Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore (Supreme Mugwump, International Confederation of Wizards, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, Order of Merlin, First Class)
Dear Mr. Black,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.
Term begins on September 1st. We await your owl by no later than July 31st.
Sincerely, Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress.
...
The next morning, the lower bunk sleeper, Scott, was still sawing logs, a sound comparable to a troll trying to clear its throat.
Maurice lay in his bed, using the sliver of light filtering through the gap in the cheap curtains to re-examine the letter he had received the previous night.
He didn't think for a second that this was some sort of cruel prank.
"Hogwarts..." he murmured.
Now that was a word that stirred some deep, faintly familiar memories.
If the letter was genuine, it meant he had been reborn into the world of Harry Potter. A world he knew almost nothing about, save for the name itself.
Maurice quickly accepted the bizarre reality. It wasn't a bad turn of events, really.
Magic...
That ought to spice up his otherwise profoundly boring existence.
Truth be told, his knowledge of the Potter saga was... nonexistent. He hadn't seen the movies or read the books. His entire mental database for this fantastical world consisted of a single, stubbornly vivid meme that refused to die.
It featured Voldemort, pale and noseless, leaning forward with theatrical intensity as he stretched a simple killing curse into a full operatic performance.
'Avaaadaaa Kedaavraa', he thought, shaking his head. The human mind was a peculiar place to store data.
Despite the lack of useful intel, Maurice felt no sense of loss or regret. He wasn't the type to wish for spoilers.
He preferred the thrill of the unknown. Exploration.
For Maurice, this drive was the most fundamental engine that pushed him forward, a trait that hadn't changed even after crossing dimensions. A completely uncharted magical world was infinitely more appealing than a predictable future that had already been spoiled.
He carefully tucked the letter back beneath his pillow, hopped out of bed, and headed straight for the door.
He had something important to verify.
...
The 'Children's Home' where Maurice resided was located in a grim, chilly section of the city—unsurprising, given the astronomical cost of real estate in any desirable area.
The early morning mist hadn't quite lifted, and the air was thick with the faint, depressing scent of damp brick, industrial grime, and stale refuse. A few early commuters, bundled in their coats, hurried past without sparing a glance for the slight boy emerging from the dilapidated porch.
Maurice walked with purpose toward the communal bins on the street corner.
"It should be around here..."
Huddled behind a tipped-over dumpster, there was a small, coal-black shadow.
This was Maurice's target: the deceased body of an adult black cat.
It was a stray, he guessed. He'd found it late yesterday evening on his way back from school. It had been lying there, body still slightly warm, but utterly lifeless. Judging by its skeletal frame, it had likely succumbed to starvation.
After a necessary half-second of mental preparation, Maurice gently picked up the poor creature's corpse.
Surprisingly, he felt no revulsion, only a sort of profound, chilly serenity. The characteristic stiffness of a dead body and the eerie, light-as-a-feather weight of a life departed, gave him a strange sense of calm.
'Am I developing some kind of morbid tendency?' he briefly wondered.
Without dwelling on the thought, Maurice carried the stiff black cat to the back shed of the orphanage, a storage space that doubled as a final resting place for broken dreams and broken furniture.
He fumbled for nearly a full minute before finding the pull-cord for the single, weak overhead light.
When the bulb flickered to life, it illuminated a spacious but cluttered room. As a storeroom, it was, naturally, full of all sorts of junk: broken chairs, foul-smelling, moth-eaten blankets, several punctured leather footballs... and a truly enormous, deceased rat in the corner.
"Right," Maurice muttered, placing the cat's body temporarily on a wobbly table—one of its broken legs had been stabilized with a stack of old phone books. "Time for prep work."
He headed for the corner full of discarded art supplies and began rummaging.
...
Approximately two hours later, Maurice wiped the sweat from his brow.
"That should do it," he announced to the empty room.
He looked at his handiwork in the center of the concrete floor. It was a pattern that strongly resembled the magical sigils one might see in dark fantasy films.
Or rather, it was a magical sigil—a highly unsettling one.
Its appearance screamed ill-omen: two perfect, concentric circles outlined in a deep, viscous crimson. Between the rings, the space was densely packed with tightly coiled, incomprehensible symbols, like an alphabet forgotten by time.
It was genuinely spooky.
Maurice hadn't intended for the design to be quite so unsettling, but the only usable substance he'd found in the junk pile was a half-can of dried, vivid red poster paint. All the other colors were either used up or had petrified decades ago.
Yes, poster paint. That's all he'd used for the elaborate circle.
He hadn't drawn it randomly, however. "The Book" stated that only a colored outline was needed to define the space.
Next, Maurice carefully lifted the black cat's body and placed it squarely in the center of the crimson diagram.
He took a step back, surveying his work. An uncontrollable look of fanaticism slowly crept onto his face. He didn't even notice it.
A profound, almost agonizing exhilaration seized him. His heart hammered in his chest, and the rush of blood deafened him.
Fear? Excitement?
The overwhelming urge to explore the mystical depths of the unknown had crushed all other sentiments.
Only one step remained: Activation.
Maurice began a hoarse, guttural chant.
"The realm of the living has not forgotten you, the peaceful slumber of death is not your final curtain."
He didn't know the language, yet he spoke every syllable fluently and precisely. Stranger still, he understood the general meaning of his invocation.
As the final note of the chant faded, the air in the warehouse seemed to thicken, becoming brittle and silent.
Then, the scarlet lines of the design seemed to live. They began to crawl and writhe across the concrete floor, rapidly contracting and, finally, spinning into a tight vortex centered on the black cat.
In an instant, the entire mass of red paint and mystic symbols was violently sucked directly into the cat's rigid body.
And then, before Maurice's very eyes, the black cat—the cold, stiff corpse—gently, smoothly, stood up.
It shook its slightly matted fur, looked at Maurice, tilted its head, and opened its mouth.
"Mrow—?" the cat inquired.
At the same moment, Maurice was hit by a wave of crushing exhaustion, accompanied by a spike of intense, blinding headache. Something inside him had been violently evacuated.
It was, he instantly understood, his "magic."
He was drained, but functional.
"Good cat, come here." Maurice's voice was soft, relieved.
The black cat gave a light, graceful jump and landed perfectly in Maurice's embrace.
It rubbed its skull affectionately against his cheek, purring a deep, satisfied rumble, acting for all the world like a perfectly normal, albeit unusually affectionate, feline.
However, Maurice could distinctly feel that the fur and body pressed against his own were still infused with a profound, unshakeable coldness.
It was a resurrected cat, a creature of necromancy. It was, at its core, a dead thing given a second chance.
Maurice didn't care.
He stroked the cat's starkly bony body and spoke with a touch of genuine sympathy. "Good cat, you really need to eat more."