The weeks blurred together into a grueling routine of blood, mud, and endless motion.
Two months passed, during which I slowly adapted to my grim reality.
The Wyrm-Breakers never stayed in one place long enough for the grass beneath our boots to die.
Every few days, the barked orders of the camp lieutenants would signal another move.
In less than an hour, enchanted tents collapsed into leather rolls, iron cages shrank to the size of thimbles, and the entire encampment vanished without a trace, leaving only trampled earth behind.
We drifted through the dense, rain-soaked glades of the Scottish Highlands, crossed into the rocky cliffs of Wales, and even spent a freezing fortnight hidden deep within a secluded pine forest in southern Norway.
Along the way, I saw a horrifying spectrum of magical wildlife dragged into our shifting camps.
I watched poachers haul in a thrashing Occamy, its shimmering turquoise feathers flying as they struggled to bind its expanding body.
I saw the thick, rubbery hides of Re’em scraped clean, jars filled with glowing blue blood, and the severed tentacles of a Murtlap salted and packed into wooden crates.
The sights and iron-heavy stench of butchery became my daily backdrop.
My only anchor in this nightmare was Finn.
Once his back had scabbed over from the thirty lashes and he was finally cut down from the pillory, Finn was tossed back into the cramped, foul-smelling canvas tent we shared.
He was a fourteen-year-old Irish boy with a wild mop of fiery red hair, a face heavily dusted with freckles, and a body permanently marked by jagged scars—cruel souvenirs from three years in captivity.
Finn had been snatched off the streets of Dublin shortly after his accidental magic flared up.
Despite having served as live bait for countless beasts and enduring Jad’s casual cruelty, he possessed a boundless, almost stubborn vitality.
He was inherently rebellious, always muttering curses under his breath or flashing a mischievous grin, yet extraordinarily warm and welcoming.
In a place where everyone treated me like disposable meat, Finn became the only person who treated me like a human being.
One night, after a grueling twelve-hour day of hauling iron buckets under a freezing autumn downpour, I collapsed onto my thin straw mattress, shivering uncontrollably.
Finn sat across from me, cross-legged, using a small bone knife to carve a piece of dry firewood.
Seeing me shudder, he reached into his tunic and tossed a small, wrapped bundle onto my lap.
“Eat up, mate,” Finn said softly, his thick Irish brogue cutting through the sound of rain beating against the canvas.
“Managed to pinch an extra chunk of salted beef from the supply wagon while Jad was busy screaming at the horse-trappers.”
I unwrapped the cloth, eyeing the meager portion.
“Finn… you need this more than I do. Your back hasn’t even fully healed.”
“Ah, wise up, little man,” he snorted, waving a hand dismissively, though a cheeky grin split his freckled face.
“I’ve got three years of thick skin build-up. You look like a gust of wind could blow ye straight back to England. Besides, if Jad catches ye fainting on the job, he’ll have ye scrubbing the pens again.”
I took a bite, the salty meat filling my empty stomach, and let out a tired sigh.
“Jad was unbearable today. I swear he spent twenty minutes just finding new ways to call me useless.”
Finn let out a sharp, bark-like laugh.
“That’s because Jad’s a total gobshite. A miserable, thick-skulled eejit who couldn’t cast a decent charm if his life depended on it.”
I blinked, raising an eyebrow.
“Gobshite?”
“Aye,” Finn chuckled, his blue eyes sparkling with wicked amusement.
“Irish for a loudmouth who talks utter nonsense. Very useful word around here. If he gets right in yer face again, just nod, look real respectful, and whisper ‘póg mo thóin’ under yer breath.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means ‘kiss my arse’,” Finn wheezed, clapping a hand over his mouth to suppress a loud laugh so the guards outside wouldn’t hear us.
“Just don’t say it out loud, or we’ll both be back on the pillory by sunrise. But hey… keeping a few insults in yer head helps keep ye sane in a place like this.”
Seeing him laugh despite the scars on his back, the hunger, and the constant threat of death touched me deeply.
In the middle of all this misery, Finn’s unwavering humor was a shield.
Through Finn’s quiet late-night chatter and the loud, drunk ramblings of the guards around the campfires, I also gradually pieced together a picture of the world I had been dropped into.
The Wyrm-Breakers weren’t just a haphazard crew of thugs; they were the premier poaching outfit in Northern Europe, boasting around forty hardened members.
Their hierarchy was sharp and ruthless.
Garrik Vane—’Garrik the Scarred’—sat at the absolute top.
Beneath him were specialized roles: Trackers who mapped magical migrations, Duelists who subdued both beasts and unwanted Ministry interference, and Butchers tasked with harvesting delicate, volatile components without destroying their value.
Their specialty was high-risk, high-reward beasts—specifically dragons and massive magical predators.
Above the Wyrm-Breakers existed the entity Jad had sneered about: The Poachers’ Syndicate.
The Syndicate wasn’t a single monolithic empire, but a loose, highly decentralized alliance of criminal gangs, smugglers, and black-market brokers spanning the globe.
It served as a violent, fragmented underworld cartel.
The Syndicate existed to set baseline prices for illegal beast materials—like dragon heartstring, Graphorn horn powder, or Acromantula venom—preventing gangs from undercutting one another.
Beyond price-fixing, it was a volatile ecosystem.
Syndicate members traded black-market intel, contracted specialized hunters, and occasionally formed brief alliances for massive raids.
Just as often, however, rival crews would butcher each other in back-alley disputes or ambush rival hunting grounds to steal a prized kill.
It was a bloodthirsty honor-among-thieves arrangement, held together purely by greed and mutual threat.
