Waking up as a baby was, to say the least, a disorienting experience for Ricardo's adult consciousness, now trapped in the newborn body of Raphael Elliott. During the first few months, he alternated between periods of disconcerting mental clarity and moments when infantile instincts completely dominated. It was as if two minds coexisted in the same space—one remembered an entire lifetime in another world, the other was pure and new, without memories or experiences.
Eleanor and Edward Elliott were loving and dedicated parents. They lived in a modest house on the outskirts of Cambridge, in a mixed neighborhood where wizard and Muggle families lived side by side, although the latter didn't know about the special status of their neighbors. It was the perfect arrangement for two Muggle-borns who wanted to maintain connections with both worlds.
When Raphael turned one, his adult consciousness finally achieved some stability. Although still limited by his infant body, he could observe and absorb everything around him with a curiosity and understanding that constantly surprised his parents.
"He has old eyes," Raphael's maternal grandmother, a Muggle who didn't know her daughter's secret, once commented. "As if he had lived before."
Eleanor just smiled, amused by the accidental accuracy of that comment.
It was at eighteen months that Raphael witnessed magic for the first time—not in the illustrated books his parents read to him, but real, tangible magic. Edward had arrived home late from work, exhausted after a long day at the Ministry dealing with a biting teapot that had attacked a Muggle family in Yorkshire. While talking with Eleanor in the kitchen, he absentmindedly pointed his wand at the teapot on the table.
"*Wingardium Leviosa*," he murmured, and the teapot floated gently to the stove.
Raphael, sitting in his high chair, widened his eyes. It wasn't just the movement of the object that fascinated him, but something more—an almost visible flow of energy emanating from his father's wand and enveloping the teapot. It wasn't exactly a color or light, but a subtle distortion in the air, like heat waves over asphalt on a hot day.
That night, after his parents put him in his crib, Raphael couldn't sleep. The image of the floating teapot remained vivid in his mind. If magic was real in this world—and he knew it was, the hazy memories of Harry Potter's story confirmed it—then he should also be able to use it.
Staring fixedly at his favorite teddy bear in the corner of the crib, Raphael concentrated. He remembered the sensation he had perceived when observing his father, that flowing, directed energy. He tried to imagine this same energy coming out of himself, pushing the teddy bear. At first, nothing happened. After several minutes of trying, he felt a slight headache and gave up.
But the next morning, when Eleanor entered the room, she found all of Raphael's toys floating a few inches off the ground, while the baby slept deeply.
"Edward!" she called, in a mixture of astonishment and pride. "Come see this!"
The incident was the first of many. In the days and weeks that followed, objects moved when Raphael looked intently at them, his bottle warmed when he was hungry, and small scratches on his knees healed almost instantly.
"Accidental magic so early and so controlled," Edward commented as he watched his son make his toy car move across the floor without touching it. "I don't remember any case like this at the Ministry."
"Maybe it's not so accidental," Eleanor replied, observing the concentrated expression on her son's face.
By age two, Raphael was already walking with ease and speaking with surprising clarity for his age. His adult mind was learning to work in conjunction with the child's developing brain, taking advantage of neuroplasticity to absorb everything about this new world. He watched attentively whenever his parents used magic, trying to understand the principles behind each enchantment.
One afternoon, while Edward was enchanting some shelves to assemble themselves in the office, Raphael noticed something intriguing. Magic didn't seem to be consumed when used. His father could cast the same spell dozens of times without showing any reduction in his capacity. He only became mentally tired after casting complex spells for a long time.
"Dad," Raphael asked when Edward finally finished, "does magic run out?"
Edward looked at his son in surprise. "What do you mean, run out?"
"If you use too much, does it go away?"
His father smiled, sitting on the floor beside him. "No, Rapha. Magic is like... like breathing. You don't run out of air by breathing a lot, right? You just get tired if you run a lot. It's similar with magic. It comes from within us, it's always there. What tires you is the effort to control and direct it."
This answer sparked a series of private experiments for Raphael. During his naps, he tried to reproduce the simple spells he saw his parents using. Without a wand, it was much more difficult. Magic seemed wild, resistant to precise control.
In one of these attempts, at age three, Raphael was trying to make his storybook float to his hands. He concentrated intensely, visualizing the energy flowing from his body to the book. After several minutes of frustration, he felt something different—a warmth spreading from his chest to his arms, then to his fingertips. The book didn't just float; it was thrown against the wall with enough force to tear several pages.
"What was that?" Eleanor ran to the room, alarmed by the noise.
Raphael, with tears in his eyes, pointed to the damaged book. "I just wanted it to come to me."
Instead of scolding him, Eleanor sat beside him on the bed. "You tried to use magic without a wand."
It wasn't a question, and Raphael just nodded.
"Do you know why we use wands, Rapha?" she asked softly, repairing the book with a quick movement of her own wand.
"To help control?"
"Exactly," she confirmed. "The magic we have inside us is too powerful to be controlled by will alone. It's like... trying to direct a river with your hands. The wand is like a channel, a tube that helps direct that power. Without it, magic tends to come out unrestrained."
