The bars severed Bella's view into numerous broken pieces as she gazed hopelessly out of her dark cell.
For weeks, months, she had howled and screeched and clawed at the dirt matted floor for her release. She had proudly cried out that her master would come for her and save her from the isolated abyss of darkness and she had believed it too. However, when hours and days started to merge together so that it was impossible to keep track of how much time had passed, a niggling doubt wormed through her mind and her shrieks stopped.
How could her Lord have abandoned her for so long? She looked desperately to the faded Dark Mark brandished on her left forearm and prayed manically under her breath for her master to help her.
It had been countless months since Bellatrix had been tossed worthlessly into the damp, disease ridden box and she could feel the dark demons of insanity prodding at her mind and soul. Her weakened body quaked with a chill and the darkness that surrounded, enveloped and consumed her made her skin grey and black eyes hooded and lifeless. It was as though she had been killed a thousand times over. Her master had fallen and left her vulnerable and weak.
The damned Aurors had located and arrested her for her heinous crimes. She had lost her appeal and been incarcerated in the place all men feared; the Hell on earth that was Azkaban. She'd been stripped of her wand and everything that defined who she was. The only company she had was the daily, and sometimes hourly, visits from the soul-suckers that guarded the high security prisoners. She was tortured continually by the agonising fact that her Dark mark was all but gone – a sign her master had still not returned after all this time. Not long after her imprisonment she had heard through the line of screeching prisoners that her accomplice Barty Crouch had died in his cell. Who else had died? Rodolphus? Rabastan? The thoughts taunted her through her sleepless nights. Then thoughts of all whom she had left behind; primarily her sister, Narcissa. Why had she not visited her? The alienation form everything and everyone beat her down and churned at her mind until words and voices crawled out of the walls to remind her of her abandonment.
Through dense, overgrown corkscrew curls, Bella snarled out into the torch-lit hall that was beyond those damned enchanted bars. If only she had her wand she'd have been able to destroy those iron confines in moments. She had tried in the early days to ram them and shake and bash them until her body was bruised and scraped with the effort. They had never opened. She was beginning to believe they never would open.
Bellatrix's body jolted and convulsed automatically as the torches in the brackets outside extinguished with a gust of icy breath and the familiar creep of a Dementor's presence slithered through her. She forced herself to stay strong – not to whimper of show weakness of any kind despite her position. The strangled cries from the adjacent cell made her spine tingle as though a thousand tiny spiders were scampering up it.
She gritted her teeth and clenched her jaw as her weak muscles tensed in preparation of what she knew would come. The drowned, hooded figure of the eerie soul-sucking monster crossed in front of the bars and for once she was glad of the distance that the isolated space gave her. She knew that distance was no relevant factor though. She backed herself against the first wall of the cell and shivered as she chilled dampness soaked through her thin robes. In a moment, Bella found herself being immersed in a frozen pool as the creature sucked any remaining harvest from her being. She could hear a distance, shrill shriek which she took a moment to realise was coming from her own cracked and dry lips and a ringing in her ears seemed to deafen her as she slipped out of reality.
Bellatrix swore to herself as she slipped into blackness that one day, be it in another life, she would have revenge for this sad, sick way of living – this torture.