Chapter 1 : The Second Awakening
Summon Manor, Scottish Highlands — September 15, 1986
The ceiling was wrong.
Not wrong in the way ceilings were wrong in hospital rooms, where you'd wake from anaesthesia and the fluorescent panels would swim into focus like pale fish. This ceiling was stone. Dark grey stone with hairline fractures webbing across it like river deltas, and a chandelier made of antlers and something that pulsed with faint golden light.
Matt blinked.
His hands were small.
The thought came before the panic — clinical, observational, the way his brain worked when something was deeply, fundamentally broken. His hands were small. Child-small. The fingers curling against the duvet were soft and unmarked, no calluses from years of handling animals, no scar on the left thumb from the Rottweiler bite in '14.
Not my hands.
Then the panic hit.
He sat up and the room lurched. Too big. Four-poster bed with green velvet curtains, a fireplace large enough to stand in, windows tall as doors letting in grey Scottish light. The air tasted different — cleaner, heavier, electric with something he couldn't name.
And his body was wrong in every way a body could be wrong. Too light. Too short. Legs that didn't reach the edge of the mattress. A chest that rose and fell too fast, too shallow, lungs the size of his fists.
The van. The animals. The headlights.
It crashed through him in fragments. The emergency call at 2 AM — three dogs, a cat with a shattered pelvis, a hawk that had flown into a power line. Rain on the M1. The transport van shaking in crosswind. Then the lorry drifting across the centre line, and the sound — God, the sound of metal folding inward like —
"Young Master?"
Matt's head snapped toward the voice.
A creature stood in the doorway. Three feet tall, skin the colour and texture of old leather, ears like satellite dishes, and eyes the size of tennis balls — wet, worried, the colour of weak tea.
House-elf.
The word surfaced from somewhere twenty years deep. Dog-eared paperbacks. Midnight reading under a duvet. A boy with a lightning scar and a world made of magic.
No.
"Young Master is awake!" The elf's ears flattened with relief, then sprang upright again. "Pip must fetch tea. Pip must fetch Tilly. Young Master has been sleeping strangely for three days and Pip has been so worried, so terribly —"
"Three days?"
His voice. High, thin, a child's voice pushing through a throat that had never shouted at a pub or sung off-key in a car. The wrongness of it sat on his chest like a stone.
"Yes, Young Master. Three days of tossing and mumbling. Pip tried cool cloths. Pip tried singing. Nothing worked until —"
"Pip." The name came out steady despite everything. Twenty-eight years of keeping calm during emergencies — dogs seizing on operating tables, owners screaming in waiting rooms. You breathed. You focused. You dealt with the impossible thing in front of you. "Sit down. Please."
The elf's eyes went round as dinner plates. "Young Master asks Pip to sit?"
"Please."
Pip perched on the edge of a footstool, trembling with the apparent novelty of it.
Matt pressed his palms into the mattress. Small hands. Real hands. Warm. Alive.
I died.
The thought was flat. Factual. Like reading a chart. Patient deceased at 2:47 AM, cause of death: blunt force trauma.
And now I'm here.
"Pip," he said carefully. "What year is it?"
"It is 1986, Young Master."
"And my name is —"
Pip's ears drooped. "Young Master does not remember? Young Master is Matthias Aldric Summon, heir to the Noble and Ancient House of Summon." A pause. A tremor in the thin voice. "The last heir."
The last heir.
Matt closed his eyes. The Harry Potter books had been his childhood — his original childhood, the real one. He'd read them cover to cover four times, watched every film, argued about Sorting Hat logic in university pubs. He remembered the broad strokes, the major beats, the characters who lived and died and came back.
He did not remember a House of Summon.
"My parents," he said. "Tell me about my parents."
Pip's ears flattened entirely. "Master Aldric and Mistress Elara are... are gone, Young Master. These six years past. The Dark Lord's followers came in the night, and Master Aldric fought, but —" Pip's voice cracked. "Mistress Elara passed bringing Young Master into the world. Master Aldric fell defending the gates three months later. Before the Dark Lord himself was vanquished."
Six years old. An orphan in a world of magic, a war barely ended, and three house-elves standing between him and oblivion.
Harry Potter is six right now, somewhere in Surrey. Under a cupboard.
Matt opened his eyes.
"And who takes care of me? Who takes care of this house?"
Pip straightened on the footstool, pride pushing through grief. "Pip does, Young Master. And Tilly, who manages the household. We is protecting the young master since he was a baby. We is keeping the Manor running. We is waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"For Young Master to wake up," Pip said simply. "Properly."
