“Go and wreak havoc on others!”
Tony’s voice echoed through the void…
warm, amused, and unmistakably Tony Stark, even at eighty-three years of age.
It was the absolute last thing Sebastian Shaw heard before he stepped beyond the boundary of his own universe, drifting into the formless chaos between worlds.
Then there was simply nothing.
No light.
No darkness.
Not even a lingering sensation of existence.
It was an absence so absolute that even a being who had literally become the cosmic embodiment of Magic itself couldn’t measure it.
And then…
pain.
Real, blinding, agonizing physical pain.
It started deep in his chest, as if someone had reached straight through his ribcage to squeeze his heart with both hands.
From there, it spread outward…
hot needles racing down his arms, a wildfire crawling up his spine, and a heavy pressure building behind his eyes until he was certain his skull was going to crack open.
He opened his mouth, but no sound escaped.
The last thing he felt before the darkness swallowed him up once again was the rhythmic sensation of a heartbeat.
It wasn’t his.
It was someone else’s.
And it was fading.
Sebastian slowly opened his eyes, blinking up at a water-stained ceiling.
The pain was completely gone.
In its place was a bone-deep exhaustion…
a profound weariness he hadn’t experienced since his very first life…
his real first life.
Long before Harry Potter, before Marvel, back when he had been nothing more than an ordinary man reading comics and dreaming of other worlds.
He tried to sit up, but his arms trembled and his vision immediately began to swim.
Groaning softly, he collapsed back against what he could now feel was a thin, narrow mattress on a cheap metal-frame bed.
“Easy there.”
The voice belonged to a woman.
It sounded tired, yet practiced and professional.
Sebastian rolled his head to the side.
A middle-aged nurse dressed in blue scrubs was checking an IV line taped to his left arm.
Behind her, harsh fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in the cramped hospital room.
The walls were painted a faded, institutional green, and a medical clipboard hung from the foot of his bed.
“You gave us quite a scare,” the nurse said, not even looking up at him as she charted his fluids.
“Three days. Doctor Hardwick was ready to call it.”
Three days.
Sebastian parted his lips.
What came out was a dry, raspy whisper.
“Where…”
“Smallville Medical Center.” The nurse finally glanced down at him.
Her expression wasn’t unkind, but it carried the specific, flat weariness of someone who had simply seen too many tragic cases.
“You collapsed at the group home. Mrs. Henderson found you on the bathroom floor with a fever of a hundred and six. Frankly, honey, you should be dead.”
Group home.
The words slammed into him, and suddenly, the floodgates opened.
They weren’t his memories…
they were the memories of the body he currently inhabited.
The images crashed into his consciousness like waves breaking violently against rocks…
fragmented, sharp, and achingly sad.
His name was…
had been…
Daniel Whitmore.
Fifteen years old.
An orphan.
He’d been a ward of the state of Kansas since the age of seven, right after his mother passed away from an overdose in some dingy motel room outside of Granville.
There was no father on record.
He’d been shuffled between four different foster homes before eventually landing at the Lowell County Group Home on the outskirts of Smallville.
Daniel had been a quiet boy.
Invisible, really.
He was the kind of kid that teachers forgot to call on and peers completely overlooked.
He attended Smallville High School on a county scholarship, but he had no friends.
He had no enemies, either.
He had nothing at all.
His grades were strictly average.
His health was generally poor.
His future had been a straight, unremarkable line leading to nowhere.
Then, just three days ago during a brutal July heatwave, his body had simply given out.
The fever had been so severe that it had burned through his fragile brain like a wildfire.
The original Daniel Whitmore had died alone on that bathroom floor.
And Sebastian Shaw had taken his place.
Sebastian closed his eyes, taking a slow, rattling breath.
Three lives now.
Three distinct worlds.
Three bodies that had never originally belonged to him.
In the Harry Potter world, he had been Alex…
an orphan who had clawed his way through Hogwarts tooth and nail, fought beside Harry against Voldemort, and ultimately died shielding the Boy Who Lived from a Killing Curse.
In the Marvel Universe, he had been Sebastian Shaw…
a boy who inherited a dead child’s body at ten years old.
He’d spent decades building himself into the Supreme Sorcerer and Lord of the Magic Dimension.
He was a being who befriended Tony Stark, fought alongside the Avengers, loved Wanda Maximoff, raised children of his own, and eventually defeated Galactus before ascending to become the cosmic embodiment of Magic itself.
And now?
Now, he was a fifteen-year-old nobody in a hospital bed in Smallville, Kansas.
He probably would have laughed if his throat hadn’t felt like sandpaper.
“Rest,” the nurse instructed gently, stepping forward to adjust his thin blanket.
“I’ll let Mrs. Henderson know you’re awake. She’ll be incredibly relieved. That woman worries about all you kids, God bless her.”
She turned and left the room, the door clicking shut behind her.
Sebastian lay perfectly still for a long time, just staring blankly up at the ceiling.
Then, just as he had done twice before in other lives, he reached inward.
He began to search for magic.
Back in the Harry Potter world, his magical core had been a bright, fierce thing…
wild and powerful, carefully shaped by years of intense wand-work and life-or-death combat.
In the Marvel Universe, it had started off small but eventually blossomed into something truly cosmic, constantly fed by the ambient mana of a universe absolutely rich with mystical energy.
Here?
He found it…
barely.
It was a lot like trying to find a single flickering candle flame in the middle of a hurricane.
His magical core technically existed, but it was so incredibly small and faint that he had to concentrate with everything he had just to feel its presence.
The mana of this universe was wildly different…
it felt thinner, rawer, and far less structured.
It didn’t eagerly respond to his will the way Marvel’s magic always had.
It wasn’t organized into the neat ley lines and structured dimensional energy fields he was so accustomed to.
But it was there.
Sebastian quickly estimated his reserves.
He was sitting at roughly the level of a first-year Hogwarts student.
It would be enough for a few basic spells.
Maybe a Lumos.
He could probably manage an Alohomora if he really pushed himself to the limit.
But absolutely nothing more.
However…
and this was the one crucial advantage that three lifetimes of grueling magical combat had given him…
his control was extraordinary.
A first-year Hogwarts student with these exact reserves would struggle just to levitate a feather.
Sebastian, on the other hand, could cast with the exact precision and unyielding efficiency of a fourth-year.
He knew precisely how much mana each individual spell required.
He knew how to minimize any waste.
He knew exactly how to squeeze every last usable drop of power from his tiny core.
It wasn’t much.
But it definitely wasn’t nothing.
“Alright,” he whispered to the empty room, a small smirk pulling at the corner of his dry lips.
“Third time’s the charm.”
Welcome to the Smallville Universe.
If you followed Sebastian’s journey through the Marvel world, you know that he does not play by anyone’s rules except his own.
Clark Kent’s world is about to get a lot more complicated and a lot more dangerous.
So come aboard this new adventure with me.