Ouroboros || harry potter

Chapter One

Nothing was the same. The world had changed beyond his imagining. Even the night sky was different. Everything was so foreign.

Non-magicals had made leaps and bounds of progress since he had last lived. He wondered how far the magical community had gotten since he had died. He could not feel the avenues of magic flowing under his feet anymore. The air held no magic. It was as if magic had fled this place.

There had to be magic somewhere. The world could not exist without a little magic. It was its lifeblood, the essence that helped birth the thousands of variations in flowers and birds, snakes and trees, beasts and reptiles, fish and bugs, unicorns and dragons, and sentient beings. If magic had not existed and the world had still found ways to bring life, it would have been a much duller world than this.

His gaze swept over the neatly trimmed grass, the bushes full of red roses, the small squirrel sitting on a tree limb, a wooden fence with its planks nailed in a tight row, and the glass walls of his relatives' conservatory. There was no magic visible to the eye nor easily detected. The vroom of the distant motorway and the rumble of closer cars, the grinding of some machine, and the roar of a mower washed away nature's sounds. With it, any verbal hint of magical nature was swallowed up.

The world had changed beyond his reckoning. It may have been better if he had stayed dead. If there was no magic left, this would be a truly disappointing second life.

But there had to still be magic, for what else could explain his return?

He had died. The pleas of his brother to stay awake echoed in his mind. Those last moments stuck with him more than any of the rest of his memories. A tiny hand pressed to his side where phantom pain spiked and spread across his chest.

"You cannot die! Stay with me!"

The echoed cry, filled with such agony, rocked through his mind. He mentally, forcefully, pushed it away and focused once more on the present moment. The reincarnated wizard lifted the tiny hand to his eyes.

His hand, he corrected internally. This tiny, pale hand with no scars or calluses was his hand. The forearm was just as pale and unmarked by freckle or scar or ritual tattoo. His other hand unwittingly rose and traced the unmarked skin.

He was a child, a toddler really. He sat there and stared at the hands and forearms. He traced them with each other, felt them, moved them. His gaze traced the lines of each hand and memorized the color and indents. All the while, he tried to bury unsavory thoughts and painful last moments into the depths of his mind.

A toddler had no reason to be weighed down by such experiences. He did not want to confront them now either. His gaze rose to stare over his relatives' back garden once more. It was years, centuries likely, since he had died. He had lived in a different time, with different expectations, customs, and languages, with an entirely different world.

What had mattered, likely no longer did.

He needed to focus on understanding the present. Later, when it was safe and he knew no threat was near, he would accept what had happened and mourn what it meant. He needed answers, though he did not know where to find them.

Had his brother survived the war? Who else had died when they came after him? Had the Norman wizards won with their non-magical king claiming the entirety of the Isles? Did Hogwarts fall? What had happened to Helga, Rowena, Godric, and the others? What of the children? (None of it mattered now. Time had made it meaningless to this second life but his consciousness needed to know all the same.)

" Boy !"

Salazar turned his gaze inside. Childish memories whispered of his relatives. His aunt scowled out at him.