An extended period of time after that was nothing but a blur for me, as I roamed the castle on the other side of the Door. There were many rooms, though none had windows, and each offered new furniture, new spells to absorb, new creatures to observe. Absorbing whatever magic I could, I grew fast, becoming tall and lean rather than small and babylike. The memories of the spoken words had highly frustrated me and I'd practiced moving my lips while blowing air through my throat. This was an odd and unpleasant thing to do, but I had eventually gotten better at it. My voice was a raspy, unpleasant rattle, but it was a voice; I could pronounce those odd and wonderful words now. Coloportus. Pulvis Repello. Adhero. Unfortunately, I found that even waving a stick while I enunciated those precious words did not produce any more magic. Ah well. I was in no shortage of it as it was.
The most remarkable thing that happened to me was finding the Portrait. I found it in a small and dusty room on the first floor (oh, gliding up stairs had not been easy!), in a position that let me deduce it had once hung on the wall, before the sticking charm had word off and the conjured wallpaper had withered away. The paint itself was half-faded; I could make out the silhouette of a man (at the time, I was rather surprised at how much it resembled my own, sharing the long neck, the oval head, the arms and the five-fingered hands), but no more. However, my soul's eye saw much more behind the crumpling pigments. There was magic in there, magic that was much more complex than any I'd seen so far. It was not a soul, not by any means, but it definitely looked just as complicated as one. The spells were woven into the canvas on multiple layers, pulsing with a bright sparkling energy that felt more alive than any other spell.
There was no memory of a word being spoken there, but instead a mass of knowledge. The part of the magic network that was meant to animate the painted figure had faded along with the paint itself, but the core memories remained untouched by Time. At first I had some doubts — was it truly not alive? But I eventually determined that it probably was not, and so I gladly ingested the magic and the memories imbued in the canvas after a last long look at the canvas of magic.
The next few hours were a strange, strange experience. I'd learnt everything from words to human customs from the memories. Seriously outdated customs — that portrait was far from recent. And to my surprise, the portrait had not only contained knowledge (how to properly speak, what was the name of this country, what a country was in the first place) but a whole life's worth of memories. It was extremely confusing to me — for a long time I was not sure who I was and would occasionally slip and think of myself as Algernon Selwyn, a perfectly ordinary Pureblood wizard (no, his Grandmother Elvira didn't count, she was just half-Muggleborn, now be quiet) with a talent for Charms, former Ravenclaw, living off his inheritance. At first I'd also absorbed his personality, and this completed the illusion of being Selwyn so thoroughly that I began walking around the mansion, muttering to myself about 'my' estate's pitiful state and wondering where 'my' House-Elf had gone. However, I instinctively began absorbing the emotional parts of all these memories, and this stripped down the whole bundle enough that in time, and after getting some sleep, I sorted it all out, regained my sense of self and reviewed all this new information.
Apparently, I was a creature called a Dementor. It quickly transpired that Mr Selwyn had few good things to say about Dementors, but didn't really know much about them. The mnemo-item 'Dementor' was closely associated with 'fear', 'wretched monster' and 'run away really really fast if I meet one', and the picture of a drawing in a book of a creature that did look somewhat like me, but was apparently wearing a cloak, the hood of which completely hid its face. Why would a Dementor do that? I wondered. The eyes of the soul could be enough to get around, especially if there was a whole world full of magic out there as Selwyn's memories suggested, but that was not to say normal eyes didn't have their uses. Although magic could probably render a piece of cloth transparent from the inside only, this looked like a lot of trouble for nothing.
There was a recurring feature in most every memory of Algernon Selwyn's: light. Wonderful, warm light that made everything clearer and easier to see. As I have said before, the Selwyn mansion had no visible windows — the memories did not help, but my enhanced knowledge of ordinary human life allowed me to guess that the last human inhabitants had sealed the windows before leaving in an effort to make it harder for thieves to break in after they were gone. Because of this, only cracks in the ceiling left a very slight glow filter into the house. So far I had never wanted any more, but Selwyn's memories of sunny days had made me quite eager to discover true light for myself. So eager in fact that I eventually decided to climb a wall up to one of the cracks and look out of the mansion and rested by head against the wall, looking out through the whole with my right eye.
…
PAIN-
NO-
BURNING-
FIRE-
HELP!
The searing pain lasted only a short instant before I jerked back. Of course, this made me fall down to the ground, but Dementors are light creatures (how else would we glide?) and I did not injure myself. So. Apparently, Dementors wore those odd hoods because any more light than I was accustomed to would burn their eyes away. Fine. Selwyn didn't know how to sew or knit — after all, why would he when there were numerous spells to do it for him? — but there were still numerous pieces of cloth on the Table in the First Room; first, of course, there was the tablecloth; and there were numerous smaller ones, which Selwyn's memories identified as napkins. I did not need a hood or cloak for the moment, but there would be little difficulty in fashioning myself one if I ever had to wander outside the castle. This was growing increasingly likely as my curiosity of the outside world grew. I also began to realize that the magic that remained in the Castle could not sustain me forever. Selwyn's memories of casting some of the spells had allowed me to locate a few treats I had missed, but a food shortage was drawing closer with every passing day.
However, I kept procrastinating and putting my departure off. If the majority of humans was anything like Algernon Selwyn, I would probably have to face wizarding warriors ("Hit Wizards" was the name Selwyn remembered) intent on restraining me or worse if I let myself be seen by them. The Castle, meanwhile, had wards, a complicated magical network that detected and blocked intruders — and those wards' definition of 'intruders' included detection spells and Hit Wizards, so a 'dark' creature like myself could not be detected. On the other hand, no such protections would follow me outside. And so I kept hesitating.
Until the decision was made for me.