AN: This prologue is from the point of view of Narcissa Malfoy, the following chapters will be from point of view of Harry. Unfortunately, our darling Draco shall not be making an appearance until later chapters.

Also, I am currently looking for Beta Readers. You can contact me through , on AIM under requiemoftable, if you are interested.

Finally, I own nothing of the Harry Potter universe, the rights belong to J.K Rowling, Bloomsbury, Schoolastic and any other entities involved. Likewise, the titles as well as several quotes from later chapters belong to Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly the first section, Inferno.

Prologue: Among the People Lost

It has been six months since my son's, Draco Malfoy, incarceration into Azkaban; six long months in which I have had to force myself to live without that which I have desired, protected, needed and possessed for almost twenty two years. They have not only wrenched a person from my life, they have poisoned memories and turned the purpose of my life prior spent to ashes. I am allowed no contact, no owls, nothing. It was as if my favorite toy has been twisted from me after all I had done to preserve and save and love it.

It has been four months since the Dementors were reinstated as the guards for the worst of the war criminals. My son, who the ministry had been unable to prove guilty of using the killing curse, is still confined under new laws for twenty five years for the use of lesser Unforgivables; he is in where beasts tread. I can daily feel my grip on his soul slipping the more he lay with the gruesome creatures.

It has been two months since my husband was subjected to the Dementor's Kiss, despite the fact he had not fought alongside the Dark Lord, he was unable to be saved. No amount of money would redeem his soul; no amount of grief that I could feel could inspire enough pity to allow the monster that society saw to live among them. They say you do not die when they give you the Kiss, but he is as good as dead to me. I will not mourn twice for my husband. I will not mourn the passing of his soul, and then the passing of his body. I will only shed the precious and rare tears of a Black once and only once.

I am slowly going mad. I am alone within the Manor, and it assaults my senses every waking moment of every day that passes. I may have been acquitted from my crimes against the Ministry, but in the freedom they had so "willingly" given, they have condemned me to a different kind of prison. Still, day in and day out I hold my head high in defiance regardless of there being an audience or no. Neither Black nor Malfoy shows weakness to themselves or to others.

Moving like a wraith through my own home, I smile bitterly as I do every morning at the portrait of my husband. He looks eons away from me in the portrait. He looks years younger too, his face in the confident smirk which was accustomed among friends and family. That smile used to belong to me. There was once a time where I possessed Lucius wholly: his body, his mind, his heart and his soul had been mine. I had ensured that my essence would poison every inch of that man, addicting him to my presence.

In the deepest shadows of my mind, I will admit that even though my inherited fanaticism from the Black line insists that I would have dominated whoever I had taken as a lover completely, it could not keep me from, somewhere along our dance of equal deception, falling as much in love as he.

I watch the Lucius in the painting watching me with fondness, and I can remember the day it was painted. Easily over a decade ago, I thought the Dark Lord was gone from our lives forever. My husband, I thought, was slowly becoming mine again, our relationship slowly becoming summer after a long winter. I never got to feel that summer sun, not truly.

His absence now is as damaging as his first betrayal of me. Between me and the self proclaimed "Dark Lord" there could have been no absolute loyalty to either side. He had submitted himself to Voldemort, and so I had lost a tiny bit of my hold on my husband, something I had clawed and scratched and demanded back with force and was met with equal force, pushing him deeper into the folds of the Death Eaters. When I had finally retained it, after long trials of blood and fire, it was the Ministry and the Dementors which had once again stolen it from my very fingers.

With Draco rotting in Azkaban, I am feeling the same defeat over. Where I had dominated my son so completely—saved his life, owned his life—it was waning. Still, there was hope. My son is not gone entirely, and I will twist my threads of control once more into his heart if it kills me.

Ghosting through the hallways, I stop at my husband's personal study. It seems too empty without Lucius' presence within the room. Many times I can remember sitting in the chesterfield across from his desk in comfortable silence as I asserted my presence in his life and imprinting his into my own. My fingers are like wires against the heavy oak door. Shouldering myself inside, my wand draws ink and quill and parchment to me.

I will do the only thing that can provide me with comfort these days, I occupy my mind with things other than the empty house, my solitary state, and the fact my influence is dying in my son—the fact that I am dying in my son —as the days labour on.

And so, I began to write.