through intention and language and focus. The wand just made it clearer, sharper, more efficient. But here, starting from zero in a world with no magical infrastructure, no teachers, no community...it was like trying to rebuild a complex machine one particle at a time.
His soul had been his advantage. That fusion of two consciousnesses—Reina's from the original world where Harry Potter was fantasy, and Abel's from the other Earth—had created something unusual. A stronger soul meant faster magical growth. That was the theory, anyway, and the results seemed to bear it out. At seventeen, his magical reserves were equivalent to an eleven-year-old wizard fresh to Hogwarts. Not impressive, but respectable for someone who'd been building from absolute zero.
The problem was that even those limited reserves couldn't be properly expressed. He had no wand. No focus to channel power through. No magical education beyond what he could teach himself from the fragments of knowledge he'd managed to preserve from his previous life.
Wandless magic was theoretically possible. In his old life, it had been a specialty—necessary training for Aurors who might find themselves without their focus. But wandless magic was blunt, inefficient, and impossible to refine without years of practice and enought magic power that could only be find on people like Dumbledore. What Abel could produce was barely more impressive than a stage magician's tricks.
The limitations haunted him sometimes. They didn't now—it was too early for ghosts—but they would, probably around three in the afternoon when school became tedious again.
He finished his run at six o'clock and headed home. His mother was already awake, a sure sign that another late shift had worn her down. Her hair was uncombed. She moved slowly through the motions of breakfast, a coffee mug never far from her hand.
"You don't have to do this," Abel said, taking the seat across from her. "I can make breakfast."
Theresa set down a plate with bacon and eggs—perfectly cooked, of course. She had the hands of someone who'd spent her entire life mastering her craft. "Baby, if I can't manage breakfast, what kind of mother am I?"
There was no real answer to that. Theresa had been his mother for six years, and she'd never once made him feel like anything less than her son. Whether it was blood relation or something weirder—the fusion of his consciousness with the body's latent connection to her—he couldn't say. It didn't matter. Love was love.
She sat across from him with her coffee, watching him eat. "You're up early," she observed.
"Nightmare," he said, and left it at that. She didn't push.
After breakfast, he helped her with the dishes while she talked about the restaurant—some new supplier causing problems, a regular customer's anniversary dinner reservation. The mundane stuff that made up her life. Abel listened with half his attention, the other half still caught in that nightmare, still reaching for a wand that wasn't there.
By the time he left for school, Theresa was already resting on the couch, her shift starting later than usual. He kissed the top of her head on his way out, a habit he'd formed years ago.
Midtown Science and Technology High School was like every other school in New York—functional, utilitarian, designed for efficiency rather than beauty. Abel parked his bike in the lot and headed inside, exchanging brief nods with classmates as he passed them in the hallway.
The main corridor had a large electronic screen displaying promotional videos about local celebrities and scientists. Today's featured subject was Tony Stark—young, handsome, radiating the kind of casual confidence that only came from being genuinely brilliant and genuinely rich. The video listed his accomplishments in that breathless voice used for local heroes: MIT at seventeen, advanced degrees in multiple disciplines, taking on the heritage of a company that had somehow stayed afloat despite his apparent commitment to playing more than working.
Abel barely registered it. Stark meant something in this world's future, he suspected—the MCU hadn't fully coalesced yet, not in a way he could predict from movies and comics. For now, he was just another rich guy on a screen.
His friend Sean caught up with him at the lockers. "Dude, did you do the calculus homework?"
"Yeah."
"Let me copy it."
"No."
Sean made a theatrical groan. "You're no fun. Nobody likes you when you have integrity."
Abel smiled despite himself. "You'll survive."
Students began drifting toward their classrooms in small groups and pairs, already slipping into the familiar rhythm of another school day. Abel gathered what he needed and joined the flow.
The peaceful campus life had begun.
END CHAPTER 1