A month.Thirty days of walking, starving, freezing, and cursing a cosmic troll of a God who thought "fun" meant dumping me in the farthest corner of Middle-earth.
I kicked a rock out of my way and grumbled aloud.
"Why did I have to spawn so far away from Hogwarts?"
No answer. Just the same endless dirt road and an unfriendly sun.
But at least I'd figured out when I was.
Two years before The Hobbit.Roughly eighty before the War of the Ring.
Which meant…
Dragons.Sauron returning.Nazgûl waking up.Smaug still roasting dwarves alive inside Erebor.
Danger was coming — and I wanted to be involved in all of it.
But first? I needed spells.Real spells.And that meant Hogwarts — my Hogwarts — the magical fortress waiting somewhere far ahead.
I wasn't the same person who woke up in that forest.Middle-earth had seen to that.
Bandits found me within the first week.They expected fear.
Instead, they found telekinesis.
Raw, barely controlled magic surged through me — a wild force with no instruction manual. I'd panicked, pushed outwards with everything I had… and the men flew like ragdolls through the air.
Trees cracked.Screams cut short.
Silence.And then blood.
I vomited. I cried.
But I survived.
The next time, I didn't cry.The third time, I barely flinched.
Was this what being strong meant?Or was Middle-earth already changing me?
Every night, I trained.Pushing my magic, trying to shape it into something usable.Lumos was now easy — a soft glow resting gently on my palm.Telekinesis remained unstable — powerful, but wild, like forcing a storm through a keyhole.
I had no wand.No focus.
Just brute willpower and frightening potential.
And a direction.A faint magical pull — like the world itself nudging me onward.
Hogwarts.
I crested a hill, wind whipping through my hair. My breath caught.
There — far in the distance, rising like a black crown above the horizon — mountains. Ancient, proud, and massive. Mist twisted around their peaks like coiled serpents of cloud.
Somewhere within or beyond that range…Hogwarts waited.
The wards tugged at me harder now — a silent promise:
Come home.
Exhausted but excited, I whispered:
"Just hold on, Castle. I'm coming."
Middle-earth's future was already written.
But I was here now.
And I refused to be a spectator.