---
Tilly was different from Pip. Where Pip vibrated with nervous devotion, Tilly moved through the Manor like she owned it. Square-shouldered for an elf, with a crisp dishcloth perpetually slung over one arm and a look that suggested she'd seen everything worth seeing and found most of it lacking.
"This is the east wing," she said, leading Matt down a corridor wider than his old flat. "Portraits along here, though most is sleeping. Haven't woken since Mistress Cordelia passed."
The portraits were oil paintings in heavy gilt frames, each showing a witch or wizard with an animal companion. A stern woman with a falcon. A laughing man with something serpentine coiled around his shoulders. A girl no older than Matt's current body, cradling what appeared to be a tiny dragon.
All of them were motionless. Dust had settled in the frames' grooves.
"The Summon family," Tilly said. She kept her voice level, but her grip on the dishcloth tightened. "Beast masters going back a thousand years. Every Summon heir had the gift — could speak to creatures, bond with them, earn their trust where no other witch or wizard could."
They stopped before the largest portrait. A woman in her sixties, sharp-featured, her silver hair pulled back. At her feet sat an enormous cat — no, larger than any cat, with markings like woodsmoke and amber eyes full of intelligence.
"Mistress Cordelia," Pip murmured from behind them. "Young Master's grandmother."
As Matt watched, the portrait stirred. Just slightly — a shift of painted shoulders, a slow blink. The woman's gaze found his.
She smiled. Sad and knowing and achingly gentle.
"You have her eyes," Pip said.
Matt's throat tightened. He didn't trust himself to speak, so he nodded and moved on.
The tour continued. A library three stories tall with ladders on brass rails. A potions laboratory with cauldrons sized from thimble to bathtub. A kitchen that Tilly clearly considered her personal kingdom.
And the grounds.
"The creature reserve," Tilly announced, pushing open a pair of French doors onto a stone terrace.
Matt stepped outside and stopped breathing.
The reserve stretched across rolling Highland terrain — meadows, a dark pond, clusters of old-growth oak and pine, rocky outcroppings, and in the distance what looked like cave systems cut into a hillside. Habitats. Dozens of them, designed for different species, connected by paths now overgrown with wild heather and bracken.
Empty. All of it, empty. Two hundred years of silence.
The wind carried the scent of damp earth and pine resin. A hawk circled high above, ordinary, not magical, just a bird living its life over abandoned territory.
This was meant for creatures. For bonded companions. For a family that's been dead for years.
"Young Master?" Tilly's voice, careful.
"It's beautiful," Matt said. And meant it.
---
He ate his first meal at a table built for twenty.
Shepherd's pie. The crust golden and cracked. Mince rich with gravy beneath. Peas and carrots in a side dish, steam curling.
Pip had cooked it. "Young Master's favourite," the elf said, hovering at the table's edge. "Since he was very small."
The first bite was —
Real. Warm and savoury and grounding in a way nothing else had been since he'd opened his eyes. Salt and fat and starch, the most ordinary thing in the world, and it existed here, in this impossible place, tasting exactly like shepherd's pie should.
His vision blurred.
He kept eating. Fork to mouth, mechanical, because if he stopped the elves would ask questions and he couldn't — not right now. Not with the taste of a normal meal sitting on his tongue while his entire previous life cooled like ashes behind him.
Mum's shepherd's pie had more pepper. She always overdid the pepper.
He pressed the heel of one small hand against his eye. Took a breath. Took another.
Kept eating.
---
Summon Manor — 11:43 PM
The bedroom window faced north. From the sill, Matt could see the Highlands rolling away under moonlight — silver and shadow, endless, ancient.
He pressed his forehead against the glass. Cold. Grounding.
Facts. Start with facts.
He was alive. He was six years old. He was in the Harry Potter universe, five years before the story began. Harry was a toddler somewhere in Little Whinging, sleeping in a cupboard. Voldemort was a wraith drifting through Albanian forests. Dumbledore was running Hogwarts. Sirius was rotting in Azkaban.
And Matthias Summon — whoever the original child had been — was gone. Replaced by a dead veterinarian from a world without magic.
I didn't ask for this.
The thought was useless. He let it pass.
Five years until Hogwarts. Five years to learn this world, this body, this life. Five years to prepare for everything that's coming.
Philosopher's Stone. Chamber of Secrets. Prisoner of Azkaban. Goblet of Fire. Voldemort's return. War.
Matt turned from the window. The bedroom was dark except for the low fire Pip had left burning. The bed was too large for his body. The silence was total.
He crossed the room and pulled the first book he could find from a shelf beside the fireplace. Magical Creatures and Their Habitats: A Comprehensive Guide, by Cordelia Summon.
His grandmother's book. The pages smelled like cedar.
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