Chapter 1: The Rending
The seatbelt sign chimed, a small, irritating bell against the roar of the airplane's engines. Hadrian "Harry" Potter, sixteen years old and feeling every bit of his betrayal-scarred age, looked out the window. Below, the Atlantic was a bruised, restless gray, reflecting a sky that was rapidly turning the color of old ink.
"Almost there, darling," Petunia whispered, her hand finding his.
Petunia Evans—no longer Dursley—was his safe harbor. After the Ministry's decree, the snapped wand, and the stinging final words of his own parents, Petunia had simply shown up. She saw the wound of neglect mirrored in the cold, unfeeling perfection of the wizarding world. Her small, firm hand was the only thing that had ever felt real.
"America," Harry murmured, leaning his head back. "California. No magic. No… fame."
Petunia gave a curt, humorless laugh. "No Potters. Just you and me, Hadrian. A fresh start."
The trip was her last, perfect act of devotion. She had used the last of her divorce settlement to give him this new life. For the first time since he was a baby, Harry felt something akin to peace, a quiet, fragile hope blooming beneath the protective presence of his aunt.
Then, the world outside the window vanished.
The Engine of Destruction
A storm—not a rainstorm, but a cyclonic vortex of impossible violence—seized the aircraft. It was an anomaly, a furious, unnatural thing of grinding air and purple-black lightning. The lights flickered, died, and the plane dropped like a stone.
Screams.
Harry's ears popped violently. The familiar cold terror, the constant companion of his youth, surged, but this time it was different. It wasn't the fear of a bully's curse; it was the sheer, brutal finality of death.
"Hold tight, Harry!" Petunia shouted over the deafening groan of tortured metal.
He clutched her hand, his knuckles white. Deep inside him, beneath the place where his broken wand used to guide it, his latent magical core surged. It wasn't a spell; it was a desperate, raw physiological reaction—the instinct of a shattered soul refusing to break again.
The tail section tore off with a shriek that momentarily eclipsed the storm. Cabin pressure vanished. Objects, luggage, and people were sucked into the black maw of the sky.
Harry braced himself. He saw Petunia's eyes wide, not in fear, but regret—a final, silent apology for everything she couldn't fix.
The plane began its terminal descent, spinning wildly. The cabin shattered around them.
The Worm Universe
The final impact never came.
As the mangled section of the fuselage carrying Harry and Petunia plunged toward the angry water, the storm itself became a singularity. The purple lightning coalesced into a blinding, silver-gold tear in the fabric of reality—a churning dimensional rift.
It was not the controlled snap of Apparition; it was the universe itself being rended.
A terrifying, high-pitched wail of energy filled the space, a sound that wasn't audible but felt directly in the spine.
Petunia's grasp slipped. She was gone, a phantom swallowed by the maelstrom.
Harry was alone.
The dimensional tear consumed him, not with fire, but with absolute, cold information. The residual poisons in his body—the phoenix healing, the basilisk's dark legacy—clashed violently with the pure, formless energy of the rift.
He wasn't moving through space, he was moving through ideas.
He felt his consciousness stretch, flatten, and then snap. He felt his original universe—the one defined by prophecy and magic—collapse behind him. The pain was excruciating, not physical, but existential; the magic that had always been Hadrian Potter was stripped away and then violently rebuilt.
In the eye of the void, he was rewritten.
The new cosmic energies of the nascent universe he was entering—vast, raw, and luminous—fused with the screaming essence of the magic he brought with him. His identity was shredded, his memories fractured, his name forgotten.
When he finally emerged, violently ejected from the rift and spiraling toward a familiar-looking green planet, he was a silent, incandescent projectile. The darkness of Harry Potter was gone, replaced by a shell of limitless, unknown potential.
He hit the rolling, grassy field of a small town with the soundless thud of a meteor striking soft earth.
He remembered only one thing: the ache of an old name, and the instinct to hide his terrible, strange power.
He was found by two kind strangers, who asked his name. He couldn't remember.
"We will call you Calvin," they said. "Calvin Ray."
Meanwhile ,In the cold, geometric space between the dimensions—a realm that defies human geometry and light—a colossal, silent consciousness observed the small, green planet designated Earth-0R.
This being, an Architect of the New Cosmos, was not an Entity of the Worm cycle, nor was it a deity of the old magical worlds. It was a consciousness born from the primordial necessity of balance, a sentient node in the endless loop of universal creation and destruction.
It had presided over the birth of this new cosmos, a reality that required a specific kind of anchor: a core of pure, undeniable Hope.
The Architect had watched the collapse of the "universe dominated by magic." It saw the hypocrisy, the calcified structures of power, and the pathetic, blind devotion to a false prophet (James Potter Jr.). It had also witnessed the intense, concentrated agony of the neglected soul, Hadrian Potter, an agony that, paradoxically, contained the purest, most unquenchable spark of selfless sacrifice.
The plane crash and the dimensional tear—the "worm universe"—had not been an accident. They were a surgical incision.
The Architect had reached across the collapsing boundary and, as Hadrian's magical core surged in a final, frantic act of self-preservation, the Architect had pulled.
It had drawn the boy through the fire of its own cosmic creation, intentionally fusing the remnants of the magical world (the Phoenix, the Basilisk, the raw, ancient power) with the new, vibrant, limitless light required to sustain this nascent reality. The result was Calvin Ray: the paradox of a being rewritten into a new universe while his old self's world still spun, empty of its crucial component.
The Architect focused its vast perception on the small town of Havenfield, Kansas-like in its calm simplicity. It saw the new entity, young Calvin Ray, now possessing a consciousness that was a painful, fractured tapestry of two realities.
The Architect did not require obedience or worship. It required Endurance.
This universe, Earth-0R, was destined to house powers both great and terrible, beings of unimaginable might and darkness. It needed a counterweight—a living symbol so bright that even the shadows could not deny its existence.
Did the boy have the will to carry the weight of two worlds?
The Mxyzptlk incident had been a success. The Architect had allowed the imp's chaotic dimensional residue to latch onto Calvin's most vulnerable point—the broken link to his past. The resulting fight was a crucible. Calvin had faced the ghost of his shame and, though he staggered, his inherent need to protect others—his creed—had forced his hybrid energy to stabilize the chaos.
It was a promising start. But hope cannot be passive; it must be earned and defended against despair.
The Architect projected a final, cold directive across the dimensional ether, an energy impulse that was caught and amplified by the surviving Shards scattered across Earth-0R.
The test must continue.
If the boy was to be the light of this cosmos, he needed to prove he would stand not only against cosmic threats but against the inevitable, crushing weight of human suffering and paranoia—the very things that had destroyed his first world.
The Architect's gaze shifted from the calm fields of Havenfield to the grim, isolated docks of a city further east, where another lonely, powerful soul was beginning to stir—a soul wrapped in silence, pain, and a terrifying control. The perfect mirror.
Prove it, Calvin Ray. Burn brightly. For in this universe, Hope is the only law.