Chapter 1: Azkaban's Oldest Prisoner

The man and the woman walked side by side.

"Where do you start though?" the man asked, sighing in light frustration, as he and the woman walked the dimly-lit corridor. "A mole in the Department of Mysteries! So what? We're all Unspeakables! We are this country's intellectual elite! How is anyone ever going to find out?"

"What point are you trying to make, Croaker?" replied the woman in a low hissy voice. "You aren't being so unspeakable when if you haven't noticed, we're walking past jail cells that happen to be holding – surprise, surprise – people!"

Azkaban's main holding floor was made of a dirty, cold, heavy stone. The huge room was completely windowless, the half-light inside a mysterious golden brown. As the pair of Department of Mysteries employees walked down the corridor, dark cells flanked them, sealed off by thick, straight (and, Croaker knew, magically protected) steel bars. If Croaker happened to peer in he would perhaps see greasy, leering prisoners, whether male or female, and would perhaps note their clammy skin, ragged appearance and haunted eyes, wallowing in despair that the Dementors, although gone, seemed to have left in their wake. He looked at his fellow employee – it was the first time they had ever partnered one another, even if it was just for a small, routine mission like today. He didn't feel much inclined towards the young woman – she was very nippy and unfriendly, and became very wound up when the subject of the mole was brought up.

"What are you looking at?" she said, narrowing her eyes upon catching Croaker's stare.

"Oh, well – you know," blustered Croaker, for a minute, before he spun the lie. "I was just thinking – what happened to you when you felt those … those things."

"What bloody things?"

"Oh, you know," responded Croaker impatiently. "Those things that are guarding Azkaban … now."

New guards for Azkaban had been brought in recently, replacing the abandoning Dementors.

"It felt weird, nothing like I'd ever felt before. Now shut up."

"I don't trust them, Naomi, the Ministry is allying with the wrong creatures yet again," Croaker stated. He almost added that he didn't trust her either, but thought better of it – even so, he couldn't help but wonder whether she had anything to do with the mole business, she always became so hostile whenever it was mentioned.

"I don't trust men," she snapped back. "And we're not on first name terms Mr. Croaker," she added, but cast him the tiniest hint of a smile. "From now on, call me Miss McGonagall –'

"Young love," interrupted a drawling voice from one of the cells. "I would give you my blessing, Croaker, but rumour has it you're a Mudblood."

Both Croaker and Naomi fell quiet, dislike washing over them. Then Croaker walked to the cell at which Lucius Malfoy knelt, his head in between the bars.

"Well, well, well," said Croaker, looking satisfied. 'I haven't seen you, Lucius, since … now let me think … since I saw the Aurors clap you in irons two summers ago. In the Department of Mysteries' Death Chamber, don't you remember Malfoy? I pray you haven't forgotten what I told you in a somewhat threatening whisper that night?"

"Oh of course not," Lucius Malfoy replied sardonically, his grey eyes looking more malicious than ever. "I didn't think you'd have the brains to realise it though, no one else did – well, little Potter had an idea it was me, let's give the filthy boy some credit – "

"Bode was not only a colleague, he was my best friend!" Croaker yelled. "You'd better hope you never get out of here."

"Oh, you know I will be, soon enough," Malfoy retorted. "My master will come for me … and I hear tell that the old fool who put me in this foul place … well, let's just say we won't be seeing him again."

He laughed nastily. Croaker moved a little closer to Malfoy's cell, who in turn shuffled back a little. Croaker saw clearly that in Malfoy's penetrating sea-grey eyes a hollow, deadened black was kindling.

"Dumbledore was a great man, and well, what you lot did to him was the Death Eaters all over," Croaker rasped with soft venom. "Murder in the dark, murder them when they're weak and can't fight back … I call it cowardice. The Wizarding world is baying for Severus Snape's blood. He won't last long."

"The Dark Lord has."

"That creature is no lord!" Croaker said, his voice rising as he pulled out his wand.

"Don't –" Naomi began, but Malfoy spoke over her.

"You have never met him," Malfoy said in a rising voice, his eyes glazing over. "You have no idea … either of you … " He looked directly at Naomi for a long moment, before asking: "What have you two been doing here anyway?"

"Like we would tell you!" Naomi McGonagall replied scornfully. In honesty, they partly didn't know themselves. They would simply go down to Azkaban's basement and make written observations on a lone, very old-looking man there. He was unconscious – in fact, he looked all but dead. For some absurd reason it was one of their most important and secretive missions, however routine and tedious – their reports would be filed and sent to the Death Chamber in the Department of Mysteries for further examination.

He was on the lowest floor in the darkest room of the wizard prison. He had been there for more than fifty years, contained by one of the most powerful spells ever conjured. He never spoke. His skin was white and stretched; his eyes dead yet at the same time madly alive, as if haunted. His hair was white and wispy; his face long, grey and expressionless. No man or woman alive had seen his face for half a century, not even prisoners incarcerated in Azkaban - only the Dementors had occasionally glimpsed him before they had left to side with Lord Voldemort. The Dementors had never lingered long in the basement, for what would attract them to a prisoner who was completely empty of any feeling they could have fed off? There was nothing to this old wizard that would attract anyone it would seem, yet little did he or anyone else know that someone out there was in fact very interested in him -interested in his past, his downfall, and most of all - his future. That same someone was brewing a plot to break the old captive out of his basement cell and out of Azkaban altogether.

Yet the prisoner was protected in ways that Voldemort hadn't quite figured out how to break. Not yet. Voldemort was still killing, still bewitching, still hoodwinking, still meticulously plotting to attain domination of the Wizarding world, but his priority was still the same: to conquer death. To achieve this, something inside Voldemort knew there were three things he must do: hear the prophecy concerning him in full, kill Harry Potter, and discover the secret of how to break from Azkaban its oldest resident. Something else inside him said that these three things were intravenously linked.

The name of Azkaban's oldest prisoner? It was a name that the older Wizarding community still knew and feared: Grindelwald.