After two weeks of nearly killing myself with backbreaking labor—scrubbing blood-stained wooden tables, hauling heavy iron buckets, and running errands at Jad’s barked commands—I finally got a break.
“Listen up, rat,” Jad grunted one morning, shoving me toward a muddy clearing near the edge of the camp.
“Boss says you’re no good to us if you drop dead the second a beast sneezes on you. Time to teach you a bit of magic. Just enough so you don’t take five hours to clean a bloody hide, and maybe enough to keep you alive three extra seconds when we use you as bait.”
He threw a piece of wood into the mud at my feet.
I picked it up.
It was a cheap, second-hand wand—scratched, unpolished, with a stiff, unyielding wood and a weak dragon heartstring core.
It lacked the warm, resonant hum of the custom wands described in the books, but holding it felt like gripping a lifeline.
The poachers weren’t worried about giving me a wand.
Without a proper magical education, I only knew what they taught me, leaving me utterly harmless against fifty trained wizards.
Or so they assumed.
Jad drew his own worn wand and knocked over a pile of filth-covered gear.
“We start with Tergeo,” he barked, his voice coarse and impatient.
“It’s a siphoning spell. Useful for draining blood, mud, or liquid before it ruins a pelt. Watch close, because I ain’t repeating myself.”
Jad thrust his wand forward in a sharp, awkward hook motion.
“Tergeo!”
A faint, muddy stream of liquid sucked out of the leather boots on the ground and trickled weakly into his wand tip.
He grunted in satisfaction, though to my eyes, the execution was remarkably sloppy.
“The trick is the wrist,” Jad spat, gesturing aggressively.
“You don’t just point it like a stick. You gotta hook the tip downward, snap the wrist at the turn, and hold the vocal emphasis on the Ter-. Got it? Most young squirts waste a week just trying to get the wand-light not to flicker before they can pull a drop of water. I expect you to have the basics down by the end of the month, or you’re skipping dinner every night.”
Jad continued barking instructions for another ten minutes, laying out the rough, unrefined ‘theory’ he had picked up over a lifetime of crude spellcasting.
As he rambled, my Supercalculator Brain flared into action.
The world around me seemed to slow down.
My mind didn’t process magic through vague emotion or instinct; it processed it through pure, analytical precision.
As Jad spoke, my intellect mapped out the spell’s core structure.
I calculated the exact arc of the wand movement—not an awkward hook, but a precise 65-degree parabolic sweep.
I calculated the optimal vocal resonance and the exact flow of internal magical energy required to stabilize the vacuum effect.
I stepped forward, lifted the cheap wand, and executed the movement.
“Tergeo.”
The spell didn’t work immediately.
Because the cheap wand resisted my intent, the magic fizzled out with a weak, sputtering hiss, sucking up only a tiny speck of dust.
‘Adjust the output,’ I thought instantly, my brain recalculating the variable resistance of the low-grade core.
‘Increase magical pressure by fourteen percent to compensate for the stiff wood.’
I adjusted my grip, corrected the angle by a hair’s breadth, and cast it again.
“Tergeo.”
A sharp, crisp siphoning sound cut through the air.
A concentrated vacuum burst from the tip of my wand.
In less than two seconds, the muddy boots, the wet grass around them, and the bloodstains on Jad’s own leather apron were thoroughly, perfectly sucked dry, leaving the material clean and spotless.
Jad stopped mid-sentence.
His jaw went slack.
He looked at his spotless apron, then down at the bone-dry boots, and finally back at me.
“What… the hell?” Jad muttered, blinking hard.
He stroked his stubbled chin, bewildered.
“You… you didn’t even get the wrist snap wrong on the second try. How did you force the flow through a dead-wood wand like that?”
“I just… tried to do what you said, sir,” I replied smoothly, lowering my head and keeping my voice small, humble, and completely harmless.
It wasn’t a fluke.
Over the next few weeks, whenever Jad or the other poachers reluctantly showed me basic utility charms—a simple lighting spell, a basic locking mechanism, or a weak knockback jinx—the result was similar.
I didn’t master them in a single millisecond—my undeveloped eleven-year-old body and cheap wand required one or two minor calibration attempts—but my rate of comprehension was terrifyingly fast compared to a normal child’s.
A subtle shift began to ripple through the camp.
The braconniers didn’t suddenly become kind, nor were they cowering in fear of an eleven-year-old boy.
But the mocking sneers and casual kicks gradually waned.
When I walked past the campfire with my cheap wand tucked into my belt, the men no longer paid me completely mind.
Instead, they watched me with strange, perplexed glances.
They looked at me the way one might look at an unpredictable, curious anomaly—a street urchin who shouldn’t be able to handle a wand, yet moved with a strange, unsettling efficiency.
It was during one quiet evening near the end of those two months, while helping Finn pack away the dried meat rations, that I overheard two guards discussing an upcoming smuggling run across the English Channel.
They casually tossed around the current date: October 1983.
Sitting in the dirt, clutching my cheap wand under the vast, starlit sky, the reality of my timeline settled heavily in my chest.
I was eleven years old.
The events of the first Harry Potter book wouldn’t begin for another eight years, when Harry would turn eleven and I would be nineteen.
I had time—years of it—to grow, to learn, and to build my strength.
But looking around at the blood-stained cages, the armed mercenaries, and the flickering campfires of the Wyrm-Breakers, I knew one thing with absolute certainty:
If I wanted to live long enough to see that future, I had to survive this cage first.
Don’t worry, the novel will follow the events of the books.
But I’m going to add a lot of lore and original stories.