All he could see was darkness.
Not the comforting kind that comes with rest, but a vast, soundless void that swallowed everything, even the idea of time.
And yet…he could still feel.
The faint hum of air. The weight of his own body. The ache that shouldn't have existed anymore. He floated helplessly through the emptiness, caught between life and nothingness.
The magic he'd used was reckless, half-baked, ancient soul magic he had barely understood. It was supposed to tear his spirit out and destroy it completely. At least, that's what his last few miserable experiments had suggested.
He hadn't expected there to be anything left to feel.
He had expected oblivion.
Then, without warning, a voice tore through the void, getting louder by each repetition threatening to blow apart his hearing.
He recognized the voice in an instant, the cold and cutting voice couldn't belong to anyone else but his father as a memory unwillingly surfaced in his mind, as if he was an observer of his own thoughts.
"You're worthless!"
His father's voice thundered through the dark.
Robert Everhart, a man who thought lineage was worth more than love despite being a half blood himself.
He stood over Kurt, with the letter from Hogwarts stating why his son wasn't accepted to Hogwarts in his hand reading it aloud over and over again.
Robert's face turning from disbelief to disgust every time he repeated the letter.
"You're a disappointment ."
Kurt remembered the trembling in his hands, the way he'd tried to speak, to explain, but there was no excuse that would ever matter to that man.
"If you can't earn your place here, you'll find another way. I've pulled some strings with Ilvermorny. You'll go there, and you won't come back until you can call yourself a wizard."
He hadn't even argued. He'd only nodded, because that was what his father expected... obedience, not apology or excuses.
And just like that, he'd been exiled.
He remembered the cold wind biting his cheeks as he boarded the ship to America, the pitying glances from the crew, the empty seat beside him where his father should have been.
The long journey across the sea to Ilvermorny, where even the air had felt foreign.
The stares.
The whispers.
The headmaster's polite pity when the Sorting Ceremony failed to place him in any house. They had placed him somewhere out of obligation. A home for those who didn't belong.
Then came the wand ceremony. None of the wand picked him. Every time he touched one, it hurled him across the room as if the wands themselves were disgusted by his mere touch.
It continued until someone bored and irritated handed him a dusty old pair that hadn't chosen a wizard in centuries.
Which at least didn't seem to hate him too much, but what could someone without magic do with a wand.
A useless wand for a useless magician.
He remembered the laughter.
The sympathy.
The disgust.
He remembered every spell that fizzled out, every duel that ended with him thrown to the floor, every whispered joke, every time he was beaten bloody until he could barely stand.
And then, the letter.
Mr. Everhart, we regret to inform you that your academic standing no longer meets Ilvermorny's standards.
He could still feel the weight of the parchment in his trembling hands. His name scrawled wrong, like he didn't even deserve to be remembered correctly.
The world had gone quiet that day. No one came to say goodbye. He'd packed his few things, sold the books that mattered, and bought a vial of death potion from a shady old wizard in the black market.
He'd thought he'd made peace with it. But now, watching it again, the shame burned like acid.
"Is this the so called life flashing before my eyes..." He thought to himself as he saw the glimpses of memories he hated the most, as even now, his fingers trembled at the scene.
The boy looked so small.
The vial trembled once in his hand, then tipped back.
He wanted to look away but couldn't, just a drifting soul, forced to watch his past self attempt to kill himself.
For one perfect heartbeat, his younger-self thought he'd done it. The silence was kind... almost to the point where he felt relief. Then the magic screamed
Kurt had been here before himself, lived through it.
This was how his magic had awakened, in death, not life. The poison hadn't ended him. It had burned away everything that wasn't magic.
The poison had been fake, a cheap poison sold to fools. His naïve younger self hadn't known, but in hindsight, it had been a blessing in disguise
He pitied that boy. But he also understood him.
After all, he was him.
The memory rippled and began to collapse as with a jolt the darkness around him trembled, not with fear, but with recognition.
A pull began in his chest. Slow at first, then violent, tearing, dragging him through the dark. His body convulsed.
The nothingness cracked like glass, light bleeding through the fractures. His heart felt like it would burst from the force.
The void shattered.
Light. Breath. Pain.
He gasped awake, lungs dragging in air like it was the first time.
He blinked hard, once, twice. His breath came ragged and fast.
