"Draco."
Narcissa's voice drifted down the corridor, soft but firm, the way it always was when she'd already decided we were leaving.
"Your father is waiting," she said. "We need to be off if we're to get everything in time."
"In a moment, Mother," I called back.
I adjusted the collar of my jet-black coat again, even though it didn't need it. The fabric was stiff and expensive, the kind that held its shape no matter how you moved. I watched my reflection copy me.
A boy stared back.
Platinum hair combed neat. Skin too pale. Grey eyes that looked sharp even when they were still. Draco Malfoy's face. Too familiar and too wrong at the same time.
Yesterday, those eyes had not been mine.
I blinked slowly, half expecting to wake up properly this time. Nothing changed. The name didn't settle in my chest the way a name should. Draco. I thought it and felt a strange pull of discomfort, like saying the wrong thing in the wrong place and being forced to smile through it.
My throat tightened before I could stop it.
I had been someone else.
Not a schoolboy with polished shoes and a famous surname. Someone older. Someone with a past that felt heavier than this body could carry. I remembered heat from forge-light against my face, the sting of runic ink under my nails, and the low hum of a completed array when it finally settled into the world like it belonged there.
Runes were never just symbols. They were promises written into reality.
I had written those promises into stone and steel. I had watched cities rise after ash and war. I had stood in battles where the sky itself looked bruised, and I had walked away when others didn't.
And then it stopped.
Not even pain. Not even one clear final memory. Just emptiness, like someone cut the thread of my life clean and left me holding nothing.
I woke up in silk sheets that smelled faintly of lavender and wealth, with a body too small and too light. My head pounded behind my eyes and servants whispered outside the door like I might break if they spoke too loud. Narcissa's hands were cool on my forehead. Someone said coma as if it explained everything.
They called it a ritual gone wrong.
I didn't remember any ritual. I only remembered waking up and staring at a ceiling that wasn't mine, listening to a heartbeat in my chest that sounded steady and familiar, as if it had always been there.
The memories that came with this body were thin and uneven. Bright flashes and childish feelings. A glimpse of Lucius Malfoy's back as he walked away without looking. The sting of being corrected in front of adults. That sinking feeling of wanting approval and getting indifference instead.
Lucius in those memories wasn't openly cruel. He was worse in a quieter way. He was busy. Always busy. Politics, influence, power, whatever mattered more than the boy standing straight beside him, waiting to be seen.
Narcissa was different. Warm, careful, protective to the point of smothering. Her love wrapped around Draco like silk, soft but tight, until you felt the pressure when it wasn't there.
And Draco wanted his father's attention the way a starving person wanted food. Quietly, desperately, and too proud to admit it.
My hand tightened on my sleeve until the fabric creased. The emotion wasn't fully mine, but it lived in the blood anyway. That was the worst part. Feeling the echo of someone else's need inside my ribs like it belonged there.
Still, the moment I woke, one thing hit me harder than anything else.
Magic.
Not as a rumor or a lesson. Magic as something real in the air. The world felt saturated with it. My skin prickled, my breath caught, and for a second I could almost taste it, faint and metallic, like the air before a storm.
Ambient mana.
The first time I drew it in, it happened without thought. A slow cold rolled down my spine and settled in my stomach. Relief came so fast it nearly hurt. I wasn't trapped in a dead world. I wasn't powerless.
But the relief didn't last long.
Because this world's magic was crude. Blunt. Like watching someone try to carve fine detail with a hammer and calling it art.
They didn't speak of cores. They didn't train the body to hold and refine power. No real discipline of elemental mastery, no serious framework, no understanding of resonance beyond what happened naturally over years.
They used wands.
I held one the day after I woke, when Narcissa thought it would calm me to practice something simple. The wood felt alive in my hand, faintly humming. Inside it, the core resonated with the mana around it and pulled power through like a channel.
It was efficient, in a way.
It was also limiting.
The wand did the shaping for you. People learned spells by repetition and memory until the wand obeyed. It wasn't mastery. It was routine dressed up as skill.
And not everyone could even do that.
Muggles, the memories supplied, with a trace of inherited disdain I didn't fully agree with. Ordinary humans. Most of the world. Living whole lives without ever feeling the mana brushing against them every day like a whisper they couldn't hear.
The idea sat wrong in my stomach. Not that non-magical people existed. I had seen that in my own world too. It was the scale of it, and the way everyone here accepted it as normal.
"What a shame," I thought, and the thought came out colder than I meant.
Maybe I already knew why. Maybe the answer was in the way this world treated magic like a privilege instead of a discipline. A bloodline instead of a craft.
Outside the door, Narcissa shifted her weight, still patient but clearly expecting me to move.
I exhaled and looked at the mirror again.
The boy's posture was too practiced for his age. Chin lifted, shoulders set, like pride was armor. But there was a tightness around the mouth, like he'd spent his whole life bracing for disappointment.
"Alright," I whispered, not to Narcissa and not to Draco either.
To myself.
Today was already decided. We were going to Diagon Alley. The memories offered flashes of it, cobbled streets and shop windows filled with floating quills and stacks of cauldrons. The sharp smell of potion fumes. The excitement Draco tried to hide behind superiority.
A letter sat on the desk, thick parchment with green ink. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The words felt heavy, like a door opening whether I wanted it or not.
A school for young witches and wizards. A beginning.
Thirteen years old, the letter said. Old enough, in this world, for magic to start behaving properly. The body had to grow into it, saturate slowly until it could manage basic spells without tearing itself apart.
I let out a quiet, humorless breath.
Thirteen, and only then they began.
In my previous life, at thirteen, I had already pushed far beyond basics. I'd been deep into elemental work. I'd carved my first real arrays. That hadn't been normal, even back then. I'd been a prodigy among people who trained seriously.
But this world was different.
This world was wasting time and calling it tradition.
I reached for the door handle and paused. My palm rested against the cool metal while I listened to the manor's quiet. Narcissa waiting. The distant presence of Lucius like a shadow you could feel even when you couldn't see it.
A borrowed face. A foreign life. A world that didn't understand its own power.
My reflection stared back, steady and pale and sharp.
Whatever brought me here, whatever I lost, I was awake now.
I opened the door.