Origin

Billy Batson was ten years old, and he was very, very alone.

He lived in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, which he thought was perhaps the cruelest joke the universe had ever made, because he had no family left to love him with. No parents — they were gone, a quiet sadness that he carried like a stone in his pocket everywhere he went. No brothers or sisters. He moved from foster home to foster home and kept his head down and tried to take up as little space as possible, because the less space you took up, the less anyone had to notice you and decide they didn't want you.

What Billy did have was goodness. Not the shiny, performed kind. The real kind — the kind that makes you help someone carry their groceries without thinking about it, the kind that makes you give your lunch to someone who has none even when you are hungry too. The Wizard would see it. Billy had no idea the Wizard existed.

It started in the subway.

Late on a November evening, Billy was walking home from school through the cold, and the station he used every day was different. Not differently arranged — it was the same platform, the same peeling yellow paint. But one of the tunnel entrances, the one that was usually sealed off with a rusted gate, was open. And standing in the opening was a small light.

Not an electric light. More like the light you see at the edges of a fire when the flame is very old and very steady.

Billy looked at it for a moment. Then he walked toward it.

Because Billy Batson was the kind of person who walks toward strange lights in subway tunnels. This was, in fact, part of the reason the Wizard had chosen him.

The tunnel went further than it should have. It went much further — past the limits of the station, past anything that could possibly be underground in Philadelphia, and then it wasn't a tunnel anymore. It was a corridor carved from rock the color of moonlight, hung with torches that burned without fuel, and at its end was a chamber so vast that Billy could not see the ceiling.

At the center of the chamber, on a throne made from a single piece of stone, sat the oldest living thing Billy had ever seen.

He looked like a man, if a man were made from a thousand years of patience. His beard was white and very long. His robes were the purple-gray of deep water. His eyes were the brightest thing in the room.

"Billy Batson," said the Wizard Shazam.

Billy stopped. "How do you know my name?"

"I have been looking for you for a very long time," said the Wizard. "I have been looking for someone good."

He told Billy about the Rock of Eternity — this chamber, this throne, this place beyond the mortal world where magic had been guarded for three thousand years. He told him about the Seven Deadly Sins, imprisoned in the walls, kept from the world by the Wizard's power and the power of those who came before him. He told him that his time was ending, that the responsibility needed a new champion.

"Why me?" Billy asked. He looked around at the ancient stone, the imprisoned Sins, the enormous weight of what was being offered. "I'm just a kid."

"You are a child with a good heart," the Wizard said. "I have chosen many champions in my time. Power without goodness destroys itself. Goodness without power cannot protect what matters. You have goodness. I am offering you the power."

He extended one hand.

"Speak my name," he said.

Billy looked at the Wizard. He looked at the rock walls humming with imprisoned things. He thought about Philadelphia above him, about all the ordinary days and the people in them. He thought about what it would mean to protect something.

"SHAZAM!"

The lightning came from nowhere and everywhere at once — a bolt of pure white that filled the whole chamber with thunder, with light, with a sound like the sky deciding. It hit Billy in the chest, and when it faded, he was standing in the body of a grown man, taller and stronger and dressed in a red suit with a golden lightning bolt blazing on his chest. The power of six ancient heroes lived in him now — the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, the speed of Mercury.

He looked at his hands.

The Wizard was smiling.

"You are the champion now," he said. "Be worthy of it."

Then, very quietly, the Wizard was gone — his long vigil complete, his work passed on at last.

Billy stood alone in the Rock of Eternity, the most powerful boy in the world, with a job to do and a heart that was still entirely his own.

He looked up at the ceiling he could not see.

He said, to the empty stone, "Okay. I'll do my best."

The Rock of Eternity hummed, low and steady, like approval.

SHAZAM.