The ceiling. The same crack in the plaster. The faint scent of mildew. It was the same night. The night he drank the poison.
Except... He was breathing. Heart pounding. Magic thrumming.
A laugh tore from his throat before he could stop it...rough, wild, half joy, half disbelief.
"Oh, for fucking Merlin's sake… not again," he muttered, pressing a hand to his chest. His veins pulsed faintly with light, like molten silver snaking under skin. "I'm... I'm high. Fuck, I'm actually high."
The rush was unbearable, liquid lightning crawling up his spine, his senses alive to every breath, every whisper of power humming in the air. It was the same euphoria he'd felt once before, that moment when the fake poison had burned through his veins, while his magic awakened rushing through every inch of his body.
But this time… the high came with memory.
And memory came with questions.
What the fuck was happening? Why was he back here?
He staggered to his desk, grabbing for a stick of chalk. His hands were shaking, but his mind was a storm, fast, sharp and burning. It needed something to calm itself down.
He needed to see it. Needed to write it.
Equations spilled from him, one after another, elegant at first, then violent, as he dragged chalk across the walls, symbols of alchemy, runic calculus, and raw magical notation intertwining in a frenzy.
Each stroke came faster, harder, louder than a manic rhythm that filled the cramped room with the scratching sound of obsession.
"The spell was designed for annihilation," he muttered, eyes darting between the sigils. "Soul extraction, total erasure through feedback implosion... but that should've ended me, not send me back in time like some bullshit fiction story... If the killing curse was a bullet, my spell was akin to a grenade meant to end not only me but everyone within a 50 meter radius..."
"Unless... the source of power wasn't external."
He stopped, panting, and slammed his fist against the wall. "That's it. I used my own magic as the core. My soul's own frequency became the detonator."
He drew a circle, a soul construct and connected it to a spiral of equations, his chalk screeching as he spoke faster.
"In a normal ritual, the soul separates cleanly from the body, like vapor from liquid as the control is left to the magic of the user. But if the magic originates from within, the separation vector collapses. The soul doesn't eject, it folds... or to be more exact... it collapses into itself."
He turned, chalk snapping in his grip, voice rising in pitch.
"And when the structure folds, you get inversion. The soul feeds on its own resonance, creating a recursive loop of infinite potential!"
He scrawled a set of variables:
Ψₛ = (μᴍ / σ) × ∂λ → ∞If |Ψₛ| ≥ self-origin constant → spatial-temporal rebound!
His hand trembled as he connected the final line.
"The moment I tried to destroy myself, the spell rebounded through my own magic field. The detonation couldn't escape the system because I was the system."
He paused, breathing hard... eyes wide, pupils dilated.
"So it did the only thing possible... it followed the tether."
He drew a new set of diagrams, three concentric circles labeled Body, Magic, Soul. Then he sliced a vertical line through them, marking Time.
"The soul and magic itself exists above temporal constraint. A whole other dimension than the physical. It isn't bound to linear flow like matter. It exist everywhere at any given time.... When the detonation folded inward, it displaced me across the axis... not forward, not backward, but toward the nearest stable convergence of magical resonance."
He stared at it, realization dawning. "My awakening."
His breathing steadied as the madness thinned into clarity.
"The surge of pure, untainted magic from my first awakening, it matched the exact frequency of my dying core. The ritual didn't destroy me. It looped me and anchored my soul back to that singular point in time."
He stepped back, staring at the vast, chaotic map of his own madness painted across the walls... thousands of symbols all orbiting that one equation.
The conclusion came cold and calm:
"One in a billion. A perfect recursive resonance. A miracle of failure."
He let the chalk fall. His fingers were white with dust. His voice broke into a whisper.
"I didn't master soul magic…" he said softly. "I broke it."
He leaned back against the wall, the room humming faintly with the residual magic of his writing, a soft, rhythmic pulse, like the world itself was trying to make sense of what he'd done.
And then, at the center of his scrawled madness, one equation flickered faintly with light, an unfinished line, a thought written without conscious intent:
"Fuck... even if I was to do this thing again, the same spell under the same condition, it would never have worked and never should have worked... I am forgetting something..."
The image of the light flashed before his eyes.
"That 'mother'... the light..." Kurt's hand itched to carve that factor into his calculation but his hands wouldn't move, how could he even began to fathom that 'thing' into a numerical value.