"But can it be done without a wand?" Raphael insisted.
Eleanor thought before answering. "Yes, it's possible. Very powerful wizards and witches can perform some spells without a wand after much training. And magical children always manifest spontaneous magic before receiving their wands. But it's a more... crude magic. Less precise."
This explanation confirmed what Raphael already suspected. The wand wasn't a crutch that weakened the wizard, but a tool that refined and directed a power that would otherwise be difficult to control with precision.
In the months that followed, Raphael developed a new approach in his secret experiments. Instead of trying to reproduce specific spells, he focused on simpler, more direct actions—trying to move small objects, generate small sparks, or slightly warm objects. He discovered that, even with these more rudimentary manifestations, control was extremely difficult without a wand.
At age four, after weeks of frustrated attempts, Raphael managed to make a small toy car roll a few inches in his direction—but only after several minutes of intense concentration that left him with a headache and a bloody nose. On another occasion, when trying to turn off the light in his room without touching the switch, he ended up making the bulb explode into pieces. His parents rushed alarmed to his room, and he had to promise not to do more experiments without supervision. The effort always left him mentally and physically exhausted, but with each small progress, he felt he was learning something valuable about the limits of his magic.
It was during this time that he had an important revelation about the nature of magical talent. Eleanor had taken Raphael to visit a friend from her Hogwarts days, Jane Prewett, who also had a young son named Martin, just a few months older than Raphael.
During the visit, Raphael watched fascinated as Jane used different spells to prepare the children's snack. Her movements were precise, but Raphael noticed that the objects trembled slightly during levitation, as if they required more effort to be controlled. It was different from when his mother or father did magic—objects always moved smoothly and precisely.
On the way home, Raphael asked his mother: "Why does Aunt Jane do magic differently from you?"
Eleanor glanced briefly at her son through the rearview mirror. "What do you mean different, Rapha?"
"Things shake when she makes them levitate. With you, they stay steady."
His mother seemed surprised by the observation. "You have keen eyes. Jane always had more difficulty with levitation spells. Each wizard has different aptitudes."
"But why? Why do some people have more facility with magic than others?"
Eleanor glanced briefly at her son through the rearview mirror. She was driving a Muggle car at Raphael's insistence, who loved observing the non-magical world. "What makes you ask that?"
"Martin tried hard to make a toy move, but he couldn't. I did it easily."
His mother was silent for a moment. "Magic is like any other talent, Rapha. Some people are born with more facility for music, others for mathematics, others for drawing. It's the same with magic. Some wizards are born with a greater capacity to channel and control magical energy."
"So it's not the amount of magic that's different?"
"Not exactly," Eleanor explained. "Every wizard or witch has access to the same infinite source of magic. What varies is how much of that magic we can channel at once and the control we have over it. It's like... imagine that magic is water in an infinite lake. Some people have a thin straw to suck up that water, others have a large pipe. And some have more facility to direct that water precisely where they want it."
This analogy made sense to Raphael. What the Administrator had granted him was not a finite amount of power, but the maximum capacity to channel and control the magic available to all magical beings.
When he turned five, Raphael had made some modest advances in controlling his wandless magic, but each small achievement required a monumental effort. On one particularly memorable occasion, after months of practicing with a single wooden block, he finally managed to make it float for almost a minute a few inches off the ground. Edward found his son sitting in the middle of the room, sweating profusely, with a bloody nose, but with a huge smile on his face as he kept the block in the air.
"Impressive," Edward said, genuinely proud despite his concern for his son's condition. "But don't strain yourself too much, Rapha. This can be dangerous without proper training."
"It's... very... hard," Raphael replied between labored breaths, letting the block drop with a dull thud. He was exhausted, as if he had run a marathon.
That night, as she tucked him into bed, Eleanor sat beside her son. "Rapha, your father and I are thinking of starting to teach you some basics about magic. Formally, I mean. You're still too young for a wand, of course, but we can start with theory and some control exercises."
Raphael's eyes lit up. "Really? Like at Hogwarts?"
Eleanor smiled. "Much more basic than Hogwarts. But yes, we want to help you understand and control this amazing gift you have."
That night, after his parents left the room, Raphael lay awake thinking. In his mind, nebulous fragments of memories from his previous life occasionally emerged—memories of a story about a magical world where dark forces would arise in the future. The details were frustratingly vague, like a dream that fades upon waking. He knew there was a great war coming, knew there would be a dark side, and that people would die, but the faces, names, and specific circumstances were beyond his reach.
But first, he had much to learn about this new world, about his own capabilities, and about the limits of what he could accomplish with the gift he had received. One thing was certain: with maximum talent for magic and the few useful memories from his previous life, Raphael was determined to prepare for what was to come, whatever it might be.
From his shelf, a small porcelain toy dragon seemed to observe him in silence. Raphael tried, with great concentration, to turn off the light in his room without getting up. After several minutes of trying, he only managed to make the lamp flicker a few times before sighing, exhausted, and getting up to press the switch with his hand.