When I first conceived of this story in 2019, it was not really known that JK Rowling is a TERF, and I certainly had no idea at the time, so I planned on making this a Silmarillion-Harry Potter crossover.
Once it became incontrovertible that JK Rowling is on the warpath against trans people, I abandoned my plans. However, I had been a fan of HP since the early 00s so it was hard to completely let the idea go of "my guys, but in a wizarding universe".
In summer 2024, I began to think that maybe I should make my own wizarding universe with blackjack and hookers, and the idea finally began to coalesce in December 2024.
There are some important differences between my wizarding universe and Ms. Rowling's that are worth mentioning up front because it'll be easier to follow along.
The first and most important distinction is that unlike the HP wizarding world keeping its existence a secret from Muggles as much as possible, here the general public is aware of magic users to a point, because in reality that sort of thing is very difficult to keep under wraps. Not everything is common knowledge, of course, there's only so much the public needs to know about before it causes chaos.
In medieval times, magic users were persecuted heavily by the Catholic Church. In the modern world, Pope Francis eventually issued a formal apology for this, and religions [and sects within religions] differ on how they view magic users. Among the general populace, regardless of religious affiliation, prejudice v. tolerance varies from person to person, region to region. Some non-magic people exhibit a degree of tokenism for performative virtue signalling clout, and some try to exploit "the gifted", just like you see others do towards different minority groups in our world.
As you can imagine, the presence of magic users has had significant impacts on history. As one example: in the world of you and I, Nazi Germany had some occultists, and in Britain there were witches who did rituals against Hitler and the Nazi invasion of Britain. In this timeline, during WW2 Hitler had actual sorcerers working for him and so did the British government; in the 21st century, dark magic has influenced the return of fascism.
Additionally, while monotheistic religions like Judaism and Islam exist here, ancient polytheistic religions never completely died out in this timeline but did adapt to modernization.
I have avoided gendered terms like "witch" and "wizard" here, everyone is a mage; "wizard" is reserved for super-powerful mages like Gandalf.
There are no wands here and no spells in Latin or pseudo-Latin. Magic is elemental - the school for magic users age thirteen to eighteen for the UK and Europe, called Wemblefrrf, "sorts" by element. Additionally, magic users often have access to non-elemental types of magic such as telekinesis, and telepathic bonds with partners.
In this universe, Sören and Maglor are both trans men who changed sex and are indistinguishable from cis men physically thanks to magic. When I eventually start the prequel there will be a bit more about this.
Anthony is a Jew who happens to be a magic user, rather than making the Jewish people inherently magical [though here it's well-accepted in Judaism and there is a university for Jewish magic users which teaches Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah, and before anyone comes @ me on this, no you don't have to be 40 to learn Kabbalah].
In keeping with multiverse canon, Sören, Nicholas and Anthony are the reincarnations of Fëanor, Fingolfin and Finarfin respectively. [In this timeline Fëanor and Fingolfin agreed to be reborn as mortal and incarnate "when the world needed them most" and Finarfin elected to go with them and "keep an eye".] While I do not enjoy making lengthy disclaimers at the beginning of my fics as it seems to not make a difference to haters and antis and therefore just wastes my time and energy, and this information would usually count as a spoiler [as it comes up on-screen later into the story and is relevant to the plot], here is my disclaimer anyway: I am a CSA survivor and do not condone or support incest IRL. My brain parses "non-human relations" differently than human incest, and past life vs. present incarnation even moreso.
Maglor is a free Elf who does what he wants the property of the Tolkien Estate, as well as characters like Gandalf, and my broke disabled ass is not making any money from this whatsoever. Sören, Anthony and Nicholas are my OCs and I do not consent for them to be borrowed by people who aren't SemperViridis, Detergent or CogitatingKerfuffle. I do not consent to any transformative works.