Perspective: Elliot Grey | Year: 1938
Gray.
That's the color that defines my life ever since I woke up in this world. The streets are gray, the sky is gray, the people... seem washed out.
I woke up at the age of five — or at least that's how everyone saw me. But inside my head, I carried too many memories for a child. I knew things no other boy my age should. I knew what the internet was. I recognized the sound of a jet engine. I remembered music that hadn't even been written yet — and I remembered pain, a hospital bed, and a light fading out. I think I died. And then... I reincarnated here.
The house I grew up in was a cold little building in a filthy back alley of London. Always gray, always covered in soot. Margaret and John Grey took me in, but I knew I wasn't their child. I wasn't like them. I wasn't wanted. I was a silent burden — raised, fed, clothed, and ignored.
They were Muggles. Of course, I didn't know that word yet — I only knew they were ordinary people. Without magic.
And so was I. Or… at least I thought I was.
For years, I believed it was just a time-travel accident. A strange glitch in the universe. The reincarnation of a modern boy into the 1930s. No magic, no answers. Just the constant discomfort of carrying a 21st-century mind in the fragile body of a poor child in pre-war London.
---
Then came the attic day.
My ninth birthday passed in silence. No cake. No congratulations. Just another bowl of watery soup and a "go to your room" before sunset.
I went up to the attic to be alone. It was dusty and quiet — my own private cave. I was shaking with rage. An old book sat on the floor, barely balanced on a pile. Without meaning to, I screamed in my mind:
> — Fall already, damn it!
And it did.
It flew against the wall, hard.
My eyes widened. My heart raced.
The next day I came back. I focused. Reached out my hand. Another book trembled. A pencil rolled. A cup slid to the edge of the table and… fell.
And I understood. It was me.
I could move things. With my mind. With… pure will.
For weeks, I tested. Trained in secret. Locked windows. Locked doors. The attic became my lab. I'd wake up early and train before school. Sleep late, exhausted. Was it magic? Psychic power? I didn't know. But I knew I wasn't ordinary.
Not here. Not anywhere.
---
The next two years were lonely but intense. I studied everything I could find. Physics? Too limited. Psychology? Shallow. The public library books had no answers. So I wrote my own: "Study of Unseen Force", "Vibrational Responses to Directed Thought", "Mental Channeling System".
Fancy names. Instinctive content. I experimented, failed, learned. No one knew. Not even Margaret and John — and I doubt they'd care.
By ten, I could lift a chair with thought. Lock and unlock doors. Push things across the room. I could feel… the energy in the air. As if the world pulsed, waiting to be shaped.
But I still thought I was just some anomaly with unexplained powers.
Until my eleventh birthday. That's when she appeared.
An owl. At my window. On the second floor.
Holding a yellow envelope in her beak.
I opened the window. She entered like she owned the place. Landed on my desk. Stared at me. Dropped the envelope.
On the front, written in a handwriting straight out of another century:
> Mr. E. Grey
Upstairs bedroom
Cobbler Street, London
I opened it with trembling hands.
> Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Headmaster: Armando Dippet
Dear Mr. Grey,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Term begins on September 1st. A list of required materials is enclosed...
Hogwarts.
I froze.
That couldn't be.
This was a story. A fictional universe. Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling. Spells. Wands. Slytherin. Gryffindor.
But here… it was real.
I grabbed the supply list.
Books on magic. A cauldron. A wand. A uniform.
And at the bottom of the page... a date.
> 1938
I sat down.
The air seemed to vanish from the room.
1938… Tom Riddle was still a child. Harry Potter wouldn't be born for half a century.
I hadn't just reincarnated. I hadn't just gained powers. I
was in a magical world I knew — but in its oldest, darkest version.
And the worst part?
I was a Muggle-born.