By the time I turned six, my life had officially become a training montage.
Gone were the innocent days of levitating apples and spinning spoons. My grandfather had taken over my education with the intensity of a general raising a soldier. Every morning began with physical drills, followed by etiquette and noble conduct training, and capped with wandless magic control in the evening.
Apparently, magical blood came with responsibilities.
> "You carry the Clarke name," Grandpa would say, adjusting my posture with a cane. "It's not enough to have magic—you must wield it with dignity."
The world was slowly recovering from the fall of a dark tyrant—Lord Voldemort, as I'd overheard. Grandpa didn't talk about it much, but the fear lingered like smoke from a long-dead fire. He said that our family had kept away from the chaos, choosing isolation over bloodshed.
Until now.
Now that I had "awakened," he said the time had come for me to reclaim our legacy.
---
It was too much.
I was six.
And even with memories of my past life as Nikhil, a jaded Hyderabad programmer, I just wanted to breathe. To do something fun. Something that made me feel *me*.
That's when I remembered one of my old obsessions: **Iron Man**.
Tony Stark had always been a symbol of what genius, grit, and a second chance could achieve. He didn't need magic. He used his mind, his pain, and his courage to save others. He was flawed, arrogant, brilliant—and real in a way most magical heroes weren't.
So I did what I used to do in my past life when the world was too much.
I wrote.
---
Each night after my lessons, I snuck into the attic with a candle and parchment. But instead of adapting the story to a magical world, I wrote it **exactly as it was** in the original: modern-day setting, Afghanistan, Jericho missile demo, the shrapnel in the chest, the cave, the arc reactor, and the first armor forged from scrap.
The only twist?
I named the protagonist **Charles Clarke** — after my father.
---
One day, I walked up to him while he was sipping tea and reading *The Daily Prophet*.
> "Papa," I asked, "do you want to be a superhero? Someone who saves people?"
He gave me a puzzled look.
> "What sort of question is that, Eliot?"
> "I'm writing a story," I said. "And I want to use your name for the main character. Is that okay?"
He stared at me, long and quiet.
Then, to my surprise, his eyes welled up.
> "Eliot… No one's ever seen me like that. Not even myself."
He pulled me into a hug. A real one. Strong and warm.
> "Thank you, son."
---
A week later, the manuscript was done.
It was *Iron Man 1*, beat for beat. No magical metaphors. No wands or runes. Just one man—**Charles Clarke**—a weapons engineer caught in a war zone, building the first Iron Man suit in a cave to survive. Then choosing to stop building weapons and start building a legacy.
It was unapologetically tech. Unapologetically modern. Unapologetically **human**.
---
I gave it to my father and told him to publish it under a pen name.
**DSK** — a nod to my old nickname from my corporate life: *Dumb Software Kaidi*.
A bit of poetic irony.
---
The book blew up.
Muggles devoured it. They thought it was gritty, brilliant, and refreshingly different from the fantasy norm.
My father was stunned. Letters came in from publishers. Reviewers called DSK a visionary. Some compared "Charles Clarke" to the modern-day Sherlock Holmes in armor.
Then Grandpa found it.
---
I expected a scolding.
Instead, he smirked.
> "So, this is what you've been up to."
He didn't even blink at the high-tech setting. He respected the execution, the narrative structure, the spirit of rebellion.
He pulled strings. Got it printed—*unchanged*—in the magical world.
Still under **DSK**.
---
To my shock, wizards **loved it** too.
They were fascinated. Not just by the character, but by the *idea*.
A man with no wand. No spellbook. No lineage. Just logic, tools, and a will to survive.
> "Is this possible in the Muggle world?" they asked.
> "Can one really power a flying suit with pure electricity?"
> "Why doesn't the Ministry have armor like this?"
Some mistook it for real events. Others assumed it was an allegory. A few conspiracy nuts started drawing connections between Charles Clarke and actual wandless dueling legends.
It didn't matter.
A storm had begun.
---
Fan mail poured in from both worlds.
> *"Will there be a sequel?"*
> *"Is the suit enchanted in secret?"*
> *"Is Charles Clarke a Muggle-born war hero in hiding?"*
I wasn't even allowed to go to the bakery alone.
But now, people believed in **tech heroes**.
Even in a world dominated by magic.
---
Grandpa doubled my training.
> "Now the world expects great things from you," he said. "You've set the bar high."
But I didn't mind.
Because deep down, I knew what I'd done.
**I'd rewritten Iron Man. And I gave him my father's name.**
---
I was Eliot Clarke. Born Nikhil.
And maybe… just maybe…
I was starting to leave my own mark on this world.