Chapter 1: An Ordinary End

Evan Carter never saw himself as remarkable. On February 23, 2025, he sat hunched in a creaky chair at the Ohio State University library, a junior chemistry major barricaded by textbooks, scattered notes, and a litter of coffee cups. Some were cold, others dribbled onto his scribbled formulas. Snow battered the tall windows, entombing Columbus in a relentless white shroud that swallowed the campus whole. At twenty, Evan was perfectly unremarkable, standing medium height with brown hair tumbling into hazel eyes. He wore glasses that slid down his nose no matter how he shoved them up, and a faded hoodie peeked from a jacket patched at the elbows. His life spun in a tight orbit. He attended 9 AM lectures with professors who droned through PowerPoints, worked afternoon shifts steaming lattes at the campus coffee shop for bleary-eyed undergrads, and spent nights wrestling equations to scrape grades for a future he pictured dimly. Perhaps he'd land a lab job, quiet and steady. It wasn't dazzling, but it was his, and he liked its predictability, a heartbeat he could count on.

The library glowed under flickering fluorescent lights, their hum a faint pulse in the near-empty room. A girl in a corner gnawed her pen, and a guy across the stacks snored over a law tome, the only signs of life this late. Evan's laptop flickered with a lab report, molecular bonds twisting into knots he couldn't untangle despite hours of squinting. His head throbbed as caffeine faded, so he rubbed his eyes until his glasses fogged from the warmth of his fingers. His gaze drifted to his backpack, where a battered copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban poked out with a cracked spine and soft pages from years of handling. He'd devoured it as a kid with a flashlight under blankets, then again through college, escaping into Hogwarts when labs loomed too large. It was a childish crutch, he knew, but it steadied him, offering a world where magic smoothed the rough edges of reality.

The clock ticked past 11:45 PM, its hands dragging toward midnight. Outside, snow swirled in the orange glow of streetlights and piled into drifts that buried benches and bike racks. His dorm, a fifteen-minute slog through the storm, felt like a taunt, but the library couch, sagging and stained from desperate naps, was no prize either. Bed won, promising a quilt's warmth if he could grit it out. He sighed and shut his laptop with a soft click as the screen faded to black. He stacked books unevenly, including Organic Chemistry with its highlighted margins, Biochemistry blotched with coffee rings, and a notebook of half-solved problems in his jagged scrawl before he zipped Prisoner of Azkaban into its pocket, a ritual as old as he could recall. He zipped his jacket to his chin, yanked on gloves that scratched his knuckles with their wool, and shouldered his backpack before pushing through the heavy doors.

The wind slammed him as a bitter gust clawed through his layers and stung his cheeks while snowflakes snagged in his lashes. High Street stretched empty, a white tunnel where streetlights flickered like dying embers. Boots crunched through fresh powder and sank deep as he hunched forward with hands shoved into pockets and breath puffing out in fleeting clouds. Tomorrow's checklist ran on a loop. He'd endure a 9 AM class with Professor Hale's monotone sludge, dodge complaints about skim milk during his noon shift, and join a 6 PM study group in the dorm lounge with its burnt-popcorn stink. It was a life of boxes to tick since each day mirrored the last, and he didn't mind because routine was a warm coat, snug and familiar.

The crosswalk light blinked green, a faint pulse in the whiteout that barely cut the storm's roar. Evan stepped off the curb with his head down and snow dusting his hood as he lost himself in the rhythm of his steps: left, right, left. A horn tore through the quiet as a sharp and frantic sound split the night. Headlights flared with blinding white, and tires screeched on ice while a truck skidded toward him. He jerked up with his heart slamming, but time crawled, leaving him too late. The impact flashed as bone-crunching, breath-stealing agony before it faded to nothing. Darkness rushed in, vast and silent, to erase sound, light, and everything. Evan Carter, twenty, was gone, a blip in the morning news: "OSU Student Killed in Winter Crash on High Street."

But it wasn't the end.

In that infinite dark, a spark flared as warmth, faint and creeping, like a match struck in a cave. A sound pierced it as a baby's cry, raw and insistent, echoed through the void. Awareness stirred, strange and disjointed, like waking in a stranger's skin. Evan tried to move or shout, but his body was small and weak as arms flailed and his voice wailed. Panic surged, a wild scramble in his mind that clawed for sense, but exhaustion crashed over him to drag him deep. He didn't grasp it yet, yet he'd crossed a divide. Evan Carter was dead, and someone new was waking.